Shoot First, Mumble Later

The best books on Bombay

2012-01-29T09:04:00.004+05:30

Back in the late 1980s, I'd be stumped when asked to recommend one book that would provide an insight into Bombay's present and past. I usually settled for Gillian Tindall's City of Gold, a competent though workmanlike history. In the mid-1990s, Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra produced their breakthrough volume, Bombay: The Cities Within, and recommendations became easier. The quintessential Bombay book of the noughties for most people was Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, but I preferred to gift Arun Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda Poems.

Now Katherine Boo has written a must-read book about the city, and I use the phrase 'must-read' very sparingly. The book is titled Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and you can read my review of it in Caravan magazine here.

Manufacturing controversy, courtesy Hindustan Times

2012-01-28T07:18:00.005+05:30

I'm involved with The Skoda Prize Show, currently on view at the Lalit Kala Akademi. One of the three artists nominated this year, Bangalore's Navin Thomas, has a work on display that uses live pigeons. They sit in a room that's sixteen feet by twelve feet, and are being fed bird food bought from Khan Market. The room's walls are made from cotton mesh that allows fresh air in. The artwork involves sound, white noise emitted by transistors inside the room. At the opening, a few viewers were disturbed by the use of live animals, and the uncomfortably high sound level. Openings are noisy affairs. We have four other pieces in the show which use sound, and the artists who created them wanted their work to be audible to the large number of viewers who came for the inaugural function. In order for Navin's transistors to be heard above the noise of neighbouring works, he turned the sound up higher than it had been in his solo show at Bangalore's GallerySKE, which I saw a year and a half ago.

Once the opening was over, we put all videos on headphones, because henceforth there would rarely be more than two or three people wanting to see a given video at the same time. Navin then turned the volume inside the bird room down to a level perfectly comfortable to human ears.

Even during the two and a half hours of the opening, however, there was no indication whatsoever that the pigeons were in any discomfort. The door to the room was open for minutes on end, and none of the pigeons bothered to hop out. They sat on Navin's copper-wire aerials or pecked at their Khan Market food. Many viewers, though, were less interested in observing the pigeons' behaviour than to drawing conclusions based on anthropocentric assumptions.

One of these, clearly, was Isha Manchanda of Hindustan Times. She's published a piece in today's paper headlined 'Artiste in soup for confining pigeons'. The truth is that Navin Thomas (who is an 'artist' not an 'artiste') is not in any soup, but Isha Manchanda clearly wants him to be in one. I spoke to her and it was evident she's an extremist who will not listen to reason: the animal-rights equivalent of those wanting to persecute Salman Rushdie and M F Husain.

Manchanda has interviewed Navin, and four (count 'em) animal rights activists. None of these activists has seen the way the birds are actually exhibited, but that has never stopped ideologues from drawing conclusions. There is one point made in the article that might have got the Skoda Prize Show in a spot of bother. This is the assertion by members of the Animal Welfare Board that permission from the Board was required before we could exhibit Navin's birds. Manchanda, however, has substituted a quote from a person who knows nothing about the show for basic research. I just looked at the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, and scrutinised with care the section which deals with exhibition of animals. The relevant paragraph (Chapter V, Clause 21) states: “Exhibit” and “train” defined : In this Chapter, " exhibit" means exhibit or any entertainment to which the public are admitted through sale of tickets, and "train" means train for the purpose of any such exhibition, and the expressions "exhibitor" and "trainer" have respectively the corresponding meanings."

The Skoda Prize Show does not fall into the category of 'exhibit' as defined by the Act. There are no tickets sold, it is not a show mounted for profit in the manner of, say, a circus. It is free to view in a public gallery. Ergo we did not and do not need any permission from the Animal Welfare Board.

Hopefully, this manufactured controversy will end right here, viewers will continue to appreciate the many excellent works on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, and the Hindustan Times will pull up its staff for bad research and dreadful language skills (an 'artiste' is , 'A skilled public performer or entertainer, especially a singer or dancer' ).

My Business Standard article on the India Art Fair

2012-01-27T22:39:00.004+05:30

For some reason I agreed to write a piece on the India Art Fair right in the middle of a frenzied week of getting the Skoda Prize show ready at the Lalit Kala Akademi, and trying to catch a bunch of interesting exhibitions, talks and performances. The article is on the Business Standard website already, and I've taken the opportunity to boast yet again about my prescience in predicting the crash and its medium term consequences for the Indian art market.

The Otolith group's Nervus Rerum

2012-01-07T10:19:00.011+05:30

The clock doesn't strike.
I was reminded of this stage direction from an Ionesco play while listening to Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar speak about their film Nervus Rerum. The 32 minute film, set in Jenin refugee camp, was screened at Jnanapravaha yesterday, and was followed by a discussion between the duo, who call themselves the Otolith Group, and the documentary film-maker Anand Patwardhan, whose work Otolith admire, but who, if his questioning last evening is any indication, does not reciprocate with equal ardour.
Otolith based the Jenin film on the idea, not startlingly original but powerful nonetheless, that even sympathetic representations of the Palestinian struggle can do as much harm as good by contributing to a glut of images which obscures rather than reveals. Instead of attempting a transparent flow of information, then, they sought a kind of opacity, a refusal to explain. They chose to "turn their back on power" rather than "speak truth to power".
It's a well-constructed film: the camera, a Steadicam, travels the lanes of Jenin, encountering many dead-ends, and wanders into small homes to find people looking wistfully out of windows. Texts from Jean Genet and Fernando Pessoa, voiced by Anjalika Sagar, overlay the shots, rarely connecting with the footage in a direct fashion. The film succeeds in making carefully plotted shots look improvisatory. What gives it away is not only our suspicion that a film-making crew couldn't just barge into peoples' homes without permission, but the fact that a couple of those looking wistfully out of windows are very bad, self-conscious actors. While the images do not communicate information in the fashion of television programmes, there's a coherence to them which crystalises into a fairly straight-forward message: Jenin is a prison; there's little to do, and few jobs to be had.
It's darned difficult to create opaque images: meaning has a propensity to shine through. It is even more difficult to create images that contrast in such a manner with the history of previous image-making that they stimulate viewers to reflect upon that history. It's like trying to bring to life a stage direction saying, The clock does not strike. According to the Tate museum's website, Nervus Rerum, "powerfully contributes to The Otolith Group's research into the conditions under which histories become visible." I believe it succeeds only in producing a new representation of Jenin that is not all that different from a number of previous representations of contested sites crafted by experimental film-makers. The film's metacritical impulse can only be communicated by Otolith members themselves, in conversations after the film.

Vodafone and Airtel: final frontier

2012-01-05T09:47:00.003+05:30

Imagine this: you have a complaint and approach a judge. A flunky tells you there's no way to meet the judge, and there’s nothing that can be done about your complaint. You approach a higher bench. The same flunky appears, states once more you can’t see any judge, and refuses to answer questions related to your complaint. Sounds a bit Kafkaesque, right?

Now let’s say the flunky is working for precisely the company that you want to complain against. The system is not merely broken, but perverse.

Well, that’s exactly how Vodafone’s customer care operates. The story so far: Vodafone wrongly took 1000 rupees from me (background here). I discovered its customer care line does not allow individuals to make complaints or to talk directly to a human being.

After failing with the first rank of customer care (details here), I wrote to the Nodal office. I received a pro forma response from Parmesh Giri ‘on behalf of the Nodal officer’:

We wish to reiterate that since Rs.1000 is not a talk time recharge offer but an integrated voice and data offer which has been activated on 27/11/11 hence we are unable to credit the amount of Rs.907 in your account.

Mr. Shahane, we further confirm that the details about offers/talk time are being updated on the Vodafone website however we regret to inform that we are unable to display the details on other bank websites.

Mr. Shahane, we request you to kindly refer the below mentioned link of the website for details recharge voucher for your reference:

https://shop.vodafone.in/shop/rechargeOnline.jsp?cid=mum

Happy to help,

I pointed out the website link he had provided said nothing about ATM recharges, only about online recharges. Also, Vodafone didn’t need to display any details on bank websites, it could just send a mass email to customers saying the 1000 rupee recharge would now come bundled with a 3G data plan. I got no response.

So I wrote to the Appellate authority. The same Parmesh Giri responded with exactly the same message on behalf of the ‘Appellate authority’. Vodafone are so brazen, they don’t even pretend to separate their ‘nodal’ and ‘appellate’ departments.

So I’ve reached the end of the line with Vodafone. I thought of going to the consumer court, but the requirements to lodge a complaint are formidable. Unless one is cheated out of many thousands of rupees, it makes no sense. So Vodafone can keep tricking consumers with impunity.

Meanwhile, Airtel has proven equally bad in its own right. Not only have a couple of friends reported similar episodes of being cheated, a couple of weeks ago all Airtel lines went down in Bombay, and the company failed to put even a basic ticker on its website mentioning the problem and apologising for the inconvenience. I’m going to try Tata DoCoMo; maybe the Parsi – Japanese combination has resulted in minimum ethical standards being maintained.

Fifty years of the Goa annexation

2011-12-18T09:34:00.004+05:30

Fifty years ago, five centuries of Portuguese dominion in Goa was brought to an end by an Indian invasion, at the cost of less than sixty lives, divided more or less equally between Indian and Portuguese forces. My uncle (father's elder brother) was a young air force pilot at the time, and, years later, he told me of his role in the operation.
He had flown a transport to Goa to evacuate Indian soldiers after the battle. News from the war zone was sketchy; there were reports the airport had been shelled. From the sky, the airstrip looked badly cratered, except for the first third of it, which appeared normal. My uncle aimed for the verge of the airstrip and hit the emergency brakes as soon as the aircraft's wheels touched the ground. He managed to get the machine to stop before the battle-scarred zone.
My memory isn't perfect at this point, but if I recall right, my uncle said there was a problem getting the plane to restart because of the emergency procedure he'd employed. It took him nearly as long to get to the building where armymen were waiting, as it had to fly from Bombay to Panjim. The victorious Indian soldiers appeared to have emptied Goa's liquor stores. Each soldier was carrying crates of rum, whiskey and feni. Once the men and booze were on board, the plane took off from a state that was now part of India.
The emergency brakes had been unnecessary. What had appeared to be damage from artillery shells was just asphalt patch-ups on a concrete runway.
When I land in Goa these days, I notice they still use asphalt to repair the runway, and the strip still looks battle-scarred when viewed from the air.

The army's special powers and Lord Curzon

2011-12-10T16:14:00.004+05:30

Yesterday, on the eve of Human Rights Day, Clark House (an arts initiative run by Zasha Colah and Thakur Sumesh Sharma), Tushar Joag and Sharmila Samant put together a programme of screenings and discussions titled Against AFSPA at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Apart from a demand for the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, it was an act of solidarity with Irom Sharmila, who has been on a fast for over a decade in protest again the repression of Manipuri citizens by the Indian army and paramilitaries. She has been held captive for attempted suicide and force-fed for all these years.
I was surprised that an event so harshly critical of Indian state policy was taking place inside a government-run institution. Maybe the NGMA Director Rajeev Lochan's ultra-bureaucratic exterior conceals a radical, subversive agenda.
The proceedings were chaotic, bearing only a passing resemblance to the schedule provided on the invite. But they did a good job of demonstrating how insanely cruel the Indian government has been and continues to be to the people of Manipur. For over fifty years, an emergency law has been in place permitting soldiers to arrest, rape and kill with impunity. Mihir Desai, a participant in a panel discussion about AFSPA, and the only person on stage who spoke cogently, pointed out that any prosecution of soldiers needed central government sanction; and that, from over 500 cases forwarded to Delhi for consideration (I forget the exact number Desai mentioned, I think it was 581), not a single trial has been green-lighted.

I thought of Lord Curzon who, at the end of the nineteenth century, had a series of run-ins with the British army. Soon after he arrived in India as Viceroy, he heard that soldiers from the West Kent Regiment had gang-raped a Burmese woman. The perpetrators had gone unpunished after witnesses were threatened, and the matter covered up. Curzon had the culprits dismissed from the army and the entire regiment transferred to Aden (a punishment posting in those days) and denied leave or benefits for two whole years.
In 1900, after a private in the Royal Scots Fusiliers battered to death a 'punkah-coolie' (a man who operated cloth fans), Curzon wrote: "That such outrages should occur in the first place in a country under British rule; and then that everybody, commanding officers, officials, juries, departments should conspire to screen the guilty is, in my judgment, a black and permanent blot on the British name. I mean, so far as one man can do it, to efface the stain while I am here.”
In 1902, three troopers of the 9th Lancers Regiment (a cavalry outfit packed with members of the British upper class), just arrived in Sialkot, beat a cook named Atu so badly that he died after nine days of agony. Curzon lashed out at the biased investigation which, he wrote, "Consists of two Captains and a subaltern, not one of whom so far as I can make out, understands a word of Hindustani. Their idea of taking evidence and holding an inquiry consists in examining four witnesses, all natives. They never think of sending for the doctor or for a non-commissioned soldier or for the inspector of police. In fact they make not the slightest effort to arrive at the truth... I will not be a party to any of the scandalous hushing up of bad cases of which there is too much in this country, or to the theory that a white man may kick or batter a black man to death with impunity because he is only a 'd- d nigger'.”

Some day we might get a leader in Delhi who has the courage and moral conviction to hold soldiers responsible for a few of the innumerable atrocities perpetrated in Kashmir and the North-East over the past decades. Right now, we can't even provide the millions of citizens living under AFSPA as much protection from the army's cruel excesses as the British colonial system did.

Ashura musings

2011-12-06T23:38:00.005+05:30

In categorising the world's major civilisations, Samuel Huntington divided Christian Europe into Western Civilisation and the Orthodox World, but took the every nation from Afghanistan-Pakistan to Tunisia-Morocco to be part of a single entity called the Muslim World. Yet, the clash between Shias and Sunnis is the longest continuously running conflict in the world. It simmers here, boils over there, but there have been no successful moves towards ecumenism in the region, and The Arab Spring has now exposed, on a geopolitical scale, this fault line running through the Middle East. Those living in West Asia have recognised the amplified threat, but the rest of the world has failed to do so, partly because we tend to classify the region exactly as Samuel Huntington did.
The two countries at the fore of crisis are Bahrain and Syria. Bahrain is a Shia majority country ruled by Sunnis, and Syria a Sunni majority country ruled primarily by Shias (Alawis to be exact, members of a heterodox sect who have drawn closer to conventional Shia beliefs in recent decades).
Let's stick with Syria, because it is turning dangerously unstable. Syria's ruling political group is the Ba'ath Party, which espouses a secular, pan-Arabist ideology. The other nation to have been ruled by a faction of the Ba'ath Party was Iraq. Iraq was the mirror image of Syria: a Shia majority nation controlled by a Sunni Arab dictatorship. Since they espoused the same beliefs, it is hardly surprising that Saddam Hussein and Hafez al Assad hated each others' guts.
Seen from today's foreshortened perspective, pan-Arabism seems to have been a convenient way to paper over the Shia-Sunni dispute. When Saddam Hussein successfully rallied Iraqi Shias to his cause in the war against Iran, it suggested that ethnic identity was stronger than denominational identity in the Middle East. Pan-Arabism, though, ended up being a flash in the historical pan, while the Shia-Sunni divide is as strong as ever after 1300 years, and extends well beyond the Middle East into Afghanistan and Pakistan, as recent bombings have tragically demonstrated.
The vote against Syria by the Arab League showed that political alignments now mirror sectarian ones. Iraq and Lebanon, the only two Arab nations with substantial Shia populations as well as some form of electoral democracy, refused to join 18 Sunni-ruled Arab states in condemning the violence unleashed by Bashar al Assad. Should Syria collapse into anarchy, there's a good chance it will lead to a pogrom against Alawis, and that might draw Iran, and perhaps even Iraq and Lebanon, into intervening. In such a case, Israel and Saudi Arabia would not just stand by, and if those two nations were to get involved in the conflict, the entire world would be affected.

The myth of creating consensus

2011-12-03T09:26:00.003+05:30

Every time a row erupts in Parliament, there are MPs and medipersons who accuse the government of 'failing to evolve a consensus on the issue'. Chetan Bhagat's take in today's Times of India on foreign investment in retail is typical. Titled Shopping for Consensus, the argument advanced in the article has three facets. First, that FDI in retail is a smokescreen to occlude more important issues like the Lokpal bill. Second, allowing Tesco and Walmart to open supermarkets in India is a good thing in itself. Third, that "the government, with humility, should involve everyone in Parliament to get a general policy consensus on FDI, not just for retail, but all sectors, across all industries."

In other words, talk sweetly to Prakash Karat and he will hit the Like button of WalMart's Facebook page. Bhagat ignores the simple truth that there exist in every parliament ideological divisions which cannot be bridged. Electoral democracy would be pretty useless if that wasn't the case, since we'd have a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Moreover, even when two parties have economic policies that are as similar as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, which has been the case with the Congress and BJP over the last two decades, the party in opposition will fight policies tooth and nail that it would support as head of a ruling coalition. And it will not budge despite all the discussion and consensus building in the world. This happened with the civil nuclear deal and is happening again in the present dispute. What has changed is that Parliament is growing dysfunctional, with increasingly frequent disruptions and forced adjournments.

David Ben Gurion said that for every two Jews there are three opinions. This is equally true of Indians. Doesn't it describe all communities? To a degree, yes, but I suspect that in the case of our largest neighbour, "Two Chinese, one opinion" is likelier. Evolving consensus in India is an impossible task. Nehru fought for years to get the Hindu Code Bill passed; and he couldn't manage anything close to unanimity even within his own party in that time. In recent months, the BJP has been uncooperative in introducing non-controversial, non-ideological changes, such as a nation-wide Goods and Services Tax. What's the likelihood, then, that the main opposition party will accept government policy in a matter where there are votes to gain by the bushelful?

Foreign investment, trade, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy

2011-12-01T09:43:00.007+05:30

Amitav Ghosh's blog entry for November 5 was a review of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari. The book makes out a case against foreign investment which Ghosh accepts, with a few caveats:

"I don’t for a moment doubt that Aseem and Ashish are broadly correct in their diagnoses and prognostications – yet I do think that they paint a picture that is, in some respects, too monochrome in its darkness. Take the Information Technology sector of the Indian economy for example: this is a non-polluting, knowledge-based industry; the compensation is usually fair and the working conditions are generally safe. This sector has been a godsend for hundreds of thousands of young people and it has served to decentralize economic power in India, moving it away from its traditional locations to other towns and cities. It is also a fact that the people who run this industry are on the whole much more thoughtful and socially conscious than other industrialists. I see nothing to bemoan in the success of this sector, limited though it may be: on the contrary I think it offers much cause for celebration."

It's common knowledge that the IT sector derives its revenues almost exclusively from exports, the bulk of them coming from the United States. There's been a lot of grumbling in the US about American jobs being offshored, and many politicians on the Left favour a more protectionist system. Most Congressmen and Senators, though, feel the US must remain a broadly open market if it is to be an evangelist for lower trade barriers around the globe. There will, however, be a breaking point at some stage. It is naive to believe our IT exports will be allowed to grow indefinitely even as we retain strict barriers to imports and investment. The future of Indian information technology is dependent on a continuous process of lifting trade and investment barriers within India.

This is a connection that opponents of foreign investment in retail fail to make. Aside from the benefits and impairments that follow as a direct result of Tesco and Walmart opening supermarkets in India (and there will doubtless be impairments; those who claim kirana stores will be totally unharmed should study the battle between Tesco and small retailers in Thailand), the move is a logical step in a process that offers India gains in areas unrelated to retail.

While Amitav Ghosh sees some positives in India's experience of liberalisation, Arundhati Roy is a far more strident critic of the process, and more closely allied to Shrivastava and Kothari's monochrome black palette. Back in 2006, in a talk titled Bombay in the Age of Globalisation that was part of a conference at the Tate Modern in London, the recording of which you can listen to here, I took on a passage from Roy's book The Algebra of Infinite Justice :

"In the early days of Indian liberalisation, I was convinced that it was a sell-out to neo-imperialists. Though I do not retain that belief, there are many who do. Arundhati Roy, one of the most eloquent speakers against the twin processes of liberalisation and globalisation, has written it has resulted in 'a kind of barbaric dispossession that has few parallels in world history.' She follows this up in the same essay with the statement: 'Across the world as the free market brazenly protects western markets and forces developing countries to lift their trade barriers, the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer.' Here are the statistics for the balance of trade between India and the US [PowerPoint Slide].
Trade Surplus in favour of India:
2001: 5.98 billion dollars
2002: 7.71 billion dollars
2003: 8.07 billion dollars
2004: 9.46 billion dollars
2005: 10.81 billion dollars
As you can see, India has been running a surplus, and this has grown from 5.98 billion dollars in the year 2001 to 10.81 billion dollars in 2005. A strange outcome if western markets are as protected and third world markets as open as Roy contends. But I suppose one should never let mere facts come in the way of a good theory. The book of hers I quote from was, by the way, published by Viking Penguin, which is owned by Pearson PLC, an 8 billion dollar multinational conglomerate."

Is there any country where the phrase 'do as I say, not as I do' is applicable more frequently than in India?

Vodafone: it gets worse

2011-11-30T10:02:00.003+05:30

I call Vodafone's Bombay Nodal Office about my recharge problem. A five minute wait, while a recorded message assures me my call is important. Then, a gentleman named Sushil comes on.
Me: Hello, I recharged for 1000 rupees and got only 7 rupees talktime plus a 3G data plan I don’t want.
Sushil: We have not received payment from you.
Me: But I got a message from Vodafone confirming the recharge.
Sushil: Could you check your bank account to see if any money has been deducted?
Me: OK, hold on. (I quickly sign on to my Netbanking account) Yes, 1000 rupees was deducted yesterday.
Sushil: I request you to send us a scan of the bank statement.
Me: I’ll do no such thing. I’m confirming that the money’s been deducted and I have a message saying you have received the money. I can forward that text if you want.
Sushil: It’s OK. Somebody will get in touch with you within 24 hours to solve your problem.

A few hours later I get a call from a Vodafone customer care executive. I explain the issue.
Executive: Sir, the 1000 rupee recharge comes with the 3G dataplan.
Me: But there was no information about that on the ATM screen when I recharged. I don’t want 3G and I don’t want any dataplan. I just want my talktime.
Executive: Sorry sir, but the 1000 rupee recharge comes with the data plan.
Me: I’ve recharged for years from the ATM, occasionally 1000 rupees at a time. If there was a change you should have informed customers about it. You send so many text messages otherwise, why not for this.
Executive: I’ll get back to you, sir.

He doesn’t get back. The next morning, I call the Nodal Officer’s number again. This time there’s a fifteen minute wait, after which Sushil comes on line. We have a long back and forth during which he keeps telling me I have no option but to accept the data plan. Frustrated, I ask for his senior.
Me: What’s your full name Sushil.
Sushil: Sushil Dhuriya.
Me: Put me through to your boss, Sushil Dhuriya.
Sushil: I can’t do that.
Me: The Vodafone website says there’s a Nodal Officer to whom complaints can be addressed. Her name is Zillah Vaz.
Sushil: The Nodal Officer does not deal with individual complaints.
Me: So if I want to complain that you have failed to solve my problem, there’s nobody I can talk to?
Sushil: No.

Apparently, Vodafone India plans to make money from 3G by forcing data plans down the throats of customers without their consent. I’m ready to jump to a different service provider, but I need to get my grand’s worth of talk first.

Meanwhile, some guys at the company have read my blog and are posting messages saying they want to help. I filled in the form as requested, now they want an alternative number because mine wasn't on when they called. Well, I switched it off because I attended a lecture yesterday afternoon. They obviously just tried at one time and then gave up.

The Keenan-Reuben silliness

2011-11-29T09:57:00.007+05:30

Last month, two Bombay boys, Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandes, were killed by a group of youths. It began when girls with Keenan and Reuben were sexually harassed by strangers outside a pub in Amboli. After Santos and Fernandes roughed up the abusers, the men got together a large group to exact revenge.
What seemed to me peculiar about the coverage of the sad incident was the focus on supposedly heartless bystanders. The friends of the slain boys harped on this on every interview they gave. A Mumbai Mirror article, headlined 'People watched quietly as our friends were dying', was typical of the general media response. The Times of India carried this quote from Reuben's brother Benjamin: "On the night of the attack, the street was crowded, but no one came forward to help us. People have become numb. They do not want to get involved . Perhaps they are afraid of the visits they will have to make to court and the police station; perhaps they don't care enough."
Barkha Dutt anchored a predictably obtuse discussion on NDTV, and wrote in the Hindustan Times, "Within minutes the assaulters had knives and swords out and soon the boys were lying collapsed in pools of blood, their insides ripped out as 40 bystanders stared on passively, ignoring all pleas for help. It would not be unfair to say that more than the mob it was urban apathy that killed Keenan and Reuben... the basics have broken down — the sense of community, kinship and humaneness appears to have evaporated. More brutal than the murder is the image of the onlookers who refused to help."
These statements all strike me as foolish, because only idiots would get involved in a fight involving a dozen people with knives and hockey sticks. A mob like that doesn't listen to reason. It is out to maim and kill, and will harm whoever stands in the way. Castigating urban apathy is warranted when someone's left to die at the streetside after an accident, but no such moral lesson should be drawn from the Amboli tragedy.
Why am I writing this weeks after the incident? It's because a news item in today's papers indicates what would probably have happened to anybody getting in the way of the thugs who murdered Keenan and Reuben. In this case, two teenagers fought over a girl. One of them brought in brawlers to beat up, maybe kill, his adversary. A young fruit seller named Sarfaraz Sheikh tried to stop the mob.

Sarfaraz (mugshot above) was stabbed to death. Two youths named Munish Patil and Mayur Patil, who had come out of a nearby cybercafe, also intervened, and were also stabbed and critically wounded. Maybe they had viewed a programme where panelists went on about how terrible public apathy was, and how citizens ought to intervene promptly in such matters.

Vodafone India: how bad can customer service get?

2011-11-28T08:03:00.007+05:30

Interacting with MTNL always makes my blood pressure rise. But Vodafone has proved that a privately held MNC can do a worse job of customer service than a public sector undertaking. So bad is Vodafone's service, in fact, that it has shaken me out of my slumber and got me blogging again.
First stage: I travel to Thailand. The international roaming function does not work, so I can neither make nor receive calls during my stay. I don't mind that overmuch, since it's not a work trip. A while after I return, a message arrives saying 99 rupees have been deducted from my account for International Roaming. In other words, IR gets switched on automatically when I travel abroad, though it does not work. Then I keep getting charged each month unless I deactivate a function I have no idea was ever activated. The news about the IR-related deduction arrives, as do all Vodafone messages, at 4.30 am. Maybe the company believes disturbing customers' sleep helps keep them loyal.
Last evening, I recharge my Prepaid account for a thousand rupees at the ATM. I get a message telling me my recharge has given me talk time of 7.04 rupees. A second message says my Data Pack is active. I have not applied for any Data Pack, but I presume that's what has gobbled up most of the recharge money.
This morning's 4.30 am SMS says International Roaming has been stopped because of insufficient funds in my account. Had the proper amount from my recharge been credited, I'd have lost a chunk of it because I'd forgotten to deactivate IR. Small mercies.
Once I'm fully awake, I try getting to the bottom of the Data Pack mess. Vodafone provides three Customer Care numbers: 198 and 111 can only be called from a Vodafone Mobile phone, while +91 9820098200 works from any mobile or landline. 111 is a chargeable call, and 198 is toll free. The two serve exactly the same purpose, but most customers are used to 111 from the old days, and have that number saved on their phones. Nice trick.
I call the three numbers in turn and, in each case, am provided a series of options by an electronic voice. None of the options relates to my problem. Not only is there no way to lodge a complaint, but there's also no way to get past the electronic messages to speak to an actual human being.
Here's where MTNL does better than Vodafone. 198 on MTNL is a number dedicated to complaints, and one which gives you a docket number at the end of your call. Vodafone's website states, "You can contact our Nodal Officer with the complaint docket number (the unique complaint number you get when you register your complaint at Vodafone Care) anytime from Monday to Friday, between 9:30 am and 6:00 pm." The problem is, you will never get a docket number, because Vodafone Care does not allow you to actually complain about anything.

When Vodafone was Orange / Hutch, if one didn't choose any of the nine options offered by the recorded message on the customer service number, the call would be transferred to a customer service executive. That no longer happens. India might be the call center capital of the world, but, after Vodafone bought a stake in what used to be Orange / Hutch, they've downgraded customer service functionality. And it was never very good anyway. In fact, one of my Time Out columns focused on its shortcomings. Naresh, Time Out's editor at the time, printed the piece even though the magazine was (and is) published by the Ruias, who owned Orange / Hutch and hold a large stake in Vodafone. I wrote, in that column, "I’ve concluded that customer service in India is a simulacrum. It does everything it is supposed to do except serve customers. It’s a bird which looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, but is not a duck."
Vodafone's Customer Care has refined the simulacrum further, taking it to a new level of sophistication.

Match fixing: Playing the race card

2011-11-02T10:47:00.008+05:30

Yesterday, two Pakistani cricketers, Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif, were found guilty by a London court of conspiracy to cheat, and conspiracy to accept corrupt payments. Another cricketer, Mohammad Amir, had already pleaded guilty to the charges.
Discussing the issue last night on NDTV's Left, Right & Centre, the veteran commentator Kishore Bhimani played the race card. He said (starts at 16.18 of the discussion), "Both Mark Waugh and Shane Warne, two great cricketers, they were involved in fixing a match on the 9th of September 1994. This was the Singer Cup in Colombo, you don’t have to take my word for it, this is recorded... But they were mollycoddled so much that it wasn’t even told to the ICC. There seem to be different rules for the English and Australian players, and different rules for the continental players." Earlier in the programme he named Tim May along with Warne and Waugh as one of those guilty of match-fixing. Needless to say, he did not mention a single Indian cricketer among the guilty. Bhimani was media manager during the World Cup, and, like all Indian cricket commentators, knows the side on which his bread is buttered.
What he said about Warne and Waugh, though, is slanderously inaccurate. What the two did was deplorable, but could in no way be described as 'match-fixing'. They took money from a punter and in return for opinions about fairly innocuous stuff like pitch conditions. When asked to alter their play for money, however, both immediately refused. Pakistani cricketers, in contrast, were in the fixing game wholesale. Testimony heard by the Justice Qayyum is utterly damning of Salim Malik (the person accused most frequently in sworn statements of directly offering players money). Wasim Akram and Ejaz Ahmed come off pretty badly too. Inzamam, Saqlain, Waqar, and Mushtaq Ahmed appear involved in shady stuff at least some of the time. A finger is pointed at Saeed Anwar, too, but he appears to have struggled with temptation and gone over to the clean side (represented by Aamir Sohail, Rameez Raja, Rashid Latif and Aaquib Javed).
The Indian team was as embroiled in this jiggery-pokery as the Pakistanis. One of the prime accused in our own match-fixing scandal, Ajay Jadeja, is now contracted by, wait for it, NDTV. Wonder why they didn't ask him to comment on the London verdict?
Jadeja's interview with the CBI back when we had an inquiry of our own makes for interesting reading. Evidence was presented to him that he was in regular contact with bookmakers. He brushed it off, saying he met many people and couldn't remember them all. Some of these people, though, called him dozens, even hundreds of times during matches. The CBI had cellphone records to prove it. One bookie, Uttam Chand, called Jadeja ove 150 times in the course of a single Test Match in 1999. Here's Jadeja's explanation for his frequent chats with this guy: On being asked whether he knew Uttam Chand, a bookie/ punter of Chennai, he stated that he did not know him. On being confronted with Uttam Chand's cell phone printout, which disclosed very frequent telephonic contact between both of them just before or during cricket matches, he stated that he recognised Uttam Chand's cell phone number but knew him as 'Gupta'. He did not know how Uttam Chand got his telephone number. Jadeja stated that Uttam Chand used to ring him up often and tell him that if he did not talk to him, he would run into bad luck and because of superstition, he used to return his call. On being asked whether he knew that Uttam Chand was a bookie, he stated that he had an inkling to that effect due to the nature of conversation Uttam Chand used to have with him. On being asked why he did not discontinue his association with Uttam Chand after that, he said that he could not explain this.

So Jadeja's defence is that he took hundreds of calls from a bookie (and, on rare occasions, made calls to the man himself) out of fear he might face a run of bad luck if he didn't. If you believe him, I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine, a Nigerian businessman with a Swiss bank account.

Did you check the dictionary?

2011-10-22T20:01:00.005+05:30

I just discovered there's a gallery in Gurgaon named Art Farrago. The gallery seems to focus a fair amount on selling through its website. Images of the gallery's stock on the site suggest the name's pretty appropriate.

I wonder if they serve Miazma wine at their openings.

The Mumbai Film Festival

2011-10-21T12:04:00.006+05:30

Long queues before each screening the the Mumbai Film Festival were taken as evidence of the event’s success. The daily publication brought out by MFF boasted about those queues. It just goes to show how warped our idea of success is. A truly successful (by which I mean, among other things, well organised) festival would have large audiences but not long queues. That would indicate the organisers had arranged screenings of individual films based on a good estimate of their popularity. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia would get four screenings at the main venue, being played simultaneously on two screens twice over.

Instead the film got just two screenings. Both were originally scheduled to start at around 8pm, but one was pushed back to 9.45pm. This meant that the 8 pm screening had two halls worth of delegates waiting in line. One view of this would be: Wow, how eager the Bombay film crowd is, queuing up for hours before Melancholia’s screening, the festival’s a true film buff’s paradise. My view was: What a shambles, preventing people from seeing movies they’re keen to catch because they have to wait in line for hours to have a chance of getting a seat for films they’re even more eager to view.

Actually, less than 10% of screenings were actually full. But even one show where people are turned away creates a ripple effect, the equivalent of hoarding during food shortages which lead to massive price spikes. So, there were people in line two hours before Nani Moretti’s Habemus Papam (We Have A Pope), although the hall was half empty in the end.

The audience for Habemus Papam skewed distinctly to the over thirty-five crowd; I suspect most had, like myself, discovered Moretti when Dear Diary was screened at an IFFI many, many years ago. The youngsters preferred a South Korean gangster movie being screened at the same time.

Unfortunately, Habemus Papam is no Dear Diary. The idea of a Pope with stage fright is a good one, but one-trick feature films tend to get tedious beyond a point. Habemus Papam doesn’t lead anywhere interesting, though it keeps the audience amused.

Another old-timer, Chantal Akerman, was in even worse form than Moretti. Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly is a dreadful adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s first novel of the same name. Why the director thought a nineteenth century tale of Europeans seeking gold in the jungles of Borneo could be adapted to a contemporary context is beyond me. I mean, are modern gold mines found by individuals trekking through tropical rain forest with maps as their only guide? To make matters worse, the main character Almayer is a pathetic loser, his daughter is cold and unfriendly, and their relationship, which is supposed to hold the film together, never comes alive in any form. The only good thing about Akerman’s Folly is its visual quality: elaborate takes in urban spaces, jungles and the seashore that one can stare at for two hours without getting bored.

Not all veterans came up short like Moretti and Akerman. Wim Wenders’ Pina, a 3-D documentary about the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch (who died soon after filming began) is a pathbreaking piece of movie-making.

For the first time in history, performance does not die in the course of being transferred to screen. The technology needs refinement, of course: characters still appear a bit like marionettes on occasion, and buildings like doll’s houses. But 3-D allows us to experience dance in ways that are impossible for an audience in a theatre to do, while retaining the crucial feeling of liveliness and presence.

Another film I liked was Julia Murat’s Historias Que So Existem Quando Lembradas (which means, ‘Stories that only exist when remembered’).

It’s about a Brazilian ghost town populated by old people, who go through a daily routine that is so set it takes on the appearance of ritual. The main character, a woman named Madalena, starts each day by baking bread. She then takes it over to a shop, shares a coffee with the shop-owner, attends church, lunches with the priest and congregation, sits by her husband’s grave, and writes a letter to him after returning home. This set of actions plays out four or five times in the film, but Murat’s exceptional framing is varied enough to forestall any monotony. The ghost town is disturbed by the appearance of a young photographer, who asks to stay with Madalena, and begins questioning the dogmas on which Madalena and the townspeople base their lives. Though the ending of Historias is unsatisfying, the film is beautifully shot and paced, and enlivened by fine performances.

The Universe is Expanding

2011-10-05T10:01:00.006+05:30

The Nobel Prize for Physics this year has been awarded to three researchers who showed that the universe is expanding at an increasing pace. Physicists don't yet know how this could be happening; they've had to dream up a massive amount of hypothetical invisible matter to get their equations right.
As a boy, I was pretty interested in astronomy. I remember reading about quasars that were 10 billion light years away and thinking, "Well, why should quasars only be found at the fringes of the universe? What's so special about the edge, except that the light reaching us from there is coming from the farthest back in time? If a chap stood on one of those quasars and looked toward us right this second, maybe he'd see a quasar too. Maybe, the universe was full of quasars ten billion years ago."
Well, apparently it was, more or less.
Before I got to the quasars bit, I learned the universe was expanding. I wasn't a morose type as a kid. The knowledge that the universe was expanding, and the stars and planets would probably keep drifting farther apart and grow ever colder till all communication and all life ceased, was about the only thing that depressed me around the age of ten. When I saw Annie Hall years later, I realised Alvy Singer had felt the same way back during World War II.

Unlike Alvy, though, I stopped doing homework a while before I read about the Big Bang theory.

Koh Samui: Making the Connection

2011-09-28T19:25:00.004+05:30

I've travelled a fair amount over the years, but that evidently hasn't stopped me from planning dumb itineraries. After Jabeen and I decided to vacation in Koh Samui, I booked the tickets on Bangkok Airways, which now flies daily to the Thai capital from Bombay, and has the most flights to Samui (I read somewhere that the airline owns Samui airport). The cheapest available flight from Bangkok to Samui was scheduled just an hour after the arrival time of our Bombay-Bangkok flight. I thought to myself, "It's a squeeze, but Samui airport offers visas on arrival, so we just need to transfer directly to our connecting flight without any intervening visa hassles".

An elementary mistake, as I was informed at the check-in counter in Bombay. Since the Bangkok-Samui leg was a domestic flight, we'd need to get visas before boarding it. Recalling how long the visa process had taken on my last visit to Thailand, I recognised there was little hope of making our connecting flight.

But Bangkok Airways and Thai immigration outdid themselves in helping us out. Our plane landed just ahead of time and, as we entered the terminal, I spotted a Bangkok Airways staffer holding up a placard with our names on it. This was 6 am, IST. He rushed us to the counter where visa forms were handed out. By 6.10, we had filled the forms and changed money to pay for the visas. He then led us to a fast track counter, where our visas were stamped in under five minutes (the other counter was thronged with applicants, mostly Indian). In another five minutes we went through passport control. At 6.25 we passed security. At exactly 6.30, we were at the gate from which the Samui flight was to take off. It began boarding seven minutes later, and we touched down on the island by 8 am, Indian time.

I said to myself, "Here's a country that takes tourism seriously".

Despite all their efforts on our behalf, we almost managed to mess things up in another way. We'd completely forgotten that our photographs would have to be attached to the the visa form, whether we filled it in Bangkok or Samui. Luckily both of us happened to be carrying mugshots of ourselves in our cabin baggage. Jabeen said, "There's always so much stuff in my handbag that I don't need but leave inside 'just in case'. Well, now all the junk I've carried all these years has proven its worth".

Home Spun and The Skoda Prize

2011-09-23T11:20:00.005+05:30

I'm in the middle (or, hopefully, near the end) of a longish period of blogger's block. I have nothing to say about current events that I feel is worth saying, but I don't want to leave this ground fallow any longer. Which is why I'm posting about two events in my professional life, a show I've curated and an art prize I've helped conceive.
The exhibition I've curated, called Home Spun, opened a couple of weeks ago at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, which displays work from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar collection. The press has been kind thus far. Here are previews / reviews from Anindita Ghose in Mint; Karanjeet Kaur in Time Out; Manjula Narayan in Friday Gurgaon; and Chitra Narayanan in the Hindu Business Line.
The show runs till 27 December and, if you're in Gurgaon before then, on a day which is not a Monday or public holiday, please consider dropping in to take a look.
I'm an advisor to the Skoda Prize for Contemporary Art, an annual award for Indian artists under forty-five which is now in its second year. We had the first jurors' meet for the current year in Delhi last week, and cut the 128 entries down to a longlist of twenty. These shows will feature in a catalogue, to be released at the opening of the Skoda Prize Show at the Lalit Kala Akademi on January 23, 2012. On October 24, 2011, the four member jury will be joined by Heike Munder, curator of Zurich's Migros Museum, to narrow the selection down to a three-person shortlist. The final selection will happen after viewing the Skoda Prize Show, and the award of Rs 10 lakh will be presented on January 28, 2012. The two runners' up receive a four-week residency in Switzerland courtesy Pro Helvetia.
Take a look at the list and let me know if you have any favourites, and if you think somebody was unfairly excluded or included. And here's a look back at the inaugural award ceremony, where Anish Kapoor presented the trophy to Mithu Sen.

Atul Dodiya

2011-09-04T11:19:00.001+05:30

In advance of his new show opening at Chemould Art gallery, I've written this piece on Atul Dodiya in Time Out.

Anna the Fanatic

2011-08-31T20:11:00.005+05:30

Anna Hazare rules the village of Ralegan Siddhi with unquestioned authority. He forces meat eaters to turn vegetarian; has men who drink liquor tied to a tree and beaten; prohibits cable TV; disallows political campaigning and elections.
There's a word for this sort of person: it is 'fanatic'. Everything about Hazare's behaviour, his posture in negotiating, his threats and fasts, points to a fanatical and authoritarian personality, a modern Savonarola. But the word fanatic has never cropped up in the media in relation to Hazare. Maybe it is because the man doesn't give fiery speeches.

Anna Hazare and individual mobilisation

2011-08-30T10:20:00.006+05:30

The first time I attended a demonstration, I was struck by an odd fact. Most of the audience was poor, composed of party members trucked in from different parts of Bombay and, perhaps, out of town. The speakers were all middle class graduates. Those attending didn't seem deeply involved in the cause being discussed, they were just there to make up the numbers.
The same pattern played out repeatedly in succeeding years. I did attend a few demonstrations composed of motivated individuals, but these were inevitably small. For example, I was part of a group that would march on August 6 demanding an end to all nuclear weapons. I don't think we ever had more than a hundred people at any public meeting.
It was different in England, where I noticed a greater homogeneity between protestors and those who addressed them. Though the demonstrations I attended in England were fairly small, far larger ones, such as marches against the Iraq war, drew thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of individuals in Europe and the US based on shared beliefs rather than party membership. Labour unions and political parties were often part of such marches, but a substantial portion of the demonstrators seemed to be independents who had just turned up because they believed in the cause.
The anti-corruption crusade is perhaps the first large-scale demonstration in India that has not involved political parties drumming up support and trucking in the public. The middle-classness of the movement has come in for criticism, but I can't imagine poor people spending valuable hours to protest in favour of something as abstract as the Jan Lokpal bill.
In the latter stages of Anna Hazare's fast, various unions showed support by striking work, and they probably had a party-political background; but the crowds at Ramlila Maidan appeared to be composed of individuals and small groups of friends and family members without strong party affiliations. In that sense, the Lokpal movement has something in common with the Arab Spring. It's probably the first time a nation like Egypt saw such individualised demonstrations. As in Egypt, all established parties in India seem to have been taken unawares by the intensity and persistence of the demos; politicians are used to being able to label crowds, and they were left playing catch-up in this instance.

This might also tell us something about the changing nature of Delhi. I've argued the city is taking on the aura of an imperial capital, but, contrarily, it is also becoming less dominated by politics. In past decades, a substantial portion of the middle class population of the capital was directly connected to the government. I haven't seen statistics, but I'm certain the percentage has fallen dramatically.

Amitav Ghosh on Anna Hazare and the deep State

2011-08-29T10:18:00.005+05:30

Some of India's best thinkers have written about the Anna Hazare movement, and now Amitav Ghosh joins the group with this article in the Hindustan Times. While agreeing with Ghosh's analysis of the malaise within the Congress Party, where position has been divorced from true power, I find myself wishing he'd gone further and spoken of the same thing happening among opposition parties.
During the Shiv Sena-BJP government of the 1990s in Maharashtra, real power vested in Bal Thackeray who, unlike Sonia Gandhi, didn't even fight elections. To this day, no Thackeray has ever bothered to fight state or national elections. It was to Bal Thackeray's home and not the Chief Minister's office that Rebecca Mark of Enron went, straight from the airport, when attempting to get the Dabhol project restarted. The result was a U-turn by the ruling coalition and a financial disaster for the state.
The BJP boasts, with a lot of justice, of not harbouring dynasties, and of changing party heads democratically. However, it faces its own 'deep State' crisis in its relationship with the RSS, whose unelected leaders have have veto power over decisions taken by BJP ministers.
Another feature of 'deep State' politics, as Ghosh points out, is the refusal to reveal details of illnesses suffered by top leaders. The secrecy surrounding Sonia Gandhi's surgery is very similar to that surrounding Hugo Chavez's treatment in Cuba; and of Fidel Castro's illness. Here, again, the BJP was no different, having drawn a veil over Atal Behari Vajpayee's health problems while he was Prime Minister.

Delhi in the Time of Anna

2011-08-25T08:34:00.002+05:30

On the flight I chat with a woman who works with ONGC, in finance. She's deeply sympathetic to the Lokpal campaign. She cites problems ONGC faces because it's a government organisation. Like, it has been headless for months, despite being one of the nation's most valuable companies.

"The stay on appointing a Chairman is coming straight from the PMO, so don't tell me Manmohan Singh is not corrupt. People say he could not control Raja because of coalition politics; but why can't he control this kind of thing in his own office?"

She tells me ONGC hired expensive rigs from Reliance, because Reliance had hired them and had no use for them. ONGC has no use for them either, but is now picking up the tab instead of Reliance.

This is all, of course, hearsay.

In the Delhi metro, on the streets, in cars, I see people carrying the tricolour and wearing Gandhi topis inscribed with Anna Hazare's name. Drivers can talk of little else, since they've faced Anna-related traffic jams for days.

Yesterday, I took the Metro to Chandni Chowk, and then back to Gurgaon. I was in a hurry and very tired when I got off at HUDA City Centre, and in no mood to haggle with rickshaws, so I agreed to pay the driver a ridiculous sum for the short drive to my destination. He said, "Our union forced us to strike today in support of Anna. I've only plied this auto from 6pm, so I have to overcharge today."

Hakkasan Bandra

2011-08-21T00:46:00.004+05:30

I dined at the Mayfair Hakkasan two years ago courtesy of Dinesh and Minal Vazirani of Saffronart. It was after a discussion on 'Junctures and Departures: Locating Modern and Contemporary Indian Art' at Saffronart's Bond Street gallery. I recall the food being good though not exceptional. What struck me most about the space was how crowded it was. Also, the waiters going around asking each diner about food allergies.
I've also dined at the restaurant which used to occupy the space where Hakkasan, Bombay, is now located. It was called Seijo and the Soul Grill, and its main dining area was demolished the day after we ate there. I believe that was a coincidence.
Apparently, Hakkasan has fulfilled license requirements by building a completely retractable roof, so it's unlikely to face the same fate as Seijo. It looks sturdy enough to make a believable indoor space; ripples of light pass over the slanted wooden ceiling as if there were a swimming pool somewhere; it's just the work of some fancy projectors.
The service, we found, is faster than McDonald's, if you count the queueing up time at McDonald's on a Saturday night. We walked into Hakkasan at 8.30, and our mains were in front of us at 8.40pm. We were done eating by nine, having consumed delectable, melt-in-the-mouth pork belly, and some chicken that came in an intriguing pickle-flavoured gravy. There was just a hint of that gravy, of course, nothing like those bits of reconstituted flesh swimming in sauce that one is used to in Sino-Chinese fusion cuisine.
For dessert we moved down the street to San Churro, which serves the best Espresso Mocha and the best thick hot chocolate in the city.
Hakkasan claims to have a dress code, and I suppose they turn away guys in shorts. Even Olive does that. But already, Bombay's famously casual attitude to clothing, one of the things I like best about the city, is having an impact. There were plenty of people in T-shirts, jeans and shirtsleeves. Which fits the place really, because, though Hakkasan's pretty expensive, it doesn't seem opulent.

Aarakshan, Anna Hazare and Narendra Modi

2011-08-16T10:39:00.012+05:30

Aarakshan (spoiler warning) is two films in one. The first half is about quotas in education, caste rivalry, and the debate about what constitutes merit. The title suggests the entire film is about these things, but the title is misleading. By the interval, Saif Ali Khan is estranged from his girlfriend Deepika Padukone, their buddy Prateik Babbar has fought with both of them; Amitabh Bachchan has quarreled with his closest colleague, been removed from his job, and debated his wife to a stalemate; all because of the issue of caste-based reservations. There's even an attempt, a spectacularly unsuccessful one, to use affirmative action metaphors in a romantic song (Prasoon Joshi's words in Mauka outdo the most atrocious of Javed Akhtar's youth-brigade lyrics, the sort Akhtar wrote for the girl-band Viva). One wonders where Aarakshan could possibly go from here.
Prakash Jha's answer is to leave the reservation issue behind, and move on to the problem of mercenary tuition classes, capitation fees, and the collusion between educators and politicians. This shift rearranges loyalties, leaving all the good guys on one side of the divide and all the bad guys conspiring against them. The Amitabh character's response to the rise of high-fee coaching classes is to set up free special classes in a cattle-shed. His solution to the education sector's ills is obviously unworkable, resting as it does on the generosity of individual teachers and the munificence of charitable institutions. I suspect that paying teachers decent wages is more likely to promote quality education than asking them to teach for free. Despite the naive idealism of this answer, Aarakshan succeeds in tapping into the common feeling that something is rotten in the state of India's higher education, and the film can therefore present itself as offering an alternative to the evil status quo.
Anna Hazare's movement, it seems to me, works on the same basis. It eschews those things which fundamentally divide civil society, and instead taps into popular outrage against corruption in politics and daily life. Everybody is against corruption, just as everybody is for peace and harmony. The solution Hazare's movement offers in the form of the Jan Lokpal bill is as naive as Amitabh Bachchan's classroom-in-a-tabela. There have been a number of critiques of the proposed bill, but I'll link to just one, an article by Pratap Bhanu Mehta which contests both the methods and substance of the Lokpal agitation. The establishment of the Lokpal as envisaged by Hazare, Bedi, Kejriwal and the Bhushans, will do almost nothing to curb corruption; if set up in the form the activists want, it will only add a layer to India's bureaucracy, a layer which will soon turn as corrupt as all the other layers.

I recall another naive solution which united civil society a while ago. Shocked at images of hundreds of tonnes of foodgrains rotting while food prices soared, the Supreme Court asked the government to provide the grain free to the poor, not appreciating that the government could only do so through the public distribution system, and that it was precisely because of the shortcomings of the public procurement, storage and distribution system that so much food was rotting in the first place.

Aarakshan arrives at a happy ending through a deus ex machina (or a diva ex machina). Just when Amitabh's school-in-a-tabela faces being bulldozed, Hema Malini, chairperson of the trust that employed Bachchan as College Principal, returns from her decades' long spiritual retreat, and makes a call to the state's Chief Minister, who promptly orders the police and municipal employees to cease and desist. In other words, the good guys win because they can make a phone call to a higher authority than the bad guys; their most powerful person has more pull than the most powerful person among the villains. A quintessentially Indian conclusion.
Nobody in the audience blinks at the idea of police officers doing Ministers' bidding. That's just the way our system works. If the Home Minister says 'arrest', they will arrest, if the Chief Minister then says 'release', they will release.

Which is why officers who have provided investigating commissions with data that implicates Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his colleagues in the horrific massacres of 2002 are being suspended and chargesheeted, while those who helped in the cover up have been consistently promoted. The subversion of the system is happening before our eyes. Yet, there is little outrage about it, certainly nothing to match the fervour generated by Anna Hazare's agitation. That's partly because so much time has elapsed since the Gujarat riots, and so much has been written about them, that people are sick and tired of the issue. But it's also because the 2002 riots, like the Mandal Commission report and the issue of reservation in general, divide society. Narendra Modi has been elected and re-elected despite his apparent complicity in mass murder. His supporters, in a Pavlovian response to criticism of their hero, parrot the 'What about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots' line whenever the 2002 massacres are brought up. In 1984, our systems were so crude and compromised that no proof could be found that X or Y led rioting mobs. The fact that the justice system failed then is hardly an excuse to allow it to fail again, as if each side is entitled to one pogrom free of charge. This time round, we possess call records, minutes of Cabinet meetings, videographed witness testimonies, and a wealth of other evidence aided by the introduction of new technology between 1984 and 2002. We have high ranking IPS officers willing to testify under oath that there was a government backed effort to generate anti-Muslim hysteria in Gujarat; government-sponsored demonstrations that were meant to turn violent; and government-mandated inaction on the part of the Gujarat police.

There are tough questions facing us: Can we bring a Bal Thackeray to justice? Can we bring a Narendra Modi to justice? What does it say about our commitment to the rule of law if we cannot? Though the questions are tough, they can be resolved through relatively simple procedures in place already. However, there is little pressure from the public to get those procedures right. I see few Facebook petitions relating to police officers victimised for telling the truth about horrific crimes. Like the issue of reservations in Aarakshan, the murders of 2002 seem best forgotten after an interval.

Shammi Kapoor 1931 - 2011

2011-08-14T15:08:00.003+05:30

Shammi Kapoor had fun in front of the camera. He endowed films with a lightness and joy that even Dev Anand couldn't match. Dev Anand was always striking a pose, whereas Shammi Kapoor added something unpredictable to each frame that the director had clearly not imagined. Which director could conceive such twisting and writhing, such contorted gestures, anyway? Kapoor put his heroines to shame, and every Bollywood actress before and since. Often graceful, sometimes ungainly, his unselfconsciousness about his body was rare, if not unique, in Indian cinema; and the craziness of his imagination was surpassed only by that of Kishore Kumar.
Shammi Kapoor did not fear appearing ridiculous, and was criticised in his time for being ridiculous. The intelligentsia looked down on his movies, till the vogue for popular culture studies forced the sons and daughters of Shammi Kapoor-castigators to take a second look at his films. What they found was something so weird and inimitable, it could not date in the manner of the acting style of his contemporaries.
It's instructive that English news channels are today giving his death significantly more space than are Hindi broadcasters. It's not like the Hindi channels don't go for pop culture; quite the contrary. But they are interested more in contemporary scandal of the kind the Rakhi Sawants of the world provide than in retro-nostalgia with a touch of fond irony.
All the Kapoors have a tendency to get fat, and Shammi Kapoor's career was effectively ended by obesity. He appeared in films through the 1970s and 1980s, but his roles were uniformly forgettable, for he had relatively little talent as a dramatic actor. It was what he did with his body in his heyday that was captivating.

Stray thoughts on the London riots

2011-08-11T09:46:00.016+05:30

The British government has spent over half a billion pounds on street cameras, and London has perhaps more CCTV cams than any other city on earth. A couple of years ago, there were complaints that the crime-solving assistance provided by these cameras did not justify the expense involved in installing and maintaining them and the invasion of privacy that resulted from citizens being watched all the time.

Now, CCTV cam footage is going to lead to hundreds of convictions. I don't understand why people would loot shops in London. Surely they knew they'd be caught on a CCTV feed?

Many of the rioters certainly knew, which is why they wore masks and hoodies. So will there be calls for hoodie bans, like there have been calls for burqa bans?

If the Arab Spring was a Facebook and Twitter revolution, were these Facebook and Twitter riots? How does the Social Media shoe feel on the other foot?

The rioters (I'm differentiating these from opportunistic looters) appear mostly Afro-Caribbean, with a substantial infusion of White working-class / underclass youth. The vigilantes seem to be Asian (Turkish, Indian, Pakistani), East European and English. Strange coalitions, very distant from the world of My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.

I've always felt the partnership between activist Blacks and Asians formed in 1960s and 1970s Britain was flimsy. Maybe it was appropriate to that era, but it's broken down substantially since then, and is surely dead now. I don't see much common cause between the two ethnic groups anymore.

South Asians have serious problems to overcome: a conservative culture that does not respect free speech; a fealty to arranged marriage that can lead to forced marriages; extremism among Muslims that becomes terrorism at its most extreme. Afro-Caribbean Brits have a completely different set of issues to deal with: the breakdown of the family; drug use linked to violent crime; and low educational and economic attainment.

I can't understand why Britain has both a debt problem as well as an investment deficit after twelve years of Labour-led economic growth accompanied by high tax rates. Where did all that money go? I know we've been through a meltdown, but Gordon Brown's economy should've been better prepared for it. After all, there was no Blair tax cut to compare with the Bush tax cut.

One of the golden rules of party politics is that riots help the Right. They helped Nixon, Thatcher, Thackeray, Modi and Sarkozy, and will now help David Cameron, who appears really angry that his Tuscan holiday was interrupted.

It's good to see London cleaning up the mess. When citizens there come together to clean up, they do it in their thousands. It's different in India. Here, a few dozen meet, spend most of their time posing for cameras and leave the tough stuff to those meant for that kind of thing, if you get my drift. All acts in India are symbolic, even our recent 'Slut Walk', which consisted of about a hundred women dressed in standard Delhi college-girl clothes; a bunch of LGBT activists, mostly men; and about three hundred mediapersons fruitlessly seeking somebody slutty-looking to film.

India must be wishing the Edgbaston Test had been cancelled. I don't believe any World No.1 Test team has been at the receiving end of such a hammering in the past.

A few people have commented on the irony of an Indian tour of England been threatened by mob violence. It's supposed to be the other way round. The great example of playing cricket in troubled times must be England's 1984-85 tour of India.

This is a picture taken at Heathrow airport, on October 30, 1984, of David Gower and Allan Lamb boarding a flight to India at the start of that tour. They landed in New Delhi the next morning, just hours before Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards. The killing was followed by the worst sectarian bloodbath since Partition. The English cricketers stayed in their hotel before moving out to Sri Lanka, which had barely recovered from an even worse killing campaign. They flew to Colombo on Sri Lankan President Junius Jaywardene's private plane; he was returning from Indira Gandhi's funeral.
After playing warm-up games in Sri Lanka, the cricketers headed to Bombay for the first Test on November 28. On November 26, they attended a party thrown in their honour by Percy Norris, the British Deputy High Commissioner. The next morning, Percy Norris was shot dead not far from his Nariman Point office while being driven to work. The murder has never been solved, but it appears to have been an act of international terrorism, possibly masterminded by Abu Nidal, whose faction was demanding the release of three colleagues held in Britain.
It wasn't surprising that England lost that first Test at the Wankhede stadium.

Just as the match was winding down, Bhopal was struck by the worst industrial disaster in history. 1984 was definitely not a good year for India.

The tour went on, though, and the second Test was played in Delhi, which had returned to calm. England recovered to win that test, and went on to grab the series 2-1.

Calcutta blues

2011-08-07T10:04:00.003+05:30

I was in Calcutta earlier this week, and landed needing to use an ATM machine to recharge my phone, and pay my credit card dues, which I invariably leave to the last minute. Public sector bank employees happened to be on strike that day, demanding whatever it is that bank workers demand when they go on strike. Now, a stoppage in Bombay or Delhi or most places wouldn't be an inconvenience unless someone wanted to make a large withdrawal. Most transactions are done at ATM machines these days. Besides, my account's with HDFC, not a public sector firm. In Calcutta, however, a strike by public sector bank employees means private banks are also closed, presumably in solidarity. Bizzarely, it means all ATM machine booths are shut too. At night, on my way back to the hotel, I saw one Axis Bank ATM working, and a couple of others with semi-open shutters, lights on inside, and the legs of the guard visible beyond glass doors. Unfortunately, HDFC ATMs offered no such tantalising views.

Any Time Money? Obviously not in Calcutta.

Yes, I know that's not what ATM stands for.

Xinjiang: Who's your mummy?

2011-08-02T11:37:00.005+05:30

When Indian reporters question visiting Pakistani politicians about the Kashmir issue, they usually assume the Indian establishment's point of view. I've always felt these chaps didn't ask questions that would really put Pakistani leaders in a spot. I have not, for instance, come across any reference to China's Xinjiang province in interviews with the likes of Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf.
Xinjiang is a mainly Muslim, ethnically majority Uighur province in China with a separatist movement that Beijing tries hard to suppress. Since China is one of Pakistan's closest and most important allies, Pakistani leaders will never say a word in favour of separatists in Xinjiang.
So, when a Pakistani President or Prime Minister or Foreign Minister says, "We believe in the right of self-determination for Kashmiris", it might be worthwhile asking, "Do you also favour the right of self-determination for Uighurs in Xinjiang?". It'll be fun watching the interviewee trying to wriggle out of that spot.
Xinjiang and the Uighurs are likely to force themselves into the lexicon of Indian reporters following a news item yesterday that China has blamed separatists trained in Pakistan for a terrorist attack within Xinjiang. Pakistan, of course, immediately condemned the attack, but will have to do more than condemn it to placate the Chinese.

As an unrelated aside, Xinjiang, like many of the earth's driest places, has revealed an old tradition of mummification, dating back four thousand years. The Xinjiang mummies, or Tarim Basin Mummies are unusual because the oldest dessicated bodies show distinctly Caucasoid features. It seems like the first inhabitants of Xinjiang rode in from Europe, and were gradually joined by East Asians. The Uighurs only migrated to the area in the 9th century, which, if I recall correctly, is also around the time Turks first got to Turkey.

John Berger and the Israel Boycott

2011-08-01T09:11:00.002+05:30

Of the intellectuals and artists who have signed on to the cultural boycott of Israel, the one I respect most is John Berger. His name is also used extensively by PACBI because he's recognised across the world, unlike all but one or two of the other signatories. Arundhati 'all multinationals are evil except those that publish my books' Roy is the other big name, but then, has anybody come across a boycott that Arundhati Roy doesn't support?
I wanted to know more about John Berger's position on the issue, and found the letter he wrote in favour of ostracising the Zionist Entity. Here it is:

"Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.
How to apply a cultural boycott? A boycott of goods is a simpler proposition, but in this case it would probably be less effective, and speed is of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month (which is precisely why some of the most powerful world political leaders, hoping for the worst, keep silent.).
How to apply a boycott? For academics it’s perhaps a little clearer - a question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more complicated. I’m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment.
For instance. An important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking to publish three of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of author’s royalties. I don’t ask other writers supporting the boycott to come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example."

This is a nuanced position and one that I have no problem with. It was obviously motivated by a particular event, which gave it urgency: Israel's indiscriminate bombing of southern Lebanon in 2006. That's why Berger wrote, "Speed it of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month".
Unfortunately, John Berger hasn't always kept to his principle that the boycott's "application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment." Earlier this year, after Ian McEwan explained why he would accept the Jerusalem Prize, Berger signed a letter urging him to reconsider, and calling the Prize a "corrupt and cynical honour", "a cruel joke and a propaganda tool for the Israeli state".

The Israel Boycott II

2011-07-31T09:13:00.002+05:30

Lisa Taraki was kind enough to continue the dialogue with me after our first exchange. Here is an update:

Lisa:
I will comment on two points that concern facts about the BDS movement rather than assessments of its efficacy or rationale:
1. The Palestinian BDS movement targets complicit institutions and not individuals, whether they are artists or academics. This is clearly spelled out in all the statements issued by PACBI (www.pacbi.org) or the Palestinian BDS National Committee (www.bdsmovement.net).
2. BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) covers a range of actions, including cultural and academic boycott. More can be learned by consulting the BDS website.
Lisa

Me:

Hi Lisa,

I've been reading up on PACBI and discovered an astonishing piece of information. Your colleague and co-founder of PACBI, Omar Barghouti, is apparently a student of Tel Aviv University (I don't know if he's been expelled or left in recent days, but he was a student long after PACBI was formed).

Please answer this question: why is it OK for founder-members of your organisation to take advantage of facilities offered by the Israeli state, when you expect Indian artists to boycott similar Israeli institutions? It seems like hypocrisy on a grand scale to me.

regards

Girish

Me, again:

Sorry to keep writing, but I just discovered an article on the PACBI site about Tel Aviv University, headlined, Study: Tel Aviv University Part and Parcel of the Israeli Occupation:

http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1038

Is this is the same Tel Aviv University attended by your colleague and co-founder of PACBI Omar Barghouti?

I've also read a statement about how it's unfair to criticise Barghouti since Palestinians don't have any choice in educational matters. However, from what I read, Barghouti was born in Qatar, and has a degree from Columbia. He certainly has access to a world of learning, yet he chooses to stay enrolled in an institution that his own organisation calls "Part and Parcel of the Israeli Occupation"!

I've read some articles about you, and I greatly respect what you have done in your career and the many initiatives you have led to enable greater educational access for Palestinians. However, PACBI's policies appear to me not just misguided in themselves, but also fatally compromised by the Barghouti situation, unless there is more to it than Wikipedia and other sources put forward.
regards
Girish

Lisa:
You probably haven't come across the PACBI response to the campaign against Omar Barghouti. Here it is:

http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=992

Me:

Hi Lisa,

I did read that statement, and this paragraph in it:

"PACBI has never called upon Palestinian citizens of Israel and those who are compelled to carry Israeli identification documents, like Palestinian residents of occupied Jerusalem, to refrain from studying or teaching at those Israeli institutions. That would have been an absurd position, given the complete lack of alternatives available"

Omar Barghouti, I've read, was born in Qatar and educated at Columbia University, New York. In which case, he certainly did, and does, have many alternatives available.

The PACBI statement also says:

"leaders of the anti-colonial resistance movement in India and Egypt, among many other countries, received their education at British universities at the height of the colonial era."
They did; but they didn't then turn around and ask everybody else to boycott those institutions like Omar Barghouti has done.
I should also point out that the fact that Omar Barghouti was admitted to Tel Aviv University, and continued to be a student even after his anti-Israel activism became well known, is an excellent example of why the parallel with apartheid, which is the basis of PACBI's argument, collapses under close scrutiny. It is inconceivable that a Black African would have been admitted to the University of Cape Town when apartheid laws were in force. A black or coloured ANC activist would have been in jail rather than studying in a prestigious South African institution. The Israeli state allows a remarkable amount of dissent from citizens, and much of that dissent comes from intellectuals employed in state-funded bodies such as universities. That was simply not the case in apartheid South Africa.
regards
Girish

I will update this post if Lisa responds.

The Israel Boycott

2011-07-30T22:09:00.004+05:30

My friend the artist N Pushpamala, has issued a call for artists to boycott a forthcoming show of Indian art, called Deconstructing India, to be mounted at the Tel Aviv Museum next April. Pushpamala's central point is that the exhibition, and the museum that will host it, serves to legitimise the 'racist and apartheid' policies of Israel.
I don't care overmuch if the show happens or not. It sounds like a replica of a dozen other exhibitions of contemporary Indian art with names like Chalo India, Indian Highway, Indian Summer, India-this, and Indian-that, none of which got rave notices or created any genuine excitement among foreign spectators.
As anybody who reads this blog regularly will know, I'm not a big fan of Israel. I am, however, even less a fan of blanket cultural boycotts. When another friend, the artist Tushar Joag, circulated Pushpamala's mail to a wide group, I responded with the letter quoted below (I've removed a few specific examples I gave):

I don't understand this, frankly. If we start boycotting museum shows because of bad things governments are doing, where will it end?

Why should Indian artists exhibit in China, when the regime there has been responsible for horrendous massacres and continues to deny basic freedom of expression to its citizens?

Why should people exhibit in museums and universities in the United States (almost all of which receive state funding), when the country is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi civilians in the past decade and many more in the decade before that?

Why should galleries exhibit at the state-backed Sharjah Biennale and Dubai art fair, when the UAE denies the most basic rights to migrant labour, much of which is sourced from the sub-continent (if you want to speak about apartheid, the UAE is a great example of apartheid written into law)?

Why should we collaborate with artists and curators from Iran and Pakistan despite the terrible record of the governments of those countries in protecting minority rights? Denying minorities equality under the law is very akin to apartheid, isn't it?

Why, in the end, should artists and curators exhibit at the Lalit Kala Akademi and the National Gallery of Modern Art when we know the many kinds of repression unleashed by the Indian state, many of which have been explored and interrogated by artists and activists on this email? Does showing at the Lalit Kala legitimise all the dreadful policies of the Indian governments in Kashmir, the North East, Chattisgarh, Gujarat etc.?

Israel has done terribly by the Palestinians, but associating art institutions and centres of learning, even state funded ones, so closely with state policy is a silly mistake in my opinion, and tokenism of the worst kind as well.

I'd hoped a debate would begin about the issue, but received only personal mails from people supporting my position. I presume other mails went out to those proposing the boycott, supporting their position. Today, Pushpamala forwarded a response to my letter from Lisa Taraki of PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel).
Lisa wrote:
This is a very familiar argument, and this is our usual response:
There are indeed plenty of repressive regimes, and some of them are already subject to sanctions. There are also many other regimes that trample on their citizens' rights while enjoying support from world powers such as the USA, the EU, and other centers of power.
However, when there is a people's movement, such as the Palestinian BDS movement, that explicitly calls upon conscientious citizens of the world to boycott their oppressor in order to bear pressure to achieve its rights, it is the obligation of those conscientious people, whether in India or in France, to heed the call. If there were a boycott movement in China, Iran, or Pakistan urging conscientious artists and academics, etc. to boycott the major cultural and academic institutions in those countries, then it would be the duty of conscientious artists and academics to respond to the call.
The vast majority of Palestinian civil society has adopted the Palestinian BDS Call (http://www.bdsmovement.net/call)
Just consider what the reaction of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa would have been if artists, academics, and sportsmen and sportswomen around the world had refused to support the boycott of the South African state because there were other oppressive regimes the world over. Either boycott all such regimes, or no support for your struggle, they would have said! That would have rightly been considered an abrogation of responsibility, a diversionary tactic. Why is Israel being treated differently? Why the special allowances for Israel?
Palestinian civil society is asking artists, academics, and other conscientious people the world over to support its call for BDS. Do we listen to the voice of the oppressed? That is the basic issue.
The cultural and academic boycott, targeting the mainstream institutions of the Israeli state (and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is certainly part of the establishment, as is clear from a review of its website), aims to isolate Israel until Palestinian rights guaranteed by international law are achieved. Pressure on the Israeli state is the only avenue left, in view of the failure of all other measures, from diplomacy to "constructive engagement" to persuasion.

And this is my reply to Lisa:

Hi Lisa,

If this is a familiar argument, I'm surprised you have not come up with better answers. But that might be because there ARE no better answers.

You write:

"...when there is a people's movement, such as the Palestinian BDS movement, that explicitly calls upon conscientious citizens of the world to boycott their oppressor in order to bear pressure to achieve its rights, it is the obligation of those conscientious people, whether in India or in France, to heed the call."

There is absolutely no obligation on conscientious citizens anywhere in the world to heed anybody else's call. There are a thousand people's movements across the globe, and many of them issue such boycott calls. The validity of every call has to be determined by individuals rather than result from the sort of obligatory Groupthink you recommend. Just because I consider your boycott call absurd does not make me any less conscientious a citizen than those who choose to obey it.

You write:

"Just consider what the reaction of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa would have been if artists, academics, and sportsmen and sportswomen around the world had refused to support the boycott of the South African state because there were other oppressive regimes the world over. Either boycott all such regimes, or no support for your struggle, they would have said! That would have rightly been considered an abrogation of responsibility, a diversionary tactic. Why is Israel being treated differently? Why the special allowances for Israel?"

Artists academics and sportsmen joined the boycott of South Africa as part of a worldwide political and economic boycott. The cultural contribution was significant, but nowhere near as significant as political isolation and economic strangulation; without those two components, and the worldwide political consensus that engenders them, cultural boycotts are of little use. You will not be able to give me a single example of a cultural boycott of the kind you propose having produced significant political change anywhere in the world.

Besides, even at the height of the apartheid ban, people all over the world read and admired novels by the likes of Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Their being South African, and continuing to live in South Africa, did not lead to us boycotting their publications. Your movement, on the other hand, insists on boycotting all individuals with Israeli citizenship. How can you decide, on the basis of a website, what the affiliations of curators in Tel Aviv's Museum of Art are? Do you know any of them? Or have you studied their writing and concluded that they support the excesses of the Israeli State? I'm willing to wager you do not and have not.

You write:

"The cultural and academic boycott, targeting the mainstream institutions of the Israeli state (and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is certainly part of the establishment, as is clear from a review of its website), aims to isolate Israel until Palestinian rights guaranteed by international law are achieved. Pressure on the Israeli state is the only avenue left, in view of the failure of all other measures, from diplomacy to "constructive engagement" to persuasion."

If the Palestinians had adopted a primarily non-violent form of resistance like India did in its struggle against imperialism, or like the American Civil Rights movement did, I have no doubt there would have been a viable Palestinian state in existence by now. Decades of Islamist terrorism failed to shake the Mubarak regime, but a few weeks of widespread non-violent protest brought it down. The Palestinians have kept the option of resorting to violence open even when they have entered negotiations with Israel. The Palestinian public continues to support the targetting of Israeli civilians, and a martyr cult has been fostered in the Occupied Territories. Perhaps Palestinians should look more closely at their own failures down the decades, before speaking of what is "the only avenue left" and of the "failure of all other measures".

regards

Girish

Nathalie Djurberg at Mumbai Art Room

2011-07-23T09:34:00.004+05:30

Susan Hapgood, an American curator who moved to Bombay a couple of years ago, has opened a small not-for-profit space in Colaba called the Mumbai Art Room. The gallery's first show features a single ten-minute video by the Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg, who specialises in painstakingly crafted claymation.
I Found Myself Alone puts a spindly black ballerina on a table set for afternoon tea. She dances awkwardly between creamy confections and baroque crockery before being doused by wax from a candle. She cleans herself of the goop after a struggle, but soon faces a second attack. Eventually, she seeks revenge on whiteness by using coffee from the pot to stain the linen and porcelain. The battle between black and white gestures to histories of colonialism and immigration, but any moral drawn from the narrative is as discomfiting as the work itself becomes beyond its cutesy opening moments. Djurberg's use of the tactility of plasticine and her partner Hans Berg's eerie musical score make I Found Myself Alone fascinating to watch.

The Mumbai Art Room is situated bravely on the ground floor of a large residential building, and news has got round about the entertainment on offer inside. Students of the Navy Children School next door are regular visitors. In the short time I spent in the gallery, four girls and then five boys walked up to the glass doors, peered inside for a minute, before entering, sitting themselves on the floor, giggling and whispering loudly, and being shushed by the gallery manager. It's good to see this connection with the neighbourhood, which is obviously something Susan Hapgood wants to take further. It does, of course, restrict the kind of art she can show. I can't imagine, for instance, that Nathalie Djurberg's more graphic stuff would be welcomed in this location.
Here's a portion of a video by Djurberg screened at the 2009 Venice Biennale, where she won the Promising Young Artist award. It's reminiscent of Salvador Dali's canvases Premonitions of Civil War and Autumnal Cannibalism, which must have been as disturbing in their time as Djurberg's work is in ours.

Aravind Adiga's Last Man in Tower

2011-07-22T08:50:00.003+05:30

My review of Aravind Adiga's novel Last Man in Tower has been published by CNN Go. Read it here.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the bomb blasts

2011-07-14T23:23:00.006+05:30

I watched a bit of the Swedish adaptation of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night. It was better than watching ranting anchors and ranting politicians and ranting analysts, but even so I couldn't watch more than 15 minutes. Adaptations usually employ actors who look better than their literary counterparts. It's a sensible policy, because it's easier to read about ugly people than to watch ugly people on screen for extended periods. For some reason, the Swedes decided that they would make all the Dragon Tattoo characters plainer than they are in the book. There's Larsson's hero Mikael Blomkvist, for example, a middle-aged journalist who has a mysterious power over women. For those who have not read Stieg Larsson's trilogy, it's worth knowing that the male characters are, almost all of them, rapists and murderers; Blomkvist is the very opposite. He's good with women, and quite indiscriminate in his tastes. He sleeps with every woman he meets and, unlike James Bond, doesn't even have to seduce them. Without exception, they make the first move. Reading the books, you wonder why so many women would fall for him; and watching the actor playing him makes suspension of disbelief even tougher. Maybe the actor is famous in Sweden, in which case his fame might have compensated for his lack of charm. But the director has decided to film everybody in the most unflattering light possible, so they all look corpse-grey and unsexy in the extreme.
For the English adaptation, they've apparently got James Bond playing Mikael Blomkvist. Daniel Craig will probably be pleased to ditch the seduction routines.
I guess I should say something about the explosions. One was about a kilometer from my home as the crow flies, and another about a kilometer from where I was last evening. I was leaving a Kemp's Corner bookshop when I got a message about the first blast; within a minute all phone lines were jammed. I decided to eat a sandwich in the bookshop's cafe, giving any other bombs that might have been planted time to explode. Afterward I got a cab home. The streets were calm and not very crowded.
Bombs are something we have to live with now. Obviously, like other nasty things we have to live with, such as murder and robbery, it's important to minimise the number of incidents. We haven't had any attacks for two years and a half, which I think is good going. I'll happily take one attack every two years that kills about twenty of us, and accept the risk of being one of those twenty next time round.
For those who don't know Bombay well, more than ten people die on the city's rail tracks every day. Over twenty thousand have died in the past five years hit by trains while trying to cross the tracks. Many of those could've been saved if we had a good rescue service organised. But we don't. We depend on guys living by the tracks who haul bloodied and broken bodies to hospitals, and then wait for tips from relatives of the wounded or dead.
Deaths on rail tracks are very different from deaths from terrorism, of course. The individuals took a risk by crossing the tracks, and broke the law as well. I don't want to suggest an equivalence between the two modes of dying. I'm just pointing to how atrocious our systems and infrastructure are. Considering that, and considering it isn't all that difficult to make a bomb, I'm surprised we have not had more attacks since November 2008. Also that other cities have not had more attacks. We need only look at Pakistan's current condition to understand how bad things could get.

Mani Kaul 1944 - 2011

2011-07-07T10:11:00.017+05:30

Mani Kaul was the closest thing India has had to an avant-garde film-maker. Let me explain what I mean by that term. The great age of the avant-garde in visual art occurred in Europe between 1900 AD and the outbreak of the First World War. A bewildering number of experimental movements flourished at that time: Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Suprematism and so on. Around 1905, Henri Matisse and his colleagues began painting in bright hues that bore little resemblance to the real colours of their subjects. A French critic dismissed them as Fauves, or wild beasts. Two years later, the 26 year old Pablo Picasso painted his seminal canvas, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Henri Matisse ridiculed the painting, calling it a hoax; and his fellow-Fauve André Derain said that one day Picasso would hang himself behind that canvas. Their response to Picasso mirrored the outrage of the traditionalist French critic when faced with their own work. That's a feature of the best avant-garde art: it feels very unlike what has hitherto been defined as art, and can't adequately be judged by established standards associated with a given art form.

Mani Kaul confronted a similar situation with his first film Uski Roti, made when he was 26. The film is a straight-out masterpiece. I have no hesitation in placing it among the great debuts of all time alongside the likes of Citizen Kane and Pather Panchali. It also holds a secure place in my list of the ten greatest Indian films ever made. On a sadder note, I categorise it as the last truly great film produced in India. Movies have come close since then: some of Adoor Gopalkrishnan's films, and Aravindan's, and the early Ketan Mehta's; and also Mani Kaul's Duvidha, made two years after Uski Roti, and his last film Naukar Ki Kameez from 1999. But Uski Roti has a clarity and command of medium that sets it apart.
The film was so different from the cinema being produced at the time that even directors outside the sphere of commercial cinema couldn't grasp its achievement. Satyajit Ray detected a "pernicious anaemia" in Kaul's work, a "wayward, fragile aestheticism" that had "led him to the sick bed". Ray was in the position of Matisse and Derain faced with Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. His own cinema had been criticised for its supposed incomprehensibility and tediousness, but here was a director whose work Ray himself found incomprehensible and tedious. The formal experiments in Kaul's work left even the leading lights of parallel cinema befuddled and angry.
It is amusing, today, to witness Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani being asked to eulogise Mani Kaul. The media groups all these directors in the category of "1970s and 80s art film makers". The fact is, though, that they belonged to two separate camps -- social realists and aesthetes if you will -- with no love lost between them. Mani Kaul and his colleague Kumar Shahani treated Benegal and Nihalani's work with something close to contempt; and, while I'm not aware of what Shyam Benegal thought of the Kaul / Shahani style, I know Govind Nihalani despised it.
Uski Roti doesn't have much of a plot to occupy its 110 minutes. A woman travels from her home regularly to give her trucker husband his lunch. One day she is delayed and he gets upset. Afterwards, they reconcile. The film's affect is determined by its pace and framing, which is as controlled and unwavering as that of the first two Godfather films. I like to say that, had The Godfather Part II run for thirty minutes less than it did, it would have seemed too long. Luckily it runs for over three hours, which is just right. When I first saw Uski Roti, I was completely drawn in; I found its rhythm mesmeric. However, for those who can't feel the power and inexorableness of the near-stasis, a screening of Uski Roti probably feels like watching paint dry.
To go back to what Satyajit Ray said about Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, I was a bit unfair to the Bengali master. He mentions Uski Roti only in passing, and concentrates his ire on Duvidha, Kaul's third film. Ray observes that Kaul and Shahani have reduced acting to certain minimalistic gestures, eschewing dramatic cliches, but the gestures they favour, such as the slow turn of head from one profile to the other, become cliches themselves, as do the lavish colours they utilise. This is absolutely on the spot, and became a significant drawback in Mani Kaul's films of the 1980s and 1990s. In cinema, particularly experimental cinema, there's no such thing as a good habit. All habits are bad habits. Kaul's over-reliance on particular gestures and modes of expression was exacerbated by an incursion of symbols in his work. An element of self-parody crept into films like Mati Manas, Siddheshwari, Nazar and Idiot. There's plenty to admire in each of them, but they are a long way from Uski Roti and Duvidha. The beauty in their frames frequently comes across as a form of prettiness rather than an exploration of new visual possibilities.
The low point in Kaul's career was The Cloud Door, part of a series titled Erotic Tales. An actress named Anu Agarwal, popular at the time, played the central character. Since her role involved nudity, the film became something of a media sensation. The Cloud Door is a disaster from beginning to end; a risible interpretation of an old myth about a parrot who tells bawdy tales; a princess who saves it from the king's wrath; and a lover led by the parrot to the princess's bedroom.
Kaul found top form once more with his final film, Naukar Ki Kameez. Hardly screened at all in India, the film marked a return to a fluid, less stilted style. Its easy humour and discernible everyday narrative were refreshing after all those films involving myth piled on legend piled on symbol; and Mani Kaul's old control over pace and framing was evident from beginning to end. In person Mani Kaul was a great raconteur, full of energy and humour. Somehow that side of his personality was absent in the films he made in the 1980s and early '90s.
He directed no films in the last decade of his life, but Naukar Ki Kameez proved a wonderful final act.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the TISS 'rape'

2011-07-02T16:39:00.003+05:30

US prosecutors are about to drop charges against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn after the accuser's story began falling apart. Seeing no way to a successful trial, New York's District Attorney is cutting his losses.
While it is legitimate to ask if DSK should have been arrested in such haste in the first place, at least he was given bail fairly soon by a judge; and freed about six weeks after the incident. The situation's very different in India.
The same day as the DSK prosecution fell apart, Bombay's High Court rejected the state's plea to appeal a lower court judgement in the TISS rape case. Here's the gist of that case: an American student doing a course at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) was persuaded to get drunk in a pub and then join six young men in a flat in Andheri. According to her, she felt woozy after entering the flat, fell asleep and woke to find her clothes undone and two of the guys sleeping next to her. Before dropping her to her hostel, the two bought a morning-after pill and asked her to consume it. She concluded her drink had been spiked, and the six had gang raped her while she slept. This even though:
1) She didn't actually recall any intercourse.
2) Four of the boys hadn't so much as touched her before she fell into that drugged sleep.
3) One of them left the house after letting his five friends in.

Forensic evidence showed no sign of any sexual intercourse having taken place. There was no trace of any date-rape drug in the accuser's urine sample, just some cannabis. It all came down to what the girl inferred had happened while she was supposedly asleep.

On the basis of that inference, six boys were charged under India's super-strict rape law and put away for months without bail in a jail where living conditions are sub-human.

The incident occurred in April 2009. The accused were acquitted in October 2010, which is very quick by Indian standards. What is unusual about last week's High Court judgement is that the judges didn't even admit the state's appeal against the order. The evidence had to have been dreadfully weak for a High Court to decline to hear an appeal.

Here's the clincher from the lower court's verdict: The woman said she was drugged and asleep from about 2 am to 10 am. Yet, her phone records showed she had made twelve calls to two friends in that period, and exchanged messages with them all the while. The prosecution apparently had no response to this glaring inconsistency.
"The victim also deposed that she was unconscious between 2 am and 10 am of April 12, 2009, but the prosecution has offered no concrete explanation for the 12 calls that were made from her mobile phone to that of her two friends - Ahmed Mitha and Rishabh Choksi - during those hours.
Her phone records show that the calls lasted for around two minutes and also several messages were exchanged. The defence harped on this point to establish that she was not unconscious during this period - when she was allegedly raped - and raised doubts over her testimony's veracity."

So here's the deal. Phone records are easy to get; the police will have had them at most within a week of the girl's complaint. If these records demolished the complainant's basic story, why did the police continue with the prosecution? It's as if the Indian police no longer have the right to conclude that any accused are innocent. On the other hand, they appear to suffer no adverse consequences if cases are dismissed in court. The New York DA's career would have gone down the drain if he launched a high-profile trial with a zero-credibility witness. Indian prosecutors obviously face no threat to their careers in proceeding with unwinnable trials.

Shouldn't it be obligatory for police to reveal whether the girl spoke with friends repeatedly on that night or not? This is a question of fact, not opinion, and the police have access to the answer. We appear to have built a system where cops leak whatever information and speculation suits their case, but have no obligation to make the facts of a case public when the accused are innocent.

Federer and Ali

2011-07-01T18:51:00.010+05:30

Roger Federer has often won matches that seemed lost. Two days ago, he lost a match that seemed won. He later came across as oddly complacent about the game, saying his opponent Jo-Wilfried Tsonga had played too well. It's a sign he's losing the edge. Which is OK, you're entitled to lose your edge after winning 16 grand slams and holding the number one spot for some 300 weeks.
What dismayed me was Federer's lack of tactical insight. It's clear to even a cursory observer that Tsonga has an iffy backhand. For some reason, Roger refused to focus on attacking his opponent's weakness. It's like he believes his opponent's playing style is irrelevant, that he can win on the basis of his own talent. Rafael Nadal is different, cannier in approach. He attacks Federer's backhand relentlessly on clay with deep, viciously kicking topspin. He can probably defeat Federer on clay even without adopting this strategy, but he keeps to what is tried and tested.
Yesterday, with the Haye-Klitschko fight approaching, I watched a few older bouts on YouTube. I started with Klitscko-Lennox Lewis, but it was so boring I needed the energy boost of a few Golden Age matches. I viewed Foreman's demolition of Frazier and Norton; and then the Rumble in the Jungle for about the tenth time. Ali was commentating on the Frazier -Foreman fight, and Frazier on the Ali- Foreman fight. Their approach was strikingly different. Ali kept stressing Frazier should not go ahead like a bull against Foreman's fearsome punches. "He should back up", he said repeatedly. Frazier didn't back up, and got clobbered. Frazier, on the other hand, had no tactical advice for Ali, which was fine because Ali didn't need any. He played his opponent like a master, taking every advantage of Foreman's amateurish technique to launch stinging attacks, while evading his clubbing blows by leaning back against the ring's loose ropes.
Ali had a famously big mouth, but he knew his limitations pretty well (at least until he came back from retirement twice too often). He never ever tried to go toe-to-toe with a superior puncher. In that sense, he was a more humble sportsman than Roger Federer.

The Indian art market's double dip

2011-06-28T17:45:00.005+05:30

ArtTactic, a research and analysis firm, states in its latest report on India: "The Indian Modern and Contemporary art market continues the negative trend as other global art markets are on the rise. For the Summer sales, the auction houses attempted to respond to the disappointing results in March 2011 and had lowered the estimates to try to re-ignite buyer interst (sic)."

Saffronart's auction earlier this month was lacklustre. Over half the lots did sell above their higher estimate, but that was because, as the ArtTactic quote above suggests, those estimates were very modest. The June 15-16 sale achieved only one truly spectacular result: a Tyeb Mehta Kali that was acquired for a little over 1.3 million dollars, over three times its higher estimate, accounting for more than 30% of the 65-lot auction's entire value.

There's been a substantial rejig in the standings of the auction houses since the meltdown. Osian's has been worst hit, and has almost disappeared from the auction radar. Sotheby's has lost ground to Christie's, which is perceived as more dynamic and driven. Sotheby's was dealt a further blow when its long-time consultant, Dadiba Pundole, left and launched his own auction house, conducting a brilliantly successful sale of twenty paintings from Jamshed Bhabha's collection bequeathed to the National Centre for Performing Arts. Dadiba says the break from Sotheby's was unrelated to the setting up of Pundole's. The NCPA sale was offered to him after he ended the Sotheby's association, and an auction was the easiest way of liquidating the stock. I believe him, just as I believe Brad Pitt only began his affair with Angelina Jolie after splitting with Jennifer Aniston.

The slump in the Indian market is receiving international attention. Last week, the Independent's John Elliot published a good piece about the situation. The question is: why should Indian art sales be doing so badly when our economy is so much stronger than most others around the world? Surely one would expect exactly the opposite to be happening, namely that the downtrend would continue in places like Europe and the US facing anaemic recoveries or a return to recession.

The answer lies in a column I published in Time Out in late 2006. I've quoted it before on this blog when the first prediction it made came true, and I'm quoting it again now that the second one has as well.

"... as the autumn auction season kicks off and the records start tumbling, I will hazard this prediction: if the market keeps its present course, it’s heading for a crash sometime in the next two years. It’s going too fast to negotiate twists in the road which are bound to appear up ahead.
People like my friend with the Badri Narayan are pricing genuine collectors out of the market. The turnover of paintings is frighteningly high: it’s not unheard of for a single canvas to be sold half a dozen times within a year. Auction houses have turned advocates rather than neutral sellers. Even Christie’s and Sotheby’s are featuring raw artists and accepting fresh-minted works consigned by galleries, in contravention of normal international practice. The boom that began with established masters has spread to artists with no proven track record or historical merit. Gallery owners, who should be turning off the tap of speculation by carefully vetting clients, have little power to set conditions. They have to suck up to popular artists in order to get a few works out of them. The artists, meanwhile, many of whom have known privation in the not-too-distant past, are keen to make their pile as quickly as possible by selling to the highest bidder.
Despite these unhealthy symptoms, the experts have convinced themselves the party will go on forever. They, like everybody else, are having too much fun to think hard about tomorrow.
The rise in art prices has been congruent with a global boom, and the crash is also likely to be triggered by global factors, as yet unknowable. Once the tipping point arrives, developments intrinsic to India will take over and probably make the correction deep and painful. Since few buyers are purchasing for love, people holding stock will want to cut their losses immediately, feeding supply even as demand fades. There is the additional dimension of mushrooming art funds to consider. These funds usually operate for stipulated periods, and will have to unload their wares even in a declining market, exacerbating the slide."

The two predictions I made were, first, there would be a crash triggered by global factors. Second, and more important, the Indian art market would be worse affected by the crash than global markets because of the dominance of art funds and speculators. In nominal terms, the Indian economy is about 15% larger than it was 12 months ago. Art sales, on the other hand, have actually fallen in value in that period.

I concluded the column thus: "I’m actually looking forward to that time, so I can visit galleries and look at art without the surrounding noise, maybe even buy a painting I like now and again. They may stop serving Black Label at openings, but I don’t like whisky much anyway."

This, too has, happened. I enjoy openings and exhibitions much more now that they're less lavish, less connected to society pages and sticker prices.

Talking Turkey

2011-06-20T12:35:00.001+05:30

My column this fortnight is about shifts in Turkey's perception of itself and its place in the world. Read it here.

Swami Nigamanand's death and CNN-IBN's lies

2011-06-15T11:15:00.008+05:30

Swami Nigamanand's death has made news because it contrasts so clearly with Baba Ramdev's recently concluded fast. Nigamanand fasted for weeks, outside the media spotlight, against illegal mining along the Ganga. Ramdev, protesting corruption in general and dominating prime time while doing so, wasn't able to keep his fast going for long.
Now CNN IBN is claiming Nigamanand was poisoned. "Swami Nigamanand's pathology report says that he he (sic) died of insecticide which was administered to him during the duration of his stay at the government hospital", the news item on CNN IBN's website says. IBN is running it as one of their top stories on both their Hindi and English news channels.
Now, what would a responsible news organisation do, having got hold of a pathology report? I suggest it would contact a doctor to interpret it. No chance of CNN IBN doing that. They're speaking to a District Magistrate and Nigamanand's colleagues, but haven't aired any expert opinions about the report. And it's easy to see why. Here are two grabs of the document from the TV screen. The frame, typically, is never still. Instead we get a series of quick pans and zooms so we can't really read much aside from what the channel chooses to highlight.

From what I can tell, the report suggests the toxicity in Nigamanand's blood sample could arise from any one of four causes:
Organophosphate poisoning
Liver disease such as Hepatitis or cirrhosis
Liver cancer
Malnutrition

Given that the man had gone without food for months, what would you conclude from this? That the swami died from malnutrition (option 4); or that somebody administered him instecticide in the hospital (option 1)? CNN IBN has chosen Option 1, and is carrying it as its top new story. Great way to make a living, Rajdeep Sardesai and company.

The controversy about the pathology report has overshadowed what, to me, seems a more justifiable line of inquiry, namely, why did the Swami die at all? Even comatose patients are kept alive in hospitals for years, so there really doesn't seem any good reason why the man should have died. The post-morten states he suffered from septicaemia. Again, why would he get septicaemia in a hospital? It seems to indicate laxity in his treatment, but I'm not qualified to make a solid judgement. My doctor friend DS is away in Switzerland, but I hope some other physician will weigh in on the issue.

M.F. Husain: 1915 - 2011

2011-06-10T08:55:00.002+05:30

Modern India's greatest painter, M.F. Husain, died yesterday. I wrote an obituary for the financial daily Mint. You can read it here.

It's the army, stupid.

2011-06-06T12:51:00.002+05:30

My latest Yahoo! column explores why India remained democratic when so many developing countries were taken over by dictators. Read it here.

I've been off the blog for a while, but promise to post more often in weeks to come.

The new Yahoo! Mail sucks

2011-05-26T12:36:00.002+05:30

Two weeks ago, I switched to the new Yahoo! Mail that is supposed to take on Google, and I'm regretting it bitterly. The Search function works maybe one time out of ten; and I need search desperately because of a personal quirk: I don't maintain a contacts list or an address book. It's silly, I know, but I fear sending out a virus to friends through the account. The only way to prevent this from happening, as far as I can tell, is not to have a folder of addresses that the virus can access.
Absent an address book, I depend on the Search function to help me out every day. Without it, I'm left trawling through 14000 mails seeking the addresses I need. It's been a nightmare because I've had to send out invites to dozens of people for an event in Delhi tomorrow. Luckily Facebook's functioning well. Small mercies.
Back when I worked in a dotcom, Yahoo! was what every website aspired to be. Now we ask how the company could ever have been a dominant force in tech, the way we wonder how Britain ever managed to rule the world.

Bashar the Basher

2011-05-23T15:50:00.003+05:30

My fortnight's column on Yahoo! is about Bashar al-Assad and other dictators, and can be read here.

Cops and robbers: dumb and dumber

2011-05-20T21:10:00.004+05:30

Early this month, my sister Renuka's Mitsubishi Pajero was stolen from her building's compound. A compound ought to be secure, but for some reason this one has a gate at the back. The guard was hanging out, or napping, at the front door while thieves managed to break into the car and drive it out the back gate.
By the time the robbery was discovered at least five hours had passed and the thieves could easily have been at the state's border. It was pretty devastating. Renuka and my brother-in-law Ashutosh filed a complaint, but the police said a professional gang had been targetting Pajeros for four years and chances of the SUV being found were slim.
Then, a week ago, Renuka received a call from Jalpaiguri police station saying they had her car. Jalpaiguri is on the Nepal / Bhutan border, so the thieves apparently aimed to drive it right out of India. They'd crossed a dozen states seemingly without hassle, but were stopped in West Bengal by cops who felt they didn't appear to have the means to be driving an SUV. They asked the men, one Nepali, one Bihari, for their papers, which were not in order. They searched the car and found, wait for it, the car's original license plates in the dickey. Guys who couldn't throw out license plates were unlikely to have erased chassis numbers. The police traced the Mitsubishi dealer through the vehicle identification number; the dealer gave them my sister's contact. And so it was that, out of the blue, Renuka got a call that lifted the depression which had hung about her house for two weeks.
Maybe the thieves believed they could bribe their way out of any tough spot. Maybe the police were more alert and more honest because West Bengal's administration has just changed after 34 years of Communist rule. Whatever the story behind their arrest, it was very nice of the robbers to preserve evidence of their crime, and to keep it in the first place anybody would look.
The car hasn't actually been returned yet. After impounding it, the Jalpaiguri police asked for the original FIR to be faxed to them. The Versova cops reluctantly agreed to do it, but then forgot, or decided that helping to convict criminals was not part of their job description. Finally, Ashutosh faxed his own copy of the complaint, and that should hopefully do the trick.

The Central Bureau of Investigation has shown the world exactly how incompetent it is by making public a list of terrorists and criminals it claims are being sheltered by Pakistan, only for the media to discover one fearsome militant hanging out in a suburb of Bombay, and another lodged in Arthur Road jail. No doubt more of the missing terrorists will soon be found in plain sight. When I read stories like this, I wonder how police manage to catch any criminals at all. Well, the story of my sister's car indicates that, if our cops are dumb, our thieves are often dumber.

Vadilal does a Häagen-Dazs

2011-05-16T17:03:00.006+05:30

Vadilal ice-cream had retreated for years to its home base, Ahmedabad, but is now taking another stab at capturing a chunk of the market in other Indian cities. It is advertising a new range called Vadilal Gourmet. The ad, which you can see here:

is a straightforward copy of commercials Häagen-Dazs has run for a while:

The question is: can Vadilal's Belgian Chocolate flavour mimic the Häagen-Dazs taste? Now that would be a copy worth checking out.

Djokovic rejuvenates tennis

2011-05-16T10:55:00.005+05:30

I can't remember the last time I watched a tennis match, outside of Grand Slams, that didn't involve Rafael Nadal playing Roger Federer. After years of those two dominating the game, there's finally somebody else to look out for. Last night I watched a tired Novak Djokovic summon up the strength to beat Nadal for the fourth successive time, and for the second time on clay, Nadal's favourite surface.
Djokovic's accomplishment eluded Roger Federer even at his best. That's because Federer's game has always had one slight weakness Nadal could exploit on clay. The Swiss master finds it difficult to hit high bouncing balls for winners from the baseline on his backhand. That chink in his armour was exploited for years by Nadal to get out of tough spots; anytime Federer seemed to be taking charge of a rally, Nadal would go deep to the backhand corner; he could hit the ball relatively slowly and gain the fraction of a second he needed to recover position, knowing Federer was unlikely to hit a clean winner in response. Djokovic nullified that tactic last evening, repeatedly climbing on high balls and crashing double handed backhands cross-court with tremendous power and accuracy.
The final was patchy, with phases of sublimity followed by some ordinary shot-making. I felt that Djokovic, exhausted from his semi-final win over Andy Murray, needed to close the match in two sets; had it gone to the decider, Nadal would've been the favourite. Despite squandering three match points, Djokovic pulled off an incredible win.

Is Jeff Koons going cheap?

2011-05-15T09:56:00.006+05:30

A news item about the Sotheby's sale of contemporary art last week read, "Jeff Koons' "Pink Panther" disappointed on Tuesday night at Sotheby's, falling about 15% short of its lowball estimate and selling for $16,882,500". You know you're living in a weird world when a porcelain figure of a Hollywood star embracing a cartoon character sells for over 16 million dollars, and yet disappoints the seller.

Pink Panther, created in 1988, first sold at auction in 1999, when it was acquired by the media tycoon Peter Brant for 1.8 million dollars. That was a record for Jeff Koons at the time, and you'd think a 900% mark-up in the 12 years since would seem impressive. Apparently not.

The man who shelled out nearly 17 million for the sculpture was an anonymous Asian telephone bidder.

Osama, icons and iconoclasm

2011-05-09T18:30:00.002+05:30

My Yahoo! column today is about Bin Laden, Wahhabis and Puritans, icons and iconoclasts. Read it here.

Digvijay Singh and bad old Congress habits

2011-05-04T11:12:00.002+05:30

Digvijay Singh, who, a few months back, lied about phone conversations with Hemant Karkare, is a throwback to the worst sort of Congress 'secularism'. It's a secularism which panders to religious conservatives among Hindus as well as Muslims. It began under Indira Gandhi and peaked in Rajiv Gandhi's time, symbolised by the twin acts of overturning the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, and opening the gates of the Babri Masjid to allow a shilanyas to take place. These actions, instead of pleasing members of both communities, led instead to sectarian polarisation, and to Muslim as well as Hindu partisans being able to speak with some justice of the Congress favouring the other side.
Under Manmohan Singh, the party has generally avoided dabbling in religious issues, which is great. But Digvijay Singh, as I said, is a throwback. As Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, he tried to counter the BJP by launching his own campaign for a nationwide ban on cow slaughter; extolling the virtues of cow urine; and accusing his opponent Uma Bharti of offering non-vegetarian cake to Hanuman.
Recently, he's switched to feeding off Muslim resentment. Yesterday, for example, he criticised the United States for not giving Osama bin Laden a sufficiently Muslim burial. Well, if he has a problem with Osama's final rites, he should be even more critical of the way the 26/11 terrorists were treated. The bodies of the nine dead men were embalmed, in direct contravention of Islamic norms, and kept on ice at the J J Hospital morgue for fifteen whole months, though orthodox Islam demands a burial within 24 hours. We have no idea if any religious rites were conducted before their bodies were finally placed in the earth.
Digvijay Singh's own party rules Maharashtra state; why didn't he lobby for a proper religious burial for the nine Bombay terrorists, since he has so much concern for mass murderers?

Thor gets hammered

2011-05-03T20:20:00.006+05:30

A piece of advice: do not pay good money and waste two hours of your life watching Thor. Not on Tyr's day, Woden's day, Thor's day, or Freya's day. Not, that is, unless you are about twelve years old or have children that age who want to go see the movie.
One major problem with it is that the story focuses on a conflict in far off galaxies between Thor's people (who are alien beings taken to be gods when they visit the earth) and some chaps called Frost Giants. Humans are largely extraneous to the happenings.
A second issue is the lighting; James Cameron got it right first time; he knew every frame had to be brightened to the nth degree to make an impact after passing through the dark 3-D viewing glasses. No other director has quite understood that, and Kenneth Branagh certainly didn't get the memo.
Kenneth Branagh: he had an extraordinary talent for making Shakespeare's words understandable to wide audiences. Actors in productions of Shakespeare usually leave me trying hard to catch what's being said, though I've read most of the plays, some of them multiple times. Branagh had a rare gift. Maybe he still has it, I don't know if he's still acting on stage much.
With Thor, though, he's seriously compromised his reputation as a film-maker.

Fast food and smoking guns

2011-04-25T14:44:00.001+05:30

My Yahoo! India column this time is about media time versus real time. Read it here.

The Jehangir Nicholson collection

2011-04-17T10:35:00.008+05:30

The Jehangir Nicholson Galley opened last week, after a long delay, at the Prince of Wales Museum (which is now named after Shivaji like everything else in Bombay). I couldn't make it to the opening, but caught the inaugural exhibition on Friday, and came away disappointed. It didn't feel like a well thought-out museum show accompanied by thorough documentation; more like something thrown together fairly quickly and haphazardly.
I don't envy the task of the curators. They had a fairly small space to work with and must have been aware that the best of Nicholson's paintings had been displayed at the capacious National Gallery of Modern Art in 1998. Still, the show on view at Shivaji Museum doesn't really give us any insight into the mind and taste of the collector, or seek to underline the collection's strengths and biases. Instead, it just hangs one or two works from each of the city's canonical artists. The exception is three large Tyeb Mehta canvases, which one is drawn to immediately and which are the best things in the room.
Nicholson's favourite painter, Laxman Shreshtha, is underrepresented. The choice of a black-and-white Shreshtha marked by geometric motifs was bold, but I believe misguided. It would have been wiser to choose one of the painter's magisterial stormy abstracts, though these are better known than the picture finally chosen.
The museum trustees hired an extremely capable and dedicated curator, Zasha Colah, to tend to the collection, but have evidently not given her much latitude in selecting works for the first show. I hope this will be rectified in the future, so we get truly museum-worthy exhibitions.

The Huffingtonpost and writing for free

2011-04-13T08:54:00.004+05:30

I've never trusted Arianna Huffington. The founder of The Huffingtonpost has changed her ideological spots too often for her political beliefs to seem anything but cynical and self-serving. I wasn't surprised, therefore, when, after banging on about US unemployment for months; after bashing President Obama for supposedly doing too little to spur job growth; and after running hundreds of columns against corporate greed; she sold her website to AOL for $315 million, and sacked over 200 journalists from the two organisations.
HuffPo, as the site is known for short, was built around two controversial strategies: cannibalising (or 'aggregating') content from online editions of newspapers; and persuading hundreds of bloggers to write for free. Many of these bloggers were celebrities or politicians -- the likes of Alec Baldwin, Robert Reich, Gary Hart and Deepak Chopra -- for whom any payment would seem like a pittance. There were hundreds of others, however, who could have used a bit of cash, but agreed to contribute gratis, tempted by the site's wide readership.
The business model angered journalists as well as newspaper owners, but there was little they could do about being undercut by content aggregators like HuffPo. Everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Bill Keller of the New York Times took issue with Arianna, but her admirers interpreted the criticism as sour grapes. HuffPo groupies saw it not as a parasite but as an alternative to mainstream media. The AOL-HuffPo deal has left those naive souls disillusioned. It's worse than Ben & Jerry selling out to Unilever.
Now a class action suit has been filed on behalf of all who contributed without payment to help HuffPo become a dominant online force. It's interesting to discover how many bloggers were taken in by the idea that they'd benefit by giving away content to Arianna Huffington.
I'm used to this sort of thing happening in India. Years ago, I was asked to write an art column for the Bombay Times. Shocked at the payment offered by the most profitable newspaper in India, I turned down the proposal immediately. The journalist who made the offer thought he was doing me a huge favour, and couldn't understand my refusal; after all, many better known people were writing columns for the same amount. Two friends I spoke to about it also said I'd been wrong to refuse. As a career move, having a picture every week in the Bombay Times would be a great boost (I should clarify this was a decade ago when the supplement was at its peak).
I have a narrow moral view of these matters, though: if somebody can afford to pay, they should do so, instead of pushing for cut-price rates promising corollary benefits. I've done my share of pro bono writing and lecturing for non-commercial ventures. If I also offer discounts (from a low starting sticker price) to billionaires, how am I going to make a living at all?

My Yahoo! column is back

2011-04-12T11:03:00.001+05:30

After a hiatus for a tech overhaul, the Yahoo! India columns are back. My first piece went online yesterday. It is about chocolate, bananas, oil and war. Read it here.

The Match

2011-04-03T09:26:00.009+05:30

For once I wished I was on twitter. As it happened, I couldn't even blog from the stadium because I'd carried an old junk phone, just in case the police decided at the last minute not to allow mobiles inside. This is what my liveblog would've been, as best I can remember. I'm putting this in without having read any accounts of the match or heard any experts commenting on it. Will be interesting to compare my take to theirs once I'm done.

10.30am: I get to Churchgate early, having encountered no traffic on the inside roads.

My companion Nikhil calls to say he's running late. I have an ice tea at Tea Centre.

I join the Divecha Pavilion queue. They're confiscating all food items, all bottles, all bags. Some women are very upset. It's difficult for a woman to go ten hours without a handbag. Friction between female security personnel and handbag toting ticket holders.

We're in, after being felt up by five different guards, police, army, NSG, whatever. I'll never get used to being frisked.

We are pointed to the seats marked on our tickets. Those are not the seats we'd have chosen within the Divecha pavilion. Besides, if we knew our places were reserved we could have come two hours later; but I'm happy it's being done. Eliminates interlopers in one shot.

Our position is high and a bit square. There's a nice breeze blowing.

Lots of Indo-Brits around us. Were foreigners favoured in the ballot? I was told last evening that I entered 'Kuwait' in my address, instead of India. Providential slip of the mouse?

We hunt for food and drink. Only samosas available, greasy. I eat two, and decide to taste Gatorade for the first time. It's blue and disgusting.

Our seats are far too narrow. Only thing in their favour is they're better than the benches they replaced.

The sound system and acoustics are atrocious; announcements are really loud but we can't understand a word being said.

The teams come out to practice. Everyone's eyes are on jersey number 10. Sachin's hair looks orange-y. Definitely a bad hair colour day.

Gambhir isn't limping; Sreesanth's bowling quite a bit; Pathan and Ashwin aren't doing much of anything. Interesting choice, if that's what the playing eleven's going to be.

The toss. Dhoni wins it, or seems to, but then they do it again. This time, Sangakkara calls right. The crowd groans. They're going to bat. Memories of 1996 always in the back of my head. Will the ball start turning square under lights?

The squads come out, each member accompanied by a child. Some of the 'children' are gangly teenagers. National anthems. The Sri Lankan one is interminable. Sinhalese, being an Indo-European language, sounds much more familiar to me than Tamil or Malayalam.

Zaheer bowls a great first spell. Trying to erase the memory of the 2003 final. It's impossible to lose a 100 over match in three overs, but Zaheer came as close as humanly possible eight years ago. This time, he bowls three straight maidens, and adds one scalp to his collection.

Sreesanth's bowling rubbish; the least you can do if you're bowling rubbish is not give free hits, but he oversteps. What pressure Zaheer creates, Sreesanth releases.

The ball's doing nothing. Looks like a 300 pitch, but Zaheer's first spell has virtually taken that score out of the equation.

Sangakkara and Mahela are looking very comfortable, batting well within themselves. Mahela's getting a run a ball without seeming to try hard.

It's a joy watching the cat and mouse game between Harbhajan and Sangakkara. Live, one sees the huge difference between a specialist bowler and part-timer. Bhajji's variation of length and pace is superb, Yuvraj is one-dimensional, but lucky.

Imran Khan says weak bowling sides should prepare pitches that favour bowlers. It's counter-intuitive but dead on. Play to your weaknesses, not your strengths. We beat Pakistan, which has a better bowling attack, because the semi-final pitch assisted bowlers.

On a pitch like this, the difference between real quality (Zaheer, Harbhajan, Murali, Malinga) and the rest (every other bowler in India and Sri Lanka) is accentuated.

India are like Real Madrid in the reign of the Galacticos. We know our defence is weak, but back ourselves to score more goals than the opposition.

Mahela steps it up at the death, as do his partners. 65 runs in the final powerplay. People around me are despondent, but if the pitch stays true it's not a great score. I'd rate India's 260 in the semi-final a tougher chase given how oddly that pitch was behaving. Lanka seem to have decided to play for a baseline score of 250 and taken everything beyond as a bonus. Mahela gave them a good fillip, but I still think it's a 300 pitch. Unless it begins turning.

The break. We get a free lunch / dinner box with our ticket. It's from Croissants etc. Dry bread with two kinds of chicken, a fruit drink and brownie. Better than greasy samosas.

Malinga's bowling at one stump. He hits it over and over. His express pace is apparent even in these practice deliveries.

Second ball of the Indian innings, Sehwag is trapped plumb. As usual, he asks for a review without consulting the non-striker. Review shows it's plumb, one of Malinga's straight and low specials.

Sachin and Gambhir demonstrate there's nothing in the pitch; they play through the line comfortably. Sachin feels confident enough to drive on the up; one of the most breathtaking sights in cricket.

Malinga gets Sachin fishing and snicking. Henceforth, he's the villain of Wankhede, booed whenever he touches the ball.

Despair in the crowd at Sachin's dismissal. I say to Nikhil, "Come on, you can't expect the thirty plus guys to do everything. Let the youngsters show why they're in the team."

It's lucky Murali doesn't like bowling in the powerplay. The Lankan attack, like India's, is twenty overs of quality and thirty of garbage. Gambhir and Virat consolidate in peace.

Gambhir lofts Randiv, bisecting deep cover and long off, but the ball just hangs in the air and suddenly there's a fielder under it; but then maybe it dips and Kulasekhara can't get to it even after a dive. Really peculiar episode: a certain boundary turns into a certain dismissal only to end up as a dropped catch.

Moment of truth. Murali comes on to bowl. No turn, at least nothing troubling. This from a guy who could get the ball to deviate on a laminated board. Now it's entirely down to our mental strength. The Sri Lankan fielding is falling apart. No mental strength there.

Murali isn't hobbling, but doesn't appear 100% fit either. Even a 70% fit Murali would be deadly on a helpful track, though.

Kohli gets out needlessly. Dhoni comes in ahead of Yuvraj, a half-expected move with Murali bowling. He begins striking the ball cleanly, as all other batsmen have done beyond the first couple of overs in each innings.

We stay in touch with the required rate. Slowly, gradually, the match equation begins to favour India. We get ahead of the Duckworth Lewis requirement. The breeze is strong and has a monsoon-y feel to it. Nikhil says he'll take a thundershower and the win now.

Luckily the breeze isn't being felt downstairs. No drift in the ball. Dhoni and Gambhir reeling the match in like a giant marlin.

Malinga back on. A last throw of the dice. Any hint of reverse swing? Nope. After two fiery overs he's taken off. Soon after, Dhoni crashes a ball straight past the bowler and Malinga at long on chases it down. A tired pick up and a defeated throw.

Gambhir gets himself out before the fish has been landed. Yuvraj comes in and looks comfortable. 50 runs in 50 balls should be an easy win for this team. Not Indian teams of the past, of course, which have lost from more dominant positions. That, right there, is the crucial difference between this squad and previous teams.

Yuvraj and Dhoni bring it home. A hugely satisfying match which hinged on the behaviour of the pitch. Sanga depended on it helping the bowlers in the evening more than it actually did. 275 is always going to be a tough chase in a world cup final, but a little movement off the track could have made it impossible.

Lots of announcements. All better seen and heard on TV. We stay till the cup's in Dhoni's hands, and then head for a beer or two.

Wankhede blues

2011-04-02T08:22:00.003+05:30

Here's a piece I wrote for Time Out after watching this match at Wankhede stadium five and a half years ago. Though not a fan of the IPL, I acknowledge it improved the spirit of spectatorship in India by mixing players from different nations and drawing more women to grounds.

Fan-aticism

The BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) has botched its organisational duties in a variety of ways. A strict rotation policy has awarded matches to cities where it’s sure to rain. The board’s avarice has meant a preference for day-night games, though evening dew gives the side batting second an unfair advantage. There’s been chaos in the allotment of telecast rights.
The Mumbai Cricket Association’s as clueless as cricket’s national authority. The section of Wankhede stadium where I sat watching India play South Africa was packed at least 60% over capacity. Obviously, counterfeiters had gained an inside track on the ticket design. The scoreboard -- installed a few years ago at tremendous expense -- failed to function. The stadium, as characterless a pile of concrete as you’ll ever see, appeared in desperate need of an upgrade. Inadequate water supply, dirty toilets, cracked benches: that’s what my 900 rupee north stand ticket afforded me.
Perhaps we get the administrators we deserve. Indians are, without doubt, the most unsporting spectators in the world. Loutish behaviour, such as hurling projectiles at fielders, has led to stringent restrictions on patrons. All objects that can be thrown and cause damage, such as water bottles, are now prohibited in stadiums. This straitjacketing disproportionately turns off those who are usually well behaved, like women and senior citizens,. In the north stand at Wankhede males outnumbered females at least 20 to 1 and there were no elderly fans at all.
The crowd gratuitously chanted “Kallis is a bastard”, heckled Andre Nel, and fell silent each time the visitors scored or took a wicket. There was the usual racism, no less shameful because it is customary. Black players from the West Indies and England have endured taunts in the past, and it was Makhaya Ntini’s turn last Monday. Indian players didn’t escape either. Dravid was briefly booed even as he methodically guided India to the target. Winning, it seems, is not sufficient. Without a steady supply of boundaries -- it doesn’t matter if they’re wild hoicks or streaky edges -- the Indian viewer gets bored.
Television foreshortens sport, cuts it up into pieces, makes it look easy. Watching it live, feeling the real pace of the ball, ought to bring home the worth of well executed strokes, make the game less utilitarian. But we seem to prefer cricket in two dimensions even when watching it in three.
So what’s to be done? There are too many issues here for me to consider individually, but I’ve a couple of suggestions. Seat numbers printed on tickets must be taken seriously. Insisting that ticket-holders sit at allotted spots will deter fakers and ease crowd control. The BCCI could study how the Hindi film industry transformed its audience profile after the dire days of the late eighties. It could also emulate measures taken by football associations in Europe to curb hooliganism and racism. Instead, I’m sure it will slumber on until a stampede or riot takes lives, and then jerk a knee.

Road to the final: Jump the Q

2011-04-01T16:57:00.004+05:30

The website Kyazoonga, which has partnered the Indian cricket board to sell tickets online, advertises itself with the tagline 'Jump the Q'. It seems a bit overstated for those who have spent hours waiting at the Mumbai Hockey Association in a queue that coiled and coiled like a giant cobra. Tickets are being handed out at a rate of about two every three minutes. My own tickets (I have got them in my wallet as I write) required just a two minute wait at one of the three counters. At that rate they'd be clearing three persons every two minutes, over twice the speed they're going at, and there would be no coiling queue. However, the line includes many proxies who have inadequate documentation, and everything is held up while phone numbers are verified and credit card numbers confirmed. There were about 150 people in front of me when I got there this morning at 11.30am. The ticket windows had opened early, and the queue was already moving when I arrived. I walked away a little after 3.30pm. At that point there were over 300 people in line behind me. At the pace they're going, the last person already inside the ground at 3.30pm would get his or her ticket at 9.30pm. For those entering later, well, the wait could stretch past midnight.
The counters were originally set to stay open for about 1500 minutes over three days. That would mean about 1000 applicants could be serviced at the pace Kyazoonga and the police have maintained. Since no individual is granted more than 2 tickets, no more than 2000 tickets could have been handed out in the time granted. The remaining 2000 (there were 4000 tickets in all in the online ballot) can't possibly all be taken care of in extra time. The maths is clear: lots of people who have booked tickets to the big game will not get their hands on them.
After my documents were checked, and details entered at the ticket counter, I had to fill in a form for the police providing address, phone number etc; then I was photographed on a cellphone. I wonder if all these records will be of any help if I was to lose my ticket. Something tells me they won't.

Road to the final: the ordeal

2011-03-31T21:15:00.003+05:30

The story so far: having set aside a paltry number of tickets for the public, failed to control crowds at booking counters, and seen the ticket-selling website crash when sales opened for the cricket world cup final, the BCCI, through its partner Kyazoonga, opted for a ballot to decide who would get a ticket to the event. I was among those whose name came up. Two days ago, I received an email from Kyazoonga. It said the physical tickets would be available for collection from March 30 to April 1 between 12.30pm and 8pm at the local hockey association ticket counters near Wankhede stadium. Claimants of tickets were asked to bring printouts, a government ID, the credit card with which the purchase was made, plus photocopies.
The first collection day, yesterday, was also the day of the India-Pakistan semi-final. No cricket fan in his or her right mind would miss that. I stayed home and watched TV. This afternoon, I went to the pickup location, getting there at 4.30. A policeman barred my way, and told me to come back tomorrow.
"It's full for today", he said.
"But I was told the counters would be open till 8".
"Yes, but we've sent in four hundred people, and that's all we can accommodate today at the rate they're giving out tickets".
There was some back and forth with me and two others who got there immediately after; the policeman, expectedly, enjoyed our plight.
"I've come a really long way" one said.
"Long way? From Australia?"
"Powai"
"That's close by. Come back tomorrow."
"It's a working day; I've already taken half-day today".
"What can I do about that?"
And so on.
So tomorrow, I shall pack a picnic lunch and a book and get there before noon, prepared to stand in queue for five or six hours. But of course, news of this additional obstacle must have got round, which means there will be a rush early, which means maybe even noon isn't good enough. People selected in the ballot who live in other cities and will only get in tomorrow afternoon are in for a cruel shock.

The fuel surcharge scam

2011-03-30T09:20:00.001+05:30

Regular travellers across the world have by now got used to the absurd division of airline fares between a meaningless 'base price' and an arbitrary 'fuel surcharge'. I call the surcharge arbitrary because it does not vary with the price of aviation turbine fuel. In the early days of the surcharge being put in place, travel websites would quote only the base fare, and those booking tickets would have to click through one or two screens before hitting the full ticket price.
The first website to quote complete fares up front was Cleartrip and, once I discovered it, I stuck with it: it was honest, easily navigable, offered good deals, didn't send out spam text messages, and had a Google-like simplicity to its GUI.
Recently I bought a ticket on Cleartrip which came with a 'free ticket' offer. The offer wasn't the reason I bought the ticket, but if it had been, I'd have ended up feeling cheated. Here's why. A few days after buying that ticket, I looked up fares to Goa. The 'free ticket' was restricted to SpiceJet, which quoted a price of about 2200 rupees on the Bombay-Goa sector, one-way. Go Air and Indigo offered virtually the same price. The fare break-up was, however, very different on the three airlines. Indigo's was something like: base fare, 900 rupees; fuel surcharge, 1000 rupees; taxes and levies, 300 rupees. Go Air's was: base fare 400 rupees; fuel surcharge, 1500 rupees; taxes and levies 300 rupees. SpiceJet had a base fare of exactly one rupee, and a fuel surcharge of 1900 rupees. So, taking up ClearTrip's free ticket offer, which applied only to the base fare, would have saved me a grand total of 100 paise. I chose to shell out the extra rupee and fly Indigo.

Save the date

2011-03-28T08:59:00.006+05:30

The first 'save the date' invite I received was to my friend Goodwin's wedding. The event was to be held in October on the banks of the Shenandoah (Had to put that detail in because it's such a lovely name), and the letter got to me in March or April. Though I couldn't make it to the wedding, I was given sufficient time to make arrangements.
About two or three years ago, Bombay galleries started sending out cards and emails with the tag 'save the date'. Without exception, they were for openings scheduled within a week of the mail's delivery. It isn't unusual now to get a 'save the date' invitation today for an opening tomorrow. I don't expect art shows here to be planned as far in advance as American weddings, but surely there comes a point at which appointment books should be presumed to have been filled, after which it becomes mildly insulting to ask for a date to be saved.
I used to be bothered by the use of 'vernissage' instead of 'opening' or 'preview', since the French term sound dreadfully snobbish. But now 'save the date' annoys me more, partly because the meme has proven so infectious.

Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-26T12:47:00.005+05:30

For an iconic actress who won two Academy Awards, Elizabeth Taylor left a curiously thin legacy of classic films. She was at her peak in the 1950s, and when I consider her beside other stars from the same period like Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, Taylor comes in a distant third. I can still watch and enjoy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. Monroe's limitations as an actress are apparent in these movies, but so are her unmatchable strengths. Similarly, Roman Holiday and Sabrina retain their charm, thanks largely to the presence of Audrey Hepburn, who outshines Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart. Taylor, on the other hand, was overshadowed by James Dean in Giant.
When one thinks of her roles, the one that comes insistently to mind is the ridiculous Cleopatra. OK, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf isn't bad, but that did not showcase Taylor's incredible beauty, preferring to play against the grain to prove she could act, though no such proof was needed. Its director, the young Mike Nichols, really hit his stride with his next film, The Graduate, which I've seen a dozen times. Back in 1967, the assessment of the relative merits of the two films was probably different. Virginia Woolf was nominated for 13 Oscars and won 5, while The Graduate was nominated for 7 and won just a single Academy Award. Just goes to show.
There must be fans of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof out there, but to me it seems like a poor cousin to a previous adaptation of a Tennessee Williams drama, A Streetcar Named Desire. Marlon Brando in Streetcar, Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, Marilyn in Gentlemen, Hepburn and Peck in Roman Holiday, those are truly memorable parts in the history of cinema. I can't think of anything Taylor did that occupies a similar place.

Got tickets

2011-03-18T11:56:00.002+05:30

Four weeks ago, I described my frustrating effort to buy tickets for the cricket world cup final. I was among half a million people who tried to access the site at the moment the tickets went on sale. Hardly surprising that it crashed. More surprising that the organisers didn't predict it would happen.
Belatedly, they put a fair system in play, based on a ballot. My name came up in the lottery, which means I have two very expensive passes to the final. But that's only stage 1 of the lottery. Frankly, although I'd love to see a game between, say, Australia and South Africa, I'd only find it worthwhile shelling out 35 grand for two passes if India are in the contest, which is only a 25% chance right now. I haven't checked the returns policy on Kyazoonga; the website might be crashed by punters seeking refunds the moment India are eliminated, if that dreadful event does come to pass.

Kababs etc

2011-03-15T20:13:00.004+05:30

I'm staying at Nizamuddin for two days, so naturally I braved the flies and dirt of the road leading to the dargah, and lunched at Karim's. The meal was fine, the seekh kababs succulent and flavourful, but I was reminded of the hype about the restaurant by articles quoted on the menu's front page.

It is strange so many people believe Karim's offers some kind of authentic Mughlai cuisine. To begin with, what we call Mughlai is very distant from what the Mughals ate. Aside from this fact, which applies to all Indian restaurants claiming to serve Mughal dishes, Karim's stands out as particularly inauthentic because all the food coming out of its kitchens is cooked in a partially hydrogented vegetable oil known as vanaspati. It's a cheap ghee substitute originally marketed by Unilever, and based on a chemical process that's been used in industrial-scale manufacturing for exactly a century (Procter & Gamble began making Crisco in 1911). There were no Mughals left in 1911, but had there been any, I can guarantee they'd have turned up their noses at the idea of kababs and biryani cooked in vanaspati. Jabeen and I did exactly that when we first dined at the Karim's in Old Delhi over a decade ago, and I'm sure the Mughals had more discerning palates where this kind of food is concerned.

Karim's has gone posh in the past couple of years; the Nizamuddin branch is now a spacious, two-level affair with air-con. The owners clearly have no need to use vanaspati as a cost-saver any longer, but they've stuck with it. They believe, I suppose, that their regulars have acquired a taste for the inferior, trans fat laden cooking medium they have used for decades.

Unlike the Mughlai tradition, the nawabi one that flourishes in Lucknow has genuine claims to authenticity: a number of current chefs are descended from men who cooked for Wajid Ali Shah and his extended family.

One such chef has opened a chain of biryani and kabab eateries called Kakori House. The three Kakori House outlets in Bombay have a few tables for in-restaurant dining, but operate mainly through delivery and take-away. They provide by far the best home delivered kababs I have had in my life. The first time I ordered from Kakori House I wasn't fully satisfied. We asked for haleem and galouti kababs, and didn't care for the consistency of either. It's one thing for kababs to melt in the mouth, quite another for them to be melted before they get to the mouth. I like meat to be at least a bit aldente since, unlike the nawab for whom the galouti kabab was supposedly invented, my teeth are virtually intact. Kakori House's burra kababs, which I was treated to by my friend Jerry and subsequently ordered from home, provide exactly the right combination of resistance and softness. Their smoky flavour is exceptional, way better than most high-end Indian restaurants can manage; and the biryani is brilliant as well: flavourful but not over-spicy, and loaded with juicy goat meat.

Kakori House is a premium caterer: most dishes cost between 150 and 300 rupees. But for those who are sick of run-of-the-mill Mughlai offerings, and are willing to pay extra for real quality, I whole-heartedly recommend this relatively new chain, particularly the mutton biryani and burra kababs.

Black Swan

2011-03-10T16:51:00.010+05:30

I have now viewed the films in competition with The King's Speech for the Best Director Oscar, and I rank the Colin Firth starrer fifth out of five. The Social Network and True Grit show far more cinematic acumen, though the latter is some way from being the Coens' best effort.
Darren Aronofsky would get my vote for Best Director, for Black Swan, which I saw yesterday. It's a movie that takes many risks; brimful of cliches, stereotypes and melodrama, but making something unexpected and disturbing from them. The film gives us a glimpse of the heart of darkness, while we imagine at the start that the protagonist's gradual discovery of an edgier self will bring relief and catharsis to us the audience.
Let me step back and explain what I mean. Natalie Portman plays Nina, a pretty ballerina (see what I mean by cliches? Aronofsky riffs off everything from ABBA to fairy tales, Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes and Roman Polanski's The Tenant in the course of the movie's hundred minute running time) who is selected to play the main role in a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Swan Lake is about a woman cursed to take the form of a white swan by day and requiring true love to become fully human again. Just as she appears to have found such love through Prince Siegfried, a scheming doppelganger named Odile takes the Swan Princess's place, and tricks Siegfried into declaring his love for her. This woman, Odile, is the Black Swan of the title.
The director of the ballet company is certain Nina will make an accomplished White Swan, but fears she is too goody-goody to be an effective Black Swan. He encourages Nina to walk on the wild side a little, to lose control. He thinks of this in sexual terms, asking her at one point to go home and touch herself. While Nina may be too repressed to touch herself, she is used to scratching herself, a form of self injury that complements her bulimia.
As she seeks her dark side, an abyss opens up much deeper than anything the ballet director could predict or desire. Starting off as a tale of self-overcoming not too far removed from The King's Speech, Black Swan shifts register and genres till, near the end of the ride, you're in the horror film neighbourhood, which is a bit like starting at the Lincoln Center and finishing in the Bronx.
Natalie Portman is excellent in the lead role. It's obvious she isn't a professional dancer, but she trained enough to be a plausible imitation, which is as much as you can expect from an actor. Her love scene with Mila Kunis was entirely removed by the censors.

The King's Speech

2011-03-07T12:46:00.003+05:30

The King's Speech is a rather rudimentary film enlivened by some excellent acting. Had it not won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director before I viewed it, I'd probably have enjoyed it considerably more than I did. The wide-angle lensing used throughout the film seemed excessive to me, good for a narrative more grotesque than one about a prince's speech impediment: it feels like an unsuccessful attempt by a man used to directing for television, as Tom Hooper is, to make cinema out of a piece of theatre. There's a noticeable axis jump in the long scene where Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush first meet, which is really surprising considering how much TV work Hooper has done. The music was horrible throughout, cutting unnecessarily into the final address, delivered by George VI as war clouds gather over Europe.
The highlight of last month's disastrous Oscar ceremony was the cutting of glimpses from the ten movies nominated for Best Picture to the sound of Firth's final speech. It worked much better than the mute tableaux presented near the end of The King's Speech.
Another downside to this enjoyable minor film was Timothy Spall's scowling Winston Churchill: surely the worst Churchill in movie history.

The film was hit with an R rating in the United States, thanks to the profanities voiced by Firth after Rush encourages him to overcome his inhibitions. Harvey Weinstein is now considering a PG rated version of the movie with the strong language removed. For some reason, the Indian censors have passed the film with a certificate for Universal exhibition, without a single sound cut. Funny that a series of fucks enunciated in a plummy Brit accent is fine for kids to hear, but if an Indian character says madarchod, our censors find it too provocative even for adults.

NDTV's false propaganda about ports

2011-03-02T09:23:00.004+05:30

Anybody who has watched NDTV down the years knows that Prannoy Roy (who appears to have instructed correspondents to highlight his educational achievements: Yesterday one of them said, "Prannoy... I'm sorry, Dr.Roy") loves liberalisation and the stock market. Every February 28, he suggests the best way of judging the budget is tracking the market's intra-day movement.
But there's one business Prannoy Roy seems to abhor: ports.
NDTV has been conducting a drive to Save India's Beaches. Perhaps because of worries this would be regarded as elitist, this has now morphed into a campaign to Save India's Coast. Roy emphasises it's not about people tanning themselves on golden sands but about the livelihoods of poor communities. The programme is sponsored by Toyota Etios. It stands to reason that the manufacturer of machines that cause massive amounts of pollution is chosen to fund an environmental crusade.
Perhaps the problem is with the medium itself. Is television well equipped to handle complex issues while maintaining ratings? TV programmes depend on assigning blame to easily identifiable targets. But there is no single predominant cause of beach erosion. Factors that can influence such erosion include dams on rivers, ports that don't dredge adequately, rising sea levels resulting from global warming, sand mining and catastrophic events like the 2004 tsunami. Of all of these, Roy has elected to concentrate almost exclusively on ports as the culprit threatening beaches.
Beach erosion, in turn, is blamed for all kinds of ills for which it's not responsible. In last night's programme, a correspondent from Madras spoke of salinity of water, and Roy annotated this by saying that, as beaches are destroyed, sea water tends to get further inland and contaminate wells. This is not false as an abstract statement, but is absolutely not the reason why Madras's wells have turned more saline. The cause of that is overuse of groundwater, leading to depletion, leading to tubewells being sunk ever deeper, until groundwater levels fall below sea level.

"We have far too many ports. We have a 180 odd ports, that's nuts", Roy complained last night. Well, we have over 180 television channels, and that's nuts too. But wouldn't it be worse to forbid the entry of new channels? Wouldn't that be against the free market principles Roy otherwise espouses? Of course, he has never suggested markets ought to be unconstrained by regulation; but then, there ARE regulations governing ports. Ports are required to ensure they do not block the drift of sand, so beaches continue to be replenished. The point is not to disallow ports but ensure they obey the law of the land, and punish them if they fail to comply. It would help if NDTV did an investigative report on ports that skirt regulation and harm the environment as a result.
NDTV's normal go-to person for environmental causes is Sunita Narain. You can read what I think of her operation, the Centre for Science and Environment, here. Among a series of platitudes on the programme, she indicated it's important that our development move inward. So should we set up a harbour in Chattisgarh next? A dockyard in Sikkim? And is the CSE supportive of any large extant industrial projects in the hinterland?

China, by the way, has 2000 ports.

Jobs, Zuckerberg and biopics

2011-02-26T09:31:00.007+05:30

Mark Zuckerberg might have felt aggrieved after watching The Social Network, tipped to win a few Oscars tomorrow, but he should consider himself lucky he didn't get the treatment meted out to Steve Jobs in the made for TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg comes across as a creep in a few scenes of The Social Network, but he's always shown to have a vision for big things. The people he works with -- the Winkelvoss twins, Edward Saverin, and Sean Parker -- all help up to a point after which Zuckerberg outgrows them. He might betray or demean these people, but there's never any doubt that he's doing so at a point when they have become a hindrance to Facebook's growth.
Noah Wylie's Steve Jobs, on the other hand, is not only much nastier than Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg, he shows little trace of the visionary we all know Jobs to be. He refuses to acknowledge parentage of his daughter Lisa, allowing her to be raised in poverty while he makes millions from the Apple IPO. He takes LSD and dances and chants with the local Hare Krishnas. He insults a prospective employee by placing his bare feet on the table while conducting an interview and asking him insulting questions about his sexual history.
Jobs and Bill Gates are the pirates of the movie's title. Jobs steals the mouse and graphical user interface from Xerox; Gates buys DOS cheap from a programmer and sells it to IBM as his own work; he then steals the Mac operating system and makes it the basis of Windows. Jobs is so focussed on IBM as Big Brother, that he fails to see the emerging threat from Microsoft, the Big Brother of the future. The only guy portrayed with any sympathy in the movie, the only protagonist who actually builds anything, is Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Soon after the movie was broadcast, Jobs invited Wylie to a Mac event, trying to draw some of the sting from the movie's critique.

Zuckerberg followed in this tradition, appearing with Eisenberg on an episode of Saturday Night Live.

Steve Wozniak has an entire section of his website devoted to answering questions about Pirates of Silicon Valley. One of the points he makes interests me because it seems to reveal why Steve Jobs returned to make Apple a success once more, while Wozniak did little beyond his amazing early achievements. Asked about why Microsoft was given access to the Mac system, he explains that Microsoft made the best application software, and then goes on:
We did all realize by this time that the difference in computers, the thing that made some more special, was the software. Macintoshes and PC's had similarly capable hardware. But the Macintosh had the special OS and apps that worked that way. That was the reason why people bought Macintoshes. But, even though we openly said this, we ran Apple as a hardware company, because that's where the big revenues were. We were a software company pretending we were a hardware company.
We built factories and ordered parts and hired sales teams and set up distribution and sold our products. We had to handle surplusses that weren't sellable as well. We put out a huge investment. Let's say that the annual profits were $1B. Pretend that we spent $4B and brought in $5B. Not bad for a computer company. But you can look back and see that these profits were all due to people wanting the Mac OS. The way that screen looked and worked, with you instead of against you. You could just look and see how to do things, rather than remember it all (this was back a ways in time!). The only way people could buy this OS was to buy our hardware. So it was easy on paper to tell a convincing story that we were a great hardware company. And our $5B revenues put us well up on the Fortune 500 list of companies. It guaranteed Apple very high respect in big business circles.
But what if we'd just sold the OS to anybody who wanted to make hardware to run it. What if we'd even given up our hardware business. Let's say we licensed our OS. Assume that we'd have brought in the $1B it was worth (you could argue less but you could also argue more) every year. We'd only be a $1B company instead of a $5B company. Not as worthy, right? I'd like to suggest that this would have been better for our shareholders. The company wouldn't have had to take the huge investment risk, wouldn't have to set up factories that might be disposed of when things turned on us, wouldn't have had to melt down tons of unsellable hardware, wouldn't have been caught with lots of unused parts, wouldn't have had to hire and manage so many employees. We just could have sat back with a good programming team and collected on the Macintosh OS. We'd have been more like Microsoft. But this wouldn't have made us as big a company as selling hardware.
It seems that if we'd looked ahead at the importance of software, we'd have seen the mistake in this.

Looking at sales and profit charts (scroll to bottom of linked page) for Apple, we see an astonishing pattern: revenues went up steadily between 1981 to 1995, from a mere 335 million to a massive 11 billion. This indicates Apple had a great run for a decade after Steve Jobs was sacked in 1985. After 1995, though revenues declined precipitously, no doubt affected by the success of Windows 95. Again, this would seem to bear out Wozniak's analysis of Apple as a software company pretending to be a hardware firm. When Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, sales were at 7 billion. Despite the success of the iMac, they kept going down till 2002, at which point they were at 5 billion annually. That's when an incredible resurgence began, helped by the Mac OS X, iPod, Apple Stores, iTunes, iPhone and iPad. Still, they only crossed the previous high sales mark in 2005, with sales of 13 billion. The chart then goes like this: 2006, 19 billion; 2007, 24 billion; 2008, 37 billion; 2009, 42 billion; and 2010, an incredible 65 billion dollars.
It was like something being torn down almost completely and rebuilt. The rebuilding was based on Apple's famed combination of well-designed hardware and intuitive software, which was finally affordable to a mass client base. Instead of Apple becoming more like Microsoft, Microsoft was left scrambling to become more like Apple. I don't know when Steve Wozniak wrote that comment about Apple essentially being a software company, but it must be evident to him now that a software company would never have been able to produce the devices that have made Apple the largest tech company in the world. Great engineer though he may be, it's clear Wozniak is no visionary. I wish Pirates of Silicon Valley had given some play to the creative side of Steve Jobs; the film would've been much better for it, and in some ways preempted The Social Network.

Investigating vegans

2011-02-23T00:10:00.005+05:30

I came to this article from Time Out a bit late in the day. It's about a meat eater turning vegan for a week in the interests of investigative journalism. There's precious little investigation done, however; as is normal in the Indian media, anything anti-meat gets a free pass. In all these years of reading Indian newspapers and magazines, I cannot recall coming across a single prominent, coherent defence of non-vegetarianism. What do I mean by 'coherent defence'? Well, something well reasoned and backed by facts, like this great article about foie gras. Since foie gras involves force feeding ducks or geese, it's pretty much the worst thing a human can eat from a moral vegetarian point of view. Among the things Kenji Lopez-Alt reveals in his essay is that geese and ducks do not have a gag reflex; therefore, having a tube stuck down their throat does not traumatise them as it would a human being.
Vegetarianism I can handle, at least of the non-proselytising variety; it offers plenty of healthy eating options for those inclined to eschew meat, and it possesses a strong supporting moral framework. But vegans are like Jehovah's Witnesses: not only do they follow an idiotic, fanatical philosophy, they obsessively try to convert all and sundry to it.
I thought I'd annotate part of Neha Sumitran's vegan-for-a-week article, because I'm annoyed at the silly ideas of a vegan preacher being given so much free play in an excellent publication. Sumitran's words are in itals, mine in normal font.

Now for the snacks. Careful scrutiny of the miniscule list of ingredients on the labels revealed that most of Parle’s biscuits (Magix, Monaco, Nimkin and Hide and Seek) are all vegan, as is Bourneville chocolate (no milk, just cocoa butter) and Pickwick cream wafers.

I've noticed a number of good writers spell 'minuscule' as 'miniscule'. They are so confident of the 'mini' bit they don't bother spell-checking it. But the use of 'mini' as a root is recent, and back-dated in our minds to connect with words like 'miniature'. 'Miniature' has nothing to do with size, however; it is derived from 'miniate', meaning 'to paint or tinge with red'.

The list of ingredients on a bar of chocolate or pack of biscuits is not only minuscule, it is incomplete. A company is only obliged to list non-additive ingredients if they constitute more than a certain percentage of the product by weight. That percentage varies between 5 and 25% depending on the product and the nation. What this means is there's no way of telling a product is vegan by looking at the ingredients' list. In the list Sumitran provides, I suspect not a single entry is entirely free of animal products. Bournville (not Bourneville) chocolate certainly uses milk powder or condensed milk. Ther's no way of making chocolate without dairy products, unless one uses soy as a substitute or else raises the cocoa percentage to something like 70%. The writer's vegan week was, it turns out, pretty unvegan.

[Nandita] Shah’s name popped up many times over the course of the vegan week. The founder of Sharan or Sanctuary for Health & Reconnection to Animals & Nature, is from Auroville, near Pondicherry, but travels across the country to convince people that dietary and lifestyle changes can result in better health. Shah’s most popular lecture, Peas vs. Pills, has been conducted in India, Europe and the US. As I sipped on hot herbal tea at her workshop in Lower Parel later in the week, I learnt that vegans rack up karma points for more than being kind to animals. A 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation says our omnivorous diets generate more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world. It blamed meat production for contributing 14 to 22 per cent of this toxic smog. It turns out that vegans, with their soy-lattes, Pickwick wafers and aloo-tikki subs, are actually saving the world.

It ought to be illegal to put soy lattes, Pickwick wafers and aloo tikki subway sandwiches in the same sentence on grounds of good taste. Why doesn't the article talk about all the great vegan food we eat in the normal course of things in India, roti sabzi, daal chawal, idli sambhar, that kind of wholesome, appetising food, rather than these mutant inventions?

The 2006 FAO report referred not to meat production but to the livestock sector as a whole. It is true these animals are raised for meat in places like the US, but that's not the case in poor countries like India, where male cattle are used mainly as draft animals to produce... the grain and veggies vegans love.

Meat production does strain the environment, particularly in its factory farming mode. But the real threat to the environment began with the invention of agriculture. The most environmentally friendly societies, which regulate their own populations carefully, are tribes of hunter gatherers. And they're all meat eaters. Women in hunter gatherer societies usually suckle their infants for extended periods as a birth control technique; that's because the lifestyle can only support a population of something like 1 human per square kilometer of earth. Agriculture allows a far more intensive exploitation of resources, and therefore permits a massive increase in population density. The huge surge in human numbers that's the ultimate cause of environmental degradation began with farms taking over forest land.

But many vegans in Mumbai haven’t give up animal-derived products just because it is a dearly-held cause. They do it because they believe a vegan diet is healthier and to help them lose weight. Shah’s 50-person workshop was filled with people who would never hoard Pickwick wafers in their bags, as I had. Groups of middle-aged women exchanged vegan recipes and talked about their weight loss, the energy they’d gained and how their skin and hair was glowing more than ever. Shah, a doctor of homoeopathy, has been vegan for over two decades herself. She claims that a healthy vegan diet (one that even eliminates vegetable oil) will not only control but reverse diabetes, hypertension, obesity and auto-immune diseases.
“Who is a mother dog’s milk meant for?” she asked at the start of her workshop. “A puppy. Even a kindergarten kid can answer that. So why are cows any different?” One might ask, what about the vitamins and calcium and protein we get from dairy? According to Shah, a cup of kale or spinach leaves, or two tablespoons of sesame seeds, has double the calcium in a glass of milk. The only essential vitamin that vegans can’t get from food, she claimed, is B12. The debate over whether we should be dietary hunters or gatherers is the religion vs science argument of the food world, and it was clear which side Shah and her crew were on.

I'm waiting for the PETA video showing cattle mistreated in the production of grain. If one is concerned about animal rights above all else, I don't see how one can eat anything in India; not just milk, everything's produced by exploiting animals.

For those who claim veganism is the natural state of humans, there is one insurmountable stumbling block: Vitamin B12. It can only be derived from animal products. Mammals that do not eat other animals get it by one of two means. Many regurgitate food, and the semi-digested cud brings with it B12-rich bacteria that grow in the stomach. Non-ruminants get their B12 by eating faeces. Since humans are not ruminants, and don't in general love ingesting shit, they can only get B12 by eating animals or animal products. An absence of B12 in the diet will cause anaemia and a degeneration of the nervous system leading eventually to death. So how do vegans get their B12? Through vitamin supplements. Since our forefathers had no pills to pop, no fortified cereal to munch, it's safe to say they'd have gone extinct had they not been omnivores. It's disappointing that a supposedly investigative piece fails to question a vegan propagandist more closely on this obvious Achilles heel. But that's the sort of free ride I've come to expect.

Hitting Refresh

2011-02-21T19:58:00.003+05:30

I spent over an hour before and after lunch hitting refresh on a webpage. The Board of Control for Cricket in India had decided finally to make available tickets for the cricket World Cup final, which is being held in Bombay for the first time. The stadium holds some 50,000, of which a grand total of 3000 tickets were offered for sale on the open market, of which 1000 were to be sold online starting 1pm. I knew the site was going to be overloaded, but I did what I could, as doubtless did like tens of thousands of others.
At one point I managed to get to the relevant page, a list of all matches to which tickets were available, but the final wasn't among them. I don't know if all 1000 passes had been bought up by then (it was about 4 minutes past 13.00 hours IST) or whether the BCCI and its partner the ecommerce site Kyazoonga hadn't managed to load the relevant page. When I hit refresh to see if an extended list popped up, the page refused to load, and remained offline till I gave up an hour later.
I just checked and the site is still down. I guess I'm going to watch the World Cup Final on TV as always.

UPDATE, 24 February: The website crashed and apparently not a single ticket was sold. So now they're going to redo the whole thing as a lottery. Meanwhile, in the brick and mortar world, there are riots and lathi charges at venues, with thousands queueing up for the few available tickets. Appalling mismanagement, considering the BCCI is among the richest sports bodies in the world.

Thin (and flimsy) is in

2011-02-16T22:48:00.010+05:30

Have you ever had a cup of coffee served by the roadside in a plastic glass? The material is too thin to provide insulation, so you grip the glass at the rim. But now it threatens to slip out of your hand because of the weight of the beverage. You tighten your grip to prevent slippage, but find the rim caving in from the pressure, and the hot coffee splashing onto your fingers and hand.
You berate the vendor for not providing more sturdy containers, and he replies this is the best he can offer for ten rupees.
The fountain Pepsi at PVR and other multiplexes, though, costs something like 85 rupees. Yet, the straws provided with the drink get thinner every year. There's a little circle at the centre of the lid, perforated so the straw can penetrate it with a measured thrust. Well, apparently 85 rupees no longer buys a straw thick enough to achieve that penetration. I complain to the guy at the counter, who snickers at says, "Sir, that's not the way". He reaches out, sticks a thumb through the lid's centre, retracts it and licks off the little cola that's adhered to the finger during the operation.
The take-away spoons at Oven Fresh and Theobroma have adopted the same supermodel diet as the straws at PVR. They're too delicate to make a dent in the softest, moistest Dutch truffle pastry. By the time you give up and use your fingers instead, the spoons look like Uri Geller's had a go at them. The people at the counter are very generous with these cut-rate implements, throwing five or six into the bag with your order, when just a single proper spoon would be more useful.
It's the Panipat-Plassey Principle, which Indians never fully learned: a lone well-armed, professional soldier is worth over a dozen farmers carrying spears.
The flimsiness consequent to cost-cutting isn't restricted to food and drink; those who fly regularly must have noticed how fragile bag tags have become. The metal ring that used to fortify the paper has disappeared, and the elastic string is now a thread. This has happened at a time when security drills are ever more complicated. As you walk away from the pat-down, checking your boarding pass, keys and cellphone, and putting your laptop back in its case, the last thing you're going to notice is a band snapping, or paper being torn off as it brushes past a sharp corner. It won't be till you're at the gate waiting to board that a guard will point to the missing tag and send you back to the X-ray machine, potentially delaying the entire flight.

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival

2011-02-08T11:41:00.010+05:30

There's plenty going on at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, with programmes covering music, dance, books, kids workshops, films and heritage walks. Although loudspeakers have been forbidden this year, the list of events is still substantial. Notwithstanding the impressive and dedicated work the organisers have done, a few questions have arisen in my mind about the festival's future.
When the KGAF was first mooted, it was built on the idea of an arts precinct in South Bombay; and that idea, in turn, based itself on the many art galleries in the area. The KGAF was, in other words, primarily a visual arts initiative at its inception, and was meant to be an intensive, seven day immersion in the sorts of events that took place in the area as a matter of course. Its other purpose was to raise awareness of the built heritage of the district. The first couple of attempts missed the 'festival' bit in 'Kala Ghoda Arts Festival'. In succeeding years the organisers did a fantastic job of fostering a festive atmosphere, but now I've begun to wonder if the 'Arts' part of KGAF is lagging.
Part of the reason is that the idea of Kala Ghoda as an art precinct is dead. Gallery Chemould has moved out from the Jehangir Art Gallery; Bodhi opened and closed after sponsoring some impressive KGAF installations while it flourished; and the NGMA is somnolent. Colaba is now the centre of Bombay's visual arts world, with The Guild, Chatterjee & Lal, Volte and Lakeeren, clustered together and Gallery Maskara, Project 88, Sakshi, Mirchandani + Steinruecke and Art Musings not far away. Without the participation of top galleries, the visual arts component of KGAF has suffered badly. It's worthwhile giving relative unknowns an opportunity to make a mark, but the quality of this year's public installations is pretty mediocre. They all have a similar didactic and symbolic intent. A few years ago two artists made a fun machine they called a Helicoptook, a cross between an autorickshaw and a helicopter. Since then, mutant machines have become a staple feature of the festival, and none has been as successful as the Helicoptook. Another artist (I'll get names soon, just putting down this first draft) used to mould giant feet at the base of the trees on Rampart Row, making the tree trunks seem like enormous legs; it was an excellent example of what street art can be; not trying to drum some lesson into passersby, but simple and visually compelling, just like the Helicoptook. Now we have trees draped in all sorts of material to create awareness of the environment and stuff like that. It all looks like a godawful mess, frankly.
The film festival has a Basu Chatterjee retrospective, but this is mixed in with a selection of films one can watch on the telly any given day, or movies that have just finished a theatrical run. I can't understand the point of a festival dominated by these sorts of films, except as a publicity vehicle for UTV. Of course, there are people who go and watch them, but that's to be expected; any popular, free films will always find willing viewers. The question is whether it furthers the cause of an arts festival to screen stuff like The Social Network or Tere Bin Laden. It might make more sense to show movies which the KGAF-going public would be unlikely to view in the normal run of things, say a selection of regional films for example. Or to weave a specific theme into the selection and bolster it with discussions.
The literature section also appears a bit tired this year, not for the first time. There are plenty of discussions I'd like to attend, of course, but the names involved are very familiar. If I recall correctly, there was a panel on food writing last year. Another one has cropped up this year. A couple of the participants have featured in every single festival going back as far as I can remember. Again, it might make sense to create a more close-knit, well-thought out, formal programme, even if it means a smaller set of events.
The main Rampart Row stretch and the traffic island of Kala Ghoda is far too commercial for my taste. Unilever and the Times of India, plus subsidiary sponsors, have plastered every possible surface with branding. I know Indian sponsors demand the maximum bang for their buck, but the Surf Excel shamianas are way over the top. The road itself is a bazaar full of stalls. A careful vetting process is followed so only people who are furthering conservation of some kind, whether of wildlife or craft traditions, get to sell their wares. It's fun and makes for an evening well spent despite the crowd, but this year the commercialism of it all made me uncomfortable.
KGAF does take over a very busy road in the city's business district, plus an important parking lot, for a full nine days. I wonder if it might be time for the festival to become less of a mela and more of a serious arts event, held mainly indoors, spread out in more locations. After all, with the heritage buildings of Kala Ghoda having been restored one by one, the Kala Ghoda Association has already achieved its primary purpose. There is such a thing as being trapped in your own success and, judging by this year's event, the KGAF is running that risk.

Mangled Anthems

2011-02-07T18:12:00.006+05:30

Christina Aguilera's been singing the Star Spangled Banner at public functions since she was a kid, but evidently hasn't learned the words yet. She flubbed the fourth line of the national anthem sung at the start of the Super Bowl. Should a singer do something like that to the Indian national anthem, she would have a dozen criminal cases filed against her in far flung courts ruled by attention-seeking magistrates.
We take our national symbols seriously. Three years ago, Sania Mirza was accused of insulting the national flag because she put her bare feet up while resting after a Hopman Cup match, and a photographer clicked a low angle shot that suggested the feet were in close proximity to an Indian flag placed on an adjoining table. This was enough for a criminal charge.

There's a folded khadi flag in a cupboard in our home, which used to be flown during Independence Day and Republic Day in the idealistic days of the 1950s. Somewhere down the line, the government forbade citizens from hoisting flags because of the potential insult to the nation, should they be flown upside down. It took a petition filed by Naveen Jindal and a Supreme Court verdict to reverse the idiotic policy, but those who inadvertently put the green above the saffron can expect to be hauled off to jail.
All of which makes a Borat-like performance impossible in India. I mean, a guy could pretend to sing the Kazakh national anthem to the tune of Jana Gana Mana at a public function, but once the film was released (abroad that is, it would be banned in India) PILs, extradition demands, and death threats would inevitably follow. Luckily there are places where expression is freer, and so we have Sacha Baron Cohen's fabulous mangling of the Star Spangled Banner to laugh at. The horse rearing and falling at the end of the sequence, which can be seen here, is an unexpected bonus. Like the bird flying to the centre of the frame and diving straight down into the water at the end of Barton Fink.

What's inhuman?

2011-02-02T23:05:00.012+05:30

I'm beginning to get really annoyed with S.M.Krishna and Nirupama Rao for shooting their mouths off at the slightest provocation when it comes to NRIs in the United States.
Foreign minister Krishna labelled 'inhuman' the radio tagging of Indians caught up in an immigration racket. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, calling the men "bonafide students", said, "It's going to rankle in our minds that our young people have been treated this way". Media reports say the 'students' were duped by Tri-Valley University, but the facts suggest many were complicit in the scam. This ridiculous comment in the Hindustan Times refers to radio tags as humiliating and calls the treatment of Indian racist. Through all this nobody has explained exactly why wearing an ankle bracelet that can easily be hidden under trousers is such a dreadful punishment. Given the choice between jail and an electronic tag, I'd choose the tag in an instant. Isn't it legitimate for US authorities to believe some of these students would be a flight risk since the entire issue revolves around gaming the visa system? Impounding passports isn't a perfect solution, since people can disappear in the US and then acquire new documents easily enough.
Indians who try sneaking into the West by underhand means make getting legitimate visas that much more difficult for the rest of us. I don't understand the outpouring of sympathy for these guys, except among those who hoped to use a similar route. What irritates me even more is our government's complete silence in response to the denial of basic rights to Indians in Gulf nations. Out there, passports of labourers can be impounded by employers; workers building swish multi-billion dollar projects can be packed ten to a room in 50 degree heat and made to work long hours with no holidays; Indian citizens can be wrongly implicated in cases, jailed, and even sentenced to death en masse following a dubious judicial process; and our government remains absolutely mute, sucking up to Sheikhs who hurt our economy, while making billions for themselves, by restricting oil output through a petroleum cartel. Our ministers only wake up when some Bollywood star is detained at a US airport for an hour or two; or when tags of the kind that have been worn by well-known personalities like Lindsay Lohan and Julian Assange are prescribed to Indians.

And don't even get me started on how we treat suspects and undertrials in India.

The Kiran Nadar Museum

2011-02-01T14:55:00.004+05:30

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art opened its new premises at DLF Place, Saket, with a huge party during the India Art Summit. The move from NOIDA, where it had occupied a hall in the HCL campus, has been accompanied by an expansion of the art on display and, more importantly a shift in focus from modern to contemporary art.
The first work I encountered on entering was Bharti Kher's bindi-decorated elephant, titled The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, which sold at Sotheby's in London in June last year for 7 crore rupees (1.5 million dollars).

There was a ring of guards around it, protecting it from the wine-sipping, canape-nibbling horde. I had a vision of Kiran Nadar holding a rifle and placing her foot on the fallen beast, for it was a trophy of a kind. I soon realised the entire museum was made of trophy artworks, bought for top dollar at auction for the most part. Nadar apparently attends auctions and bids herself, which must be an auctioneer's dream. Even on the rare occasion she doesn't get what she wants, I'm sure her underbid is high enough to ensure a high winning price. Walking through the galleries I ticked off a few auction records, and I don't follow results all that closely, so I probably missed more than I caught.
Obviously a collection built in this fashion can't reveal any personal vision. The Kiran Nadar Museum display is eclectic, disparate, and ultimately less than the sum of its parts, though the parts are so exceptional that even the 'less' is substantial. Nadar appears to resemble some late 19th century and early 20th century American multimillionaire collectors who didn't have strong personal tastes, but knew they wanted the best and were willing to pay whatever it took to get it. Nothing wrong with that.

Why we make such terrible films

2011-01-30T09:00:00.003+05:30

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece for Time Out about the reasons why Indian films, Hindi films in particular, are so bad. An editor at The Caravan liked it and asked if I could flesh out the argument to three times its original length. I agreed because the article did feel cramped within the space Time Out could afford. The longer essay has been published in The Caravan's latest issue, and can be read here.

Husain at the Art Summit

2011-01-29T12:11:00.006+05:30

The removal and reinstatement of an M.F.Husain painting from Delhi Art Gallery’s booth at the India Art Summit in Delhi last week may have been a storm in a teacup, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. The Husain canvas had earlier been part of a larger show of paintings displayed in Delhi Art Gallery’s Hauz Khas Village space. There were in fact a number of Husain works on show there, freely on view in a gallery that had very little security. Anybody walking into DAG intending to vandalise a Husain canvas would have encountered hardly any resistance. Even as one Husain picture was transferred to Pragati Maidan, others continued to hang on DAG’s walls.
At the art fair, visitors had to go through ticket checks, metal detectors and pat downs, before being allowed entry. Delhi Art Gallery hired a couple of intimidating bouncers who stood next to the Husain, glaring at everybody who passed. The state and central goverment had assured support to the Art Summit, with officials publicly stating that displaying Husain works would be no problem. This was after the Summit authorities had refused to show Husain in previous editions citing security issues.
To sum up: there was absolutely no reason not to have an M.F.Husain painting on display throughout the Art Summit.
Yet, the evening of the VIP preview, just as proceedings were winding down, we heard the Husain was being removed. Threatening emails had apparently been received, and the organisers feared a stampede. That evening, news organisations like CNN-IBN led their prime time news with the Husain story.
I was furious, seeing the episode as a craven capitulation on the part of the Art Summit organisers. It sends a terrible signal to give in to anonymous emails despite the presence of great numbers of state and private security personnel, after activists and influential people in the art world had lobbied for months to ensure all conditions were in place for a public viewing of Husain’s paintings. The next afternoon, Neha Kirpal, the head of the Art Summit, told me a solution was being worked out. A couple of hours later, the Husain was back up in the DAG booth. Nothing much had changed on the ground. Maybe an extra platoon had been posted outside, but it would hardly make a difference to a determined vandal inside the hall.
The entire episode left me feeling depressed, and wondering if the Husain issue had not been cynically used to garner valuable publicity. The Art Summit depends on footfalls, and these can best be guaranteed through the media. In a crowded media space, it’s extraordinarily difficult to receive the kind of coverage that draws real public attention. The broadcast time and column inches granted the Art Summit a few hours before its public opening were priceless. It would have taken crores of rupees to get that sort of notice through advertising. Whether capitulation or cynical ploy, there’s no doubt the latest Husain fracas helped the Summit massively.
A number of representatives of media outlets were present at the VIP opening, but the alacrity with which the news spread still seemed calculated. It would’ve been fairly easy to keep an event like this under wraps; but it was burning up the newswires within a few minutes of the paintings coming down.
Neha Kirpal’s done a tremendous job in creating an event that has grown so quickly in popularity and influence. The Husain episode, though, made me think less of the fair as a whole.

Delhi hotels

2011-01-28T17:19:00.011+05:30

The recent Delhi trip was my first visit to a city involving stays in two five star hotels in succession. When I speak of Delhi, I'm referring to the National Capital region, including Gurgaon, for it was at Gurgaon's Leela Kempinski that I first landed.

The hotel's embedded in Gurgaon's Ambience Mall, and came on board after architectural plans were drawn, so its exterior includes a standard shopping mall glass facade. The inside felt pleasant enough but unremarkable. I later learned Rajeev Sethi had put together a selection of artwork in the lobby and rooms. I'm afraid I didn't notice any of this art in my walks across the marble floor to the glass door in the mornings, or my walk across it to the lift in the evenings. What I did notice was the number of people saying namaste to me at every point: the chap who opened the car door; the two security men; two women just inside the door; two males flanking the lifts; and any other staffer who happened to be within ten yards of me at any time of day or night.
Delhi has completely gone over to the namaste greeting. In Bombay they still do 'welcome', 'good morning', 'good afternoon' without reflexively folding hands.
The room was very comfortable with a pleasant view over some scrub-like forest. All fixtures worked, and the wifi was fast, though the 550 rupee price tag for 24 hours was a bit hard. What I didn't understand was the wooden floorboards, which creaked below me every time I walked across the room, and creaked above me whenever the guy upstairs moved across his. There's really no excuse for using wooden floorboards in this day and age: tile or stone does perfectly well, and if you're worried about cold floors, a carpet's far better than wood.
Strangely the second hotel I stayed in used wooden floorboards as well: a peculiar fixation appears to have gripped the hotel designers of Delhi. This second hotel was The Park near Connaught Place. It claims to be a five-star hotel, but really is not. Like, I checked in at night, and I suppose the windows had been kept open by the previous occupant or by staff, and so the room was really cold. I turned the climate control to 25 degrees, but it didn't help. I called reception and was told the hotel had no heating, the thermostat was there only to adjust the level of cooling. They gave me a portable heater to keep the temperature comfortable, and I kept the AC switched on to ventilate the room, but really, a five-star hotel in Delhi ought to have central heating, no?
The lobby of The Park is done in retro-sixties style: bright, velvet-y biomorphic sofas, bead curtains, that sort of thing. Problem is, the place is showing its age, giving the lobby the feel of a fancy bordello.

The Park is a tourist's hotel, unlike the Leela which is full of suits; the senior citizens I saw looked quite happy. Maybe the decor reminds them comfortingly of what was cutting edge in their teenage years.

I was less than happy. The rooms are small; the water in my bathroom seeped under the glass partition separating shower from toilet; there's no wifi, only a slow ethernet connection at an extortionate 450 rupees plus taxes for an hour and 800 plus taxes for a day; the staff looked a bit too eager for tips; and the muffins at breakfast had a kerosene flavour.

The hotel that seriously impressed me on this trip was The Trident, Gurgaon, which I visited for a late night drink with a friend.

Designed by a Thai architect, the hotel makes use of traditional Indian structures such as the bangla roof, but within a spare overall plan, not minimalist by any means, but calm, reflective. Entry at night is spectacular: one walks through a gate to a black rectangle of water within which gleam four fires. To one side is the dramatically lit entrance to the reception area.
Going back to the Delhi versus Bombay theme, here's another reason Delhi scores: it has lots of interesting modern and postmodern architecture, while hardly anything good has been built in Bombay after the art deco era.

Delhi boots

2011-01-27T10:47:00.003+05:30

My friend Adrian, commenting on a previous post, spoke of finding Delhi staid and dowdy in comparison with Bombay. Well, Delhi fashions have changed considerably since Adrian visited half a dozen winters ago. Which makes sense: all the clothes sold in all those new malls have to end up somewhere, right? The most important sign of the shift in fashion sense is, in my opinion, an exponential increase in the number of women wearing boots.
No item of clothing combines allure and assertiveness, power and play, the way stiletto-heeled leather boots do. A decade ago one could stay in Delhi for days and spot hardly a couple of boot-shod females. Young, office-going women wore shoes; seniors wore sneakers or chappals with woolen socks. Now women in boots are all over the place, striding down streets, in offices and restaurants.
If I'm right in relating boots to power, the change in female footwear represents something larger. It is a sign that women are slowly claiming Delhi for themselves in a way previously unthinkable within a city notorious for its female unfriendliness.

Bhimsen Joshi

2011-01-26T11:00:00.002+05:30

Listening to Bhimsen Joshi was like consuming a comforting meal in a top quality restaurant, a meal based on hearty fare, devoid of frippery. I can think of singers who soared higher (Kumar Gandharva), dug deeper (Amir Khan), and had more refined voices (Pandit Jasraj). But nobody approached Bhimsen Joshi for the all-round satisfaction he always provided.
A concert by him seemed somehow basic, fundamental, even though his practice was highly sophisticated. One came away satiated. Meat and potatoes on a cold winter night; or fish curry, rice and beer by a sunny Goa beach.

Bombay versus Delhi revisited

2011-01-25T10:13:00.007+05:30

I just got back from a week in Delhi, and have lots to blog about. But first, I'd like to continue where I left off, with my Mumbai Boss piece on NGMAs (link in the January 10 post below). A number of Dilliwallahs looked askance at what they saw as my criticism of the capital. Sure, I'd written about Delhi's new imperial aura, but I don't believe the article as a whole was critical of the capital.
On my most recent visit I perceived that since the annoying blockages resulting from Commonwealth games prep have been cleared, the pattern I discerned some half a dozen years ago has become boldly etched: Delhi is racing ahead of Bombay and is now India's premier metropolis. And it's going to stay that way because, as I wrote in my final column for Time Out back in 2008, nobody has a claim on it. As soon as some group claims a city as its own, it signals the beginning of a decline. Bombay grew to greatness because it was the one city in India that welcomed people of all religious, ethnic and linguistic groups. Ever since its political discourse began revolving around the claims of Marathis, the city has suffered. In the past five years, Hyderabad has fallen victim to the Telengana agitation, and Bangalore to Kannadiga - Tamil conflict. Calcutta and Madras have, of course, long been mired in parochialism.

Since my valedictory Time Out column doesn't seem to be on the Web, I'm cutting and pasting it here. The final sentence suggests Bombay may soon have to give up its status as India's premier metropolis. Less than three years later, its clear the switch has happened, and Bombay's now in second place. It may be that a decade from today there will no longer be any debate about the issue. During Lord Curzon's reign as Viceroy, Calcutta was India's foremost city, with Bombay brashly staking a claim. Eventually, Bombay comprehensively overtook Calcutta, to such a degree that the debate itself died out. The same looks set to happen in the case of Bombay versus Delhi.

A Tale of Two Cities

I don’t love Bombay. I barely like it. Things were very different in my teenage years, when I had a pride in my home town that extended even to supporting its Ranji Trophy team. I viewed other Indian cities, as many Bombaywallahs did, with snobbish disdain. We had great public transport; we had power 24 / 7; taxis and autos charged by the meter; shops were located conveniently at most street corners; eateries catered to every income level; liquor stores stayed open well after sunset; vehicles maintained something like lane discipline; appointments were kept more or less punctually; and women participated in the workforce in massive numbers. None of this was true elsewhere in the country.
My attitude began changing after the January 1993 riots. That’s when the city’s liberal identity suffered a dreadful wound. It wasn’t a fatal injury. Recovery would have been possible, had the instigators of violence been punished. Instead, they were elected to run the city and Maharashtra state.
Many good things have happened in Bombay since then. Aside from revolutions in IT services, telecommunications and organised retail that have transformed all cities, we have witnessed enormous growth in the entertainment and financial services sectors. We’ve begun to appreciate the preciousness of our past: localities like Kala Ghoda, Khotachiwadi, Bandra and Juhu have benefited from the efforts of heritage activists and citizens’ groups. But 1993 and its aftermath irrevocably shattered my pride in the city. Visiting other places these days, I frequently find myself comparing them favourably with my home. Delhi, in particular, appears an increasingly congenial location. It always had abundant open spaces, large homes, magnificent monuments and important academic institutions. In recent years, the city has grown more diverse, and less obsessed with who’s-in-who’s-out politics. Infrastructure’s been upgraded, with new transport systems promising an end to the cliché about needing a car to get around. Having its own government is a great help, but what’s even more crucial to the capital’s progress, I believe, is the fact that no religious community or linguistic group can stake claim to it. Free of chauvinistic demands, Delhi has not just physical but also mental space to develop into a truly great city. I’m afraid Bombay may soon have to give up its claim to being India’s premier metropolis.
There, it’s done. This is my last column, and I’ve ended with perhaps the unkindest cut of all. Before I go, though, I’d like to thank all readers who have taken time out to respond to my articles over the past four years and a bit. Your feedback has been incredibly gratifying. I’ve been privileged to have a prominent position in a magazine of such consistently excellent quality, but I now feel the need for a more expansive and interactive format. Hope to meet you soon in cyberspace.

Ranbir Kaleka at Volte

2011-01-16T17:33:00.004+05:30

The most impressive exhibition in town right now, and perhaps the best show of all 2010, is the work of a 57 year-old British citizen of Punjabi origin. I’m referring not to Anish Kapoor’s Dilli Mumbai, but Ranbir Kaleka’s Sweet Unease at Gallery Volte in Colaba. Kaleka lived in Chandigarh and Delhi before leaving for England in 1985 on a Charles Wallace scholarship. Anish Kapoor, his junior by a few months, had by that time established himself in the London art scene. Kaleka stayed on in Britain for about a dozen years after gaining an M.A. in painting from the Royal College of Art. He returned to India at the end of the 1990s, and settled in Delhi. In the years since his return, he hasn’t had a single solo show in India. He’s famously non-prolific, known for taking months, even an entire year, to complete one of his hyperelaborate canvases. But he’s stepped up the pace in the past year, creating four works in 2010 alone, all of them video projections on painted canvas. Tushar Jiwarajka of Volte has taken a huge leap forward as a gallerist by mounting Sweet Unease.

State of the NGMAs

2011-01-10T11:58:00.003+05:30

My article in Mumbai Boss about the state of the National Gallery of Modern Art as part of a wider Bombay versus Delhi debate can be read here.

Rolling back the communist conspiracy

2011-01-08T16:08:00.001+05:30

Now that Republicans have regained control of the US Congress, they have begun to roll back President Obama's socialist agenda. It's no coincidence that federal health officials have recommended a lowering of the fluoride content in water. As General Buck Turgodson pointed out in Stanley Kubrick's Dr.Strangelove, fluoridation was part of a communist conspiracy to corrupt Americans' precious bodily fluids. No doubt he would read today's news as a vindication.

Digvijay Singh's lie about Hemant Karkare

2011-01-05T09:20:00.005+05:30

Here's what Digvijay Singh said in an interview with the Indian Express published on December 11, 2010: “On November 26, 2008, at 7 pm, just about two hours before the attacks in Mumbai started, Hemant Karkare, the slain ATS chief rang me on my mobile and told me how his family and his life were blighted by constant threats from people annoyed by his investigations into the Malegaon blasts."
The remark became controversial, and Maharashtra's Home Minister R R Patil issued a statement saying there was no record of Karkare and Singh having spoken at the time mentioned. Now, Singh has produced telephone records which he claims vindicate his position. Except they do not. What the records show is that Singh called Karkare, not the other way round. It's a crucial difference. I don't like the idea of police officers contacting politicians to whine: I'd think less of Hemant Karkare if he'd done what Digvijay Singh said he did. However, if a politician calls a police officer he is acquainted with, it's perfectly acceptable for the policeman to mention in passing that he is being threatened. Moreover, we only have Digvijay Singh's word for what was actually said. If Singh could lie about who called whom, he could well twist the contents of the conversation.
I've been very critical about the police in a number of posts on this blog. There are, however, a few perfectly honest, dedicated officers who stand apart within the force. Hemant Karkare was one of them. Digvijay Singh lied when he said Karkare called him the day he was killed. I hope newspapers and TV channels covering the issue highlight the difference between making a call and answering it.

Wikileaks lies

2011-01-04T10:17:00.004+05:30

How will governments react to the potential for more embarrassing revelations in the future from Wikileaks and likeminded websites? They will obviously grow more circumspect, and will probably place greater restrictions on access to diplomatic and security related documents. It's mind-boggling that 3 million people in the United States had access to the cables now being published in dribs and drabs by Wikileaks.
I believe governments might also begin to insert convenient fictions into such communications. People tend to believe that everything released through Wikileaks reflects truth on the ground, but that's far from the case. A cable from a diplomat in Cuba stated, for example, that Michael Moore's Sicko was banned in Castro country, while the documentary was in fact shown on Cuban national television. Now we get news of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being slapped by Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander-in-chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. This incident might well have actually happened, but it's also one of the cables whose publication the US will not regret. It's possible the message, which came out of Baku, was based on embellished information. After the Iraq WMD fiasco we know how dissidents tend to tell the CIA what US politicians want to hear.
The question then arises: If diplomats can lie or pass on dubious details in official cables, what's to stop US intelligence from going further and seeding data banks with misinformation in case of further leaks? Muddying those waters will create a new barrier to transparency in government functioning.

Heritage hero or villain?

2010-12-31T15:11:00.007+05:30

This afternoon, BBC World broadcast an episode of Heritage Heroes applauding the work of Mohamed Turshi al Soghayer who was instrumental in conserving the traditional multi-storey houses of Rijal Alma in southern Saudi Arabia. The chairperson of the jury was Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, head of the Saudi Supreme Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, whose statement can be read on the Heritage Heroes site here.
Earlier, I'd read a New York Times article about real estate development in Mecca, including the building of a huge clocktower modelled on Big Ben and a series of highrises right next to the Kaaba. The clocktower is six times the height of its Westminster model, over 1900 feet as against Big Ben's 315 feet.

The apartment blocks and clocktower were built by bulldozing an old Ottoman fortress and levelling the hill on which it stood, to fulfill the demand among super-wealthy Muslims to have a room overlooking Islam's most holy site. Rapid construction around the Kaaba has displaced Meccans who've lived close to the site for generations, and created a divide between the rich who ring the complex and their less well-off brethren who have been forced further afield. According to many this runs contrary to the idea of Mecca as a place where class distinctions, so prominent elsewhere, fade, and are replaced by a sense of oneness and solidarity among all Muslims.
Prince Sultan, head of the Heritage Heroes jury was asked about the kitsch version of Big Ben rising where a hill and fortress used to be. He replied curtly, “When I am in Mecca and go around the kaaba, I don’t look up.” So much for commitment to heritage. It was surprising in any case coming from a member of the clan of Al Saud, probably responsible for more destruction of built heritage down the generations than any other currently powerful family in the entire world.
On a related note, today's Mumbai Mirror has the results of a poll listing the city's 'seven wonders'. It's a bit of hyperbole, but two predictable winners are VT / CST station and Haji Ali. Haji Ali was ruined years ago when a guesthouse was built right behind the dargah, warping the delicate outline of the structure seen against the sky. Now there's a proposal to dilute heritage norms for VT, and to use land on its eastern side to build, what else, shopping complexes and hotels. All of Bombay's municipal corporators ganged up not long ago to push through a scheme to redevelop Crawford market along similar lines. This morning's paper left me thinking: if the skyline around the Kaaba could be destroyed, what hope for a 19th century railway station and market?

Rasta to Zion, cut and paste

2010-12-30T23:18:00.006+05:30

Bobby Farrell, of Boney M died in St.Petersberg yesterday, in his hotel rather than during a performance of Rasputin. I wrote a column about Boney M and geopolitics a few weeks ago, but since Yahoo! is in the midst of a reorganisation, and all our columns have temporarily gone off line, I'm cutting and pasting the piece here.

Rasta to Zion

The Palestine International Festival of Dance and Music, designed to draw attention to water shortages in the West Bank, isn’t exactly the hottest ticket on the global performance circuit. The only reason the disco band Boney M’s gig in Ramallah gained coverage was that organisers asked the band not to play one of its greatest hits, Rivers of Babylon. The lyrics, derived from the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms, are words spoken by Jews lamenting their exile from Jerusalem, which is frequently referred to in the Bible as Zion:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down

Yeah we wept, when we remembered Zion.

When the wicked

Carried us away in captivity

Required from us a song.

Now how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

Any mention of Zion is a tricky matter in the Arab world, where the state of Israel is frequently disparaged as ‘the Zionist entity’. The Wachowski brothers discovered this when their film The Matrix Reloaded was banned in Egypt. The authorities claimed they objected to the portrayal of a Creator, but the real problem probably lay with the rebel stronghold in the movie being named Zion.

The Wachowskis, aware they might be labelled Zionist propagandists, had taken precautions, like putting the rebel leader Morpheus in charge of a ship called the Nebuchadnezzar. That gentleman was a king of Babylon who conquered Jerusalem in 597 BC, and returned to crush a revolt a decade later. The Jews captured or driven into exile in this period constituted the first Diaspora. Nebuchadnezzar may have constructed one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but it counted for little in the minds of those who composed the Bible. There, he is forever the wicked king carrying the Chosen into captivity. It is commonly held that history is written by the winners. The Old Testament appears to disprove that theory, as do a few Rajput tracts I know.

Despite the bad notices in the Holy Book, Nebuchadnezzar has attracted his share of fans down the ages, like a certain Saddam Hussein who dreamt of becoming the second ruler from what is now Iraq to conquer Jerusalem. Unlike his predecessor, however, Saddam was a mediocre general. The Nebuchadnezzar division of his Republican Guard found considerably less success in battle than the Nebuchadnezzar of the Matrix series, leave alone the army of the ancient Babylonian king.

Those who saw The Matrix Reloaded might have noticed a preponderance of dreadlocks at the dance party within the rebel camp before the crucial battle. This arguably echoes a different tradition of longing for Zion, Rastafarian rather than Jewish.

The Rastafarian faith traces its origins to the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, who launched a Back to Africa movement in the early twentieth century. In one of his more fervid speeches, Garvey proclaimed, “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King; he shall be the redeemer”. When, some years later, Ras Tafari Makonnen became Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, it was interpreted by many Jamaicans as the crowning Garvey had spoken about. In Rastafari theology, Haile Selassie, who claimed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, came to be regarded an incarnation of Jesus. Ethiopia was considered Zion, the land to which the African Diaspora would return from its exile in Babylon, variously seen as Jamaica or the West.

Ethiopia, the Promised Land? What were those guys smoking, you might ask. The answer is: preparations of Cannabis Indica, a plant indentured labourers from the subcontinent introduced to the Caribbean. Rastafaris believe, as do some dreadlocked sadhus, that ganja has spiritual properties. Smoking it is a sacrament.

The songs of the most famous Rastafari convert, Bob Marley, are saturated with the political and philosophical beliefs of the movement. When Marley sings Iron, Lion, Zion or Zion Train; or when he speaks in Exodus of leaving Babylon and returning to the fatherland; he’s referring to places outside Israel and Iraq, and even Asia. This is also true, as it happens, of Rivers of Babylon, originally recorded by the Rastafarian reggae group The Melodians before being covered by Boney M in a version that achieved worldwide success.

Maybe that’s what Maize Williams of Boney M should have told the organisers of the Palestine festival. It’s not Jerusalem the people in my song are remembering, it’s obviously Addis Ababa. There’s more than one Zion in the world.

There’s also, as it turns out more than one Boney M in the world. There are as many Boney Ms, in fact, as there were members in the band’s line-up in the late 1970s. After disco collapsed as precipitously as Arab defences had during the 1967 war, the group spent years in the wilderness before the nostalgic revival of the early 1990s brought them back to the limelight. Each of the four toured separately as Boney M; the only problem was, just two of the four had ever sung a word in the band’s studio records. The other two were there to dance attractively and lip sync in concerts. Maizie Williams, who rocked Ramallah a few days ago, is one of the non-singers. How would she sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Out of tune, unless helped by backing vocalists, with the volume turned low on her microphone.

Contempt of Court

2010-12-27T10:55:00.006+05:30

If there's one good thing to come out of the absurd verdict in the trial of Binayak Sen, it is the overthrow of the idea that decisions of courts are beyond criticism. In the past, the threat of being hauled up for contempt restricted public contestation of judgements. This self-censorship has been relaxed in recent years, and appears to have disappeared entirely after the Binayak Sen verdict, which has been called 'shocking' in an editorial of the Hindu, and a 'kangaroo trial' and 'a farce' by members of the National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi. Today's Times of India carries two articles critical of the way the case proceeded and highlights the flimsiness of evidence.
Essentially, one of India's most distinguished public health practitioners and human rights activists was held without bail for months and has now been sentenced to life in jail because he supposedly served as a conduit between an imprisoned Left wing extremist leader and other militants. The proof of this were letters recovered, not from Dr.Sen himself, but from a businessman who first said he was given the material by Dr.Sen and then retracted the statement. The place where the letters were recovered was mentioned as 'Station Road' in the police report. This was later changed to a completely different location, namely 'Mahindra Hotel'. The court accepted that a typing error led to the police putting down 'Station Road' instead of 'Mahindra Hotel'.
The police, after going through Binayak Sen's home and computer, came up with proof of his sympathy with terrorists in the form of pamphlets and books about Naxalism. Well, if that's evidence, then they could lock me up as a Maoist militant, since I have similar material lying about in my house. There was also an email sent by Dr.Sen's wife to somebody in the ISI; that was the Indian Social Institute, not Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, but the police were satisfied the ISI label meant the Sens were colluding with Pakistan.
The case sheds light on the working of the whole judicial system in India. If a trial in the world's spotlight, during which two dozen Nobel laureates as well as human rights organisations like Amnesty International have spoken out on the defendant's behalf, becomes such a grotesque travesty of justice, imagine what it's like for the poor of Chattisgarh and other regions. What chance do they have against a combination of harsh laws, merciless police and pliant judges? None. And what happens when large sections of the population feel they have no recourse within the legal framework? They decide to work outside it.
I'm certain the verdict will be overturned in a higher court and Binayak Sen will eventually be acquitted. But he will have spent years in custody by then, and it will be wrong to suggest, the day he is set free, that justice has finally been done.

UPDATE, December 28: Rajinder Sachar, the former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, has called the Binayak Sen judgement "nonsensical", and said he was ashamed to belong to a judicial system that delivered such a '"ridiculous judgement". I cannot recall any previous Indian verdict being described in such scathing terms by a former judge.

Happy holidays, Barack Obama

2010-12-24T17:59:00.003+05:30

There's finally a caesura in the narrative of Barack Obama's presidency. The stimulus was signed when he'd barely taken charge, leading to an early partisan divide that only became sharper as the months progressed. His first December break was interrupted by a would-be terrorist trying to blow up an airplane. Earlier this summer, with the jobs situation looking grim as ever, an oil well blew up and, though it wasn't the government's fault, Obama's image took a beating. His vacation in Maine and his wife's trip top Spain around that time got them a shellacking from the Right. It's been twenty three months of perpetual crisis.
Now he can relax for a few days knowing he's already fulfilled most of the promises he made during his campaign. OK, it's pretty difficult to live up to statements like, The world will look back to this time as the moment our planet began to heal. But Obama couldn't have got elected without making such grandiose claims, so he has to accept the inevitable feeling among ardent (and naive) supporters, of being let down.
A presidential campaign is like a ramp show with impractical and unwearable but hugely creative clothes on display. It's a hypothesis that needs major adjustments after practical tests. The question is: does the Obama pret line look sort of like his ramp show? I'd say it's a close enough variant and, after the DADT repeal, maybe some on the Left might begin to agree.
The biggest let-down of these two years has been, of course, unemployment. But a President can't create jobs out of thin air, at least not in the long term. The stimulus kept job losses down, the Fed's actions helped keep the economy growing, and now he's managed a second huge stimulus package. Estate tax cuts may be about the worst way to stimulate jobs growth, but there was no realistic path forward without giving in to some Republican demands, pretty much everyone agrees with that. At this point, Obama just wants the unemployment rate down to between 7 and 8 % in two years; if it remains around 10%, he's likely to lose the next election. I doubt any man could be re-elected President after having near double digit unemployment for virtually the entire term of his presidency.
To get unemployment down, companies have to start hiring. And for companies to start hiring, they have to feel a sense of stability. The health care law and new financial regulations appear to have created a sense of insecurity among entrepreneurs. They will not expand while they feel uncertain, any more than an old-time trading vessel would leave port during a storm. Having pushed through much of his long-term agenda, Obama requires to calm public discourse so owners of firms feel they can chart their own course without interference.
The START victory gives him the impetus to turn seriously to international affairs, where Republicans will provide less opposition. Unfortunately, both Israel and Iran are saddled with the worst imaginable regimes, so progress in the Middle East, which should be his first priority, looks improbable.
It'll be interesting to see how he decides to steer. Meanwhile, I hope he gets some deserved rest, without some lunatic attempting a terrorist strike against American citizens.

Tendulkar and Bradman

2010-12-22T08:31:00.006+05:30

Now Sachin Tendulkar's got his 50th Test century, the media have predictably revived the debate about whether he's the greatest batsman of all time. Well, of course not. Donald Bradman's clearly the greatest batsman who ever lived by a wide margin.
Batting averages have not shifted all that much in the past century. After a long career, a good Test batsman typically ends with an average of between 40 and 45; an exceptional one with an average of between 45 and 50; and an all-time great with a 50 plus average. That, at least, was the case before helmets became the norm, grounds grew smaller and bats more powerful. When helmets were rare, in the late 1970s and early 80s, there were four batsmen in the entire world with an average of over 50: Greg Chappell, Sunil Gavaskar, Vivian Richards and Javed Miandad. Chappell was replaced by Allan Border as the 50 plus Aussie in the 1980s. In the first sixty years that India played Test cricket, Gavaskar was the only batsman to end a substantial career with a Test average above 50 . Contrast this with the fact that the current Indian team itself has four batsmen averaging 50 plus: Sachin, Dravid, Sehwag and Gambhir. Pretty much every major team has one or two players in that category.
Judging by the stats, batting's become easier than it used to be; certainly no harder. It is reasonable to assume, then, that batsmen of the past would have had more or less the same success if transported to the present; their average would be in the same ballpark.
How, then, is there even a suggestion that Sachin Tendulkar, with an average in the mid-fifties, might be the equal of Bradman who averaged virtually 100? There simply is no comparison. Bradman is one of those outliers that defies comprehension; he is so far above any other batsman to have ever played cricket that he becomes a serious contender for the title of greatest sportsman of the twentieth century. I can't think of any sport where one person has left his contemporaries quite so far in his wake.
In any debate about the greats, Bradman should be left out of the equation, he's way greater than everybody else. What Sachin's done in the past year, I believe, is to put himself at the top of that group of 'everybody else'. About five years ago, Brian Lara and Sachin had similar records, and there was a valid debate about who was the preeminent batsman of their generation. Ricky Ponting had hit such a purple patch it seemed he might in the end overtake both Lara and Tendulkar. Well, Ponting's career graph has described a trajectory quite normal among great batsmen: a peak between the ages of 28 and 32, when the career average rises to the high 50s, and then a gradual falling off till it gets to about 50 at the time of retirement. Dravid's graph shows the same pattern, a rise to 57 or 58 and then a decline back to 52 - 53; The careers of Richards and Miandad also followed a similar arc. Sachin has defied this trend, by getting an improbable second wind late in the day. Having played more tests, scored more runs and hit more Test and ODI centuries than any other batsman in history, he's cemented a place as the second greatest batsman to have ever lived.

The death of the Hollywood star-driven drama

2010-12-20T15:56:00.006+05:30

James L Brooks' How Do You Know, one of the rare recent examples of a big budget spent mainly on actors, is doing very poorly at the box office, as is The Tourist, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. This is probably because they're bad films, but it makes me wonder what happened to the star-driven drama. I can think of few hit films of the recent past that compare with Brooks' previous Jack Nicholson starrers, As Good as it Gets and Terms of Endearment.
Thirty years ago, the second highest grossing film of 1981, behind the leader Raiders of the Lost Ark, was On Golden Pond, starring Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda. In 1983, the aforementioned Terms of Endearment, in which Jack Nicholson teamed with Shirley McLaine, was second behind Return of the Jedi. Dramas had been overtaken by comedies and special-effects laden blockbusters, but movies with big star casts that not only became hits but were contenders at the Oscars, retained a secure niche.
I guess there were three films in 2009 that might make that category: The Blind Side, Up In The Air and Julie and Julia, though I'm not sure if the latter two qualify since they ranked no. 38 and 34 respectively in the annual box-office standings. There hasn't been a single release of the kind I'm talking about so far this year. Nor was there in 2008, when Angelina Jolie's The Changeling was 80th, and Sean Penn's Milk 89th; or in 2007, when Johnny Depp's Sweeney Todd ended 49th, George Clooney's Michael Clayton 55th and Daniel Day Lewis's There Will be Blood 66th on the annual charts.
The last Oscar winning, box-office topping, star-led drama I can think of was A Beautiful Mind. The Academy awards are shifting to niche movies as a result of the drying out of powerful mainstream dramas. Not a happy trend for their ratings. But I wonder why Hollywood's no longer making movies of the On Golden Pond, Out of Africa, Rain Man and Dances with Wolves variety. Any thoughts?

The new Australia

2010-12-16T10:53:00.004+05:30

It was a painful experience that recurred over a number of years. I'd wake up, switch on the television and find Australia on approximately 165 for 1 on the first day of a Test match. By the end of the day, typically, the team would have put on something like 350 for 3, with Ricky Ponting 85 not out. On the odd occasion when early wickets fell, Adam Gilchrist or Andrew Symonds hit a run-a-ball century and the home team would get to 400 before the opposition fully understood the balance had shifted. Then, McGrath, Brett Lee and Warne would use the pressure of that first innings total to squash visiting batsmen.
It's all different now. Missing an established opening pair, and with middle order stalwarts out of form, Australia typically lose half their side before hitting 200, and it's left to Hussey to play the kind of role VVS Laxman did for India before Dhoni's emergence, and Steve Waugh adopted during the early phase of Aussie dominance (though Waugh, typically, took a tally from big to enormous, rather than from meager to respectable).
Out in South Africa, India can only pray for more rain after the first day of the first Test. I didn't watch any part of that match because it's on a new channel called Ten Cricket. I've already paid for Ten Sports, and now the firm has shifted some of its previously acquired and advertised properties to a new channel and is charging separately for them. How is this allowed?
There's also a channel called Ten Action which I can't get because TataSky has a problem with it. There's no point asking any customer service chaps what the issue is, they don't know, or won't tell. Ten Action was previously Zee Sports; TataSky cut deals with every Zee channel except Zee Sports, and the stalemate has evidently continued after the channel's change of name.
Ten Action broadcasts La Liga, which means I miss watching the two best football teams on earth. On the bright side, it also means I get a little more sleep.

The Assange conspiracy

2010-12-13T13:42:00.008+05:30

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. I'm warming to the notion that the rape charges against Julian Assange are part of a plot, at the centre of which is not the elder of his two accusers, Anna Ardin, an activist who has hogged most of the media's attention, but the other woman Sofia Wilen, who has more or less disappeared since the charges were framed.
Consider the timeline (based on one of Guy Rundle's articles and an interview with Claes Borgstrom):
August 13: Assange has sex with Ardin, who hosts him in Stockholm during his Sweden tour.
August 14: Wilen attends a meeting addressed by Assange, makes contact with him, gets herself invited to a party that evening.
August 16: Assange is invited by Wilen to her home in Enkoping, and has sex with her twice; once with a condom, the second time without.
August 18: Wilen gets in touch with Ardin and they share notes, after which they decide they've been raped.
August 20: They file charges, which are immediately leaked to the press.
August 21: Eva Finne, chief prosecutor for Stockholm, rejects the rape charges. The same day Ardin says in a newspaper interview that Assange was not violent and she didn't feel threatened by him.
August 23: Claes Borgstrom, a lawyer - politician, inserts himself into the case.
August 30: Borgstrom approaches a prosecuter in Gothenburg, Marianne Ny, who agrees to resurrect the charges against Assange.
August 31: Assange gives a deposition before the prosecutor, and applies for a Swedish work and residency permit.
After Assange leaves the country, the prosecutor decides his deposition wasn't enough; so an Interpol notice, an international manhunt, and an incarceration in London follow.

It was apparent for a long time before Assange's application for residence that he was thinking of moving his centre of operations to Sweden. It would have been politically embarassing for Sweden to be the headquarters of Wikileaks, but such embarrassment was preempted thanks to the rape charge. A well-connected politician and a pliable prosecutor got in the mix, but they needed a complaint first. Most people have pointed fingers at Ardin as the plotter, but she just seems like a borderline loony activist to me, a curious mix of right- and left-wing ideologies. After the complaint was made, she erased embarrassing blog posts and tweets, but they remained easily accessible through caches. Wilen, on the other hand, has whitewashed her cyber presence with great proficiency; techies say only a professional could manage such a thorough job. Unlike Ardin, Wilen appears to have no history we can track; she just appears, seduces Assange, gets in touch with Ardin, cries rape, and vanishes. Very suspicious.

Defence land and squatters

2010-12-09T09:23:00.002+05:30

I received a number of responses, almost unanimously negative, to my column about armies and cities. One of the best exchanges was with a respondent named Harjodh, who disputed my statement that defence land was commonly encroached upon: "Secondly – as regards army land being occupied being squatters, could you give specific, concrete examples of it? As far as I know, if any squatters enter army land, they are thrown out." He said I was taking a very Bombay-biased view, and that even in Bombay encroachments were on civil land outside defence boundaries: "yes there are squatters in Cuffe Parade area. But they are outside the walls. Thirdly, again.. with the examples you give, you are taking a narrow view of defence land on Bombay more specifically in Colaba (not in santacruz or madh island). When you say in your article 'The army itself has not been able to stop some of its land being occupied by squatters.' I would presume you are talking of the entire lands of the army all India. The squatters are on the lands situated outside defence lands."

At the time, I could not find much material to back up my claim, which was based on personal conversations from the past. However, in the forty days since then, a lot of information about defence land has been made public. We were first told what a huge bank of unutilised land the forces own. Now we have details of how much of that unutilised land has been taken over illegally.
"The defence ministry has now admitted that around 11,052 acres of its 17.30 lakh acres of land across the country has been encroached or occupied illegally.
Leading the list of states where the maximum number of encroachments has taken place is Uttar Pradesh (2,949 acres), followed closely by Maharashtra (2,285 acres), as per information provided by defence minister A K Antony in a written reply to Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.
Some others in the list include Haryana (961 acres), J&K (722 acres), Assam (617 acres), Punjab (494 acres), Bihar (456 acres), Madhya Pradesh (448 acres), Rajasthan (418 acres), West Bengal (406 acres), Gujarat (304 acres) and Delhi (107 acres)."

11,000 acres may be a lot of land, but accounts for less than 1% of the total holdings of the military. The land currently being used in legal ways is 2 lakh acres. That leaves over 15 lakh acres unutilised or under-utilised.

Hindustan Times: Thanks for the virus

2010-12-08T10:48:00.004+05:30

I stay away from Indian newspaper sites as much as I can because of the intrusive ads they use, but can't avoid them completely. So ,this morning, a link from Google News took me to the Hindustan Times website; about five seconds later, I got a virus alert. I hit 'Heal' on the virus guard and thought I'd caught it. I was mistaken. I found I couldn't access any files on the machine because, ostensibly, a disk defragmentation was required. I've seen that kind of thing before: run the defrag and it eventually says there's a problem with the system and only buying HDD Plus (the malware in question) will solve it.

The last virus that attacked my machine came from the Indian Railways online reservation system. That was particularly infuriating because it's a site that generates revenues through ticket sales and has no business foisting bank loan ads on clients.

Luckily I'm not in the middle (or worse, near the end) of a long article with an urgent deadline. Also, I use a wireless modem that allows me to surf from my laptop. Small mercies.

Anish Kapoor: Better on a second look

2010-11-30T09:23:00.006+05:30

The official opening of Anish Kapoor's show at Mehboob Studio last evening drew a large crowd, and that livened up the work considerably. Kapoor's mirror sculptures rely on what is around them. In a massive, mostly vacant room, their effect is muted. When the space fills up, the sculptures teem with interesting reflections.
Performative pieces like Shooting Into a Corner also gain from having a substantial audience; the oohs and aahs as the cannon goes off help create a sense of community among those present.
The wood chips that so distracted me on my first visit have thankfully been removed from under the S-shaped wall, and replaced with discreet stacks of slate-grey squares.
Finally, I think I appreciated the show more this time round because I hankered less for what was absent. I knew what I was going to see -- and what I was not going to see -- when I walked in, and calibrated my expectations accordingly. I'm happy therefore, that I wrote that downbeat first-look piece: those who read it went into the show with relatively low expectations and generally came away happy.
The air conditioning was working perfectly last evening, which also helped. As did the champagne, lobster and shami kababs available in the garden.

Of Football, Potholes and Britishness

2010-11-29T13:22:00.003+05:30

My Yahoo! column for the fortnight can be read here. It's about football, powdered eggs, textile mills, John Lennon, and majoritarianism, among other things.