Desicritics Author: Bishwanath Ghosh

Remembering Sholay - Ramgarh Revisited

Bishwanath Ghosh — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:15:19 EDT

There are two kinds of people who take the road from Bangalore to Mysore. One, whose destination is Mysore or one of the towns that fall in the 120-km stretch. Two, the connoisseurs of Sholay, who treat the road as reverently as the Silk Route, traversing it to relive history. Presently I fall under category no. 2.

I am waiting at the traffic junction at Ramanagaram, a town 40 km from Bangalore. Sholay, the 1975 blockbuster, was shot somewhere here, as testified by the rocky terrain that flanks you as soon as you approach the town. This is also the constituency of H.D. Kumaraswamy, the Karnataka chief minister. But that’s only for record’s sake. For the connoisseur of Sholay, the territory is called Ramgarh and it belongs to Gabbar Singh.

“Sholay ka shooting? Take a U-turn and then left,” the man selling sliced cucumber at the junction gives directions. So there we are, the driver and I, entering a narrow road off the highway, under the gaze of brown hillocks that loom large on the horizon. We snail past a ‘Men’s Beauty Parlour’ and a few timber shops, and then stretches of barren land on one of which stands a signboard: ‘Site for sale’. Then comes a nursing college: young boys and girls trickle out of it in white coats. From their gaze, it is very clear that a passing car is not a frequent sight on that road. Then comes a village, Konkani Doddi, and soon tiny boys with mischievous eyes and with catapults in their hands start running alongside the vehicle. Every adult we ask for directions points further down the road. So we snake through isolated huts, trying to evade roaming goats and hens all the while, and finally climb up a bit when the road terminates in front of a tall iron gate. The arch over it reads: Sri Pattabhirama Devalaya – Rama temple, in short.

Is Ramanagaram – and therefore the fictitious Ramgarh – named after this temple? I have just begun to wonder about that when the driver, looking relieved that he has finally deposited me at some significant-looking destination, asks me how long I will take. Thirty-two years, I want to tell him. But I hear myself saying, “Maybe an hour or so.” “In which case,” he grins, “can I go and have my tiffin? You know we have been out since eight.” I tell him he can take his time and enter the gate.

The search for Ramgarh begins with a steep climb. The temple, I soon make out, is right on top of the hillock that I am now climbing. As I pause once in a while to catch my breath, I realise I am the only living creature there apart from the birds and the insects – such is the privacy. No wonder the rocks along the steps bear innumerable graffiti that testify ‘love’ between people with every conceivable Indian name.

I soon realise there is someone lonelier than me: the priest of the Rama temple. Still, he treats me as if I was the 75th visitor since the morning and dutifully pours, on my joined palms, the holy water. He tells me that Sholay was shot around that hill but that he was too young then to remember the shooting of the movie. “Maybe you can ask the elders in Konkani Doddi,” he suggests.

One side of the temple offers a bird’s eye view of a terrain that could have well been Ramgarh. On the other side is a huge boulder, on top of which stands a small Shiva temple, a small dome (even its ceiling is cluttered with love graffiti – God alone knows how) and a water tank. Standing under the dome, I look at the other side of the hill – that too looks like Ramgarh. As I stand there wondering which could be the real Ramgarh, I notice an old man climb up, panting and holding on to his bag and umbrella. He walks into the control room of the water tank, and when he comes out, I ask him if he knows anything about Sholay. “Oh Sholay! I worked for it. I was a carpenter (on the sets).”

Meet Parasuram. He is 66 years old now and looks after the maintenance of the temple. He led me to the edge of the rock and points to the land spread out below: “That’s Sippy Nagar. The Thakur’s house stood there. And that was where they shot the Holi song. And there, do you see those rocks? Behind them we had built the bridge where Amitabh Bachchan dies.”

As a carpenter, Parasuram helped build the water tank from where Dharmendra threatens to commit suicide, and also the wooden posts on which the hands of Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) are tied up before being chopped off by Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). “At first we put up temporary structures (for the hand-chopping scene) but they kept falling, so (Ramesh) Sippy asked us to build proper wooden pillars. Oh, what a scene that was!”

Other scenes that Parasuram recalls vividly include the one where the shrouds fly off the faces of the slain family members of the Thakur, the Holi song, and the shot where Gabbar orders Basanti (Hema Malini) to dance on broken glass. “Oh, such a fine actor! What a personality he had! The way he said, ‘Naacho!’” Parasuram says of Amjad Khan.

Parasuram reported to Aziz Sheikh, the construction manager, and his most difficult moments happened during the shooting of the Holi song, when he had to keep fixing the roller-coaster featured in the sequence. “Sippy was just not happy with the way it was going. He would keep saying, ‘Cut, cut, cut.’ It took 15 days to picturise that song. How much money must have been spent!”

He surveys the landscape and goes on: “Sippy was a lion-hearted man. By 4 pm everyday they would start counting the money to pay us. Four o’ clock sharp, everyday. And apart from the meals, we would be treated to puris and omlettes and kababs. Along with the sets, he had constructed a (makeshift) temple, church and a mosque for his unit. He had also installed a telephone line to talk to Bombay.” He says Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan were quite friendly with the locals, and so were the “two foreigners” (Sippy had hired stunt directors from London).

According to him, the shooting of Sholay, which was released in 1975, spanned three years. Sippy would shoot for four summer months each year, providing temporary livelihood to people like Parasuram and hundreds of other residents of Ramanagaram. “At least one member from every household in this village worked for the film,” says Elamma who, now in her sixties, sells knick-knacks from a wooden stall in Konkani Doddi. Her brother, for example, had lent his bullock cart for the sets.

But there are people whose lives the shooting altered forever. Such as Kadamma, who doesn’t know her age but is certain that she is past 70. Back then, she was young enough to have a daughter who was old enough to fall in love. And fall in love she did, the daughter, named Shanta, with a man called Shankar who was assigned to drive Dharmendra from and to the Ashoka Hotel in Bangalore every day.

“When I first got to know that my daughter wanted to marry Dharmendra’s driver, I thought it was some kind of a hoax. But Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan came home with the proposal. That was exactly eight days after Amitabh Bachchan’s daughter was born. (Jaya Bhaduri was pregnant during the shooting). I had made food for them but they did not eat. So I gave them tea and sherbet,” says Kadamma. Shanta and Shankar now live in Mumbai, where Shankar runs a taxi business. They even have grandchildren.

Kadamma, meanwhile, continues to be in awe of Hema Malini (she recalls the actress’ looks as “super”) and remembers how during the shooting, rice and sambhar had to be cooked separately for her and her mother (who accompanied her on the sets) because they could not stand non-vegetarian food.

Soon a small crowd gathers and the men complain about the lack of amenities in the village, most of whose residents are daily-wagers in nearby silk factories. “There are some 150 houses here but only one borewell and four taps. There is no proper sanitation. No government official ever comes here,” says Bairaiah, a neighbour of Kadamma. Kadamma, meanwhile, has begun to narrate the story of Sholay. Time for me to leave.

As soon as I get into the car, the boys with catapults arrive. Nothing has changed in Ramanagaram, or Ramgarh, in these thirty years. Each of them could have been a present-day Basanti, trying to aim at raw mangoes the whole afternoon because their mothers or aunts want to make pickles, or just for the fun of it.

By the time we hit the highway, the sun has begun to dip. Thirty-three years ago, Jaya Bhaduri must have been lighting oil lamps very close to the village I had just left, to the background strains of the mouth-organ, possibly played by R D Burman himself.

Book Review: Bikram Yoga - The Yogi Who Became a Bhogi

Bishwanath Ghosh — Wed, 2 May 2007 14:40:54 EDT

For the benefit of those who have not heard of Bikram Choudhury: he is the Richard Branson of yoga. To bring the comparison closer home, he is the Bappi Lahiri of yoga. Better still, he is a cross between Branson and Bappi - flashy, funny, fun-loving, yet a guy too smart and talented to be laughed away.

The maverick yoga guru was in the news recently for patenting the sequence of 26 poses - called Bikram Yoga or Hot Yoga, because the thermostat is turned on to 100 degrees - which he has been teaching for decades. Critics slammed him for his cheek to patent something that has been around for thousands of years; Bikram retaliated by saying that yoga is like musical notes, no one can own them, but if someone makes a tune out of them, it becomes the property of the musician. Bikram won.

And now he has come out with his first ever book, titled, obviously, Bikram Yoga, which attests his image of an Indian yogi-cum-Amercian bhogi. This bhogi (the one who seeks pleasure) is also acutely aware that he is also a yogi, and vice-versa. Little wonder that the book drips with assurance as well as arrogance - a tone that makes it such a page-turner. And since it's written in a style where the writer is not talking at you, but talking to you, it takes only a couple of hours to breeze through Bikram's life-history, his philosophy, his instructions and, of course, his signature programme of 26 postures.

You might want to read this book for two reasons:

1. To enhance your life through yoga (new yoga-converts must know that kapalabhati kriya is not an invention of Swami Ramdev and that Bikram, like many established yoga gurus, has been teaching it for decades).

2. To marvel at the success story of an ordinary Bengali man who sold yoga to Americans just like Americans sell soft drinks and burgers to the rest of the world, and went on to become a multi-millionaire, owning a house in Beverly Hills besides a fleet of luxury cars.

His success has a sound foundation: Bikram learned his yoga from Bishnu Ghosh, the younger brother of Paramhansa Yogananda, whose celebrated autobiography is still a bestseller. So strict was the teacher that he would not have his food (his wife would keep reheating the meal) till his young disciple had mastered a pose, froth coming out of his mouth. Over time Bikram became a teacher himself, and his guru sent him to Tokyo to spread yoga. While in Tokyo, he was summoned one day to Hawaii, where US President Richard Nixon was down with advanced thrombophlebitis. Bikram claims he cured Nixon and was, in return, handed a green card - personally - from the President. Thus began his fairytale story.

No wonder Bikram runs low on humility. Every now and then, in the book, he urges people to sign up for Bikram Yoga, when he could have at least faked modesty and recommended just yoga instead of his version of yoga. That would have been so un-Bikram, however. He also takes pot-shots at revered gurus such as Swami Vishnu Devananda, Swami Satchidananda and BKS Iyengar (who he refers to as 'furniture yogi' because Iyengar recommends extensive use of props). He ridicules them for adapting yoga for Americans rather than adapting Americans to yoga. But in the same breath he explains why he skips the lotus pose (or the padmasana), which is synonymous with yoga, in his programme:

"Most Westerners have very tight hips, which in turn puts unnecessary strain on the knees in Lotus. So I don't use it in the Sequence."

That's Bikram Choudhury for you.

I shall cherish the book for this particular passage:

"You haven't been exercising, you haven't been happy, you've made mistakes in your life up until now? Doesn't matter. The past is past; I am offering you a new beginning. Just by taking one yoga class, you'll begin to improve your life immeasurably and change it forever. In the words of my guru, Bishnu Ghosh, who taught me from when I was just a little boy: 'It's never too late, it's never too bad, and you are never too old or too sick to start from scratch once again.'"

Bangalore Diary: Where's My M.G. Road?

Bishwanath Ghosh — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:05:25 EDT

The city you live in is a lot like your parents: they have been around for much longer than you; they love you and you love them; and you want them to stay young and healthy forever. Then time takes its toll and one morning, you find your father donning a pair of glasses. The man you had known all these years looks suddenly so different - he is your father all right, but don't those glasses make him appear as a stranger? It takes a while before you accept your old man's new look, and then you move on, realising that change is inevitable.

The people of Bangalore are going through a similar emotion these days. By people of Bangalore, I mean those who have lived in the city for decades and not those who have been washed up by the IT tide during the past ten years. The latter variety is a thankless lot: they first make a mess and then complain about the mess. The real Bangalorean rarely complains, even now, when M.G. Road will no longer be the M.G. Road they have grown up with - the calmness of the boulevard majestically offsetting the hustle-bustle on the other side of the road. The greenery provides a visual relief even when the road is choked with vehicles. But now to ease the traffic, they are felling the green.

As part of the Metro Rail project, work began last Sunday on M.G. Road with the felling of a few trees at the Anil Kumble circle. The boulevard will eventually have to come down to make way for a 2.5 km elevated viaduct connecting the circle with Kamaraj Road junction. One doesn't know if there was indeed a way to ease the traffic without disturbing M.G. Road, but Bangaloreans will have to learn to live with a pair of concrete glasses above the nose of its most famous thoroughfare.

I was one of those few who witnessed M.G. Road in its original glory for one last time as the Metro Rail guys took over. Last Sunday, around noon, the road was nearly deserted as the driver cruised towards the Anil Kumble Circle. He slowed down as he approached the circle: I saw a green sheet of metal barricading a part of the road and a yellow bulldozer parked nearby. I took pictures sitting in the car. I had wanted to get down and pose with the entire boulevard serving as the backdrop, just to put it on my blog for record's sake, but the otherwise-polite driver made noises about finding a parking place and I found myself being bulldozed out of M.G. Road.

**********

It is best to be in Bangalore on a weekend: the roads are mostly empty - which is a luxury these days; while the malls and pubs are full - which means you will find pretty faces all around you and, at times, over you. It is a different matter that pubs shut these days at 11.30 sharp - something that the DJ keeps warning you about from 10.45 - but young Bangaloreans have made peace with that and they know how to make the most of the evening.

So there I was, at Fuga, one of the hottest nightspots in the city, nursing my drink with one eye on the women who sashayed in and out, and the other on the TV screen that showed New Zealand demolishing South Africa. A woman on the next table smoked a cigar: the aroma was no doubt delicious but I felt a little sad for the lips that sucked onto the half-burnt brown cylinder. On the table opposite, another woman cutely sipped her cocktail from a goblet whose mouth was as big as her face.

Soon it was time to dance: it is now or never, thanks to the 11.30-deadline. Guided by wife, I squeezed my way into the dance floor. As I danced, my right elbow constantly brushed with that of a woman on the right, and my left with that of a woman on the left. The hair of another was getting into my collar from behind, and in the front was wife, egging me on to keep rhythm. I swayed even more. As we walked out of the pub, I told her: "We must come to Bangalore more often."

Travel Essay: Goodbye Malgudi, Hello Mysore

Bishwanath Ghosh — Sat, 7 Oct 2006 07:35:14 EDT

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

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

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

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

Jois' Mysore was indoor: chiselled Western bodies striking difficult yoga postures in unison in a gloomy hall. Narayan's Mysore was necessarily outdoor. Veteran photographer T.S. Satyan, a friend of Narayan, wrote in an article in 2002: "One of my greatest joys in life was to stroll down the streets of Mysore in his exhilarating company, listening to his witty comments and observations on the people he met and the goings on that he saw. He never walked fast and stopped at many places on the way. He observed people and their ways with pleasure."

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

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

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

We drove around a few more streets before I was suddenly shaken out of the Malgudi stupor: apartments springing up in between old-fashioned houses. They stuck out like sore thumbs, shattering the visual silence of the neighbourhood. I instantly recalled a UNI report I happened to read the night before taking the train to Mysore. It began like this:

Emerging from the shadow of its cosmopolitan neighbour Bangalore, Mysore, witnessing a flurry of activities on many a fronts, is all set to evolve as a brand.

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

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

"I can relate Mysore's growth to my own. [In 1977] I started my press in Saraswathi Puram in a small house. The owner was not able to build the house fully so I completed it. Now I have grown so big. Similarly, all people -- hoteliers, industrialists -- have grown. Growth of industry and trade is a sure indicator of growth of a city," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not before strolling around the bus station, where I noticed dozens of people eating paani puri from the roadside vendors. Narayan has mentioned set dosai, but not paani puri. Clearly, winds of change are blowing. I noticed more changes back in the hotel.

AAI takes over airport land, at last! -- screamed Star of Mysore. The takeover, according to it, was held up because of litigation over 20 acres of land, and the Airports Authority of India had now decided to make do without it and would prepare an airport in two years.

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

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

The heritage city had suddenly become the cynosure of all eyes, with a flurry of activities being witnessed in the IT scene, infrastructure, housing, schooling and investments in highways and airport projects.
Observers feel that the ringing of the NASDAQ bell from the city to coincide with the silver jubilee of IT giant Infosys had done much to build the brand image of Mysore. The historic ceremony in the city, which along with London and Davos were the only places from where trading on NASDAQ was started remotely, could be symbolic, but it had helped the city take a giant leap forward.

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

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

Book Review: Compost called Indlish

Bishwanath Ghosh — Fri, 6 Oct 2006 09:34:58 EDT

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

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

underprivileged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Integration And Other Stories From Kanpur

Bishwanath Ghosh — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:55:14 EDT

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

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

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

But this is not just the story of Kanpur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla, Sabeena Gadihoke Parzor

Bishwanath Ghosh — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 01:05:12 EDT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old India, New Indian

Bishwanath Ghosh — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 12:22:30 EDT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confessions Of An Aspiring Yogi

Bishwanath Ghosh — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:06:32 EDT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madras Day

Bishwanath Ghosh — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:03:42 EDT

The self-appointed custodians of Chennai's heritage and culture are a busy lot these days. The term 'self-important' is not meant to be sarcastic or derogatory here: I mean someone has to take it upon himself or herself to keep the identity of a city alive, especially when ministers/government officials are concerned about what they can extract from a city rather than what they can contribute. Oh yes, they do contribute -- in the form of hideous statues. Like our present chief minister Karunanidhi.

Karunanidhi is now an old man who has clearly lost his marbles. First he installed the statue of Sivaji Ganesan at the Marina, putting him on par with Gandhi. (Sixty years from now, the life-size cutouts of various Tamil heroes put up by vendors on the sands could dot the Marina as bronze statues). Then he said no tax (or very little tax) for movies with pure Tamil names. Then he drastically cut the registration fee for people changing their names into classical Tamil (wonder why he doesn't lead by example and drop his Sanskrit name). Tomorrow, he could promise a free colour TV for those changing their names into classical Tamil. If that happens, I have already thought of a name for myself: Sakthivel. I could sell the TV to stock my bar.

Oh no, that was a long digression. I was talking about how the custodians of Chennai are a busy lot these days. They are preparing very seriously for Chennai Day -- or is it Madras Day? -- which falls on August 20. I guess the celebrations have come a little too soon because only last year, they had celebrated 365 years of Madras. Celebrating 365 days is fine, but to celebrate 365 years? -- but then, you don't expect the custodians to wait for another 35 years, do you?

That reminds me, when Madras turns 400, I will be 70. Where will I be then? I wish I could know, but you certainly won't catch me speaking at a seminar in Taj Conemarra or Taj Coromandel reminiscing my years in Madras. I hate seminars, and also people who attend or speak at seminars. My job is to write, and if things go the way I want, I would have, by then, written the most exciting book on Chennai -- part-Naipaul, part-Theroux, part-Bill Bryson, part-Henry Miller. Till that happens, it would suffice to reproduce what I wrote last year, on the occasion of 365 years of Madras:

A city is no different from a human being. It wakes up at the crack of dawn, stretches lazily and sets about its chores. It works during the day, enjoys in the evening and retires to bed at night. It has its good qualities and its flaws, as well as its eccentricities. And like all humans, it also has a heart and a soul. And its moods.

Sometimes it behaves like a pampering mother and sometimes like a sulking wife. At times it gives you a cold stare like a stranger and at other times it embraces you like an old friend. Only that a city has an infinite lifespan. The people who live in it are incidental: they come and go. But the city goes on. Like Chennai.

The Chennai that we know was born in 1639 as a strip of beach three miles long and one mile wide -- acquired from the governors of Poonamallee by two East India Company employees, Francis Day and Andrew Cogan. That makes the city 365 years old. During this period it contributed to the history of modern India in different capacities -- as the seat of the British power in the South, as the capital of the entire South India, as the venue of some defining political movements and, of course, as the capital of Tamil Nadu.

But what has survived the political changes, and is still flourishing, is the culture -- something that accords Chennai its unique place. Idli-sambar, Bharatanatyam, Carnatic music... these are things you can happily take out of Chennai, but you can never take Chennai out of them.

It's also a city awash with colour: walls in the entire city are wrapped in posters while gigantic cinema billboards unseen anywhere else in the country tower over prominent junctions. And in the nights it's not uncommon to pass by illuminated larger-than-life cutouts of gods and goddesses and also of politicians. It's only here that politicians enjoy the status of gods.

Amidst all this Chennai exudes warmth -- something rarely found in the other metros. Bombay is too busy while Delhi loves to show off -- every Delhiite thinks he or she is a nephew or niece of the Prime Minister. Calcutta, on the other hand, is too snooty -- it never tires of celebrating itself.

As the celebrated British journalist, the late James Cameron, wrote in An Indian Summer: "...I have a sort of trust in Madras... It is an agreeable, rather boring place; it is the sort of place I would be if I were a town." The accompanying impressions celebrate not only Chennai's birth anniversary but also the trust Cameron has talked about. But hang on, whose anniversary are we celebrating -- Chennai's or Madras'? Now, what's in a name! Thayir saadham tastes as good as curd rice.