Journalism

Sunday Spin, etc.

2007-09-12T22:45:00.000-07:00

Everything that I have written for The New Sunday Express, including my column Sunday Spin, can be found here.

Mad TV

2007-03-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

Who says old habits die hard? A couple of years ago, I effortlessly got rid of a childhood habit, a habit — I am certain — many others share as well: that of reaching for the remote the moment dinner is served. These days, months pass before I switch on the TV, and the few hours that I watch it make me determined not to touch the remote for the next few months.

The other evening I made the mistake of touching the remote and I immediately forgot what I was having for dinner: kadhi-chawal or news of the Abhishek-Aishwarya engagement? Even CNN did not show so much excitement when the suicide pilots struck the twin towers on 9/11.

But I am sure there are people who would never tire of watching Ash and Abhishek, so it is entirely up to me whether I want to watch the “breaking news” or not. Now one can’t blame the channels. It is easy to fill 24 pages, but to fill 24 hours? So Shah Rukh Khan sneezing becomes “breaking news”.

A reporter with a hidden camera bribing a policeman, who is overworked and poorly paid in any case, becomes a scoop. A man who had predicted his death and was waiting for its arrival is covered live. It is so easy to get into TV these days. I will tell you how.

The other day I went to a stylish pub in the city to meet some old friends, and was somewhat taken aback at the attire of some of the women there: barring the basics, they showed off everything. I thought: if they are comfortable, what’s my problem? And who am I to have a problem in the first place?

But then, I missed my five minutes of fame. The next morning I could have filed a complaint with the police commissioner (an increasingly common practice in Chennai) or a petition in the court, demanding a ban on such pubs and nightclubs because they were corrupting society. By the evening I would have had a battery of cameras at my doorstep. If the cameras did not come, I would have hastily formed an organisation called PMC, or Protection of Morality in Chennai, and called a press conference to denounce the pub culture. Who knows, the effort could have paid off in the form of “breaking news”!

Two days ago I was watching Party, Govind Nihalani’s brilliant portrayal of the dark side of a glittering society party (today, Nihalani might have named it Page 3 Party). As a teenager I had seen the movie on Doordarshan and, for obvious reasons, missed out one scene: Rohini Hattangadi, in angry desperation, tearing off her top to catch the attention of her aging husband. Rohini Hattangadi and topless!

My jaw dropped, but my first instinct was to recall if any theatre-burning had taken place when the movie was released in 1984. Nothing had happened. Nothing happened those days. Even Debonair carried centrespreads of nude Indian women.

Today any magazine attempting to do that would have its offices gutted. So have we discovered Indian culture and morality within a short span of 20 years? No. We have discovered the power of free television. Why else should an out-of-work lawyer file a petition against a kissing scene, or a bunch of unemployed youth vandalise a theatre when they should be sitting inside and enjoying the so-called “corrupting” bits?

(Published on 1 February 2007)

Kolkata Chromosome

2007-03-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

It’s past midnight, when the average Bengali has been asleep for hours — the quilt firmly secured around his neck to protect against the January chill — and dreaming of social change. But in Shisha Bar, one of the poshest nightclubs of Kolkata, the evening is just warming up. It is a weekday and people are trooping in late, and it is 12.30 by the time we hit the dance floor.

My energy comes mainly from deprivation —- in Chennai you don’t know, at any given point of time, whether a nightclub is functioning or has become the victim of the city/moral police. I am, however, clueless about the source of energy of my fellow rice-eaters. Perhaps it is the quest for good life: Bongs love, rather relish, the good life, and for their Gen Next, nightlife seems to be part of the package.

No one in the gang whines as we hop from one hangout to the other — from Park Hotel’s Someplace Else and then Roxy to the newly-opened Venom and now to the Shisha Bar. And while at Shisha, we make plans where to go next.

After dancing for a while, I need to go to the rest room. As I make my way through the dancing couples and crowded tables, a question springs to my mind: which city am I in? For a few moments, my mind goes blank — much to my horror. I suddenly find myself in a nameless place — it could have been anywhere in Chennai or Bangalore or Delhi or Bombay. There is no one else in the rest room except a young man, who is gripping a mobile phone between his neck and an ear as he relieves himself. “No, no,” he says in English, “not 10 am your time, but 10 am IST.” Then, after a pause, he tells the person on the other end with trademark Bengali sarcasm: “Luck? Aamar luck to kuttar luck (Luck? My luck is as good as a dog’s)!” Ah, I am in Kolkata. But for such region-specific sarcasm and expletives, it would be very difficult to tell one city from another in a globalised world.

************

Kolkata has been celebrated in the West for its poverty and squalour. But standing at Park Street in the evening, with the cold New Year breeze brushing your cheeks, you could be in London: well-dressed, good-looking people walking by or having coffee in one of the restaurants with huge windows, tastefully-decorated shops, handsome buildings, the tolerant traffic. The darkness and the pleasant weather had put a blanket over the poverty and had transformed Park Circus into Piccadilly Circus.

For a pilgrimage to the era when India was remote-controlled by London, it is mandatory to pay a visit to Flury’s, where you can spend hours discussing anything from politics to sex over tea and pastries. But the place was renovated a couple of years ago, and these days you could spend hours waiting to get a place there. We waited for a while in the swank new Flury's, but soon moved across the street to The Tea Table, or T3, where the ghost of the old Flury’s resides. Even the furniture was shifted from there. I had Darjeeling tea, omelette and toast, and a rum pastry. After which I lit a cigarette — for the sheer pleasure of being able to do so without attracting frowns from neighbouring seats. I haven’t had such a wonderful evening in a long time.

************

At a music shop in City Centre, a sprawling mall in the Salt Lake area, I was looking for some albums of Salil Chowdhury. When I named a few albums and asked the attendant if they had any of them, a voice from behind replied: “Aagey cassette aashto. Akhon aar aashena (Earlier they came in cassettes. Now they’ve stopped coming).” I turned around: it was a Sardarji, the owner of the shop.

Postscript: I was all set to return to Chennai with nice stories about Kolkata when, on the final day of my visit, the Opposition parties led by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress, suddenly called for a 24-hour bandh. I ended up driving around empty streets and roaming around an empty New Market. Some things will never change in Kolkata.

(Published on 12 January 2007)

Noose For The News

2007-03-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

Just when you were beginning to bask in the fading glow of 2006, all set to put on your dancing shoes and raise a toast to the New Year, a man holidaying in his ranch in Texas decided to spoil your fun. A phone call from him could have made your whiskey taste better, but since this man has given up drinking — “having been an alcoholic once upon a time” — he probably decided that your drink should taste like water too.

No sensitive — and perhaps sensible — person could have savoured his or her drink on the evening of December 31, having woken up that morning to pictures of Saddam Hussein being put to death and having watched, the entire day before, footage of the noose being tightened around his neck. Imagine watching death — what that must have meant to a ten-year-old!

We had, so far, only read about famous people being hanged, like Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. And in recent times, about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the deposed Prime Minister of Pakistan who was sent to the gallows in 1979 by the then President Zia-ul-Haq.

More recently, hanging became hot news when rapist-murderer Dhananjoy Chatterjee was put to death. The Indian TV channels covered every aspect of the “event” — from interviewing the hangman to informing viewers about the diameter of the rope. If they had their way, they would have shown the hanging too — but then you are not allowed to show such things in a civilised society. As a result, the final moments of a convict are usually recreated later by, or with the help of, the witnesses — the jailor, the guards and so on.

Saddam’s execution, on the other hand, was captured on camera. And while facing death, Saddam was no less brave than our freedom fighters who went to the gallows valiantly. Perhaps braver, considering that Saddam was 70, when the rush of adrenaline is nowhere near the kind you experience in your 20s.

But there he stood, defiant, refusing to wear the hood and chanting the name of Allah while staring straight ahead, till the very second he got sucked in by the death trap. Yes, you can see him go down, and even hanging awkwardly from the rope with a broken neck, courtesy www.youtube.com. The images were bound to be uploaded on YouTube, considering that many witnesses were filming the execution on their mobile phones.

And YouTube, which is a site where you can upload just about anything except hardcore pornography, is widely watched by Internet users across the world, including India. So what will the young Indian think of Saddam’s hanging?

I received a message last week from a reader, an engineering student in Hyderabad who is just 18 years old. “Sir, are you against or in favour of Saddam’s hanging?” I replied. She asked again, “Sir, do you think US has the right to rule any other nation?” I replied. She asked again, “Then what is the UN there for?” I had no reply.

I wanted to tell her that there is no UN, only the US, but she probably knows that. And the man in the ranch (he should have emerged out of it by now) knows that too. But what he does not know is the huge cost his countrymen are going to pay for his actions. Hanging Saddam in a hurried manner was a mistake. But allowing the release of footage of his hanging was a big mistake — so big that no American is ever going to feel safe in the coming decades.

Meanwhile, according to the Melbourne paper The Age, Saddam was the 3000th person to die in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. Is anyone going to hang for the remaining 2999 deaths?

(Published on 4 January 2007)

Sugar And Spouse

2007-03-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

During my long bachelor years in Chennai, my few close friends included a young couple with whom I spent countless evenings discussing God (rather His non-existence, since they were staunch atheists), movies, people, places and everything that should interest people in their early thirties. To me they were a role-model couple — their eyes shone with admiration for each other even after eight years of marriage; they would occasionally squeeze each others’ hands in between discussions; he would second a point she made and vice versa, and so on. I, the bachelor with no fixed partner, could not help envying their togetherness. That’s what I want when I get married, I would tell myself.

The other day the man came home. “So now you are married, and I am a bachelor! Ha! Ha! Ha!” I don’t know whether his laughter was tinged with bitterness or relief, but I could not help being amazed at the games fate can play. Today I have a wife by my side, while he is alone. The subjects of conversation remain the same — existence of God, movies, people and places — except for an addition: his sudden divorce. I had worshipped their togetherness for six years, but their divorce came through in precisely six months.

If it can happen to them, it can happen to anybody. And it is happening. I am not sure about the figures, but I am told that in Chennai alone, there were over 3000 divorces in 2005. And in 2006, the number of cases crossed the 3000-mark by the middle of the year. Why?

Getting a divorce is not easy. In the court, your (as in you and the spouse) name is first called out so that the judge is sure you are present. Then you are asked to wait. Imagine two people, hitherto partners in life, in bed and in everything else, sitting separately and killing time. Then the judge calls you in, and if the divorce is sought by mutual consent, he gives you six months’ waiting period. If it is not by mutual consent, then you might just as well join a course in the Art of Waiting. For the moment let’s stick to couples that fall in love and get married and then get divorced by mutual consent — as has happened in the case of my friend.

In the beginning they wait interminably in bus-stops, bookshops and cafes for their loved ones to appear. “Oh darling, I am so sorry, did I keep you waiting for long?” And then the coffee and/or the movie and/or the holding of hands. The desire is single and simple: When can we start living together forever!

And then they wait in the courts — the mission is single and simple: When can I get out of this marriage! So what is it that changes overnight? Perhaps the change in perception. Things that appear cute and adorable during courtship tend to become irritating and unbearable after marriage. Ego then lights a fire and impulse adds fuel to it. Finally, the fire goes on to burn the strongest thread of marriage: tolerance. Gone are the days when tolerance was expected only out of the woman, who would seek to save her marriage even at the cost of her dignity. She would be haunted by uncomfortable questions: “Where will I go?” “Who will feed me?” “What will people say?”

Today’s woman usually finds the answers before taking a question mark-raising step. And that’s bad news for men who think they can still ape their fathers and grandfathers, and it’s bad news for the institution of marriage. If two people can wait for and woo each other for years just because they can get married, why do they need to wait for hours in courts to get divorced? Surely they had liked something about each other, and that is why they had decided to get married in the first place. So while waiting in court, can’t they draw a mental list of the things they liked about each other? Or try to remember the first time they had met? Or the very first time they had made love?

Marriage doesn’t come with a warranty card: it is a commodity you buy purely on trust, like you buy a book. You can’t discard it just because you don’t like it beyond three chapters. Who knows, the fifth chapter could be interesting and the sixth even more? Coming from someone who has been married barely for seven months, all this might sound presumptuous, perhaps even hollow. But let me tell you, I take great care of my books once I’ve bought them — no matter if they are disappointing in places.

(Published on 30 November 2006)

Coorged

2007-03-16T21:51:00.000-07:00

It often takes a long journey — in my case three hours of a frustrating wait at the airport and nearly five hours of a back-breaking drive — to learn basic things. Such as the elephant has 292 bones. And that its eyesight covers less than 50 metres. But that its smelling distance is 5 to 6 km. Or that it has 45,000 to 50,000 muscles in its trunk. And that it is a female that leads the pack.

Presently we are standing in a semi-circle in front of a female. Her name is Mythili and she is 40 years old. Standing by her trunk is P. Joye Eerappa, the naturist-guide with the Club Mahindra resort at Coorg. He is nice and cheerful to us not because we, a bunch of journalists, are the guests of Club Mahindra, but because he is made that way — going the extra mile to unravel the nature of nature in the Kodagu valley. He keeps his audience engaged by constantly playing the quiz master on wildlife.

We have now spent the best part of the morning amid elephants at the Dubare forest along the stream that goes on to become the river Cauvery — bathing them, watching them being fed, learning about them, and even riding them. We stroll around, and we are in a village in the heart of Kodagu valley. It’s a village that fits our childhood imagination of a village — forests around, no electricity, no roads. But there’s a school — a neat classroom under a thatched roof, with about two dozen students whose enthusiastic grins distract from the shabby clothes they are wearing. They greet us with a loud “Namaste” and, for our benefit, put up an impromptu song and dance show, “Madikeri ogona raja setannu nodonna or korona…” (a song in praise of their region). We are in a different universe.

A tribal from the village happens to be loitering around. Joye speaks to him in Kuruba, a local variant of Kannada, and the villager tells us his story. There are 86 houses in the village, and the primary occupation of its people is to grow raagi and to collect wild mushroom, wood rose and honey from the forests. They also pluck aamla, or gooseberry, but make sure to leave some behind for the deer. In the evenings, they light a bonfire and play games or sing and dance. Now doesn’t that sound like real holiday? Perhaps the day is not too far. The Karnataka forest department is already holding regular classes to teach them how to behave with visitors (read tourists). The next step could be to let visitors stay in their huts.

There was a bonfire at the Club Mahindra resort too the night before — on a hillock that in the daytime overlooks the beauty of Coorg. The resort had kicked off its gourmet festival that morning, and we were supposed to have sampled many cuisines throughout the day before creating a thirst for drinks that would precede an elaborate dinner spread out by chef Padmanabhan.

But nature had conspired against the team from Chennai: fog in Bangalore delayed the plane that was to carry us from Chennai to Mangalore, and as a result, the drive from Mangalore to Coorg was undertaken mainly under darkness, which meant poor visibility for the driver and no visibility at all of the scenic drive.

It was past ten when we reached. Whatever little desire was left to drink had died, but the ambience of the resort turned out to be a rejuvenator, especially the fragrant candles lit up along the pathway to the hillock where the bonfire and the dinner was on. I made a stiff drink, sat by the steps of what looked like an amphitheatre, and watched the mist settle in on the valley. Punjabi music played and a lavish dinner awaited us. Presently, Kodava dancers took over. Their drums lent zest to the chilly air and gave me an excuse to make another drink. And yet another. Time to eat. What I relished most was the jackfruit biryani.

But what I would remember the most is the walk back to the room: climbing down and up and down and up, amid singing insects and the fragrance of the candles, and the sight of a giant moth hovering around. It was the night to be up and get mushy, and not the night to sleep. But sleep one had to, for one had to be up early for the date with Joye Eerappa. Foodies were up even earlier: they had to catch up with a session on doughnut-making. A lot of those doughnuts and sandwiches were packed in boxes, and off we went with Joye to explore Madikeri (the district headquarters of Coorg) and places around. That’s when we met the elephants at Dubare.

From there we went to Bylakuppe. Bylakuppe is one place I’ve been planning to go for a long time: the idea being to learn meditation. And now I suddenly find myself being driven there. It’s a small town at the foot of Coorg but technically part of Mysore district. It houses the Namdroling monastery which, according to Joye, is the second largest Buddhist monastery in Asia. It is home to more than 5000 monks and over 1400 nuns.

You could be in Tibet, if not for the scorching sun, and the sights and sounds were straight out of the Brad Pitt-starrer Seven Years in Tibet — the maroon-robed monks and the horns and the drums and the chants. A new shrine, locally called the Golden Temple, has giant statues of the Buddha flanked by Guru Padmasambhava and Buddha Amitayus and has plenty of space for visitors to meditate without feeling they are confined within four walls.

Across the monastery is a market where you get Tibetan handicraft. I bought a Tibetan bell, which lets off a humming sound as you keep rubbing a wooden staff around its base. “The sound is very good for stress,” the Tibetan boy running the shop told me. I also bought a rosary, punctuated by green stones which he said were “lucky.” I asked him if I could keep it on while bathing. He said no, and he also asked me to take the rosary off every time I did “ghalat kaam” (this Hindi expression, translated literally, stands for “wrong doing”, but in effect means having sex).

I wore the rosary. Tonight, after all, was my last night in Coorg, and most of it was going to be spent wine-tasting. We sat under the sky by the poolside. The table linen was limp with mist, but our spirits soared with every glass of wine. A two-man orchestra kept us entertained, the violinist giving a melancholic touch to popular tunes, such as Que sera sera. It was a “Greek night” — the idea was to celebrate the Coorg-Greek connection but in effect it meant that the dinner was Greek and, in hindsight, great.

Wine isn’t intoxicating — unless you drink copious amounts, which you can’t afford to anyways, at least not in India. A small amount is actually good for your heart, and a little more than that leaves you just happy. That is why we entertained — and got entertained by — Kapil Grover, the director of Grover Wines, at our table. He held forth on the art of wine-drinking and wine-making, and at one point berated the waiter for filling his glass more than decorum allowed. And then, of course, the Greek dinner, followed by the fascinating walk to the room — the singing insects, the mist, the giant moths… But tonight I had to sleep: the team from Chennai had a morning flight to catch. Life is unfair just when it shouldn’t be.

(Published on 30 November 2006)

Lost And Found

2007-03-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

The first ever wallet I bought with my own money and which — needless to say — contained my own money, stayed in my pocket for barely a month. In 1993, P V Narasimha Rao, then the Prime Minister, had come to my city, Kanpur, to address a rally. Nothing happened during the two hours we spent waiting for him, but he was just about to finish his speech when the rains came down heavily, and people ran for shelter. In the chaos, my pocket got picked. A fellow reporter dropped me home after I finished filing Rao’s speech.

In early 2000, I was dining with friends one night at a restaurant in Delhi’s Pandara Park when I lost my wallet again. Quite a lot of money was there, but what bothered me most was the loss of the Press card, issued by the Press Information Bureau to accredited journalists. Bill Clinton, then the US President, was arriving, and I was assigned to cover his press conference, and the card was a must to get passes for the venue.

Time was too short to get a new one and the procedure far too complicated: first an FIR at the police station, then getting a challan for Rs 200 from the SBI, that too from a particular branch, and so on. I was halfway through the complication, in the hope I could still get a new card just in time, when I got a call. It was the restaurant owner: “One of our sweepers found it. You don’t expect the money to be there, do you? But everything else is intact.”

The next year, I relocated to the south of the Vindhyas: to Chennai. Ever since, losing the wallet has become a rather pleasant experience. Sometimes incredibly so. In 2003, I was on my annual trip to Delhi, and hours before I was to take the Tamil Nadu Express to Chennai, I sat drinking with old friends. Time flew and the alcohol flowed as we caught up on each other’s lives, and by the time we reached the station, I was barely sober enough to tell Platform no. 1 from Platform no. 12. I returned to my senses when I wanted to buy a bottle of water and found the wallet missing. What happened next — will not bore you with that now.

Two weeks later, I was sitting in my office when a parcel arrived. I tore it open and out came my old wallet! It was accompanied by a letter, written on ruled paper torn out from a school notebook. I wish I could quote from it, but it is tucked away somewhere, safe. The writer — God bless him — wrote that he tried calling me immediately after finding the wallet but could not get through, so he was couriering the wallet. He regretted that he had used my money “to enjoy” with his friends and that I should forgive him. The sender lived in a small town in Maharashtra — below the Vindhyas! I can go on and on.

Last month my wife, while attending a conference in a Chennai hotel, left her wallet behind. She realised the loss hours later, after she went to the ATM. Gone are the days when losing your wallet meant a loss of a few hundreds of hard-earned rupees. These days, thanks to the credit and debit cards, it could mean rebooting your life. She rushed back to the hotel. A waiter handed over the wallet along with loads of cautionary advise. She, like most people, sought to purchase his honesty by giving him a 100-rupee note. He refused to take it.

The other day, a fellow blogger told me a story when we met for lunch. His sister-in-law had left her bag, containing her mobile and Rs 5000, in an autorickshaw. The auto driver scanned her mobile phone to trace her contact, and then, from a PCO, made calls till he reached her. Bag handed over, he refused to take any money — not even for the calls he made or the petrol he spent on locating her house.

What prompted me to write this piece? A letter forwarded to my e-mail, written by Juned Choudhury, a Bangladeshi national who had travelled on Pandiyan Express from Chennai to Kody Road:

“While alighting from the train … a small bag of mine containing valuables fell under the seat and was left behind by mistake. I did not realise this till after about an hour and a half, when a friend of mine travelling on a separate bus to Kody received a call on his cell phone from the platform Inspector of Madurai saying that they had found a bag and the owner should go and collect it from him. I got off the bus and hired a taxi to travel the 70 km to Madurai.”

The bag contained his passport with a couple of valid European visas; Indian, U.S. and Bangladesh currencies amounting to about Rs 16,000, his Visa card, airline tickets, spectacles, pen and notebook, and cellphone. They were intact.

(Published on 13 October 2006)

Bye Bye Malgudi, Hello Mysore

2006-10-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

Under the overcast sky, the green of the paddy fields looked as dense as the grey above — so picture perfect that I could have tried my luck with National Geographic if I was not standing at the door of the train. In fact, when a hill appeared in the backdrop of the lush greenery, I did turn to fetch my camera. But I found my path blocked by the suitcase of an elderly fellow traveller who announced with an apologetic grin, “Mysore is coming.”

Mysore is one of those places like Siberia: you’ve always heard about it, but you never really see anyone booking a ticket to get there. For the lay traveller, the city is on the itinerary only when a trip to Bangalore permits enough time. It was hardly surprising then, when, 90 percent of the passengers on the Chennai-Mysore Shatabdi Express detrained in Bangalore.

Mysore is also a city whose mention — particularly if you have never been there — conjures up some image or the other in your mind: it could be colourful silk sarees or the smoke emanating from a sandalwood agarbatti or just a soap. But as I sat in the nearly-empty train presently pulling out of Bangalore, the faces of two elderly men floated in front on my eyes every time I tried to visualise Mysore.

One is 90 years old, while the other would been exactly 100 if he were alive. One made Mysore the international capital of ashtanga yoga, the other gave the city a pseudonym and put it on India's literary map. Pattabhi Jois and RK Narayan, lions in their respective fields; and Mysore, I thought, would bear their signature. The two men had given me a detailed visual tour of the city long before I set foot in it.

Jois’ Mysore was indoor: chiselled Western bodies striking difficult yoga postures in unison in a gloomy hall. Narayan’s Mysore was necessarily outdoor. Veteran photographer TS Satyan, a friend of Narayan, wrote in an article in 2002: “One of my greatest joys in life was to stroll down the streets of Mysore in his exhilarating company, listening to his witty comments and observations on the people he met and the goings on that he saw. He never walked fast and stopped at many places on the way. He observed people and their ways with pleasure.”

I now wanted to walk the streets as Narayan did. But when you decide to walk back half a century, that too in a new city, you don’t quite know where to begin and which route to take. So I sought the help of a local friend, and asked her to drive me around Lakshmipuram, where Narayan and his large family lived in a rented house till the late 1940s. I was hoping to find Malgudi.

“I don’t know if you will find anything there, but still,” she said, breezing through the traffic around the Chamaraja and KR Circles, the city’s most prominent roundabouts named after (and bearing the statues of) two former kings, Chamaraja Wodeyar (who ruled from 1868-1894) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar (1894-1940). The latter is the architect of modern Mysore. (The city had a private radio station, Akashvani, way back in 1935. In 1957, Akashvani became the official name for All India Radio). On these roundabouts, which are overlooked by the majestic palace, it is common to see jutkas, or horse-driven carts, jostling with cars and bikes. The old world seeking to survive in the new.

Lakshmipuram is a maze of spacious streets flanked by well-appointed houses. Some are old-fashioned, some are really old and crumbling. A number of them, however, are modern: 20 or 30 years old. “There, on the left,” the friend stopped the car and pointed out, “that’s where Pattabhi Jois used to live.” The door of the house still bears a small signboard: Vidwan Pattabhi Jois. The house looked too simple to have been the world’s biggest export centre of ashtanga yoga. Jois now lives in a more upmarket neighbourhood, Gokulam. He charges Rs 27,900 for the first month of training (doesn’t include food and lodging) and Rs 17,900 for each month thereafter. Little wonder that almost all his students are Westerners.

We drove around a few more streets before I was suddenly shaken out of the Malgudi stupor: apartments are springing up in between old-fashioned houses. They stick out like sore thumbs, shattering the visual silence of the neighbourhood. I instantly recalled a UNI report I happened to read the night before taking the train to Mysore. It began like this: Emerging from the shadow of its cosmopolitan neighbour Bangalore, Mysore, witnessing a flurry of activities on many a fronts, is all set to evolve as a brand.

Narayan, in all likelihood, would have liked Mysore to remain in the shadow of Bangalore. He wrote in The Emerald Route: “When in Bangalore, I generally feel a regret that I didn’t make it my home (instead of Mysore), considering the advantages — its cosmopolitan air, amenities, accessibility to any part of the world, climate and all the excellences of urban life. But actually Mysore has been my home — for half a century now. It just happened that way, that’s all. And every time I go back to Mysore, I feel thankful to the heavens for placing me there.”

If I were to don Narayan’s spectacles, I would see Mysore undergoing reverse metamorphosis — a butterfly turning into concrete larvae. Some people, though, would like to call it ‘growth’. Such as KB Ganapathy, the owner-editor of Star of Mysore. He has an impressive office on the outskirts of the city, which also houses his Kannada paper, Mysooru Mitra. In the parking lot, a Mercedes stands out proudly. Ganapathy, impressively turned out in a red silk shirt and black Color Plus trousers, showed me into his office. “It’s like asking a mother what changes she has found in her grown-up son. The changes take place in a subtle but sure manner,” he pronounced when I asked if Mysore was becoming a mess. And Narayan’s Malgudi, he says, is only imagination.

“I can relate Mysore’s growth to my own. (In 1977) I started my press in Saraswathi Puram in a small house. The owner was not able to build the house fully so I completed it. Now I have grown so big. Similarly, all people — hoteliers, industrialists — have grown. Growth of industry and trade is a sure indicator of growth of a city,” he says.

According to Ganapathy, Mysore has two kinds of visitors these days: people who come sightseeing, and people who come site-seeing. “Last year MUDA (Mysore Urban Development Authority) auctioned four and a half acres of land near the race course. The highest bid was Rs 22 crore. The next highest bid was Rs 11 crore. Since then, property prices have shot up,” he says.

According to Mysoreans, it is common these days to see dozens of cars parked on the Ring Road on weekends, with wealthy buyers negotiating for land with the locals. And the buyer could be anyone from India. A source told me that even a top politician from Uttar Pradesh has bought lands in Mysore.

The breeze had a mild chill, perfect for an evening walk, and as I walked up and down the Devraj Urs Road — Mysore's answer to Bangalore’s MG Road — I sought to shake off from my mind the sight of the ugly apartments in Lakshmipuram and the concerned voice of Ganapathy that informed me of the scramble to buy land in Mysore.

I wanted to be RK Narayan: walking leisurely, listening to people, taking mental notes. But I felt I was on a sidewalk in Bangalore — or perhaps London (because of the cool breeze) — with a Reebok store distracting me every now and then. I felt like Narayan only when I walked past the grocery stores on the road and smelt the strong aroma of the spices they displayed in jute bags.

Only in Mysore can you find grocery stores co-existing with swank Reebok outlets. I didn’t expect a pub, though, on Devraj Urs Road (maybe because Narayan drank only coffee), but I hunted for a bookshop where I could find his books and maybe buy them all over again as mementos. All fingers pointed to Geetha Book House, on the KR circle. The bookshop clearly belongs to old Mysore — “47 years old”, an attendant told me — and doesn’t have enough of anything, leave alone Narayan. But the Ashok Book Centre, a few streets away, has an impressive collection, but again, not many of Narayan. Not even on his birth centenary.

I guess Mysore had bigger preoccupations, such as the Dasara which, during my visit, was only a few weeks away. I saw electricians climbing up poles at the KR Circle and fixing electric bulbs. I wanted to take pictures but had run out of film. I walk into a photo studio.

“Things have changed very fast in the last two years. Bangalore is full because of the IT boom, so people are coming here. And once the six-lane highway comes up, you can reach Bangalore in just 90 minutes (a distance of 140 km), so more people will come here,” says Krishna, who runs the studio. He is talking about people who expect to earn Bangalore salaries while living in relatively low-cost Mysore.

Krishna also remembers old-time Mysore. “As a kid I have seen RK Narayan going for walks in Yadavagiri (where Narayan built his own house after the landlord in Lakshmipuram hiked the rent). He was quite old even then.” After taking more pictures, I buy some newspapers and retire to my hotel, Siddharta.

But not before strolling around the bus station, where I notice dozens of people eating paani puri from the roadside vendors. Narayan has mentioned set dosai, but not paani puri. Clearly, winds of change are blowing. I notice more changes back in the hotel. AAI takes over airport land, at last! — screamed Star of Mysore. The takeover, according to it, was held up because of litigation over 20 acres of land, and the Airports Authority of India had now decided to make do without it and would prepare an airport in two years.

But the man who hogs the headlines in Mysore, or Karnataka for that matter, these days is Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy. He is redefining the bed-and-breakfast scheme by becoming the first VIP in the country, perhaps the world, to stay overnight in the modest homes of his subjects during trips outside Bangalore. I wonder if he pays the hosts for their hospitality, or takes it for granted that they would consider themselves blessed just because he set his foot in their dwelling. Whatever the case, the pant-shirt clad Chief Minister seems to be the new icon of Karnataka.

After I finished reading the papers, I glanced through the printout of the UNI report that I had carried along:

The heritage city had suddenly become the cynosure of all eyes, with a flurry of activities being witnessed in the IT scene, infrastructure, housing, schooling and investments in highways and airport projects.

Observers feel that the ringing of the NASDAQ bell from the city to coincide with the silver jubilee of IT giant Infosys had done much to build the brand image of Mysore. The historic ceremony in the city, which along with London and Davos were the only places from where trading on NASDAQ was started remotely, could be symbolic, but it had helped the city take a giant leap forward.

The first path to growth was the flurry of real estate activity. The construction sector was witnessing a boom and the skyline of Mysore was already changing as individual houses were giving way for high-rise apartments and housing complexes.

Malgudi is dead. Long live Mysore. Today you might have to spend a crore to buy an acre in Mysore. But to buy the whole of Malgudi, you need only Rs 80; and it is available at your nearest bookshop.

Browner Than Brown

2006-10-07T00:41:00.000-07:00

It’s ee-ko-nomist, not a-kaw-nomist,” a well-meaning colleague, who takes great pleasure (or is it pride?) in finding nits in my pronunciation, corrected me recently. His comment should have made me blush; instead, it set me thinking.

Blush I did not because in my younger days I have had girlfriends who tried their best to transform the small-town guy — that is me — into a refined metro-citizen. How to eat, how to speak, how to dress — their inputs have contributed to who I am today. How far they have succeeded, I do not know. And I shall never know, because not everybody is as well-meaning as my colleague.

It is not at all difficult to visualise a situation where I have just left a Page-3 party after rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of my city, and people commenting: “Did you notice that? He was using his fingers to eat. How messy, na?” Or: “Didn’t he look as if he is just out of the zoo?” Or maybe this: “I was trying so hard to control my laughter every time he said ‘economist’.”

Ok, so I was saying how my colleague’s comment set me thinking. The point is, we are all Indians, and irrespective of the state we belong to, we have certain things in common. We all use our hands to eat. And, traditionally, we are also used to eating sitting on the floor. We usually speak our mother tongue at home, which is not English. We all have our traditional outfits — the kurta and the saree being common to most cultures. We all force-feed our guests. We bend backwards to help people (try losing your way and there will be half-a-dozen people giving you directions, at times competing with each other for accuracy).

The two-century old British rule, however, created a class of people that was socially British but culturally Indian. Their table manners, for example, were that of the Sahibs (the British); but the attire of their womenfolk was thoroughly Indian: could you imagine a respectable Indian woman wearing a frock? These people were called the Brown Sahibs. After the British left our shores, they became the rulers; and soon after a class was formed that aspired to be the Brown Sahib. That’s the class most of us belong to — the Brown Brown Sahib.

While the Brown Sahib was the prisoner of circumstance, the Brown Brown Sahib is the prisoner of attitude. While the Brown Sahib was loyal to the British, the Brown Brown Sahib has gone a step forward: he worships the white skin of any nationality. So when a Frenchman speaks English with a French accent, they find it cute. But when a Malayali or a Bihari speaks English with an accent, he is considered a bumpkin and becomes the butt of jokes.

If a German expat wears a Fab India kurta and a dhoti to work, you are likely to find him cool, but an Indian won’t wear a dhoti even when he is out shopping. When a French woman mispronounces an Indian name, you consider it given, even cute; but if an Indian woman says ‘Kam-us’ instead of ‘Kamoo’ or ‘Ver-sace’ instead of ‘Ver-sachi’, she forfeits her right to be admitted to high society.

And can you imagine an Italian girl admonishing her boyfriend for not having heard of the samosa? But you can imagine the plight of an Indian man who loudly wonders what pasta is when he is taken to an Italian restaurant (in India) by his girlfriend. Should the winds of globalisation flow only from the West?

At times I really think of joining English-speaking classes, apart from signing up for French classes, and also going to the Max Mueller Bhavan to learn a bit of German. And maybe enroll in an etiquette class too. Wait a minute: won’t I be killing many birds with one stone by going to a skin-grafting clinic instead, a la Michael Jackson?

Book Review: Indlish

2006-09-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

Things that can do a world of good to you usually come cheap. Such as a kilogram of carrots: barely Rs 20. A litre of milk: hardly Rs 15. A refreshing jog: Rs 0. The Economist Style Guide: Rs 295. If you have reasonable command over the English language, then a thorough - and sincere - reading of the guide could make you bypass the expensive journalism schools and transform you into a conscientious reporter/sub-editor. It is a different matter that you might need a degree from one of these schools to get a job in the first place.

Coming back to the Economist style guide. The other day, I was browsing through its latest edition after its publisher in India, Viva Books, kindly sent me a copy. For no apparent reason, my eyes settled on an entry under 'E':

underprivileged Since a privilege is a special favour or advantage, it is by definition not something to which everyone is entitled. So 'underprivileged', by implying the right to privileges for all, is not just ugly jargon but also nonsense.

I panicked: have I ever used the word in my copy? I could not recall immediately. But I recalled having seen the word in print - several times. But then, we make such mistakes either out of ignorance or carelessness. We are, after all, not The Economist, where every word is put under the microscope.

We are the Chalta Hai (anything will do) brand of journalists, feeding entirely on compost that usually consists of ignorance, laziness and leftovers from translations of vernacular languages. Such compost is called Indlish. For example, it is perfectly okay to say in Hindi, "Yeh kitna sundar hai, na?" - This is so beautiful, isn't it? The "na" is for "isn't it". But "na", in English, primarily means "no", so you have people saying, even writing, "This is so beautiful, no?"

But there are, fortunately or unfortunately, sentinels like Jyoti Sanyal who don't want English writing in India to be overrun by 'Indlish'. Fortunately, because if these people have their way, then the standard of writing in English papers would match that of the Economist. Unfortunately, these people don't seem to have their way - for evidence you have to look at the pages of any Indian newspaper.

I will settle for the path in between fortunately and unfortunately, and that is the path of hope - that things will improve someday. Improvement, once again, comes cheap: Rs 295. You'll have to cough up only that much to buy Sanyal's Indlish (Viva Books), which caps his 30-year-old career with the once-revered Statesman, perhaps the only paper to have a comprehensive in-house style guide authored, needless to say, by Sanyal. As the dean of the Asian College of Journalism, he also moulded the younger crop of journalists who are today scattered across the country, hopefully carrying his passion for plain English.

Indlish is replete with the stupidities you come across in the papers every day, morning after morning. Such as the overdose of "he categorically stated", "he noted", "he added" and "he further added" you find in the reported speech of a minister. Sanyal presents one classic case of syntax error - which Indian journalists are highly prone to: Mr Revanasiddaiah said Mr Manjunath had expressed his willingness to contribute the amount in a letter written to him.

Another gem: Mr Chautala's statement that both parties would have a separate poll manifesto for the Assembly elections scheduled for March, too has irked the BJP leaders. How can both parties have a separate manifesto? And that's just one of the howlers in that sentence.

The problem is, such howlers are most often made by senior journalists, who are likely to have halted their learning the moment they got their first jobs. Their juniors follow suit. Sanyal's book should serve as the Bible to journalists who want to write clean, sparkling copies. But I would recommend it more to senior journalists, editorial writers included, who think they know it all.

Mysore Musings

2006-09-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

With India fast becoming one standardised city — a Shoppers’ Stop here and a Landmark there, with a few Baristas and Cafe Coffee Days thrown in — it is difficult to tell one city from the other. The only reminder that you are in a new town is the language spoken by people around you. But this distinguishing feature is also blurring out fast: your ears rarely catch a Telugu word in downtown Hyderabad, and Bangalore, but for its pleasant weather, could be mistaken for Delhi. So if you take the morning flight from Chennai to Hyderabad (or Bangalore) and return the same evening, you will feel you have not gone anywhere at all.

That is why my trip to Mysore was refreshing: Kannada was being spoken all around, and I finally felt I was in a new land. I even picked up a word, beda (don’t want), which came handy when a lottery seller near the bus station tried very hard to sell me a ticket, forecasting that I would be richer by Rs 20 lakh. After shaking him off with half-a-dozen bedas, I walked back to my hotel wondering what I would do if I were to get Rs 20 lakh. The answer, in the soothing evening breeze, came easily: buy a modest flat in Mysore. Mysore is one place whose name you get familiar with from your childhood, even without knowing its location on the map, thanks to Mysore Sandal Soap, Mysore silk, Mysore agarbattis, Mysore pak...

Present-day youngsters, however, are likely to have heard of another expression prefixed with the name of the city: Mysore Mallige. No, it’s not the collection of poems by the romantic poet K S Narasimhaswamy, or the 1991 film made by T S Nagabharana, but an amateur (and hardcore) porn video shot by a young Kannadiga who is shown spending time with his girlfriend in a hotel/lodge. The two (at the time the video was made) were supposed to be students from Mandya, though there are a million theories about their identities, and also about their fate once the video found its way into the porn market. Some say they committed suicide, some say they were killed, some say they are married and settled in the US. If you Google up ‘Mysore Mallige’, the maximum number of search results would be related to this video and only a few to the famous poet or director. Sex sells, after all — a point that was driven hard into me during my return journey to Chennai.

From a news vendor at the Mysore railway station, I bought R K Narayan’s Talkative Man (as a souvenir) and a copy of my paper, New Sunday Express. No sooner had the train started, the man across the aisle asked for the book; a few minutes later, the man next to me borrowed the newspaper. I was observing the man on the next seat as he fished out the Magazine section — the one you are holding now. He first looked at the cover page; it took less than 10 seconds for his eyes to travel from top to bottom. He did not even bother to look at the ‘Opinion’ page. ‘Books’, ‘Insight’ and 'Focus’ pages were spared two seconds each. Finally, he settled on ‘Meanwhile’, the page that is facing you now.

I looked at him with increased interest: is he going to read my column? If yes, what is his facial expression going to be? From the corner of my eye, I saw his eyes move in a circle around the page till they settled on ‘Ask Simi’, the sex (well, mostly) column at the bottom left. He spent nearly ten minutes on the column, lingering over every question and answer. Next, his eyes went up, on the snippets about celebrities. I waited for him to come to my column. Suddenly, he shut the paper and moved on to another section. He hadn’t even seen my column, leave alone read it.

French Leave

2006-09-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

I had been away for only 24 hours, but when I returned to Chennai after scouring every corner of the maze of quiet streets called Pondicherry, I felt I was returning after 24 days. I also felt as if I had left a fusion music concert mid-way and pushed open the door of a disco to find a top-of-the-pops blasting on my ribcage.

Fusion: I can’t think of any other word to describe Pondicherry. The topography is Tamil, but the air is decidedly French. That is because the architecture is French, even though the buildings are Indian. The inhabitants (as well as the tourists) are also a mix of both — Indian and French. So are the menus of its restaurants. Wine (which is impossible to find in Tamil Nadu) flows as freely as beer. Aurobindo mixes with Annadurai, with a generous dash of Dupleix. And the music... actually there is no music in Pondicherry, only silence, which is repreatedly broken by the waves in case you are living by the sea.

I stayed by the sea, in a hotel whose design was French but name Indian: Ajantha. Or was it L’Ajantha? I seriously can’t recall, but the view from its spacious balcony was excellent, and so was the food. In the name of ‘Press’ I extracted a 10 percent discount, and the money saved was spent on buying various ’Auro’ brands of incense sticks.

**********

The VHP guys have clearly not been to Satsanga, and I sincerely hope they don’t ever, because that’s one of the few places in Pondicherry which provides you excellent Continental fare for prices you are unlikely to find anywhere else in the world. The restaurant, on Lal Bahadur Shastri Road, is spread out in the courtyard of an old French-style bungalow, and run by a Frenchman: a quiet, laidback place where you can indulge in food and drinks at your own pace. Lunch for two is likely to cost you around Rs 500, with a couple of beers thrown in. Be careful about not trampling upon the tail of a pet puppy that can sprawl out at your feet and go off to sleep without you even noticing it.

About why the VHP should not discover this place. First of all, it is going to object to the name Satsanga, because the word usually conjures up images of a bunch of people singing a bhajan or attending a discourse. How can you eat meat and drink wine in a place with such a name? And the owner, in a bid to give his place the ethnic Indian touch, seems to have gone a bit overboard. The lovely saris that hang as the background curtain are fine, but idols of Ganesha sitting alongside beer mugs and clay ashtrays on the tables? Some might find it hip, but the sight can remind even the most liberal of Hindus that clay, when given the shape of a God, deserves a better place than the dining table. Or maybe these Ganeshas are French and not Indian.

Uncle Moon At 60

2006-08-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Madras of today might be synonymous with technology, but in a quiet street in the city’s Ekkatuthangal area, a bunch of people are busy packaging the timeless, ‘once-upon-a-time’ era which has a king and a queen who go on to live happily ever after.

It’s the era our childhood belongs to, and when I say ‘our’, I mean you, me or anybody in the age group 18 to 80. Ask your grandfather if he has heard of Chandamama: chances are he would have even read it, if not read its stories out — to your father, that is.

For three generations of Indians, Chandamama and Childhood have gone hand in hand. Over the years, Superman and Spiderman might have elbowed out the valiant kings and princes in the imagination of pre-teen minds, but Chandamama manages to hold its fort as it approaches its 60th year.

Tales of King Vikram and Vetala, for example, is still a regular feature, which appears along with the same old sketch of the sword-wielding king walking through a cremation ground in the dead of the night with a corpse on his shoulder. For me, as a child, this trademark sketch was the ultimate symbol of bravery. I would look at it every now and then — at times at the fearless expression of the king, at times at the skulls strewn in the cremation ground, at times at the bats and the dangerous snake, and at times at the name of the artist, ‘Sankar’, which would be signed over a grey rock for easy visibility.

Sankar was one of my heroes, and I even wrote a post-card to Chandamama asking if they entertained freelance artists. I didn’t get a reply but my name did appear under the ‘Do You Know’ column — the first time I ever saw it in print. Anyway, the years rolled on and Chandamama entered the archives of my life — I didn’t really need it anymore but I knew it was safe somewhere.

Then, the other day, a quarter century later, I mentally dusted and dug out the archives as I hunted for the Chandamama office in Ekkatuthangal. A few minutes into the conversation with the editor and I mentioned to him what a great fan of Sankar I used to be. I wanted to enquire about the artist but feared that the reply could be heart breaking. But a surprise awaited me.

“Sankar is still here. He is about 75 now. You see, in Chandamama we don’t retire people,” informed the editor — a genial, self-effusing man called B Viswanatha Reddi, whose name appears in the magazine’s printline as Viswam.

Viswam himself is 63 — technically past retirement age. But then he looks only 53, and the passion with which he talks about the magazine makes his eyes resemble those of a pre-teen reader turning its pages. And in any case, owners don’t need to retire: Viswam, after all, is the son of the man who started Chandamama, the legendary film producer B Nagi Reddi. And Viswam has been in the editor’s seat since — now that was another big surprise to me — 1975. In other words, I was presently face to face with the man who had been editing MY Chandamama!

Chandamama is a month older than Independent India. The first copy came out in July 1947 — in Telugu and Tamil. It was brought out by Nagi Reddi and a writer called called Chakrapani, who had acquired minor literary reputation at the time because he was translating Sarat Chandra’s stories from Bengali to Telugu. He had learnt Bengali in a hospital in Madanapalli from a next-bed Bengali patient who was being treated for tuberculosis.

Nagi Reddi, on the other hand, used to run a printing press in George Town in Madras, and in 1945, had started a Telugu monthly, Andhra Jyothi. In the glow of the freedom movement, he also started a magazine for the youth called Yuva. It was with Yuva that he came to be associated with Chakrapani. Chandamama was an instant success. The first edition, priced at six annas, sold six thousand copies, and for a very long time the circulation stood at that figure.

Apart from working on Chandamama, Chakrapani also wrote stories and dialogues for the initial movies of Nagi Reddi who, by 1949, had acquired the Vahini Studios in Madras after its owner ran into tax problems. “The idea behind starting the magazine was to introduce the post-Independence child to Indian culture and tradition. Even today, we stick to the Indian ethos,” says Viswam, who too over the reins of Chandamama after Chakrapani died in 1975.

By then, it had become a household name across the country, being published in as many as 12 languages (the English edition began in 1955). The magazine's popularity peaked in the early 1980s when its combined circulation touched nine lakhs. It was also the period when Nagi Reddi had secured his reputation as the producer of “wholesome entertainment” movies with Swarg Narak and Swayamvar, both starring Sanjeev Kumar.

By then, he had already given Bollywood a few memorable movies — Ram Aur Shyam, Ghar Ghar Ki Kahani (in which actor Rakesh Roshan got his break) and Julie (which introduced Rakesh’s younger brother Rajesh as a music director).

But in 1980, his eldest son, Prasad, who helped him with the film business, died; and Nagi Reddi went into depression. Sanjeev Kumar sought to bring him back to his elements by successfully persuading him to make another film, Shriman Shrimati. “Sanjeev Kumar was a great support to my father. We were planning to ask him to run our movie business, but he died soon after,” says Viswam. The movie-making days were now, sadly, belonged to the past.

Chandamama, too, almost became history. In the mid-nineties, labour problems began to brew in their press at Vadapalani, where the magazine was headquartered for decades. Finally, a scuffle between workers and a supervisor spinned so much out of control that publication had to be suspended in May 1998. “It was the most painful decision of my life. I could have done much better in life had I not taken up Chandamama, but it was a passion for me,” says Viswam.

Adding to the labour trouble was a dispute in the family — Viswam calls it “conflict between ideologies of the second and the third generation.” The patriarch, B Nagi Reddi, meanwhile, lay bedridden in his Vadapalani home. Publication remained suspended for more than a year till two investment bankers, Sudhir Rao of Karvy and Vinod Sethi of Morgan Stanley, came to Chandamama’s rescue.

From a new, modest office in Ekkatuthangal, Viswam started all over again. “Once you shut down a publication, it is not easy to come back back. But by November 1999 we managed to print all the 12 languages and I presented the first set to my father on his birthday on December 1. That was the happiest day of my life.” The magazine sold six lakhs when it shut down, and when it revived, it sold around two lakhs — also the current circulation.

But seven years on, it has managed to break even and now, with some help from organisations like Infosys Foundation and Pratham, is seeking to expand its reach into rural areas. “For 60 years we survived on sheer goodwill. We never promoted ourselves. And we will continue to survive on goodwill,” says Viswam.

Considering three generations of Indians grew up on Chandamama, the goodwill is one thing you can’t doubt — so much so that Walt Disney has been reported to be buying it out. Viswam, however, says the report about Walt Disney taking over is only speculation. “I was surprised myself when the report appeared. My phone kept ringing throughout the day. Even my staff was upset that I had not told them anything.”

He, however, is in favour of a strategic partnership with Walt Disney where the American company can use Chandamama’s content for its programmes. But Viswam says his real desire is to see Chandamama develop into non-profit institution like Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan — the idea being to turn it into a permanent pillar of Indian culture and ethos.

If there is any truth in the report about Walt Disney’s takeover bid, then you could expect more action in the boardroom of Chandamama than in its editorial rooms. That should not matter for lay readers as long as they get their monthly quota of, “Once upon a time, there was a king...”

Three Enemies Who Ruined My Game

2006-08-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

I have a fetish for nostalgia, but this column isn't inspired by it. If anything, it is driven by a sense of despair that grips you when a bunch of people conspire to ruin your happiness. It is like going to an old-world restaurant for years and years, and then one day the restaurant is pulled out and a shopping mall springs up in its place. Shoppers will come in hordes, but a handful of people will always mourn the restaurant. In the same way, I mourn cricket.

In those days, it was pure cricket — completely unadulterated by commercials for pesticide-containing cola. Everything happening on the ground was telecast live — cricketers chatting with each other during the drinks break, the facial expression of the batsman who had just got out, the fast bowler shining the ball repeatedly with his spit while walking up to the run-up point. It was like watching the match in the stadium with binoculars.

Then came Enemy No. 1. It had many names: commercialism, commercialisation, consumerism. Perhaps liberalisation and globalisation as well? I don't know; but what I know is that my party has been spoilt. Even before the last ball of an over completes its journey across the pitch, an ad springs up on the screen. And in many cases, the hero of the ad happens to be the man facing that last ball. By the time the cameras return to the ground, the next bowler has already begun his run-up. I can no longer figure whether I am watching a cricket match in between commercials, or watching commercials in between a cricket match.

Enemy No. 2: politics. Traditionally, in an Indian newspaper, Page 1 is reserved for politics and the Back Page for sports. But in the past few years, the papers have been putting cricket news on Page 1 — and the news is not about who beat whom by how many runs or wickets. That's a clear indication that the game has become synonymous with politics. The only saving grace is that the papers haven't put Jaswant Singh's spat with Manmohan Singh over the mole issue on the sports page. In my estimate, the day is not too far when press releases issued by politicians will go on the sports page and when every e-mail exchanged between players and their coach will go on the front page.

The day, come to think of it, is really not far considering that almost every politician save Sonia Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee and L K Advani is now connected to cricket. West Bengal takes the cake: the Chief Minister props up the police commissioner of Kolkata to fight Jagmohan Dalmiya in the elections for the Cricket Association of Bengal. The police commissioner! The man who should be busy guarding Kolkata in the wake of terrorist attacks in Mumbai! Thank God the commissioner lost.

Enemy No. 3: The killer instinct. The Indian team was always said to be lacking the killer instinct. Is that why we are now being treated to footage of our cricketers dressed in Army fatigues, crossing hurdles like the jawaans and trying their hand at sophisticated rifles? Guys, don't take the term "killer instinct" literally: just stick to the bat and the ball and keep off the guns and the grenades. What you actually need is the spirit — the spirit that earned India its sole World Cup in 1983. But then, you guys are too rich and pampered and spoilt. Probably what you need is a Deepak Chopra, not a Greg Chappell. Did anyone say they are now flying down Deepak Chopra?

Confessions Of An Aspiring Yogi

2006-08-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

Eight years of living in Delhi had deprived this rice-eater of rice so much that when I came to Chennai and set up a kitchen for myself, I decided to pull out all the stops. Almost every dinner would be rice and boiled potatoes — steaming hot — with a spoonful of ghee, accompanied with some dal and boiled eggs. I hesitate to mention that the dinner was preceded by the sub-standard rum you get in Tamil Nadu.

Life went on like this for two whole years and then one morning when I woke up and looked in the mirror, I found Vijaykanth, the actor, staring back at me. I looked again: this time it was Mohan Lal’s face in the mirror. Many people — my mother included — would have seen it as a healthy sign, literally. But I alone knew how unhealthy I was.

Every morning I would wake up with pain in the heels and the knees. Very frequently I would have ‘heart attacks’ and rush to the doctor, who would send me home saying it was nothing but acid reflux. I never trusted the doctors: I thought they were hiding something. I suffered in silence. But I was not willing to suffer the bloated look, come what may. I checked my weight.

Eighty kilos! In Delhi I never exceeded 67. What was I to do? There were many things I could have done: I could have joined a gym, gone on brisk walks, bought a bicycle, and so on. But I chose yoga, and that’s because I believe that you push yourself hard enough only when you are in a class: an instructor has to breathe down your neck and you should also feel a sense of shame when the man or the woman in front of you is doing far better.

Today I weigh 71 and am nearly as flexible as when I was 20. And that is why I am writing this, even though I am not a yoga expert or teacher. A teacher can only write out a prescription like a doctor, whereas I am the patient who is recording the success of a medicine. The medicine, in this case, is thousands of years old.

Yoga: the very mention of the word is likely to throw up the image of a serene beauty, her eyes peacefully shut, sitting amid mountains in the lotus pose and meditating. It could be some other image as well, depending upon the degree of your familiarity (or non-familiarity) with yoga. But at any rate, the image won’t be that of sweat and speed and stamina — the kind you would associate with a gym, where one man is panting on the treadmill, a woman with earphones is cycling away, a bloke is pumping iron and is admiring his triceps every second minute.

Yoga — I am sorry to disappoint gym enthusiasts — not only packs in the power of a gym but much more. All you need to do is go to www.ashtanga.com and look at the dozens of pictures of 90-year-old Mysore-based Pattabhi Jois, the Ashtanga Yoga guru, directing his devoted students. Each of the students has a chiselled body that you would die for; and why not, because yoga is not just about sitting on your backside and breathing. In fact, it can be a pain in the backside. “Welcome to Bikram’s torture chamber for the next 90 minutes” is how Bikram Choudhury, the Calcutta-bred yoga guru who found riches in Beverly Hills, welcomes his new students.

It is just that yoga is taken lightly because it is highly flexible by nature: there is no definition to it. If you sit and focus on your breath, it is yoga. If you lie down like a corpse, that is also yoga. If you do the headstand or the handstand, that is also yoga. It all depends on how you use yoga to achieve what you are looking for. And here we are looking for some vigorous stuff — stuff that will make you lose weight like crazy and sculpt your body and also make you flexible. Yoga can’t make you an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Salman Khan, but you can certainly aspire to acquire the body of Brad Pitt or Akshay Kumar. The choice is yours. And women, won’t you want to look like Angelina Jolie?

The key to achieving the dream body is not hidden away in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. It is, in fact, the very basis of every school of hatha yoga: surya namaskara or sun salutation. The sun salutation is supposed to be only a warm-up sequence that prepares you for other postures, but in itself, it gives you the collective benefit of all the equipment in a gym. When done slowly, it stretches and tones your body and increases you awareness. When done fast, it builds your muscles and also becomes as an excellent cardio-vascular exercise.

The traditional sun salutation is a combination of 12 postures (check www.sivananda.org or other yoga sites), which work every part of your body. But wait, these 12 postures involve only one leg, and therefore constitute only half a round of surya namaskara. For one full round, you will have to repeat the same 12 postures with the other leg. And yoga gurus usually recommend a minimum of 12 rounds for a healthy person.

By the end of five rounds, beads of sweat will surface on your eyebrows, and at the end of twelve rounds — if you are easily able to achieve it, that is — the yoga mat will turn into a river of sweat. But professional yogis think nothing about doing 20 rounds, and there are contests (in the West, of course; because yoga is still not the ‘macho’ thing in India) where one is required to perform 108 rounds! You need to be Superman to do that.

Whatever it is, surya namaskara is the surefire way to lose weight along with strengthening your heart and your muscles. Ah, but that’s only the traditional surya namaskara, which is relatively kind on its practitioners. The Ashtanga version of sun salutation, as taught by Pattabhi Jois in Mysore, is ruthless: even one round can require the strength of Superman. And mind you, the Ashtanga school prescribes two versions of it: Sun Salutation A and Sun Salutation B. Check them out on the internet! — and you will find a lot of pages because Ashtanga is very hot in the West, where they also call it Power Yoga.

A hardcore yoga practitioner will wish that he or she didn’t have to do the surya namaskaras at all, but those not into yoga at all will find the postures simple. And that’s because they are merely looking at the postures and not doing them. But then, for the ignorant, everything is deceptively simple. All they need to lose weight and sculpt their bodies is a yoga mat and an empty space, not even 10 ft by 10 ft. Yet they spend Rs 10,000 to sign up in a posh gym, only to stare at an empty wall while running on the treadmill or pumping iron even though their muscles are not strong enough to lift even their girlfriends. Sad.

But they will take to yoga one day — the day Hollywood stars such as Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves sign up for a class. But I can tell you that these stars are already into yoga, courtesy Men’s Health magazine, and last year I saw Jude Law doing the headstand in Vanity Fair. Maybe our blokes are waiting for the Indian media to report their fascination with yoga. Well, you have now read this article, haven’t you?

'Amitabh is a Lucky Superstar'

2006-06-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

Smartly turned out in a black T-shirt and grey bermudas and white sneakers, Mani Ratnam sat right in the middle of the Express press, thoughtfully scribbling something. His cinematographer Rajiv Menon, also clad in T-shirt and bermudas and sneakers, sat in a corner chatting with Fanaa writer Shibani Bathija. A couple of Mani Ratnam’s assistants, also wearing T-shirts and bermudas, went around setting up the place for the next shot. Is that the uniform of Mani and his crew, or is it because of the Chennai heat? Or it could just be for the sake of mobility, because when you are a Mani Ratnam or a member of his crew, you have to be on your feet all the time – as I was to realise a little later.

So there I was, standing at the door of the press, all set to watch the next shot of Guru, the upcoming and much talked-about film of Mani. It is a delight to watch the director. The man, I am told, has had his share of heart attacks, but he was bouncing around, as if he was wearing springs inside his FILA socks. His eyes were rarely normal: they either pondered or twinkled. As I surveyed him surveying the press, someone touched my shoulder and said, “Excuse me.” I stepped aside and let the male voice walk in. It was Madhavan. He was wearing a vest and an assistant was presently handing him a shirt. Then another tall man in a white kurta and dhoti, with his cropped hair painted in silver, arrived: Mithun Chakraborty. The same Mithunda who disco-danced into people’s hearts two and a half decades ago wearing white – not dhoti-kurta but shirt and bell-bottoms and white shoes. But the hair was black and long.

As soon as Mithun entered the press his assistant handed him a khadi waistcoat. They were ready for the shot. Mithun plays a media baron and Madhavan plays his son-in-law who is also his reporter. The scene is that of a confrontation between the two where Mithun basically asks Madhavan to get lost.

Ever since I moved to Chennai five and a half years years ago, I have seen quite a few film shootings and quite a few Tamil stars: Ajit Kumar, Vikram, Vijay, Sharath Kumar, Ramya, Rambha, Jyothika and a few others whose names I do not know. But they were all shooting action or song sequences. This was the first time I was witnessing an intense dialogue scene. And it taught me two things: 1. You can’t beat experience, and 2. Perfection can be a pain but it is worth it.

When I say experience, I mean Mithun Chakraborty. The confrontation scene was okayed after about half-a-dozen retakes, and Mithunda breezed through each of them. Each time Mani shouted “Cut!”, the Disco Dancer would take a break in front of a pedestal fan. An assistant would give him a piece of cloth and he would dab his face.

But Madhavan had no such respite. Mani, after shouting the “Cut!”, would walk up to him and ask him to put more emotion in his dialogue. Not that what Madhavan was doing was anything wrong, but Mani wanted perfection. He would make Madhavan rehearse his lines like a schoolboy after every take. But not once did the director have a word with Mithun Chakraborty.
Mithunda, after all, is no ordinary actor. The masses might know him as the Disco Dancer, but few know that he has won the National Award thrice, including for his debut film – Mrinal Sen’s Mrigyaa. And he hopes to get the fourth for Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Kaalpurush.

Coming back to Mani Ratnam’s perfection. Perfectionists are usually an impatient lot, and impatience often breeds bad temper. And today I was witnessing Mani Ratnam’s temper. Before one of the retakes of the confrontation scene, an assistant who was barely in his twenties went around clearing the place. But in the process, he himself lingered on in front of the camera for long enough to arouse the temper of Mani, who had by now announced “Ready!” and was about to say “Action!” Mani went charging at the boy with a raised palm, as if about to slap him, and said, “You, you son of a b***h! You soiled a natural shot!” The boy’s face remained emotionless: he was clearly used to such abuses. After the shot was taken he gently told the boy that he should run out – and not stroll out – of the camera’s view after getting a shot ready. But the very next moment he lost his cool with another of his bermuda-clad assistants who was giving the clap. “You fool, don’t you know how to do it?”

Throughout the retakes I had plenty of opportunity to talk to Mithunda but I was too scared of Mani. A little later, I spotted him in the portico of the Express office. Technicians were setting up reflectors and lights and a few men were busy yanking off the backdoor of a Fiat that bore a number plate starting with M. Clearly, the movie dates back to a few decades. The door was being pulled out to enable Rajiv Menon to install his camera.

While the preparations were on, Mithunda sat on a plastic chair smoking a cigarette. A colleague who had already met him before, introduced me. He was visibly happy at having met a fellow Bengali on the sets.

For a 10-year-old watching a movie, especially in the days I was growing up, the hero was the man who could beat up ten goondas without batting an eyelid – as if it was a dance sequence. And if the hero could dance, it was a bonus. Mithun Chakraborty could do both not only effortlessly, but also convincingly. Amitabh could fight goondas well, but he was never a convincing dancer. Jeetendra danced well, but he was not a convincing fighter. But Mithun, with his dancing and ‘fighting’ abilities, made even a B-grade movie like Disco Dancer a superhit.

He was the only Bollywood star who command a parallel audience to that of Amitabh Bachchan’s throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. As a result, film glossies referred to him as poor man’s Amitabh; and when Govinda arrived on the scene later, they referred to him as poor man’s Mithun. Any other actor might have felt flattered being sandwiched between the two comparisons, but not Mithun Chakraborty, who won the National Award for his very first film as hero – Mrinal Sen’s Mrigaya, released in 1975. The success tasted even better because earlier in the same year, Mithun’s first commercial movie, Do Anjaane, was released. In the movie, which had Amitabh and Rekha in the lead, Mithun is only a junior artiste – he plays the role of a loafer who hangs around on the street outside Amitabh’s house and also has a brief confrontation with the superstar.

Ok, I think of Amitabh as a superstar, the world thinks of him as a superstar, but what does Mithunda, a contemporary and a co-actor in Agneepath (which fetched Mithunda a National Award for best supporting actor), think about the Big B? The Bengali star smiles and says: “I would say he is a lucky superstar.” Lucky? As in the Big B is no good as an actor? “Look, what is acting? Acting means you should be able to play any role given to you. Acting means playing Ramkrishna Paramhansa (in Swami Vivekananda) and also being the Disco Dancer of the nation. If you talk about acting, I think Naseeruddin Shah is a great actor, Paresh Rawal is a great actor, even Johnny Lever is a great actor. For me, they are the real actors.”

And the Big B? “He is a terrific actor too, no doubt, but I don’t think he is the ultimate superstar. As I told you, he is a lucky superstar. There are people like Naseeruddin Shah and Paresh Rawal. Even Johnny Lever. Such great actors!”

According to Mithun, the Big B’s superstar image had also hampered the growth of his son Abhishek as an actor. “Poor boy, they were all comparing him with his father. The boy has talent, and he has finally managed to come out of his father’s shadow. In fact I was first one to congratulate him and tell him that he was now an actor in his own right.”

Will his own son, Mimo, who was recently launched as an actor, won’t face the same problem? “I think he will,” Mithunda says, but quickly adds, “but he is a far better dancer than I. He dances 22 times better than me. He is a boy to watch.” Just as his face begin to assume a father’s pride I ask him a question I had always wanted him to ask: Why did he chuck everything in Bombay and come to settle in the South?

“Even while I was in Bombay, I found myself in Ooty for six months in a year. I fell in love with the place and decided to settle there. I love the South,” he explains. He also loves the South Indian approach to making movie. “They are perfectionists, technically and otherwise. The discipline you see here, you don’t see anywhere else. I want Mimo also to do films for South Indian banners before he moves elsewhere. It is a good training ground.”

His shot is called. He pulls out another cigarette and takes a few drags. The scene is like this: Mithun, the media baron, gets into the car (the Fiat whose door has just pulled out), and as soon as he gets in some goons appear and smash the car windows and decamp in a waiting taxi. Unfazed, the media baron jumps out of the car and yells at the escaping goons. The shot is okayed in two takes. The unit begins to wind up. So far, Mani Ratnam hasn’t exchanged a single word with him. Perhaps that explains the three National Awards that are currently under his belt.

But the man does not have any attitude. If I had wanted my picture to be taken with Madhavan, I might have thought thrice. But Mithunda was hanging around there like an affectionate college senior. “Aye, aye,” he said in Bengali – meaning “come, come” – the moment he saw me wanting to take pictures with him. To tell you the truth, I was never a great fan of his. But then, he and movies have been an integral part of my childhood. And after the encounter with him, I have become his greatest fan.

Old India, New Indian

2006-06-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

The man on the upper bunk snored away as I sat by the window, watching the world-famous greenery of Kerala pass by. Every time the train stopped, he would lower his head and ask me ‘‘Which station?’’ and go back to sleep.

Finally, during a longish halt, he climbed down. He smiled at me and asked: ‘‘Where you going?’’ ‘‘Trivandrum,’’ I replied. ‘‘I also going to Trivandrum. My friends booking a resort in Kovalam. We will have some enjoyment.’’

In India, a train journey is rarely complete without fellow passengers exchanging bio-datas. Within minutes, I had his: His name was Velu, he was 29, and he worked as a leather technician in Guangzhou, China. He had a wife and a four-year-old daughter who lived back home in Chennai. He was on vacation, and he was on his way Kovalam beach for ‘‘enjoyment.’’

‘‘You coming to China? You must go to Shanghai. Very big city. I take my wife there last year.’’ He offered me a cigarette. I reminded him that smoking was not permitted in the train. He withdrew the packet and went on: ‘‘In China, even females are taking smokes, just like men!’’

The urge for a smoke had made him restless and he asked for the copy of Time magazine lying on my lap. He absentmindedly flipped through the pages until his eyes fell on an article titled ‘‘Sex, Please — We’re Young and Chinese.’’ His eyes kept widening as he progressed through the article and muttered from time to time: ‘‘Correct! Absolutely correct!’’ His eyes finally popped out of the sockets when he spotted the word Guangzhou. ‘‘See! See! Here I am working.’’

By now the train had pulled out of the station. We were passing railways buildings, their walls painted with slogans like ‘‘Railway men on strike!’’ and ‘‘SRMU Zindabad!’’ (SRMU is a union of railway workers). Barely 20 years ago, such graffiti could be seen on walls anywhere in the country. Those were the days of the capitalist versus the worker, when strikes, or threats to strike, were commonplace.

But in Corporate India, unions have by and large become redundant. They are now concentrated mainly in the communist bastions of West Bengal and Kerala, and it was Kerala our train was snaking through. Outside, it was the Old India, which still believed in the might of the workers. But inside, sitting with me, was the New Indian, earning good money in the New China. Old India, New Indian — these two contrasting concepts divide the average Indian today.

This division cannot be more obvious than on Kolkata’s Elgin Road. Last week, I stood on that road, asking for directions, when something struck me. On my left was the house of Subhas Chandra Bose (now called Netaji Research Bureau), an icon of Bengal — Communist or otherwise. Technically, the party founded by him, Forward Bloc, is now a part of the Left coalition ruling the state. Shattering the calm of his house is the loud music blaring from the compound of Forum, an upscale shopping mall. The music was meant to attract the attention of people to a car-buying scheme. A few years ago, such a blatant pratice of consumerism, that too on the road where Netaji once lived, would have been considered blasphemous. Not anymore. Most Calcuttans no longer think like Satya Kaku. One rarely comes across a committed man as Satya Ray, or Satya Kaku — Kaku meaning ‘‘uncle’’ in Bengali. He is a bachelor at 74, but he has been married to Communism. I met him at a friend’s place.

Satya Kaku retired about 15 years ago from the State Bank of India. He told me with pride: ‘‘I joined in 1955, when it was called the Imperial Bank. Then it became the State Bank of India. I worked there for 40 years minus 17 days.’’ He added with the same sense of pride: ‘‘I did a lot of ‘union’. That is why I never got promoted. But those days you treated the officer like an enemy, like dirt. But these days union leaders are sold out. They treat the officer with a lot of respect. It is really sad.’’

In fact, the new-generation Calcuttans have said an emphatic ‘‘No’’ to the graffiti with which the ruling Left Front wants to paint the city’s walls to highlight its 30 years in power. ‘‘Left or Right, you have no right to write,’’ a woman listener told a radio programme when asked about her reaction to the State Government’s move. Newly-formed unions of residents have crossed swords with the traditional unions over the proposed graffiti-writing. Considering that political graffiti is something that every Calcuttan has grown up with, the resistance indicates a drastic change in attitude.

That’s India for you today. On the one hand, you see the fruits of economic liberalisation and globalisation — processes started in the early 1990s by the then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, who is today the Prime Minister. Shopping malls are becoming so common that newspapers and magazines have stopped screaming: ‘‘Mall Mania!’’ Tommy Hilfiger underwear and Guess jeans have moved out from the glossy pages of GQ and Vanity Fair into the racks in these malls. Peopling these malls are young men and women who no longer seek government employment just for the sake of job security. One works in a confectionary company that has just been taken over by a Korean major, another works in a software firm headquartered in California, and so on. At parties, they curse Indian airports and debate which airport is better, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.

On the other hand are the watchdogs of Old India — people who are highly allergic to the terms ‘‘economic liberalisation’’ and ‘‘globalisation’’. They oppose proposals to privatise airports or any government institution that is in a pathetic state: the idea is not to endanger the job security of employees. They fight all takeover bids. They go on strike. And yes, they hate America. These people are getting stronger as well. Earlier this month, Communists returned to power in West Bengal as well as Kerala. And in the 2004 general elections, the Left parties bagged 64 seats — their best performance ever.

But strangely, the New Indian and the watchdogs of the Old India are allies in the Central Government. And they seem to be faring well together, considering that Manmohan Singh has just finished two years in office without any hurdles coming his way. So while their friendship keeps the Government going, their differences keep editors and journalists in business. Good news, after all, is hardly any news.

The Eye of Time: Book Review

2006-06-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla By Sabeena Gadihoke Parzor Foundation and Mapin, Rs 2,570

Time is like a fistful of sand. You can rarely completely own it: the grains are bound to slip out of your fingers and become what we call history. But here is a chance to do just that, own history. Buy Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla.

Vyarawalla needed no introduction to the high and the mighty in the 1940s and 1950s, but for the benefit of the present generation, here goes. She was India’s first woman press photographer, who covered momentous events and who today lives, at age 93, alone in Baroda. Her lifetime’s work, whose importance she didn’t realise in the prime of her life as a photographer, has been put together by Sabeena Gadihoke, a mass communications teacher at the Jamia University in Delhi.

At Rs 2,750, the coffee table book might not fit every budget, but once bought, it gives you every paisa back in the form of hundreds of lavish photographs that mark the transition of British India into our India. And the bonus is that the history chronicled in this book is honest. Photographs, after all, don’t lie, though the same can’t be necessarily be said about a historian’s pen; a historian’s pen has the luxury of omitting or suppressing details, depending on his or her ideology.

Take the Partition, for example. We all know of it as a dark event, when a Muslim Pakistan was carved out of India in the Northwest and the East, leading to the butchering of thousands of people in communal riots on either side of the newly-formed border. Even 60 years on, India continues to pay a heavy price for that outcome of Partition called Pakistan. Today, you hardly notice the front page of any newspaper without the mention of Pakistan — and the news is rarely good.

It is easy to blame Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In fact, it is considered politically correct for Indians to blame him. Praise him, and you are in trouble — as L K Advani might have realised by now. But the lay Indian is not aware that the Partition was also endorsed by the All India Congress Committee during a marathon meeting on June 14, 1947, much to the displeasure of the Mahatma and many others.

Says Gadihoke of the meeting: “While scholarly work on the largest migration of people in history has been more prolific in recent times, the visual representation of Partition has largely focused on the victims of the tragic event… (Vyarawalla’s) own account of this meeting where a ‘handful of people’ voted for Partition is a testimony of her deep disappointment at the turn of the events.”

And this account cannot be more credible because she and another man called P N Sharma were the only photographers left to cover the All India Congress Committee meeting. They had covered the meeting clandestinely after other photographers staged a walkout because the then-Congress president, Acharya Kripalani, did not want the Partition debate to be photographed.

Says Gadihoke: “From Homai’s accounts, this meeting was a stormy one, where younger socialists like Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan lashed out at the others for allowing the division of the country. Congress Muslims like Maulana Azad and Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan were visibly upset, as was Gandhi.’’

Gadihoke further quotes Vyarawalla: ‘‘I feel absolutely disappointed about Partition. They were in a hurry to take power into their hands, and if you see my pictures of the final meeting, there were just a few people there. The entire hall was just about as big as my house. When they said ‘Raise hands for Partition’ you could see there were very few people there. India is so big: they should have taken the consensus of people but they didn’t do. Kripalani was in the chair, and he was averse to our taking pictures. He allowed only two minutes for everybody to speak for or against, and if anybody tried to speak against it, he was made to sit down, and if someone was in its favour, they were allowed to speak. Sardar Patel then stood up to speak and said, ‘If you have gangrene on your arm or leg, you cut it off and finish with it.’ That was their idea of Partition. But the gangrene is still there and it is progressing now.”

In other words, if the Mahatma had his way, the country might have escaped Partition, and you wouldn’t have had a Pakistan today to contend with. But the Congress leaders seemed to be in a hurry to gain power and they bulldozed Gandhi into saying yes. In Vyarawalla’s words: “The Congress party treated India like their own jagir, giving away part of the country as if it belonged to them.”

Only a Mahatma — a great soul — could have seen the larger picture then and felt the pain. For lesser mortals, India was a free nation, and Jawaharlal Nehru the face of that freedom. No other man was going to matter more for the next two decades, so it is not surprising that he figures in most of Homai’s pictures in the book. A rare picture shows Nehru flanked by the Dalai Lama and Chou en Lai.

“Somehow or the other he never resented photographers around him, and sometimes I noticed that he posed for pictures, as if unconsciously,” she says. A couple of pictures show Nehru waiting for his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit at the Palam airport; right behind him is a signboard that reads: “Photography strictly prohibited.”

The book can help the younger generation catch up with many momentous events of the past, such as the Mahatma’s funeral; Vyarawalla’s coverage is extensive. Also prominently featured is the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1961. But what can be particularly a treat to the eyes, especially for those interested in political history, are the pictures of Nehru and his first Cabinet ministers.

A set of pictures shows them at a lunch hosted by Sardar Patel. The impression one gets from the picture is that the lunch was a cold and silent affair — as if the bunch did not get along very well. Sitting in one corner is Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, the industry minister, who seems to be totally out of place. He was out of place indeed: he quit the government soon after to form the Jana Sangh, which later on became the BJP.

The book also chronicles Vyarawalla’s own life — from being a poverty-stricken girl to being the wife of a photographer to being a loving wife and a mother, and from being a star photographer to being a lonely woman who lost her husband and son and who now prefers to lead a lonely life. She is one of the monuments of Independent India, and this book is a monument to that monument.

Who Are You Banning?

2006-06-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

In journalism we follow one principle when we are not certain about a fact or facts while writing or editing a copy: When in doubt, leave it out. Suppose we are not sure whether Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi is 82 or 83, and if there is no reliable source at hand to verify his age instantly, we leave it out.

Governments, not only in India but also elsewhere, follow a similar policy when faced with controversial situations or tricky issues. The moment they sense an issue could create trouble, they slap a ban. That still makes sense, even though it could mean robbing their subjects of their fundamental rights.

Take, for example, the ban on Satanic Verses. The average Indian reader was not given a chance to decide whether Salman Rushdie’s book was indeed blasphemous. But a lot of times, a ban is slapped merely for historical reasons or to make a symbolic statement in the name of morality, in total disregard of the ground reality.

Indian movies, for example, continue to be banned in Pakistan. And in India, while youngsters in the rest of the country can spend evenings gathered around moisture-coated jugs of beer, their counterparts in Gujarat will still be breaking the law if they drink. Reason: Gujarat is the home-state of Mahatma Gandhi, and since the Mahatma was against the habit of drinking, the Gujaratis cannot drink too. From time to time, various regional parties who come to power on the plank of prohibition ban drinking in their states – only to revoke the ban a few years after.

What’s the point? For that matter, what’s the point in any ban? Does it serve any purpose? Indian movies might be banned in Pakistan, but there would hardly be a Pakistani who is not familiar with Bollywood stars or Hindi songs. Even during the 1987 World Cup, after which Imran Khan was supposed to retire, Pakistani girls, during the semi-final at Lahore against Australia, kept singing in chorus for their hero: “Chalte chalte, mere yeh geet yaad rakhna, kabhi alvida na kehna…” (remember my song: never say goodbye). That’s a hugely popular Kishore Kumar song, not a Pakistani song.

In Pakistan, where alcohol is prohibited for religious reasons, Scotch flows at parties hosted by the well-heeled. And in Gujarat, where alcohol is banned for moral reasons, people who have the money and the means to drink, drink. So at the end of the day, who is the ban enforced for? It is usually for the people who are not connected to the ban in any way. An average Indian, for example, couldn’t have cared less, in the 1980s, about Salman Rushdie’s books. In fact, but for the ban on Satanic Verses, they wouldn’t have even known who Rushdie was. As for the elite who were aware of his earlier works, they could have easily picked up Satanic Verses in either London or New York.

The same goes for drinking: a compulsive drinker, if he is poor, will manage to get his drink anyway, even if it is hooch. That he might pay for it with his life is a different matter. And if he is rich, he will have a bootlegger deliver Scotch at his home. So what about the ban?

Certain bans are outright ridiculous. Like the one on smoking in trains. This is not to defend or extol the habit of smoking, but the point is, if cigarettes are being sold in the market, there are bound to be people smoking them. World over, airports have separate smokers’ lounges. But imagine the plight of a habitual Indian smoker who travels, say, in Raptisagar Express from Gorakhpur to Kochi —a journey of 60 hours! Is he not supposed to smoke during those two and a half days? Little wonder that passengers don’t follow such an impractical ban: the smokers smoke away. Once again, the ban holds good for people who don’t smoke anyway.

But it is unfair to blame India alone: it is still a democracy that is growing up. Today every literarily-inclined Indian has at least heard of Henry Miller, if not read his works. In the West, he is an icon. But Miller was banned in his own country, the US, till the 1960s. The charge was that his writing was pornographic. Many other literary geniuses suffered because of similar bans, one of them being D H Lawrence. Till a few years ago, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was officially banned — I am not sure if it still is — in India. The ban had carried over from the British days.

The English should have learned from the French. It was in France that many of the icons of English literature flourished: Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, D H Lawrence and dozens of other writers, including the writers of the Beat generation. These people could write because Paris, even in the 1920s and 30s, encouraged freedom of expression. If the French went about banning books and writers, can you imagine how poor literature would have been?

What's Your Caste?

2006-05-21T03:19:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, a friend had thrown a small party at his flat in Chennai, where I met a very attractive girl from Kerala. As luck would have it, I found myself alone in her company quite a few times during the evening. Since I had been to the state quite a few times, I sought to impress her with whatever little knowledge I had then about God's Own Country. Luck seemed to be going in my favour till I made a terrible faux pas. I happened to ask her, “Are you a Nair or a Nambiar or a…?” She cut me short, penetrating my eyes with hers, “In this day and age, how can you ask someone's caste?!”

I wished I could bury myself in the concrete floor. My question, as I look back at the incident, was merely intended at carrying on the conversation. After all, it was her charm that had kept me engaged, and charm knows no caste or religion. But I still can't figure how the evil spirit of political incorrectness gripped me momentarily that evening. Maybe deep inside I was highly nervous to blurt out something so silly. Whatever it maybe, I lost her instantly. But her question still haunts me and makes me wish I could disappear in thin air: “In this day and age, how can you ask someone’s caste?”

But come to think of it, you can — even in this day and age. If some of our politicians had their way, then the application forms for premier educational institutions are going to ask you your caste. And if some overenthusiastic politicians have their way, you would be expected to provide your caste name even when you seek a job in a call centre or in a three-star hotel. If it is politically incorrect to ask someone's caste, it is equally politically incorrect to create situations where the issue of caste leads to tensions within the society.

The dictionary, after all, gives two definitions of political correctness:

1. Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

2. Being or perceived as being overconcerned with such change, often to the exclusion of other matters

Those who conformed to the first definition of political correctness were the founding fathers of the Constitution, including B R Ambedkar, who indeed sought to redress historical injustices in matters such as caste. They provided for 22.5 percent reservation for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in government institutes and institutions. And the reservation was to be in effect for only for 10 years — the idea being that 10 years was long enough for the social imbalance to be rectified.

People who took over from the founding fathers fall under the second definition. They recognise castes as potential votes. At any rate, none of them would like to be seen as anti-dalit. So every ten years the Constitution is being amended to extend the reservation for yet another decade (that last amendment was in 1999, when the quotas were extended till January 25, 2010.) Among these people there are a few overzealous ones, such as V P Singh and Arjun Singh. Both, interestingly, belong to the upper caste and both were fiercely loyal to Indira Gandhi - the same Mrs Gandhi who had put the Mandal Commission report (recommending 27 percent additional reservation for other backward classes, or OBCs) in the cold storage.

By digging out the Mandal report, V P Singh not only dug his own political grave but also opened the gates of power for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which united the Hindus by telling them that their religion was more important than caste. One does not know the political future of Arjun Singh, who has now reopened the Pandora's Box by proposing 27 percent reservation for OBCs in IITs and IIMs and medical institutes, but he has certainly made a million enemies overnight.

Last week, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, or AIIMS, resembled the Tiananmen Square of 1989. If the students’ hunger strike at Tiananmen Square was bad news for communism in China, the hunger strike by young doctors at AIIMS could be bad news for the Congress.

As the nationwide protest against Arjun Singh’s move rages, spokesmen from either ends of the social spectrum are going to offer their views. Even a range of social scientists, much sought after by the media for a quote or two on issues ranging from dowry deaths to rising communalism, are going to offer expert comments.

But I have only two simple questions to ask:

1. Imagine two engineers, Mr X and Mr Y, working in a government organisation. Mr X had got in through the quota, while Mr Y had come in as a general candidate. They get the same salaries, they live in similar houses, they send their sons to the same school and so on. Then why should Mr X’s son be entitled to a quota once he grows up and looks for a job?

2. Sweepers might be an extinct species in metros, where people live in apartments and clean their own toilets. But back home in Kanpur, we have one: a 15-year-old boy of cheerful disposition. His grandfather was a sweeper, his mother is still a sweeper, and now him. It is quite heartbreaking to see him whistling and singing and going about cleaning the house: he should be holding a pen instead of a broom. How does the reservation policy help boys like him?

Why Should Politicians Be Khadi-Clad?

2006-02-16T23:28:00.000-08:00

It isn’t easy if you want to look like a policeman even for a day. You have to get a khaki uniform stitched — and God alone knows where you can get those stars and the badges and, above all, the cap from. Ditto if you want to look like an Army or a Navy officer. Even a lawyer, for that matter. Unless you are friends with a film ‘extra’ who can guide you to the shop that rents out stuff for shootings.

But to look like a politician, all you need to do is walk into the nearest Khadi Gramodyog store and buy yourself a white kurta and a pajama and, perhaps, a waistcoat. Go home, change, and there you are! — a politician. If you want to look like a hardcore Congress politician though, you may have to don the Gandhi cap, though one is not sure where you get them. Interesting question: where do you get Gandhi caps? And why are they called Gandhi caps? Gandhi, at least in the pictures we see of him, never has a cap on. Except in the few pictures of his younger days when he had just turned into a political activist from a lawyer. (According to a friend, the Gandhi cap is a khadi replica of the prison cap worn by all black convicts in South Africa during those days).

In any case, even Congress ministers and politicians hardly wear those caps these days: they have discarded the cap just as they have discarded Gandhi’s principles. Sitaram Kesri was perhaps the last Congressman to faithfully don the cap till he died a few years ago. He had prostrated and placed the same cap, as a mark of loyalty, at the feet of Narasimha Rao when the latter was the Prime Minister. The occasion was Rao’s birthday. But when Rao ceased to be the Prime Minister, the same Kesri forcibly replaced him as the Congress president. Soon after, Kesri himself was forcibly removed to make way for Sonia Gandhi. He died a heart-broken man.

With his departure, the Gandhi cap went completely out of fashion. It doesn’t matter much because the Gandhi who Congressmen worship today is not Mohandas but Sonia. Wait, this is not yet another column on dynasty-bashing. It is about khadi being the uniform for politicians and why I think it is time they discarded it.

The khadi, during the freedom struggle, was a symbol of economic independence. It made perfect sense for politicians, who were the torch-bearers of the struggle, to wear khadi. But today the word ‘politician’ evokes general hatred. People identify it with greed, lust and selfishness. And bearing the brunt of the hatred is the khadi uniform: anyone wearing it is considered to be evil and scheming. The villains in most of the present-day movies, Hindi or Tamil or Telugu, are khadi-clad. The khadi-clad, pot-bellied man is often the object of ridicule in cartoons and comedies.

To shed the ‘evil’ image, they need to shed khadi. They should learn from IT minister Dayanidhi Maran. He dresses up like any other office-goer who knows his job. Such an image instills confidence in people, who have lost faith in the khadi-clad breed which only knows how to seek special privileges or make empty promises.

By the way, what do you or your dad wear to work? Shirt and trousers. That’s the common Indian’s attire, described in the common man’s language as ‘shirt-pant’. Then why should politicians, who are supposed to be representatives of the common man, wear something different? Wouldn’t their constituencies identify more with them if they wore a shirt and a pair of trousers?

But then, we practice politics of symbolism. We cling to symbols even when they lose their relevance. Khadi was relevant then, but today India is no longer a nation nursing the bruises from the freedom struggle. Today it is considered as an emerging superpower. At a time when the art of dressing is an industry in itself, why should politicians stick to something that is reminder of a bygone era and something that inspires only cynicism? They too should dress up to inspire confidence — in themselves and in the people. They should learn to look cool.

The new president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, is in news these days because of his clothes. Recently, when he went meeting heads of states across the globe, he kept his alpaca-wool pullover on. Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin, as Presidents of their respective countries, did not wear dark suits when they visited the Taj Mahal. They just wore T-shirts. Even Musharraf was dressed rather casually, in a Chinese-collared shirt, during his summit meeting with Atal Behari Vajpayee in Agra.

One reason why they looked cool is they are trim. Clinton worked out, Putin is a judoka, while Musharraf is a former commando. Indian politicians, who often sport a generous paunch, might not look so cool in a T-shirt after all. But that’s the point: why can’t our politicians have trimmer tummies and fit into T-shirts and inspire the nation into being fit and healthy?

Waiting For V-Day

2006-02-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

I had been noticing the man -- let’s call him Mr. X -- in the gym for nearly two months now, but it was only the other day that we got talking.

After the usual I-am-so-and-so information was exchanged, he shot a question at me. ‘‘Are you married?’’ No, I replied.

Mr. X (his eyes getting wide): ‘‘What? No?’’

Me: ‘‘No.’’

Mr. X (eyes getting wider): ‘‘Why? How old are you? 28? 29?’’

Me: ‘‘I am 35.’’

Mr. X (the sockets not allowing further expansion of the eyes): ‘‘What?! You are older than me?! And you are not even married. I have a four-year-old daughter!’’ Then he added: ‘‘Don’t you think it is high time?’’

In India, once you are on the wrong side of your 20s and still not married, it is common to attract such concern from total strangers -- you may meet them in the gym, in the bus, in the train, in the bars, at the workplace. And their concern is usually genuine. ‘‘Beta ab to shaadi karle, teri maa to kuchh aaram milega (Son, it is still not late. Get married now. Your mother will get some rest).’’ That’s the advice I have always received from elderly women in the train during my trips to (and from) the North.

I have always dismissed their advice with a smile: for me, nosey neighbours are one of the hazards of long-distance travel. But the other day, when Mr. X asked, ‘‘Don't you think it is high time?’’ it set me thinking.

Okay, it did please me immensely when he mistook me to be 28 or 29, but who am I kidding? I am 35 - the age when people remain single only when ‘‘something is wrong with them’’. Is something wrong with me? Or have I simply missed the bus? Or am I getting worked up unnecessarily? I don’t know.

People in India get married primarily for one of these three reasons: 1. Persuasion by parents, which stems partly from reason No. 2, which is ‘‘what will people say’’; and No. 3. Out of love.

But youth, in its arrogance, refuses to recognise any reasoning: it only follows its instincts, which are often basic in nature. Then, one day, life pulls the rug and you stumble into the threshold of middle-age. The world suddenly turns upside down. Till the other day, pretty young women were not willing to associate with you in any way till you promised marriage. Now, women -- young as well as older -- are willing to associate with you only if you don’t propose marriage. ‘‘Can’t we be just friends?’’ they tell you - exactly the stuff you told those young women in your younger days.

The arrogance might have deserted me, but hope hasn’t. We live on hope, or dreams - dreams peddled by Hollywood, Bollywood and the several other Woods that obsess the nation. And there are many stars in these Woods who are happily single in their 30s and who marry 25-year-olds even at 41.

So I am giving myself one last chance this Valentine’s Day-eve, desperately stirring up hope that some secret admirer will emerge on that magical day and ask me: ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ It that happens, you won’t ever see me using this space again to talk about romance and marriage.

If that doesn’t happen, you still won't see me doing that. For the day I had the conversation with Mr. X, I promptly registered myself on Shaadi.com. Very soon, I might bring home someone whose hobbies are ‘‘knitting, cooking, interior decoration and indoor games’’.

Thoughts From Kerala

2006-02-03T04:02:00.000-08:00

Like the immigration officials who presume you are a terrorist before they fork out answers that may prove you to be otherwise, I presume every new Hindi film is bad till our in-house reviewer ‘Baddy’ Rangan puts his stamp of approval. Still I end up watching movies of my choice only on DVD, that too months later. The theatre is not my scene: I still tend to look over my shoulder every time there is clapping or the screeching of a car, realising only seconds later that they are part of the sound effect.

But for some reason I wanted to catch Rang De Basanti in the theatre — first day, first show. Maybe I was too taken up by the promos. But watching an Aamir Khan movie on the first day, first show is like asking for the moon. “Sold out,” a friend told me when I asked about the possibility of getting tickets. Then luck intervened in a strange way. I got to watch Rang De Basanti: first day, first show. For on the day of its release, I found myself in Trivandrum, where getting tickets for a Hindi movie is rather easy. The balcony was full, but I effortlessly found a seat in the Middle Class. For Rs 27.

The star cast on the porch of the theatre read like this: Aamir Khan, R Madhavan, A R Rahman. I guess no one else matters much here. Inside the theatre, paper bits went up in the air rented by screams the moment Aamir’s name appeared on the screen. Another round of applause burst through when Madhavan’s name showed. And the crowd went berserk when Rahman’s name appeared. After the first two rounds of applauses, I leaned to express my amusement to my companion — a young engineer, very proper and ladylike. And even before I could whisper to her, Rahman’s name appeared and she cupped her palm around her lips and went: “Vooooooooohooooooooo!” I left her alone after that.

The no-smoking-in-public law in Kerala seems to be only on papers. Of course there are menacing cops who patrol trains looking out for possible offenders, but once you are in God’s own country, you are free to smoke almost anywhere. The young men at the theatre puffed away without care — an act that would instantly attract a rebuke from policemen in a place like, say, Chennai. In fact, most of these men just stopped short of bringing their cigarettes inside the theatre: they put them out while handing their tickets to the doorman. But I have seen them smoke inside the theatre too. I was in Kannur about five years ago — the time when actress Shakeela was a rage. I had only heard of her, but never seen any of her movies. Curiosity led me to a theatre which was playing Naalam Simham (Fourth Lion). Soon after the film began, lights popped up from various corners of the theatre, and soon I was watching Shakeela through a haze of smoke. “This is the bidi capital. People have every right to smoke here,” a local friend later told me.

There is also a link between cigarettes and communism, if you believe writer John Steinbeck. In his book In Dubious Battle, the protagonist, a dedicated Communist Party worker, always remembers to carry cigarettes because he sees them as an effective tool to initiate conversation with a potential convert: “Here, want a smoke?” No wonder most old-time communists were/are smokers. E K Nayanar was a smoker. West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is one. CPI veteran A B Bardhan smokes, so does CPM’s Sitaram Yechury.

Talking of Fourth Lion, there is a movie playing at the moment in Kerala called Lion, which has local star Dileep as the hero. Lion comes on the heels of Tiger, which had Suresh Gopi as the hero. What next? Panther?

An Inheritance Of Shambles

2006-01-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

Name: Bharatiya Janata Party
USP: Party with a difference
Builder’s name: Lal Krishna Advani
Vote-catcher: Atal Behari Vajpayee
Spokesmen: Krishan Lal Sharma, K R Malkani
Muslim face: Sikandar Bakht
Highly respected leaders: Sundar Singh Bhandari, Kushabhau Thakre
Firebrand leaders: Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati
Ideologue-in-chief: K N Govindacharya
Agenda No. 1: Construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya
Aim: To come to power.

That was 1995. Now let’s look at the party’s bio-data in 2005, in a laterally inverted form.

Bharatiya Janata Party: The principle Opposition party
Party with a difference: No longer. Rather party with serious differences
Lal Krishna Advani: Steps down as party president in a rather disgraced manner
Atal Behari Vajpayee: Decides to retire from active politics
Krishan Lal Sharma, K R Malkani: Dead
Sikandar Bakht: Dead
Sundar Singh Bhandari, Kushabhau Thakre: Dead
Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati: Sent to political wilderness
K N Govindacharya: In political wilderness
Construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya: No longer on the agenda
Aim: To regain power.

The comparison of the two CVs should, more or less, tell you the story of the BJP’s downfall, which has been as spectacular as its ascent. But as a columnist, you can’t just wind up a story like that and walk off; you have to write a certain number of words. Just like the BJP, while celebrating its Silver Jubilee in Mumbai, had to say the right kind of words that were in keeping with the occasion, even though they hardly conveyed the ground reality.

‘‘(If) the scourge of corruption is to be removed from our society, the Congress will have to be ousted from every lever of power. Power corrupts; Congress in power corrupts absolutely,’’ Advani, in his capacity as the outgoing president of the party, told the Silver Jubilee gathering. Even as those watching him on TV had yet to get over the hidden-camera footage showing BJP MPs receiving bribes to ask questions in Parliament.

But to be fair to Advani, he did mention in his speech that a ‘‘Congress-isation’’ of the BJP had also happened in the past few years. He had to; the manner in which all the flaws of the Congress party were transmitted to the BJP has been so glaring that one cannot sweep it under the carpet. And who would know that better than Advani, himself a victim of that infection?

Here is a man who is physically fitter than politicians not only his age but also many far younger. Mentally, he is today perhaps more agile than anyone else in the field: sharp, shrewd, observant, and does not utter a word more than is necessary. And he built the BJP from scratch. But he had to go, that too at a time when he was needed the most. The irony is that Advani, throughout his political career, was known as a ‘‘hardliner’’, in other words someone close to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). But in the end, it was the RSS which perpetrated his ouster by taking offence to his glowing tributes to Mohammad Ali Jinnah when he visited Pakistan last year.

The RSS, which advocates Indian culture and ‘‘Indianness’’, must be aware of the ancient saying, ‘‘Atithi Devo Bhavah,’’ which means the guest is like God. But then, the guest also has some responsibility towards a gracious host. That’s why Advani said good things about Jinnah when he was on Pakistani soil. But back home, all hell broke loose. Finally, he had to go, an unceremonious exit for a man who has travelled the length and the breadth of the country several times, braving sun and rain, to mobilise support for his party.

Today the second generation of the BJP has formally taken over the reins of the party, with the appointment of Rajnath Singh as the new president. Now, how many of you really heard of him before you read in the papers that a certain Rajnath Singh was likely to replace Advani? ‘‘You’’, as in your readers living south of the Vindhyas. There’s nothing wrong if you hadn’t: around 10 years ago, even the people of Uttar Pradesh had hardly heard of him.

Rajnath Singh’s first noteworthy political assignment was as the education minister of UP in the government of Kalyan Singh, during the pre-Babri Masjid demolition days. Then he came to the Centre as a member of Parliament. Time was when there were two BJP MPs by the name of Rajnath Singh, and one of them had to append the title of ‘‘Surya’’ to distinguish himself from the other. The fact that the other did not need to append any title or nickname showed that he was more prominent of the two. And he was. He went on to become the Uttar Pradesh president of the BJP in 1997, and in 1999 returned to the Centre as the surface transport minister under Vajpayee. The next year, he returned to Lucknow as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.

But Rajnath Singh has always been at the centre of factionalism in the UP BJP. As the president of the BJP’s UP unit, he was hardly on cordial terms with the then-Chief Minister, Kalyan Singh. Kalyan Singh was eventually removed after a sustained campaign within the party, only to be replaced by Ram Prakash Gupta, an elderly man who was dug out of political oblivion and installed in the CM’s chair by the BJP just to avoid further infighting. But Rajnath Singh had the last laugh when he managed to replace Gupta as the Chief Minister in 2000. Gupta was later sent appointed as the Governor of Madhya Pradesh, where he died in 2004.

The BJP that Rajnath inherits from Advani is, like its Uttar Pradesh unit, in a state of disarray. The old guard is almost gone; so is the discipline. The second-rung leaders are highly ambitious and can barely stand each other. In such a scenario, will Rajnath only add fuel to the fire, or will be able to douse the fire as he is ideally supposed to? The coming months should tell us that. The only significant change in the party, as of now, is that its reins are once again in the hands of a leader from the Hindi belt, the region BJP has been traditionally identified with.

On The Galle Road

2005-12-23T02:05:00.000-08:00

It is 7 p.m., and I am at the seaside town of Bentota, sitting in a tiled-roof bar that is practically empty and that is now playing Akon’s I am so lonely, I have nobody. Over the music you can hear the whirring of a generator running in a building not very far away. It isn’t a generator, though; it’s the sound of the ocean.

Presently that sound is drowned by the rattling of the seven o’ clock train that is passing by. The rail track is just a few feet away from the balustrade of the bar. That’s how it is in Sri Lanka. Wherever you go, a rail track always follows you, just like that faithful dog in the Hutch commercial. Even when you go to a local bar. The track, of course, doesn’t follow you inside the bar; it waits for you outside, as is the case now.

I look at the passing train. Like many things in Sri Lanka, the rail coaches have something old-world about them. Maybe it's the make: they are still painted a rusty red and seem to have been manufactured at least a quarter of a century ago. One wouldn’t be surprised if the coaches were indeed made then, or even earlier, because for the past two decades, the country’s energies—and resources—have been directed towards fighting the war against Tamil separatists. A country that registered eight per cent growth until the early 1980s, economically ahead even of Singapore, today spends nearly a billion dollars annually on defence alone. And now there is talk of war again.

‘‘I think Mahinda (Rajapakse, the new President) is giving them (the LTTE) a last chance for peace. If that doesn’t work out, he will go for a fight-to-finish war. I think you can expect a war in six months,” says Chaminda, my driver, who is sharing the local Lion beer with me. According to him, the LTTE has already been decimated because of last year’s tsunami (which wrecked the country's eastern coast—the stronghold of the Tamil Tigers). ‘‘The LTTE is now run by young boys,’’ he says.

The ocean continues to roar, and a young man emerges from the darkness and walks into the bar, carrying two pineapples. He is wearing Bermuda shorts, and so is the boy who runs the bar. The music has changed to a party number. If you discount the talk about political turmoil, we could have been sitting in a restaurant in a Caribbean island. I suddenly pity friends who have always pitied me for my love for Sri Lanka. They say: ‘‘What is there to see in Sri Lanka? It is just like Madras.’’

Not quite. The panther and the tiger may belong to the same family, but they are two distinct animals: you never make the mistake of confusing one for the other.

I ask Chaminda what he thinks of Rajapakse. His opinion is no different from those of the Sinhalas I’ve spoken to so far. ‘‘He is a good man. He is not like Chandrika. He is not like Ranil. They come from the elite class, just like all the previous Prime Ministers and Presidents. Rajapakse is the first President to come from a village, from a village down south. He understands the problems of the poor,’’ he says.

Today, the problems of the poor primarily means suffering because of the December 26 tsunami last year, which killed at least 30,000 people across the island. Many in the country think the toll is much higher: 80,000 to a lakh. Rajapakse, who is also the finance minister, set aside 50 billion Sri Lankan rupees (a hundred rupees make a dollar) for post-tsunami reconstruction in the budget he presented recently.

‘‘I lost my house. I was in Colombo that morning. But my wife and son were down south. They ran to the hills. Then they moved to my mother’s house. That’s where we all live now,’’ says Chaminda. But he does not betray the bitterness of a man who, like millions of others, has lost his home, his belongings.

It is not difficult to see why: after 20 years of war, Sri Lankans have made peace with adversity. Adversity, for them, is like the wayward son you resent but cannot discard: you have to give him food and shelter. So the next day, a Sunday when the traffic is almost nil, when we drive from Bentota to Galle, you hardly feel that this stretch was a scene of destruction only a year ago.

The highway has been rebuilt. A few metres to its right is the ocean, and a few metres to the left the mandatory rail track. ‘‘There were houses here,’’ says Chaminda, pointing to empty stretches on the side of the ocean. At some places, damaged, deserted houses still stand. At other spots, wooden houses have come up. Sinhala boys loiter around here and there. Their bodies are sculpted, and many of them have grown their hair like Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

The real testimony to Sri Lankan resilience are the hoardings flanking the Galle Road. They tell you that the tsunami is now a memory, and that the country is looking forward. Aishwarya Rai is selling Lux. Another hoarding, hoisted above a tsunami-wrecked building, screams ‘‘Sun & Fun’’. It is selling a sun screen lotion (‘‘Tested in USA’’) and shows a bunch of girls frolicking on the beach. Another one advertises Sri Lanka’s ‘‘fastest growing fixed line network,’’ Suntel.

Chaminda suddenly cries out: ‘‘They took away the train!’’ He points to a stretch of the rail track on the left. ‘‘They had put up the Matara train there, but now it's gone.’’ He is talking about Train No. 50, the morning fast passenger from Colombo to Matara, which was washed away by one of the killer waves on December 26 last year. Nearly 2,500 passengers died—about a 1,000 of them were those who had jumped into the train to escape the first wave. Today the site of the disaster looks like an innocuous stretch of the unescapable rail track.

If there is any suffering on account of tsunami, it must be elsewhere, perhaps in the relief camps. In Galle city, life is as usual. Families are headed for the Dutch fort, where barebodied teenagers offer to jump into the ocean from its parapet for a small tip. There is one scar, though — the Galle cricket stadium, where many a famous cricket match has been played and which today lies unattended. The sea is so close to the stadium that a powerful shot by someone like Virender Sehwag can land the ball into the water.

We stop by at the Dutch museum on the Leyn-Baan Street. Opposite the museum is a 150-year-old house inhabitated by an old woman and her daughter. ‘‘Water came upto four feet inside the house. My furniture got washed into the garden,’’ the woman, who refuses to give her name, says in a clipped accent. As if she were talking just about a flood, not tsunami.

I asked her how the prolonged war had affected her family. ‘‘You mean the Second World War? Oh, you mean the war with the LTTE. That was going on in Jaffna, we weren’t affected.’’ So did she have memories of the Second World War? ‘‘Yes, yes. I was five years old then. 1939, I remember. Even Colombo was bombed then.’’

Driving back to Bentota, and then back to Colombo, the spirit of celebration is palpable. Last year Sri Lan- kans had welcomed the New Year in gloom. This time they are determined to celebrate. Tiding over tsunami, at least mentally, seems to have been easy for them.

What Makes A Man Sexy?

2005-12-08T09:32:00.000-08:00

Last month, when the People magazine, which annually transforms a mere mortal into a Greek God, named Matthew McConaughey as the “sexiest man alive,” I silently rejoiced. Silently, because not many people I know have heard of him, leave alone seen his movies. And rejoiced — it is important to clarify at the outset — because I felt vindicated and not because I dream of being marooned in an island with a Hollywood hero.

Even I had never heard of McConaughey (what a difficult name even to type out) till I saw Sahara, an action movie based in Western Africa, which ran in the theatres for just about two weeks. But for Penelope Cruz, it might have gone totally unnoticed. An out and out action movie — so much of action that it could have given you a headache. Surprisingly, I didn't get a headache. In fact, I went back to watch it one more time.

There was something seductive about the movie. Was it the camerawork which did justice to the beauty of Africa? Was it Clint Mansell's haunting background score, including the adrenalin-pumping Boat Montage song? Or was it the action itself — at times convincing, at times deliberately comic? I can't figure why, but, yes, I found myself being enamoured of McConaughey: tall, rugged, good-looking and with the air of devil-may-care, he pushed Penelope Cruz and her role to insignificance.

Now that's a real man, I thought, so why aren't they talking about him? But they kept on writing obsessively about Tom Cruise and his scientology (whatever that might mean) and Brad Pitt and his romance with Angelina Jolie. They kept toasting George Clooney and kept gushing about Johnny Depp's good looks (something I will never understand). No one ever mentioned McConaughey, no one mentioned Sahara.

And now comes People magazine’s verdict, which is soon likely to become the people’s verdict. The magazine chose him as the "sexiest man alive" because of McConaughey’s “heaping helping of Texas's finest South charm.” The jury, instead of pinning down his charm to a certain geographical location, could have simply said: “The man has got presence.”

My opinion might have been vindicated, but the question continues to rankle me, whose answer I am not destined to find: What makes an actor, or just about any man, sexy? This is considering that he is tall, trim and reasonably good looking.

Does the woman like him raw? Or does she like him refined? I really wouldn't know, for women rarely reveal the crevices in their minds. All my life, I was given to understand (by women) that they like hairy chests. But the men who are ruling their hearts have chests that are as smooth as a baby's bottom. I always thought a real man was the one who rubbed Lifebuoy soap on his hairy chest under the shower. But present-day sex symbols sit in a bath tub strewn with rose petals and caress their smooth chests with a cake of Lux.

The moustache is another area of confusion. In India, especially in states like Haryana and Tamil Nadu, the length of a man’s moustache is considered directly proportional to his manliness. But the heart throbs of today are all clean-shaven. Even the cricketers. So does the moustache make a man sexy or does it not?

Smell is another area were I have doubts. Does she like him smelling of sweat, leather and tobacco? Or does does she like the fragrance of cologne on a well-scrubbed skin? And the hair — is long sexy? Or short? Short seems to be the flavour of the season, but Mahendra Singh Dhoni grows it long.

From what I gather, the definition of sexy changes every season. That is why you had men who were metrosexual, then retrosexual, and now technosexual. Tomorrow they could be autosexual, when the size of their cars would be determining their manliness. I would rather remain just a heterosexual who prefers sex over sex appeal. Sex appeal, after all, is just a mask you change every season. The other one is the real thing.

The News Isn't Good Enough

2005-11-26T00:37:00.000-08:00

A fact of life: the English left our shores nearly 60 years ago but the urge to learn their language never left us. On the contrary, it is tightening its grip every passing year - today even the accent in which the English is spoken matters, thanks to call centre jobs.

Nothing wrong in that. In a country like India where the number of dialects spoken is about three times the numbers of days in a year, it doesn’t help at all to be proficient just in your mother tongue. Hindi might be the national language but learn Hindi alone and you could at best be a Hindi teacher in some government school.

You might have often observed in public places such as restaurants or train compartments: a mother speaking to or rebuking her child in English. The confused child keeps slipping into its mother tongue, but the mother would stick to the English she knows. There are two reasons for her doing so - one, to demonstrate to the people around that she isn't a village woman; two, she genuinely wants the child to learn the language.

There was a time when parents had another handy device to make their wards learn English -the newspaper. The Midnight's Children will tell you how their class teachers asked them to read Calcutta's Statesman, which had a British editor even after the British had left and which was then reputed for its impeccable use of the language.

Many Calcuttans still accord God-like status to Desmond Doig, the legendary editor of Junior Statesman, who once had a copy rewritten 27 times by the reporter before considering it fit for publication in JS. Many other Indian papers also had, at the time, larger than life editors who could teach an Englishman a thing or two about the use of the language. And they also had their Doigs - faceless, nameless news editors who spent evenings peering over type-written copies in their tiny, musty cubicles.

Several generations of journalists honed their skills under the tutelage of these Doigs, producing newspapers that could indeed be considered the last word as far as the usage of the English language went. The Express, in Chennai, had its Doig in C P Seshadri, more popularly known as Master - an old-world but apt nickname because he could make others in the newsroom feel like a schoolboy. That's how you were those days: a nervous kid who considered it safe to deposit his ego at the doormat before entering the newsroom.

Today you might trust a journalist to give you the news, and maybe the news behind the news. But you can no longer trust him, or her, to teach you English. That’s because these days, journalists aren’t made. They are manufactured, by the expensive journalism and creative-writing schools that have sprung up in every respectable city today.

These schools, instead of puncturing egos, only seem to be inflating them, so much so that there is no space for the real education that comes along with the job. So these days you have someone trying to write like Marquez, and someone else trying to ape Hemingway (and none of them are likely to have read the journalism of these giants, only literature). And those who don't read books write as if they are still writing for their college magazines, thinking that's their ‘style’.

Both varieties - they are usually people in their 20’s - are extremely touchy about their writing: they would often want to know why their stories were edited or cut. They don’t care to remember the advice Chekhov gave about story-writing: after you have written your story, always cut out the first and the last paragraphs, because often they are the most pompous.

But who is there today to puncture egos and show the way to the youngsters? You can only lead by example, and here is an example of bad English and the worst kind of journalistic writing - the introduction of the lead story in the recent issue of a leading national newspaper which takes itself very seriously. “Islamabad: Even as it became clear that the death toll in Saturday's earthquake in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) could be well over 30,000, Islamabad on Monday said it would receive relief goods from India.”

The introduction is so convoluted that it serves as a shining example of how not to write. It is the journalistic equivalent of illiteracy. But such writing is commonplace these days. Properly put, the sentence would read something like this: “Pakistan on Monday said it would receive relief goods from India to help victims of Saturday's earthquake that devastated parts of the country, killing more than 30,000 people.” Is it laziness that is allowing the murder of the language? Or is it merely incompetence?

Whatever the case, the news doesn’t seem to be good for either budding journalists or readers aspiring to enrich their language. It looks as if the guardians of the language are now sitting outside the newsrooms. I have three friends whom I turn to for advice or assurance whenever I am stuck with a piece of writing. They are all women in their twenties - one is a surgeon, another a teacher, and the third an architect.

Have Allies, Will Rule

2005-11-26T00:32:00.000-08:00

In a nation that has been Independent barely for sixty years, ten years is a long time, especially when it comes to the existence of a political party or a political movement or a political system. Cross the ten-year milestone and you find will a permanent place under the Indian sun. Anything that is at first dismissed as an aberration, once it completes ten years in existence, eventually gains public acceptance. Perhaps that can explain why certain communal, casteist and, even, 'linguistic' groups, initially dismissed as the lunatic fringe, have become political forces to reckon with.

The foundations of Independent India may have been soaked in the blood of the nearly half a million killed in the Partition riots, but people who were old enough at the time to understand politics could have never visualised that a party which beat up fellow Indians hailing from down South and openly abused Muslims would one day rule Maharashtra. Neither would they have imagined that an electrical linesman's daughter who earned political fame overnight by heaping abuses on the upper castes would one day run Uttar Pradesh, the state that made Jawaharlal Nehru — the hero of 1947, a sophisticated, broad-minded man — a full-time politician.

Nehru was the Prime Minister when trouble began in Madras over the language issue. The refusal to accept Hindi as the national language led to a full-scale anti-Hindi agitation in the 60's. But no one, even at the height of that agitation, is likely to have imagined that some day, a Tamil director wanting to make a Tamil film called Love Story could risk himself being straddled on a donkey and beaten with brooms unless he changed the title to Kaadhal Kadai (the Tamil translation for Love Story).

Coming back to the point: ten years matter a great deal. If they stick around that long, the lunatic fringes become vote catchers, and a temporary political arrangement becomes part of the political system. And in about six months from now, India would be celebrating the tenth anniversary of an event which, politically, is no less significant than the achievement of Independence.

In August 1947, the British handed over political power to Indians. But in May 1996, the Indian electorate, breaking away from the tradition of being ruled by a single party, handed over to its leaders the concept of coalition politics. Actually what they had given was a fractured mandate: for the first time in the Independent history of the country they could not collectively decide which party should rule. The BJP and its allies — the Shiv Sena, George Fernandes' Samata Party, Akali Dal and former Sanjay Gandhi loyalist Bansi Lal's Haryana Vikaas Party — won more seats than any other party or combine. They staked claim and were asked to form government, even though they were far short of majority.

They hoped that some of the regional parties traditionally opposed to the Congress would support them for the sake of political stability. Sushma Swaraj, then the BJP spokeswoman, kept saying during the run-up to the vote of confidence that politics was not about arithmetic where one plus one made two, but about chemistry where one plus one could make eleven. She also kept saying that a large party, supported by various smaller parties, would provide a more stable government than a small set of parties propped up by a large party. Her chemistry didn't work, because the BJP, thanks to the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque, was considered a political untouchable. India's first coalition government came down in 13 days. Before the motion of confidence could be put to vote, Vajpayee made an emotional speech in the Lok Sabha and announced: “I am going to submit my resignation to the President.”

But Swaraj's theory that a large party when supported by various smaller parties provided a more stable government turned out to be correct in the coming months. In fact, it turned out to be the guiding principle for coalition politics in India. Even as Vajpayee was driving to Rashtrapati Bhawan to submit his resignation, a man who spoke no Hindi and whose command over English was no better than Vajpayee's, sat in Delhi's Karnataka Bhavan fielding questions from journalists who kept asking him how he was going to provide a stable government.

The man answered the questions rather absent-mindedly, because his mind was on the call from Rashtrapati Bhawan that was expected any moment. The call came soon enough, and H D Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal was bound for the President's House to collect the invitation letter to form the new government. But where did Gowda read out the contents of the invitation letter? At the courtyard of Delhi's Andhra Bhawan. He did so standing out of his white Ambassador car, so that he could be elevated enough to be seen (and heard) by all reporters and cameramen.

So that was that: Deve Gowda was to be the new Prime Minister from June 1, heading a 13-party coalition called the United Front which would be supported by the Congress. It is a different matter that not many outside Karnataka know who Deve Gowda was. Gowda, a former Chief Minister of Karnataka, was chosen for the job after the CPM politburo voted against Jyoti Basu becoming the Prime Minister — a decision that Basu himself later described as a “historical blunder.”

But why did he read out his letter at Andhra Bhawan? That was because the architect of that coalition, Chandrababu Naidu, operated from there. Naidu even got the CPI to join the government. Indrajit Gupta, the CPI giant who spent his lifetime opposing the Congress, was now the home minister in a government propped up by the Congress.

But the track record of the Congress as a supporting party had been bad. Indira Gandhi had pulled down Charan Singh in 1979 and Rajiv Gandhi had pulled down Chandra Shekhar in 1991. And in April 1997, in keeping with this party's tradition, Sitaram Kesri, for long the Congress treasurer and now its president, withdrew support to Gowda. His charge: Gowda had become a “communalist” and was being friendly with the BJP. Kesri made this allegation in a passionate speech at the Congress headquarters in Delhi, where the old man energetically lifted himself up on his toes every time he uttered the word “communalist.”

In came I K Gujral under “Operation Ganesh”, which was the BJP's description the episode : “the head is severed and another head, of an elephant, has been installed. The torso remains the same.” Within eight months, the ageing Sitaram Kesari swung into action again, this time demanding the removal from government of the ministers of DMK, which had been indirectly implicated by the Jain Commission probing the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Gujral had to go.

The BJP returned to power, and this time their alliance was 24-party strong. The coalition system had finally secured its place. It had become the norm, rather than a matter of convenience or compulsion. But teething problems were there. Allies who thought they were not getting their share threatened to withdraw support time and again. Mamata Banerjee of Trinamul Congress made the threat several times. The possibility of a key ally pulling out kept politicians as well as journalists on their toes for most of the late 1990's. It finally happened in April 1998 when AIADMK's Jayalalithaa decided to break away from the alliance.

Vajpayee lost the confidence motion by just one vote and fresh elections were called. The Kargil war intervened and Vajpayee, riding the sympathy wave, returned with a stronger and bigger coalition, which now included many parties from the erstwhile United Front. After that, it was a rather smooth ride for Vajpayee. He managed to complete five years in office — the first time by any non-Congress Prime Minister.

During these five years, the Congress seemed to be silently taking lessons in the coalition dharma. For when the National Democratic Alliance was defeated in the May 2004 elections, another coalition called the United People's Alliance smoothly replaced it. But there's one thing you might have noticed of late: no party of the ruling alliance is any longer threatening to “withdraw support”. And the Opposition is no longer expecting “mid-term polls.” These were terms that made headlines frequently in the late 1990's.

Withdrawal of support, the allies know, would only mean forcing fresh elections on public, which only wants a stable political system. So the politicians seem to have matured, and so have the electorate. Perhaps that is why in Bihar they decisively voted for the alliance led by Nitish Kumar. They had obviously failed to understand the strange equation between Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan and the Congress and had decided not to waste their votes on them.

International Integration and Other Stories From Kanpur

2005-11-23T06:59:00.000-08:00

Bara Chauraha, or the Big Square, is the heart of Kanpur from where life is pumped to the rest of the city. All public transport vehicles terminate here, and from here they begin their return journey. A crowded, noisy and chaotic place around which stand some of the city's biggest landmarks, all more than as century old — a college, two hospitals, two banks.

Till recently, Bara Chauraha boasted of another landmark, Nishat Talkies, which showed latest Bollywood movies. Hindi films are released in Uttar Pradesh a day before they hit theatres in the rest of the country, and Nishat would be packed for weeks after a new release. Often police had to be called in to control the crowds. While at college (which was right opposite Nishat), I had gone there to see blockbusters like Tridev and Maine Pyaar Kiya. And soon after I left the city.

The other day, when I was walking past Nishat, I paused for a second to see which movie was being screened. But the huge poster on the building, which once showed Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, Sunny Deol, Jackie Shroff and others (all usually brandishing a pistol) was now announcing, “Mega Sale! Get woollen garments for best prices.” During my previous, annual visits to Kanpur, I had seen quite a few respectable cinema halls either closing down or downgrading themselves to showing C-grade movies. Now Nishat has fallen too. And the hottest destination for Kanpur’s — to use the appropriate term — cinegoers? It’s Rave, a cineplex, rather a multiplex, for it also houses a few lifestyle shops and an outlet of Barista. For an average Kanpurite not used to such sophistication as watching a movie on a computer-generated ticket handed out by tie-wearing young men or just checking out the shops in case the tickets are sold out, Rave is indeed a place to rave about.

But this is not just the story of Kanpur.

Those were the days when you stood in the queue for almost an hour to buy tickets, and having bought the tickets, would alternately stare at the poster — an artist’s impression of the actors — and the girls who had come dressed up for the occasion. Once the gates opened, you would pause to look, with anticipation, at the stills from the film pinned inside glass cases at the lobby. Finally you surrendered to the man with the torch.

Today you only have to drive to a cineplex. If you don’t get a ticket for this movie, you can always get a ticket for that movie. And you no longer bother to look at the posters because you already have seen endless promos on TV. There are plenty of girls to look at, though, but who do you stare at? They all look alike: tight tops, low-rise jeans. The tops are usually black, the jeans either black or blue.

There is even an easier, far more comfortable way of watching latest movies — call your VCD wallah and within minutes he will deliver you “original prints”. Suddenly, watching a movie has become so simple. But those where simpler times.

One symbol of sin during those simpler times was Debonair, the famous (men’s) magazine brought out from Bombay which adorned newsstands even in the smallest of Indian towns. Adorned is the word, because the magazine was supposed to be only watched from a distance. The hawker won’t show it to you till you promised to buy. That was because for the lay reader, the magazine held only visual value and by merely browsing it, one automatically extracted a chunk of its value without paying for it. For the informed reader, however, the magazine’s assets extended beyond those of the topless models it showcased: incisive interviews, brilliant essays, high-quality reportage, short stories, poetry... Debonair, after all, has had an impressive list of editors.

But there is no denying that the topless models — all gorgeous, all Indians, and all shot by celebrated photographers (or photographers who went on to become celebrated) — were the USP of the magazine. For a society like ours which wants sex but does not want to be seen wanting sex, Debonair was handy: buy it and hide it under your pillow.

In the early 1990’s Debonair found a rival in Fantasy, which was published from Allahabad. Fantasy became such a hit that its publishers followed it up with Fun. Suddenly, in the mid-1990’s, there was a spate of “girlie” magazines. They began to be brought out from places like Noida and Ghaziabad. Then one morning Internet came and wiped them all out. Porn had gone online. Debonair still adorns my favourite newsstand at Mall Road, but nobody seems to be buying it. It is evident from the thick dust that has gathered on plastic covers wrapping the recent issues of the magazine. Today titillation in no longer bought on the sly from pavement bookshops but can be comfortably accessed in the privacy of your home. And to hide it you only have to press Alt+Tab. There is nothing to hide under the pillow.

A memorable evening for a family, in those simpler times, meant dinner at a good restaurant. Restaurant: the word conjures up images of a gently lit room, not too crowded, where waiters indulged you without indulging into your privacy, and where you could linger over your food for hours on end. The next morning you could say, “Last night we dined out.”

Today, when life is on the move, the word ‘out’ in ‘dining out’ or ‘eating out’ has become redundant; it is almost taken for granted. These days you grab a meal, or have a quick bite, at one of the eating joints where food ranging from Chinese to Italian is served under one roof. Just eat and get out, for there are others waiting to eat. Or because you just don’t have the time. One does not realise all this while in the middle of it, but floating here in the relatively slow pace of Kanpur, one can’t help wondering how the New Economy has changed the definition of eating.

In the locality I live, there is a sweet shop which is known for its samosas — authentic UP samosas made by halwais (the rustic equivalent of chefs: people who specialise in making sweetmeats, samosas and jalebis) hired from Banaras. Now those halwais seem to be learning additional skills: that’s what I presume from the new signboard the shop has put up. It reads: “Samosa, Masala Dosa, Burger, Pav Bhaji, Chowmein, Pizza.”

A Banaras cook making Pizza? Politicians might still be parroting the need for national integration, but a sweet shop in Kanpur has demonstrated international integration!

That reminds me, the VCD shop in my neighbourhood, run by a Sardarji, has also repainted its signboard to include a new line, “Tamil, Telgu and Malayalam VCDs also availeble.” India has become a smaller place, leave alone the world.

Postscript. National integration: the phrase returns to my mind as I return to Chennai from Kanpur in a train called Rapti Sagar Express, popularly known as the Gorakhpur-Trivandrum Express or the Gorakhpur-Cochin Express (depending on which of these cities in Kerala it is bound for when it originates from Gorakhpur on a particular day. The day I board the train at Kanpur, and today it is bound for Trivandrum (or Trivendrum, as the signboards on the coaches read, and not Thiruvananthapuram). When the TTE comes with the chart, it looks as if he has spread out the map of peninsular India in front on me. A journey of 36 hours lies ahead. But I take solace in the facial expression of a fellow passenger, a Malayali, who has boarded the train at Gorapkhpur, the northeast end of Uttar Pradesh, a good seven hours before I have, and even after I detrain at Chennai, he would still travel for nearly 17 hours before reaching his destination, Trivandrum. He is going to spend 60 hours in the train. Two and a half days!

The first big stop after Kanpur is Jhansi, the historical town famous for its rebellious queen Lakshmi Bai and where, till two decades ago, people coming from the North to the South and vice-versa had to change trains. The train stops for 20 minutes. Like most passengers, I step down onto the platform just to while away the time. I hear an announcement: “A passenger travelling from Orai to Vasco Da Gama has lost his ticket. If he happens to listen to this announcement, he should contact the station master.”

Orai and Vasco Da Gama: geographically, they must be about a thousand kilometres away from each other, but culturally, they are centuries apart. Orai, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, where women still cover their heads at the sight of elderly menfolk; and Goa, where Western women sunbathed naked till twenty years ago. Connecting the two civilisations, the two cultures, is Indian Railways.

The binding force of the railways grips you harder as you travel further south, to the prominent junctions of Itarsi (in Madhya Pradesh) and Nagpur (in Maharashtra). They are not just railway stations built on reddish-brown soil. They are the pulse points of India. There is hardly any station in the country whose name you would not hear on the PA system here. One moment you hear that the train from Howrah bound for Nagercoil was arriving on platform no. so-and-so, the next moment you are told that the train from Ahmedabad to Chennai was delayed by half an hour. The East Coast touching the West Coast, the Himalayas touching the Indian Ocean — Indian Railways achieves that every day, every minute. Who can be a better mascot for national integration? That makes me wonder: why the railway minister of the country is usually a Bihari or a Bengali?

Some Sell Books, Some Sell Soap

2005-11-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

Many of the writers whose books today sit on the ‘Literature’ racks of posh bookstores would have never imagined that their works would some day become classics. Run your finger through the spines of these books and you will realise that many of these writers did not even live long enough to bask in the fame that was due to them and that came posthumously.

If poverty put a comma in the writing careers of some of them, tuberculosis injected semi-colons in the lives of several others. Not to mention the question mark that would pop up now and then because of factors like alcoholism and censorship. Finally, a combination of some of these factors would put a full stop to the life of an about-to-be-celebrated genius. They would die even before they could turn 50, and in some cases, even 40. Maybe true geniuses are meant to die young enough, because if they live longer, they might produce stuff that negates their previous work.

As Hemingway famously remarked when William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949, “No son of a bi*** who ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards.” Hemingway might have said that out of jealousy, but he has a point — a point you will see if you closely follow the works of all Nobel laureates. Hemingway himself wrote nothing worthwhile after he accepted the Prize in 1954, with the exception of A Moveable Feast, the memoirs of his days in Paris as a struggling writer and which was published posthumously. And he wrote the book while fighting against depression which was induced by alcohol and ill-health (on the account of two plane crashes he survived) and failed marriages and which led him to commit suicide. He was 61.

If depression was an enemy for Hemingway, it was a constant companion for people like Eric Arthur Blair, or George Orwell, who could barely write in peace — ill-health and poverty kept hounding him till the end. A friend (was it Cyril Connolly?) once anonymously bailed Orwell out of his financial mess, so that he could keep his mind and soul together while writing. Orwell had no idea about the millions that were going to come because of 1984 and Animal Farm. Even if he had, it was too late: he was dying.

Tuberculosis and the censors killed D H Lawrence long before his time should have been up, even though he too had an anonymous benefactor in Aldous Huxley. Kafka died at 41, a sad man. F Scott Fitzgerald led a sad life and died young too. They all had something to say, so they wrote. Maybe to sustain themselves, but never to make money out of it.

Back home we had R K Narayan, who treated writing as yoga, irrespective of whether his books sold or not. And then there is Ruskin Bond, who has been soldiering on for decades from his modest home in Mussoorie, sustaining on whatever little money the children's books bring him.

But today the publishing world is no different from Hollywood or Bollywood. It has its own Tom Cruises and Brad Pitts and Shah Rukh Khans and Aamir Khans. Today you have celebrity writers who first write books and then go around, city to city, peddling them. And that does not exclude Sir Vidia, or V S Naipaul. The man has won every literary prize including the Nobel, does he still need to sell his books? Little wonder that Magic Seeds, the first book that he went around promoting after winning the Nobel, turned out to be eminently forgettable. It is quite possible that Naipaul, a man who cannot suffer fools and banality, is not even interested in such promotions and does that at the behest of publishers. In which case, publishers must realise that it is good writing that sells, and not the writer.

Hype can only get the writer fifteen minutes of fame. Maybe a dozen socialites will buy the book at the launch function. But that’s about it. Penguin editor David Davidar’s House of Blue Mangoes, which was launched with much fanfare only a few years ago, today sits dumped in the ‘Bargain Books’ shelf. On the other hand, the quietly-released Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh, is doing well. Not to speak of Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur, which was written more than a decade ago, when writers had not become glamorous.

The bottomline: good writing is capable of finding its way into readers’ homes. But not many seem to understand that in the age of desperate marketing. A big name like Tom Wolfe, for example, is today enticing people to buy his book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, by offering them a chance to win a beach holiday. One wonders if Indian readers should expect advertisements in the coming years which would say something like, ‘Buy this book and you could win 2-day/3-night trip to Goa!’ The ad could also be about finding a gold coin hidden inside the pages of a book, provided you buy the book. When marketing takes over, there isn’t much difference between a book and a one-kg pack of Surf Excel.

Madras Musings

2005-11-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

One of the downsides of living alone is that when you fall ill, there isn't anyone to take your mind off the various aches and pains, except perhaps the newsreader who only adds to your illness by repeating the news over and over again. That's what you are resigned to — watching TV. Or reading the papers over and over again, including columns that you never bother to look at otherwise. And when you are done with both, you just lie down and stare at the ceiling, pondering about what you've just heard or read. Life can be sad.

Having been recently pinned down to bed by flu for almost a week, I often pondered over the sadness of life. After much thought I realised: life might not have been so sad if I was living in another city instead of Chennai — say Bangalore or Hyderabad or Delhi. Why go that far — I would have been better off even in Kancheepuram or Vellore. Because there, even in my sickbed, I would have had Amitabh Bachchan or Richard Gere for company. You know what I mean —I could have killed time watching Set Max or Zee Cinema or HBO or Star Movies.

But the average Chennaiite has been stripped of the small luxury of watching movies on TV, because the city's cable subscribers are governed by the Conditional Access System, or CAS, under which you can only watch free-to-air channels on your TV unless you buy a set-top box by paying a small fortune. The idea of CAS was to allow viewers to choose what they want to watch, and pay for what they watch. For some strange reason, a man called Ravi Shankar Prasad — the lawyer-turned-politician who is best known in Bihar as the BJP leader in the forefront of anti-Lalu campaign and who happened to become the country's information and broadcasting minister shortly before the National Democratic Alliance was voted out of power — chose Chennai as the test case for introducing CAS.

Why Chennai? He could have chosen Patna, his hometown. Today, the NDA has been long out of power, but the CAS continues to be under implementation in Chennai. But for how long? Either the CAS is scrapped, or the entire country comes under it: Chennaiites alone can't be deprived of watching movies. But it is unlikely that there will ever be a protest strong enough to reach the ears of the present information and broadcasting minister, because all Tamil — and other South Indian language — channels, including their movie channels, are free-to-air. So are all the news channels — the ones in South Indian languages as well as those in English and Hindi. And people addicted to HBO and Star Movies and Star Plus have already bought set-top boxes. So who is left to crib?

So for a ‘North Indian’ Chennai-resident like me, the only option left was to watch the news channels — watching how the Indian cricket team had turned into a political party. Newspapers are even spelling out the allegiances of individual players, as if they were members of the Union Cabinet caught between the Prime Minster and their party president. But you can’t blame the sportsmen: politics has seeped into every aspect of our lives, even into our private lives. These days, go to a discotheque in Chennai with your girlfriend and grab a beer there, and chances these days are that you could be featured in the newspapers twice — first as a Page 3 animal, and the second time as a sex-starved animal who is letting his culture go to the dogs by drinking with the female in public. And you thought such things happened only in Shiv Sena's Mumbai.

Earlier this month, a Tamil paper called Dinamalar front-paged a picture taken in Chennai's Park Hotel. The picture shows a woman on the dance floor drinking beer straight out of the bottle. It is quite apparent, from the picture, that she is being egged on to do so by her male companion; perhaps he has just passed on his bottle to her. Whatever the case, it is a common sight for those who frequent discos. For a newspaper, a juicy picture, alright, but the caption smacked of chauvinism: “Is this what equality means?” And then it added: “In a society where married couples are reluctant to hold hands in public, how can women be allowed to sing and dance with them?”

The hotel ran into trouble with the police because of this picture as well as other pictures of that evening in the disco published by the paper. And this drama coincided with a public apology tendered by the celebrated actress Khushboo for having said that she saw nothing wrong in women indulging in pre-marital sex as long as they took precautions. She was forced to tender a tearful apology because of political protests sparked off by her statement —a statement that would make perfect sense to any average, levelheaded Indian.

Are we living in the Taliban's regime? Does equality only mean the right to vote? If a man can drink in a pub, why can’t women? Or do these so-called guardians of Tamil culture think only men can drink? No wonder no one ever points fingers at the nuisance created by men drinking openly till late in the nights outside the numerous wine shops that dot the city's map.

And as for saying, “in a society where married couples are reluctant to hold hands in public”, well, these self-appointed guardians of culture should know that married couples rarely hold hands. Handholding is an obsession with teenage couples, who grow out of the obsession by the time they get married.

And if you really want to see couples holding hands and doing much more, you only have to spend an evening in one of the parks used by people for walking or jogging. Each bench in these parks in occupied by couples who get bolder as the sun dips further. But they are unlikely to make it to the front page of any crusading paper — so far they haven't. Neither have any of these papers ever front-paged stories about the outrageously vulgar songs that feature in the post-midnight programmes of almost all the South Indian channels. Wonder what happens to culture then.

But then, conflict of culture is not the news as is being made out to be, because you really can't define culture. The news, if anything, seems to be the conflict of classes —between people who get amorous in parks and people who get amorous in discos. And it is always easy to attack those under the spotlight — or the strobe lights.

Colombo Journal

2005-11-21T02:55:00.000-08:00

Unforseen expenses may rise,” the star forecast in the Daily Mirror cautioned me, before adding with an air of authority: “No cheer for the romantic.”

My spirits instantly touched the ground even though I was flying at 35,000 feet. I suddenly felt angry with the air-hostess for having given me the paper. As compensation I asked for another drink. It isn’t, after all, a great idea to begin your first day in a new country by keeping an eye on your wallet instead of eyeing the beautiful things of the land.

The land, meanwhile, was 15 minutes away, as the screen in front of my seat informed. By the time the plane touched Colombo and the stewardess folded her hands and said goodbye, my anger had melted. She had really been warm. The warmth is on record: Sri Lankan Airlines has got awards for having the most friendly cabin crew. In any case they were going to be my hosts for the next five days. So I thanked her and stepped down into the steaming heat of Colombo.

The hour-long drive to the city seemed like a drive in our own Kochi — the same greenery, the same heat, the similar attire and mannerism of the people. Only the vehicles on the road were different: instead of the Ambassador and the Maruti and the Santro, you see Toyota and Nissan and Isuzu. The autorickshaws — or the tuk-tuk, as the locals call it — are, however, made by Bajaj. But they are not painted in any uniform colour. Some are bright red, some deep green, some others blue. I wondered if the colour depended on the whim of the driver or some government rule.

‘‘Do you like your room, sir?” the bell-boy asked me as he placed my bag on the rack. Clever boy, because the answer couldn’t have been ‘no’, for my ninth-floor room at the Colombo Plaza offered a splendid view of most of the city’s high-rises, the Beira Lake and the Indian Ocean. Is this the same city, I wondered, from where all the news that came out all these years were mainly about conflict, wars, blasts, suicide bombings and, of late, the tsunami? The tsunami hadn’t hit Colombo — fortunately so because most buildings that matter are just metres away from the Indian Ocean.

News about the tsunami devastation, however, continues to dominate the newspapers. All the more because this is the ‘National New Year Season’ — a time to introspect about the past and move into the future. But the past is yet to be repaired. “Avurudu (New Year) in welfare centres, thanks to officio-political bungling,” screamed the headline of a massive article in the Mirror’s edit page. The article lamented, “As politicians and policy makers wrangle over how, when and where the tsunami displaced are to be located, tens of thousands of fellow Sri Lankans will continue to languish in welfare centres, tents and makeshift places as we celebrate the Sinhala and Hindu New Year tomorrow.”

It also bitterly complained that ministers and MPs, instead of doing something for the victims, were going on foreign jaunts to study “disaster preparedness methods.” Reports on the front page had also taken the government to task for various other things. One report began like this: “In a National New Year attack, the main opposition UNP yesterday accused the government of deceiving a heavily burdened people, by advertising false price lists for essential items.” Another report said chicken had gone out of stock in Colombo and some suburban areas following a dispute between traders and producers.

I put the paper aside and turned on the piped music. A radio channel came alive with ABBA’s Take a chance. Then came George Baker’s Sing a song, then Osibisa’s Dance the body music... The jockey soon came on air to make the periodic announcement that this was Gold FM “that brings you the best of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.” The noise of the nineties had been left out. It was with some effort that I tore myself away from the speaker. Colombo, after all, was waiting to be seen.

Heavily-burdened people. The phrase used in Mirror kept ringing in my mind as I made my way to Odel, a shopping mall recommended by the hotel staff. The mall doesn’t have the size of the malls you usually find in Indian cities: it’s only a two-story colonial building, but that makes it elegant. I happened to pass by a large mirror. In fact, I looked like a heavily-burdened man, compared with the impeccably-dressed young men and women floating past. People of Colombo are fashion-conscious. (They are also a friendly lot: people often smile at strangers).

The men often look good in what they wear because they seem to work out. And the women seem to be spending a lot of time turning the pages of Vogue. In any case, giant screens in Odel keep showing Fashion TV (unless a cricket match is happening) — the idea is to inspire you to buy more and more. And there is so much to buy — Calvin Klein underwear to Guess jeans. The price tags might send you in a tizzy — Rs 3000, Rs 5000, Rs 7000. But that’s Sri Lankan money: for the approximate Indian value you’ve to divide the figure by half. Two hours there had lightened my wallet. Part of the star forecast seemed to be right.

‘‘Those days were bad,” says Anura, a twenty-something who works with an advertising company. She was referring to the days when the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government had not signed the ceasefire agreement. “The police would stop people at every few metres and frisk them. You could not park your vehicle anywhere. Boys could not go out with girls, girls could not go out with boys. You could not go out in the nights. And you had to carry your I-card all the time, or else you could be arrested.”

Today, you hardly find police on the streets. And night life is rocking. I ask Anura which is the most popular disco in Colombo. “You mean the most happening disco? It’s the Blue Elephant.” I was tempted to ask Anura out to the disco but did not for the fear of the rest of the prediction coming true so quickly.

Right now the sun was about to set so it was time to head to the beach. You won’t find sand but a promenade, called the Galle Face Green, which stretches out a kilometre and a half. Laid out in 1859, it’s a picnic spot where families gather every evening and mothers help their children fly kites. More grown-ups play cricket while even more grown-ups come with their girlfriends. The place teems with couples. The sun had just dipped into the ocean, turning the light into faint orange. The crescent of the moon had shown up overhead. I sat alone on the stone steps, eating pieces of raw mango dressed in salt and chilli flakes and watching the expanse of the ocean through the silhouettes of lovers sitting on the embankment. The forecast, I guess, was correct.

*****

Many heroes of Sri Lanka today are cinema heroes, and the biggest of them is Shah Rukh Khan. Aamir Khan and Salman Khan have a lot of fans too. Among the Tamil heroes, Vijay (not to be confused with Vijaykanth) is the biggest heart-throb. But no one can beat Shah Rukh. “I accompanied Shah Rukh Khan from the airport to the hotel when he came to perform in Colombo. He is awesome, and also a nice human being. A child wanted his autograph but the security people would not let him. Shah Rukh happened to see the child and gestured him to come in,” says Martin (his name changed), who works with a travel agency.

Buddhist monks did not want the show to happen that evening, for it was the first death anniversary of a revered monk, Gangodawila Soma Thero. The actor was about to end his show when a bomb went off, killing two people. “Shah Rukh immediately rushed to his Mercedes. Just before he got into the car, I heard him saying, ‘F*****g Sri Lanka!’ The other actors jumped in too and they sped off, straight to the airport,” he said. “But please don’t say that I told you that Shah Rukh said this. I have to live here, and people here worship Shah Rukh. They will kill me if I say anything against him,” he pleaded.

*****

But the real-life heroes in Sri Lanka are its people, who’ve retained their warmth and smiles in spite of years of conflict and hardship. The cheerful family you spot on the beach is likely to have lost a number of relatives in the December-26 tsunami. But the tragedy happened four months ago: right now it’s the time to usher in the New Year, to move on.

At a party, I found myself drinking with M Zarani, a society photographer and a man with impeccable manners who speaks English with the old-world elegance. We got talking and soon he gave me a recap of the island’s political history, starting with the rule of Sirimavo Bandaranaike “when children learned that A is for apple but never got to see an apple, when you were allowed to carry only three and a half pounds worth foreign exchange if you went abroad.” He also spoke about the tsunami devastation, and said how the government was doing little to rehabilitate the people. Only much later did he let it slip that almost the entire family of his father’s brother had been wiped out by the tsunami. “I think every second person in the island lost someone or the other,” he said thoughtfully.

Another person I met at the party was Nimmi Dethlefsen, a 54-year-old woman who runs an ayurveda resort near Galle. For an hour or so we spoke about yoga and panchakarma and about the yoga ashrams in India. The next morning we met again and she took me around Colombo — to a Buddhist temple, a few shopping malls, and also to the beach. I bought a couple of CDs and a granite figurine of the Buddha, but she didn’t let me pay at the shops. “You are in Sri Lanka. When I come to Chennai, I will make you pay.”

It was only over dinner that night that she told me her story. On the morning of December 26, she was in the bathroom of one the cottages at Galle, getting a tap fixed. Suddenly she heard people shouting and she came out to see what was wrong. The first wave took away her sauna huts. The next to go were the cottages. The third giant wave split her home into two. And the fourth washed away the upper half of the home. The destruction was complete. Nimmi survived holding on to a column.

Miraculously for her, all her staff and guests survived too. “Ganesha saved us all.” Today, she is not only rebuilding her resort but also helping — with aid from her clients abroad — to rehabilitate displaced villagers on the Southern coast. There are many like her in Sri Lanka who are silently doing their bit without seeking — or getting — recognition. For them, it’s all a part of life.

*****

Sitting by the window on the return flight from Colombo and sipping arrack and watching the plane glide above the kingdom of clouds, I pondered — what is it about Sri Lanka I would miss the most? The beauty of the place? Maybe, but Kerala is just as beautiful. The weather? Certainly not — it is as hot as Chennai this time of the year. The people? Of course, yes; one doesn’t come across a friendlier lot very often.

Then, after a few more sips of the golden-coloured drink, I realised what I’d been missing the most ever since I left the hotel a few hours ago. Gold FM. Imagine the Beatles, ABBA, Boney M, George Baker, Osibisa and others taking turns to keep your spirits up round the clock. Is that why Sri Lankans manage to be so lively in spite of the years-long conflict and, now, the devastation caused by the tsunami? I wouldn’t know.

Human Harvest: Farmer Suicides in Andhra

2005-11-21T02:39:00.000-08:00

Sangam Narayana has left behind a memento for his wife which she would rather not look at but preserves with great care — the May 22 edition of the Telugu daily Vaartha.

The front-page photograph of the paper shows Narayana, 48, a farmer in Masanpalli village of Medak district, lying sprawled in the fields, with dried up froth staining his right cheek.

Narayana seemed to have been pondering over his electricity bill before he decided to kill himself consuming endosulphan, because the electricity card lay near his body. The electricity dues for his farm, according to villagers, was Rs 12,000 and for his home another Rs 9000. The electricity department was asking him to pay up — even though the new chief minister, Y S Rajasekhar Reddy, announced waiving off farmers’ power dues immediately after he assumed office.

Narayana also owed about Rs 1 lakh to private moneylenders, and a similar amount to the State Bank of India. And with the monsoons failing for the last three years, his 3-acre land had yielded practically nothing but had only sucked in investments, like sinking of four borewells — three of which failed to strike water. The fourth gave him just about enough water to irrigate the small crop of sugarcane he had grown in a corner of the field. So like the hundreds of other farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Narayana chose the easy way out of the financial mess — embracing death.

‘‘Sometime back the moneylenders came home and abused him. Since then he looked very upset but he never said anything. That morning also he quietly had dal and roti and then left home saying he had to water the fields. I had no idea he was going there to die,’’ says Ushamma, Narayana’s devastated wife, squatting all alone in front of her hut.

Up in the sky, the clouds kept gathering and dispersing, lighting up hopes of the other residents of Masanpalli. But for Ushamma, the clouds have showed up too late. And no one knows yet whether those clouds will actually bring rains. Ushamma lost her husband, but for the rest of the world, it was yet another case of ‘‘farmer suicide’’ — a phenomenon that has gripped Andhra Pradesh, forcing the new chief minister to announce a host of steps to curb the death toll.

On June 12, his government placed an advertisement in Telugu papers which, while recording 108 suicides since May 14 when Rajasekhar Reddy took over, promised Rs 1.5 lakh compensation to the family of every deceased farmer, waiving off farmers’ electricity dues amounting to Rs 1100 crore, free power supply to them that would cost the state Rs 400 crore, increasing Budgetary allocation to agriculture and related sectors by nearly 40 percent and setting aside Rs 23,479.20 crore towards easy loans to them. The ad also announced setting up of helplines in every district, while the chief minister himself, in his recent roadshows, urged farmers not to get intimidated by moneylenders and report them to the police if they sought to recover their money forcibly.

But curbing suicides — which are sparked off by emotional distress — is not as easy as curbing murders and theft. The number of suicides has been so steady in the last one month that Andhra Jyothi, a leading Telugu paper, has been recording them on a daily basis on its Page 3, in a column titled Darunalu, which literally means disaster but which actually plays on the word runalu, meaning debts. In fact, Reddy’s promise of the Rs 1.5 lakh compensation seems to have only inspired more suicides.

‘‘Ever since he promised the compensation the farmers seem to be going tup, tup, tup (a sound indicating people falling dead). They know they are ruined, so they want their family to benefit from the money,’’ says Krishna, a journalist in Medak. In Medak district alone, at least 18 farmers committed suicide between May 14 to June 12, though the official figures put the toll at nine — the reason being the government does not recognise all such deaths as ‘‘farmer suicide.’’

The case of Shambhu Reddy, for example, does not come under this category. The story of Shambhu, a farmer in Medak’s Korpol village, is that of riches to rags. Once upon a time, his family owned 68 acres, growing millet. But expenses were to be met, such as the wedding of the various girls in the family, so one patch of land was sold after the other. Finally Shambhu was left with three acres, which he sold off two years ago to marry off his only daughter. Rendered landless, he leased three acres for cultivation. But the clouds never gathered over that land and Shambhu was forced to become a labourer for construction companies — the ultimate humiliation for a self-respecting farmer. But he managed to hide his humiliation till the morning of June 6.

‘‘He seemed normal, laughing and joking as usual and then we all went to sleep here (pointing to an open courtyard). At 4 in the morning he went to the toilet. When he came out he was staggering and he fell down. We rushed him to the hospital but he was dead,’’ says Upendra, 22, Shambhu’s son.

Honour: that’s something a farmer guards more zealously than even his crops. Hunger he can hide, but a moneylender’s knock at the door is heard loud and clear across the village. And that’s when he begins contemplating suicide. But the question is: Why are farmers being pushed to the wall in Andhra Pradesh?

Well, the sequence of events leading up to every suicide is simple and almost similar in every case: The farmer plants the seeds and waits for the rains. The rains fail. The next year he repeats the process, taking a loan from the bank and if that’s not sufficient, from the private moneylenders. In any case he can’t go to the bank if he has already availed of a loan from there. A majority of this loan money goes into providing for irrigation of the land, such as digging of borewells, while the rest of it goes for buying of seeds, fertilisers, etc. But borewells either fail to strike water or break down. And at times there is no electricity at all to pump water. The seeds, on the other hand, turn out to be of bad quality and the fertiliser adulterated. And the rains fail too. For whatever little crop he has managed to produce, he gets next to nothing, thanks to the middlemen. Somewhere in between, his daughter reaches marriageable age or his wife falls ill or his son wants to study further.

In the middle of this, he has only one hope — a good monsoon the next season. So he starts all over again, plunged in even greater debt. But the rains fail yet again. The government, all these years, has hardly been of help. There is no crop insurance to speak of, no guarantee of regular power or water supply, and no assurance of alternative income in case of a natural calamity or crop failure.

In Medak, for example, crops worth Rs 3 crore were damaged, but the compensation the farmers got was only Rs 3 lakh. ‘‘The government promises a lot of things but it never reaches the ground level,’’ says P Chengal Reddy, chairman of Farmers’ Federation (Andhra Pradesh). ‘‘What’s happening today is the cumulative effect of red tapism, faulty pricing mechanism, corruption and the institutionalised exploitation of farmers by middlemen. There comes a time when a farmer is at his wit’s end. He desperately wants to get out of the system but what he gets is a notice from the bank,’’ says Reddy.

A lot of farmers’ problems can be solved if they shift to cultivating crops that require far less water than paddy or sugarcane. The state governments have been encouraging them to do so but the farmers seem to be reluctant. ‘‘Even if we grow paddy in a small area we at least get rice to eat and fodder for our animals. The excess we can sell to buy seeds and fertiliser. That way we can survive,’’ says Bantu Shiva Chander, the sarpanch of Masanpalli village. And he does not approve of the idea of reporting bullying moneylenders to the police. ‘‘Banks don’t give us another loan till we pay back. Moneylenders are our only hope. If we take them to the police, who will give us loan again?’’ he asks.

Banks, post-liberalisation, are no longer what they used to be. During their recent meeting with chief minister Reddy, the state’s bankers remained quite indifferent to his appeal to cut interest rates for farmers. They said their money was also public money and they cannot give special concession to Andhra farmers. The new government, clearly, will have to play a bigger and aggressive role now. Promises and schemes aren’t enough: it has to make sure what is planned in Hyderabad reaches the villages. Farmers, after all, have placed all their hopes on Reddy, who is seen as farmer-friendly unlike his predecessor Chandrababu Naidu who was considered IT-friendly.

The agriculture department, it is learnt, is contemplating a comprehensive insurance scheme which would take care of the family’s health and the children’s education — two areas where increasing costs have added to a farmer’s burden. It is also planning a law which would make it mandatory for a farmer to get a certificate from the groundwater department before sinking borewells. If the department certifies there is groundwater, yet the farmer fails to strike water, then he can ask the pump manufacturer for refund.

Another area of thrust is to encourage farmers to plant pongamia, which produces oil-bearing seeds that can be processed into bio-fuel. Pongamia can grow in desert conditions and it requires only a one-time investment of Rs 12,000. But there’s a problem: the first crop grows only after five years and it will be 15 years before a farmer reaps its benefits. At the moment, though, the farmers’ sole hope is a good rainfall.

But clouds, like the sun, have this habit of playing hide and seek. And they love to hide when you seek them the most.

June 2004

Ghost of The Gas: Bhopal Tragedy

2005-11-21T02:28:00.000-08:00

In North India, they love to watch wedding processions pass by in the neighbourhood. In front of the procession march liveried members of a band party playing film songs, followed by the dancing friends and family members of the groom. The groom himself is at the tail-end, sitting nervously either on a caparisoned horse or inside a flower-decorated car.

The night of December 2, 1984 — a Sunday and an auspicious day for weddings — was a night of such processions throughout North India and that included Bhopal, the sprawling, laidback capital of Madhya Pradesh which was by then famous mainly because of Sholay. In the 1975 blockbuster, comedian Jagdeep plays a wood-seller called Soorma Bhopali (the strong man from Bhopal), who is actually a weakling but whose favourite pastime is to tell false stories about how he managed to capture the two notorious thieves, Veeru and Jay (Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan).

So to the night of weddings. Standing at the door of their home near the Bhopal railway station, Lakshmi Srivas, 35, and her six children watched two or three such processions pass by. Her husband, an employee of All India Radio, would join them occasionally. After the last of the processions had gone, the family had dinner and went to sleep. Another day in the life of a middle-class family had passed.

Then came the screams.

“It was about two o’ clock (in the morning). I heard people shouting Bhago! Bhago! (Run! Run!) Nobody said why, they just asked us to run. It was smoky outside and smelt as if somebody was burning chillies. Our eyes were burning and we were finding it difficult to breath,” recalls Lakshmi, now 55. She and her family first thought it was some kind of a terrorist attack — perhaps a retaliation by Sikhs because the anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination (on October 31, 1984) had just ended.

“Everybody was running. Many fell down, but people stepped over them and ran. My husband had just got his salary, so we had money to take a train out of Bhopal. But at the railway station there was chaos. Trains weren’t running and people were all over, coughing and vomiting. So we ran to the bus-stand, but there weren’t any buses. So we ran back to the station and spent the night in a pit next to platform no. 5,” she says. Huddled in the pit with the family, with faces covered in wet cloth, Lakshmi passed out.

She returned home next morning to find her eyes red and swollen. She also learned what the smoke was all about. But those living closer the pesticide-making Union Carbide plant in Bhopal knew almost immediately that it was poisonous gas emanating from the factory. “We were woken up by a burning sensation in the eyes. My uncle worked in the plant and he knew instantly what had happened. By then people were already on the streets, screaming Bhago! Bhago! I grabbed my younger son, who was a year old then, and ran towards the lake. In the panic I forgot about my elder son, who was three. I left him sleeping under the quilt. Next morning, thank God, we found him still sleeping,” says Rehana, 42, wife of a daily-wager.

Unlike Lakshmi and Rehana, some 3000 people of Bhopal never returned home. They were lying dead here and there — in their homes, on the streets, in hospitals, in mortuaries. But that was only the beginning of a new chapter in the history of Bhopal — a chapter that shows no signs of ending even 20 years later.

It all began with the fight against insects that ate up crops. The poor Indian farmer, perennially the human face of sadness, badly needed pesticides. Then one day, Union Carbide, an American multinational, came to his rescue. Heard of Eveready batteries? Well, that’s what it made after it was set up in 1886. It diversified into making gases and chemicals during the First World War and to atomic energy processing during the Second World War. It started operating in India in 1905 as Eveready (India) Company, marketing Eveready batteries that you still use for torches and transistors. In 1959, it became Union Carbide India Limited.

In the 1960’s, Green Revolution was sweeping India and farmers were abandoning traditional growing methods for high-yielding seed varieties that required fertilisers and pesticides. Time was ripe for the multinational to set up a pesticide plant. And Bhopal, a virgin city and centrally located, literally, was its choice. Union Carbide engaged its best engineers to build the plant which was finally installed in 1969. It was to produce a cheap pesticide called Sevin. “Spend one rupee on Sevin and make five,” that was the mantra it preached to the Indian farmer. It was in 1973 that the first batch of methyl-isocyanate — the tongue-twisting name of a poisonous gaseous compound that would be on every Bhopali’s lips 11 years later — was imported to make Sevin.

And in 1977, the maiden production of Sevin took place: 321 tonnes of the pesticide were produced. Everything seemed to go on fine till December 6, 1982, when the American engineer Warren Woomer, who was the chief architect of the plant, left India. He had worked on the principle: “Always keep only a strict minimum of dangerous materials on site.” He also left with the hope that the three huge tanks at the plant, E610, E611 and E619, which could stock up to 120 tons of methyl-isocyanate, would never be filled. Woomer believed that a small quantity of the deadly gas was enough to meet the demand for Sevin, which had been dwindling swiftly because of failing monsoons. No rain, no crop — so where was the need for pesticides? Union Carbide India Limited was now running into losses and the new bosses who took over from him were heavily into cost-cutting. As a result, safety measures went out of the window. And then.

Safety is everybody’s business — read the notice board in the control room of the Union Carbide plant. (The board, ironically, remains intact till date). But that night on December 2, the staff which had taken over from the previous shift, had no idea that safety itself was at risk. Till it was too late. The pressure in tank E610 had mounted from two to 55 pounds per square inch and soon it began to smell of boiled cabbage — a definite sign that tank 610 was spewing methyl-isocyanate!

The time was five minutes past midnight — something that inspired the title of Dominique Lapierre’s book on the tragedy, It Was Five Past Midnight In Bhopal. It is alleged that one of the workers on duty that night, Mohan Lal Verma, who was sore with the management over his promotion, had deliberately induced water into tank 610. The allegation, however, could never be proved and today Verma, according to Lapierre’s book, lives 60 miles from Bhopal and works for the industries department of Madhya Pradesh.

Call it accident or negligence, the fog of methyl-isocyanate that settled on sleeping Bhopalis that night changed their lives forever. Over 3000 died that night itself, and nearly 12,000 died in the following years because of diseases induced by the poisoning. And thousands and thousands of others — nearly six lakh people according to some estimates — are dying a thousand deaths everyday. Their lives are now all about trips to the doctor.

Like in the case of Lakshmi, who that night was watching the wedding processions. To begin with, Lakshmi’s menstrual cycle went haywire soon after the gas leak. And that is now also the problem faced by her four grown-up daughters. And almost all members of her family suffer from weak eyesight and recurring chest pains. And one of her daughters has been repeatedly operated for cysts in her reproductive organs. About her husband, who is due to retire from All India Radio next year, she says shyly and hesitatingly: “I can’t even tell you what he is suffering from.”

Says Satinath Sarangi alias Sathyu, who has been rallying the gas victims for demanding adequate compensation: “Breathlessness, poor eyesight, loss of appetite, pain in the joints, anxiety, irregular menstrual cycle – these are common problems faced by the gas victims. They are only being treated for the symptoms, for which they have spent thousands of rupees so far, but neither the Centre nor the state government has bothered to go into the core of the problem. Alternative therapies like ayurveda and yoga help, but the government is doing nothing.”

Sathyu, an engineer by profession, has set up Sambhavna, a trust that seeks to rehabilitate gas victims through such alternative therapies. Sambhavna also has a gynaecological clinic set up with the help of the royalties received by author Lapierre. Another crusader in the town, Abdul Jabbar, has also done his bit to rehabilitate the victims by setting up Swabhimaan Kendra (Self-Respect Centre) where poor women make stuffed toys, paper bags and, above all, flags and badges for political parties.

“We hope to get a lot of work for the Bihar elections,” says Jabbar, in his forties, as he directs an effigy-maker to make a monstrous effigy of the people responsible for the miserable life of the Bhopalis which is to be burnt on December 3, the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy. “I want one body with three heads — one of an angrez (a Westerner to represent multinationals), one of the Indian government, and one of Warren Anderson (the man who was the Union Carbide chairman when the disaster happened),” he directs. “For the multinational, make any white man, and to represent the Indian government, make any Indian man. And as for Anderson, do you know how he looks like?” The poor effigy-maker has no clue how Anderson looks like, so he points to a picture in the room which shows former President R Venkatraman shaking hands with Jabbar. “Is that him?” asks the effigy-maker innocently. Jabbar rebukes him: “Idiot! Anderson is a white man!” The effigy-maker smiles sheepishly. Jabbar then asks an assistant to show the effigy-maker a picture of Anderson.

Anderson. That’s a hated name in Bhopal. His company had the blessings of the Congress party — the ruling party at the Centre as well as Madhya Pradesh during the disaster. That gave him enough courage to come down to Bhopal immediately after the gas leak and he was arrested — but only briefly. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, and Arjun Singh, the then chief minister, ensured that Anderson flew out of India safely.

Today, Anderson is missing from his given address in the US fearing possible arrest as the awareness against the Bhopal gas tragedy grows worldwide. “If Chilean dictator Pinochet can face trial at the age of 88 for his misdeeds, why can’t Anderson, who is only 82,” asks Ward Morehouse, who has been running the Bhopal Action Resource Centre in the US since 1985. “Twenty years is too long a time. Time has come when Union Carbide, and its present owners Dow Chemicals, are made accountable,” he says. He makes sense. No one has been held accountable so far in the world’s worst-ever factory accident. Union Carbide did pay compensation, which was Rs 715 crore in February 1989. That time a dollar amounted to Rs 15.

Lengthy procedures followed to ascertain the identity of gas victims and finally, after three years of the tragedy, every survivor was paid Rs 25,000 — at first Rs 200 a month and then a settlement of the remaining amount in the mid-1990’s. But today one dollar is equal to Rs 45 and the remaining compensation money has accrued up to almost Rs 1,500 crore. The amount is now supposedly being disbursed among gas victims following a Supreme Court order in July this year.

It is not just money that Dr Divya Kishor Satpathy wants for the victims. He wants a research into the mutations that might have taken place after the gas leak. Dr Satpathy, who divides his time between roses and dead bodies, should know better. Today, at 55, he is the director of the medico-legal department of Bhopal’s Gandhi Medical college, but that night, it was his job to do post-mortem of the gas victims.

“We spent five days at the mortuary without going home. Every half an hour one of us used to cry. There were small kids. What was their fault? They didn’t have any shares in Union Carbide, they didn’t profit from the sales of Sevin. Many of them where clutching to their mothers,” says Dr Satpathy, wiping a tear. He has been conducting autopsies for the last three decades and that should harden him, but he still cries at the thought of that night. “We got a thousand bodies on the first day, 725 on the next, and 55 the day after. We ran out of shrouds, but the cloth merchants threw their shops open and let us take bundles of cloths. The red cloth was for Hindus and the white for Muslims,” says Satpathy, whose pastime is to grow roses. He has nearly 30 varieties of roses growing at his home as well the terrace garden of the hospital. He also has about 30 pigeons under his care.

“I love people who can’t speak, like pigeons and roses. You see, living beings always tell lies. It is the dead who speak the truth,” says the doctor. Is anyone listening?

December 2004

2004 Election Reporting: Who'll Be The PM?

2005-11-21T02:21:00.000-08:00

We have watched over dinner, the same politicians say the same things for two months non-stop. It has become tiring and tedious. Fortunately, it all got over yesterday with the final round of the campaign, and in the next 3-4 days you should know who the new Prime Minister will be.

Unfortunately, though, if a clear picture does not emerge that quickly, you still may have to put up with the faces of those politicians. Each will be claiming how close he, or she, is to the magic figure, 272, the strength required in the Lok Sabha to form government.

When the election campaign formally began two months ago, Atal Behari Vajpayee looked comfortably set for a second term, riding on the expensive India Shining campaign, which the BJP had started last year itself. Perhaps that's a mistake the BJP made: it lit up its candles too early in the evening. Most of the wax had melted away by the time the election campaign reached its peak, and that's when the Opposition parties pulled out their candles.

Mulayam Singh Yadav employed smarter copywriters to create sleek ads that projected him as the Chandrababu Naidu of Uttar Pradesh. And the Congress launched Rahul Gandhi to resurrect, quite successfully, the charm of Rajiv Gandhi. And then came the exit polls after the second round of elections which showed the Congress narrowing its gap with the BJP, and out came from hibernation the leaders who've always aspired to architect a non-BJP coalition such as Harkishen Singh Surjeet.

The CPM general secretary is old and ailing, but he is still so passionate about dislodging the BJP that he emphasises the need for a Congress-CPM alliance even in Kerala, forgetting that the two parties are bitter enemies there. This could be his last chance to stitch up a non-BJP coalition, and his efforts are bound to stoke the ambition of many politicians who have been waiting for their day to rule the country.

Whether their day has come will depend on the NDA's tally. If it falls just little short of the 272-mark, then Vajpayee should have no problem continuing. He can trust on George Fernandes to get the requisite numbers. In any case, Vajpayee still enjoys a mass appeal and in the present circumstances, he alone can provide a stable government — something he has proved by successfully running a coalition government for six years. But if the NDA falls way short of the magic figure, then you'll either have a Congress government supported by the Third Front parties; or a Third Front government supported by the Congress. The latter's longevity will always be doubtful, because the Congress has a history of pulling down governments at the Centre. But in either case, one of these could be the Prime Minister:

Sonia Gandhi: The sphinx rises

If she pushes up the Congress tally, which has only gone down after the death of Rajiv Gandhi, it will be a major victory for her and she will have the moral right to stake claim. As for her foreign origin, the court has made it clear that she is an Indian citizen and her allies like Laloo Yadav also consider her to be an Indian. But she might face roadblocks from people like Sharad Pawar, who had quit the Congress only because of her foreign origin. But if she becomes the Prime Minister, she will not only make history but might also raise the hopes of Indians settled in Italy to someday step into the shoes of Silvio Berlusconi. And foreign correspondents, when they send their dispatches from Delhi, will begin their reports like this: “Italian-born Indian Prime Minister Sonia Gandhi on Monday said...”

Manmohan Singh: Backroom Boy

The shy, soft-spoken Sardar, who as the finance minister in the early 1990's sowed the seeds of economic reforms, could be a possible candidate if Sonia Gandhi is not unanimously accepted by the non-NDA parties. Singh says he is not interested, but you can't expect a man like him to say, “Yes, I want to be the Prime Minister.” As the finance minister he was hated by the Left parties but that was when the Left hadn't discovered that the BJP was the bigger enemy.

Somnath Chatterjee: Not Left out...

In May 1996, when Vajpayee's minority government was certain to fall, the newly-formed United Front decided to make the CPM leader Jyoti Basu, then the West Bengal chief minister, the Prime Minister. Bengali journalists stationed in Delhi rejoiced: they could have free access to the PMO. But their joy lasted only for a day. The CPM politburo decided against Basu taking up the job — a decision Basu later described as “historical blunder.” The CPM won't repeat the blunder and if the situation calls for its man to become the Prime Minister, then Somnath Chatterjee, a Lok Sahba veteran, could be the candidate. A good-natured man, Chatterjee gets along well with all political leaders and he could be the bridge between the Congress and the parties which are anti-BJP but not so anti-Congress, such as the Samajwadi Party. It was at his place about two years ago that Sonia Gandhi, over dinner, interacted with other Opposition leaders for the first time.

Mulayam Singh Yadav: Kingmaker/King

If the NDA falls short of majority, then Yadav is definitely going to be the kingmaker, if not the king himself. The Uttar Pradesh chief minister has worked hard this election and if he wins the 40 seats that he is expecting, his party could be the third-largest in the Lok Sabha and would be wooed by both the BJP and the Congress. When Vajpayee's government was pulled down by Jayalalithaa in April 1998, Sonia Gandhi could have become the Prime Minister but Yadav refused to support her because of her foreign origin. He has since toned down his stand on the foreign-origin issue but it remains to be seen whether he agrees to support a Congress-led government, or is adamant, like in 1998, on the Third Front forming a government with Congress support. And if the Third Front is installed at the Centre, then Yadav, as the leader of its largest constituent, could be the natural choice as the Prime Minister.

Laloo Prasad Yadav: The Shrewd Jester

“One day I will rule the nation, serve the nation,” roared Laloo, the shrewd politician who hides behind that buffoonery, on a TV channel last week. “But unlike them I am not in a hurry.” By “them” he meant the BJP, the party he hates the most. He hates the BJP so much that he is now the biggest ally of the Congress at the Centre -- the same Congress which he fought to establish himself as a politician. Laloo might not be in a hurry, but in the event of a hung Parliament, the non-NDA parties might be in a hurry to cobble up a coalition. And if egos prevent the emergence of a consensus candidate, then Laloo could spring out the compromise candidate. In that case, the most sought-after man in the PMO will be the man who carries his spittoon.

Sharad Pawar: The outsider

He became the chief minister of Maharashtra in 1978 at the age of 38 by splitting the Congress and toppling its government. Since then Pawar has made many such dramatic moves, the most recent being quitting the Congress over Sonia's foreign origin and forming the Nationalist Congress Party. At present, though, the Congress and the NCP are allies in Maharashtra and opinion polls show their alliance winning 20 of the 48 seats in the state. That might not leave Pawar with too many seats to bargain for the top job, but many non-NDA parties might prefer him over, say, Sonia or Mulayam. Pawar's logic is, if Deve Gowda can become the Prime Minister then why can't he? Yes, why can't he?

2004 Election Reporting: Voter Fatigue

2005-11-21T02:12:00.000-08:00

May 5: There are two Indias, come to think of it.

One India produces Nobel Prize winners, but in the other India thieves make off with a Nobel Prize medal. One India produces Muslim cricketers who help their team beat Pakistan, but in the other India, Muslims are taunted for allegedly being sympathetic towards Pakistan. One India boasts of some of the best hospitals in this part of the world, but in the other India, a man wakes up after post-mortem has been done on him. One India is partying, wearing designer clothes, but in the other India, bare-bodied people are toiling to earn their bread. The list is fairly long.

So which India is going to elections - India no. 1, which is hot and happening, or India no. 2, where people remain poor and illiterate and deprived of basic amenities and divided by caste and religion?

Depends on who you ask.

If you ask Govinda, the hero of Bollywood superhits such as Hero No. 1 and Coolie No. 1, his answer would be India no. 1. And he won't be wrong. Otherwise, he and some two dozen other filmstars would not have traded the greasepaint for the grime that is Indian elections. The glamour value attached to this year's elections is so high that except for the celebrity fashion designers, almost everybody who graces society parties in Bombay and Delhi has joined one politicial party or the other.

How did the election process become glamorous? Maybe that’s because in the last one year or so, we've been hearing a lot of good news - the sensex touching the 6000-mark (whatever that might mean to the man on the street), foreign exchange reserves touching an all-time high, the economy growing at 10.4 percent and so on. Besides, most Western papers wrote lengthy features on the booming outsourcing and the information-technology industries.

Feel-good news like these gave credibility to the India-Shining campaign that was being run by the NDA government led by BJP on television channels and newspapers. That's why a smug BJP called for early elections, hoping to cash in on this feel-good mood. Once the elections were announced, the Opposition parties pressed their own spin doctors into action.

These days, the Congress party is running an ad on TV channels which shows a young man liberally ordering tea and snacks for his friends from a roadside stall. The stall owner asks the young man, “What is the matter, you look happy. Have you got a job or what? He replies: “Not yet, but I know I will get one soon. After all, the Congress is returning to power.” The ruling party, on the other hand, runs an ad which shows pre-1947 clips of the Congress leaders who fought for India's freedom and which ends with the line: “These people made sacrifices to drive foreigners out of the country. And now some people are trying to install a foreigner as the Prime Minister.” The reference is to the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress party.

The common man, meanwhile, is sitting back and watching the elections being fought out in television channels. He isn't interested one bit, as evident from the thin crowds that public meetings of politicians have been attracting. For example, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s rally in his home constituency, Lucknow, on April 5 drew sparse crowds. And Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani's month-long campaign, cutting through the length and breadth of the country, also drew mild response from the people. Similar campaigns by him in the past had helped the BJP storm to power.

Why are the people disinterested? One reason is election fatigue. True, elections are being held after five years, but the gap hasn't made up for the fact that this would be the third general elections in eight years.

Another reason is that the parties don't have anything to offer them except tired promises. The BJP is still clinging to its promise of constructing a grand Ram temple at Ayodhya - a promise that earlier won votes but now only puts off voters. (Even the shopkeepers of Ayodhya blame the BJP for ruining their business. Pilgrims have stopped coming to this temple town ever since it was turned into a garrison following the demolition of the 16th-century Babri mosque in 1992.) And of late the BJP has a new promise - that of a developed India by 2020. That’s too distant for the Indian voter. As a man in one of Advani’s meetings commented: “In that case we will vote for the BJP in 2019.”

The Congress, on the other hand, is a party that has ruled India for more than 40 years since 1947, so its promises don't really hold any credibility. On top of it, it doesn't have a leader who could be projected as the alternative Prime Minister. Maybe the party will wait for the children of Sonia Gandhi to gain enough political experience to run for the top job.

Still, people have to vote for someone or the other. Even here, TV channels are trying to do the job for them. One of the channels recently commissioned AC Nielsen to conduct a survey, which gave the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance a clear majority. It showed the NDA winning 287-307 of the 543 seats and the Congress and its allies winning only 143-163.

Now, if the actual results are drastically different than this, then you can be sure it was India no. 2 that went to the elections.

2004 Election Reporting: Kannauj

2005-11-21T02:11:00.000-08:00

In Lohia land

April 27: What is common between Jaya Prada and the late Ram Manohar Lohia? It is likely that instead of answering that question, you'll ask another: Who exactly was Ram Manohar Lohia? Put that question to Jaya Prada and chances are you'll draw a blank, even though the actress today represents the ideology of Ram Manohar Lohia.

You can't really fault Jaya Prada. The Samajwadi Party -- or the Socialist Party -- she has joined belongs to Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh. It has nothing to do with Lohia -- the greatest socialist thinker the country has ever produced -- even though its leaders claim to be hardcore Lohiawaadis (followers of Lohia's ideals).

Mulayam Singh's brand of socialist politics breathes on caste politics while his lieutenant Amar Singh's brand of socialism thrives of society parties in Delhi and Mumbai. These days Amar Singh has taken a break from these parties and is busy addressing the final round of election meetings across Uttar Pradesh. And the posters advertising these meetings don't forget to prefix the word “Thakur” before his name.

The real Ram Manohar Lohia is preserved in the memory of Keshav Lal Gupta, a shopkeeper in Kannauj. Gupta is ten years older than Independent India and he remembers all the elections since 1952. But the one he remembers fondly is the 1967 elections -- that's when Lohia stood from Kannauj and won a Lok Sabha seat for the first time. (Lohia died the same year).

“He was such a big leader but so simple. He dressed simply and went around talking to people like you are talking to me. You didn't have four security guards following a politician then,” says Gupta. After Lohia, the leader Gupta admires is Atal Behari Vajpayee. “You can't find a better Prime Minister than him. Tell me, can you?”

Now Kannauj is a place which really looks frozen in time, cut off from the rest of the world -- that is if you discount the Coke ads. If you are making a film on a 12th-century Hindu king and want to show a town square, you can shoot in Kannauj instead of creating an expensive set. So it looks a bit out of place to watch Gupta lighting his bidi and rattle off the achievements of Vajpayee instead of whining about local problems. ”All these years America never cared for us, but now they want to be friends with India,” he says.

Today Gupta has the choice of either voting for Vajpayee's candidate, Ramanand Yadav of the BJP, or Akhilesh Yadav, the 30-year-old son of Mulayam singh Yadav, the follower of Lohia. Gupta spells out his preference by pointing to the flag on top his shop -- it is the BJP flag. But it is one of the few you find in Kannauj, which is awash with flags and posters of the Samajwadi Party. From each of them, the young, innocent face of Akhilesh looks out at you. (Mulayam Singh, during his first tenure as the chief minister in 1989, was zealously promoting Hindi. His men were putting symbolic locks in English-medium schools and he himself made it a point to write his official correspondence, even to his counterparts in non Hindi-speaking states, in Hindi. He was eventually snubbed by the then Kerala chief minister, E K Nayanar. But all this while, Akhilesh was studying in Australia).

Akhilesh also happens to be the sitting MP from Kannauj. His victory in 1999 is being attributed to the fact that during those elections, there was no BJP candidate in the fray. The BJP, as part of its electoral understanding with the Loktantrik Congress Party -- a breakaway group of the Congress led by the Naresh Agarwal who was dumped by the BJP soon after -- had left the seat for the LCP. Angry BJP supporters had voted for Akhilesh.

The present BJP candidate, since he too is a Yadav, is expected to give a tough fight to Akhilesh. And since this is his first election, he has a clean slate unlike Akhilesh, who is being charged with not doing enough for Kannauj is the last five years. “There are villages where there is no electricty, so people are angry,” says Rvanidra Shukla, a tempo driver. And there are some people who are angry for other reasonhs. Mayawati, when she was the chief minister, had taken out a chunk of Etawah (Mulayam Singh Yadav's home constituency), clubbed parts of Kannauj to it and made it a separate district. But Yadav, when he became the chief minister, cancelled her decision.

But Akhilesh's youth seems to be working in his favour. “People studying in degree colleges will vote for him,” says Jyoti Sharma, a BA student. Agrees her friend Nisha, “He represents the youth.” She pronounces the word with a typical UP accent: Yooth. They are both sitting in a tonga -- horse-driven carriage -- one of the means of getting around in Kannauj.

Moreover, dad Mulayam, as the chief minister, is doing whatever he can to help his son win. Kannauj, which doesn't betray its status in the world as one of the biggest producers of itr, or indigenous perfume, is about two hours drive from Kanpur (the nearest city). You know you've hit Kannauj when you run into sunflower fields. There are miles and miles of them and springing from between them, at regular intervals, are hoardings that carry Mulayam Singh or Akhilesh's picture and say, “Uttar Pradesh. Baney Uttam Pradesh.” (Let's make Uttar Pradesh the best state). The same message is conveyed by Amitabh Bachchan in cinema halls just before the movie begins -- and the movie usually is a soft-porn one such as Garden of Eden -- or by a recorded female voice, sympathetic to the Samajwadi Party, which keeps on playing in shops .

There are two more candidates in the fray worth mentioning -- Vinay Shukla of the Congress and Rajesh Singh of the Bahujan Samaj Party, but the locals insist that the fight is between the Samajwadi Party and the BJP. The Congress ceased to matter in Kannauj in 1989, after which the socliasts and the BJP took turns in representing the seat. The last big Congress leader who won from here was in 1984 -- Sheila Dikshit, who is now pursuing a successful political career as the chief minister of Delhi.

Perhaps the only place in Kannauj unaffected by the election fever, untouched by the flags, in the centuries-old Gowri Shankar temple. The temple has a permanent, stationary flag -- made of gold. It's Monday and tractor loads of devotees -- turbanned men and veiled women shyly sucking at ice candies -- has descended from neighbouring villages to worship Lord Shiva.

There's a plaque in the temple compound which informs that somewhere around that spot, in 637 AD, the great king Harshavardhana had called an all-religion meeting in the presence of the Chinese traveller Huen Tsang. Kannauj was the capital of Harshavardhana. Today, the elections in the same Kannauj is a matter of prestige for someone who claims to be the modern-day champion of secularism in Uttar Pradesh -- Mulayam Singh Yadav.

2004 Election Reporting: Rampur

2005-11-21T02:09:00.000-08:00

Jaya Prada live

April 23: Fifty-fifty. That's how R K Khandelwal, a hotelier in Rampur, rates the chances of Jaya Prada winning the elections.

This should make the actress happy, considering that the rating comes from a 70-something man who must have stopped watching Hindi films after the departure of Madhubala and Nargis and who, above, all, thinks women don't make good politicians.

But at the moment Jaya Prada does not need a Khandelwal to make her happy. She has entire the Rampur descending on the streets under the afternoon sun to watch her travel in an open jeep to file her nomination as the Samajwadi Party candidate for the May 10 Lok Sabha election. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of party workers who follow her shout slogans, beat the drums and burst crackers.

Khandelwal remains seated on his desk at the reception (he doesn't seem to trust anyone else doing the job) while his staff -- the waiters, the roomboys, etc. -- gather outside the hotel to watch Jaya Prada's procession pass by. The actress, whose beauty was once praised by none other than Satyajit Ray, is clearly aware that Muslims form nearly 60 percent of Rampur's population. So she wears a green embroidered salwar kameez and a matching dupatta to cover her head (she has her head covered whenever she appears in public here). She is also wearing sunglasses so you can't make eye contact with her, but there she is, waving at you.

Standing next to her in the jeep is Mohammad Azam Khan -- the man to who people like Khandelwal attribute her fair chances of victory. Khan hails from Rampur and is the urban development minister in Mulayam Singh Yadav's government, and a powerful minister at that. Before the procession took off, Khan told Samajwadi Party workers: “(The Rampur election) is a question of my political life and death. So make sure Jaya Prada wins.”

“If Jaya Prada wins, it will be only because of Azam Khan,” says Khandelwal. If she wins, that is. The more you travel around Rampur, the more you talk to people there, you realise even the other candidates have 50-50 chances of winning.

The most visible among them is Begum Noor Bano, the sitting Congress MP and a member of the erstwhile Nawab family that once ruled Rampur. And unlike Jaya Prada, the Begum doesn't have to dress up as an elegant Muslim woman -- she is as elegant as aristocracy can make you, but that could be her drawback as well.

“Unlike Jaya Prada, she doesn't hug a village woman or pat the cheek of a child. After all she is a Begum and she has to keep a distance. But that could make all the difference,” says Jai Prakash Sharma, a roadways employee.

And the actress is promising voters that she will settle down in Rampur if she wins. Not a bad idea, come to think of it. She won't find so much of open space and greenery anywhere else in the country -- not at least in Mumbai, where she owns a rs 48-lakh apartment, not even in Hyderabad, where she owns a Rs 92-lakh house and a Rs 35 lakh worth plot, or in Chennai, where her husband Srikant Nahata owns a Rs 35-lakh house in T Nagar and where she herself own commercial properties worth crores. In all she is worth nearly Rs 9 crore -- according to the affidavit submitted by her while filing the nomination.

But locals doubt if she will really settle down. The Begum, on the other hand, might be aloof but she belongs to the local ruling family -- something the typical Indian voter always idenitifies with. Also, she has been an MP twice -- in 1996 and 1999. And her husband, the late Nawab Zulfiquar Ali Khan, had been a long-serving MP from Rampur.

The biggest charge against her is that she has not done anything for her constituency in the last five years, but many locals are not against giving her another chance. “After all she is going to stay in Rampur. We can always approach her,” says Suraj Singh, who runs a phone booth in Rampur's Civil Lines area.

The two women are banking primarliy on the Muslims voters -- constituting nearly 60 percent of the 13 lakh electorate. And that's where the problem is: the Muslim vote is bound to be divided. On the other hand their two main rivals, Rajendra Kumar Sharma of the BJP and Afroze Ali Khan of the Bahujan Samaj Party, do not have such problems.

Sharma, who defeated Noor Bano's husband in 1991, is assured of the Hindu votes, consisting mainly of influential Punjabi traders. Afroze, on the other hand, is assured of the Hindu dalit votes -- amounting to nearly two lakh. On top of it, if Afroze manages to win some of the Muslim votes, he could be the winner. On the contrary, however, if the Muslim and some of the dalit votes gets split between Jaya Prada, Noor Bano and Afroze, the BJP man could be the winner. So it's a tricky situation for each of the candidates.

But Mulayam Singh's administration is clearly trying its best to see the actress sail through. A couple of theatres in Rampur are re-running old films of Jaya Prada -- tear-inducing films such as Maa. And last Wednesday, when her procession reached the collectorate for the filing of her nomination, the state police had no problems with the huge Samajwadi Party crowd gathering at the collectorate. But on the same day, when the BJP candidate filed his nomination, the police chased out his supporters from the collectorate compound.

Jaya Prada's presence, however, has breathed some life into this quiet town in Northwestern Uttar Pradesh where the main occupation of the people is agriculture. There used to be a textile factory and a sugar factory once upon a time, but they have closed down. Today Rampur is known for its distilleries and wood-carving and embroidery workshops.

More than anything else, the South Indian actress has made Rampur famous -- famous even across the borders of Uttar Pradesh. Till the other day, Rampur was just a dot on the map, located quite close to Nepal -- a dot they generally ignored because nobody ever went there except for, say, a wedding in the family.

But there was a time when Rampur was famous, especially among the British rulers. “In April 1905, His Excellency Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy, visited Rampur. During his two days stay Lord Curzon visited several of the public institutions and offices of the state and expressed himself well satisfied with all he saw,” says the Rampur State Gazetteer. Many of these insititutions, at least their splendid buildings, exist even today, including the 225-year-old Oriental University and the 100-year-old Raza Library.

The Nawabs -- the descendants of the Rohillas of Afghanistan -- were so faithful to the British that they opposed the 1857 mutiny and saved the life of the British soldiers and their families in their state. For this gesture, Queen Victoria decorated Yusuf Ali Khan, the then Nawab, with the title of the Knight Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Star of India.

There is much more of Rampur's history hidden in the palatial Raza Library. None of the candidates has talked about, say, setting up a museum to tell the world that better things happened in Rampur other than knife-making (Rampuri chaku, or knife, is legendary). But then, Indians politicians are not known to save history: they only exploit it.

2004 Election Reporting: Allahabad

2005-11-21T02:07:00.000-08:00

Joshi faces the heat

April 16: Those pirates struck in the high seas, these pirates strike in the river, rather the confluence of the two great rivers of India which makes Allahabad famous. They glide their boats alongside yours and even before you realise, you've been persuaded into performing a boat-to-boat puja for the well-being of your near and dear ones.

Since all this happens in the middle of the river, you can't even walk out. All you can do is console yourself watching other would-be victims getting rowed into the trap of the priests and the pandas -- as the middlemen between God and mortals are called -- who throng the river.

Still, thousands gather everyday at Sangam, as locals call the confluence of the three rivers -- the third river being the underground spring Saraswati, which is supposed to have dried up. When and how, nobody knows. Murali Manohar Joshi, soon after he became the human resource development minister in 1998, commissioned a project to explore if the river existed.

One does not know what came out of the project. Perhaps nothing, or else that would have been mentioned prominently in the long list of Joshi's achievements that is being circulated in Allahabad these days.

Topping the list is the construction of a bridge across the Yamuna that will take the loads off the existing bridge that was built in 1927. The bridge, built by Hyundai with money given by a Japanese bank, is almost ready. Other prominent achievements include the setting up of the Indian Insititute of Information Technology (called Triple I-T by locals) at Allahabad and the institution of a space chair at the Allahabad University. Besides, there are dozens and dozens of other achievements -- a swimming pool here and a park there, a road here and a drain there and so on. Not to mention what he claims to have done for the Muslims -- modernising the madrasas, promotion of Urdu, etc.

“He has done so much for the city,” says Vipin Gupta, the BJP activist who gave me the list of Joshi's achievements, “and you must not forget that Allahabad is a city of intellectuals, and Dr Joshi (who taught physics in the Allahabad University) is the only intellectual in the fray. So even if they don't like the BJP, they will vote for him.”

But Joshi, who has won Allahabad thrice since 1996, himself doesn't seem to share Gupta's confidence. Or else he wouldn't have spent this entire week in Allahabad, campaigning especially in the rural and Muslim areas. Last Tuesday he visited a village of Patels -- a backward caste in Uttar Pradesh -- and sought to win them over by comparing them to Vallabhbhai Patel, who belonged to Gujarat where Patels belong to the upper caste.

The mild state of panic that Joshi is in at the moment is best explained by a local journalist -- we will call him Ramji Shukla -- who has been associated with Joshi in some manner or the other. “It's like this,” says Shukla, “Dr Joshi has been winning mainly because of his support in the urban areas, where the main voters are Brahmins, Kayasthas and Bengalis. They are sophisticated voters, who don't vote for the typical rustic Indian politician -- the kinds you find in the Samajwadi Party or the BSP. But this time Mulayam Singh Yadav had planned to field Jaya Bachchan, and that's what gave Dr Joshi a scare. She would have easily picked up the Kayastha (Amitabh Bachchan is a kayastha) and the Bengali votes, besides the regular Samajwadi Party votes. That's why Dr Joshi has been coming to Allahabad so often in the last six months.” Forunately, for the HRD minister, Mrs Bachchan refused to contest.

Joshi got another scare when Rita Bahuguna, who lost against him in 1999, suggested that Priyanka Gandhi stand from Allahabad. Locals -- from journalists to rickshaw-wallahs to paan-wallahs -- insist that had Priyanka contested, Joshi would have lost without doubt.

Still, things aren't going to be easy for Joshi. His primary opponent is Samajwadi Party's Reoti Raman Singh, who is the transport minister in Mulayam Singh's government. Singh has been the MLA from Karchana -- an Assembly segment of Allahabad -- for eight terms now and has a strong grip on the rural votes. Joshi's other opponent is Satyaprakash Malaviya, the veteran socialist-turned-Congressman. A Brahmin, he expected to bite into some of Joshi's votes, besides winning back the old Congress voters who see the party rejuvenating with the entry of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi.

Joshi has to consider two more things. One, the percentage of votes polled by him has dropped consistently -- from 42.7 percent in 1996 to 33 percent in 1999. Two, if you translate the 2002 Assembly election results in Allahabad into Lok Sabha results, then the Samajwadi Party wins hands down.

For the situation that Joshi is in today -- unlike Atal Behari Vajpayee in Lucknow and L K Advani in Gandhinagar -- he himself is to blame. He has always been seen as arrogant and unapproachable. He is also seen, by some, as an outsider -- he hails from Almora in Uttaranchal. Last Wednesday, Ravi Bhushan Wadhawan, a former mayor of Allahabad and one-time associate of Joshi, called a news conference to say that the contest in the city was “Allahabad Vs Almora.”

The Yamuna bridge, Wadhawan claimed, was cleared by V P Singh when he was the MP, and that Allahabadis did not benefit from the IIIT. Only people from Almora were getting jobs there, he said, adding that during Joshi's tenure, most of the industries of Allahabad, like the Indian Telephone Industries, BPCL, HCL, etc. had only closed down.

In any case, there is an interesting contest on cards, even though people of Allahabad have witnessed far more interesting fights in the past. This is a high-profile contituency, after all. It gave the country its first two Prime Ministers (Nehru contested from Phulpur in 1952 when Allahabad was part of the constituency. After that Allahabad became a separate seat and Lal Bahadur Shastri won from there in 1957 and 1962). In 1984, Amitabh Bachchan defeated political heavyweight, the former chief minister H N Bahuguna. And in June 1988, all eyes were on Allahabad when V P Singh, the new national hero, defeated Shastri's son Sunil. Locals remember Singh campaigning on motorcycles.

But when you ask people who will win the 2004 elections, they say without a thought, “Dr Joshi”, just like they say “Atal Behari Vajpayee” when you ask who the next Prime Minister will be. Maybe because the Opposition candidates aren't high-profile enough. Who will eventually win you will know only on May 13, but if Joshi wins, it would be a hard-earned victory this time. For he is doing what he really hasn't done in the past -- going out in the heat and dust and meeting people.

2004 Election Reporting: Ayodhya II

2005-11-21T02:03:00.000-08:00

People in Ram's kingdom blame BJP for driving them to economic ruin

April 8: Sant Ram eagerly looks forward to Hindu festivals and holy days. That's when pilgrims from nearby towns descend on Ayodhya to offer prayers at the makeshift Ram temple -- which sits on the spot where the Babri Masjid stood till 1992 -- and Sant Ram's tea shop does some business. On the rest of the days, he “kills flies” -- as he describes his idleness.

“The demolition of the mosque has demolished our business,” says Sant Ram, who says he is 55 but looks far older. He has been running the shop, a stone's throw from the makeshift temple, for 30 years now. ”Things went on so smoothly before. Hundreds of people came every day, and that used to be the bus stop,” he says, pointing to a nearby spot.

“But now Ayodhya has become a chhawni (Hindi word for cantonment). They have even diverted the bus route. Nobody wants to come here now, except the few who come during the festivals,” says Sant Ram.

A handsome town with rather good roads and dotted by temples and buildings mostly dating back to the early 1900s, Ayodhya, about 150 km from Lucknow, indeed resembles a cantonment area. Uniformed men and women from the Rapid Action Force stroll about the streets, and men and women from the Uttar Pradesh police are almost everywhere.

“Yesterday was full-moon day, that is why you see some acitvity here. Otherwise you will find only monkeys on the streets,”says Ram Pratap, a farmer squatting in front of Sant Ram's shop. Chips in Sant Ram: “Even the monkeys are starving. What to do, people themselves do not have enough to eat.”

Sant Ram's story is written all over Hanuman Garhi -- literally meaning the domain of Hanuma -- which sits right in the heart of Ayodhya and holds most of its shops. Here every shopkeeper, big or small, blames the BJP for giving “a kick on his stomach” -- a Hindi _expression for depriving one of his livelihood.

“They should build a sarvadharma (all-religion) temple here and leave it alone. Otherwise, these politicians will ruin us even more,” says Sanjay Akhilwani, who runs a grocery store.

I spoke to these people the morning L K Advani came to Ayodhya. He was the man who made Ayodhya a household name in 1990. Since then, his party's fortunes has shot up, while the fortunes of the common man in Ayodhya have nosedived. It wasn't surprising therefore that people like Sant Ram and Ram Pratap weren't impressed when Advani came to their town again to seek votes and to promise a grand temple soon after the victory of the National Democratic Alliance.

“Our business should be back to nomal if a temple is built. But I don't think that will ever happen, because the politicians will have no issue to fight over,” says Saroj, who sells flowers on a Hauman Garhi street. Does she support the BJP over the temple issue? she shakes her head: “BJP ne to humen barbaad kiya hai -- the BJP has ruined us.”

Ram Pratap, the farmer, is angry with the BJP for other reasons as well. “When Deve Gowda was the Prime Minister, a bag of urea cost Rs 185 and one litre of diesel Rs 16. Now urea costs Rs 265 and deisel Rs 24,” he says.

The Ram temple, clearly, isn't an issue here. Still the BJP has chances in Faizabad (the distict under which the town of Ayodhya falls) and that's because of the popularity of its candidate, Lallu Singh. Singh has been an MLA for long and has excellent rapport with the locals. “If you call him for your daughter's wedding, he will come. He knows each and everybody here,” says Akhilwani, the grocer. Maybe that is why Singh was preferred over the sitting MP, the notoriously sharp-tongued Vinay Katiyar, who was once the head of the Bajrang Dal and is now president of the BJP's Uttar Pradesh unit. Katiyar is contesting from Lakhimpur Kheri.

But Lallu Singh has a formidable opponent in Mitrasen Yadav, a veteran CPI leader who joined Mulayam Singh's Samajwadi Party in the early 1990's. In the recent past, Yadav and Katiyar have taken turns in representing Faizabad -- once the capital of Shuja-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Avadh in the late 18th century.

If you look carefully, a lot of that Nawabi charm is still intact -- spacious streets, magnificent but decaying palaces and temples, gardens and the river Sarayu that presents a wonderful sight. But thanks to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the BJP, the place has been overrun by kar sewaks several times. In 1992, they pulled down the 16-century mosque, creating a rift between Hindus and Muslims throughout the country.

But in Ayodhya, the story is different. “In Allahabad or Lucknow, you can tell a Muslim from a distance. But here, you cannot make out a person is a Muslim till you ask him name. They are a part of us,” says Shyam Bihari, a school teacher. A number of the 5000 or so Muslimsin Ayodhya, in fact, are engaged in garland-making. and Ayodhya is a sea of garlands. They are sold in the hundreds of wooden stalls that line the streets eventually leading up to the makeshift temple. They also sells knick-knacks that a Hindu pilgrim might require -- vermillion, sandalwood sticks, bead-necklaces, bangles and so on. And unlike Varanasi or Puri, this place is a lot cleaner and middle-men of various kinds don't accost you. You almost feel sad for Ayodhya, and also for Lord Ram, for being in such a state of siege.

It isn' easy getting into the temple. After depositing your mobile phones and other electronic gadgets with the policemen at the gate, you have to travel more than a kilometre through a narrow, grilled corridor -- narrow enough to ensure a single file -- and pass through security checks at three different points. At places there are gaps in the grills from which monkeys hop in and hop out. Finally the corridor slopes up and there you are, under a canopy, looking at a brightly-lit platform. The platform is far enough from you not to have a close look at the idols -- you can barely make out those marigold-covered figurines.

A security guard standing behind me tries hard to make me see those idols, but I still can't figure out, except for the idol of Lord Rama, which is taller than the rest. Anyway, it's Rama that matters, so I took the exit route after accepting the prasada -- few sugar globules -- from a priest sitting there.

The makeshift temple stands on a mound, and all over the mound, there are huge holes covered by tarpaulin. The security guard said it was part of the digging work done by the Archaeological Survey.

You breathe easy on the way out because there aren't any grills around you, but it takes quite a while to get out of the compound. And once out, you run into stalls selling different kinds of things -- booklets and VCDs showing the events of 1989 (when kaw sewaks were fired upon) and 1992. The booklets were sold by young boys who could teach seasoned salesmen a thing or two, and the VCDs were being played on TV sets for the benefit of the pilgrims/visitors. It has been a part of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's campaign to promote these “events.”

Once out, I return to Akhilwani's shop and ask him what people of Ayodhya think of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. “We really don't care about VHP or Ashok Singhal. Singhal's visits to Ayodhya look like an event because TV crews accompanying him project it like that. But here, life goes on,” he says.

One can believe him, because even when Advani came calling on April 6, life in Ayodhya was going on.

2004 Election Reporting: Ayodhya I

2005-11-21T02:00:00.000-08:00

Advani promises Ram temple soon after NDA returns to power

April 6: On the foundation day of the BJP, where would you expect to find its chief architect who built up the party using the cement with the brand name Ayodhya? Ayodhya, of course.

The architect, deputy Prime Minister L K Advani, began the day offering prayers to Lord Rama at the makeshift temple that stands today where the Babri Masjid stood till 1992. After that he addressed a news conference, where he announced that the Ram temple would be constructed “shortly after” the NDA government returned to power at the Centre, and then drove off to finish the final leg of his India Shining rath yatra.

“We have already made some quiet progress. I am confident that we will be able to reach an agreement involving Hindu and Muslim representatives shortly after the new government is in place,” Advani told the conference. He, however, refused to say who the Muslim representatives were, saying they (the Muslim representatives) did not want publicity till a solution was found to the Ayodhya dispute. “You might be looking for a good copy,” he told a journalist, “but I am looking for a solution. So I cannot reveal the details.”

But he said once the temple was built, it would unite India the way the movement for its construction in 1990 had united the Hindus. “People say the temple movement had divided the society. But when the movement began, the society was divided like never before. One caste was fighting the other (because of the introduction of the Mandal Commission report). But our movement brought about unprecedented unity among the Hindus. And when the temple is built, it will bring about unity between the Hindus and Muslims,” Advani told the conference, held in an open space adjacent to the makeshift temple.

The temple is heavily guarded by battalions of the Uttar Pradesh police and the CPRF. Devotees have to go through a maze of narrow, grilled corridors – narrow enough to ensure they move in a single file – and have to pass through security checks at three points. Mobile phones and other electronic gadgets are not allowed.

Advani said he was saddened by the state of siege in which the idols of Lord Rama and his wife and brothers sat under the canopy, and hoped that things will improve once a grand temple was built. He said the construction of a grand temple would also lay the foundation for Ram Rajya – a dream of Mahatma Gandhi – in India. But the Ram Rajya, he said, would materialise by the year 2020 “when India would become a developed nation.”

The promise of a developed nation by 2020 was the focus of the speeches Advani made while cutting through the heart of Uttar Pradesh on his chariot. In fact, he used the promise to blunt the criticism his party, the BJP, has been drawing for boasting that India is shining. “Maine yeh kaha hai ki Bharat chamak raha hai. Maine yeh kabhi nahin kahaa ki Bharat chamak gaya hai (I have only said that India is beginning to shine. I have never said that India has already shined),” Advani said in speech after speech, including the one he made in Lucknow on Monday at a rally where he shared the dais with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. India will really shine, he said, by the year 2020.

The future he is talking about is distant: Vajpayee will be 96 then and Advani himself 95. As a member of the audience, listening to Advani at Lucknow, commented while walking out of the Ambedkar Stadium: “In that case, we will vote for them in 2019.”

The crowd that Vajpayee and Advani addressed in Lucknow on Monday was thin – in fact very thin if you compare it with the crowd that came to listen to Mayawati in the same stadium on March 13. But then, Mayawati, in Uttar Pradesh, is a force to reckon with and the BJP admits that. Advani told a news conference in Kanpur on Monday that his party’s principle opponents in the state were the Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. Yet, in speech after speech in the state, Advani, and also Vajpayee, trained their guns on Sonia Gandhi’s Congress, which is hardly a force when compared with the SP and the BSP.

Maybe the crowds, which have seen an aggressive Advani in the past, are tired of hearing the same statements about the ineffectiveness of the Congress and its leadership. Or maybe, thanks to the television channels and the extensive media coverage of the rath yatra, people knew what to expect from Advani. Whatever the reason, the response to his yatra in Uttar Pradesh has been quite lukewarm, with the exception of Faizabad (the district under which Ayodhya falls), where people in great numbers had gathered to listen to Advani and Kalyan Singh, who was the chief minister when the Babri mosque fell in 1992.

But even there, locals say, people are enthusiastic about voting for the BJP only because its present Lok Sabha candidate Lallu Singh, who has a long-serving MLA has established an excellent rapport with his electorate, and not because they are fond of the party.
Maybe that is why the Kalyan Singh, to make sure the BJP candidate won, literally begged the people to vote for his party. “I fall at your feet, please vote for the BJP and don’t let Ram down,” the once-fiery Kalyan Singh said.

2004 Election Reporting: Who To Vote For?

2005-11-21T01:55:00.000-08:00

March 31: Dinesh Shukla thinks Atal Behari Vajpayee is a good man but says he will not vote for him.

“I like him, but I don't like his party,” says Shukla, 35, who runs a phone booth on Lucknow's Ashok Marg. “At times they talk of building the (Ram) temple and at times they talk of wooing the Muslims. What do they really want?” He adds: “Maybe I won't vote at all. Who is there to vote for?”

Who is there to vote for? -- that's a question staring at the face of the electorate in Uttar Pradesh which goes to the polls in late April. They, however, have more choices than people in other states. There is the BJP, which is desperately trying to see a feel-good atmosphere in the heat and dust of the Gangetic plains where people face power and water crisis more than ever before. There is the Congress, whose spirits have lifted after Rajul Gandhi decided to fight from Amethi. And then there are the local parties -- the Samajwadi Party, the ruling party, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, which till recently was the ruling party -- confident of winning the support of the castes they represent.

Each is out to impress the voter with slogans and the charm of its leaders, celebrities and filmstars. Amitabh Bachchan will campaign for Mulayam Singh Yadav, Jaya Prada is Mulayam's party's candidate from Rampur, and the list of stars to come in support of the BJP and Congress is along. Union minister Murali Manohar Joshi, BJP's candidate from Allahabad, even wanted cricketer Mohammad Kaif to campaign for him (Kaif belongs to Allahabad), but Kaif refused. The only exception is the Bahujan Samaj Party which, true to the character of its election symbol, the elephant, is wading through the election jungle alone without banking on hired charisma.

But if the mood in Lucknow, at least for the moment, is anything to go by, the voter isn't feeling good about the election. He isn't feeling bad either. He is just indifferent. It's the parties who are taking turns in feeling good or bad -- at least the two parties which aim to rule India by picking up as many seats as possible from Uttar Pradesh. After all, maximum seats can be picked up from this state -- there are 80 in all.

In the outgoing Lok Sabha, from Uttar Pradesh, the BJP and the Samajwadi Party have 26 seats each, theBSP 14 and the Congress 10. But last week's AC Nielsen survey has projected the 2004 tally as BJP 32, Samajwadi Party 32, BSP 11 and Congress only five.

That should make the BJP feel good, and the Congress, whose very existence in the cowbelt will be wiped off if it wins only five seats, feel bad. But the survey, it seems, was done before the BJP had given out its tickets and before Rahul Gandhi decided to take the plunge.

The BJP's ticket distribution has completely exposed the infighting in the party -- something that never comes to light in the national papers where the party still projects itself as disciplined. The case of Kanpur is the ideal example. The party's high command was considering Satish Mahana, a youthful Punjabi leader who has been an MLA for long and also a minister in the successive BJP-BSP governments, for the ticket from Kanpur. But the Brahmins stood up in revolt, saying only a Brahmin should be given a ticket. Meanwhile, Jagatvir Singh Dron, a three-time MP from Kanpur who lost to the Congress in 1999, also staked hia claim. Finally, the high command bowed to the Brahmins' demand and gave the ticket to Satyadev Pachauri, a Brahmin. Result? Mahana is angry, Dron is angry. And the Congress is happy -- it is going to get Kanpur on a platter. Resentments of such nature were witnessed in several constituencies across the state.

For the Congress, which has almost touched the bottom in Uttar Pradesh, things can only get better. At least they seem so with the entry of Rahul Gandhi. In an opinion poll conducted by a Kanpur paper, 57 percent of the respondents said they thought Congress will benefit from Rahul's entry. They think the “f oreigner” issue dogging the Congress will now be put to rest.

And in Allahabad, the birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru and which is now being represented by Murali Manohar Joshi, rumours are that Priyanka Gandhi will be fielded from there. The Congress still hasn't announced its candidates for Allahabad as well as Lucknow, Vajpayee's seat, where speculation is that it will field Ram Jethmalani. Lucknow shouldn't bother BJP, but if Priyanka decides to stand from Allahabad, the scene in Uttar Pradesh could change drastically. Joshi's popularity, if figures are any indication, has slipped over the years. In 1996 he got 42.7 percent of the votes and in 1999, it had come down to 33.7 percent. Unlike in other states such as Karnataka, where it has S M Krishna, or Punjab, where it has Amrinder Singh, the Congress lacks a charismatic leader in Uttar Pradesh. And who could be more charismatic than the children of Rajiv Gandhi?

But something heartening seems to be happening for the BJP as well. Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, till recently a bitter critic of the BJP, is now singling out Congress for his attacks. There is a war of words going on between Congress veteran Arjun Singh and Samajwadi Party's Amar Singh. On Tuesday, Samajwadi Party's savvy face, Amar Singh, called Arjun Singh “old and senile.” Mulayam, meanwhile, has considerably softened his criticism of the BJP. In fact, he is almost behaving like an ally of Vajpayee. Recently, he allocated Rs 20 crore for the development of Lucknow -- Vajpayee's constituency. And last week, when Vajpayee came to address a rally in the state, Mulayam was at the Lucknow airport to receive him. Papers showed him holding a bouquet and bowing before Vajpayee.

Political observers in Lucknow say this could be the beginning of a new friendship. All in Indian politics, everything is possible. Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav were bitter enemies of the BJP, but they joined the NDA government. Telugu Desam's Chandrababu Naidu also once treated the BJP as an untouchable, but today the two parties are great friends. So one can't rule out -- according to observers -- Mulayam bailing out Vajpayee in case he falls short of majority. Though Vajpayee won't need his support, if the AC Nielsen survey is to be believed. But battlelines have just begun to be drawn and voters are yet to decide whose side to take.

2004 Election Reporting: Amethi

2005-11-21T01:51:00.000-08:00

Rahul Gandhi: His Father's Son

March 29: “Let Vajpayee contest from Amethi,” thunders Banwari Lal, a paan-seller sitting in his shop -- a small wooden cube supported on four legs, “he will get a taste of his feel-good factor. He will bite dust.”

About half-a-dozen people sitting on wooden benches around his stall agree in unison: “Yes, yes, we challenge either Vajpayee or Advani to fight from here. We would like to see what happens.”

That's one challenge Vajpayee or Advani are never likely to take up: it is easier for an Italian-born to become the Prime Minister of India than anyone defeating a member of the Gandhi family in amethi. The only time a Gandhi lost from here was in 1977, when Sanjay Gandhi contested Lok Sabha elections for the first time. But at the time, the country, especially North India, was in the grip of an anti-Emergency, and Sanjay, supposed to be the architect of the Emergency, lost to Ravindra Pratap Singh of the Janata Party.

In January 1980, Sanjay won the seat but he died within months in June, performing aeronautical stunts that led his twin-seater aircraft to crash. The seat was filled up by elder brother Rajiv in 1981, and he went on to win elections from there in 1984, 1989 and 1991. But in 1991, while elections were still going on in the rest of the country, Rajiv died. With Sonia Gandhi refusing to join politics despite pleas by Congressmen who were so used to being led by a member of the gandhi family, Amethi passed on to the hands of Satish Sharma, a close member of the family.

Sharma won from here in 1991 and 1996, but in 1998, in what was a big blow to the congress, he lost to BJP's Sanjay Singh. Locals see this as the defeat of an “outsider” rather than the defeat of the Congress. Sharma, according to them, did not tend to the constituency the way Sanjay and Rajiv did. Sanjay Singh, on the other hand, was known by the people: he belonged to the local royal family and was a close friend of Sanjay Gandhi.

In 1999, when Sonia Gandhi finally decided to take the plunge, she naturally chose Amethi and won handsomely. (Though to be on the safe side, she also stood from Bellary, in Karnataka, where she was given a fight by BJP's Sushma Swaraj but still managed to win by some 50,000 votes). So Amethi returned to the family.

This election, Sonia's son Rahul is making his political debut from Amethi and its people, naturally, are electrified. They don't admit it, but it is clear that they see Rahul more as Rajiv's son than as Sonia's son. After all, spouses haven't mattered more than progies in Indian dynasties, and especially so in the Gandhi family. Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru's wives remained in the background, so did Indira Gandhi's husband Feroze. Sanjay's wife Maneka was shown the door after he died and today she is part of the BJP parivar rather than the Gandhi parivar. And as for Sonia, political analysts have been saying that she is keeping the Congress president's seat warm for her children. And today, one of her children have taken the first step.

“I wish I could have shown you that girl, she was playing here just now,” says Banwari Lal, the paan-wallah, “you know she is barely two years old but still she says, 'Rahul bhaiyya zindabad, Rahul bhaiyya zindabad.'”

Adds Anokhe Lal, a man who must be spending his 70th summer at Banwari's shop: “Rahul ke aa jaane se hum sab khushi ke maarey pareshan hain (we are so happy that Rahul is coming here that we are getting tired of being happy).”

Adds Akhilesh, a 30-something whose job seemed to be hanging around in the paan shop all the time: “I think the idea is to project Rahul as a Prime Ministerial candidate. That is why he is contesting from here.”

Suddenly, out of the blue, tea is served. I protest, saying I've had too much tea. But they protest: “This is our culture. you cannot go without tea.” So over tea, they tell me Rahul might not have any political experience, but they will “blindly” vote for him because he reminds them of Rajiv Gandhi.

They are quite right about the resemblance. If you look at him carefully, Rahul not only resembles his father but also looks at lot like his late uncle Sanjay -- a man they really worship. “Wah, kya din thhey woh (Ah, those were the days),” says Banwari reminiscing Sanjay Gandhi's visits to Amethi. “He (Sanjay) used to walk very fast, so fast that others had to run to keep pace with him. And he used to campaign either by walking or on a motorcyle. He used to drive the bike himself while another Congressman rode pillion.”

Rajiv, like Sanjay, also came here often but not on a bike. “He drove in his car, but he also used to walk around. We once took him to the nearby theatre to watch a film. I even remember the name of the film, Do Badan (Two Bodies),” says Akhilesh.

As the conversation goes on, Banwari pulls out a framed picture and hands it to me. It's a newspaper picture showing Priyanka Gandhi greeting Banwari. “Sir, we are willing to lay our lives for the Gandhi family. After all, they have laid their lives for us. They died, but still kept coming to Amethi to contest elections. Is there any dearth of seats for them?” he asks. The family, clearly, has given Amethi its place under the sun.

The sun was scorching when we had set off for Amethi from Rae Bareli, where Sonia Gandhi is contesting the elections. A 60-km long road separates the constituencies of the mother and the son, but the two-hour taxi ride, on the rather smooth road, presents one of the most beautiful countrysides that the landscapeless Gangetic plain can offer. We pass miles and miles of wheat fields, interrupted occasionally by a lone, deserted brick structure which had a painting on the wall that exhorted people to come to Mayawati's rally in Lucknow (the one that was held on March 13).

Amethi arrives without warning. Suddenly the road gets bad and you run into a street where merchants on either side are selling foodgrains spread out on jute sheets. As you move on, you come across shops selling household stuff, among them, ropes. There are several shops selling different kinds of ropes -- probably to be used to draw water from wells or to be used as clothesliness. Maybe something more basic: as a harness for animals ploughing the fields.

The place, at best, looked like a village square. I asked the driver to go on, hoping to find the Amethi that matched the profile of its elected representatives. But after a point, where a statue of Ambedkar stood, the driver said, “This is Amethi. There is nothing beyond.”

So we return to the busy street where the shops were and stop at a tea-stall outside the local post office. Several people sat at the shop, reading different pages of the same newspaper. It's quite obvious that people of Amethi are used to journalists coming over. Even before I can introduce myself properly, they have shuffled and made place for me on the bench.A glass of tea appears and they, I can see, are ready with the soundbites. I begin with the poor amenities. “They are all deeds of the state government. The MPs allocate funds but it never reaches us,” the man sitting immediately next to me says.

“Satish Sharma is also to be blamed,” joins in the barber who runs his shop next to the tea-stall. “He was a useless man. It was because of his deeds the Congress lost in 1998.” Butts in the tea-wallah: “But now that Rahul bhaiyya has come, things will change. The roads will shine again.”
Our next stop is the house of Roop Lal, a farmer. I ask him about the poor amenities. “Look, conditions might be bad here, but today Amethi figures in the internatianol map because of the Gandhi family. And as for the conditions, show me one place in India where conditions are better.”

The sun is setting and it's time to leave. On the way out, we passed Banwari's shop. He waved us down and said: “Next time when you come, I will show you my pictures with Sanjay Gandhi.” As we drive out of Amethi, into the wheat fields, a silly thought comes to my mind: if the Gandhi dynasty ever wants to set up a kingdom of their own, they can easily be assured of this land of 14 lakh people. But then, this is democracy, and they are aiming to rule one billion.

2004 Election Reporting: Rae Bareli

2005-11-21T01:49:00.000-08:00

Resurrection of Indira Gandhi

March 27: The roads in Rae Bareli are so bad that a rickshaw ride around the town can give you a backache the next morning. You can't call them roads: they are beds of stones, the asphalt having been washed away many monsoons ago. So the rickshaw goes bump, bump, bump and you curse yourself for being here.

But soon you realise you are not the only one cursing. The people of Rae Bareli are cursing too. They are cursing the day Indira Gandhi died. “She was like our mother. She used to come often. The same roads used to sparkle once, but after she died, nobody cared for us,” says Bhagwan Din, 52, who takes care of a small Shiva temple on a busy tri-junction.

Today, people like Bhagwan Din are pinning their hopes on Sonia Gandhi -- who has decided to stand from Rae Bareli -- to bring back the good, old days to their town. If Sonia wins, which she is a near certainty, and if she wants to live up to the hopes of her constituency, she will have a lot of do.

If you discount the Reliance India Mobile hoardings and the shops that sell electronic goods, Rae Bareli looks a lot like a 19th-century town. And if you count them in, the place looks like a 21st-century village. The narrow, battered roads are lined by either dilapilated buildings -- one of them houses the electricity maintenance board and another the wights and measurements office -- or shops that sell basics needs of man: groceries, garments, cooking stoves, bathroom fittings. Barber shops, 'beauty parlours' and puncture repair shops are scattered all over the place.

Only one shop seemed to be selling mobile phones and connections. The number of ATMs is only two -- both belonging to the State Bank of India. The people of Rae Bareli don't seem to have discovered the advantages of e-mail yet. There are, however, quite a few wine shops, selling both 'foreign' and country liquor. The entire district has just one degree college, named after Indira Gandhi's husband Feroze, and only one park, if you can call it so, in the name of sight-seeing. The park, naturally, is named after Indira Gandhi.

Nothing indeed seems to have moved in Rae Bareli since 1984, when Indira Gandhi died. On the contrary, the locals say, the town has moved backwards. Most of the industries she had set up in the area, mainly paper and cotton mills, have shut. The Indian Telephone Industry, which once boasted of 650,000 employees and was the prid of Rae Bareli is today down to 2500 employees. Locals blame ITI's decline on “unionbaazi” -- or trade unionism. No wonder in this Congres bastion, the only red flag you see -- a fading one -- is in the sprawling ITI campus.

“There were 156 industries here once, today only 56 remain,” says Paras Jaiswal, who sells figurines and framed pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses near the town's Ghantaghar Chauraha, or the Clock Tower. “Those days, you also had regular power supply. Now there are frequent power cuts because of which thefts in the nights have become commonplace,” says Paras. “We hope things will improve now that Soniaji has come here. She will understand our problems. After all, she is Indiraji's bahu (daughter-in-law).”

Thirty-sevenyears ago, in 1967, Indira Gandhi had also come here to seek votes as a daughter-in-law. Rae Bareli was the seat of her husband, Feroze Gandhi, who had won from here in 1952 (when the first ever Lok Sabha elections were held in the country) and in 1957. He died in 1960. In 1964, Jawaharlal Nehru died and Indira Gandhi was elected to the Rajya Sabha and she became the information and broadcasting minister under Lal Bahadur Shastri.

In 1966, Shastri died and she became the Prime Minister. In 1967, it was time for general elections and Indira had to hunt for a Lok Sabha seat (those days, a Prime Ministers had to be a member of the Lok Sabha. They don't seem to be care much now: H D Deve Gowda and I K Gujral were member of the Rajya Sabha when they were Prime Ministers).

Senior Congress members were of the opinion that Indira should contest from Phulpur, near Allahabad, which was Nehru's constituency. But Gaya Prasad Shukla, a Rae Bareli Congressman who was one of the coordinators of Feroze Gandhi's election campaign, pleaded that Indira contest from Rae Bareli. The Congress then organised two public meetings by her -- one in Rae Bareli and another in Phulpur. The response in Rae Bareli was stronger and that became her seat. She went on to stand from there in 1971, 1977 and 1980. In 1977, when India was in the grip of a general anti-Emergency feeling, she lost to Raj Narain.

The man who was instrumental in getting Indira to contest from Rae Bareli, Gaya Prasad Shukla, is still alive: he looks as ancient as the two-storeyed Congress office which, according to Shukla, used to be the “pilgrimage centre” for the who's who of the Congress. Local Congressmen now hope that the crumbling building will return to life with the entry of Sonia.

One thing is clear: people of Rae Bareli are fiercely loyal to the Gandhi family, but not necessarily to the Congress or even to distant members of the Gandhi family. In 1984, they elected Arun Nehru -- Rajiv Gandhi's cousin -- and in 1989 and 1991, they elected Sheila Kaul, an aunt of Indira. Kaul was the urban development minister in Narasimha Rao's government, but she, as locals, say, thought nothing of Rae Bareli's development. “Ever since Indira Gandhi died, middlemen and contractors have had a field day here,” says Bhagwan Din.

So the mood turned anti-Congress and they punished the party in 1996 and 1998. In 1996, Sheila Kaul's son Vikram came fourth, getting only 25,000 votes. In 1998, Kaul's daughter Deepa came fourth too, getting less than 50,000 votes. In both these elections, the seat went to BJP's Ashok Singh, an old lieutenant of Arun Nehru. Ashok Singh is today Samajwadi Party's candidate against Sonia.

The 1999 contest was interesting and explains the sway the Gandhi family holds on the electorate here. On one was Satish Sharma, the Congress candidate and a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi, and on the other hand Arun Nehru, the BJP's candidate and Rajiv's relative. In the words of Santosh Singh, a local taxi driver: “Satish Sharma, like the Kauls, was seen as an outsider. They had done nothing for the people. Arun Nehru, on the other hand, had managed his campaign very well. Moreover, there was a pro-BJP mood. So Nehru was all set to win. But then, two days before the elections, Priyanka Gandhi came to Rae Bareli. She must have spent hardly two hours with the people here, but overnight the mood turned in favour of the Congress and Sharma won.”

But Sharma, says Santosh, was all set to lose the coming elections had he contested. “He rarely came. And whenever he came, we got to know about it only from the papers. Now Congress' victory is certain. Sonia's coming has given the party a new life here,” he says.

It is as if Indira Gandhi has been resurrected. “Hum sab Gandhi parivar ke diwane hain (we are all crazy about the Gandhi family,” says Jaiswal, the man who sells figurines of Gods near the clocktower. But he says nobody is as crazy as is 60-year-old father, who he describes as “mentally disturbed.” As in? “Well, he is so obsessed with the Gandhi parivar that he never cared about his own parivar. He keeps talking only about them. You can have no other conversation with him,” Jaiswal explains.

It is perhaps because of this obsession that you almost forget to ask people if they see Sonia as a foreigner. When you do ask, the answer in obvious. “She is our bahu, not a foreigner,” says Devi Dutt, a postal employee enjoying his tea break outside the post office. But doesn't she look like a foreigner and talk like one? “Sir,” says Devi Dutt, “even you don't look like us and your mother-tongue is not Hindi either. But aren't we able to communicate our thoughts?”

2004 Election Reporting: Lucknow

2005-11-21T01:45:00.000-08:00

Letter from Lucknow

The girl dancing on the roadside stage couldn't have been more than twenty. Wearing hip-hugging jeans and a T-shirt that was clearly two sizes smaller than hers, she gyrated, under strobe lights, to the raunchy remix, Kaanta Laga. She was facing a crowd of not more than a hundred people, most of them passersby who had stopped out of curiosity but had stayed on to watch, their jaws dropping. They couldn't have asked for more. Neither could have the dozen or so policemen, who were trying hard not to smile as they waved motorists on to prevent a jam on the busy road.

It was a 'colourful cultural programme,' informed the huge banner in the background, to celebrate Holi (In North India, functions are held for days after the festival). There was another information the banner gave, that the chief guest of the evening was Mr... well, the name doesn't matter much. What matters in Lucknow is your political designation and in this case, the chief guest was a poorva vidhayak, or ex-MLA, as the banner announced in large, red letters.

So even is a minor roadside show like this, which aimed at nothing but giving the chance to a handful of pedestrians to feast their eyes on a dancing girl, you could see the hand of power. Lucknow is all about power. It has always been so. For centuries, the city saw power changing hands. But in the last two decades or so, the people in power have been trying to change the city, its spirit. Worse, you never know who is going to come to power next, and when. That's the story of Lucknow, better known these days as the constituency of Atal Behari Vajpayee. and somewhere between the lines lies the story of Uttar Pradesh -- the state no politician can ignore if he wants to be the Prime Minister of India, the state of which Lucknow is the capital city.

Lucknow, when it was being ruled by the Nawabs 150 years ago, it had the reputation of being easy-going. People were known for their manners (there is a legend about two Nawabs missing the train because each insisted the other get in first). Music and arts flourished. Even food was the work of art. Easy-going it still is -- the evidence being the large number of cycle-rickshaws plying on the roads. When they hapen to be a popular mode of transport, you know people are not in a great hurry.

Taking a rickshaw ride is the best way to explore Lucknow. The leisurely ride gives you enough time to see how the place is changing, and to imagine how the place must have been 150 years ago. I almost felt like a nawab being carted to the mehfil of a singing girl, or to the haveli of a friend to play chess. My destination, though, was a friend's home. He showed me around the colony. “Nice place, isn't it?” he said, pointing at the palatial of his rich neighbours. “But you can get a house here only on one condition: you should not be a Muslim.” So being a Muslim is a taboo -- the Muslim who had given Lucknow the ghazal, the kabab, the manners, its very identity.

The decline of the Nawabs is shown masterully by Satyajit ray in the only Hindi film he ever made, Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players). The film portrays, to quote V S Naipaul from India -- A Million Mutinies Now, “the decadence or blindness or helplessness of a 19th-century Muslim culture at the end of its possibilities: where the rulers play chess and conduct petty affairs, while their territory (and its people) pass into foreign hands.”

If the arrival of the British, in 1858, marked the decline of the Muslim culture, their departure, in 1947, saw the emergence of Congress culture in Lucknow. A politcian necessarily meant a Congressman who wore khadi and Gandhi cap and who had participated in the freedom struggle. The seat of the Congress government was Delhi, but the Congress leaders who mattered in Delhi derived their political clout from Lucknow. And these leaders included the Congress Prime Minister -- Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi. Even V P Singh for that matter.

Singh was the Congress chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when he resigned, in 1982, accepting moral responsiblity for his failure to check banditry in the state. One of the bandits active at the time was Phoolan Devi. (On the Valentine's Day in 1981, she had shot about two dozen Thakurs in Behmai, a village near Kanpur. It was said to be an act of revenge for the atrocities she had suffered at the hands of men from the upper caste). Singh's resignation earned him the tag of an honest politcian -- an image that helped him when he took on Rajiv Gandhi on the Bofors issue and went on to become the Prime Minister in 1989.

P V Narasimha Rao was the only Congress Prime Minister who didn't come from Uttar Pradesh, and no wonder he presided over the decline of the party in the state. As it is, Rao was a disaster as an organisation man; and his reticence, which helped him pull through five years in power, encouraged Congressmen to fight themselves instead of fighting political opponents. By the time Rao's term ended, in 1996, the party was in shambles. The BJP had won over the upper-caste, middle-class, television-owning homes that were fresh from watching Ramayana. Mulayam Singh had won over the Yadav and other backward castes. Mayawati, on the other hand, had opened the gates of power to the dalits.

The condition of the Congress in Lucknow today is like that of the Nawabs in Shatraj Ke Khiladi. It's like an aged haveli, past its prime, which only has old family portraits to show off. The Congress headquarters in Lucknow, in fact, is somewhat like that. The fax machine doesn't work (at least it didn't till recently) and the party has no cars to campaign. During the Assembly elections in 2002, the Congress headquarters in Delhi had despatched some two dozen Ambassador cars to Lucknow. But soon after those elections, the cars were auctioned. Rahul Gandhi has now entered the fray, like the foreign-returned son of a decaying ruler, to shore up his family fortunes. But the Congress isn't taking chances: last week, it felled several eucalyptus trees inside its office compound in Lucknow because they had become taller than the building, which is supposed to be bad omen.

The BJP office, meanwhile, has even set up an aviation cell to coordinate air travel by their leaders in Uttar Pradesh. The entire campaign is being controlled, from Delhi, by BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan, who knows the art of blending ideology with technology. The Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, being one-man or one-woman parties based in Lucknow, have already activated their machinery across the state. Money for campaigning should be the last of the problems for Mulayam Singh, who has a host of powerful businessmen friends. “We expect maximum orders from his party,” says Anup Agrawal, who sells campaign material in Lucknow, “They are big spenders, and now that they are in power, they will spend more.” Money doesn't seem to be a problem for Mayawati either: the entire city of Lucknow had turned blue -- her party colour -- on the eve of her rally on March 13.

In the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, the Samajwadi Party had won 26 of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh. The BSP had won 14. The tally of the BJP, which in 1996 had bagged nearly 60 seats, was down to 26. And the Congress, which was once Uttar Pradesh, had picked up only 10 seats. Each party, naturally, will try to push up its tally but for the two giants, the BJP and the Congress, it is the question of survival in the state. Come to think of it, they've been pushed in to this situation by two politicians who were barely known 15 years ago!
The political transition in Uttar Pradesh can be best exlained by the case of Phoolan Devi. It was because of his failure of catch bandits like Phoolan Devi that V P Singh had resigned as the chief minister in 1982. In 1996, the same Phoolan Devi was given a Lok Sabha ticket by Mulayam Singh Yadav. Phoolan won the elections. It was seen as a victory of the oppressed against the oppressors, of the lower caste against the opper caste.

The new awekening resulting from victories such as Phoolan's is visible on the streets on Lucknow. When you take a rickshaw ride, soaking in the sights of the still-handsome city with wide tree-lined roads, it is common to find your rickshawpuller, like other rickshawpullers and motorists, hurriedly making way for the sound of siren coming from behind. You look behind, expecting an ambulance, but the occupant of the appraching vehicles turn out to be the local Samajwadi Party corporator, the Bahujan Samaj Party MLA from a neighbouring district or some other minor politician.

You know the designation of the occupant because it is brass-lettered on a board, painted in the party colours, fixed in the front of the car. The siren, of course, is useless unless the car has a revolving red, or blue, light. These days, they have a new addition: fog lights. As these cars breeze past you, the occupants seem to tell the crowd they are tearing through: “Look, we have arrived.” So even if the people of Lucknow are today being ruled by their own people, the difference between the rulers and the ruled remains.

2004 Election Reporting: Kanpur

2005-11-21T01:42:00.000-08:00

In UP's Biggest City, India is Stinking

March 9: The garbage has been piling up for so long that it has narrowed down the road by half. Stray dogs and pigs feed on it, and it is usual to see them fight over a piece of refuse. Some pedestrians, when they pass this stretch of the road, cover their noses and look away. But most locals don't care: they are used to the sight and stench of the rubbish.

India Shining? It's India Stinking in Kanpur, because the road in question is not an ordinary one tucked away inside a crowded settlement. It is the prestigious Mall Road, and the garbage lies right at the door of the Ursula Horseman Memorial Hospital -- one of Kanpur's oldest -- and right opposite is the city's biggest hotel, Landmark, and the biggest shopping mall, Som Datt Plaza.

"Sometime I feel like leaving this city," says R K Agarwal, one of Kanpur's Midnight Children. "The politicians have ruined it," says the businessman from Birhana Road, where the city's busines community lives.

The planned destruction of Kanpur at the hands of politicians in symbolised by Phool Bagh -- the city's equivalent of Chennai's Marina Beach or Bangalore's Palace Grounds. For long, Phool Bagh -- Garden of Flowers -- has been a paradise for morning walkers and the venue for cultural shows and political rallies. But today there's hardly any place for walkers, leave alone for crowds who come to listen to politicians. Reason? Those very politicians have decided to leave their mark, literally, on the garden. A statue of Ram Manohar Lohia has sprung up in recent times, so has a plaque bearing the vasiyatnaama, or the Will, or Jawaharlal Nehru. And now, thanks to the present Congress mayor, the mother of all statues, with canopy and all, is waiting to be unveiled -- that of Mahatma Gandhi.

And just outside Phool Bagh, in the middle of another stretch of Mall Road, stands the statue of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, the ideological guru of the BJP's present leadership. There are rumours that Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, like the Mahatma, will also be protected from the blazing Kanpur sun with a canopy.

"Bus, yehi sab dikhawa hota raha hai (only this showing off business has been going on). Nobody has done anything for us. Yes, they did introduce a new direct train from Kanpur to Delhi, but that's all. Even there they are fighting to take the credit," says Onkar Gupta, 21, who runs a newspaper stall on a pavement at Phool Bagh.

So does he think India is shining? "Shining?" he laughs, pointing to the open drain that runs right below the wooden plank on which he displays magazines and newspapers. "I've been sitting here for 10 years now, and the drain has always been like this. Yes, India might be shining elsewhere, I've read that in papers," says Gupta. As one talks to Gupta and browses his magazines, it is not difficult to get used to the stench that the drain gives out, but it's difficult to ward off the mosquitoes that breed on it and are resolved to bite you.

India Stinking. Given the kind of rot that has set into Kanpur, the largest city of Uttar Pradesh -- the state that will eventually decide the composition of the Lok Sabha, any party using it as an election slogan has high chances of winning in the city. But it's obvious why no one is adopting it. The Samajwadi Party today runs the state, and till last year, it was run by Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Most MLAs belong to the BJP, but the MP and the mayor belong to the Congress. Since they are all joint architects of the mess that Kanpur is in today, nobody has the courage to promise to restore the city to its olden days, when it was the industrial capital of the state and was also known as the Manchester of the East.

Little wonder that the voters are undecided. "Sahab, is baar hawa nahi chal rahi hai. Samajh mein nahi aata kaun jitega (Sir, there is no wave this time. It's difficult to say who will win)," says Banke Lal, a rickshaw puller.

But the wave-makers are coming. L K Advani's India Shining Rath Yatra will touch Kanpur on April 4. Advani was the man who, thanks to his fist rath yatra in 1990, changed the colour of the city, a communist bastion, from red to saffron. Top Congress leaders, including Sonia Gandhi, are expected to come too. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and leaders of the Left parties will address a series of meetings too.

But all that only after the parties declare the list of their candidates -- an exercise that is expected to be completed by the middle of this month. While the Congress is likely to give the ticket to its sitting MP, Sriprakash Jaiswal, the BJP is not showing its cards at the moment. Speculation is that Arif Mohammed Khan, the newest and the most credible Muslim face in the BJP who had won the seat in 1980, might be fielded; though there are other contenders too, like three-time MP Jagatvir Singh 'Dron' and the youthful Satish Mahana, a long-serving minister in the governments of Kalyan Singh and Mayawati.

Once the candidates are announced, the campaign is bound to pick up and stars -- political and from Bollywood -- are going to come in and voters are likely to forget the stink and look at larger issues -- it could be how India is shining in other states, it could be the Ram temple, it could be their own caste or religion.

P.S. The Mall Road might be strewn with garbage in certain places, but in some of its junctions, the municipal corporation has put up halogen lights. Maybe when Advani comes to town next month in his motorised chariot, he will have something to show that India is shining.

Waves That Swept Elections

2005-11-21T01:32:00.000-08:00

The world over, in healthy democracies, general elections usually hold an element of surprise. You never really know who’s going to win till the results are out.

No American, for example, can tell you at the moment whether George Bush is going to win a second term or whether he will be taken to task by his people for attacking Iraq. Similarly, no Briton can tell you for sure if Tony Blair is going to win a third term or whether the Tories will return from the political wilderness.

But in India, the world’s largest democracy, people usually know months before the elections who the next Prime Minister will be. Today, put the question to anyone and the answer — unless the person happens to be a Gandhi family loyalist or a communist cardholder — is likely to be: Atal Behari Vajpayee. Before the 1999 elections, the answer was the same, Vajpayee. And it turned out to be correct. Before the 1989 elections, the answer was V P Singh. It too turned out to be correct. Before the 1984 elections, the answer was Rajiv Gandhi. It turned out to be correct as well. How do the voters manage to get it right?

It’s simple logic. Before every election the country witnesses a ‘wave’, from which emerges a knight in the shining armour who promises to rescue the country from all ills and evils, and the people vote for him (or her). But the building up of this wave is not based on any logic. In fact, it is based on something purely illogical — emotion. And in India, emotions are easier to whip up than lassi. You only need to give them people a slogan, and they’ll build a wave for you. That’s how most elections have been won in this country since 1971.

Garibi Hatao

Jawaharlal Nehru did not need any slogan or wave to stay in power. The spirit of the freedom struggle, of which he was a leading light, kept him going till he died in 1964. His successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, did coin a slogan in the wake of the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Victory to the soldier, victory to the peasant). But the slogan, which became hugely popular and inspired actor Manoj Kumar into making patriotic films such as Upkaar, never made its way from the battlefield to the election arena. It died with Shastri in Tashkent, where the then USSR was brokering peace between India and Pakistan in 1966.

After his death, Congress heavyweights of the time made Indira Gandhi the Prime Minister, thinking they could remote-control her. It was under her that the Congress went to elections in 1967 and suffered its first major setback: The party’s tally in Lok Sabha slipped from 361 to 283, with the Opposition joining hands for the first time. Then in 1969, the Congress split. That was when the Indira Gandhi we know was born.

On the eve of the 1971 elections, she gave a simple, two-word slogan, Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty), claiming that she had a time-bound scientific plan for abolishing poverty. The slogan captured the nation’s imagination and Mrs Gandhi’s Congress-I swept the polls, winning 342 seats in the Lok Sabha. The 1971 Indo-Pak war, where India was supporting the liberation of Bangladesh in the face of international opposition, boosted her popularity like never before. But that began to dip soon after.

The country experienced a severe drought in 1971 and 1972 and the price of food rose 20 percent by early 1973. The decision by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to quadruple oil prices in 1973-74 also led to inflation and increased unemployment. Garibi Hatao remained only a slogan. Finally, Jayaprakash Narayan, once seen as the successor to Nehru but who had renounced politics to join the Sarvodaya movement, came out of retirement to lead a sustained political campaign against Mrs Gandhi. The entire Opposition, sinking ideological differences, joined him. In June 1975, Mrs Gandhi imposed Emergency and put the Opposition leaders behind bars. Democracy was in danger.

Indira Hatao

During the 19-month Emergency, India again saw the building up of a wave. The wave didn’t throw up any particular hero, but was the expression of a collective national sentiment directed against a single villain: Mrs Gandhi. Indira Hatao, Desh Bachao (Remove Indira and save the nation) — that was the slogan. In due course several heroes emerged out of jails to take charge of the nation, much to the relief of the people whose civil rights were suspended during the Emergency. But then too many heroes, like too many cooks, can spoil the show.
Rather than governance, the Janata Party leaders concentrated their energies on fighting each other. Prices spiralled. Onions sold at Rs 10 per kg. Mrs Gandhi made that an election issue and returned in 1980 with a thumping majority.

The assassination

Pictures of Indira Gandhi’s body lying in state, the live coverage of her funeral, footage of a handsome Rajiv Gandhi grimly performing her last rites — they were mere visuals, but more evocative than any slogan. Even those who hated the lady were charmed by the innocent looks of her son. Their hearts bled for him. Their sympathy helped Rajiv make history: The Congress won 415 seats in the Lok Sabha. A nation that was surviving on the fading glow of freedom struggle was impressed when he promised to take them to the 21st century. He brought computers to dusty government offices and gave weekends off to the babus. India was in the hands of the new generation.

Bofors: Gali, gali mein shor hai...
Sometime in 1988, All India Radio in Patna hosted a live programme for children. The participating children were asked to tell jokes and when a little girl’s turn came, she chirped: “Gali gali mein shor hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai!” (In every street they are saying Rajiv Gandhi is a thief!). The station director lost his job. The child, though innocently, was only voicing the opinion of the public, which was now convinced that Rajiv Gandhi was thoroughly corrupt, having “eaten” Bofors money. The media ridiculed his lengthy speeches and his favourite phrases “Humen dekhna hai” and “Hum dekhenge” (both meaning, We will see). ‘Rajiv Gandhi jokes’ began doing the rounds and housewives gossiped that once he lost the elections — they were sure he would — he would flee to Italy. They were sure about his defeat because a new hero had appeared on the horizon — V P Singh, the Mr Clean of Indian politics. The same housewives were glued to their TV sets when in November 1989, Singh addressed the nation, having won the elections on the Bofors wave. They believed every word he said because the country was suddenly witnessing an openness it had not seen before: Opposition leaders were finally shown on TV. The saviour had arrived.

Mandir wahin banayenge...

Bofors turned out to be an anti-climax. No names came out, no one was punished. Instead, V P Singh pulled out the Mandal Commission report (recommending reservation of 27 percent of seats for OBCs in government jobs) from cold storage and decided to implement it. The middle-class Indian, who fell for his so-called crusade against corruption, was enraged. Parents saw V P as the man who was out to ruin their children’s future. There was general disenchantment. That’s when the BJP, which had just seen a fresh surge in its popularity (its tally went up from two in 1984 to 80 in the 1989 elections), moved in. It gave the people a new cause — the construction of a Ram temple at the spot where the Babri Masjid stood.

Their argument was convincing: as it is no one offers namaaz in the mosque, so why not relocate it and build the temple there. After all, Lord Ram was born there and conqueror Babar had deliberately built the mosque over there. To mobilise public opinion for the cause, L K Advani began a rath yatra from Somnath and changed the course of India’s political history. Jai Shri Ram, Garv Se Kaho Hum Hindu Hain (Be proud to say you are a Hindu) and Mandir Wahin Banayenge (We will build the temple only there) became the new slogans of India. The Ram wave overnight transformed the BJP into the largest political party in the country.

India Shining

The Ram wave might have pushed the BJP close to power, but after the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, the issue had lost its appeal and the party was not getting anywhere. It had become a political untouchable. That’s when it projected Atal Behari Vajpayee, a moderate, a poet, as the Prime Minister and went about winning allies. And when power was within striking distance, it set aside Ram and won over even more allies. Today, Vajpayee is completing his full term in office — an achievement in itself because no non-Congress Prime Minister has done so before — and is looking forward to a second term. His confidence is understandable.

India, after all, is shining and we are feeling good. At least we are being made to feel that our countrymen are feeling good. Perhaps that is why the slogan is short and sweet and in English, so that the global Indian understands it. Now there are two things about the India Shining slogan. One, unlike the previous slogans, it is not negative. It does not attack anyone, nor does it seek to arouse passions. Two, it seems to be coined by a seasoned economist rather than a street-smart politician. So will the voters — the emotional lot that they are — find it inspiring enough to keep Vajpayee in power, or will they refuse the buy the India Shining theory, rubbishing it as an exaggeration of a government’s achievements? Emotions and economics, after all, rarely mix. Do they?

February 2004

Ruling 300 Million!

2005-11-21T01:13:00.000-08:00

India is a country of paradoxes — as they will tell you in the geography class. For example, while one part of the country reels under a cold wave in December, another sings carols about Santa Claus and foggy nights without having a clue as to what a foggy night looks like.

But such paradoxes are not confined to geography alone: they extend to politics as well. For example, politicians love to preach about Gandhi but what they practise can put the Mahatma to shame. And of late, another contrast has come to the fore.

On one hand, the bill for reserving 33 percent of seats for women in legislatures has been pending in Parliament for years now. Reason: Everybody agrees in principle that there should be a quota for women, but when it comes to practice, nobody wants to give them so many seats. But on the other hand, nearly 30 percent of the country is ruled by women chief ministers today. And if Mayawati were to come back to power, then nearly half of the country would be ruled by women!

How did this happen? It happened overnight. When the BJP handpicked Uma Bharati and Vasundhara Raje to lead their campaigns in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, it did not do so because they were women: they were the best bets. Ditto for Sheila Dikshit: who else could have led the Congress in Delhi? But once they pulled off stunning victories, the focus instantly shifted to their gender.

Woman power. Stree Shakti. The She Factor. That’s how many papers headlined their stories. One magazine attributed their success to the “decisive women’s vote” and, in its editorial, said: “From now on, it seems the women will, as always, have the last word.” So are these Assembly elections results a turning point for women — a new chapter which will see more and more of them coming up in politics on their own steam? Or is it just a coincidence that all the women chief ministerial candidates happened to win?

Many think that the victory of the trio has thrown open the gates of a male-dominated fortress. “Women seem to be the flavour of the season,” says Yashwant Deshmukh, director of C-voter, the agency that conducts opinion and exit polls. “If you look at the six most populous states (Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan), their politics today is woman-centric. If you add up the number of Lok Sabha seats in these states, it crosses the 272-mark. So if our politicians still don’t sense the mood of the nation and keep stalling the women’s reservation bill, the electorate will take them to task,” he says.

Also, according to Deshmukh, more and more voters seem to be believing that women are better managers than men. “The issue of this elections was good governance, and all the women won. People I think saw them as the traditional housewife: you hand them your salary on the first of the month and sit back, because they know how to run the house,” he says.

Sheila Dikshit epitomises such a housewife: during her five years in power, she has emerged as the symbol of a development-centric chief minister. “I think her image helped in the campaigns of Uma Bharati and Vasundhara,” says Deshmukh. Both, Uma and Vasundhara, when they campaigned in their respective states, single-mindedly talked about power, water and good roads. Hindutva wasn’t mentioned, as the media had expected; and Modi wasn’t the star campaigner, as the media had projected.

Historian and political analyst Dr Mahesh Rangarajan, does not see the victory of the trio as a turning point for women in the democracy but definitely as a “sign of the times.” “The turning point would be when the reservation bill is passed, but this is a sign of the times. This is the first wave. In the next 15 years you will see many more women coming to public life. The three women will be the role models,” says Dr Rangarajan. What is most significant about their victory, according to Dr Rangarajan, is that “none of them derived power from their male kinsmen.”

He is right. Sheila Dikshit’s father-in-law, Uma Shankar Dikshit, was a Congress leader of some standing, but that was a long time ago. Vasundhara Raje, in spite of being Rajmata Scindia’s daughter, always took the backbenches in BJP’s politics and always kept a low-profile: she transformed into a heavyweight leader on her own steam. And Uma Bharati has no political godfather or godmother: she is a mass leader in her own right. Even Mayawati, for that matter, comes from a Dalit family with no political background, but she changed the contours of politics in Uttar Pradesh.

In the success of these women, Dr Rangarajan sees the emergence of ‘women’s politics’ — just like the emergence of ‘Dalit politics’ and ‘backward class politics’ in the past decade. But there are some who feel too much is being read into the victories of Uma Bharati, Vasundhara Raje and Sheila Dikshit.

“The fact that we have five women chief ministers today is extremely significant, but you cannot separate the parties from these women. The vote for them, especially in the case of Uma Bharati and Vasundhara Raje, has also been a vote for the party,” says Professor Zoya Hassan of the Centre for Political Studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “The priority of these women, after all, will be the interest of their party. Uma Bharati is a saffron leader, and you saw the line-up of sadhus at her swearing-in ceremony. So I think we are reading too much into the election results,” she says.

Hassan, however, hopes that their victory will encourage greater participation of women in politics. That’s something even Dr Rangarajan and Deshmukh agree with. Whatever the arguments, one thing is certain: never since Independence did so many women emerge as regional powers — that too in the most populous and male-dominated states. The women of these states will look upto them for what they’ve been looking for all these years — empowerment.

Big B at 61

2005-11-21T01:10:00.000-08:00

He didn’t have a ‘style’ like Dev Anand or Rajesh Khanna. He had neither the physique of Dharmendra nor the sex appeal of Vinod Khanna. He didn’t have the dimpled innocence of Shashi Kapoor, or the boyish charm of Rishi Kapoor.

All Amitabh Bachchan had was height — 6 feet 3 inches; a great voice — though it once failed the audition test at All India Radio; and a different hairstyle — mane parted in the middle. And also a unique name. Had he stuck to his Uttar Pradesh Kayastha surname, no one might have taken notice. Who would cast a second glance at a guy called Amitabh Srivastava? But in those days of struggle, the name made no difference. As for the height, directors thought he was far too tall. And as for the voice, well, Sunil Dutt gave him the role of a mute in Reshma Aur Shera (1971)!

One movie came after the other, but Amitabh either went unnoticed or was overshadowed by the reigning stars of the era. It was his 13th film that turned luck in his favour. Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer, in which Bachchan played a young and upright police officer, not only made people sit up and take notice but also propelled him to superstardom.

I grew up when Amitabh was becoming a phenomenon, and sitting in the theatre those days could be a torture if the casting did not begin with the name ‘Amitabh Bachchan.’ Millions of others, I am sure, felt the same rush of adrenalin when they saw the two words appear on the screen to the sound of violins and trumpets.

Today Amitabh Bachchan is 61. You might not feel the same rush of adrenalin when you see his name on the credits. His movies might not even induce you to go the theatres the way they did 20 years ago. And that’s because you no longer associate him with just movies — today he’s a brand name.

Currently, he commands the same price as that of a top hero. For endorsing products he charges anything between Rs 8 to Rs 10 crore. And look at the range of products he is endorsing today — from pens to paints. And last week, Mulayam Singh Yadav made him the brand ambassador for Uttar Pradesh! From star to superstar, Amitabh Bachchan now enjoys the status of what would be the showbiz equivalent of a statesman. Why did he not fade away like Rajesh Khanna — the other superstar who in his heyday had the entire nation under his spell?

One reason is range. Amitabh played the comedian with as much ease as he played the rebel or the romantic. Two, he wasn’t a narcissist, like Dev Anand and Rajesh Khanna, who were so much in love with their ‘style’ that they never grew out of it. As a result, what was once ‘style’ became ‘antics’ and the audience moved on. Amitabh, on the other hand, had no fixed style. He sat lightly on the audience, and spoke to them rather than speaking at them.

But the most important reason why his popularity continues to soar is that he recognised the limitations of age. Had he continued acting in films believing he was still the Angry Young Man who could take on 20 goondas single-handedly, he would have been history by now. But he recognised the limitations of age. Instead he reinvented himself. He sported a grey goatee and started playing his age. People — from seven- to seventy-year-olds — instantly identified with him. So when contestants sat on the hot seat in Kaun Banega Crorepati, they were rarely nervous. Because the man who sat across them was not the Big B, or the biggest star India had ever seen, but the gentle, friendly, neighbourhood uncle who has always been around. Kaun Banega Crorepati earned him new fans. And old fans fell in love with him all over again.

“Even as an anchor of a show, he is not just asking questions... He is performing. Just watch him minutely — how he pauses, how subtly he gives a hint to the contestant,” said Prakash Mehra in an interview while KBC was still on air. “He also helps the contestants win some money, however small. He gives himself so completely even to this show. That is the secret of his longevity — his sincerity,” according to Mehra.

To quote Ramesh Sippy: ‘‘How gracefully he has matured. Like vintage wine, totally positively.” They should know: they are among the few who made movies that made Amitabh Bachchan. But the country’s renewed interest in the superstar can be explained best by the line on the invitation card to his birthday that fell on October 11: ‘‘In life, as in cricket, there’s always a second innings.’’ And how well he’s playing it.

Kerala Diary II

2005-11-21T01:07:00.000-08:00

Missing the kiss

My latest trip to Kerala began with a piece of advice coming from a stranger. ‘‘Don’t miss the kiss, so kiss the miss,’’ someone had written on the lavatory door of Allepey Express. It takes patience to write a grafiti like this: usually they’re short and obscene. I could almost picture the guy who wrote it - someone in his late teens or early 20’s, perhaps an engineering student, a quiet, shy boy who could get only as far as a kiss. Or was it the handiwork of a female? Unlikely. They don’t scribble such things on walls. Or do they? The advice kept dancing in my mind as I walked back to my berth. The kiss I didn’t know, but I certainly didn’t want to miss the early morning landscapes of Kerala. So I went to sleep.

Red and white

Kochi - the city, that is - lacks the geographical character of Kerala. The roads, flat and wide, lined by plush buildings and shopping complexes. And there is life on the roads: it is the commercial capital of Kerala, after all. Sometimes you see another kind of life: there are people who are perenially unhappy - except when their comrades are in power - and always want to take to the streets. And these days they are a common sight in Kerala: two women walking in the front, holding a banner, and following them some hundred other women and men, shouting slogans. They’re usually a peaceful and disciplined lot, but other than adding (red) colour to the streets, what do these processions achieve at the end of the day. Yes, the red does complement the shades of white that people prefer to wear. Missing the boat Kochi has a small Venice tucked away - in the form of the 14 islands that dot its shores. The real Venice of the East, though, is a little to its south - Alleppey or Alappuzha, which is famous for boat races. And what a life people in these islands lead. Instead of bus-shelters they have boat-shelters, and it’s not the nine ‘o’ clock bus or train, but the nine ‘o’ clock steamer. The steamers ply at regular intervals throughout the day - the last one is available at about 9 pm. In the city, you can always take an autorickshaw or a taxi if you’ve missed the bus. What if you miss the last boat? You can always wake up the good old boatman. But when you can see little other than the frighteningly black waters and hear little other than the splashes, such a ride cannot be for the weak hearted.

Fishing in history

It’s only when you drive towards the old city that the real character of Kochi starts unfolding. That’s where they all came - the Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese and the Dutch. Somehow, you can feel their invisible presence. In any case, they’ve all left their legacies behind. The Chinese fishing nets, for example, are still used widely in Kochi. They line the beach on Fort Kochi, overlooking various islands and passing steamers and ships. For those who have only seen breathtaking pictures of these nets, clicked during sunrise or sunset, the reality can be disappointing. The beach is filthy, and the nets look cruder than they seem to be. They have to be crude - the device is nearly a thousand years old and unaided by technology, but it works. The catch is usually passed on to the stalls that sell a large variety of sea fish. If you think the fish will be cheap just because they’ve been freshly caught, you’re wrong. But you have the choice of getting them fried and eating them right there. For fish lovers, that can be a delightful experience. Only that you have to constantly shoo off crows and cats wanting a share from your plate.

Catching a train

Whether a railway station is good or bad, you get to know only during your departure and not on arrival. When you arrive in a new place, you usually hurry out of the station and do not even notice it. It is only when you wait for the outgoing train that the station suddenly matters. And stations in Kerala are, by far, the best in the country. They are spotlessly clean: garbage bins are everywhere and sweepers are constantly at work. Vendors don’t price bottled water at their whims. And the man behind the enquiry counter is courteous and helpful. There is also a chart telling the position of your bogie from the engine. Difficult to imagine a more organised life in India.

October 2002

Sholay II, Now Showing on CNN

2005-11-21T00:58:00.000-08:00

Sholay — in the rare case you haven’t seen the film — is about a retired police officer hiring two small-time crooks to catch a notorious dacoit called Gabbar Singh. Now it’s the job of the police to catch a dacoit, why should a retired officer want to get him, that too with the help of criminals cooling their heels in jail? That’s because the retired officer, respectfully called Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) in his village, has a personal score to settle with Gabbar. In his heyday as a daring officer, he had nabbed Gabbar.

But Gabbar manages to escape, after which he wipes out Thakur’s entire family and also chops off Thakur’s both hands. Since then, his only mission in life: Get Gabbar. So he hires Viru (Dharmendra) and Jay (Amitabh Bachchan), two nice-hearted crooks who also happen to be close friends. So close that only death can part them, as testified by the famous song on the bike, Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge, todenge dum magar, tera saath na chhodenge.

The movie is still shown occasionally on TV channels. But these days CNN is showing it, 24/7. Although it is a third-rate version of the original, the storyline is the same. And there’s a striking resemblance between the characters.

George Bush, like Amitabh Bachchan, is tall. Tony Blair, like Dharmendra, is not so tall. Boy, are they good friends! The way they were praising each other during the news conference at Camp David recently, it looked as if they went home not in their respective cars but on a bike, singing Yeh dosti, hum nahi todenge... And who’s the Thakur? That’s the United States of America, whose two symbolic arms of economic might were chopped off on 9/11. And we all know who’s Gabbar Singh — the kind of stories that are in circulation about Saddam Hussein, he fits the role to the T.

In the original movie, the Thakur firmly believes that Gabbar is his catch and that the police have nothing to do with it. He can afford to ignore the police because he is a man of stature. In Sholay II too, the Thakur is determined to get his enemy, no matter what the police (read Security Council) says.

There is one area, however, in which the new version surpasses the original — dialogues. Sample this. “F*** Saddam! We are taking him out.” This is what George Bush said in March 2002, poking his head into a room where his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice happened to be discussing Iraq with a couple of senators.

But on the whole, it is — as we said — a third-rate copy of the original. To begin with, the plot is weak. We don’t even know if Gabbar was responsible for chopping off Thakur’s hands and killing many of his family members. Even the police and village elders are not convinced if Gabbar is really evil. “If he is evil, we will deal with him, you don’t poke your nose into it,” they’ve been telling the Thakur. But he brushes them aside.

This Thakur, in fact, is of strange character. He has a history of poking his nose into the affairs of other villages. If there is trouble even in the remotest of villages, he sends his henchmen from Ramgarh to restore order. And when order is restored, a few of his henchmen stay on in that village to prevent further trouble, much to the irritation of the locals.

What is more, he is not a man of principles, unlike the original Thakur. When he terrorises villagers with all those bombs and missiles, killing innocent men, women and children, he calls it an act of liberation. But when his soldiers are attacked by Gabbar’s suicide squads, he cries foul, saying: “This is terrorism!” Doesn’t he know that all is fair in love and war? People, no wonder, are sympathising with Gabbar. They’re beginning to recognise the bigger evil.

March 2003

Sunlight and Sex

2005-11-21T00:50:00.000-08:00

James Watson, the man who co-discovered DNA, whipped up a storm two years ago when he said, at a guest lecture, that dark-skinned people had a stronger sex drive. “That’s why you have Latin lovers. You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only English Patient,” the Nobel Laureate said, expounding on his theory that exposure to sunlight enhanced sex drive.

Now, sunlight is abundant in India. Does that mean Indians... tut-tut, let’s not talk about that. We Indians discuss such things only when nobody is around. But there’s one question which we cannot escape, and one wonders whether it has anything to do with Watson’s theory: why is India so unsafe for women?

According to WHO, every 54 minutes one woman is raped in our country. The Centre for Development of Women’s Studies hikes the figure to 42 rapes a day. And in most cases — 85 percent, according to a study — the rapist is known to the victims. What’s wrong with our men?

Ours is one of the few countries where women — if they are alone — don’t like to venture out after dark, because that’s when evil creatures creep out of their dens. Where else is it commonplace for a woman to be dragged into a car and raped by a bunch of men and then thrown out?

Forget darkness, daytime is no better. You will find them outside girls’ schools, women’s colleges, at bus-stops, inside the buses. They ‘pass comments’, they heckle, they whistle, they pinch bottoms, they nudge. And who are they? Ah, there are so many ways of describing them — loafers, rowdies, roadside Romeos, eve-teasers... Where else in the world do you hear these words more often, or hear them at all? ‘Roadside Romeo’ and ‘eve-teasing’ seem to be purely indigenous expressions. You don’t find them in the dictionary. You don’t find any of the Western papers using them. And ‘eve-teasing’ is so common that we don’t even capitalise the ‘E’, even though Eve is a proper noun.

Eve-teasing is such a menace that worried police commissioners set up women cops in plain clothes to nab offenders. And then there are offenders who are above the law — the VIPs and the semi-VIPs — whose misdeeds occasionally creep out of the closet into the newspaper columns and create sensation. But there are millions of other deeds that go unnoticed — deeds of men who would like to keep their wives and daughters under lock but who, the moment they step out of their homes, eye the women on the street, their secretaries or the seat next to that woman. Women, for them, are purely sex objects.

Does this have anything to do with Watson’s theory? The sunlight is abundant, but the societies are closed, so is the extra drive being channelised into activities like rape and eve-teasing? Worth researching. Should we hire Dr Watson?

February 2003

Attack on Parliament House

2005-11-21T00:44:00.000-08:00

Two things come easily in the Parliament building, once you get in, that is: good, cheap food and access to politicians.

Little surprise, then, that the place should attract so many hangers on. And in India, as we know, hanging around is an occupation in itself. So what better place for it than Parliament House, walking whose corridors makes you feel as powerful as the people who preside over it?

The hangers on blend well with the crowd. If they wear kurta-pyjama, they can look like politicians (or their chamchas). If they are clutching a file, they can be mistaken for one of the PAs of the numerous ministers. And if they are carrying note-books, they can be mistaken for journalists. (Some of them actually take pains to become journalists, working for newspapers that exist only on paper. But they make it a point to sit next to the politician addressing a news conference: the idea is to be seen sitting next to the politician on television, which establishes their 'proximity' to him).

But there is one thing, if you look carefully, that distinguishes them: they always keep to themselves. Just as you will keep to yourself if you are gatecrashing a wedding. The bride's side takes you to be a member of the groom's party; and the groom's side thinks you are a member of the bride's family. You keep them guessing, have a good time and scoot. During the five years that I did Parliament reporting, I became familiar with at least a dozen such faces. I could never get talking to them. Their names and occupations remained a mystery. But they were all over the place-in the canteen, in the corridors, in the library and, at times, even at press conferences (but never in the press galleries of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha because entry there is strictly controlled).

So who are they? They could be anyone - those who get a kick by rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, wheeler-dealers, racketeers, aspiring politcians, or those who want to get something done. But then, they could be terrorists too, familiarising themselves with the building before they struck. Even the five terrorists who stormed Parliament House on December 13 were familiar with the complex. They were obviously briefed by someone who had been there before.

That brings us to the question: how do such people get in? That's not difficult. If you even remotely know any minister, MP, or a member of their staff, it is fairly easy to get a pass made. The pass is valid only for an hour, but once you are in, no one cares. The first time I got into Parliament was without a pass: a friend in a television channel got me in as his lightman or something like that. More recently, I got in with my mobile phone on several occasions. So did many others, especially women reporters. That's because the security staff get friendly over the weeks and months you cover a session and often don't check you. They can tell from your face that you are harmless. But that's hardly a guarantee.

Most of the frisking takes place only when you walk into Parliament House. First, when you enter the reception. Second, when you leave the reception for the main building, and finally, when you enter the main building. But if you come in a car bearing a Parliament sticker (a new one is issued every session), you can drive straight into the complex, skipping the first two levels of frisking. And if I am a killer, I don't need to go through the third level of frisking. I can simply park my car, walk up to the main entrance of the circular building (gate no. 1) with a gun in my pocket and wait for the VIP I want to shoot. Sooner or later the person will show up.

Alternatively, I can ram an RDX-laden car into the entrance immediately after an adjournment and cause a catastrophe. Sheer providence that such a thing did not happen on December 13. Things will obviously change now. The point is, December 13 could have been prevented since intelligence reports had warned the government of a possible attack. Security (and security checks) in India have always been more about fuss and less about common sense. They frisk a human being, but do not check a car just because it bears a Parliament sticker, no matter how many kilos of RDX it might carry! This is just one lapse. There are many others.

In the West it is the reverse: more of common sense and less of fuss. Who could be more protected than the President of the United States? But when Bill Clinton, in March last year, addressed a joint news conference with Atal Behari Vajpayee at the Hyderabad House in Delhi, not a single Secret Service agent was in sight in the compound. That does not mean they were not there: it's just that they were doing their job without any fuss.

December 2001

Kerala Diary I

2005-11-21T00:41:00.000-08:00

Waiting for the monsoon

If the monsoon is romantic, in Kerala it is doubly so. The green gets greener, and the clean looks cleaner. It would be a sin not to sit in the balcony and watch the coconut trees take a shower. Ever since my affair with Kerala began two years ago, I have only encountered off-seasonal rains, which come and go without notice. So in the second week of June, I took off for Attingal — a rather laidback town between Kollam (Quilon) and Trivandrum — hoping to catch the first showers. Alas, I only got drenched in sweat, day after day, with no sign of the clouds. The clouds finally appeared on the day I was leaving, and just an hour before I was to take the Chennai Express, it began pouring heavily. I gave up every hope of making it to the station but somehow I did, just in time. When I was about to climb the bogey, a man at the door signalled me to wait. I turned back to find a tiny, old man approaching, holding a white cloth over his head. He was K Karunakaran, the former chief minister, who is now past 80 but remains politically as agile — if not more — as he was 20 years ago. He hopped in. I hopped in after him and the train pulled out. Nature had poured water over my plans to court the monsoon.

Marble war

On a cloudy afternoon or a breezy evening, nothing can be more pleasurable than driving on the national highway to Trivandrum. You tear through the greenery, without getting intimidated by the lorries and the buses, whose drivers are pretty considerate towards fellow motorists. These days, the highway is lined on either side by yellow hoardings. They carry a large picture of a sumo wrestler and below it, a text in Malayalam. Some of these hoardings, however, carry the picture of WWF wrestler Hulk Hogan. I asked my friend what these yellow hoardings were advertising. “Marble,” he replied, “but they are two different companies. One of them put up the pictures of the sumo wrestler, then the rival company came up with Hulk Hogan.” The market in Kerala seems to be waking up to competition.

Those were the days

One thing that strikes you about Kerala is the unassuming character of its cities. Take Trivandrum. It lacks the pomposity of its counterparts in other states. Life is as unhurried as it must have been in the 1950s or 60s. Fast-food joints like McDonald’s, where teenagers swarm like flies on a sweetmeat in other cities, do not exist here. (Teenage girls you see only in bus-stops, standing in groups, waiting for the bus after college). The only places which seem alive are the juice shops, which sell drinks like Sharjah Chocolate Milk, and the roadside tea-stalls. Most shops shut by 8 pm, and by 9, the city is silent. The days are as laidback as well, and why not? The good, old PSUs are very much alive in Kerala, and the corporate culture has not yet crossed over from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. So the ‘Work hard, play hard’ policy doesn’t work here: most people still go to the office in the mornings, break for lunch around noon, and head home at 5. So those who think that the 21st century is maddening and who miss the India of the 50s and the 60s, Kerala is the place to be in.

Parking problem

The corporate culture might not have permeated the borders of Kerala, but the car-buying culture has. And why not, when buying one has become so easy. But then, cars are going to pose a big problem to Kerala in the coming years: where do you park them? Most roads in Kerala are so narrow that two vehicles can’t pass at a time: one has to back off to let the other pass. So if you happen to live on one such road, you can’t park your car outside your gate because it will obstruct traffic. Even if you park your vehicle inside your house, what if a visitor comes to see you, in a car? Worse, what if you throw a party for 10 people and all the guests come in their cars? Where will they park? Think, think, think.

May 2003

Down And Out in London

2005-11-21T00:29:00.000-08:00

You might have seen this happening sometime or the other. You’re buying ice-cream from the roadside, or beachside, vendor when a foreigner comes and asks for one. The vendor charges you Rs 15, but for the foreigner, hikes the price to, say, Rs 30. “Why are you doing this?” you protest. The vendor replies, “What‘s your problem?”

Yes, what’s my problem! What’s 15 rupees for the foreigner — that’s like loose change. But big money for the vendor, who doesn’t even have proper clothes to wear. But cheating is cheating, and we Indians have earned the reputation of excelling in the art. Travel writers from the West describe — in stylish prose — how people tried to extract money from them in every nook and corner of India. Fine, fine, some people do that — but only to get richer by a few hundred rupees. In the West, they can cheat you big time. Boy, you can feel miserable for the rest of your life. Here’s my story.

Soho is one place in London where you usually don’t hear the hurried clip-clop, clip-clop on the cobbled streets. People stroll about, getting drunk on the evening air. In one corner, a man in tatters plays Four Seasons on the accordion. In the next street another man plays the guitar: the guitar case is open for people to drop money. The smell of draught beer floats out of a pub, which is quickly killed by the perfume of a pretty woman passing by. You don’t know which one you like more. You move on. Suddenly, from one of the shops, floated out a voice. It was a striptease joint.

“Sir, come sir, five pounds, only five pounds!” The model-like woman beckoning us kept closing and opening her palm to indicate the amount — five pounds! I wasn’t really impressed, but I was curious — such things don’t happen openly in India. So why not check it out? I asked my Sudanese friend who was accompanying me. He didn’t mind, but he had no money. “Don’t worry,” I said, and we stepped into the joint.

I immediately noticed a printout at the reception: It is compulsory for customers to buy one drink each. “How much is the drink?” I asked the model-like woman. “Minimum four pounds, sir.” I did a quick mental calculation. Entry for two = 10 pounds. Drinks for two = eight pounds. Total 18 pounds. No problem. But to be sure, I asked the woman: “Are you sure there are no other charges, I mean hidden charges?” “Not at all, sir. Have a good time.”

We walked down a dark stairway, into a dimly-lit room in the basement. There was on sign of any striptease. But many of the tables were occupied — as if the show was about to begin. We took a table. A woman came over and we ordered drinks. She returned with two tiny glasses of beer and said, “The show will begin in 10 minutes. Have a great time.” Pleased, we settled down.

But we barely had taken a sip when she returned again, with the bill. I opened the folder. For a moment I thought they had added an extra zero by mistake. But I was mistaken. “That’s the hostess charge,” the woman said. Her tone had changed. “But we don’t have 100 pounds. And we were told...” I tried to protest. But it was too late.

“Gentlemen,” she thundered, “this is a licensed club. You have to pay the hostess charges. If you don’t, we will have to call the police.” The threat was very assuring. I told her I did not have the money, and that she was free to call the police. “Please show us your wallets!” she commanded. We did so. Mine had two 20-pound notes peeping out. My friend’s showed none. “There, can I have that?” In less than a second my money was in her hand. “Now, please come and see the manager,” she commanded again.

We followed her meekly. The manager was a 40-something woman who must have never smiled in her life. “Gentlemen, this is a serious offence! Do you know we can call the police?!” She asked us to show our wallets again. There was nothing to show. She asked us to leave. On the way out, I met the model-like woman at the reception. She looked away. It was a relief to be on the street again. Soho was getting livelier. But we had no money. We walked back to the hotel in silence. The rest of my days in London were spent thinking what all I could’ve done with those 50 pounds.

October 2002

An Autumn in London

2005-11-21T00:23:00.000-08:00

After spending 10 hours sitting cramped, in the care of insensitive air hostesses who behave like housewives sick of their chores (it wasn’t Air India), it’s quite a relief to see London spread out below, lit like an Indian town on Diwali night.

As the plane touches down, the man in the next seat discreetly takes out a rexine folder from his pocket and opens it to look at a picture of Lord Venkateswara (he had done the same while taking off). With the blessings of the Lord, we step into London.

I am carrying only a handbag, but tonnes of mental baggage: is it going to be as great as I’ve heard it to be — I keep asking myself during the hour-long drive to the hotel. I’ll find that out soon. Meanwhile, I badly need a lighter. Mine was confiscated by a Jat constable at the Delhi airport. And here, the hotel is a no-smoking one, and the staff doesn’t smoke too, but they give directions where I could find one.

Thus begins my first encounter with a famous yet totally unknown city, late in the night, in search of a lighter. I walk on the cobbled streets, against a crisp, chilly breeze. These are the last days of autumn, and the sidewalks are carpeted with maple leaves. Mish, mash, mish, mash, comes the sound as you trample upon a heap of them — that’s usually the sound of a still night in London.

Finally I find a shop — Hart The Grocer. Having bought whatever I wanted to, I am suddenly faced with a problem: will I find my way back? Worse, what if I get mugged? As I walk out of the store, a bearded man (he could’ve been a Charles Dickens character) calls out to me. He says something, which goes above my head, but I presume he’s asking for directions and tell him: ‘‘I’m new to this place.’’ ‘‘No man, you got a pound to spare? Am hungry, you see,’’ he says. Beggar or a bully? I say sorry and walk off. On the way, I walk past people walking in groups, talking and laughing loudly. Potential muggers? I get nervous and quicken my pace. The hotel isn’t very far.

The next day is Sunday. I am up at six. Joggers and dog-walkers are up too. I wander near my hotel for a while before walking into a shop, run by a Gujarati, to buy the Sunday papers. I scratch my head which paper to buy — I want to buy them all. I settle for ones you don’t get back home — The Scotland on Sunday and The Irish Independent. The news isn’t good — there’s been a bombing at Bali.

But the weather is great. It’s sunny and time to see London. I randomly choose a destination: Buckingham Palace. My hotel is near Russell Square, in the heart of London, from where I take the tube to Victoria station. Taking the underground train is the fastest — and the cheapest — way of getting around London. The underground here is the oldest in the world, and also the largest: it takes three million people around the city every day.

But very often, your legs take you around faster from one place to another. London is the place to walk. Everybody walks. I walk too, from the Victoria Station, finding my way to the Buckingham Palace. I follow groups of tourists — they ought to be going there too. And soon I am at the gates of the 18th century Palace — the home to the Royal Family. Had I not known this was the Palace, I wouldn’t have stopped to look at it — that’s the beauty of London. The past and the present blend so well that you can’t say what is what. Everything is charming, in a very old fashioned way.

In front of the Palace is the Victoria Memorial. The queen is perched on her throne, looking at the city. She looks as if somebody froze her into marble while she was still ruling most of the world. I take pictures and walk away, under her gaze, into St James Park. Here, ducks swim in the lake. Pelicans come to say hello to you. And squirrels eat out of your hand.

I walk out of the Park, on to the Great George Street, and reach Parliament Square. It is 1.45 pm. The Big Ben chimes (it chimes every 15 minutes). The tower overlooks the Thames. On the other side of the river is the London eye, the giant wheel that offers you spectacular views of the city during a 40-minute ride. I take a walk along the river, on the Victoria Embankment. I pass Cleopatra's Needle — the Egyptian obelisk which, 3500 years ago, stood at the Sun Temple at Heliopolis.

My next destination is Trafalgar Square — again, walking distance. The fountains you see here were remodelled in 1939 by Edwin Lutyens, the man who designed New Delhi. Then, for a while, I roam around Picadilly Circus and Soho — the cultural centres of London. You can walk here for hours and hours, passing by fashionable shops, fashionable people, theatres, open air restaurants, pubs. Bombay Dreams is still running here, and so is ABBA.

Londoners love to drink (but they don’t like to get drunk) and Soho is the place to drink. I get into a pub — just to get the feel of being a Londoner — and ask for a pint of Guinness, the dark bitter beer said to be high in iron content. It costs me 2.70 pounds — almost Rs 200.

The sun is about to set when I step onto Fleet Street where all newspaper offices were located once. Today, thanks to technology, they’ve all moved out to bigger places. Only Reuters remains, but its journalists have moved out too, to Gray‘s Inn Road, into a building which was once the Times office and where Graham Greene started off as a sub-editor. Hidden in a lane next to the Reuters building is the 500-year-old St Bride’s Church — also known as the journalists church. I tip-toe in: there is a musical performance on. I notice inscriptions in memory of departed people — all past editors, news editors, correspondents, publishers...

The Fleet Street ends with the majestic St Paul’s cathedral. It was built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1698, to replace the much larger original destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666. Londoners still haven’t got over the fire. Most buildings have smoke-detectors, which are tested on a regular basis. So, all along the sidewalks, you find smokers puffing away outside their offices.

It’s getting dark and I return to Russell Square. I am tired, but it’s too early to get back to the hotel. So I do what a Londoner does every evening — go to the pub. It’s a traditional English pub where I am sitting. The furniture is wooden and vintage posters adorn its walls. In another few minutes, Arsenal will play Auxerre in the championship league. Armed with their pints, the people in the pub are ready for action. Most of them seem to be supporters of Arsenal, but goalkeeper David Seaman lets them down.

When I leave the pub it is drizzling. I get a little wet but feel refreshed. After a hot shower in the hotel, I watch television. The ads are already about what to buy this Christmas. Somewhere in between, I fall asleep and miss the interview of my favourite writer, the late Evelyn Waugh, recorded in the 1960’s, which BBC was to show later in the night.

October 2002

Pancham's Magic Lives On

2005-11-21T00:08:00.000-08:00

Music director Sachin Dev Burman, when he went for his early morning walks, often overheard people say, ‘‘Look, there goes S D Burman.’’ But one day, sometime in the late sixties, he overheard people say, ‘‘Look, there goes R D Burman's father.’’ That’s when Rahul Dev Burman arrived: he was no longer another celebrity son trying his hand at his father’s profession.

1994 marked the second arrival of R D — or Pancham, as his illustrious father had nicknamed him — with the tremendous success of the music of 1942 — A Love Story. But by then, Pancham was dead, having succumbed to a heart attack a few months before the music of the film was released. He was only 54.

Between the two arrivals stands a nearly 30-year-long career which had its ups and downs but which was uniformly rich and productive. The lean phase, which came after 1985, was not because Pancham was losing his touch, but because music had become loud and vulgar. The music directors of the day — even the big names — made composing look as easy as frying pakodas. There was no place for creative people like Pancham. Even his friends, like Dev Anand, deserted him. Only a few, like Ramesh Behl, Nasir Hussain and, of course, Gulzar, did not move to greener pastures. Because they knew what looked green was only a wild, seasonal growth.

Good times returned with 1942 — A Love Story, but it was too late. Posthumously, however, R D Burman got an adulation he would have envied in his lifetime. In his heydays, he was the most happening composer who brought energy into Hindi film music by experimenting with sounds and by fusing Indian tunes with Western instruments (and vice versa). But after his death, he became a genius, an idol, a role model. He enjoyed a fresh spell of success — the market was splashed with his music, people began analysing his style, papers paid periodic tributes, and the remix chaps began working overtime.

Even nine years later, the spell continues. What makes Pancham tick? The freshness in his tunes. Can you imagine a song like Chura liya hai tumne (Yaadon Ki Baaraat) going stale? On the contrary, its popularity seems to have only increased over the years. You are unlikely to call it an ‘old song’, even though it was recorded more than 25 years ago. This is the case with most R D numbers. Mehbooba, mehbooba (Sholay), Dil dena khel hai and Hoga tumse pyaara kaun (Zamaane Ko Dikhana Hai) and Jahaan teri yeh nazar hai (Kaalia) still get people to the dance floor in discos. And how can one forget Dum maro dum (Hare Rama Hare Krishna)!

R D brought out the best in his singers. Mukesh sang many memorable songs in his lifetime, but there’s something refreshingly different about Ek din bik jayega (Dharam Karam). Mohammed Rafi won the National Award for Kya hua tera waada (Hum Kisise Kum Nahin). And Hemant Kumar, who owed his Bollywood career to Sachinda, sang only one song for R D, which was perhaps his last for a Hindi movie, Aaja mere pyaar aaja (Heeralal Pannalal). You got to listen to the song to believe how beautifully R D used Hemant Kumar’s voice. Kishore Kumar and R D, of course, were made for each other. Together, they boosted the popularity of so many heroes — Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Rishi Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor... Many second generation singers, like Shailendra Singh, Suresh Wadkar, Amit Kumar and S P Balasubrahmanyam owe some of their best songs to Pancham.

A couple of years back, SPB held a full-fledged show in Hyderabad to pay tribute to R D Burman. It was called Yeh Shaam Mastaani. About the female singers, you can’t say much because R D mostly used Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle. And, like his father, he knew who was good at what, and he used them accordingly. Asha, who became his wife, sung the songs that were fun and racy, while Lata sang the serious and the not-so-serious ones (remember her songs in Ghar, like Tere bina jiya jaye na?).

R D’s critics have often accused him of lifting Western tunes. True, a few songs have been straight lifts, like Meri jaan meri jaan (Do Chor), which was a copy of Cliff Richard’s Fall in love. But then, which music director doesn’t lift tunes? And in R D’s case, the Western number usually was only an inspiration — the final product was 100 percent Indian. After all, it’s one thing to import a Japanese machine, but quite another to go to Japan, watch the working of the machine and manufacture the same in India.

And R D always silenced his critics by giving soulful classical numbers from time to time, such as Beeti na beetaye raina from Parichay. In fact, his debut composition was a classical one, Ghar aaja ghir aye (Chhote Nawaab, 1961). It would be wrong to say that Chhote Nawaab was his debut movie. While assisting his father, he scored the tunes of many hummable songs, including Sar jo tera chakraye (Pyaasa) and Yeh dil na hota bechaaraa (Jewel Thief). Not many know that R D also doubled up as the mouth organ player in his father’s orchestra. Not many also know that he played the mouth organ in Dosti, a 1960’s movie that established Laxmikant-Pyarelal as big time Bollywood music directors. R D, after all, was their friend because Laxmikant and Pyarelal were also once assistants to S D Burman.

Years later, R D’s ego suffered a major jolt when Subhash Ghai announced to sign him up for Ram Lakhan but dropped him unceremoniously to return to his old favourites, Laxmikant Pyarelal. Soon after, R D had a heart attack. As it is, he was going through the lean patch. He recuperated and returned to work. But there wasn’t much work. That’s when Gulshan Kumar decided to bring out an album with him. One of its songs was Aaja meri jaan. The original was sung was R D himself in Bengali, and he wanted S P Balasubrahmanyam to sing the Hindi version. “I told him, it’s a very difficult song, I can’t sing it. He told me, ‘You bloody fellow, why do you think I called you all the way from Madras’,” SPB recalled during his Hyderabad show. So Balu — as R D called SPB — sang the song.

Unfortunately, the album never came out but Gulshan Kumar incorporated this song in the movie he made to launch his brother Kishen Kumar as a hero, Aaja Meri Jaan. R D’s self-respect took further beating. The only saving grace during that period was Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda, whose music, composed by R D, became quite a hit (Tumse milke by Suresh Wadkar and Asha Bhonsle). Then he recorded 1942 — A Love Story. “When we couldn’t get a song right, he used to abuse us, but once we got it right, he became so affectionate,” recalled Kumar Sanu, who sang all the songs for the movie, in an interview. His last movie was Priyadarshan’s Gardish. But 1942 — A Love Story was released later, and it became Pancham’s swansong. Its melodious songs showed that he had a lot of music left in him. That’s why we still mourn his death.