Scribbles and Stories

Jab Raat Hai Aisi Matwaali

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 19:21:00 +0000

MJ Akbar's 2004 'Byline' column on re-watching the colored version of Mughal-e-Azam. It originally appeared in the Asian Age newspaper.

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Now that George Bush can confess to getting "teared up" and win an election, I can make

my own confession. I am a total sap for movies like Mughal-e-Azam, the wondrous

classic about Emperor Akbar, his son Salim, and the dancing girl, Anarkali. The casting

is perfection. Prithviraj as emperor: no one has quivered quite like him. Dilip Kumar as

Salim: no one has crossed a heart with his sword with such poetry. Madhubala as

Anarkali: no beauty better deserved a prince. Give me a map of my country rising above

a plasticine medieval-Delhi-skyline on a large screen, a sonorous voice saying ‘Main

Hindustan hoon,’ dollops of the sweetest language in the world, Urdu, and my eyes fill

up like a river in the monsoon. Thank God movie halls are dark. What I was not prepared

for was the intensity of the rest of the audience. It was a late night show in the heart of

Delhi and the hall was full for the colour version of a black-and-white film first screened

in 1960. I thought that only Sixties’ groupies would turn up to relive their comparatively

innocent youth. It was an age when virginal love was considered scandalous, so fantasy

had a wonderful time. The Sixtians were there, and looked frostbitten by reality. They

had found husbands instead of Dilip Kumar, and wives instead of Madhubala.

The young people in the audience were clearly anthropologists who had come to check

out what made the Neanderthals tick. They must have been shocked to discover that it

was songs like Pyar kiya to darna kya, jab pyar kiya to darna kya; Pyar kiya koi chori

nahin ki, chup chup aahen bharna kya! (When I have loved, why should I fear? It is love,

not theft, so why should I sigh from behind a curtain?) It would need a social historian

better than I to convey how powerful, even revolutionary, the idea was that love

transcended fear, for every father was an emperor then, demanding the destruction of

love in the name of some higher social principle. Emperor Akbar would not allow his son

Salim — the future Emperor Jahangir — to marry Anarkali, a kaneez, a palace girl much

above a courtesan but much below a princess because the honour of Timurid blood and

the demands of empire would not permit a leap over social walls that held the

establishment in place. In thousands of mohallas across India, millions of fathers would

not permit a leap over the walls of caste and religion and language. And just as Anarkali,

played by Madhubala, accepted in the end, so did millions of women who dreamt of a

brief moment of defiance and glory that they could call their own and take to their

graves, secret even from their children. All around me every Madhubala had become just

another mother. Sitting to my left was a lady who, midway through the movie, spoke

very softly into her mobile, a transgression I forgave for she was talking to a hospital

about a patient. As in the last moments of the film a frozen Madhubala walked away to

freedom and misery, bereft of a love she had been forced to betray, and the song in the

background became a chorus of catharsis for us all, I could not help singing along with

Lata Mangeshkar: Khuda nigehbaan ho tumhara, dharakte dil ka payaam le lo, Tumhari

duniya se jaa rahe hain, utho hamara salaam le lo (God protect you, my love, take a

message from a trembling heart; I leave your world, broken, but rise and take my last

salute). The lady next to me began to sing as well. I am sure that both of us wished,

strangers as we were, that we had the courage to sing louder.

These are some of the things that could shock the young. In a film of 20 reels,

unravelling over three and a half hours, there is not a single item number. There is no hint

of cleavage. Even the men are overdressed. The highest-paid playback singer in the

movie is the classicist Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, who was given Rs 25,000 for

Shubh din aayo and Prem jogan ban… at a time when Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad

Rafi received about a thousand rupees per song. (Classical Indian music in a popular

movie? Isn’t that truly shocking?) Bahar, Anarkali’s competitor for Salim’s affections,

played by Nigar Sultana, arguably as beautiful as Madhubala, wears a light veil when she

goes to meet a stranger. Madhubala says namaaz for the life of Durjan Singh, son of Man

Singh, who has just rescued her at the cost of his life to keep the word of a Rajput. The

emperor prays to Allah, through the sufi divine Salim Chishti of Agra, for a son, and

accepts prasad from his Hindu wife, Jodha Bai, after she has worshipped Lord Krishna

on Janmaashtami. I could hear the credulity of one youngish voice break down in the

hall. The scene was set just before the epic battle between father and son (the battle itself

is a masterpiece of fusion between K. Asif’s direction and R.D. Mathur’s camera). A

maulvi ties a tabeez on the right arm of the emperor with the famous victory verse of the

Holy Quran Nasrumminallah-e-fateh-un-qareeb. Then a Hindu priest blesses the emperor

as well with a saffron mark on the forehead. "Arrey," asked a querulous voice, "yeh

Hindu hai ke Mussalman hai? (I say, is this chap a Hindu or a Muslim?)" The times are

more liberal now, but the understanding is much less.

Why hasn’t a chain of Mughal-e-Azam boutiques opened up? K. Asif brought master

tailors from Delhi, and specialists in zari from Surat to create an exquisite array of

clothes. But the piece de resistance is the jewellery, made by goldsmiths from Hyderabad

and craftsmen from Kolhapur. It was the most expensive, as well as the slowest, film

made till then, and the passion shows in every intricate detail. The clothes may not find

takers in a culture of pace, but the jewellery that Bahar wears would lead to competitive

bidding in any elite environment. It could even be called the Bahar line. I visualise a

jewellery fashion show ablaze with Mughal gold, ruby, sapphire, emerald, diamond and

baskets of pearl. The models would wear jewellery and nothing else, of course. That

would put their pictures in every newspaper and magazine around the world.

Bahar’s high moments come during two qawwalis in which she is matched against

Anarkali. The first, Teri mahfil mein kismat aazman ke ham bhi dekhenge, Ghari bhar to

tere nazdeek aakar ham bhi dekhenge (Let me test my fortune in your presence, Let me

spend a moment near you), establishes the interplay of character, ambition, opportunity,

love and tragedy. Prince Salim judges the two women. The rose goes to the upbeat

Bahar, the thorn to Anarkali, who knows that tears are so often the price of love. She

accepts the thorn, and tells the prince, "Kanton ko murjhanein ka gham nahi hota…

Thorns never have to face the sorrow of decay."

It is a line that gets derailed in English.

With the ebb of Urdu a civilisation has diminished. Urdu is utterly civil, rooted in values

and anchored in two words that supersede translation: tehzeeb and akhlaq. A "practical"

Urdu-English dictionary defines tehzeeb as civilisation, etiquette, manners, politeness,

courtesy, polish, refinement, instruction, education, discipline, culture. It is all this and

much more, including that very delicate wit that nuances an idea or a sentiment with a

sensitivity that becomes a bridge between lovers and a gulf between antagonists. Akhlaq

is the practice of tehzeeb.

I wondered about the Urdu-deficit in the Delhi theatre hall. Forty five years ago, a film

could be made in superb Urdu for an India-wide audience. Mughal-e-Azam also made

marketing history in 1960 when it was released in 150 theatres simultaneously. Today

film language is a pidgin patois bred outside known cultures. This does not make it good

or bad. To state a fact is not to pass judgment. The relevant point is that the Mughal-e-

Azam audience of 2004 seemed entranced by the music of words, and in the music lay

the meaning. Urdu lives.

The denouement is marked by a qawwali that Bahar sings alone, for the conflict with

Anarkali is over. Love has been defeated by power. There is pyrrhic victory for both

women. Anarkali is permitted to become queen for one night, not — as the emperor

taunts, because a laundi (slave girl) cannot give up the dream of a crown — but because,

as Anarkali retorts, she does not want a future emperor of Hindustan to be remembered

as a man who could not keep his word to a slave. In return, she must drug the prince to

sleep while she is led away by guards to death (in the legend) and desolate freedom (in

the film). Bahar has won the night, but lost the future, for she does not replace Anarkali

in the prince’s affections. But she is permitted her final taunt, and she sings:

Yeh dil ki lagi kam kya hogi, yeh ishq bhala kam kya hoga

Jab raat hai aisi matwali phir subah ka aalam kya hoga!

How will this passion ever diminish, this love ever wither?

When the night is so delirious, imagine what morning will bring!

I have rarely come across a more startling and poignant metaphor for power. This is

the story of every government, yesterday, today and tomorrow. Everyone in power is

permitted the luxury of just one night, and no one ever believes that the night will come

to an end. Deceivers promise a dawn filled with wine, when the truth is that dawn will

bring a drug that will put the miracle to sleep. And you will wake up with nothing around

you except loss; the mind swooning with the memory of what was, and the mouth bitter

with the ash of what might have been.

The Hunt

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:26:00 +0000

A version of this appears in the January issue of GQ India.

A master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University was meant to boost my fledgling career. However, six months after coming back home to Delhi, I’m still struggling to find work. I didn’t want to be an unpaid intern or worse, risk being unemployed, which is why I left America. I had already worked too hard at Time Out magazine, running around town looking for story ideas while simultaneously collecting phone numbers of senior journalists who’d help me get my dream job: features editor of a leading Indian magazine like Caravan or GQ. All that was missing was this fancy degree.

Yet, friends and editors have stopped responding to texts and phone calls. I'm now the household errand boy and have to buy medicines, pay electricity bills and get computers fixed. My father has berated me to get a real job; one that involves going to an office, attending meetings and earning a salary, not interviewing a pigeon-caller and visiting a toilet museum, both of which I had to do for Time Out. I really should’ve applied for that unpaid internship as an editorial assistant in Iowa. Better than being a penniless chauffeur to my grandmother.

Admittedly, starting a job hunt was not the first thing on my mind when I returned home. Instead, I wanted to freelance for a while, get some more bylines under my belt and then start looking for something permanent. I don't have rents to worry about, and I don’t pay my own bills, so I thought I should take the risk of working on a piece of long-form journalism. After that three-month-long assignment and a short author interview, I sat back and waited. Now that these stories were out there, the job-hunt would get easier, right?

Wrong. My phone hasn’t been ringing. I’ve often wondered whether it’s on silent mode or the battery is dead. Honestly, this whole Ivy League education feels like a con job. I mean, you work 13-hour days to complete writing assignments – some of those days were incomplete without a dose of anti-anxiety pills – spend thousands of dollars on tuition and living expenses and in the end, you have to return home and become a freelancer.

Now, as a "self-employed journalist", my job involves sending emails, pitching stories, following up with editors, retweeting people on Twitter and posting tweets of my own. My ambition of writing and editing 7,000-word pieces has been reduced to a mere 140 characters.

I’m now writing for anyone who will pay me. I’m only 26, but my family is so worried about my future that they want me find a rich but desperate (read, ugly) girl so I can live off her. My friends have found employment and expense accounts in the corporate world whereas my parents have tightened their wallets so I’m forced to wear faded clothes from five years ago. As if to make me feel worse, property dealers send me spam texts about cheap apartments in Faridabad.

But there’s a silver lining to this dark story: along with all the friends and editors who’ve stopped calling me, PR people have stopped too. It’s not a big perk but as a “self-employed journalist”, you settle for what you get.

Anatomy of a hit

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 05:55:00 +0000

Just 11 days to go for the release of Salman Rushdie's memoirs. Here's an essay I wrote about his most popular work of fiction during my stint at Columbia Journalism School.

In the summer of 1981, Salman Rushdie delivered a lecture at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The crowd grew so “unexpectedly large that it had spilled out under the trees and loudspeakers had to be set up to broadcast his voice, a voice that everyone present recognized instantly as being the voice of a new age: strong, original and demanding of attention,” recalls Anita Desai in her introduction to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Rushdie’s second novel is an arresting allegory for independent India that’s narrated through the life of Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 – just like his country. He’s endowed with a strong sense of smell, a dripping nose and the ability to teleport himself to wars.

Midnight’s Children is considered the first “Indian” novel because it examined India as a whole rather than being rooted in a particular region. It gave confidence to future Indian writers that they could write about their country in an English that’s distinctly Indian. It showed publishers in the West that books by Indian writers can be commercial successes. Thirty-one years later, the filmmaker Deepa Mehta is adapting the flamboyant novel into a movie that’s scheduled to release in December this year.

The novel attracted laudatory reviews and commercial success in India when it was published. “It is, in fictional terms, one of the most ferocious indictments of India’s evolution since Independence,” wrote Sunil Sethi in the India Today magazine in 1981. “Salman Rushdie, as a novelist, has chosen his weapons of crucifixion, as few journalists, analysts, soothsayers or historians have or possibly can.” By 1984, the book had sold 4,000 hardback copies and 45,000 paperback editions - substantial figures for an infant publishing industry.

Midnight’s Children closed the Anglicized chapter of Indian writing in English. Rushdie’s predecessors like GV Desani and Mulk Raj Anand depended on Western sensibilities for their success. Desani’s 1948 book All About Mad Hatter was the story of an Anglo-Malay man in search of enlightenment. It created a stir in the literary salons of London rather than the sedate bookstores of India while Anand’s work explored the themes of untouchability. The English poet Anthony Burgess wrote the preface to All About Mad Hatter while EM Forster wrote one for Anand’s book, Untouchables.

The pages of Midnight’s Children opened readers to themes that were never before written about, only experienced. Partition, marginality, abuse of political power and being a Muslim in India bind the pages and the boisterous generations of Saleem Sinai’s family. In doing so, Midnight’s Children followed the path of European and Latin American post-modern literature that mirrored a nation’s progress, in works by such authors as Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Its success gave a future generation of Indian writers like Mukul Kesavan and Aravind Adiga the confidence to write ambitious novels about India. Kesavan’s 1995 book, Looking Through Glass, is an odyssey through an India gets divided along sectarian lines en route to Independence. Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, touched on themes endemic in contemporary urban Indian discourse: corruption, Hindu-Muslim tensions and an economic rivalry with China.

A contentious element of Midnight’s Children is its prose. Rushdie uses translations of Indian idioms and Bollywood lyrics to make the novel accessible to a wider readership. “His real focus was on Indians speaking in English,” said Amardeep Singh, a professor of Indian literature at LeHigh University. “He showed the world that the language belongs as much to India as it does to the United States and the United Kingdom.” Some critics believe that this was Rushdie’s attempt to make the book appealing to a Western audience. Rushdie himself claimed that he never had an audience in mind for the book. “I didn’t conceive of an ideal reader except perhaps myself,” he said in an interview with the India Today magazine in 1981. “I was trying primarily to write the kind of book about India I would like to read.”

The India of Midnight’s Children was churned in a cauldron fired by the forces of economic liberalization. It gave birth to a new India whose global ambitions and darker realities are now explained by writers like Suketu Mehta, Aravind Adiga and Sonia Faleiro. Their work seems closer to the phrase ‘Indian writing in English’ than Midnight’s Children. “When I teach Indian literature, Midnight’s Children is a tough sell to my students,” said Singh. “They find it hard to accept the novel as Indian. On the other hand, when I mention Suketu Mehta’s book, their jaws drop.” It is important to distinguish that Midnight’s Children is a novel whereas Mehta’s book, Maximum City, is a riveting memoir about contemporary Bombay. Rushdie uses fantasy and magic realism to tell an allegorical story. Mehta, on the other hand, explains how the city of his birth has changed over time.

One reason why “Indian writing in English” has come to seem antonymous to Midnight’s Children is the novel’s central theme: partition. In the 31 years since its publication, India has seen the birth of a new generation to which Singh’s students belong. They never experienced the trauma of 1947 nor the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s political power. The only bridge that lessens the gulf between these Midnight’s Grandchildren and those years are history books. Another reason why these students disconnect India from Midnight’s Children is India itself. In his novel, India experiences authoritarian rule and fights full-scale wars with Pakistan. The book portrays Indira Gandhi as the root cause of all that plagues democracy in India and suggests that her departure will ensure the country’s progress. Instead, we’ve made more peace with our neighbor than wars and never experienced authoritarian rule. Indira is no longer alive but her departure hasn’t reduced India’s deep social, political, sectarian and regional fissures.

Midnight’s Children, however, set a frame for a future generation of Indian writers who chronicled the chasms of India in their fiction and non-fiction works. Be it Kesavan or Adiga, Faleiro or Mehta, they all write for India and of India. Their works condition the English language to Indian sensibilities and reflect their own experience with the country. Back in 1981, the novelist Clark Blaise wrote “Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.” The last 31 years have proved him right.

BOOKS Meet Jamal Joseph author of Panther Baby 04/05 by ColumbiaJournalism | Blog Talk Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:25:00 +0000

BOOKS Meet Jamal Joseph author of Panther Baby 04/05 by ColumbiaJournalism | Blog Talk Radio

The Free Speech Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:50:00 +0000

Nilanjana Roy, the redoubtable writer and journalist, has started a campaign to protect and reinforce a fundamental right. The idea is to do a bunch of readings on February 14 (the day when Satanic Verses was banned in 1989) to protest book bans and censorship in the arts. The campaign page suggests that you should organize a public reading (or take part in one) at 3 PM in whichever city you are. If you have a blog, post this poem by Rabindranath Tagore: just like I did.

"We cannot let our republic, our beloved republic, our constitutional republic, our free and free-speaking republic, be hijacked by fear. It happened once in the Emergency. It must never happen again.
We cannot let them close our mouths and eyes and ears.
We cannot let them break the pen or ration the ink. ~ Vikram Seth, speech at the Kolkata Book Fair.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth…
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~ Rabindranath Tagore.

(The poster below was designed by Sanjay Sipahimalani. Check out more on his site.)

The Big Move

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:12:00 +0000

For the past five and a half months, this blog has been comatose. That's because I've moved to New York City to pursue a master's program in arts and culture journalism at Columbia University (yay!). My life these days is being ruled by dense academic readings on art, theory, post-modernism, anthropology and a lot of other geeky stuff that's associated with a rigorous grad school program in the arts. Which means no time to for any blogging.

The upside is that I've also taken up a digital skills class where I will learn the intricacies of Wordpress and how to blog on that platform. Once I get the basics in order, I'll be moving this blog to that platform and, hopefully, start blogging on Wordpress with a some alacrity. Till then, the blogspot site will remain dormant (save for the occasional rant/post)

For the time being, though, pop over to my twitter feed and browse the archives for light reading

Green peace

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:56:00 +0000

A few reasons to love the Lodhi Gardens. Not that you need any reasons but its a good way to celebrate this beautiful garden's 75th birthday. Did a version of this for (what else) the Time Out Delhi magazine.

It has been 75 years since the land east of Safdarjang’s Tomb was transformed, from a place where kings lay dead to a place where common people feel most alive. In 1936, the residents of Khairpur village were turfed out of the vicinity of the Lodhi tombs, so that the 90-acre Lady Willingdon Park could be planted here. This fortnight we celebrate the Gardens’ 75th birthday.

Democratic mingling It’s the only place in Delhi where Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma or Leader of the Opposition Arun Jaitley stroll by as families picnic on the lawns and octogenarians squabble about politics. Anil Ambani’s lobbyist in Delhi, Tony Jesudesan, works his charm on politicians over evening walks. Hopefully the tombs of the dead sultans send a message to today’s proud rulers.

The butterfly conservatory Visitors to the gardens will spot a multitude of butterflies, courtesy a three-acre area created solely for butterflies. Thanks to the NDMC Centre for Environmental Management for Degraded Ecosystems and the organisation Green Circle, the butterfly conservatory is insecticide-free and has 22 plants specially chosen to accommodate butterfly larvae.

The greenhouse Within the garden complex, this shaded area shelters plants unable to withstand the Delhi heat. Although the flora isn’t for sale, it attracts students of botany as well as visitors interested in plants like the golden fern.

Time travel By now, its heritage is unconfined to any particular era. Muhammed Shah Sayyid’s tomb of Delhi quartz is believed to have been built around 1444. The athpula, or eight-tiered bridge, was built by Nawab Bahadur, a nobleman in the court of Akbar; it spanned a canal which was part of the river system that once drained Delhi. The gardens were designed in 1936 by Lady Willingdon, the wife of the Viceroy. In 1968, it was re-landscaped by architect Joseph Allen Stein, who also designed the India International Centre next door.

The trees Not just for sheltering canoodling couples, the garden’s foliage keeps all kinds of secrets: The pale grey bark of the Kaim, for instance, is used to treat colic and fever, while its pinkish-brown timber is used to make cricket bats. The leaves of the Jhinjheri are good for rolling beedis and the oil from Kosam seeds are used to treat skin diseases. The city’s only freshwater mangrove can be found near the entrance to the greenhouse.

Recycled water Don’t think about it too long, but the water used to water the lawns is recycled from the Okhla Sewage Treatment Plant. The NDMC plans to set up a treatment plant at the gardens to ensure it has no effluent smells.

Fourty-four species of birds can be spotted at the gardens. These include the Blackrumped Flameback woodpecker, which parks its cackling self on tree trunks. That noise is offset by the fluting call of the Eurasian Golden Oriole which can be spotted in April.

Its literary prominence The Gardens crop up in every other novel set in New Delhi, recently including Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-goers. Khushwant Singh chose it for his latest work The Sunset Club, in which three octogenarian friends share secrets and discuss sexual fantasies. Singh’s son-in-law, the late publisher Ravi Dayal, chose to stroll in Sujan Singh Park rather than Lodhi Gardens because he said “Lodhi Gardens is a place full of rejected manuscripts”. Vinay Dharwadker called his collection of poetry Sunday at the Lodi Gardens. But it was Octavio Paz, the late diplomat and poet, who captured it best in this poem “In the Lodi Gardens”:

The black, pensive, dense

domes of the mausoleums
suddenly shot birds
into the unanimous blue

Erudite escorts

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 17:29:00 +0000

Sorry for the silence, guys. Work, work and more work has ensured that I only write for the magazine and not for the blog. This, I assure you, will change in the coming months. For now, enjoy this short Q&A I did with Chandrahas Choudhury on his new book, India: A Traveller's Literary Companion.

In a new anthology, Chandrahas Choudhury has compiled 13 works of fiction set in different parts of the country to portray a theatrical version of

India

. He has included pieces by writers as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Kunal Basu and Qurratulain Hyder. In an email interview, Choudhury explains why he chose the smooth world of fiction to describe the turbulence of reality.

Are these stories meant to highlight the underbelly of India to audiences that have been enamoured by the “‘great India story?”

I did want the book to provide the greatest possible diversity of viewpoints. That’s why literature in English is balanced with literature in translation from several languages, and older Indian writers with newer ones. I’d say that the stories cumulatively reveal both the strengths of India – the complexity of its history, the many layers that make for personal identity in

India

, the liberatory potential of Indian democracy – and its flaws and stresses, such as the ubiquity of hierarchical thinking and the pervasive suspicion and misrepresentation of the “other”. I didn’t want a formulaic or shallow picture of

India

to emerge from my selections, especially when the idea of the book was to highlight the particularity and density of “the local”.

How did you select these pieces?

Well, I had all of modern Indian literature to choose from, because the concept of the book was “stories that engage powerfully with place”. Now place is integral to the human sense of self, to our awareness of history, to our dreams – and therefore to storytelling. This meant that the scope of the book was vast. So in a way I was being paid to teach myself a lot more about Indian literature than I did when I was offered the editorship of the book. Many older Indian writers, from the first half of the twentieth century, haven’t really got their due in English – Fakir Mohan Senapati and Phanishwarnath Renu, for example – so I was keen to include them.

Why didn’t you include any non-fiction in this anthology?

The idea of the anthology, and indeed of the entire series of traveller’s literary companions to different countries, was that it was all going to be fiction. There are lots of non-fictional guides and introductions to

India

anyway. And in moving between character, society, and landscape, all the while telling a story, fiction offers an intensity and depth of representation that most reportage cannot achieve.

Why aren't any of your pieces in the book?

Well, usually as an editor of a book it's not considered good form to select your own work. And there was so much good writing to choose from – about a hundred years worth of modern Indian fiction – that it wouldn't have been right to put my own writing into the book. At the same time, I did feel ambitious for the little bit of the book that did feature my own writing – the introduction, and the notes to each story – so I threw myself into making these bits as vivid as possible.

The stories in this anthology reflect the political turmoil of the region they're set in…

Literature can't but help address questions of politics, social injustice, gender and history. These issues always come up in the telling of stories. Obviously I did want the stories I chose to be a complex as possible, so that they both fulfilled the demands of the theme of the book but also transcended it. I just chose the stories I loved best.

Delhi in the 50s

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:19:00 +0000

My latest piece for the TimeOut Delhi magazine as part of our cover story about the ten decades of Delhi. If this essay feels a bit abrupt, it's because it was part of a larger canvas that looked at Delhi life over the last 100 years. Read on:

As New Delhi struggled to its feet after Partition, it had at least two things on its mind. The first was rebuilding the lives of its refugees, in new colonies at the city’s periphery, areas like Rajinder Nagar to the west and Kalkaji to the south. The second was escapism. The elite cinemas of Connaught Place were too few to help refugees flee the difficulty of their new lives in raw, far-flung suburbs. Between 1952 and 1961, cinema halls sprung up right in the neighbourhoods they now inhabited.

Jangpura, the colony originally provided to the villagers displaced from Raisina Hill, received a new deluge of the displaced, and with them Eros, south Delhi’s first movie hall. Karol Bagh had Liberty and Patel Nagar had Vivek. In 1954, the Delite and Golcha cinemas both opened at Daryaganj, the former with plush interiors and the first air-conditioned hall in the city. (Such was the impact of this new cinema-going experience that the Hindustan Times film critic gushed about Delite’s “carpeted floor, comfortable seats with sidelights [and] the lowest rates, lower than any of the New Delhi cinemas,” instead of reviewing their debut flick Angaray.) Come 1961, Shiela would expand the movie-watching experience with its 70mm screen.

The birth of these movie halls didn’t just provide Dilliwalas with entertainment, but also heralded the first days of an egalitarian cinema culture in the city. They collapsed the elite cinemas, like Regal, with the working-class scene of travelling fairground shows. With class-stratified seating and cheap front-row stalls, for the first time, people of many classes shared the same hall, receiving the same entertainment. Inclusiveness didn’t just mean cheap tickets, though. When Shiela opened, screening only English language movies, patrons were offered synopses of the story written in Hindi and Urdu. To add to the sensation, audiences were sometimes treated to live stage-shows, as at Delite in 1955, when the Pakistan-born father-son duo Prithviraj and Raj Kapoor enacted the play Yahudi ki Kahani.

Meanwhile, for the more established set of Dilliwalas, live entertainment meant Rudy Cotton enthralling listeners with his saxophone renditions of “Blue Moon” and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” at the Lagoona in Scindia House. Indians had finally inherited the thumping music-stages and dance floors from British officers and US soldiers. At the restaurants of CP – Lagoona, Alps, York’s and Volga – live jazz had centre-stage of Delhi’s social life. While Cotton’s melodies rang through Lagoona’s walls, Hecke Kingdom and the Jazz Quartet band propped up the fortunes of Volga in CP. Until the band arrived, Volga’s tables stayed vacant. After the Quartet tuned up, you were lucky to get in. “Hundreds have had the uncomfortable and embarrassing experience of either queuing up for a table, or going elsewhere for their fun,” recorded the listings magazine Delhi Diary. Those who went elsewhere often landed up at Alps, on Janpath, to hear pianist Mosin Menezes and his Quartet belt out his famous number “Night Flight”.

The crescendo of New Delhi’s jazz era was a visit by no less than Dave Brubeck, on a 1958 world tour sponsored by the US State Department at the dawn of the Cold War. Over 3,000 people crowded into a free open-air concert in the University Gardens to see Brubeck slam out “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and “St Louis Blues” (he would only compose “Take Five” in 1959, on his album Time Out). A sombre State Department communique reported the success of the Delhi show, in demonstrating to Indians that jazz “can display discipline and intellectuality of a high order”, and shouldn’t be classed with “wild and undiscplined” rock ‘n’ roll. Either way, the message from Brubeck that Delhi heard loud and clear was the title of his second song, “I’m In A Dancing Mood”.

A prince among men

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:24:00 +0000

Really enjoyed writing this piece since I got opportunity to meet Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma and the author of Dara Shukoh: A Play in Verse to talk about his book. It's a beautifully written volume which looks at the clash between pluralism and orthodoxy through the life of Dara Shukoh, the doomed, younger brother of Aurangzeb. Although my chat with Mr Gandhi lasted about 15 mins, it was one of the most enjoyable meetings in a long time. Read on:

At a point in Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s play Dara Shukoh, Mir Jumla, a staunch ally of the Mughal prince Aurangzeb, camps on the outskirts of Delhi. It is night time, and Jumla is dictating a letter to the prince when he is interrupted. A soldier enters his tent, informing Jumla that he has arrested a family that forced its 12-year-old daughter-in-law to commit sati. Jumla admonishes the soldier, saying “Law is law, custom custom/Therefore, their decrees cannot overlap/We uphold the former, Leave convention for some bold reformer.” His casual dismissal resonates with the Khap panchayat horror that still consumes Delhi’s hinterland, precisely where Jumla might have been camped three centuries ago.

“Very often the combination of orthodoxy and male chauvinism has wreaked havoc in India,” said Gandhi, considering the allegory. A long-time critic of India’s social violence, Gandhi powerfully channels the struggle against religious and social orthodoxy in the play, which was reissued in paperback last month. Gandhi, the former governor of West Bengal, is a prolific writer of history and translated Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy into Hindustani. In Dara Shukoh, he uses rhyming medleys – inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s 1892 play Akbar’s Dream and John Dryden’s 1675 Restoration Drama Aurengzebe –to tell the story of the famously enlightened Mughal prince, who despite being his father Shah Jehan’s choice as emperor, was overthrown by his conservative brother Aurangzeb in a bitter war of succession.

While the history is riveting, Gandhi uses the saga to illustrate a contemporary struggly between religious tolerance and conservatism that still blights sections of society today. “I didn’t take him [Dara] out of the context of history,” he said. “He was, to me, a figure in history who lent himself to dramatic presentation without any embellishments.” Of course, as with most tragic heroes, Dara’s character contained a fatal flaw – in this case an overly trusting nature. He was not built to slay his own flesh and blood, and bemused by how easily his brother turned him and their father in the pursuit of power. “From all I’ve been able to understand, Shukoh was a very trusting man to the point of being gullible”, said Gandhi. “His reactions to the intrigues of court were reactions of a trusting man who was bewildered by the betrayal of trust.” His gullibility was matched by severe anger-management problems, which Gandhi does not fail to present, as in the third act when Dara reacts to news of his brother Shuja’s rebellion: “Shuja you malignant tumour/ Cyst of a rumour/ Suppurating excess/ In pig’s recess.”

Yet for all its rage and betrayal, Dara Shukoh is a play counterbalanced with optimism. For the writer, Dara’s story is less a tragedy than a “triumph of tragedy”. The prince has proved an enduring and popular figure in Indian history, a sort of icon for tolerance, Gandhi said. “In India, it is the illiberal who are on the margins but are more vocal. The centre-stage is still extremely tolerant which is why people respond to Dara Shukoh in the way they do.” This response has had traction elsewhere in South Asian literature. In his 2000 novel Moth Smoke, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid uses the prince’s trial as an allegory for the state of Pakistan during the 1998 nuclear tests.

Perhaps appropriately, Dara has received few of the grand memorials that go to men of power. It’s doubtful the visitors who course through Humayan’s tomb every weekend realise that the prince lies buried in an unmarked grave there. Unlike his father and brother, no roads in New Delhi were named after the Sufi prince. But it may be that Dara secured a greater seat than the one that was captured by his brother, Gandhi said. “Aurangzeb ascended the throne but Dara Shukoh was already enthroned in the hearts of the people.”

This piece first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Royal Rajah

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:42:00 +0000

Did this for TimeOut Delhi. A short profile of celebrated photographer Raja Deen Dayal whose works are on display at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts until February:

As a 20-year-old student at Thomson’s Civil Engineering College in Roorkee, Deen Dayal was content sketching plans for roads, buildings and canals. It only happened that, in the final year of his course, the college faculty introduced photography as a subject. That was how Dayal came to be quite prepared when, in 1866, as he sat in his draughtsmans’ office at the Indore Public Works Department, he received the news that all draughtsmen were to be replaced by photographers. It was time for Dayal to shed his drawing instruments, pick up the camera and begin a legendary career of photography.

This fortnight, 200 of Deen Dayal’s photographs will be dusted off and exhibited at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the bulk of them on display for the very first time. The images in Raja Deen Dayal: Studio Archives from the IGNCA Collection range from portraits of Indian royalty to grand shots of monuments. Just like the other non-royal Raja, his exact contemporary Ravi Varma, Deen Dayal skilfully adopted a European technology that Indians had had little access to, became a greatly sought-after artist, and broke a new frontier in the visual capture of nineteenth-century Indian life.

“What made Dayal special was the way in which he photographed monuments and portraiture,” said Jyotindra Jain, the director of the IGNCA, who curated the exhibition along with Pramod Kumar KG. “In his portraiture, he recorded almost the entire lifestyle of the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mehboob Ali Khan. The British hired him to photograph 78 monuments in central India, and he became famous because of the manner in which he took them. He’d use a slightly low angle to shoot a monument, so its upper part would appear against the sky. The contours of the monument would be extremely clear. But it wasn’t just Dayal’s talent that won him fame. He combined his skills with a tenacity that ensured his friendship with the high and mighty of that era.”

Deen Dayal used his friendship with Maharaja Tukoji Rao II of Indore to have himself introduced to Sir Henry Daly, the British Agent at Indore. Daly had Dayal appointed the official photographer of the Prince of Wales’ tour of India in 1875. Later, he was appointed official photographer to Viceroy Lord Dufferin. “After that, there was no limit [to the extent of his work],” said Jain. “He scored over British photographers because even they didn’t have that kind of access to maharajas, the upper classes and nobility. Being an Indian, he established a certain rapport with these people, and it reflects in his work that his sitters were much more comfortable with him.” In his fourties, he was appointed court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad, who gave him the title Raja.

Dayal worked in a time when the tools of photography were still rudimentary, yet he created some stunning clear visuals. Photographers used glass-plate negatives, which required long exposures and extreme care. Another striking quality is “the quality of performance in his photography”, Jain said. “The people who he photographed were always performing. For example, the Nizam of Hyderabad held a durbar thrice week. He and the visitors would dress up, and there was a certain hierarchy [of who followed whom]. The whole scenario was almost a theatre backdrop, in front of which these people performed. Deen Dayal understood this element of performance he was photographing and that drama comes out very well in his photographs.” No wonder then that his patron the Nizam composed a couplet in praise of Dayal: “Ajab yeh karte hain tasvir mein kamaal kamaal/ Ustaadon ke hain ustad yeh Raja Deen Dayal [In the art of photography, surpassing all/a master of masters is Raja Deen Dayal].”

Live and Unplugged

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 07:18:00 +0000

(Wrote this for the latest TimeOut India cover story on how social networking affects real life and vice-versa along with my colleagues Vandana Verma, Jaideep Sen and Aditya Kundalkar.)

Moksh Juneja was an early victim of a geo-social privacy breach. No, that’s not what happens when a renegade spy breaks into the CIA mainframe. It’s what happens when you tell your father you’re going to Malad, a northern suburb of Mumbai, but you check into Andheri station on the geo-social application Foursquare.

“That was updated on his Google Buzz,” said Juneja, the CEO of Avignyata, a social media marketing company. “When I got home, he needed to know what I was doing there. I said I was getting a bottle of water at Andheri station, that’s all. I disabled the updates on my dad’s Google Buzz that day.” For years, Facebook has asked us everything about ourselves, except the question “Where are you?” The answer was usually obvious: “Stuck in front of my computer”. But 2010 was the year that new applications, like Foursquare, UberTwitter, Google Latitude and Gowalla, operating on our smartphones, began to ask where we were. Not in which city, but which nightclub, which ice cream parlour, which mechanic’s workshop.

And people answered.

This wave of mobile apps use the global positioning system found on most smartphones to broadcast your location to your online social network. By taking the powers of existing online tools – your friend list on Facebook, your feed on Twitter, your iPhone’s mobility and GPS – and plugging them into each other, “geo-social networks” could change basic assumptions about how we live with the internet.

We’ve always experienced our virtual and real social lives as a zero-sum game. These new apps represent the threshhold of a lifestyle in which there’s no difference between going online and going out on the town. But as it is, most of us have only the foggiest idea of how to protect the privacy of our online presence (things like photos on Facebook). Now we’re already thinking – or not thinking – about the privacy of our offline presence, also known as our real lives. Take Foursquare. The most well-known of the lot, it lets users “check in” every time they arrive at a destination, earning a point for every visit. They can share insider tips (“try the fig mojito at Shiro”) or post quick reviews. More importantly, 4SQ frequent-fliers rack up “badges” for the nature of their social lives: for adventurousness (a first-time visit), loyalty (repeat visits) or bad behaviour (the “bender”, for many successive nights out).

Obviously, it’s a fantastic way to see if friends (or strangers with shared interests) are around. In March this year, Sarthak Raheja and his wife were holidaying in sunny Pattaya in Thailand. They ventured into Swensen’s, a local ice-cream parlour, to try its“outrageous sundae”. Before they dived into it, Raheja pulled out his Blackberry, fired up “4SQ” and checked in. Moments later, Sumit Berry, an old college chum, saw him check in at Swensen’s – which Berry had done only a little while earlier. He and his wife walked over and introduced themselves to the Rahejas. The two couples ended up exploring Thailand together.

But geo-social life is also almost instantly competitive. Really, for as long as there’s been Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, MySpace or Facebook, friends have been involved in a sort of virtual one-upmanship. We vie to post funnier status updates, better-shot profile pictures or the next awesome viral video. Traditional apps like Farmville gave users virtual rewards (like an elephant topiary) for performing incredibly repetitive game tasks, like harvesting virtual strawberries. But 62 million people were drawn into organising their lives so they could be at hand at harvest time. With 4SQ, life is the game. Every place that you go, when you go, how often you go and even who you go with, all potentially earn you points and medals, virtual scores that pit you against other users on your network.

Juneja is a 4SQ “Super User”. He’s made nearly 2,000 check-ins. By having the most check-ins at any one location, he’s been crowned “mayor” of that place, and Juneja is the mayor of 82 places, from Diamond Tyre-Shop to the Gateway of India. (Actually, no longer: “I was the mayor of Gateway of India,” he said, “but one day someone said ‘Moksh Juneja, tu Gateway ko toh chhod de.’ So I left it.”) Every subsequent visitor is informed of his supremacy, at least until one of them tops him, and steals the title. It’s a virtual twist on the hallowed tradition of the regular, who prides himself on haunting the place, and gets his last beer gratis from the bartender. On 4SQ, the pride is replaced by a mayor’s yellow crown, which proclaims your reign to the world... Or at least to the network. “The game is the mayorship. It’s the number of badges you can get,” Juneja explained. “For me there are no physical returns, only psychological benefits.

I’m getting famous, somebody is recognising my efforts… and my effort is only that I’m going to my favourite place.” The competition for a yellow crown means that off-beat locations quickly find themselves on the radar. “It brings a smile to my face to see chai-wallas and bhurji-wallas listed,” said Twain Taylor, a marketing professional in Bengaluru. “One of them is the Cantonment bread omelette wagon, which I’m trying hard to become mayor of.”

More and more, though, being mayor means real rewards as well as virtual ones. The regular’s on-the-house pint is being replaced by the mayor’s special deal. At Mumbai’s Blue Frog, mayors would get a free drink. At Faaso’s, a kabab chain in Pune, the mayor of any outlet receives a free kabab wrap with their meal. On behalf of his client Inorbit Mall, Juneja contacted all its mayors, and handed each one a Rs 1,000 voucher for Crossword Bookstore. At Delhi’s The Yum Yum Tree, tech-savvy proprietor Varun Tuli is among the first in the capital to offer real rewards for virtually logging real activity. (Still with us?) Book a table at YYT via 4SQ, and you get a free round of draught beer. “The idea here is to be a market leader, and to be prepared for when the masses start calling on us via 4SQ or Twitter,” Tuli said. “I’d say that the reason we have so many reviews online is that we have such an online presence. But customer feedback is the primary motive. People can tell me there was too much wasabi in the wasabi prawns and we can jump on it right away!”

But the larger potential value of geo-social networks lies in harnessing them for marketing. Preetham Venkatesh of Bengaluru-based Catalyst Labs is a “techvangelist” for 4SQ, and his job is to convince businesses like bars and hotels to help 4SQ help them. That means they need to create more rewards for mayors and badges, incentives that will get more people onto the network and spur customer loyalty battles. “While other sites connect people with their actual GPS locations, 4SQ is completely based on game mechanics,” Venkatesh explained. “The game-like competitive environment of badges, mayorships, and points lets businesses reward specific actions.” It’s actually integral to the design of 4SQ that business-side incentives, rather than user buzz, drives its expansion in new cities.

Apart from getting customers to competitively visit, businesses gain access to “data that is specific to their retail outlet… which times of the day and times of the week their top visitors drop by,” Venkatesh said. The involvement of businesses will also help clean up the sometimes chaotic 4SQ map. They create their own virtual establishments, and make sure that sly users don’t duplicate venues to win bogus mayorships. In fact, Venkatesh said, the ability of 4SQ Super Users to merge or delete fraudulent venues is the earliest form of moderation to be introduced on the network. (More authority for moderation is likely to become necessary, especially to certify users’ feedback and tips. Self-marketers and spammers are already afield.)

Proprietors’ involvement may be essential to blowing this spark into a social fire. The number of Indians checking into geo-social networks is currently miniscule, as is the number of reward-schemes. The cycle by which virtual networks spread beyond just the early adopters, and become popularly indispensable, hasn’t begun to turn. Blue Frog actually dropped its mayor’s reward because “the mayor turned out to be the same one guy,” said Lilian Ricaud, head of programming at the bar.“There needs to be more population there, so people compete for mayorship.”

Yet the fire is probably inevitable. Three months ago, Facebook introduced its app Places, a 4SQ-alike that piggybacks onto the network’s existing database of 500 million users. If location-sharing is going to go mainstream, Facebook Places may be how it will happen. And predictably, once Facebook enters the picture, things start to feel a little creepy. If you pop into a bar with another Facebook Places user, it allows them to “tag” you as they check in – meaning your location is broadcast, even if you don’t know about it. That information could be useful to burglars, letting them know you’re not home, or stalkers, letting them know where you are. A trawl through web-safety forums turns up 4SQ safety guidelines – such as checking in when you leave a place, rather than when you arrive – all just waiting to be neglected.

Savvier users are thinking hard about how they manage their geo-social privacy. “The advantage with 4SQ [over Facebook Places] is that you can choose who knows where you actually are,” said Ishita Kapoor, a student at Delhi University. “On Facebook I’ve got around 500 friends and they really don’t all need to know whether I am where I’ve said I am.” Places does, in fact, allow users to define a subgroup of friends who have access to location updates. But set-up is fiddly, a fact that may be nudging most geo-socialisers toward 4SQ. “They’ve got sexy privacy settings. They’ve learned from Facebook’s mistakes,” said Juneja, though he conceded that settings are only as good as their users. “There’s a girl [who] I always tell, you make so many check-ins, and you’ve given the addresses for your home, your office. People can stalk you whenever they want. That’s a serious danger.”

These apps don’t just encourage direct contact between friends, or users and businesses, but they also imply a level of trust between both. “It [geo-social networking] can be a real problem because of the absence of privacy-protection laws in India,” said Peter Griffin, the Forbes India editor for social media. “Apps like 4SQ can be used by companies as marketing tools. The more they know you, the better their service to you. So essentially it’s a trade-off for you: how much privacy are you willing to give up? Now, a lot of these apps are used by younger people who don’t seem to care about how their personal information might be used by companies.”

On the other hand, said Hardik Sanghani, a PR executive with Text 100 and an advocate for “increasing awareness and brand loyalty” through geo-social networks, users have the option of logging into a place but not broadcasting their location. “It’s called ‘going off the grid’.It’s like going into invisible mode,” he said. But will venues you’re checking into still give you points, if you’re invisible? “No. They can’t see it either. If you’re off the grid, you’re off.” It’s not hard to imagine that, in a few years, going off the geo-social grid will feel as impractical as getting off Facebook does today. Anything you hate dealing with online – the laissez faire information economy, the “friendship” of total strangers, the endless distraction of renewing the News Feed – is likely to crop up again, in all-too-real dimensions. But geo-social networks also point to solutions to many online-lifestyle issues.

Having more than just information at stake may make us finally take e-security seriously. If 4SQ and its descendants actually make us go out more, rather than less, they could solve the paradox that social networks seem to make us antisocial. Having fresh information and live social options layered over real geography could make living in a new city, or the same old city, a lot more pleasant. In the future, when we connect to the internet, we might really find ourselves reconnecting with the world we live in.

Book Review: Nomad

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 07:13:00 +0000

It takes nerves of steel for a Muslim woman from Somalia to escape a bad marriage, to lie to get refugee status in the Netherlands and then migrate to post- 9/11 America. But it takes more than just steely nerves to write two books – Infidel and Nomad – which are a scathing condemnation of conservative Muslim society. In Infidel, Ali exposed the world to her harrowing personal journey. In Nomad, the former Dutch MP writes about how orthodox Islam devastates the lives of its followers.

Hirsi Ali’s memoir-manifesto is about the journey of a Muslim woman cross-countrying Somalia, Holland and America. But it’s the people she encounters during the journey – family, politicians, college students – and the manner in which Islam has dictated their life choices which provides her fodder for her indictment of the religion. The anger in her writing stems from her family’s obsession with the Quranic dictat. In one passage Ali describes how, when she fell ill as a kid, her mother spent all her time praying for her recovery instead of giving her medicines. She blames the illnesses of her depressed half-brother and AIDS-stricken sister on her father’s polygamy, and laments the fact that her half-sister Sahra chose to marry in her early twenties in accordance with her family’s wishes.

As Nomad’s narrative races ahead, Ali makes provocative points that are bound to polarise the opinions of both Islamists and Islamophobes (both of whom have made the error of treating conservative Somalian society as a generalisation for Muslim life). She minces no words in writing that she supported the war on Iraq as an MP, and that she believes the political and legal infrastructure imported by European colonisers to Muslim countries improved the situation of women there. Ali demands that Muslim immigrants to America not stunt their children’s growth by keeping them “culturally illiterate”. These blunt arguments are anything but politically correct, but they draw on a lived experience that makes them impossible to dismiss.

A version of this review appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Building a legacy

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 06:56:00 +0000

Apologies for ignoring this blog. Have been swamped with work with very little time to do some exclusive blog writing. Will try and be more consistent now onwards. Below is a Q&A with the eminent Delhi architect Raj Rewal who's left his unique mark on contemporary Delhi. Read on:

As a young boy in Hoshiarpur village in pre-Independence India, Raj Rewal loved drawing. In a few years, his meandering sketches grew into comic strips for Shankar’s Weekly, a journal of political cartoons. Fifty years later, Rewal’s further sketches have produced some of Delhi’s most prominent buildings, including the Asian Games Village, the State Trading Corporation and the Parliament Library. This fortnight, the India International Centre will screen Resonance: Raj Rewal and Tradition, a film shot by Rewal’s filmmaker son Manu, centred on the construction of the Parliament Library. Rewal talks to Time Out about Delhi’s architecture and working with builders who are “architecturally illiterate”.

What’s fascinating about your work is the unconventional, striking shapes of some buildings. How do you design those projects?

All our buildings or design projects are related to a context. The Hall of Nations [at Pragati Maidan] was built to commemorate the 25th anniversary of India’s independence. It was 1972, I was very young and I wanted to project the idea of intermediate technology… that we could do a lot with our own labour, use concrete and similar material, and create a building which, at 256 ft, was one of the largest span structures in the world at that time. When model was shown to Mrs Gandhi, she was very quiet. Later, Ms [Pupul] Jayakar explained that the reason she didn’t express herself was that if she liked it, the bureaucracy would go on and on about it, and if she didn’t, they’d run me down.

After studying in Paris, what was it like beginning your practice in Delhi?

The context here is very different. When I returned, we were not an industrialised country. We had to find our own idiom and grammar of design, which incorporates what is theoretically possible with what can be implemented by our own means. I used a lot of stone because we have brilliant stone-workers. Nobody had used stone much before I began doing it.

Have architects since developed an Indian idiom of design and do they pay a lot of attention to context?

[Chuckles] Well, some of them are sensitive enough to our own situation. We have temperatures rising right up to 45 degrees, so it’s absurd to make buildings all glass – that too in a way that the cost of air-conditioning increases four-fold. So there are those architects, particularly younger ones under international influence, who make bad copies of bad architecture. But there are also those who are interested in finding a vocabulary suitable to our climate.

How do you incorporate the cultural ethos of the city in your work when you design a building or public area?

You know, Delhi is a very lucky city because it has great historical buildings and Mughal architecture. I lived in front of Humayun’s Tomb for around ten years, so it seeped into me. My work, in a way, is influenced and inspired by it [Mughal architecture], but it doesn’t copy it. It’s not a pastiche, ki vahaan se utha kar vahaan laga diya [you lifted it from here and pasted it there]. But it carries it further in different directions to suit different requirements. The World Bank building at Lodhi Road is next to Lodhi Gardens, so it carries the theme forward but doesn’t look like it. It’s the essence I’m after, not a cheap copy.

What do you mean by the “essence of Mughal architecture,”?

I would say it’s geometrically very balanced. It’s built around courtyards, gardens, etcetera and that’s what I’d like to carry forward.

You designed government buildings through the ’70s and ’80s. Were you given a free hand to do your own thing or was there interference from the government?

Things were much better at that time, because the Government of India awarded work only to Indian architects. The projects were awarded based on architecture competitions, mostly judged by our peers and seniors. So it was architects assessing the work of others. This process was carried to the implementation stage, which wasn’t always great, but at least they wouldn’t interefere with the design ideas. Frankly, even with the Parliament library there was no interference. The then Speaker Shivraj Patil just said it should be in harmony with what we [the MPs] are doing, and that was that.

Nowadays, a lot of work is done through promoters and builders who are architecturally illiterate. Their main aim is to make fast money, so they don’t cater to architectural values. There’s been a transition from architect’s architecture to promoter’s architecture.

Photo Courtesy: Shiv Ahuja

A version of this first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Crawling around in Nizamuddin

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:48:00 +0000

Did a version of this for the TimeOut Delhi magazine as part of their cover story on Eid/Ramzan food. One of my most enjoyable assignments till date.

In his famous travelogue of Delhi, City of Djinns, William Dalrymple writes that the sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya would eat little, unable to bear the sight of starving people sleeping in the streets around him. The neighbourhood around his grave is still a beacon for Delhi’s homeless, but also for visitors with great appetites for kebabs and for qawwali.

During Ramzan, the area’s forking bylanes are filled more than ever with the smells of roasting meat. But listening to qawwali – essentially what “going to Nizamuddin” means in Delhi parlance – is less of an option. The roza is a time of sombre abstinence, and after the lifting of the fast, the Nizami family gives over their dusk singing hour to the reading of the Quran. For that reason, to visit Nizamuddin during Ramzan is to get a sense of the direction in which the neighbourhood may be headed, as a lodestone of Sufism in North India slowly gives over to the sway of more orthodox Islam.

The erosion of Sufi culture from Nizamuddin, where it has thrived for seven hundred years, is largely due to the rise of the Tablighi Jamaat, an international reformist Muslim movement that does not appreciate the company of syncretic Sufism. The Tablighis, who function out of a mosque near the Nizamuddin police thana, run several schools in the area. In contrast, the Nizami family – which claims descent from the saint himself – have grown aloof, locals say. They’ve given back too little to the community, building no schools or hospitals, despite the money dropped by visitors at the shrine. “On the pretext of conducting special prayers, the khadims [dargah attendants] extract money from visitors and pocket the cash,” said filmmaker Yousuf Sayeed, who has researched the life of Nizamuddin Auliya. “There’s never any money to maintain the 800-year-old shrine, so it’s in a bad state.” Recently, the Agha Khan Foundation was entrusted with the massive and controversial task of restoring the shrine to its former glory. They’ve restored the saint’s baoli (step-well), but restoring his true influence is not part of their mandate.

That might just fall to young locals like Sufi Kamaal Hassan Shah, convenor of the Jalali and Rifai Sufi Order Group. During Ramzan, Shah organises private qawwali nights, where they pray, experiment with zikr, smoke chillam and – of course – tuck into those tasty kebabs. Shah’s gatherings welcome visitors with an appreciation for the ethos and the music (which is usually qawwals sung in Bengali). For visitors who are less adventurous, or just seeking respite from the madding crowd and the late-monsoon humidity, it can be found in the air-conditioned interior of the local branch of Karim’s. It rides on the reputation of the Karim’s at Jama Masjid, so prepare your tastebuds for sikandari raan, burra kabab and other Karim’s-popularised meats.

But the smaller restaurants of Nizamuddin are equally welcoming (and far more reasonably priced). No sooner has the muezzin signalled the end of roza, the fasting period, than floods of young men throng Nasir Iqbal Restaurant to devour its delicately spiced mutton qorma (Rs 60). The rough-edged Ghalib’s eatery has a following greatly out of proportion with its size, mostly thanks to its soft, mouth-watering beef shammi kababs (Rs 25). Diners who prefer their meat tough and crunchy should head to Yaseen’s Kebab Corner, which specialises in crunchy fried chicken (Rs 50 per piece) and roasted beef tikkas, locally called “bade ka meat”. Here, in the space between the Tablighi mosque and the dargah, it briefly doesn’t matter if you’re a puritan or a Sufi, a rozedaar (fast-keeper) or a lapsed Muslim or not a Muslim at all – if you have an appetite, you can believe Nizamuddin is paradise.

Sir Sobha Singh: A Profile

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:02:00 +0000

My latest piece for the Timeout Delhi magazine

Among the maharajas and the English nobility who graced the Delhi Darbar of 1911, were two Sikh gentlemen. One of them – a 22-year-old contractor – had been busy working on the Kalka-Simla Railroad, but was awed by King George’s announcement that the imperial capital would shift from Calcutta to Delhi. Sardar Bahadur Sir Sobha Singh’s first job was to relocate the foundation stones from where the King and Queen had laid them, in Kingsway. Under cover of darkness (so it would not be taken as a bad omen), he moved them to the new site on Raisina Hill. Here, in the light of a petromax lamp, he personally laid the real foundation of New Delhi.

It was a fitting start. Sobha Singh became the original great builder of New Delhi, constructing at least 28 of its iconic structures, including South Block, India Gate, the Jaipur Column outside Rashtrapati Bhawan, Vijay Chowk, the National Museum and the Modern School on Barakhamba Road. Like Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, the principal architects whose plans he helped materialise, Singh was never honoured by having a road or building named after him – and isn’t popularly remembered today. Yet he acquired so much land in the new city Delhi that he was famously called aadhi nai dilli da maalik (owner of half of New Delhi).

Sobha Singh resurfaced in Delhi’s memory this month, with the release of Celebrating Delhi, a compilation of eight lectures given in the 2006 Sir Sobha Singh Memorial series (and three newer articles). The speakers at the lecture series were quintessential Delhi figures, including historians Narayani Gupta, Upinder Singh, William Dalrymple and Sohail Hashmi, environmentalist Pradip Krishen and publisher Ravi Dayal. The keynote speaker was writer Khushwant Singh, the son of the builder himself. “Rarely was a man so identified with the birth of a city as Sir Sobha Singh was with New Delhi,” he wrote in the introduction, “translating into sandstone and marble most of the imperial blueprints of Lutyens and Baker.”

Many of the essays in Celebrating Delhi unfold in this period. Khushwant Singh’s lecture, drawn largely from his own memories, revisits New Delhi when it was more brick kilns than buildings and “contracts were going a-begging”. It was the first generation of New Delhi builders getting super-rich, both legitimately (buying empty land) and otherwise (using surplus materials to build themselves large houses, Khushwant Singh recalls). Other chapters layer detail onto the city that Sobha built, such as how it was named (Narayani Gupta points out that the nationalist upsurge in the ’20s led to names linking British rule to forgone rulers: Prithviraj Road, Asoka Road, Aurangzeb Road) and how it was greened (Pradip Krishen: “No native species [were] planted on any of its avenues… Not a single species of tree that can be called a Delhi native.”)

Today, lecture series apart, the most prominent public remembrance of Sobha Singh is a nameplate at his former residence on Janpath, now the headquarters of the Sir Sobha Singh Memorial Trust. “Not only him, but even the contributions of Lutyens and Baker have never been duly acknowledged,” said Mala Dayal, editor of Celebrating Delhi and grand-daughter of the builder. “Politicians are only out to please some kind of vote bank.” According to Gurbaksh Singh, son of the builder and president of the Memorial Trust, the family – Delhi’s intellectual first family – once requested the NDMC to name a road after Sobha Singh, but “general laziness” crept in and the family didn’t chase the request.

It wasn’t just twenty-first century forgetfulness that served to efface Sobha Singh from New Delhi. In the years after Independence, figures who had been friendly with the Raj landed in the bad books of the interim government. “Liaquat Ali Khan [then finance minister] started an income tax enquiry commission against people who supposedly made money during the [World] War and hadn’t paid taxes,” said Gurbaksh Singh. “My father had to spend three years answering to that commission.” He added that Sobha Singh didn’t have time to worry about politics (or architecture). “He just kept constructing and building and making money.”

However, there was another side to this workaholic builder – that of a family man who was more liberal, and more humble, than most of the patriarchs of his generation. “A lot of his grandchildren, including me, married outside the Sikh community and he was completely okay with it,” said Mala Dayal. Sobha Singh named nothing after himself or his children. After his father, he named Sujan Singh Park, the set of spacious private apartments in the heart of the city where his descendents now reside. “He was very generous to those who did favours for him,” Dayal said. “At times he was over-generous, since he gifted flats in Sujan Singh Park to people who just did him a favour.” Still, that’s not a bad way to be remembered.

Cheap Thrills

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:53:00 +0000

Sorry for the long silence but things have been quite hectic at work, as a result of which the blog writing has suffered. Did this piece - a sharp, slightly provocative critique of vernacular pulp fiction in India - for TimeOut Delhi. Read on.

Nadia is a bad girl. In Rajesh Kumar’s Hello Good Dead Morning, she is a young, sexually aroused woman who must douse “the fire burning in her body” after watching a blue film. So she seduces Nirmalkumar, the AC technician, then turns around and accuses him of rape. Ultimately, however, it is Nadia who is raped and filmed after receiving a “sex-inducing injection so that her senses are aroused to every male hand that touches her”. And another loose female receives her comeuppance in the world of Indian pulp.

India’s vernacular pulp fiction has shimmied back into the limelight with the recent release of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction – Volume 2. The first volume, also translated by Pritham Chakravarty, caught fire in the literary salons of metropolitan India when it came out in 2008. It was the instant conversation-piece in Delhi/Mumbai/Bangalore bars, the ideal cool gift for anyone with a sense of irony. Blaft’s anthology rose to become the cigar-chewing don of a pack of translated and pulp-inspired creations, from the translated fiction of Surender Mohan Pathak to the grinding, tectonic body-mass of cartoon porn goddess Savita Bhabhi on the web.

Pulp – cheap thrills printed on cheap paper – has always referred to risqué or violent fiction to be read on train journeys (it’s easiest to find at railway platforms) or in the bathroom. It is popular culture in its truest form, and stays popular by offering sheer entertainment and the simple reaffirmation of conservative values. But now the new wave of Indian pulp is being devoured by the kind of Indian reader who would, in the same breath, dismiss a John Irving novel as middle-brow. Nobody is objecting to the prose, as mediocre and melodramatic as ever. Nobody is troubled by the fate of loose woman. Come on, man – it’s hilarious, they say. Even translator Pritham Chakravarthy, who worked on both the anthologies, agreed and said that pulp is “positively sexist”. But the purpose of the genre is to make people derive “vicarious pleasure” from these stories, she said.

Our new enthusiasm for pulp could spring from the fact that Indian writing in English has long failed to produce books which were written simply to entertain. “I’d like to use the joker’s dialogue from Batman: why so serious?” said book critic Nilanjana Roy. “For 30 years, Indian writing in English lacked books which were meant to be read just for pleasure and entertainment and pulp fiction – whether in English or in translation – has been filling that gap.” But the fact that it’s popular doesn’t mean anyone is mistaking it for quality literature, she says. “It’s like saying that Chetan Bhagat’s popularity makes him India’s greatest literary writer – one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.”

Roy noted that pulp and literary fiction both look at the same issues affecting society, though through different lenses. “The first volume of [the Blaft anthology], for instance, gives an insight into the role of women in Tamil society at that time,” she said.

However, Roy is wary of how easy it is to “fetishise” pulp fiction, pointing to the adulation it has received in the media. She likens the new pulp fiction to the kitschy design products such as tote bags emblazoned with Bollywood poster icons. “These products were staples of our households at one time and are now being sold back to us with a wink,” she said.

Shruti Ravindran, a Delhi-based journalist and fan of pulp fiction, is the kind of reader who discovered vernacular pulp after its “glossification”. Though she finds it “jarring to see retrograde sexual politics reproduced in shiny paperback form”, Ravindran attributed her enthusiasm for pulp fiction to “nostalgia for the world lost to our childhoods and youth and its [the fiction’s] perceived innocence”.

Reading these stories ironically, of course, is merely an excuse for metropolitan readers to avoid engaging seriously with the stories. “Irony is a deflection of critical awareness,” Ravindran said. “But as we’re unaware of the cultural background of the original readers, we don’t know whether they read it sceptically, or alongside feminist poetry.”

Maybe their favourite character was actually Karate Kavitha. Kavitha is always being captured by villains and having her clothes ripped off, but always comes back to kick their asses (“Amma! I’m dying!” they yelp) and save the day.

Going coastal with Samanth Subramanian

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:19:00 +0000

Did this for Timeout Delhi

Journalist Samanth Subramanian’s travelogue Following Fish does a circuit of

India

’s coastline, exploring the history, habits and environmental concerns of the country’s fishing communities. Three chapters of Following Fish – written from Bengal, Kerala and Mangalore – are dedicated to the eating of fish. Subramaniam talks about gods, gravies and why he thinks that “if Bengali cuisine was Wimbledon, the Hilsa will always play on Centre Court”.

Of all the elements in India’s coastline, why did you choose to place fish at the heart of your book?

Fish comes very naturally at the heart of life on the coast, particularly if you’re living on the extreme edges of it. The traditional fishing communities have it not only at the heart of their diet but also their profession, and in a sense their religion, because their profession is or was often influenced by religion. They would pray to get a good catch, so their culture is influenced by that to a large extent. It turned out to be the most natural link if you’re looking at the Indian coast.

What is it about hilsa, and other fish, that Bengalis make it their culinary obsession?

I think it’s just because they get damn good fish! For a long, long time, Bengal got the best fish in India.

As a result, it was woven very, very strongly into their rituals and their culture. The ilish is a special fish in the sense that it’s seasonal, or rather it was seasonal and had an elusive quality to it. Also, its various textures and its strong flavor make it quite unlike any other. It’s enormously complexly constructed, too, and it really is an acquired taste. Bengalis have this superiority complex about ilish; they think that, since it’s their fish, only they can eat it well and appreciate it.

Curry seems to be integral to the dishes you ate. Did you deliberately choose curry-based dishes or do they reflect a common preference across the coastal regions?

The method of preparing fish by curry is, surprisingly, very common across the coastline of India. Gravy-based dishes became very common as you travelled down south, where the cuisine tends to get a lot more liquidy. It was not a conscious decision on my part but I guess it comes up a lot when you eat your way across the coast of India.

What sort of alcohol did you discover goes best with a coastal fish dish?

The most obvious answer has to be toddy in Kerala. If you get a good fish dish and some toddy in a “shaaap”, you could just sit there for hours; it’ll be nightfall before you know it. And if you go in the morning or early afternoon, the toddy is very sweet, almost like buttermilk with an acidic taste to it. The fish is kind of fresh too so if you go to a good shaaap, they will fry it well for you. So you can just sit there and enjoy the two…it’s a mind-blowing combination!

Quick note

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:40:00 +0000

Sorry for the intermittent silence; much has happened over the past two weeks on the work front, which is why I haven't been reading much. Suffice to say that I'm gainfully employed now and am settling into the new workplace.

Will be doing a bit of reading over the weekend for a work related assignment and post an author interview in due course. In the meanwhile, enjoy the archives and do grab a copy of Samanth Subramanian's wonderful collection of travel essays, 'Following Fish'.

Musings on Soumya Bhattacharya's 'You Must Like Cricket'

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:04:00 +0000

One of my many grouses about the mainstream media (and, to a lesser extent, Indian literature) is that it is devoid of quality memoir writing; particularly essays on personal experiences about cricket. Thanks to the advent and spread of TV and the internet, my guess is that cricket buffs would watch a riveting game of cricket rather than read stimulating and enjoyable memoirs about the game. Not only has that lead to the near-death of cricket writing, but, I reckon, made the experience of being a cricket buff distant and sterile. I am no exception; the first and last time I saw a game of cricket was in 1998 when India played Pakistan in Delhi and Kumble took 10 wickets in an innings.

So on a balmy Saturday morning, I was delighted to find in the mail, Soumya Bhattacharya’s excellent cricket book You Must Like Cricket? Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan. It’s a book I’ve been keen on reading since I’ve read it’s (sort-of) sequel All That You Must Leave Behind and interviewed Soumya about it.

Essentially, You Must Like Cricket is about Soumya’s 30-year obsession with the gentleman’s game; nearly everything he does, experiences, thinks or observes has to do with the game of cricket. And, sometimes, this obsession makes him do slightly strange things. For instance, the book informs us, that after a getting sloshed during a junkette in Mauritius, Soumya went up to Kapil Dev and asked whether he could “touch the hand that had bowled the best outswinger in the history of Indian cricket”. On another occasion, he bought an air ticket from London to Calcutta just so that he could watch the final match of a tournament at the Eden Gardens. And, when asked by friends about the year of his daughter’s birth, Soumya nonchalantly replied ‘the same in which Laxman scored a historic double ton against the Aussies in Calcutta’.

These humorous vignettes aside, You Must Like Cricket is a quirky, irreverent and poignant account of the evolution of cricket as seen through the eyes of an enthusiastic cricket fan. Most importantly it gives words to those thoughts and emotions which get drowned under victorious cries of “Indi-yaaaaaahhhhh” and cuss-filled rants which evoke the misery of defeat. You Must Like Cricket, therefore, is a book which wants you to enjoy a fan’s experiences of the game as much as you enjoy the game itself.

Hence, what you’ll come across in this vivid, conversational memoir are not gushing accounts of historic victories but about how strong the memory of that victory is. Nor are there long winding essays on the shabbiness of some of our cricket grounds; instead, there’s poignant account about food and the importance of sharing it with fellow members of the audience. Most importantly, even though this a book of memories, cricket never seems to be on the periphery in this book, nor, I suspect, in Soumya’s life (possible, to the chagrin of his wife). Such is the writer’s craft that he places the sport as the skeleton and his memories of it as the flesh and blood of this book.

Since this is a collection of essays, I’m sure some of you are bound to ask about a favorite (or two). But, to be honest, I have none. After all, how can you say that one memory is better than another? That you enjoyed watching Sachin score a match-winning blistering century in Sharjah than a century at, say, Wankhede. Just like the sport which it reminisces about, You Must Like Cricket is best enjoyed as a whole and not in parts.

To be frank, You Must Like Cricket, has left me, well, stumped. For, as I wrote earlier, Soumya Bhattacharya has managed to give drowned emotions and thoughts words, sentences and paragraphs. He has written about India’s (and his) beloved sport with sparse prose and without being voluble or verbose (can any of you describe an innings or a memorable cricket win without using an adverb or an adjective? I bet not). Most importantly, he’s made the experience of cricket loving writable in an era which has seen the decline of cricket writing. That alone is reason enough to read this book.

Hence, I’m going back to re-read it and I suggest you do the same. At least once.

Hack Digest: Edition 1

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:13:00 +0000

Starting today, I'll be posting links to the best journalistic writing that I've read in the recent past. I'll try and be as regular with this as possible but in case I can't do it on a monthly basis, I'll put up a bi-monthly or even quarterly digest depending upon my workload. In the meantime, enjoy this and if you think you've read an equally good or a better piece of journalistic writing than what I've posted here, feel free to email and I'll upload it.

Rahul Bhatia's account of the three days he spent with LSD director Dibakar Banerjee (Open magazine)

Siddharth Varadarajan's powerful piece on the double standards of Indian politics when it comes to riots (The Hindu)

Chandrahas Choudhury's wonderfully written account of the BJP's 30 year journey and how it tries to strike a balance between the old and the new (The Caravan)

Shreevats Nevatia's cover story on how New Delhi is getting newer and better for the Commonwealth Games (Outlook)

Priya Ramani on why Shyam Benegal is the Indian villager's Last Action Hero (Mint Lounge)

Jai Arjun Singh talks to movie director Anup Kurian about the 'smallness' of his movie 'The Hunt' (Business Standard)

Gaurav Kalra on why Prince Yuvraj will never be King (IBNlive.com)

Samar Halarnkar wonders what Twitter is all about (Hindustan Times)

Manu Joseph's superb piece on the most foolish things said about Sachin Tendulkar (Open Magazine)

Vir Sanghvi on why the Hindu loony fringe was obsessed with Sania Mirza's wedding and the origins of Dal Makhani (Hindustan Times)

And finally, Salil Tripathi on the humility of the Indian journalist (Mint)

Also check out the anniversary issue of TimeOut Delhi which is an exhaustive compilation of the best eateries in the capital

In Conversation with Fatima Bhutto

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:16:00 +0000

A brief chat with Fatima Bhutto on her new book Songs of Blood and Sword.

It’s coincidental that we meet on a day which also happens to be your grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s 31^st death anniversary. How has Pakistani politics evolved over the last three decades?

Well I wasn’t alive for all those 31 years but with his death – his murder actually – a very dangerous precedent was set. The first democratically elected leader of the country, who was truly committed to socialist principles put to death which sends the message that when we disagree with our political leaders, we don’t entrust the people to vote them out.

Any country, over a 31 year period, goes through tremendous shifts and changes but in Pakistan what we see is that problems like corruption are allowed to continue; the people are not given an agency that they deserve in a participatory system

In the book you write very glowingly of your grandfather but a lot of people in India and elsewhere would like to believe that he was more dictatorial than his predecessors. How would you react to that?

First of all, I didn’t write glowingly about him. I wrote very critically of Balochistan and of the powers he increased for himself towards the end. But I think the assumption that he was more dictatorial than his predecessors was totally unfounded because his predecessors did not come into power on a one-man-one-vote ballot. They didn’t even abide by the Constitution let alone pen a Constitution. His predecessors followed the dictates of America and the Soviet Union rather than engage in foreign relations with Asian and African countries. Certainly, he made mistakes like we saw Mujib in Bangladesh and Indira Gandhi did.

Also, if one looks at Pakistani history, certainly there hasn’t been that sort of freedom in terms of the right to vote, right to a constitution etc. All these things are now identified with the repression in Pakistan like the Hudood laws, the blasphemy laws etc which came after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

In recent interviews you’ve been called ‘the other Bhutto’, ‘the lonely Bhutto and ‘Benazir’s niece’. Have you ever felt that your individual identity as a writer has been overshadowed by your surname?

No. It’s a very South Asian thing to bio-data everybody; even on the book cover you see it written. And I have to say, this phrase ‘the other Bhutto’, I’ve only heard it in India. This book, obviously, is a very big book and a book on an important family..

But even when your previous book, 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, came out you were referred to as Benazir Bhutto’s niece…

And it’s very strange; it’s way for people to connect something which I completely understand. In countries like ours, which are so dominated by life figures, it’s easier for people to say ‘oh this person comes from so and so family’ when in fact, neither my family nor I had anything to do with the earthquake relief work. It is a very strange thing because for two years I wrote very critically of the Musharraf regime; at that point it wasn’t Benazir Bhutto’s niece. It was only when my aunt returned to Pakistan and I spoke about her it became ‘oh look, the criticism is coming from inside’. I was in Hong Kong for a literary festival and I remember being introduced as being the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, niece of Benazir Bhutto etc… And I said, you know these things have their place but when it is referred to as a profession, then we’re losing sight of things slightly because as South Asians we do have multiple identities. Yes, I am all of these things but it feels very restrictive to be told ‘you are only this’. I for a woman in a South Asian country, you are always someone’s something. It takes a while to break out on your own. But I’m not worried about it; it (being labelled as Benazir’s niece etc.) doesn’t affect me.

You spoke about South Asian countries, which have a long history with dynasties. Is there a problem with our political systems that we throw up dynasties? Do you think these systems need to be re-examined?

Well I think if we look at this region, we also have to remember that for hundreds of years we ruled by foreign powers and when they left, they didn’t do so willingly; they left begrudgingly and left incredible cleavages in our country. I don’t think there’s any mistake that in all the countries the British left – Greece and Turkey, Palestine, the Irish – they left us with really fractured senses of self. And not just that but the way they ruled when they were here was really vile; by pitting people against each other, by strengthening education systems in one part and neglecting the other. For me, the main issue with dynasty is that it negates participation. And the British, if nothing else, were famous for not encouraging participation.

I think it’s one of the tremors they left us with. I think it was their refusal to deal with the country as a whole; it was their tendency to create factions that leaves not only Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, but Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma and Bhutan all with these ridiculous dynastic systems that otherwise we wouldn’t have had. I think, unfortunately – and this is probably an unpleasant thing to say – we still have this complex when it comes to Britain and America and our countries. We still have these ridiculous sort of histories told through foreigners’ eyes. The best sort of writing on Pakistan is by Tariq Ali and on India by Khushwant Singh. It’s not people who parachute themselves and explain our countries to us. Certainly, we don’t go to England and write their histories for them; I think colonialism has a lot to answer for and dynasty is one of them

Most reviews in the Indian press say that your book is a partisan account. In fact, one reviewer went to the extent of saying that you’re being ‘vengeful’. How do you react to such statements?

There’s not a drop of vengeance; this is a search for justice. There is no calling for violence; there is no calling for revenge. My father’s murder is reconstructed through the eyes of survivors, witnesses, police officers and judges. So anybody with the faculties to read can open up the footnote section and see it. And I would ask those critics what is vengeful? And I would ask them to find me a part that is vengeful. I don’t believe in vengeance as a human being. And in terms of partisan, I am a Bhutto and I’m writing about the Bhuttos so I will be partisan. What does objective mean? There is no such thing as objective history because we are writing about countries we know, we live in, we’ve experienced. So the idea that it is partisan is not pretended – it is very clear here on the cover. There are the people who killed and I’m writing about them, I love them. As objective as I can be, I am. In fact, the opposite is said of me in Pakistan; ‘you’re too critical of your family, why are you being disloyal’. So I hope that at the end of the day, critics who read the book, read it and see that there are sources and they can double check. This is ultimately a labour of love and there is no call for blood in this book.

After the death of your grandfather, your father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto moved to Kabul and travelled frequently to Damascus and Libya. Do you think that if he remained in Pakistan, he could’ve been the political heir to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rather than Benazir?

I don’t think it was possible because the two sons (Mir and Shahnawaz Bhutto) were sent out because Zulfikar believed there was a threat against them and he turned out to be correct; Shahnawaz was killed six years later. But I think my father was on a quest for justice, not for power. So before Afghanistan, Libya and Damascus, he spent two years travelling the globe meeting human rights activists, presidents, publishing newspapers, books and organising law conferences. So his quest was really very different from Benazir’s; his quest was to get justice in the murder of his father, to get clemency in the case of his father. Not to sort of take hostage a political legacy. So had he stayed, his quest would’ve been different from his sister’s.

But don’t you think that had he stayed in Pakistan, his task would’ve been made easier?

Not under Zia because, as you know, the patriarchal societies that we live in, the son would’ve been assumed to be the political heir of his father. So would Shahnawaz have lived had he stayed back in Pakistan? I don’t know because this was an environment where you had journalists flogged in public. And not only that, the family of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto never saw his dead body. The Army claims that he was hanged but there is no proof of that. So I think that Murtaza and Shahnawaz’s fate wouldn’t have been very different from their father’s.

You call this book a search for justice; what is the next step in this search? How do you see this search going forward?

This is not the first attempt; we’ve been fighting for justice for 14 years and it has consistently been denied to us in the courts. Of course, we understand the courts in Pakistan are not always free especially in these last few years. They’ve been heavily influenced and heavily hijacked. For me, justice is not revenge because that means violence and that I’m not interested in. Justice is about memory. To be here and talking to you, it took 14 years to reach this point. For me, justice means that there is a remembering of these men who were killed and not just in my family, but the 3000 people who were killed. That this never happens again; that we are never faced with a government that kills 3000 people in a period of one year. So it’s a long road ahead.

Is there any hope for justice?

There is always hope for justice

Even with President Zardari at the helm of affairs?

President Zardari will come and go but the truth and justice are much stronger than his corruption of his government, of any government. If people say that they believe in truth and justice, then there is no force stronger than this belief.

Fatima Bhutto image courtesy: The Daily Beast

Songs of Blood and Sword image courtesy: Amazon

Sneak Peek: Quarantine by Rahul Mehta

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:32:00 +0000

The good folks at Random House India recently sent me a sample copy of their forthcoming book, Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta. It's a collection of short stories about gay relationships and the manner in which Indian families deal with them. What struck me the most about Rahul's stories is the simplicity of his prose; crisp sentences, simple words and well-constructed paragraphs which make his stories beautiful and tender. Just to give you a brief insight, in Quarantine we see Bapuji, a typical grandfather who cribs about his daughter-in-law Asha's cooking and is unable to come to terms with his grandson being gay while in Ten Thousand Years, we read about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks because one of the partners, Thomas, has been unfaithful. There's a third story, Citizen, which I'm yet to read but I'm sure it'll be as enjoyable as the previous two.

I don't want to say too much right now because I've just read two stories but it's suffice to say that I really enjoyed whatever I read and am looking forward to reading the full book once it's out at the end of April.

Will post a review/author interview if, as and when it happens.

Next Big Thing: Wilbur Sargunaraj

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:22:00 +0000

If you’re one of those who troll the Internet looking for mindless entertainment, you probably know who Wilbur Sargunaraj is. If not, log on to YouTube and search for this 32-year-old, US-based Tamilian, whose satirical videos and tutorials on marriage, blogging, talking in German, ordering burgers, and cricket are becoming quite a rage. His Love Marriage video, by far the most popular, has already been viewed by over 2.5 lakh enthusiasts and is getting downloaded as a ringtone for mobiles too. Another hit is Blog Song, which has been creating quite a buzz in the blog community.

But what makes Sargunaraj — looking out of sorts in corporate attire while singing and dancing and beating, literally, drums in one of his videos — such a hit? He knows that he lacks singing and dancing skills. But the manner in which he combines this knowledge, complete with bawdy lyrics and catchy tunes, produces a heady concoction.
Sargunaraj’s motto, in his own words, is quite simple: “Making the common, extraordinary”.

In Love Marriage he does just that. He’s prancing around with villagers, moving around in a humble bullock cart, singing a song where he’s requesting his parents to let him have a, well, love marriage. He may describe his style of singing as “vocal chanting” and though he’s anything but a singer, his music videos are bound to make you laugh.

Sargunaraj has been doing standup comedy in the US for a while now, but only recently decided to venture into music videos. “I always wanted to be an actor,” he confesses. But instead of waiting for an opportunity to come his way, he created one himself. “I wrote songs and through my music videos, I was able to sing, dance, play drums... just like an actor.” He calls himself a “pure entertainer” and going by his online fans’ comments he is a hit. Hailed as a “global superstar and a visionary” by one fan, another follower remarks that “Wilbur inspires me....” What other plans does Sargunaraj have? For the moment, he says, he plans to release more videos, before concentrating on another album, which, he says, will release later this year. “I’d love to do a world tour so that all my fans have a chance to sing and dance along”. That apart, he also wants to host a travel show. “God willing, movies will happen soon”, he adds. That can wait, after all, he’s already dealing with being the Internet’s newest sensation.

(Did this for the Sunday Business Standard. Also, this piece was inspired by Aishwarya's blogpost so a big thank you to her as well!)

Aatish Taseer on 'TheTemplegoers'

noreply@blogger.com (Aayush) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:15:00 +0000

As some readers of this blog might recall, a few months ago I had blogged about Aatish Taseer's debut novel The Templegoers as being one of the most anticipated books of 2010. I'm quite pleased to inform you that the wait for the book was absolutely worth it; Templegoers is one of the most stunning books I've read in recent months. And although the story is set in contemporary Delhi, it really echoes the contradictions that urban India and its residents are afflicted with. I won't divulge much about the novel for I don't intend to ruin your reading experience; instead here's an email interview I did with it's talented author Aatish Taseer.

1) Apart from Delhi, you've lived in London,

America

and in a boarding school in southern

India

. Did your stay and experiences in these different places ever obliterate your Delhi years? Or did they make you think of the city from a different perspective?

No, they intensified my memories of Delhi. And I suppose living in those other places, feeling in some ways cold to the things that in India would have been my inspiration, made me realize where my real material and subjects lay. But it would be churlish of me to ignore the fact that I had lived with a kind of blindness in Delhi—on a basic level, to dirt, poverty, to human relations, in which there was often an element of casual violence; on other levels, to culture, language, and aspects of high civilization that had been all around me in India as I grew up, but that I had not had any means to assess or regard. Living in the West did not give me those means, but watching them regard not only their own civilization but that of other places as well, forced me to look at my own place in new ways; Delhi, and India too.

2) What would you attribute the political undercurrents in The Templegoers too? Your education, your brief career as a journalist, your parentage or your mother's own career as a political journalist?

A question like this from someone living in India surprises me. India is full of politics. You can’t take a pee in

India

, without the wall your peeing against being festooned in political slogans. Every lunching lady, taxi driver, gym trainer and heiress has a political opinion, especially in Delhi. As for The Temple-goers, it is less concerned with politics than with the question of what an Indian regeneration is to mean? Is it going to be some bland dystopia growing from a third-rate borrowed culture? Amazing Thailand so Incredible

India

? Or is it going to be a thing of substance? Is it going to produce an architect in Orissa who might one day build a modern legislative assembly in Bhubaneshwar, taking, for instance, as his model the marvelous shape of the notched amalka that towers over all its temples? Might we have modern apartment buildings that have a shade of our medieval river-fronts? Could it mean that India might lead the world in Indic scholarship? Might it produce institutes of Classical studies equal to our IITs? Will it lead to new ideas about our history? Will we start to create an environment that is more welcoming of the man coming up? Or will he continually be forced to shed his attachments to his language, dress, religion and customs in order to be acceptable to our shabby modern culture? These are not frills; they are the life-blood of any rising power that is to be more than tyranny. And for India to have a new and deeper sense of her past is essential, especially the Sanskritic past, which extends our cultural reach deep into Asia. So far it is not clear what the new energy that has entered India will amount to. But what is clear is that if we go quietly, the way of malls and blue glass, with all the shoddiness and imitation implicit in taking such a road, this ‘Indian renaissance’ would be a very disappointing thing.

3) The standard question one usually asks fiction writers is 'how much of the protagonist is the writer' but, in this case, I'd like to ask how much of the protagonist-narrator is NOT Aatish Taseer considering you've given him your name and set parts of the story near your residence? Also, did you lend him your name so that it enables the reader to put a face to it?

The narrator of The Temple-goers, for all his superficial resemblance to me, is a fictional character with little basis in reality. That he carries the name of ‘Aatish Taseer’ is part of a theme of blurred authorship that runs right through the book. But I don’t wish to give too much away.

4) It seems that one of your characters, Aakash, is a slight contradiction to today's world where some people, after gaining material wealth, have distanced themselves from being religious. Did you deliberately keep Aakash religious and was it attempt on your part to make a statement?

This is plain nonsense. Do a little experiment and find out where the majority of funding for religious organizations and our richer temples comes from and you will know that gaining material wealth in India has nothing to do with losing one’s religious feeling. What you’re talking about is a breed of deracinated Indian of English education, who has lost more than his religion; he has usually lost his language and culture too. That person, though certainly powerful, still constitutes a tiny minority. In any event, none of this concerns Aakash as he is neither rich nor yet rootless.

5) Aakash is a character which has many shades and layers and I get the impression that it must've taken you a long time to create him. Is that so? And if it is, do describe what the process was like?

This is hard to describe as most of it happens during the writing. But yes, Aakash had a sweeter, more vulnerable twin in an unpublished story I wrote, now three years ago. When I developed that character for the novel, darker elements crept in. They had perhaps always been there.

6) Sanyogita, the writer's girlfriend, seems to be a slightly passive element in his life; in the sense that she doesn't express very strong feelings at crucial points. Was it easy for you to keep Sanyogita at a periphery given that you have also been in a relationship in the past?

She is not a passive character. She looms over the story. And her silences, her withdrawal, are always there in background. She is the natural recipient of our sympathies. But yes, the narrator’s rejection of her is like the rejection of his world in Delhi. And once again, my having had a relationship (or two) has nothing to do with the novel’s narrator!

7) How easy or difficult did you find the task of incorporating real-life incidents such as bomb blasts and murder cases into a work of fiction?

Yes, but in the novel, they are not really the bomb blasts or the murders themselves; they are their reproduction in the media. From the outset, it is that that the book is concerned with. So the murder in a sense is of absolutely no importance. It is why Megha seems not so much to die as to disappear.

8) A recent trend that has been noticed in contemporary fiction writing - at least in

India

- is the caricaturisation (for want of a better word) of real-life characters. Why is this so? As a writer, does caricaturisation make it easier/difficult for you to construct your characters?

I don’t really understand this question. Do you mean the emergence of a kind of novel, usually a set of short stories, that feels like it has been commissioned in London or New York by a woman with bleached blonde hair and an upper-west side accent, who says, ‘Yes, let’s have those gay NRI short stories from Mum-BAI.’ Or: ‘We could use a Vietnamese immigrant on our list. Let’s send it through the creative writing school machine and publish next spring’? I think I know what you mean. I despise that kind of fiction. It is the elevator music of literature. And we, in India, who need real writing, cannot afford that voiceless drivel.

9) Just like in your last book, Stranger To History, your debut novel has a very strong element of religion in it. What is it about religion that you make it such an integral part of your work? And will this feature in your future books as well?

I’m interested in religion only when it enters areas beyond faith. In the case of Hindusim, I’m drawn to it for the ways in which it makes sacred the topography of India. I think it gives many Indians their deepest idea of India, the land. And if not misused, it is a very gentle, beautiful idea, neither sectarian nor nationalistic, but actually built into a love for the natural world, for the contours of this country. It is a very easy idea to possess, and I think many Indians carry it in their heads effortlessly. One has only to turn to the epics to see what an incredible celebration they are of the landscape and seasons of India. Just the number of trees named and identified is enough to make one’s heart jump up. And so, you see, when one strays so far out of the sphere of faith, it becomes very difficult to answer your question in terms of ‘religion.’ I think it is important in India to make an intellectual shift, by which we are able to see our works of scripture as also works of literature; Sanskrit, as not merely a liturgical language, but also a literary one; and our temples, as not just places of worship, but as objects of beauty. That is real secularism, not the bogus government variety.

10) Will there always be an element of autobiography in your books? Will you ever be able to detach the Aatish Taseer from a work of fiction or will you always be present in some form?

No autobiography here, Aayush. That narrator is not me. And there have been many like him in the past, ‘Marcel’ of In Search of Lost Time and ‘Manto saab’ to name only a few.

11) Lastly, The Templegoers comes nearly a year after your first book Stranger To History was released. How would you describe your journey from Stranger to Templegoers over the past year?

Quiet. The only life-altering addition has been Sanskrit, with its exquisite grammar and razor-thin views into the classical world of India.

(A shortened version of this appears in the Business Standard. Also, an earlier interview with Aatish is here)