Indira Gandhi in glimpses

THE UNSEEN INDIRA GANDHI
Through her physician's eyes
K P Mathur
Konark Publishers
151 pages; Rs 470

The belief that drives most biographies is that famous people are more than the sum of their public personas, so aspects of their personalities that are unnoticed, unseen or unimagined are as important to form a more rounded understanding of them. Libraries overflow with books on Indira Gandhi. A strong woman, an iron-fisted politician, a heroine, a villainess - every memoir, biography and even fiction has established her as a milestone in independent India's history. And yet, there will always be more books "revealing" aspects that may appear familiar but add to the present portrait.

In The Unseen Indira Gandhi, K P Mathur, a 92-year old former physician of Safdarjung Hospital who served as the doctor to "a number of senior politicians, bureaucrats and other VIPs", offers yet another bunch of anecdotes and tales from the life of Mrs Gandhi. Dr Mathur was associated with Mrs Gandhi as her personal physician for nearly 20 years till her assassination in 1984, and witnessed many behind-the-scene incidents during some of her most defining moments - the Emergency, the war with Pakistan in 1971, the death of Sanjay Gandhi and the birth of her grandchildren.

He recounts the coolness of a prime minister as the nation went to war and how the same prime minister waited agitatedly as the "Buddha smiled" in Pokhran. We are offered a glimpse of a shaken mother after she loses her son in a plane crash and how she regains her composure within weeks. The dynamics of the Nehru-Gandhi family emerge - the daughters-in-law, the uneasy truce and a matriarch's constant efforts to keep her family bonded - never in great detail but through tantalising glimpses.

The narrative is neither sensational nor overtly intimate. Rather, it is a doctor's glimpse into a politician's life - clean, clinical, formal and distant. The author, however, is a family physician and, by that merit, more intimate with India's first family than most others. He tells us how Indira Gandhi spent her Saturdays in a more relaxed fashion, reading biographies of great men, solving crosswords and playing card games after lunch.

He talks about how Maneka Gandhi, thanks to her relative youth, found it more difficult to gel with her mother-in-law and how both women kept their distance from each other. We are told how the senior Mrs Gandhi was keen, anxious even, about getting her other daughter-in-law, Sonia, more involved in "the social and cultural life of the country".

We are also given a peek into a leader who suddenly finds herself out of power, after a long and eventful stint in the hot seat. "Initially, PM felt a bit lonely after losing the elections. She had nothing to do. No files would come to her… She had no office, no staff car or even a car of her own. The staff car allotted to her had been withdrawn and she had no telephone operator to help and she had forgotten the telephone numbers of friends," Mathur writes.

In The Unseen Indira Gandhi, we see her dusting her own room, ordering breakfast from South Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place, practising yoga and visiting numerous temples and religious places and meeting religious thinkers. We watch as she counts beads on the rosary of the rudraksha mala received from her spiritual guru Anandmayi Ma through trying times.

Yet, in all these, the reader will find a sense of incompleteness. Even as the doctor is present with the prime minister on the day of the secret Pokhran tests and finds Mrs Gandhi visibly agitated, the reader is not given a sense of the prevailing atmosphere in her household. The section on the Emergency has no behind-the-scenes insight to offer, as the doctor states what newspapers have maintained all these years. Sanjay Gandhi's death, however, provides some insight into the human that Indira Gandhi was, as she confides that her right arm has been chopped off. A similar human moment comes when Mrs Gandhi meets her British counterpart Margaret Thatcher and both "Iron Ladies" transform into "school girls" on vacation. Mrs Gandhi's assassination, too, is kept a low-key affair in the narrative, as the author bows out.

Infinitely more interesting are the small handwritten notes that the author adds between chapters as standalone one-page narratives. These notes - ranging from complaints of stomach ache to friendly chidings - are both a patient's queries to her doctor, as well as billets passed on to a confidant and friend. The black and white photographs of the author travelling with Mrs Gandhi similarly offer an interesting montage of the prime minister's tours.

The book nonetheless is refreshing in parts, especially when Indira Gandhi steps out of her hard shell, sometimes giggling, sometimes broken in an unexpected manner. For anyone who has not seen or felt the power of her public persona, these chinks would not amount to much. But for those who have, each single glimpse could be truly insightful.

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Indira Gandhi in glimpses

The revolutionary impulse

Serious writing on the history of India is always welcome because so many myths and mythologies are in vogue. If popular culture is to be cleared of a mythical construction of the past, the task has to be performed by professional historians who painstakingly collect facts to refute non-historical received knowledge that is made popular by social and cultural pretenders. This process applies as much to the role and contribution of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) founded by Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad.

The mainstream "official" and sometimes "nationalist" history, whether academic or political, has simplified the debate on the role of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Chandra Shekhar Azad and other dedicated revolutionaries to a question of "practitioners of violence" versus the Gandhi-led mass movement based on non-violence. This book shows that the revolutionaries of the HSRA played a significant role in the inter-war period in north India, and their significance in the anti-colonial struggle was noticed and noted by the British, who ruthlessly tried to suppress the movement.

Kama Maclean, the author of this important study, has set for herself the goal of probing a larger question: to demonstrate "the important role that the revolutionaries played in influencing Congress policy and provoking colonial responses in the process bringing India closer to independence". In fact, Ms Maclean says, the interaction between Gandhi's Congress and the revolutionary movement of north India is much deeper than routinely understood.

If a section of Indian and foreign historians had tried to downplay the contribution of the revolutionary martyrs (shaheeds), the British colonisers were clear that those who has killed John Poyantz Saunders or those who threw a bomb at the Legislative Assembly were "terrorists" and "conspirators". For them, the Lahore conspiracy cases under the Sedition Act were the appropriate responses for which, on March 23, 1931, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged.

The first issue the study examines is the role of Gandhi and his studied and widely unpopular silence when the shaheeds were hanged. This did not go down well because of the widespread popular sympathy for the revolutionaries. But the immediate impact of the hanging was the Gandhi-Irwin pact of 1931, which raised the issue of Dominion Status for India.

The message of this study is that history cannot be seen in black and white. The revolutionaries evolved a strategy of making lengthy statements against the colonisers during the Assembly Bomb Case trial, and all of India read with great interest the rationale behind their acts. Their acts were a response to the death of the popular Punjabi leader Lala Lajpat Rai after being assaulted by the police. The idea of personal sacrifice for freedom carried weight with Indians. The revolutionaries, thus, cannot be reduced to the status of bombers or mindless killers, she argues. She quotes Bhagat Singh's views on the "limits of violence" and how violence can never become the mainstream political line but could be used to "lift people out of their torpor".A REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF INTERWAR INDIA
Violence, Image, Voice and Text
Kama Maclean
Penguin
305 pages; Rs 599

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The revolutionary impulse

Censorship and sensibility

TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A CONNECTED WORLD
Timothy Garton Ash
Yale University Press
491 pages; $30

Among our most treasured public values, free speech is indispensable and perplexing. It involves us at once in high principle and shaming triviality, as two otherwise unconnected headline cases nicely attest. In Germany, a comedian who mocked the Turkish president on air may soon stand trial under an antique law against offending foreign dignitaries. In Florida, a jury in March rejected Gawker Media's free-speech defence and ordered it to pay $140 million in damages for posting a tawdry video on its gossip site showing a retired wrestler in bed with another celebrity's wife.

Defending free speech, alas, takes more than standing up for science, sound argument and brave eloquence. It takes standing up as well for the right to say things that are false, hateful, mindless, base, vulgar, stupid or reckless. It is easy to defend what we admire and believe in. To defend free speech, you have to allow for bad speech. Free speech gave us Martin Luther King's "I have a dream." It also gave us Donald Trump.

It would be nice to have one without the other. But that is not what free speech promises. Free speech is complicated and comes at a high price. We pay for it in terms of other things we also need to care about: public order and security, children's needs, private reputations, civic courtesy, cultural worth, the social­dignity of vulnerable minorities. As Timothy Garton Ash makes admirably clear in his wise, up-to-the-minute and wide-ranging new survey, most of the difficult arguments about free speech bear on its price in terms of other things that also ought to matter to us.

The controversies are fierce and familiar. Ought leakers be punished, and how can whistle-blowers be protected? Should pornography be restricted? Do libel laws gag the press? May religion be shielded from mockery? Ought hate speech be criminalised? Mr Garton Ash pursues each in depth. He follows the common practice of taking "free speech" to mean a cluster of freedoms to express yourself and your thoughts as you please: not just voicing words but printing what you want, ­proclaiming your faith as you wish, campaigning for your chosen causes and making art without interference.

The main arguments now separate laxists from restrictionists. Laxists favour few limits, restrictionists many. The kinds of limits matter. Coercive laws, whether prior censorship or after-the-fact sanctions, provide one kind of limit.

Mr Garton Ash is generally against them. High standards of public argument and common decency are another kind of limit. Mr Garton Ash is broadly for them. You could say he is laxist about law and restrictionist about standards. His approach has the great merit of keeping distinct what is legally permissible and what is or ought to be socially acceptable. Mr Garton Ash treasures the jewel but recognises and regrets the mud. His guiding maxim, never wholly lost amid near encyclopedic detail, is "More free speech but also better speech."

As a scholar-journalist, Mr Garton Ash knows what he is talking about from a career of reading, writing, listening and, more lately, web-clicking. When reporting on the break-up of the Communist world in the 1980s, he befriended East European dissidents, saw how truthful speech could sap the will of wrongful power and collected a private lexicon of sardonic political jokes that here lighten the going. Now a fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, he supervises a 13-language online debating platform - freespeechdebate.com - for promoting free speech and arguing with all sides about its proper limits. His travels and interviews for "Free Speech" spanned the world, or what he calls the "cosmopolis," a global space that is virtual as well as geographic. That range alone will squelch the fantasy that free speech is a purely Western concern.

Law to Mr Garton Ash is a poor tool for civic education. He questions hate-speech laws and Holocaust-denial laws, fearing a "taboo ratchet." Corporations in their turn are after profit, not civic uplift. He distrusts the idea that Google, Amazon and Facebook, for example, serve­equally the values of free speech and good speech. His preferred answer to the more flagrant vices of liberty - hate speech, manipulative journalism, coarsened debate and a vast sewer of abuse on social media - is to encourage "shared norms and practices that enable us to make best use of this essential freedom."

In lesser hands, that recommendation might sound overabstract or simply pious. Mr Garton Ash, however, applies and tests it in 10 chapters offering "complex, contextual judgments" that pretty well cover the field of present controversy. He writes with panache and understands the world he works in, especially the virtual world of the Net. Practical answers interest him more than doctrinal purity. His website has adopted a "one-click-away" rule. It screens provocative material - Muhammad cartoons, for example - with a warning that some may take offence, leaving them to see it or not as they choose.

Most of us are somewhat stunned at present by the scale and ­complexity of the forces in play, be they government surveillance; the "Great Firewall of China" that can censor the national web; the mounting strength of the Internet giants; or the frightening violence of militant Islam. Bewilderment is the easy option. Free Speech encourages us to take a breath, look hard at the facts and see how well-tried liberal principles can be applied and defended in daunting new circumstances.

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Censorship and sensibility

Virat Kohli: Pushing the limits

'Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason'Blaise PascalLook around. Go as far as your mind allows you to - from the dustbowls of Mumbai to the green tops of England and the backwaters of Jamaica. To try to think of a batsman who is better than Virat Kohli right now is akin to a trivial attempt at spotting a polar bear in the Atacama Desert. Yes, it's that futile.

After the seemingly paranormal AB de Villiers helped Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) storm into the final of the ninth edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) earlier this week, Kohli said that the "who's the best" debate had been settled. "It's AB," announced the RCB skipper. However, despite the amicable show of reverence for his new bromance partner, even Kohli, deep down, would acknowledge that he is a ravaging beast who is currently operating on a level that borders on the absurd. Naturally, there are no peers in sight.

On commentary a few nights ago, former West Indian fast bowler Ian Bishop spoke about the intractable purpose that accompanies everything Kohli does. With Kohli, a single is taken with the same ardor as a six that is deposited out of the stadium. To think that Kohli has notched up four hundreds this IPL season is a remarkable testament to this unyielding intent, and more strikingly, the man's fitness.

Post the single-handed decimation of a dumfounded Australian side in the ICC World T20 in March, Kohli confessed to the hard yards he puts in the gym. At Mohali on that whirlwind evening, it invariably showed. Along with the calculated blitzkrieg that sent the Aussies tumbling out, Kohli ran between the wickets like Hicham El Guerroj on turbocharge. His fitness, after all, has allowed him to master the art of making fine margins count.

Pradeep Sangwan, Kohli's former junior cricket teammate, says that his transformation has been unreal. "He has incredibly hard on his fitness. You don't get so good without working on all aspects of your game, and fitness is his priority," he says. As a teenager, Kohli was chubby with erratic food habits. When he first made it to the Indian team, the extra weight had been shed but he lacked the wholesome strength that is such an intrinsic part of his game today.

"When he started playing for India, he realised the need for greater fitness," says Rajkumar Sharma, Kohli's coach for over 10 years now. "The talent was always there. His fitness has helped him take his game to the next level."

Kohli works out in the gym five times a week, with the major focus being lower-body strength; that's what gives him the explosive power in his legs. Working on his upper body, though, does not figure very high on his priority list. RCB insiders say that you seldom see Kohli eating anything. "Forget about sweets, he won't even touch anything that is even remotely likely to add calories to his body," says a teammate. "His biggest asset is immense self-control."

RCB's strength and conditioning coach, Shankar Basu, who also works with the Indian team, has been the catalyst for Kohli's astounding transformation. Often, Basu makes Kohli do more than 100 squats in one session. His exercise routine is a mix of cardio and strength training - the ideal way to build the right muscles.

And, Kohli would do anything to be the fittest player on the team. Earlier this year, he started using a high-altitude mask, which makes the workout more productive and helps in conditioning the lungs. Kohli, in the past, has also put to test the Technoshaper, an apparatus that works around the midriff - speeding up fat loss and ensuring firmer skin.

Even on the field, the Indian Test captain is the first man to arrive for training. During RCB's pre-match football games, Kohli - in his resplendent orange and black football boots - is easily the most enthusiastic player on the pitch. "He takes all these things seriously. Any sport and he's up for it. This is what separates him from the rest," says Sangwan.

It's not only the fitness schedule but also the diet that has undergone a massive change. Sangwan reminisces how Kohli could easily devour plates full of chicken tikka and tandoori chicken. Now, the focus is firmly on salmon and lamb chops. "Kohli makes sure he consumes a lot of protein; you need that for strength," says Sharma.

For all his metaphysical exploits this year - first the World Cup, now IPL - Kohli's name does not feature in the team that is headed to Zimbabwe next month. Right now, he will happily agree to run a marathon without even batting an eyelid, or say yes to playing a gruelling 90-minute football match. But even men blessed with his kind of endurance need rest. For once, the selectors must be happy leaving him out.

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Virat Kohli: Pushing the limits

Irrfan unplugged

Irrfan Khan has the soul of a wandering Bedouin.

Even as he straddles successful careers in Hindi and international cinema, the Jurassic World star yearns more and more to be closer to nature. Recent projects have helped the actor, known for his melancholic eyes and penchant for nuance, fulfil this aspiration.

While shooting in the deserts of Rajasthan this year, he spent a happy month without reading newspapers, and made friends with birds and camels. Another upcoming film sent him into the lap of the hills in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

Enviably, the people in these places appeared to him to be content living in less modern ways. "Sometimes you feel life is better when you have no agenda."

At Irrfan's well-appointed home in Oshiwara, however, there seems to be a pressing agenda. Members of his entourage hang around, waiting for orders, as he finishes one meeting after another. When he is ready for the interview, 30 minutes after the scheduled time, his sonorous voice precedes him.

He steps out of a room dressed in slim-fit jeans, blue T-shirt, and a khaki shirt on top, looking carefully dishevelled. His brown hair is slightly overgrown, and a single green stud gleams on his left ear. He looks younger than his 49 years. A slender Apple laptop, film scripts, a packet of loose tobacco and rolling paper crowd the centre table. Stills of Qissa, his 2014 work, flicker on a projection screen.

This cannot have been the scene of a just-concluded script-reading because Irrfan is careful not to schedule those in the afternoon. "And not after lunch either," he says, with a sheepish grin. "Once, I went into deep slumber and was so embarrassed. Sometimes there is nothing to discover in the narration, so I get bored."

It is clear the man has a sense of humour. When he laughs, the impact reaches his eyes and temples. He is a patient interviewee, giving more than the 10 or 15 minutes celebrities usually offer to journalists. The responses are often philosophical, and his meditations on acting especially confirm his drama school-origins.

"But people always talk only about his acting," his wife Sutapa Sikdar rues. "He has a whole other side too. He loves music."

Irrfan is an admirer of The Doors' Jim Morrison, and the Kurdish singer Aynur Dogan. He likes to discover artists through musical films such as Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club and Crossing the Bridge by Fatih Akin.

As a viewer, he prefers documentaries over fictional tales. It has been an enduring desire to do a film where he is immersed in music. A forthcoming work, The Song of Scorpions, took him close but not all the way. It is based on music but his character does not play any.

With a mysterious faith, Irrfan declares, "I think I am about to get something related to music. It is just in the periphery."

Irrfan is a believer in serendipity, saying he listens to the "signs that life gives". Several important career decisions were born from this, as well as an innate desire to attack ennui.

Irrfan Khan with Tom Hanks in a still from InfernoThe eldest son in a family that descended from the Nawabs of Tonk, he was raised in Jaipur. Unlike his uncles, Irrfan's father did not inherit farms or villages but started a tyre business.

Acting was hardly seen as a profession where he grew up. Much of his comfortable childhood was spent being bored in classrooms. During the summers, he would visit cousins in Tonk, observing bullock carts and exploring "haunted" mansions for fun.

After Class X, young Irrfan took up some field jobs that might have helped him go overseas, but two months in, he abandoned it.

Soon, the films of Dilip Kumar and Naseeruddin Shah piqued his interest and he saw it as a sign to try acting. "But I was not going to land up in Bombay. I wanted to learn the craft." He knocked instead on the doors of Delhi's National School of Drama (NSD) and lied about having done 10 plays, a prerequisite for getting in.

He would meet several important people there: his writer wife, Sutapa, for one. Fellow student Tigmanshu Dhulia would go on to direct him in television and on the big screen. There was also Professor Robin Das, whose advice he still carries with him: a good actor lets his emotions go but still keeps an eye on which light is on him.

Irrfan's process begins with searching for an entry into the story and the character. Some roles are easy to grasp because they are simple or very clearly envisioned. Some others, says Irrfan, need him to find a physical model.

After initially struggling to essay the character of the athlete-turned-bandit in Paan Singh Tomar, he began channelling his father's demeanour and mannerisms. The Namesake's Ashoke Ganguli was a mystery to him until he met writer Jhumpa Lahiri's unobtrusive father.

"He makes major character revelations with the smallest of gestures," Gabriel Byrne, his co-star on HBO's In Treatment had told The New York Times. Irrfan's drama teacher Das says he spent time among people as well as alone on campus.

Das directed him in a production of Jean Anouilh's farcical play Fighting Cock where he played a man confronted by his betrothed's father. Instead of loud movements, Irrfan chose to make subtle ones. "I asked him if it was difficult to act caricaturish. He said it felt odd. In the run-through, I saw his way worked beautifully as comedy."

Irrfan in MadaariIrrfan later moved to Mumbai to work in television. A role in Star Bestsellers, directed by Dhulia, won him accolades. In 2002, when Irrfan was toying with TV production, a big break came in the form of The Warrior by British film maker Asif Kapadia. This, he believes, was another sign to turn to cinema. Dhulia filmed the student politics drama Haasil with Irrfan the next year.

The international movies in his filmography are by far outnumbered by Indian titles but they have brought him recognition. The New York Times has written of his "soulful gaze", while a Guardian writer called him a "dependable actor" who is "head-turningly handsome".

Playwright Adam Rapp, who scripted the episodes of In Treatment in which Irrfan starred, says he is among the greatest actors alive today. LEGO, the toy maker, introduced Simon Masrani, Irrfan's character in Jurassic World, in a 2015 collection based on the film.

Apart from the testimonials for his acting chops, directors such as Mark Webb of The Amazing Spiderman and Ang Lee who cast him in Life of Pi have praised his interesting face.

This is drastically different from his early days in Indian films when his looks were routinely termed unconventional. "It was mostly used as a condescending thing. To show I don't belong here," observes Irrfan.

As a young aspirant, he had doubts about being accepted as "a hero", but focused on references like Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan who succeeded despite their unusual looks. The old label does not bother him now. "The day I become conventional, something inside me will die."

He dislikes comparisons with the other Khans of Bollywood.

The image-conscious celebrity in him surfaces only once when he asks to be shown his photographs before they are carried. He is boyish almost, otherwise, putting his legs up on the white sofa, and occasionally folding his arms behind his head.

More recently, Indian film makers are imagining him in lighter, romantic roles. Shoojit Sircar's Piku most notably cast him opposite the statuesque Deepika Padukone. Before that, Irrfan played the reticent Saajan Fernandes who turns into a tender lover in The Lunchbox.

America's new hunger for bringing diversity to its television and cinema too spells good things for Indian artists, he notes. "They don't require that Peter Sellers cliche anymore. Neither Hollywood wants it, neither are we interested in doing it."

So far, he has met demands to speak English with British and American accents, as well as the more confounding French-Canadian-Indian accent for Life of Pi.

His appreciation for language seems deep. "Every language has its own peculiarity, its own flavour, and its own appeal."

He picked up Bengali and Punjabi for roles in The Namesake and Qissa, respectively. With certain scripts, as in the case of Piku, he called for a reading because the writing seemed to have a unique rhythm to it.

With Maqbool, he memorised each line as is because any improvisation took away from it.

Next up, Irrfan will appear in Nishikant Kamat's Madaari, and share Hollywood screen space with Tom Hanks in Inferno.

He has interests in reading beyond film scripts, as evidenced when he tweets lines from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, and links to articles in the Paris Review. Anthony Burgess, Haruki Murakami and the Hindi writer Uday Prakash are among his favourites.

Irrfan rarely puts pen to paper himself though. There is not enough harmony between his thoughts and written words. "There are spelling and grammar mistakes that I only notice later," he says about his tweets.

His elder son, Babil, is seemingly a skilled writer. "Even when he is accusing us over SMS, there is a kind of force and expression that we cannot ignore."

It was one such accusation that led the actor to move to the tony suburb of Oshiwara.

Irrfan looks decidedly less relaxed here than he had in his quiet, sea-facing Mudh Island home two years ago. If it were not for traffic, which lengthens commute, he would continue living far away.

Mumbai always struck him as a place obsessed with money. In the heart of the city, man and wild have no connection; a letdown for someone whose favourite childhood memory is walking in the forest with his father.

"When you are young you are fascinated by so many things. Some things drop, some stay. I can be without anything but I cannot be without nature," says perhaps one of the most natural actors in the industry.

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Irrfan unplugged

Chandra Arya: Playing on home turf

Two-and-a-half years ago, Chandra Arya, 52, was not even a politician. Now, the Member of Parliament from Nepean, a seat in Canada's capital city of Ottawa, is the Chair of the Canada India Parliamentary Friendship Group. After last October's parliamentary elections, the group was reconstituted earlier this month, with its largest ever membership of over 75 MPs from both houses of Parliament. It is also among the largest such groups in the Canadian parliament.

"I talked to a lot of my colleagues, MPs, and found tremendous support to enhance this group," Arya, a Liberal Party MP, says. "A lot of people signed up on my suggestion and in the end, some people asked me to take this lead and I volunteered to do so." India's High Commissioner to Canada Vishnu Prakash describes Arya as "a doer and a person of ideas, who is keen to infuse greater momentum in bilateral ties".

Arya, who was an investment advisor and technology company executive in Ottawa, has identified advancing bilateral economic ties as a key priority in his new role. It is a challenging assignment, given that annual trade stands at a meager Canadian $8 billion despite a nearly 30 per cent jump last year, and well below the target of $15 billion by 2015 promised by the two governments. Talks on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, or CEPA, and the Bilateral Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement, or BIPPA, have dragged on for years, also missing their deadlines.

The Canadian MP admits there's a lot of work to do on those fronts. "From what I hear from the Canadian side, we are quite eager to take the negotiation to its logical end. I don't want to say that it is the Indian side that is an issue, because I'm yet to understand the complete status of the negotiations currently," Arya says.

Prakash confirms India's commitment to the pacts. "Both countries are committed to bring CEPA and BIPPA talks to early fruition. The last round of consultations held in New Delhi on April 22 was productive," he says.

While its function is roughly equivalent to the India Caucuses in the US Senate and House of Representatives, the parliamentary friendship group is a notch below parliamentary associations in terms of resources and reach. Arya is keen to upgrade the group to the status of an association. "That will enable bilateral exchange of parliamentarians, plus we will get staff support to host various events," he explains.

The first-time MP believes greater engagement, both on the political and policymaker fronts, is crucial for advancing bilateral ties. While there is a lot of interest about India among Canadian lawmakers, according to Arya, he feels India has not yet woken up to the potential of this partnership. "The Canadian MPs are quite aware of the potential of trade with India. Whether the same degree of awareness exists at the policymakers level in India, I don't know. I know the Indian high commissioner is very much aware of it, I know some of the officials who have visited are a bit aware of it, but beyond that I don't know how high priority is Canada in the minds of the policymakers in India," says Arya.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Canada in April 2015, when Conservative leader Stephen Harper was his counterpart, was seen as a milestone. Modi also met then opposition leader Justin Trudeau during that visit, and the two leaders have met or talked again since then. As Arya points out, the change of guard in Ottawa prompted little change in Canada's approach to India. "The Conservative government also worked hard to improve the trade relations between Canada and India. We too are committed to the same. It is a good thing that the main political parties are all on the same wavelength, and recognise the growing importance of India," says Arya.

His is a remarkable success story in Canadian politics, more so for a recent immigrant. The lawmaker, who was born in a village near Bengaluru, and studied at Bangalore University and Karnatak University, moved to Canada only a little over a decade ago with his wife and son. Despite holding engineering and business degrees, he says he had to re-educate himself and switch careers. "I took 12 to 13 courses in a matter of four months," he recalls.

In Ottawa, Arya worked with thee wealth management company CIBC Wood Gundy, and the defence and aerospace systems firm D-TA Systems. "I had zero names, zero phone numbers when I first landed here, and today I have in my Blackberry 1,700 names," he says.

In early 2014, despite lacking any exposure to politics, he became intrigued by the Liberal Party's new leader, Justin Trudeau's, pledge to hold open primaries to select candidates for the parliamentary election. By March 2014, he had announced his intention to run for the nomination in Nepean, a new constituency. "I did not have any mentors, not in the political sphere, not in the business sphere. I ran on my connections with the average Canadians in Ottawa. That was my base and that has been my greatest support," Arya says.

He was locked in a tight race against his Conservative opponent, but won comfortably as part of the pro-Trudeau wave across Canada. He proudly recalls that Trudeau started the final phase of the Liberal campaign from his office. "When I met Trudeau, I told him, I am going to deliver Nepean. Those were my first words to him after I became the candidate. I hope he remembers," say Arya with a laugh.

His ties to India remain strong, as his and his wife's families are all still in Karnataka. His wife Sangeetha works for the Ottawa Catholic School Board, and their son Sid is training to be a chartered accountant.

Arya is now part of the largest contingent of Indo-Canadian MPs in Ottawa, with 19 lawmakers from the community, a majority of them belonging to the Sikh faith. In fact, this led to an amusing incident during the campaign, when a Canadian journalist reported that while the Conservatives had both Sikh and Hindu candidates on their list, the Liberals had only nominated Sikhs. Arya received urgent messages from Trudeau's aide, saying, "Chandra, you are a Hindu, you have to tweet it out!" Arya believes Indo-Canadians are now getting more engaged in politics. "The Sikh community has been very active politically for a long time, and they deserve to be there. The Hindu and Muslim communities are also getting quite active now and we want to build on that," he says.

For now, Arya has big plans for the parliamentary group he heads. He plans to seek briefings from Canada's foreign and trade ministries for his members. He also urges Indian ministers and lawmakers to visit Canada. "The various committees in Indian Parliament, they too should visit, because some of the main work, at least on the Canadian side, gets done at the committee level and the group of MPs who are interested in this like the group we have, these make a big difference," he says.

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Chandra Arya: Playing on home turf

Nike off the starting block

SHOE DOG: A MEMOIR BY THE CREATOR OF NIKE
Author: Phil Knight
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 386
Price: Rs 599

My appointment at Onitsuka was early the next morning, so I lay down immediately on the tatami mat. But I was too excited to sleep. I rolled around on the mat most of the night, and at dawn I rose wearily and stared at my gaunt, bleary reflection in the mirror. After shaving, I put on my green Brooks Brothers suit and gave myself a pep talk.

You are capable. You are confident. You can do this.

You can DO this.

Then I went to the wrong place.

I presented myself at the Onitsuka showroom, when in fact I was expected at the Onitsuka factory -across town. I hailed a taxi and raced there, frantic, arriving half an hour late. Unfazed, a group of four executives met me in the lobby. They bowed. I bowed. One stepped forward. He said his name was Ken Miyazaki, and he wished to give me a tour….

We passed through the accounting department. Everyone in the room, men and women, leaped from their chairs, and in unison bowed, a gesture of kei, respect for the American tycoon. I'd read that "tycoon" came from taikun, Japanese for "warlord." …

The executives told me that they churned out fifteen thousand pairs of shoes each month. "Impressive," I said, not knowing if that was a lot or a little. They led me into a conference room and pointed me to the chair at the head of a long round table…

Seat of honor. More kei. They arranged themselves around the table and straightened their ties and gazed at me. The moment of truth had arrived….

Unable to remember what I'd wanted to say, or even why I was here, I took several quick breaths. Everything depended on my rising to this occasion. Everything. If I didn't, if I muffed this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about. I'd be a disappointment to my parents, my school, my hometown. Myself….

I coughed into my fist. "Gentlemen," I began.

Mr. Miyazaki interrupted. "Mr. Knight - what company are you with?" he asked.

"Ah, yes, good question."

Adrenaline surging through my blood, I felt the flight response, the longing to run and hide, which made me think of the safest place in the world. My parents' house. The house had been built decades before, by people of means, people with much more money than my parents, and thus the architect had included servants' quarters at the back of the house, and these quarters were my bedroom, which I'd filled with baseball cards, record albums, posters, books - all things holy. I'd also covered one wall with my blue ribbons from track, the one thing in my life of which I was unabashedly proud. And so? "Blue Ribbon," I blurted. "Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon."

Mr. Miyazaki smiled. The other executives smiled. A murmur went around the table. Blueribbon, blueribbon, blueribbon. The executives folded their hands and fell silent again and resumed staring at me. "Well," I began again, "gentlemen, the American shoe market is enormous. And largely untapped. If Onitsuka can penetrate that market, if Onitsuka can get its Tigers into American stores, and price them to undercut Adidas, which most American athletes now wear, it could be a hugely profitable venture."

I was simply quoting my presentation at Stanford, verbatim, speaking lines and numbers I'd spent weeks and weeks researching and memorizing, and this helped to create an illusion of eloquence. I could see that the executives were impressed. But when I reached the end of my pitch there was a prickling silence. Then one man broke the silence, and then another, and now they were all speaking over one another in loud, excited voices. Not to me, but to each other.

Then, abruptly, they all stood and left.

Was this the customary Japanese way of rejecting a Crazy Idea? To stand in unison and leave? Had I squandered my kei - just like that? Was I dismissed? What should I do? Should I just . . . leave?

After a few minutes they returned. They were carrying sketches, samples, which Mr. Miyazaki helped to spread before me. "Mr. Knight," he said, "we've been thinking long time about American market."

"You have?"

"We already sell wrestling shoe in United States. In, eh, North­east? But we discuss many time bringing other lines to other places in America."

They showed me three different models of Tigers. A training shoe, which they called a Limber Up. "Nice," I said. A high-jump shoe, which they called a Spring Up. "Lovely,"

I said. And a discus shoe, which they called a Throw Up.

Do not laugh, I told myself. Do not. . . laugh.

They barraged me with questions about the United States, about American culture and consumer trends, about different kinds of athletic shoes available in American sporting goods stores. They asked me how big I thought the American shoe market was, how big it could be, and I told them that ultimately it could be $1 billion. To this day I'm not sure where that number came from. They leaned back, gazed at each other, astonished. Now, to my astonishment, they began pitching me. "Would Blue Ribbon ... be interested . . . in representing Tiger shoes? In the United States?" "Yes," I said. "Yes, it would."

I held forth the Limber Up. "This is a good shoe," I said. "This shoe - I can sell this shoe." I asked them to ship me samples right away. I gave them my address and promised to send them a money order for fifty dollars.

They stood. They bowed deeply. I bowed deeply. We shook hands. I bowed again. They bowed again. We all smiled. The war had never happened. We were partners. We were brothers. The meeting, which I'd expected to last fifteen minutes, had gone two hours.

From Onitsuka I went straight to the nearest American Express office and sent a letter to my father. Dear Dad: Urgent. Please wire fifty dollars right away to Onitsuka Corp of Kobe….

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Nike off the starting block

Bad acting killed Veerappan

I remember the first time I watched Satya, I was amazed and in complete awe. I thought Ram Gopal Varma had done an outstanding job with the film and I started respecting him as a talented director. But then a slew of films such as Naach, James and the oh-so-horrible Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag shattered that newfound respect.

Naturally, I was apprehensive about watching Veerappan but I drummed up courage and braced myself for whatever came my way.

Almost instantly I was thrown into a state of deja vu. With ludicrous close-ups and a background score that is nothing short of aural torture, the film reminds you time and again that you're watching a RGV-directed work.

Based on his 2016 Kannada film Killing Veerappan, this film revolves around the life of the infamous brigand, Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, and the events leading up to Operation Cocoon during which he was killed by a Special Task Force. It stars Sandeep Bhardwaj as Veerappan along with Sachiin Joshi and Lisa Ray who play the supporting leads.

The film opens with Voltaire's quote, "Society gets the criminal it deserves", and thus tries to create an air of ambiguity around the man.

The film is set a few months before Veerappan was gunned down. Joshi, who plays an STF officer and is referred to as just "Cop" in the closing credits, hatches a plan to nab the dacoit by using the widow of a fellow STF officer. The widow (Ray) tries to forge camaraderie with Veerappan's wife Muthulakshmi in order to get vital information about the brigand.

Ray, though beautiful, fails to capture my attention. Her dialogue delivery is dull and forced. The same can be said for Joshi, who looks clueless for the majority of the film. Though Joshi plays the role of a no-nonsense cop, he fails to garner any attention due to his immensely bad acting. Bhardwaj as Veerappan is the only actor who looks promising. His appearance and acting make him seem like a brigand. Muthulakshmi is a far cry from her real life counterpart and is portrayed as just an on-looker.

The script is weak and the acting shoddy. Take this for example, Bhardwaj's Veerappan looks gritty but his lackeys look like they're facing the camera for the first time. The narrative, however, might take you back to RGV's good films such as Satya, Company and the likes. But the feeling is pretty shortlived.

It is pretty evident that a lot of characters have been rewritten a bit differently from their real life counterparts. To ensure the smooth sailing of the film, perhaps.

Another aspect that irked me was the way many dialogues were muted to make way for the thunderous background score. I'm pretty sure I'd be more interested to know what Veerappan says than torture my eardrums.

The film has several engaging scenes in the form of shootouts and chases. The cinematography is where the film scores the most. The backdrops and shooting locales add a bit of credibility to the story.

Though there are glimpses of RGV's long-lost talent, the movie doesn't really attract you. I kept waiting for the film to show Veerappan's climb to power and becoming one of the most feared men in south India. But the film was too attached to Operation Cocoon, it seemed.

After sitting through this 126-minute ordeal, the only thing I could take away was that Ram Gopal Varma hasn't redeemed himself yet, but is certainly on the path to do so.

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Bad acting killed Veerappan

Waiting on grief

Call it misfortune or a necessary training in adulthood, but I have visited a lot of hospitals, mostly accompanying a loved one. While they used to be scary at the beginning, they became exhausting after repeated visits. Anu Menon's Waiting offers a heart-wrenching account of how hostile, confusing and tormenting the waiting room at a hospital can be.

The trailers of the film reveal the basic plot, so I am at no risk of giving out any spoilers. Shiv Natraj, essayed effortlessly by Naseeruddin Shah, is a jolly old man whose wife has been in coma at a Kochi hospital for the last eight months. Tara Kapoor, which Kalki Koechlin plays in her trademark "troubled-girl" style, receives news of her husband's car crash. Natraj and Kapoor's respective spouses are admitted to the same hospital and Natraj becomes a sort of coach for Kapoor to navigate through medicalese and her own grief.

Superlative performances from all actors, including the supporting cast, drive the grief home with needle precision. Shah as the doting husband, who is fighting all odds to keep his wife alive, is instantly charming. He becomes a father figure to Keochlin's character, countering her volatility with his stable, calming presence. Neither Shah nor Koechlin seem aware of the camera and even the dialogues are written to reflect an easy colloquialism. Girish, the man from the company where Koechlin's husband works, complete with his broken English and benign face, is quite memorable. Suhasini Maniratnam's short role as Pankaja Natraj, Shah's wife, is equally noteworthy.

Unsurprisingly, Rajat Kapoor is cast perfectly as the doctor who is both involved and detached. The cool professionalism of doctors and the need to be distanced from their patients makes one both despise and relate to Kapoor's character. In a country where the doctor-patient ratio is so poor, one really cannot blame doctors for being brusque. And yet, it's easier said than done when one is on the other side of the table.

But the biggest strength is perhaps the script of the film, simple yet beautifully layered. It is surprising that for something that is an everyday reality for almost anyone who visits the hospital with and for a loved one has never been the core of a film. One sees the doctor's perspective often in popular television series such as Grey's Anatomy, but the myriad emotions that unravel themselves in a hospital waiting room has yet been unexplored.

The other aspect that is left largely untouched in the Indian health care discourse is the question of life support. When is the right time to pull the plug on a loved one's life? When do you know you've fought enough? The absence of healthcare directives or even a debate over them is brilliantly highlighted in Natraj's heated exchange with the doctor.

"Zara zara" and "Tu hai toh main hun" are haunting and perfectly capture the poignant tone of the film. The writers of the film have sprinkled a light dash of humour over the dark reality of lives of the characters, giving it, in turn, an element of unexpected profundity.

At a personal level, this film is bound to touch anyone who has seen a loved one on a hospital bed and felt helpless. As Natraj explains the five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - to Tara, one experiences each stage in the 99 minutes of the film. Though it ends on an inconclusive note, it tugs hard at your heartstrings. I would recommend carrying a pack of tissues, I certainly needed them.

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Waiting on grief

The man who knew Ramanujan

The Man Who Knew Infinity, released recently, is not the first film to be made on Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and it will probably not be the last. The man has been the subject of endless fascination in India and abroad, not merely for his advanced skill in the subject but also for the brief success he enjoyed during his lifetime, a success that would not have been possible without the painstaking support of British mathematician G H Hardy.

Most accounts of Ramanujan's life focus on his partnership with Hardy. Few, if any, look beyond the professional contours of their relationship, especially the fact of Hardy's homosexuality and what role it might have played in the duo's association. In his 2007 novel, The Indian Clerk, American writer David Leavitt imagined the Hardy-Ramanujan partnership from the mentor's viewpoint and did not shy away from exploring its homoerotic subtext.

The Indian Clerk begins on that fateful day in 1913, when Hardy received a letter from Ramanujan chock-full of obscure equations and inexplicable formulas. At the time Hardy had been collaborating with John Edensor Littlewood on the Riemann Hypothesis. Ramanujan's letter shows that he had derived without assistance what the greatest mathematicians of Cambridge were working on using the zeta function.

Hardy invites Ramanujan to Cambridge and so begins an exciting chapter in the Indian's life that will, however, end in tragedy. Within months of returning to India in 1919, Ramanujan will succumb to tuberculosis. For most of the first half of The Indian Clerk, he comes across as a primordial ape bumped into an unknown culture. Weighed down by the demands of his religion that prohibited consumption of meat, he faces myriad troubles in adjusting to life in England, not least of which is the frigid climate.

He is desperate for recognition, going so far as to seek a B.A. in math at Trinity, when his talent far supersedes any such qualification. He is temperamental and has issues with women, from whom he expects a sort of benevolent servitude, which when disrupted, has him erupt in flashes of morbid anger. His declining health exacerbates his terrible loneliness - one might even say his heterosexual loneliness - which Hardy fails to glean.

The real achievement of The Indian Clerk lies in its imagining of Hardy's ruminations. Like Gustav von Aschenbach's doomed love for a teenage boy in Death in Venice, Hardy's feelings for Ramanujan aren't straightforward. He is slyly expectant of Ramanujan's impending death.

As Andrew O'Hehir expatiates in his incisive essay "Just how gay is 'Death in Venice'?" in Salon, "Aschenbach almost seems convinced he has created the boy himself, out of "austere and pure will". Perhaps he has. Here and elsewhere, Tadzio is described as a piece of classical statuary, a mythical or godlike figure who is pale and translucent, indeed almost dead. (At two different points Aschenbach imagines that Tadzio will not live long, which he finds a satisfying, even pleasant notion.)

Hardy too is possessive of Ramanujan and nearly insouciant about his ill health: "While he continued to refer to the impending trip [to India] as 'a visit,' I think I knew, even then, that he was going to die." Yet, there is a crucial difference between The Indian Clerk and Thomas Mann's novella. It is Hardy, the lover, who survives here, while the object of affection succumbs.

The book is interspersed with Hardy's lecture at Harvard in 1936 - the one he did not give, as Leavitt reminds us too often - "all the while writing equations on the board and disquisiting, with his voice, on hypergeometric series." Initially, the lectures give off homoerotic longings and heartache, but later, they make interesting reading on the First World War; how it affected England, and especially Cambridge. Even so, one such account develops into an erotic fantasy, of a wounded Hardy being tended to by handsome doctors on the battlefield. "Somehow I dreamed, even gloried in, the possibility of my own death," he says.

This quest for death (albeit erotically handled) is of a piece with the other major theme of the novel, Hardy's intense grief over the death of his Cambridge colleague and lover, R K Gaye. By turns benevolent and merciless, Gaye, a phantom charge of pure emotion, rides roughshod over Hardy's imitation of a life.

Ramanujan's approaching death, Gaye's undead spirit, the scene on the battlefield - all these point to a fascination for annihilation. Hardy's solitariness is an outcome of his being gay. He is nearly thankful for the abnormality because it suits his temperament; in fact, the absence of sexual attraction for the opposite sex has relieved him of the conventional constructs of marriage and domesticity. Death then - ritualistic, metaphorical death - is presented as a more welcoming proposition than life.

An assured triumph, The Indian Clerk presents an alternative, but no less fascinating, reading of a partnership that, in its sheer impossibility and wide-ranging scope, continues to provide fodder to storytellers.

vjohri19@gmail.com

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The man who knew Ramanujan

The world through Bhupen Khakhar's canvas

It was the late-1960s and Indian artists were veering towards the Western ideas of abstract expressionism and high Modernism. In such a scenario, Bhupen Khakhar started his journey towards becoming India’s first pop artist and during the 1970s, had “established himself as a connoisseur of kitsch,” wrote poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote in his catalogue essay, A Crazy Pair of Eyes: Remembering Bhupen Khakhar,  for the 2013-exhibition on the artist at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke.

However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Khakhar’s paintings became deeply autobiographical, as he became, perhaps, the first Indian artist to come out of the closet and freely express his sexuality. Works such as Two Men in Banaras (1982) and Yayati (1987) were, Khakhar said in an interview to Outlook, “kind of personal confessional paintings.” It is to celebrate his stature as a key global figure in 20th-century painting that Tate Modern is presenting the first ever international retrospective of Khakhar since his death in 2003.

Hathyogi, 1978. Courtesy of the Estate of BhupenKhakhar/National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi © Estate of Bhupen Khakhar.The show derives its title from Khakhar’s seminal work You Can’t Please All (1981), which shows a life-sized naked figure on a balcony, watching characters from an ancient Aesop fable. The exhibition also heralds the opening of Tate Modern’s new extension, which has been in the works since mid-2000s. “The exhibition features 70-plus works, and also significant archival material,” says assistant curator Nada Raza, who worked on the exhibition alongside Chris Dercon, director, Tate Modern.

One can see Khakhar’s major works — watercolours, oils on canvas and even experimental ceramics — created over five decades and drawn from major collections from across the world. “Khakhar, since his death, hasn’t had a serious re-appraisal. He has been acknowledged by everyone as important, but his work has not been seen so much,” she adds. Khakhar’s association with the gallery is not recent: his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1982 as part of “Six Indian Painters” and then again in “Century City” in 2001. “And now in 2016, he is part of the opening exhibition at the new wing, for which we wanted to go back to an artist that we have always considered important,” says Raza.

Three significant works — Night, Republic Day and American Survey Officer — have been loaned by Delhi-based Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, or KNMA, which is also one of the supporters of the exhibition, after Deutsche Bank. “The retrospective is significant as Indian artists are now being given the pride of the place in the West as well — first the Nasreen Mohamedi show at the MET and now this at the Tate,” says Kiran Nadar, art collector and chairperson, KNMA. She feels that though Khakhar was an untaught artist, his oeuvre was huge and varied. “Be it watercolours or canvases — each work emphasised his personality vocally,” she says.  

The exhibition is full of newer insights into the artist’s life and works, gleaned during Raza’s extensive travels around the Gujarati neighbourhood of Khetwadi in Mumbai, were Khakhar grew up, and then Baroda, where he worked as a chartered accountant and also studied art criticism at MS University. Her travels brought her in touch with friends of Khakhar’s such as Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Nilima Sheikh, Sunil Kothari, and more, who aided her in understanding what produced the practice. “Baroda provided an international perspective on art and art history, aided by our mutual friend Gulammohammed Sheikh. You can find references of colonial and early renaissance art.

Death in the Family, 1977. Oil paint on canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum © The Estate of BhupenKhakhar.Later, his work became more subjective and homo erotic,” says Sundaram. Raza also went to Ahmedabad to meet his close friend Ambalal. “I was struck by the wide range of people that he was able to connect with,” she says. It was fascinating to note that he could recall a tailor in a shop or a barber with as much fondness as his friends within the art world. The exhibition catalogue also chronicles Khakhar’s literary side — that of a writer and playwright. In fact, he worked with Salman Rushdie on a special edition of two short stories, for which he produced a series of wood cuts. “He wrote plays and even directed one. When he couldn’t sleep, his favourite thing to do was to read detective stories,” recalls Sundaram.

Another artist who knew him well and has depicted and quoted Khakhar in some of his works is Atul Dodiya. One of Khakhar’s paintings that left an early impression on him is Ranchhodbhai Relaxing in Bed, which shows a man in bed with a quilt on his lap and in the backdrop has a boy combing his hair in front of the mirror. “I knew so many Ranchhodbhais while growing up in Ghatkopar and this one was exactly like some of them,” laughs Dodiya. Khakhar’s wit shines through not just in the names of his paintings, but also in the imagery. In his opinion, while Khakhar’s technique was like that of a Sunday painter, it was his choice of subjects that made the works fascinating. “They were so rooted in Indian soil and landscape. Unlike others, he was depicting middle and lower-middle class India,” says Dodiya, while adding that Khakhar was someone who stood against the norm.

You Can’t Please All, 1981. Oil paint on canvas. 1756 x 1756 mm. Tate © BhupenKhakharHe would go against the quality of image or colour considered “tasteful” by the art world. “He would use garish colours like violets and magentas, and add an element of kitsch, which is not synonymous with high quality aesthetic. Khakhar would love to offend the sensibility of the viewer. It was as if this was his motto,” says Dodiya. “His works were extremely personal, autobiographical and had a sense of urban primitivism. These were the kind of qualities that made him different from figurative painters of that genre.”

“Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All” will be held at Tate Modern, London, between June 1 and November 6, and will travel to Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin

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The world through Bhupen Khakhar's canvas

Mitali Saran: The unbearable niceness of TV

If you’ve spent any time immobilised, lately — say, for example, because you’ve twisted your ankle, and been medically sentenced to two to three weeks of watching television while pretending to read — you will have noticed that TV has really changed in this country over the last few years. Specifically, it has been put into a playpen, wearing a corset and a veil, and taskedwith safeguarding the national moral fibre.

In other words, it’s ruining television viewing. Dialogue now sounds like this: “If you had the *** you would have stood up to your ***. Now get off your *** and get to work, you lazy ***.” It’s as if Vedic biochemists have discovered that our tender ears will burn to a crisp if they are exposed to the napalm of a salty colloquialism. It makes you want to throw the book you’re pretending to read at the screen.

Indian television is self-regulated, and since the Broadcast Content Complaint Council was set up in 2011, TV has followed the Indian Broadcasting Foundation’s version of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting’s self-regulation guidelines. A quick look at these guidelines suggests that the ministry suggests that Indian television protect Indian viewers from any resemblance to life. And asked to bend, broadcasters seem to have decided to crawl in order to avoid becoming judicial bait.

Watching a really great adult show like Orange is the New Black is, therefore, an incredibly annoying experience — not only do they keep cutting out same-sex kisses, as if those might cause Indian pelvises to go up in flames worse than heterosexual kisses, but every third word of dialogue is missing. Why air a show about inmates in a women’s prison if you’re only going to try to make it sound like a grown-ups day care centre? Are we supposed to believe that jailed criminals do drugs, run smuggling rackets, whack each other with locks in socks, and bonk each other constantly, but would never, never utter the word “boob”?

But — after noting that one show inexplicably replaced the word “shit” with “jerk” — forget sex, drugs, violence, and swearing for a moment. Television shows are subtitled, to clarify difficult accents and compensate for hearing challenges. The subtitles take purification so seriously that they have become entirely uncoupled from rationality, replacing the word “breast” with “chest”, “sexuality” with “femininity”, “lesbian” with “queer”, “horny” with “in passion”.

Who amongst us has never said: “My queer friend said that chestfeeding can feel feminine, but maybe she was just generally in passion”?

Words like “vagina” and “nipple” can simply disappear into asterisks, so dangerous are they to society. So can “cocaine”. So can… wait for it… “beef”. Yessir, beef. Not in a movie about Partition, but on an episode of the much-loved sitcom, Friends.

Indian television airs shows like Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones because younger Indians have the cultural bandwidth to appreciate them — they’re smart, sexy and edgy. But it only airs them, as The National pointed out, after cutting out smarts, the sex and the edge.

India is hauling itself into the future of entertainment with typically anaemic adherence to the most puritanical standards, not the most progressive. It’s amazing that a country filled with adult viewers hasn’t made a serious racket about increasingly being treated like infants. Or perhaps most adults just go and get the whole show off the Internet, without the mutilation.

It’s enough to make you say, “I’ve had it with this jerk,” and go back to your book for real.

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer

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'Sarbjit' gets no distributor in Pakistan

The newly-released Bollywood film "Sarbjit" has failed to attract any Pakistani distributors, with some saying the biopic has no box office potential due to its non-commercial subject and anti-Pakistan content.

Pakistan's Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC) Chairman Mobashir Hasan told PTI that until now no major distribution company in the country has approached to review the content of the movie.

"In Pakistan the system is a distribution company first approaches the information ministry for importing and releasing an Indian film the ministry than asks the censor board to review content of the film," he said.

Hasan said once the CBFC has given a clearance certificate and its feedback to the information ministry only than it asks the Ministry of Commerce to clear the film for import or not.

He said in the case of "Sarbjit" no attempt has been made so far to seek clearance for its release in Pakistan perhaps because of its storyline.

A local distributor confided that it would have been a useless exercise to try to release the film in Pakistan since it was already viewed as a anti-Pakistan film in the country.

The film, starring Randeep Hooda and Aishwariya Rai Bachchan, is based on the ordeal of Sarabjit Singh who was captured and deemed an Indian spy by Pakistan and who later died in jail on May 2, 2013.

The Omung Kumar-directed film revolves around his sister Dalbir Kaur (Aishwariya), who attempts to bring her brother free from the jail.

A distributor also claimed that the film did not have box office potential due to its non-commercial subject.

"No one wants to get their investment stuck or go to waste which usually happens if a film is stuck with the Censor Board or it flops at the box office."

The distributor added most distribution companies, which import Indian films, have to face backlash from religious elements and others if they attempt to bring the movie to Pakistan.

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'Sarbjit' gets no distributor in Pakistan

Wisdom of the hollow tree

THE LEADERSHIP SUTRA
An Indian approach to power
Devdutt Pattanaik
Aleph
399 pages; Rs 149

Good books, movies and, increasingly, television shows, have an amazing ability to connect with a wide mass of audiences with varying tastes; they do so usually by removing the layers around a complex character, emotion or a situation without oversimplifying or dumbing it down. Not an easy task but, then, that is what separates masterpieces from the trash.

The Leadership Sutra: An Indian Approach to Power (derived from the author's earlier work, The Business Sutra) attempts to simplify seemingly abstract mythological stories into tangible principles for the world of business. The author is perhaps the best man for the job; mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has numerous books to his credit and is among the most influential speakers on the business circuit in India today.

But the book is no masterpiece. In trying to pigeonhole the rather complex network of stories and metaphors into a set of easy-to-swallow sutras, the author turns the mysterious and interesting into banal and mundane. Both readers and the pantheon of gods and goddesses are reduced to one-dimensional beings. And the book seems more like a publishing trick. Bringing out an excerpt as a new title may be innovative marketing, but it is hardly a fresh read.

There is no doubt that the author is trying to do something difficult. It is said that myths were written for the gods, who preferred the obscure and the abstruse over the simple and lucid, according to one Sanskrit aphorism. Besides myths unlike fables do not come with a lesson or a moral; they are dangerously amoral in many ways. Hence using stories about gods, goddesses, heroes and villains to build a behavioural roadmap for the corporate world is fraught with risk.

Mr Pattanaik makes a valiant attempt, though. He makes an interesting distinction between Durga and Shakti, two forms of the goddess. Shakti, he says, stands for inner power and Durga for external power and then smartly uses this to segregate the corporate world into two kinds of beings, abilities, perceptions and so on. Having done that, however, the book is caught in this binary classification, which prevents the reader from stepping deeper into the narrative.

In a chapter called "Insults Disempower Us", for instance, the author looks at the practice of devotees abusing a god or a goddess. He calls this ninda-stuti and compares it to gossip sessions in the workplace. Dissing the boss is how we empower our mental image of ourselves, he says. But an abusive devotee is doing more than venting his spleen; the rituals are layered with meaning. On a lighter note, it is only in an ideal world that bosses are gods and employees are comparable to devotees.

The author, perhaps inadvertently, implies that those who do not quite see the world the way he does need to expand their minds. In the "Notes", where he lays bare the skeleton of the book in a glossary of terms he says, "with new words are created new worlds, as they are vehicles of new ideas. They enable the process of expanding the mind." But the new terms/metaphors he coins ask for the opposite. For instance, Arjun, the Pandava hero, he says, stands for "one who argues too much, shooting counter-questions like arrows when questioned". Now that is just one way to look at the hero: when he questions Krishna's logic on the battlefield, for instance. However, Arjun as the dutiful brother, who took off on a self-imposed year-long exile because he had entered Yudhishthira's conjugal chambers when he was with Draupadi, is a far cry from the questioning version that the book presents. Arjun, like many other characters from the epics, is a multi-dimensional hero and poorly fits the behavioural archetype into which the book slots him, as is the case with several others.

Still, the book is brief, written simply and is somewhat like a power-point presentation on interesting ideas. For those who wish to use it for management training sessions, it could be a handy tool. However, if you are looking for anything more, the book comes up short. The ideas skim the surface, the characters are cardboard cut-out versions of their original selves and the language is pedantic and even tiresome.

For instance, an interesting story about Ashtavakra, the boy genius who challenged his father's knowledge when he was still in his mother's womb becomes a case study in arrogance. There were other issues the author could have explored - challenging the hierarchy, the attitude towards deformities, but he doesn't. He writes: "Kahoda's aukaat is threatened by Ashtavakra's brilliance, which is why Kahoda curses his own son, behaving like a cornered beast."

Apart from the clunky sentence formation (Kahoda is used twice in the same sentence and "his own son" - is there any other kind?), the simile of a cornered beast is tired and even misleading. Kahoda is not cornered, even if his behaviour is beastly. As the book says, however, the fault may not lie with the writer, but the reader who is unable to expand her mind wide enough to connect the dots.

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Wisdom of the hollow tree

Drive smart

During my hour-long commute to work, I receive umpteen number of calls and messages which are mostly work-related. Now, being a responsible driver of a humble no-frills car, I tend to avoid using my phone which leads to missing important calls. 
With everything going digital these days, it's no surprise that carmakers are coming up with newer and better tech to woo customers. I, then, got the opportunity to review the technology the Ford Figo Aspire comes fitted with. Claiming to be smart, safe and sophisticated, the Aspire is meant for the workaholic.
The Aspire comes with MyFord Dock integrated into the car's entertainment system. It enables the user to mount and charge their smartphone.The car comes with SYNC, a voice-activated system, which lets you call people from your contact list or have your messages read out. You can even play a music track with just a voice command. SYNC also has an emergency assistance service, which if activated, will use the smartphone to call emergency services and give your GPS location.

 
I couldn't test the emergency service but I took the other features for a spin. Pairing your phone with the car is fairly easy. With voice-activated tech, one usually faces the problem of the software not understanding your accent. But, I didn't face any such problem with SYNC. All my voice commands were registered and followed. 
Though simplistic, the tech in Aspire doesn't have any kinks and makes sure you don't miss anything important. 

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Drive smart

The Dalai Lama's tragedy: A brother's story

THE NOODLE MAKER OF KALIMPONG
The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet
Gyalo Thondup with Anne F Thurston
Random House India
384 pages; Rs 599

It is not always easy to tell someone else's story. It is even more difficult to tell that story in the first person, organising, interpreting and assembling a coherent and flowing narrative drawn from what must have been weeks and months of personal interviews and conversations. It is a tribute to Anne Thurston's skill as a writer that the narrative retains the feel of a first-hand account throughout.

This a the story of Gyalo Thondup, the elder brother of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who now lives in Kalimpong and runs an ancient noodle-making factory adjacent to his compound. It is also the story of Tibet and its tragic loss of independence and identity, assaulted by forces its insular leaders could neither comprehend nor confront. And the rest of the world preferred to look away.

Mr Thondup is a fascinating character, growing up in the pristine but primitive environs of Tibet's Amdo province. His life is transformed dramatically when his younger brother is identified, through divination, as the 14th Dalai Lama and the entire family moves to Lhasa. Mr Thondup is despatched to Nanjing, then the post-war capital of China, to learn Chinese and study the country's culture. He lived under the personal care of the Kuomintang leader, Chiang Kai-shek, who apparently grew quite fond of him.

Mr Thondup learnt to speak Mandarin and married a Chinese lady. But while he was away, Lhasa was the scene of dark political intrigue and factional struggles. The Tibetans were oblivious to the dramatic changes taking place in the world around them, complacent in the belief that, as in ages past, Tibet would remain sheltered by its high mountain ranges, icy deserts and, of course, the power of its faith. Mr Thondup was aware of the disaster looming over Tibet, particularly after the Communist armies under Mao Zedong had liberated China. From his new base at Kalimpong he tried to alert the ruling elite in Lhasa of the dangers. Jawaharlal Nehru used Mr Thondup to warn the Tibetan leadership that the Chinese under Mao would try and occupy their country by force and that they should mobilise and prepare well in advance to resist the inevitable assault. Nehru offered assistance both in weapons and training but there was no response from the Tibetan government.

Thus, it appears that contrary to generally accepted wisdom, Nehru did not readily acquiesce to the Chinese incorporation of Tibet, but there was no response to his offer of help from the Tibetans. Once the Chinese swiftly occupied Tibet in 1950 and the Lhasa government signed the "17 point Agreement" accepting Chinese rule, Nehru decided that there was no choice but to acknowledge the ground reality.

Mr Thondup alleges that Nehru went back on his promise to grant Dalai Lama political asylum when the latter came to visit India in 1956 for the 2,500th birth anniversary of Lord Buddha. In his account, Nehru, under the influence of Chinese Premier Chou Enlai, persuaded the Dalai Lama to go back to Tibet with a solemn assurance given by the Chinese that the 17 point Agreement would be strictly observed. But that did not happen and events led inexorably to the 1959 Tibet Revolt and the Dalai Lama's escape to India. This time, Mr Thondup praises Nehru for agreeing to grant his brother asylum unhesitatingly despite being aware of what this would mean for the already strained India-China relations.

Another theme in the book is the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in assisting Tibetan resistance. Mr Thondup is very critical of the American role, accusing the CIA of giving paltry assistance in weapons and training, enough to needle the Chinese but never to constitute a serious threat. He should know since he was the conduit for much of these clandestine operations.

When Deng Xiaoping became China's top leader in 1979, he invited Mr Thondup to Beijing to discuss the possible return of the Dalai Lama to China. This was an important meeting and is covered in some detail by Mr Thondup. Deng conveyed that "except for independence everything is negotiable. Everything can be discussed." Deng agreed to facilitate movement of Tibetans living in India to freely visit their families and go on pilgrimage to religious sites. He also agreed to a proposal to open a liaison office for the Dalai Lama in Beijing to be in regular touch with the Chinese government.

For a time conditions did improve though the liaison office was never established. When I visited Tibet for the first time in 1984 I met several Tibetan monks and traders from Tibetan settlements across India. This initial promise of reconciliation, however, was never realised as conditions in Tibet deteriorated and the talks went nowhere particularly with the Chinese insisting that the Dalai Lama accept Tibet as an inalienable part of China and agree to live in Beijing and only visit Tibet occasionally. Some later openings also failed to deliver and here the finger is pointed at the Indian agencies that were apparently not keen to have the talks succeed. If this is true then it is short-sighted. With political reconciliation between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese, the Tibet issue would lose its salience in India-China relations and could make it easier to resolve the border issue.

This is an important book, throwing light on some very murky yet far-reaching developments in our neighbourhood. Thucydides said, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer because they must." That about sums up the tragedy of Tibet.

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The Dalai Lama's tragedy: A brother's story

In search of Hinduism

BEING HINDU: OLD FAITH, NEW WORLD AND YOU

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In search of Hinduism

Shiny chrome trim, vibrant enamel and a unique A Lange & Söhne watch

On 22 May 2016, Lange CEO Wilhelm Schmid presented a special watch to this year’s winner in the “Best of Show” category of the Concorso d’Eleganza: a LANGE 1 TIME ZONE “Como Edition”. The prize for the most beautiful automobile of the tradition-steeped competition, graced with a special engraving, was handed over to the anonymous owner for the Maserati A6 GCS from 1954.

The presentation of the unique collector’s piece took place during the award ceremony within the scope of a gala dinner at the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este. In his laudatory speech, Wilhelm Schmid praised the winner for devoting so much precious time to the preservation of cultural values: “I am convinced that every second which you spend restoring a classic automobile is time wisely invested. This applies all the more when, in the process, you prevent the deterioration of a timelessly beautiful work of art and safeguard it for posterity. For this reason, we are honouring the most exquisite sculpture on wheels with the matching sculpture for the wrist.”

Some 50 attendees presented their automotive rarities in the rambling park of the estate on sunny shore of Lake Como. A. Lange & Söhne has been sponsoring the prestigious vintage car competition since 2012.  Conceived explicitly for this event, the special ”Como Edition” model of the LANGE 1 TIME ZONE in white gold features a hand-engraved cuvette. Complementing the event’s coat of arms, the 1929 and 2016 year engravings trace an arc from the first Concorso d’Eleganza to the present. Paying tribute to the venue, Como represents Central European Time on the rotatable city ring in the dial.

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Shiny chrome trim, vibrant enamel and a unique A Lange & Söhne watch

Nilanjana S Roy: A writer's conscience, and protests

A major Indian literary festival chooses to partner with a corporate sponsor of dubious track record. The JLF Southbank festival is held in London; a few weeks before it starts, a campaign asks writers to boycott the festival, citing Vedanta's track record on tribal and adivasi rights.

Some campaigners trash the culture of literary festivals, calling them colonial; some make personal attacks on the organisers and writers who choose to attend. But these are distractions; the ethical questions the campaign raises are fundamental.

Where should a literary festival, which depends on corporate sponsorship, draw the line in its choice of partners? Should they seek professional advice on how to decide what makes a company good, dubious or rogue? Protests in the past against JLF sponsors have targetted a blanket array of organisations, from Coke and the DSC Group to the American Centre, so it is not as if all appeals to conscience are of equal merit.

Should authors join the boycott? Should they take no interest at all in these matters, arguing as some do that writing and the business of writing are separate things, or should they go to the festival and speak out against unethical practices? If they participate in one boycott, is it then their duty to question the corporate structure that underpins the publishing industry?

In 2002, Germaine Greer and Jim Crace pulled out of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival protesting Nestle's involvement as sponsor. Greer said: "I'm not leading a boycott, this was an entirely personal decision, but I will not take part in an event where a Nestle banner is sported. If other people want to, then so be it, but I won't."

Nestle's marketing of powdered baby milk formula in Africa and other countries had triggered a corporate boycott of long-standing, which ran with some breaks from 1970 to the present date. In the boycott years, though, Nestle also sponsored the very successful Smarties Book Prize from 1985 to 2007. Children from across the UK chose their favourite authors, which gave the prize a special appeal - its winners include Oliver Jeffers, Julia Donaldson and JK Rowling, who's won it thrice.

Mr Crace and Ms Greer were not wrong to withdraw from Hay-on-Wye in protest over Nestle, but neither were Ms Rowling and the more than 60 writers who've won the Smarties wrong to accept the award. There was little controversy over Nestle's sponsorship of the book prize, in part because the product - chocolate - does not set off the same debate as baby formula. With their gesture of protest, both Ms Greer and Mr Crace drew attention to Nestle's history, but they stopped short of demanding that other writers boycott the festival too.

In 2006, the writers John Berger, Arundhati Roy, Eduardo Galeano and Ahdaf Soueif called for a cultural boycott of Israel in solidarity with Palestinian writers, teachers and film-makers. This March, over 100 writers, from Susan Abulhawa and Hari Kunzru to Alice Walker and Junot Diaz, sent a letter to the PEN American Centre asking it to refuse support from the Israeli embassy for its annual World Voices festival.

In response, chair of PEN's World Voices Festival, Colm Toibin, wrote: "PEN and PWVF must always fall on the side of maximum protections for free expression. With that guiding principle in mind, PEN does not and cannot subscribe to cultural boycotts of any kind - which impede individual free expression - no matter the cause." The debate over the validity of cultural boycotts is not likely to die down any time soon.

The response from writers to the Vedanta sponsorship controversy has varied. Two writers, Aarathi Prasad and K Satchidanandan, are reported to have withdrawn over the anti-Vedanta protests. Many writers attended JLF Southbank despite the boycott call, including the transgender activist A Revathi, the novelist and poet Jerry Pinto, the historian Sunil Khilnani, Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam, the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy.

Several made it clear that they agreed with the anti-Vedanta protestors, and some, including Salil Tripathi and Ruth Padel - attempted to talk about the history of the Niyamgiri protests, particularly relevant now against the background of fresh concerns over the possible erosion of tribal rights in Odisha. For JLF, the debate should - but might not - lead them and other cultural organisers to create a blacklist of companies they feel they can't work with, and a parallel whitelist of corporations they feel they can defend.

One company might stir the conscience of writers for all the right reasons - as Mahesh Rao argued in a short, powerful appeal, sometimes a writer must ask, "How disgusting am I prepared to be?" Every writer has a personal line of conscience they will not cross. But as the poet Karthika Nair pointed out, both ways of engaging with an issue might be equally powerful: "Sometimes, it is necessary to withdraw, as a mark of protest, just as it is sometimes necessary to be present to speak and raise one's voice at that very platform."

In India, the history of boycott calls over books, art and cinema is long and inflected with violence. Over the last decade, in 2006 Indian Muslim clerics and Christian groups joined forces to prevent screenings of The Da Vinci Code. In 2007, Bajrang Dal activists successfully boycotted the film Parzania; in 2014, Baba Ramdev called for a boycott of Amir Khan's film PK, in 2015 VHP leader Sadhvi Prachi called for Hindus to boycott "films made by the Khans" (Amir, Shahrukh and Salman Khan).

Given this history, I choose not to join in boycott calls myself. "Those" protestors believe in the rightness and justice of their cause as much as "these" protestors do. But writers have many ways to protest - to speak at the venue, to stay away, or, even, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez did with the Banana Company in One Hundred Years of Solitude, make lasting art from their anger.

Boycotts are often swiftly forgotten, especially when they are ineffective, but Garcia Marquez branded United Fruit Company forever as the banana company that arrived, pursued by a leaf storm, sowing over the town "the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it". Along with all the other ways of protest, this was a classic example of how to put the power of negative advertising to work.

email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

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Nilanjana S Roy: A writer's conscience, and protests