The Perils of partying late into the night.

Amba Batra Bakshi writes about the party scene in Delhi.

The 2 am crowd is certainly serious about their partying. In Delhi, a typical evening would begin at a friend’s house followed by clubbing and rounded off with a drive to Noida or Gurgaon to get alcohol as late as 6 am. The Gurgaon stretch of NH-8 comes alive past midnight when some of its dhabas dole out techno beats, alcohol, cocaine or Ecstasy to send you the high way. South Delhi’s opulent drawing rooms begin to serve the finest single malt as the first hand of poker is dealt. The really rich and influential head for the very lap of luxury, an exclusive nightclub at Hotel Samrat, a stone’s throw away from the prime minister’s house, where membership is over a lakh per year, and all the privileges extend up to the waking hours.

Nandita Das by Khushwant Singh

She is the best example of an Indian’s perception of a beautiful woman: brown complexion, chiselled features, fawn-like eyes and a gentle smile on her lips. She uses no make-up like eye shadow, powder, rouge or lipstick to enhance her beauty. Even so, her face leaves an indelible stamp on one’s mind which can be brought alive anytime you think of her. She is Nandita Das—actress, director and producer of films which carry a message. She is the daughter of the eminent Oriya painter Jatin Das and Gujarati Hindu-Jain mother Varsha. She was born, brought up and educated in Delhi and may rightly be described as Nai Dilli ki beti. She did her schooling in Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, took a degree in geography from Miranda House and MA in social work from Delhi University—getting firsts in all of them. With her academic achievements she could have made it to one of the central services. She toyed with the idea of becoming an Odissi dancer but her stunningly photogenic looks and talent for acting drew her into the film world.

I have not been inside a cinema hall for over thirty years and rarely switch on my TV except to catch up with the latest news. I am not qualified to write on a film personality. However, I had a couple of sessions with Nandita Das in my home. The first was after the success of Firaq, based on the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, directed by her. It won her nation-wide acclaim and drew huge crowds when shown in Pakistan. It also brought her a lot of hate mail from Hindu fundoos. The second and longer session was soon after the release of Before The Rains, about an illicit love affair between a married English coffee-planter and his maidservant, also married. It got some good as well as some critical reviews. I gathered whatever material I could find on her on the net—acted in 30 films, directed four and details of her life. I asked everyone who had seen her films how they rated her—and felt compelled to put my conclusions on paper.

I went through the biodata she had sent me after our first meeting. I noticed something strange: she had lots of nice things to say about her father whom she calls Baba, but there was nothing about her mother. I knew her parents had a messy divorce when she was barely eight years old. I also heard her father had a roving eye and remarried more than once after divorcing Varsha. I told her what I had noticed and asked if her parents’ divorce had left any scars on her mind and if she had been forced to take sides. She was on the defensive. “No,” she assured me, if there were any scars, they had healed and she loved both her mother and father equally. She admitted her father was a bit of an eccentric and much misunderstood. It was her duty to set the record straight. She is very protective about her father’s reputation. I came to the conclusion it was a case of father-fixation. For her, Baba can do no wrong.

Nandita’s own forays into matrimony were also of brief duration. The first lasted a bare three years, ending in divorce by mutual consent. “We remain the best of friends,” she assured me. I changed the subject. “What do you think of marriage as an institution?”
She relaxed. “Not much. People fall in love and get married. Then they get bored with each other. They hang together for family considerations or for the sake of children. But the fun is gone. Few have the guts to get divorced.”

“And religion?”

“I don’t have any. I don’t even know what caste I belong to. In our home we had no pooja room or idols of deities. We lit diyas on Diwali, squirted coloured water or gulal on people if any came visiting. When my aunt wanted me to go with her to the Jagannath temple in Puri, I went along to keep her company. No one in the family bothered whether a person was Hindu or Muslim—or whatever.”

“And God. Do you believe in a divinity?”

“If you don’t believe in any religion, there is no place for God or divinity in your mind. No, I don’t believe in God.”

“Do you plan on spending the rest of your life making films?”

“No, if I was I would not be living in Delhi, I’d be in Bombay. I’ll make films when I have something to say. I want to make a difference in people’s way of thinking.”

“Many people say you make only art films meant for the educated elite?”

She protested. Firaq had made an impact on the common people. She quoted what her driver had to say about it. He was very moved.

So why has Nandita not made it to the top in Indian films? I answer the question myself. She is not willing to compromise on her themes. She is not willing to take part in films which have a set number of songs, acrobatic dances and mock fights which the gullible gobble up with relish and are rated by what they rake in at the box office. It is not manoranjan (amusement) she is after but chintan (thinking). She wants to make an impact on the minds of people.

Nandita lives in Gulmohar Park with her younger brother who is a creative designer. She does not go to parties. She has a busy schedule of work. She gets up at 6.30 am and gets down to it. She does not waste time reading newspapers: at one time she subscribed to three, now she only reads The Indian Express. She has no time to watch TV or indulge in idle gupshup. She loves travelling and is on the hop most of the time to distant places in the country and abroad. She reads a little and retires around 11 pm. I asked if she slept soundly. “I used to,” she replied. “Not so soundly these days.”

She is a teetotaller. In the two sessions she had with me when I was sipping Scotch with soda and ice, she kept sipping uncooled mineral water.

This is from Outlook.

Deccan, Chronic.

Is Karnataka following the Gujarat mode of development?


Between 1998 and 2000, communal incidents were reported every six months, every month between 2000 and 2004, and from 2004 on, we find that incidents occur every week."
The invariable plot for violence, he adds, is about a boy from a Muslim or Christian community ‘found being friendly’ with a Hindu girl, which leads to the self-styled protectors of the Hindu faith ‘intervening’ to ‘free’ the girl. Except intervening here means thrashing the boy. "We should remember that there was a sustained campaign against the Muslim community in Gujarat before Godhra happened," says Phaniraj. Just prior to the Surathkal riots in 1998, a lot of pamphlets warning young Hindu women against going with Muslim boys were circulated.




"There is a state of utter and complete lawlessness in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Bellary." H.D. Kumaraswamy Janata Dal (S) President


"One of them asked Hindu women to be cautious of Muslim men in footwear shops."
In fact, you would indeed think the Mangalore pub incident to be ‘trivial’ compared to earlier incidents in the region (See here) were it not for the staged replays of the event,



courtesy a local TV channel. On the very same day, Bajrang Dal men had barged into a private party and assaulted those present. And the man who instigated the pub attack, Prasad Attavar, had in 2007 assaulted a Muslim boy at the Ideal Ice-cream Parlour in the heart of Mangalore for talking to a Hindu girl. More ghastly, however, was the 2005 incident in a Puttur cinema when two men (one Muslim) and two Hindu women working in an areca processing factory had gone to see a movie. Around 150 Bajrang Dal activists barged in, dragged the four out and assaulted them before handing them over to the police. As recently as six months ago, a Muslim and Hindu couple living together were forced to return to their native Gadag by parivar activists. "Intrusion into private spaces has become common," says Phaniraj.

The girls who were assaulted by Mutalik’s Sena

Rajashekar rues that even people have become insensitive. "The pub incident is not a one-off criminal act as the CM and home minister are trying to project," he says. "It is part of a political programme. The fact that TV cameras were in position before the incident took place reminds me of the Walter Benjamin observation that ‘Fascism makes a spectacle of its ideology’. People are not shocked by what has happened. They simply watched it like any TV serial."

Father Prashant Madtha, former principal of St Aloysius College, Mangalore, attributes the frequent eruptions in the city to a clash of cultures. "Because of the various educational institutions in the area, Mangalore has witnessed an influx of people from across India. The locals feel threatened by the outsiders and feverishly protect their culture from corruption."

Amidst all this are fears that the constabulary too has been communalised. But state DG and IG of police, R. Srikumar, dismisses the idea outright. "It is easy for people to pass value judgements," he says. "Let those who accuse us give us in writing the names of officers who have acted communally and we’ll investigate the charges."

The other worry is the media. "The local media here has coopted the language of the parivar," rues Phaniraj. "So, the common man has started accepting propaganda without questioning it." The general attitude of the Sangh to media non-compliance was evident in the case of B.V. Seetharam, the editor of the Mangalore-based newspaper Karavali Ale and a Sangh critic. Handcuffed and arrested in an alleged extortion case on January 6, he is still in prison.

The quality of public discourse too seems to have reached a nadir ever since the BJP has come to power.There seems to be no middle path. Following the church attacks, a mainstream Kannada newspaper ran a poisoned debate on the issue of conversions for over a month. The right-wing historian and novelist S.L. Bhyrappa, who opened the debate, claimed that "there was an alarming increase in conversions ever since Sonia Gandhi had come to power". He also endorsed a study which said that every day "5,000 people in India were converting to Christianity".

Besides the coastal districts, there has been an uneasy calm at other flashpoints like Baba Budangiri since 2004, where the Sangh parivar is hell-bent on converting the Sufi shrine with a rich tradition of religious syncretism into an exclusive Hindu pilgrimage centre. BJP leader H.N. Ananth Kumar had vowed to make it the ‘Ayodhya of Karnataka’. The Hubli Idgah Maidan issue had cropped up temporarily in September 2004 when Uma Bharati courted arrest and lost her chief ministership, but there has been little noise since then. The silence is eerie, however, and with a BJP government in power, pregnant.

Marks on the water

Outlook has an interesting article on the planning, organization and backing of the terrorists.

As commandos of the Indian navy flushed the Taj Mahal hotel of terrorists, they came upon a bag containing ammunition, magazines, wallets with photo-IDs, fake credit cards and a huge stock of almonds. Twenty-four hours had passed and the terrorists were still active, so investigators were barely up to sifting through evidence. But pressed for an early assessment, they dismissed the e-mail sent by a certain ‘Deccan Mujahideen’ claiming responsibility as a red herring. The name doing the rounds is the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), purportedly working in close coordination with a section of the Mumbai underworld and rogue elements of Pakistan’s isi. But neither Maharashtra dgp A.N. Roy nor Mumbai police commissioner Hasan Gaffoor would confirm the involvement of this deadly troika.

In fact, early intelligence assessments suggest that some of the terrorists who came in were young British Muslims of Pakistani origin. Sources say they had been in training for well over a year but the final decision to carry out the assault was given at the annual conference of the LeT held in Muridke, PoK, last week. The Mumbai operation, apparently, was funded by Saudi Arabia-based Abdul Bari. He’s part of a larger international terror network and has financed strikes in India earlier too.

In a major breakthrough, investigators had traced the ship in which the terrorists made their way from Pakistan to the Mumbai coast by Thursday evening. The fishing vessel, Kuber, was found off the coast of Mumbai and some satellite phones recovered from it. The boat is owned by a Porbander-based businessman, Vinoo Masani, who has been detained for questioning. Kuber left Gujarat 14 days ago with six crew members who are believed to have been killed by the terrorists who hijacked the boat. Investigators are looking into how this will bring out the Pakistan connection.

If the Kuber was indeed hijacked, then the modus operandi becomes clear. Proceed to Indian waters in a Gujarat-registered vessel (Regn No. 2302) so as not to attract attention and then move into the mainland on dinghies.

Meanwhile, analysis of the accents of the two (purported) terrorists in conversations they had with a private TV channel suggested they are either expat Pakistanis or from Punjab there. The use of "muthbhed" (encounter) instead of the term "muqabla" is a dead giveaway, says analysts. Like Pakistani Punjabis, they also signed off saying "Allah hafiz", instead of "khuda hafiz." Maj Gen R.K. Hooda, goc (Maharashtra and Goa area), says the intercepts during the operations revealed that they spoke to each other in Punjabi. Prior technical intercepts as well as other sources had suggested a major attack was to go down in Mumbai via the sea and that the Taj Mahal Hotel would be targeted. These inputs had been looked at but with few concrete leads, no preventive action was taken.

Intelligence sources told Outlook that Dawood’s men in Mumbai may have provided the logistics support. An official told us, "Dawood has this diesel smuggling network in Mumbai—diesel is downloaded from tankers in the high seas off the coast of Mumbai and then brought in using high-speed boats. Our inputs suggest that these guys provided safe passage to the terrorists. They provided the boats, the cars and reports on the patrolling schedules of the coastguard. The idea was to hit the international community as well as shake up the top businesses in the country."

Maharashtra CM Vilasrao Deshmukh said that 20-25 terrorists were involved in the attack this time but "it was too early to say anything concrete. We have leads, but we won’t talk until there is confirmation". Two of the terrorists, chased after they hijacked a police jeep, were gunned down near Chowpatty.

Arise, Sir Salman!

Priyamvada Gopal has an insightful perspective on Sir Salman.

Is America a shining example of a multi-party political system and accountable government? Rushdie's list of 'what matters' pays pious lip service to 'a more equitable distribution of resources' while stressing 'kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches and cutting-edge fashion' priorities rather specifc to upper-class metropolitan glitterati. (Could cutting-edge fashion be connected to an inequitable distribution of the world's resources, one wonders?). The Muslim diaspora, Rushdie then opines, have values that are at odds 'with the Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish cultures among which they live'.

Had Rushdie not compromised himself so severely, it would be easier for us to acknowledge the continuing relevance of some of what he says. He has rightly called for a fast-growing version of 'a self-exculpatory paranoid Islam' which blames 'outsiders' for all the ills of Muslim societies to be examined and resisted. He has also called for the 'restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal', a call he might have extended more widely and forcefully to the driving forces in American politics today. Trouble is, what he once undertook in the name of shared human values and goals, he now identifies largely with the West, using culture-specific, parochial terms like 'The Enlightenment' and 'Reformation' to call for change in non-Western contexts and cultures.

Rushdie and his allies in the West need to return to a more wide-ranging critical engagement with the present and with the cultures outside the West which shaped him as a young writer. Equally, so-called representatives of Islam who find only books and images--not poverty, intra-faith violence, shame killings and dictatorial regimes--a source of offense need to stop being such willing puppets for every provocateur, real or imagined, who comes their way. Until this happens, the only winner will be those who espouse the specious but self-fulfilling prophecy of the 'clash of civilisations'.

Piles

Khushwant Singh has written a very funny piece, in the Outlook, about his piles problem.

Well, I Nether!
Thoughts of a dignified, noble farewell quashed by an endoscopic bathos


Khushwant Singh


I crave the forgiveness of my readers for writing on a subject which is taboo in genteel circles. I also apologise in advance for using words which some people may find distasteful. I wouldn't be doing so if the end of my tale of woe was not so comic.

It all started during my recent summer vacation in Kasauli. I woke up one night with a queasy feeling in my stomach. Half asleep, I tottered to the loo to rid myself of my sleep-breaker. When I got up from the lavatory seat to flush out the contents, I was shocked to see I had passed a lot of blood with my stool. "Shit!" I said to myself, suddenly wide awake. The rest of the night was wasted in contemplation of the end. I had had a reasonable innings, close to scoring a century, so no regrets on that score. Was I creating a self-image of heroism in the face of death? That vanished on the following day as more blood flowed out of my belly.

I asked my friend Dr Santosh Kutty of the Central Research Institute (CRI) to drop in for a drink in the evening. Over a glass of Scotch, he heard me out. When I finished, he asked me: "Have you been eating chukandar?" I admitted I'd had beetroot salad the day before.

"It could be that," he suggested. "It is the same colour as human blood. Or it could be nature's way of reducing high blood pressure—bleeding through the nose or arse. Or it could be a polyp, or piles, or...." He did not use the word but I understood he meant cancer. "Let me examine your rectum."

"You'll do no such thing," I rasped. "I'd rather die than show my rectum to anyone." He paused and continued, "It would be wise to have an endoscopy. It will clear all doubts. We don't have the facility in Kasauli. You can have it done at pgi in Chandigarh or in Delhi. The sooner the better."

I opted for Delhi to be with my family. And rang up my friend Nanak Kohli to send up his Mercedes Benz to take me down. I looked up my dictionary to find out exactly what polyp and endoscopy meant. One is a kind of sea urchin-like growth in the lower part of the intestine, the other an instrumental examination of one's innards. I spent the rest of the day drafting in my mind farewell letters to my near and dear ones. Nothing mawkish or sentimental, but in the tone of one who couldn't care less about his fate, something they could quote in my obituaries: he went like a man, with a smile on his face, etc, etc.

The next morning, my son Rahul and I drove back to Delhi. The first thing I did was to ask Dr I.P.S. Kalra, who lives in the neighbouring block, to come over. Dr Kalra is a devout believer in miracles performed by Waheguru. He has been our doctor for over half a century and has treated several members of my extended family in their last days on earth, until their journey to the electric crematorium. Since I am a lot older than him, he addresses me as Veerjee (elder brother). He took my blood pressure, it was higher than normal. He heard my bloody tale and straightaway fixed an appointment with Dr S.K. Jain, Delhi's leading endoscopist.

The next evening, accompanied by Kalra, Rahul and my daughter Mala, we presented ourselves at Dr Jain's swanky clinic in Hauz Khas Enclave. All white marble, spotlessly clean, and with the obligatory statuette of Lord Ganapati with garland of fresh marigold flowers around his neck sitting above the receptionist's desk. Since I was the first patient of the many he had to examine that evening, I was conducted immediately to his operating room.

I can tell you that endoscopy strips your self-esteem and any dignity you may have. I was ordered to take off my salwar-kameez, given an overall to wear, and ordered to lie down. Dr Jain took my BP and proceeded to insert an endoscope up my rectum.At times the pain was excruciating. It went on for an hour. When it was over, Dr Kalra ordered me, "Veerji, pudd maro—kill a fart, you'll feel easier." I refused to oblige and instead went to the lavatory to get rid of the wind the nervous tension had created inside me.

Dr Jain pronounced the verdict: "No polyp, no cancer, only internal piles which bleed because of high BP. It is nature's way of bringing it down." As a parting gift, he gave Mala a filmed version of all that had transpired—from my bottom being bared to the muck inside my belly. As if that was not enough, when asked about his father's health, Rahul told everyone, "Pop has piles." There is something romantic about cancer; polyp is like a plop sound produced by a frog leaping into a stagnant pool; but haemorrhoids have no romance attached to them; they are simply a miserable man's piles. Many well-wishers called to enquire how my endoscopy had gone and how I felt about the whole exercise. My reply was standard: "I feel buggered."