Erudite escorts

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.

Building a legacy

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.

Going coastal with Samanth Subramanian

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!

In Conversation with Fatima Bhutto

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

Aatish Taseer on 'TheTemplegoers'

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)

In Conversation with Soumya Bhattacharya

Earlier last week, I met up with journalist-writer Soumya Bhattacharya for a short chat about his book All That You Can't Leave Behind - a short collection of his essays on how life in India revolves around cricket. Soumya's debut novel, If I Could Tell You, about a father's letters to his daughter, was also published in the same week.


In the opening essay of your book, you wrote that cities remind you of cricket grounds. Why do you think so?


What I meant was that, for someone who is so obsessed by the game and who's so engrossed in it. what strikes you most when you take the name of a city is its cricket ground. You identify the city to its cricket ground first and then to other things. For instance, London would mean Lord's and Sydney would mean the SCG rather than the opera house. That's what I meant.


Do you think that T20 cricket will be the most defining sport of the next decade, despite the fact that it has competition from faster sports like football and Formula 1?


I don't know and I don't think anyone really knows. It's really early to tell; you can date it back to 2007 and India winning the T20 World Cup.  After which the Indian administration woke up and the BCCI, being the greedy pigs that they are,  woke up to the fact that 'oh! there's a helluva lot of money in this'. Immediately, the IPL was born; which did phenomenally well in the first season and not-so-well in the second one. Soon after, there was the IPL Champions League nonsense, which I think was fundamentally flawed in its conception - was a huge, huge flop. So, while at the moment it does seem that a three-hour-20-over-a-side-slam-bang extravaganza is quite popular, three years is nothing in the life of a sport/game. Hence, I think it's far too early for any of us to be able to tell.


The problem with T20 is that it attracts new converts (to cricket) who are looking for a nice, sexy way to spend three hours. Two or three years from now, the novelty having worn off, they might go to a Karan Johar movie or they might want to watch Dr. Zhivago at home which is longer and probably more fulfilling. That is when we will know whether T20 is the future. It looks like the future now because of it's phenomenal popularity. Test cricket has been around for 120 years and football for god knows how many years. So whether T20 will acquire the kind of following Test cricket and football have, is too early to say. 


In the book, you justify the numerous references to matches between India and Australia. Do you think this rivalry has replaced the sort hysteria and hype associated with the Ashes or an India-Pakistan game?


No longer, I think, because no longer is Australia the number one side But at the time it was number one and everyone was yapping at Australia's dreams, there was a huge gulf between Australia and the rest of the cricket-playing nations. I'd say from the beginning of that 2001 series going right up to (the time) when India beat Australia in 2008. It was the most potent rivalry in the contemporary game - the marquee show. And I say this despite the fact that England won the Ashes in 2005 after which there was a huge resurgence of cricket in England. Even then, that series was a one-off. There is nothing in the contemporary game like  an India-Australia match where, every time India played Australia, both teams raised the standard of the game so high, that they'd look each other in the eye to see who'd blink first. Hence, I say it was the marquee show. 


At one point in time, after the India-Pakistan peace process resumed, there was this be-nice-to-each-other feeling which crept into an India-Pakistan match/series because of which, a lot of the needle that people look for vanished..


But look, India and Pakistan have such complicated histories and we hardly have that history with Australia, although, things have happened on the field which can hardly be called sport (like the whole Symonds-Harbhajan fiasco). 


You write in your book that cricket is a symbol of popular Indian culture but isn't it also true that its popularity has overshadowed other sports as well?


Of course, I completely agree. Look at someone like Abhinav Bindra, Pankaj Advani and Vijender Singh and ask about the kind of following they have. It is to do with this whole hysteria about cricket. 


And most sports administrators blame the media for giving cricket undue attention. How much do you agree with that statement?


It's very to hard to tell for the media that 'okay we'll give our readers more of billiards and less of cricket and we'll try and change things. ' Readers start howling in two months. On occasions, we do panel feedback from readers and they say things like a Sri Lanka-Pakistan match should have been given more prominence. So do you try and keep your readers happy which is what you should do putting out a newspaper? But a lot of the times, readers are confused. However, one does get an inkling of what a reader wants. Eventually, you're caught in a trap of your own making; whether you should give shooting more importance than cricket.


In another of your essays, you write about cricketers coming from small-towns or lesser known places. Virender Sehwag, MS Dhoni, for instance. So it would be fair to say that cricket has shed its elitist tag?


Of course and that's the point.  And there's a theory that young people in the big cities have too many distractions and therefore, they don't have the hunger that their counterparts in B-towns have which is what propels these guys to the top. I don't know how true this is but (just to give an example) look at Bombay. Once the crucible of Indian cricket, how many players does it have in the team today?


On Sachin Tendulkar, while it is true that he is one of the greatest players of the game, some uncomfortable questions have been asked about him. For instance, I read someone's facebook status recently where the person said 'why doesn't anyone ask him about the shot he played in Chennai against Pakistan and why he played it.' And 'why didn't he win the match against Australia after scoring 175. Are we being inhuman in our expectations or are we being too objective in our analysis?


I think no one is above scrutiny or judgment in the game and no one should be. But there are two things at play here. One, whatever Tendulkar does is never enough for us and that is true; we always want a bit more.  At the same time - and this is bound to happen to someone who has been playing for so long - Tendulkar has completely changed his approach to the game over the past five years.  Its happened for many reasons but it has happened. So I think people do tend to feel nostalgic or seem to want back the Tendulkar they saw 15 years ago.  So we want him to be the savage and brutal Tendulkar of 1998, demolishing the attack all the time which he is no longer for a variety of reasons. So a lot of the dissatisfaction stems from that.


Coming to your writing style, do you follow any particular cricket writer or do you write about cricket from a fan's perspective? 


No, I don't see myself as a cricket writer. I am not a cricket writer. Nor is this book, a book on cricket. I've written two books and numerous essays about cricket. This is a book about cricket or about India seen through cricket. I've not done match reports or interviews and I'm not a cricket writer in the remote sense of the term.  In terms of reading, yes, I do read a lot and Nick Hornby's writings have been a great influence, which again were about obsession, London and football.  HG Bissinger's Friday Night Lights would be another. 


Lastly, what has been your most memorable cricket moment from a fan's perspective?


Very hard to tell since there are so many of them. Perhaps, being in Australia when India won the Adelaide match. Even the Sydney Test where Tendulkar scored 241. So was the Multan test in Pakistan when Sehwag scored a triple hundred. Eden Gardens 2001 and World Cup '83 have to be there.


And your worst ones?


The first one came quite early when I was a small boy. It was when India were bowled out for 42 against England. Again, too many instances because we only started winning in this century. Before that, we either held out for valiant draws or we got walloped all the time!  

In Conversation with Madhav Mathur

25-year-old Madhav Mathur is the quintessential urban Indian male of today:  a young, successful, well-paid banker living in Singapore. But there's more to Mathur than his day job; he owns a film production company (Bad Alliteration Films), like to paint, has - in his own words - "messed around" with acting and theater. What's more, his debut novel, Diary Of An Unreasonable Man, will soon be adapted into a movie by Anurag Kashyap (Dev D, Gulaal and Black Friday). Dressed sharply in a black blazer, purple shirt and black trousers he seems slightly nervous I catch up with him at the Penguin Books India office for a quick chat about his book.

What was the genesis of this book?

I think it's a slow burn I have lived with all through my life. The themes I have explored - greed, materalism, corruption - are not new. People have spoken about them, but I think my take on them is new. I've tried to address these problems that I've had for a very long time and lived with them for a very long time. There was no incident which said "write this now". I have always thought about these things and decided to put them down when I left for Singapore.

How much of Madhav Mathur is in the protagonist, Pranav Kumar?
Quite a bit. I would say there's a good overlap. He's definitely more unreasonable than me and likes to take the bull by the horns; he's got convictions and lives them out. I am a bit of a panzie when I compare myself to him because I can't do the things he does. And, in a way, Penguin and Anurag (Kashyap) saved me from doing those things because had I been as unpublished and as beaten down as this guy, I would like to think that I would have mustered up the guts to do something crazy. 

Don't you think the theme you have explored - 'well-paid executive quits job to explore passion' - is becoming clichéd?
Well, I just wrote about what my experience should be. I think there are a lot of people who hate what they are doing, are discontent or sick of their jobs. And these people want to see a change not just in their lives but in the lives of the people around them. That's a common sentiment so I think you will continue to see books like this since there is some element of truth in it. 

The Diary Of An Unreasonable Man

In terms of a film, did you start visualising the book while you were writing it?
I did think it would make for a good film sometime when I started writing it, which is why I approached Anurag. But I did not add elements to make the story more 'filmy'. Some of the feedback I have got is that the description is sometimes overdone; where you look at things and share that detail of painting a picture. I can't help but write like that because I have to communicate to that level of detail. And since I make short films and feature films myself, I would like to communicate to that level of detail.

You call this The Diary Of An Unreasonable Man but its written in prose format rather than diary entries. Was that deliberate?
We were toying with a lot of titles initially. Why we thought of this is because it is a personal thing being shared even though it's not written as a diary. The diary is there basically to illustrate that its personal thoughts being put out there.

How did you approach Anurag Kashyap and what transpired between the both of you?
I saw No Smoking in Singapore and I thought it was quite brilliant. 

You seem to be one of the rare people who liked No Smoking. It got pretty bad reviews…
Yes, it got trashed everywhere and even Anurag said the critics didn't like it. But I had my own reasons for liking the movie. I thought here's a filmmaker who has the guts to do something he believes in without bothering much about the conventions and norms of Indian cinema. I thought, since he likes to break some rules in his style and I'm trying to break some in my own way, it might be a nice fit to try and reach out to the guy to see if there's some synergy. And I'd reached out to him through his blog. I'd submitted a short film for a film competition which he also liked. We started talking after that, one thing led to another, I met him in Mumbai, he liked the raw manuscript and he almost immediately agreed to make it into a film.

How much of the book will be made into a film since the world of a novel is larger than that of a movie?
True. I will be a part of the scriptwriting process so I think that'll be decided at a later stage.

You've lived in Singapore which, in many ways, is a symbol of capitalistic success. What is your take on the greed, commercialism, materialism, etc. which accompany capitalistic success?

I would say that I am upset about certain things and it comes across in my writings in a very direct way. One of the things my protagonist complains about is how certain things become the be all and end all of people's lives. So yes, I do agree with that.

Tell us something about your next book...does it revolve around the same theme?
I wouldn't say so, no. It's a fictional take about fanaticism and fascism set in the future. I'm going to take a look at it from fresh eyes.

A slightly different version of this interview appears on the Businessworld website

Interview: John Elliott and Bernard Imhasly

Earlier this year, I read an anthology of journalistic writing, Foreign Correspondent: Fifty Years of Reporting in South Asia. Published jointly by Penguin Books India and the Foreign Correspondents Club to celebrate the latter's 50 years of existence and contains the best journalistic accounts by foreign correspondents. Now, in an email interview two of the three editors, John Elliott and Bernard Imhasly, discuss the role of a foreign correspondent and the nature of his/her work


With South Asia being exposed to a variety of new media forms such as blogs, social networking websites and, on a larger scale, the internet, how do you think a foreign correspondent approaches his work in the region?


Bernard (BI): For foreign correspondents, the nature of work in the subcontinent has not changed (yet). The citizen journalist profile has yet to gel, so the approach is still much the same - travel, investigate, meet people, use the traditional media, read, look and listen.

John Elliott (JE): A foreign correspondent approaches his work in the same professional way that he always  has, but the pace of work and consequently the time available to research and analyse stories, has been dramatically reduced by the advent of the internet. This not only affects news agencies but also leading newspapers with websites which require instant stories from correspondents. There is therefore less demand for, and time for, reflective stories and the general quality of reporting is thus at risk. Some newspapers allow (or require) their correspondents to write blogs, which gives a journalist a new way to express his personal views, but again increases the pressure on time.


When a foreign correspondent was posted to South Asia say 30 or 40 years ago, how would he react then and how would he react now?

BI: The environment was different in many ways but in one strikingly so: the fact of time had another quality. Political processes were slower and so was the reaction time. There was more deliberation before filing a story. Now, speed is of the essence; so much so that the story is still developing while the correspondent files it. 


JE: I was first posted here 25 years ago when the country and region were different in many ways, though the negative aspects which colour many people's views remain the same - the appalling poverty, dismal airports, awful roads and tiresome bureaucracy. That of course is offset by the huge potential for success, which a newcomer can see more quickly now than 25 years ago though it was of course evident then. 


During the 26/11 attacks, the BBC was severely criticised for using the term 'militants' instead of 'terrorists'. Is there still some sort of bias against the region in the Western media?


BI: Biases across societies and continents are inevitable. They have lessened with globalisation, but have become more insiduous also because now they are more hidden behind this global facade. What is important (and what has improved) is the awareness about them. 


But it is also important to differentiate between biases and points of view. It is legitimate to look at a society eg. India from the point of view of, say, a European and this is especially so in India where there are many indigenous points of view for everything anyway. So it is okay to report from where one stands - and say so.  A bias is a principled prejudice unwilling to be corrected by reality. And that is obviously wrong.


JE: This is not a bias - those who regard it as such are surely paranoid. Along with other parts of the media, the BBC is, I believe, attempting to avoid indiscriminately labeling people and group with tags - though I would agree that 'terrorists' would have been correct on the Mumbai attacks. But, to illustrate the problem, in the 1980s when I was reporting Punjab for the FT (Financial Times),  should Khalistan 'militants'  have been called extremists (as I sometimes did), or 'zealots' as another FT colleague wrote, or 'terrorists' as they might be called now?

This anthology contains a lot of pieces on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. What is it about this family that it towers over all others in South Asia? Is it because they gave India three Prime Ministers or is there something more?

BI: Simple: They have dominated the politics of India and therefore pretty much of the subcontinent so naturally the media, and that includes the foreign media, reflects this reality.

JE: The number of pieces on the dynasty accurately reflects the role they have played down the years.

Which are your favourite piece(s) from the lot that got left out of the book?  Any specific reason as to why they couldn't make it in the end?

BI: We left out many good pieces and it is difficult to rate them. I missed a piece on Bhutan by Simon Denyer, one by John Elliott on modern Indian art; there should have been a piece on the Maldives, women,  more on the many diversities of India - from languages to food to street culture to religious expressions.  But given the parameters, I think we covered a lot of ground.

JE: I agree with Bernard's list including his kind mention of my modern Indian art article and would add that it is a pity we have not got a couple of pieces on other politicians around Nehru in the early years. If we were going to press now, we would need one on the emergence of Rahul Gandhi as a serious politician. The paperback edition (now published) has added articles on Sri Lanka, the Mumbai attacks, and Pakistan, as well as a report from 1984 on Indira Gandhi's assassination. But note that in our introduction we said that, while we tried to get a broad spread of history into the book, we selected good reporting and writing even if that meant that subjects or events were not covered. 

In his 1990 piece about the BJP, James Clad writes towards the end that "the BJP is a coming power in India, a beneficiary of vacuum at the centre of Indian politics". 19 years later, do you think a similar/different vacuum still exists in North Indian politics?

BI: That is a wide field - too wide to be answered in this space. Certainly, the vacuum of 20 years ago has been filled to a large extent, though the BJP has not really grown into a modern right-wing party but has remained stuck in the tradition v/s modernity discourse. In that sense, there is still a vacuum to be filled by a modern party that challenges the Congress on its own ground.

JE: There is a vacuum in that there is no major party representing the poor and emerging lower castes. The parties that have grown into space left by the decline of the Congress Party are run by mostly self-serving, highly corrupt politicians with littler interest in the welfare of those who elect them. It is, however, beginning to look as if the Congress is beginning to emerge as a significant player again.

Another striking feature of this anthology is that there isn't a single piece on cricket: a sport which has a huge fan following in this region. Why? Was it a conscious decision?

BI: No, certainly not a conscious erasure but deplorable nonetheless. Our editorial approach was largely directed by what came in in terms of contributions. When there were significant gaps, we tried to plug them by looking for pieces ourselves. In the case of cricket, this wasn't possible or maybe we just didn't look hard enough.

JE: No, not a consicous decision. Add to the list of gaps above!

The year 2001 was, in many ways, a tumultuous one for South Asia - the Gujarat earthquake happened, the war on terror started as a consequence of 9/11, a Royal massacre in Nepal, an attack on the Indian Parliament....As a foreign correspondent, how did it feel to be in South Asia back then?

BI: A bit overwhelming, to be frank. The Delhi posting was always exciting and never lacked action. But in 2001, there was a surfeit of it. It was difficult to keep up especially for the (many) one-man-bureaux in town. To give an example, when the Indian Parliament was attacked, I was in Pakistan - in Quetta!

JE: Apart from the Royal massacre in Nepal which was (hopefully!) a one-off,  the other events reflect the range of stories that crowd in, year after year, in South Asia, with the Parliament attack adding emphasis on terrorism. 

Lastly, do narrate the one incident which you will always remember being a foreign correspondent in South Asia.

BI: One of many that comes to mind immediately: the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, being confronted by a bandana-clad man who put his face close to mine, and hissed: "Get out of here you bloody Muslim!"

JE: Maggie (Margaret) Thatcher said the Dalai Lama should not speak publicly when he was in the UK in the late 1980's ('88 I think) so most of the British media - including me from the FT - rushed to Dharamsala to interview him. He thus got much more publicity than he would if Thatcher had not tried to gag him just as he has recently because the Chinese said he shouldn't go to Arunachal Pradesh.