Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
A former bar girl dancer rues her present occupation of waitress
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
The ground floor apartment of former bar girl dancer, Mala Lichaye, 22, is at the very end of the Sindhi Camp at Chembur. The building in which stays is so close to another, that when you look up, the sky is just a sliver. Inside, there is a small living room, (with several pillowcases drying on a clothesline on one side), a dining area, a kitchen and a bathroom. But what catches the eye is a shoe rack, which is crowded with all sorts of shining women’s footwear: platform, wedge and stiletto heels.
Lichaye is brushing her teeth at 4.30 pm, while her friends are busy in the kitchen. She is an irritated mood: the water has run out. One of her friends produces a cup of tea within minutes for the visitor. Without make-up and their garish clothes, all of them look ordinary and, sad to say, a little run down, although they are all in their twenties.
“I am now working as a waitress in the Trimurti bar at Ghatkopar,” says Lichaye, using a towel as a dupatta. Works starts at 7 pm and goes on till 1.30 am.
“Earlier, we used to dance and earn our money,” she says. “There was a dignity of labour. Now, we have to pour drinks and stand very near the patrons. Some of them talk rudely. Some pinch us, and say, ‘Look what has happened to you. You were a glamourous bar girl and now you are just a waiter.’ I feel bad when I hear comments like this.”
She earns about Rs 200 a day, a far cry from the Rs 600 to Rs 800 as a dance bar girl.
All the other girls who live in the area are going through the same financial problems. “They are also working as waitresses,” she says. “The ban has really hurt us.”
When asked what she would say if she were to meet Home Minister R.R. Patil, she says, “I would say that what you did was not right. It is a terrible thing, to take away somebody’s livelihood and you have no right to do that. Why don’t you come to our homes and see how difficult is our lives. Like any human being, we also want to lead a decent life and give our younger brothers and sisters a good education.”
Sitting next to her is Shyam Sundar, a member of the Bharatiya Bar Girl’s Union: “I have heard the Russian girls are doing dances in bars but there is no ban against them. Patil says the dance bars are against Marathi culture. How can a dance form be against Marathi culture?”
Monday, August 21, 2006
Wah Wagh!
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
The third generation Wagh sculptors are still going strong
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“One person from Sakori placed an order for a statue of Shirdi Sai Baba,” says sculptor Vinay Wagh, 45. “It took about four months to make. This was a statue on which I worked single-handedly.” A few months later, when the client called, Wagh told him the statue was ready. But the client insisted it was not ready.
“How can you say that?” Wagh remembers saying. “I have been working on it myself. I know it is ready.” He urged Wagh to inspect the two fingers of the right hand, which was placed below the knees. “Without disconnecting the phone, I went and looked underneath the hand and saw that the separation of the fingers was not up to the mark,” says the sculptor. “What should I think? My only conclusion: God is there. Otherwise, how do you explain it? Nobody else was working on the statue.”
When the client arrived, Wagh asked him how he was able to spot the error from so far away. “He said, ‘When you told me the statue was ready, I felt a pain in my finger,’” says Wagh. “‘That is why I felt some work still remained.’”
This is one of the most profound experiences of Wagh in over 30 years of work as a sculptor. In the window of his studio on Chowpatty, there are plaster of paris replicas of Mother Teresa, Madhavrao Scindia, Swami Chinmayananda, Bhagat Singh, Shivaji, Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi.
Inside, the floor has a thin layer of white dust while the velvet green sofas have seen better days. Amidst all this sits Wagh, the third generation of the family, which have making sculptures for the past 94 years. His grandfather, Vinayakrao, was officially appointed to make a sculpture of Lord Hardinge, the first Viceroy of India, while his father, Brahmesh, was appointed as sculptor to the President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad.
As for Vinay Wagh, he says one of the most memorable statues he has made was of Karan Singh’s grandfather, Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jammu and Kashmir, riding a horse.
“To make the horse in clay took me eight months,” says Wagh. “I went to the racecourse to study horses. I made sketches. I took photographs. I met the trainers. I tried to figure out what type of posture the horse should have: should it be the walk, the canter, the gallop or the trot.”
In the end, he selected the trot. When the statue was being made, he invited trainers to come and see it, so that they could offer advise on the correct position of the horse and the posture of the rider. “Where should the Maharaja sit? What should be the position of the feet? Where would he hold the reins?” says Wagh. “What should the dress be like? Singh was of medium height, so I needed a model of that height to resemble him.”
Father of the nation
Among the many statues he has done, he has made several of Mahatma Gandhi. One such statue, a bust, can be found in the lobby of the Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya. It is the familiar one of a bespectacled Gandhi, with the bald head, the sticking out ears, the wrinkled forehead and a hint of a smile on his face. It seems very real and even though the eye cavities are empty, you almost sense that he is looking at you. That is how good the sculpture is.
“Wagh has got the face of Gandhi perfectly,” says Meghshyam Ajgaonkar, 59, executive secretary of the bhavan. “Wagh was given the commission because his family has been in the business for a very long time.” The statue was put up in 1999 and cost Rs 75,000.
Ajgaonkar says lots of visitors appreciate the bust and take photographs next to it.
One of them is Nicholas Guichard, 26, a dentist from Toulouse, France, who is here with a group of friends. “This bust is an accurate representation,” says this handsome Frenchman, with red cheeks. “You feel a sense of serenity when you look at it.”
The lifelike Shastri
On another side of Wagh’s studio, there is a 11 foot tall statue of Lal Bahadur Shastri, which has been commissioned by the government of Karnataka. Being built at a cost of Rs 22 lakh, it will be set up just outside the Vidhana Soudha, next year. In June, son Anil Shastri, 56, a member of the Congress Working Committee, inspected it. “It was as close to Shastri when he was alive,” says Anil, by phone from Delhi. “Some of the other statues of my father that Wagh has built for various NGO’s and government trusts have been par excellence. My mother is an admirer of his work and I will recommend him to anybody.”
Talking to Wagh, it is clear that there is a lot of hard work behind the scene before a statue becomes one. So what is the procedure behind the making of a statue? There are numerous processes, like lost wax moulding, and Wagh says, this is the same process that greats like Leonardo Da Vinci and Auguste Rodin used. The final process is when the mould is baked in a furnace for eight days, at the sculptor’s factory in Matunga. “The mould is then put into a pit,” he says. “Then we pour liquid bronze on it. If it is a big statue, we have to weld it. We have to match it with the master copy, which has been made of plaster of paris.” Next up is the oxidisation process, which is done in one tone: from coffee brown to jet black.
The cost depends on the size, but it ranges from Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 15 lakh or more. His customers range from municipal corporations to state governments, industrialists and several trusts. Interestingly, the most orders that Wagh gets is for B.R. Ambedkar. “The demand is there because of government backing,” he says. So far, he has made more than 1000 statues and busts of the late leader.
Asked about the qualities need to be a good sculptor, Wagh says, “You need to have talent and a lot of concentration. You have to do a deep study of the human anatomy, and understand facial expressions, and use your imagination.”
A sculptor, he says, has to be physically fit, because he has to work for 12 hours in a standing position. “It is heavy work,” he says. “It is not like a painter who delicately daubs paint on a canvas.” Each statue weighs about 800 kgs and the sculptor has to use his hands to help the staff and the labour. Wagh plays volleyaball, swimming and does weight training. “I keep my mind refreshed by doing yoga,” he says. “I am very passionate about sculpting. It is a nasha.”
This nasha has lasted for three generations and if all goes well, Wagh’s son, Chaitanya, who is 10, will follow his footsteps one day, provided, of course, that God endows him with talent.
The third generation Wagh sculptors are still going strong
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“One person from Sakori placed an order for a statue of Shirdi Sai Baba,” says sculptor Vinay Wagh, 45. “It took about four months to make. This was a statue on which I worked single-handedly.” A few months later, when the client called, Wagh told him the statue was ready. But the client insisted it was not ready.
“How can you say that?” Wagh remembers saying. “I have been working on it myself. I know it is ready.” He urged Wagh to inspect the two fingers of the right hand, which was placed below the knees. “Without disconnecting the phone, I went and looked underneath the hand and saw that the separation of the fingers was not up to the mark,” says the sculptor. “What should I think? My only conclusion: God is there. Otherwise, how do you explain it? Nobody else was working on the statue.”
When the client arrived, Wagh asked him how he was able to spot the error from so far away. “He said, ‘When you told me the statue was ready, I felt a pain in my finger,’” says Wagh. “‘That is why I felt some work still remained.’”
This is one of the most profound experiences of Wagh in over 30 years of work as a sculptor. In the window of his studio on Chowpatty, there are plaster of paris replicas of Mother Teresa, Madhavrao Scindia, Swami Chinmayananda, Bhagat Singh, Shivaji, Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi.
Inside, the floor has a thin layer of white dust while the velvet green sofas have seen better days. Amidst all this sits Wagh, the third generation of the family, which have making sculptures for the past 94 years. His grandfather, Vinayakrao, was officially appointed to make a sculpture of Lord Hardinge, the first Viceroy of India, while his father, Brahmesh, was appointed as sculptor to the President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad.
As for Vinay Wagh, he says one of the most memorable statues he has made was of Karan Singh’s grandfather, Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jammu and Kashmir, riding a horse.
“To make the horse in clay took me eight months,” says Wagh. “I went to the racecourse to study horses. I made sketches. I took photographs. I met the trainers. I tried to figure out what type of posture the horse should have: should it be the walk, the canter, the gallop or the trot.”
In the end, he selected the trot. When the statue was being made, he invited trainers to come and see it, so that they could offer advise on the correct position of the horse and the posture of the rider. “Where should the Maharaja sit? What should be the position of the feet? Where would he hold the reins?” says Wagh. “What should the dress be like? Singh was of medium height, so I needed a model of that height to resemble him.”
Father of the nation
Among the many statues he has done, he has made several of Mahatma Gandhi. One such statue, a bust, can be found in the lobby of the Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya. It is the familiar one of a bespectacled Gandhi, with the bald head, the sticking out ears, the wrinkled forehead and a hint of a smile on his face. It seems very real and even though the eye cavities are empty, you almost sense that he is looking at you. That is how good the sculpture is.
“Wagh has got the face of Gandhi perfectly,” says Meghshyam Ajgaonkar, 59, executive secretary of the bhavan. “Wagh was given the commission because his family has been in the business for a very long time.” The statue was put up in 1999 and cost Rs 75,000.
Ajgaonkar says lots of visitors appreciate the bust and take photographs next to it.
One of them is Nicholas Guichard, 26, a dentist from Toulouse, France, who is here with a group of friends. “This bust is an accurate representation,” says this handsome Frenchman, with red cheeks. “You feel a sense of serenity when you look at it.”
The lifelike Shastri
On another side of Wagh’s studio, there is a 11 foot tall statue of Lal Bahadur Shastri, which has been commissioned by the government of Karnataka. Being built at a cost of Rs 22 lakh, it will be set up just outside the Vidhana Soudha, next year. In June, son Anil Shastri, 56, a member of the Congress Working Committee, inspected it. “It was as close to Shastri when he was alive,” says Anil, by phone from Delhi. “Some of the other statues of my father that Wagh has built for various NGO’s and government trusts have been par excellence. My mother is an admirer of his work and I will recommend him to anybody.”
Talking to Wagh, it is clear that there is a lot of hard work behind the scene before a statue becomes one. So what is the procedure behind the making of a statue? There are numerous processes, like lost wax moulding, and Wagh says, this is the same process that greats like Leonardo Da Vinci and Auguste Rodin used. The final process is when the mould is baked in a furnace for eight days, at the sculptor’s factory in Matunga. “The mould is then put into a pit,” he says. “Then we pour liquid bronze on it. If it is a big statue, we have to weld it. We have to match it with the master copy, which has been made of plaster of paris.” Next up is the oxidisation process, which is done in one tone: from coffee brown to jet black.
The cost depends on the size, but it ranges from Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 15 lakh or more. His customers range from municipal corporations to state governments, industrialists and several trusts. Interestingly, the most orders that Wagh gets is for B.R. Ambedkar. “The demand is there because of government backing,” he says. So far, he has made more than 1000 statues and busts of the late leader.
Asked about the qualities need to be a good sculptor, Wagh says, “You need to have talent and a lot of concentration. You have to do a deep study of the human anatomy, and understand facial expressions, and use your imagination.”
A sculptor, he says, has to be physically fit, because he has to work for 12 hours in a standing position. “It is heavy work,” he says. “It is not like a painter who delicately daubs paint on a canvas.” Each statue weighs about 800 kgs and the sculptor has to use his hands to help the staff and the labour. Wagh plays volleyaball, swimming and does weight training. “I keep my mind refreshed by doing yoga,” he says. “I am very passionate about sculpting. It is a nasha.”
This nasha has lasted for three generations and if all goes well, Wagh’s son, Chaitanya, who is 10, will follow his footsteps one day, provided, of course, that God endows him with talent.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Magical, mystical and mesmerising
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Photographer Prabir Purkayastha captures Ladakh in its varied hues
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“In September 2001, I was in the village of Basgo, one of the four ancient capitals of Ladakh,” says photographer Prabir Purkayastha, 54. “The main monastery in Basgo is about 600 years old. I was helping a dear friend – His Highness Jigmed Wangchuk Namgyal of Ladakh – photograph the sad decay and ravages of time in this exquisite house of god.”
It was 4 pm and Purkayastha was exhausted and desperate. He had been taking pictures since 11 am and did not have the time to eat or drink. “I wanted to go back home,” he says. “Just when I thought it was time to leave, my friend asked me to go to a smaller monastery and photograph it, too.”
In this old and desolate monastery, there was a 16 ft tall bronze statue of Maitreya. The body was in the hall while the shoulders and head extended upwards into a glass-fronted attic. “The caretaker took me to the roof, as it was too dark in the prayer hall to see anything,” he says.
The panes were grimy and Purkayastha cleaned them by using his bandana and some water.
“As I looked upon the radiant face, glowing like burnished gold, in the rays of the setting sun, I saw tears–molten and shining–streaming down the cheeks!” says Purkayastha, as he rapidly took photographs. “Tears, just like yours and mine.”
Purkayastha was stunned into silence and disbelief. He showed this amazing phenomenon to His Highness who insisted they leave the monastery immediately. Next morning, on the flight back to Delhi, he was introduced to His Holiness, the Gyalwang Karmapa. When he was told about the phenomenon, the Karmapa was speechless, too. He had never seen nor heard of such a thing.
A few weeks later, a curious Purkayasta went back to Basgo. This time, when he looked in through the roof, he got a shock: “I saw golden rays of sunbeams streaming from Maitreya's eyes - glowing like a million suns all blazing together,” he says. “The tears had dried up but His eyes were alight with wonderment. I always show this picture, with the light shining in Maitreya’s eyes, in all my exhibitions.”
This has been one of the most astounding experiences of Purkayastha, in his decade-long love affair with Ladakh, trying to photograph this mysterious land in all its varied moods.
In Mumbai, Purkayastha’s exhibition, called ‘Zendo’ is on show at the Bodhi art gallery. There are 42 pictures on display, of which 28 are in black and white. These are images of desolation and a stark beauty. When you look at them, you feel like going into the photograph and escape from the madding crowd, the pollution, the daily struggle and the fears of terrorism that is life in Mumbai these days. This is a glimpse of a strange and unreal world, where Nature lords it over man; where you sense the insignificance of man in the scheme of things.
What helps to quiet down the hysterical voice in your head and your ragged nerves is the haunting music: it is a rare jugalbandi between the Tibetan, Nawang Khechog, and the Red Indian, Carlos Nakai, both of whom are among the best bamboo flutists in the world. The vocals are by Senegalese star, Baaba Maal, who is singing, according to Purkayastha, one of the finest azaan's ever recorded: Duniya salaam. These are pictures of mountains, lakes, valleys and of deserts, shot with deep affection and respect. Even though the environment dominates in most photographs, the striking images are of people: an old man, sitting on his haunches, his face ravaged by age, wearing a weather-beaten cloak, a couple of sticks in his hands, in a rock strewn desolate landscape and yet, in his eyes, there is such an acceptance of life that you are transfixed on the spot. Then, there is an image, in light and shade, of the late Bakula Rinpoche, the head lama of Ladakh and India's Ambassador to Mongolia. It is a face of tremendous character and serenity and Purkayastha has caught it perfectly.
“This Zendo (a Japanese word for an ancient meditation hall suffused with energy) exhibition is the result of a fascinating journey,” says Purkayastha. “I wanted to show the latent and haunting beauty of Ladakh and I have compared this mystical land to the sacred zendo.”
The obvious question to ask: Why Ladakh? What has made him go back so many times over so many years? Purkayastha is eloquent about his love: “When you trek across a lake that dried up a million years ago, at 14,000 feet, with barely enough oxygen, to keep you alive, you stop thinking of this mundane world. You are no longer who you are. This freedom from the superficial self is more than a breath of fresh air. You are one with the astounding beauty all around you. It’s magic! And that’s why I travel back to Ladakh. Time after time.”
Talking to visitors at the gallery, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Fashutana Patel, 20, feels the photographs look more like paintings. Collegian Nergish Sunavala, who admires Purkayastha’s technique, feels some digital manipulation has taken place.
Purkayastha explains why the photographs look the way they do. “I was desperate to photograph Ladakh only as my mind’s eye viewed it,” he says.
After many experiments, with films and processing techniques, he said the best effect came when he used Kodak Technical Pan film. He says he only uses ambient light, and that, too, at a select time of day or year.
“My portraits have a dark, moody appearance where the highlights and shadow details glow like polished pearls,” he says. “During winter, depending on the quantity and brightness of the snow, the natural light and by pushing the film speed I am now able to create images that look like charcoal paintings. No digital wizardry. No darkroom manipulation. Just pure photography! What more could a photographer ask for!”
Purkayastha has had a successful career in advertising for over two decades, when in 2004, much to the dismay of his family, friends and colleagues, he quit to pursue photography full time. In 2005, he published a coffee table book on Ladakh, which coincided with a presentation at the Rubin Museum of Arts in New York. In 2006, Ladakh won the silver at the Regional SAAPI awards in Jakarta and was selected in July, 2006 as the ‘Book of the month’ by UK’s Outdoor Photography magazine. His Ladakh portfolio also won the international Spotlight Award in B&W Photography magazine, a leading American journal.
So where does he go from here? “I have begun shooting some specific subjects in Ladakh,” he says. This is quite different from my Zendo work. For this I am experimenting with some new film from Germany. Hopefully this body of work will be
exhibited next year. The future has never seemed more thrilling!”
Photographer Prabir Purkayastha captures Ladakh in its varied hues
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“In September 2001, I was in the village of Basgo, one of the four ancient capitals of Ladakh,” says photographer Prabir Purkayastha, 54. “The main monastery in Basgo is about 600 years old. I was helping a dear friend – His Highness Jigmed Wangchuk Namgyal of Ladakh – photograph the sad decay and ravages of time in this exquisite house of god.”
It was 4 pm and Purkayastha was exhausted and desperate. He had been taking pictures since 11 am and did not have the time to eat or drink. “I wanted to go back home,” he says. “Just when I thought it was time to leave, my friend asked me to go to a smaller monastery and photograph it, too.”
In this old and desolate monastery, there was a 16 ft tall bronze statue of Maitreya. The body was in the hall while the shoulders and head extended upwards into a glass-fronted attic. “The caretaker took me to the roof, as it was too dark in the prayer hall to see anything,” he says.
The panes were grimy and Purkayastha cleaned them by using his bandana and some water.
“As I looked upon the radiant face, glowing like burnished gold, in the rays of the setting sun, I saw tears–molten and shining–streaming down the cheeks!” says Purkayastha, as he rapidly took photographs. “Tears, just like yours and mine.”
Purkayastha was stunned into silence and disbelief. He showed this amazing phenomenon to His Highness who insisted they leave the monastery immediately. Next morning, on the flight back to Delhi, he was introduced to His Holiness, the Gyalwang Karmapa. When he was told about the phenomenon, the Karmapa was speechless, too. He had never seen nor heard of such a thing.
A few weeks later, a curious Purkayasta went back to Basgo. This time, when he looked in through the roof, he got a shock: “I saw golden rays of sunbeams streaming from Maitreya's eyes - glowing like a million suns all blazing together,” he says. “The tears had dried up but His eyes were alight with wonderment. I always show this picture, with the light shining in Maitreya’s eyes, in all my exhibitions.”
This has been one of the most astounding experiences of Purkayastha, in his decade-long love affair with Ladakh, trying to photograph this mysterious land in all its varied moods.
In Mumbai, Purkayastha’s exhibition, called ‘Zendo’ is on show at the Bodhi art gallery. There are 42 pictures on display, of which 28 are in black and white. These are images of desolation and a stark beauty. When you look at them, you feel like going into the photograph and escape from the madding crowd, the pollution, the daily struggle and the fears of terrorism that is life in Mumbai these days. This is a glimpse of a strange and unreal world, where Nature lords it over man; where you sense the insignificance of man in the scheme of things.
What helps to quiet down the hysterical voice in your head and your ragged nerves is the haunting music: it is a rare jugalbandi between the Tibetan, Nawang Khechog, and the Red Indian, Carlos Nakai, both of whom are among the best bamboo flutists in the world. The vocals are by Senegalese star, Baaba Maal, who is singing, according to Purkayastha, one of the finest azaan's ever recorded: Duniya salaam. These are pictures of mountains, lakes, valleys and of deserts, shot with deep affection and respect. Even though the environment dominates in most photographs, the striking images are of people: an old man, sitting on his haunches, his face ravaged by age, wearing a weather-beaten cloak, a couple of sticks in his hands, in a rock strewn desolate landscape and yet, in his eyes, there is such an acceptance of life that you are transfixed on the spot. Then, there is an image, in light and shade, of the late Bakula Rinpoche, the head lama of Ladakh and India's Ambassador to Mongolia. It is a face of tremendous character and serenity and Purkayastha has caught it perfectly.
“This Zendo (a Japanese word for an ancient meditation hall suffused with energy) exhibition is the result of a fascinating journey,” says Purkayastha. “I wanted to show the latent and haunting beauty of Ladakh and I have compared this mystical land to the sacred zendo.”
The obvious question to ask: Why Ladakh? What has made him go back so many times over so many years? Purkayastha is eloquent about his love: “When you trek across a lake that dried up a million years ago, at 14,000 feet, with barely enough oxygen, to keep you alive, you stop thinking of this mundane world. You are no longer who you are. This freedom from the superficial self is more than a breath of fresh air. You are one with the astounding beauty all around you. It’s magic! And that’s why I travel back to Ladakh. Time after time.”
Talking to visitors at the gallery, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, Fashutana Patel, 20, feels the photographs look more like paintings. Collegian Nergish Sunavala, who admires Purkayastha’s technique, feels some digital manipulation has taken place.
Purkayastha explains why the photographs look the way they do. “I was desperate to photograph Ladakh only as my mind’s eye viewed it,” he says.
After many experiments, with films and processing techniques, he said the best effect came when he used Kodak Technical Pan film. He says he only uses ambient light, and that, too, at a select time of day or year.
“My portraits have a dark, moody appearance where the highlights and shadow details glow like polished pearls,” he says. “During winter, depending on the quantity and brightness of the snow, the natural light and by pushing the film speed I am now able to create images that look like charcoal paintings. No digital wizardry. No darkroom manipulation. Just pure photography! What more could a photographer ask for!”
Purkayastha has had a successful career in advertising for over two decades, when in 2004, much to the dismay of his family, friends and colleagues, he quit to pursue photography full time. In 2005, he published a coffee table book on Ladakh, which coincided with a presentation at the Rubin Museum of Arts in New York. In 2006, Ladakh won the silver at the Regional SAAPI awards in Jakarta and was selected in July, 2006 as the ‘Book of the month’ by UK’s Outdoor Photography magazine. His Ladakh portfolio also won the international Spotlight Award in B&W Photography magazine, a leading American journal.
So where does he go from here? “I have begun shooting some specific subjects in Ladakh,” he says. This is quite different from my Zendo work. For this I am experimenting with some new film from Germany. Hopefully this body of work will be
exhibited next year. The future has never seemed more thrilling!”
Monday, August 07, 2006
Getting hold of a new medium
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
A dentist is the producer of a hit Marathi film
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
The last thing on Dr Uday Tamankar’s mind as he talks in his dental clinic at Lokhandwala is teeth. Instead, he is talking films. It is easy to understand his enthusiasm: His first Marathi film, as a producer, Kya Dyacha Bola, directed by Chandrakant Kulkarni, has celebrated its silver jubilee. In fact, it is in its 28th week at Pune. In Mumbai, it ran for 13 weeks. “If a Marathi film runs for four weeks in Mumbai, it is considered a hit,” says Tamankar. So not only has the first-time producer recovered his investment, but he has made a profit.
Tamankar has been a dentist for the past 23 years and has built a successful practice. He wanted to make movies ever since he was a teenager but his parents insisted he become a doctor. So he became a dentist but then “one day I realised 15 years had gone past,” he says. So, he decided to fulfill his dream of producing a Marathi film. It needed an investment of Rs 40 lakh and he decided he would invest his savings, instead of taking a loan. “I know of many Marathi film producers who took loans and made movies and it flopped and they fell into a deeper hole,” he says.
Tamankar could also have fallen into a deeper hole if you hear about his experiences in the early days. “The first day of shooting was scheduled for July 28, 2005 in Film City, Goregaon,” he says. “Now, you know that what happened on July 26. The shooting was postponed by two days. Luckily, our crew was staying in Goregaon East, so they could come easily for the shoot.”
But on the first day, there were 80 people present and they had no work to do because there was no electricity. They tried desperately to get a generator but all the generators were in use all over the city because of the power breakdown owing to the floods. “So the people were waiting and I had to provide them with lunch and dinner and pay their salaries,” he says. “And I was thinking to myself, ‘from the first day, I am getting sunk in spending money and no work being done’. But luckily, at a construction site nearby, there was a generator. They were not using it because their workers had not been able to report for work. So, in the end, I lost about ten hours.”
But the unit was so co-operative, they worked the whole night, to make up for the lost time, and finished shooting only at 4 a.m. “It was then I realised there are so many good people in the film industry,” says Tamankar. “They understood the importance of money even though I remember reading in glossy magazines how stars have wasted the money of producers with their extravagant demands.”
So, was he surprised that his film turned out to be a hit? “For a movie to be a hit, you only need two things: a good director and a good story,” says Tamankar. But it took him some time to find a quality story. He read stories for six months and rejected all of them. Then a cousin, based in America, called him up and asked him to see the Hollywood film, My Cousin Vinny. (Plot summary from imdb.com: “Bill and Stan are mistaken for murderers while on vacation, and Bill's family sends his cousin Vinny to defend them for his first case as a lawyer. Vinny, a brash New Yorker took six tries to pass his bar exam.”)
Tamankar saw and liked the film and felt that it could be adapted to Marathi but with one difference: Instead of the lawyer going from a town to a rural set-up, in Kya Dyacha Bola, the hero-lawyer would go from a village in Maharashtra to Mumbai. “Essentially, it is a comedy of two youths implicated in a murder case and how the village lawyer, who is pitted against a sophisticated prosecutor, wins the case,” he says.
So where does he go from here? Tamankar breaks into a wide smile and says, “I have tasted blood. I am going to produce another movie.” He has been looking at scripts but has not found one that he likes. “Anyway, I have time till the monsoons end, because there can be no shooting now,” he says.
Asked what tips he will give his fellow producers, who have not had a hit in years, his advice is succinct: “The story is the hero of the movie. Pay attention to it and you will be successful.”
A dentist is the producer of a hit Marathi film
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
The last thing on Dr Uday Tamankar’s mind as he talks in his dental clinic at Lokhandwala is teeth. Instead, he is talking films. It is easy to understand his enthusiasm: His first Marathi film, as a producer, Kya Dyacha Bola, directed by Chandrakant Kulkarni, has celebrated its silver jubilee. In fact, it is in its 28th week at Pune. In Mumbai, it ran for 13 weeks. “If a Marathi film runs for four weeks in Mumbai, it is considered a hit,” says Tamankar. So not only has the first-time producer recovered his investment, but he has made a profit.
Tamankar has been a dentist for the past 23 years and has built a successful practice. He wanted to make movies ever since he was a teenager but his parents insisted he become a doctor. So he became a dentist but then “one day I realised 15 years had gone past,” he says. So, he decided to fulfill his dream of producing a Marathi film. It needed an investment of Rs 40 lakh and he decided he would invest his savings, instead of taking a loan. “I know of many Marathi film producers who took loans and made movies and it flopped and they fell into a deeper hole,” he says.
Tamankar could also have fallen into a deeper hole if you hear about his experiences in the early days. “The first day of shooting was scheduled for July 28, 2005 in Film City, Goregaon,” he says. “Now, you know that what happened on July 26. The shooting was postponed by two days. Luckily, our crew was staying in Goregaon East, so they could come easily for the shoot.”
But on the first day, there were 80 people present and they had no work to do because there was no electricity. They tried desperately to get a generator but all the generators were in use all over the city because of the power breakdown owing to the floods. “So the people were waiting and I had to provide them with lunch and dinner and pay their salaries,” he says. “And I was thinking to myself, ‘from the first day, I am getting sunk in spending money and no work being done’. But luckily, at a construction site nearby, there was a generator. They were not using it because their workers had not been able to report for work. So, in the end, I lost about ten hours.”
But the unit was so co-operative, they worked the whole night, to make up for the lost time, and finished shooting only at 4 a.m. “It was then I realised there are so many good people in the film industry,” says Tamankar. “They understood the importance of money even though I remember reading in glossy magazines how stars have wasted the money of producers with their extravagant demands.”
So, was he surprised that his film turned out to be a hit? “For a movie to be a hit, you only need two things: a good director and a good story,” says Tamankar. But it took him some time to find a quality story. He read stories for six months and rejected all of them. Then a cousin, based in America, called him up and asked him to see the Hollywood film, My Cousin Vinny. (Plot summary from imdb.com: “Bill and Stan are mistaken for murderers while on vacation, and Bill's family sends his cousin Vinny to defend them for his first case as a lawyer. Vinny, a brash New Yorker took six tries to pass his bar exam.”)
Tamankar saw and liked the film and felt that it could be adapted to Marathi but with one difference: Instead of the lawyer going from a town to a rural set-up, in Kya Dyacha Bola, the hero-lawyer would go from a village in Maharashtra to Mumbai. “Essentially, it is a comedy of two youths implicated in a murder case and how the village lawyer, who is pitted against a sophisticated prosecutor, wins the case,” he says.
So where does he go from here? Tamankar breaks into a wide smile and says, “I have tasted blood. I am going to produce another movie.” He has been looking at scripts but has not found one that he likes. “Anyway, I have time till the monsoons end, because there can be no shooting now,” he says.
Asked what tips he will give his fellow producers, who have not had a hit in years, his advice is succinct: “The story is the hero of the movie. Pay attention to it and you will be successful.”
‘Papa is just before me’
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained form Hindustan Times
A family discovers the death of an elder member on television
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“One of our friends saw a clipping on Zee TV at 9 p.m.,” says Dinar Talpade, at his home in Dahisar. “My father looked perfect but she was not sure. She called my home and asked for my dad. My wife, Anjali, said that he had not returned and we were all waiting anxiously. Then she asked, what was the clothes he was wearing that day. Anjali described them to her and the lady started crying and said, ‘Please put on the Zee news immediately.’”
Anjali put on the Zee News and the camera was focused on the face of her father-in-law, who was lying on the Matunga platform. “At the same time, I got through to her and she was shouting, ‘Papa is just before me, Papa is just before me,’” says Dinar.
As he speaks, his face is streaming with tears, the cheeks are red and he is shaking his head from side to side. “I am unable to talk,” he says. “This is such a sudden tragedy. Just a few days ago, he was sitting on this chair and playing with my daughter Aditi and now…”
For several moments he is silent. Anjali, wearing a white salwar kameez, comes and sits on the opposite chair. Dinar, who works in the hotel industry, takes a deep breath and continues the narration: At the same time that Anjali sees her father-in-law on television, the police arrived at their door to inform them about the death. “My father had his senior citizen’s card and his monthly railway pass,” says Dinar. “Because of that, he was identified quickly. I did not have to search for him. Immediately, from my workplace in Juhu, I went to KEM Hospital. And then after all the formalities, we claimed the body, without too much problems.”
Girish Talpade, 66, worked as a custodian with Mega Safe Deposit Vault at Nariman Point. “He was a happy-go-lucky person,” says Dinar, whose mother died four years ago. “On the 9th of July, we celebrated Aditi’s tenth birthday. On Tuesday evening, he was supposed to see the video of the birthday celebrations; he had been unable to see it earlier.”
What do they feel about what has happened? Anjali, who is calmer, says matter-of-factly, “One man loses his life and the repercussions are felt by many people. They have targeted the bread-winners of every family. The families will be suffering so much. Why should they pay? What have they done wrong?”
There are no answers to these questions. Anjali is not finished: “This is not the first time this has happened. And it will happen again. I don’t know how many times it will happen.”
Dinar says, “Ultimately, it is the common man who suffers all the time.”
A family discovers the death of an elder member on television
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“One of our friends saw a clipping on Zee TV at 9 p.m.,” says Dinar Talpade, at his home in Dahisar. “My father looked perfect but she was not sure. She called my home and asked for my dad. My wife, Anjali, said that he had not returned and we were all waiting anxiously. Then she asked, what was the clothes he was wearing that day. Anjali described them to her and the lady started crying and said, ‘Please put on the Zee news immediately.’”
Anjali put on the Zee News and the camera was focused on the face of her father-in-law, who was lying on the Matunga platform. “At the same time, I got through to her and she was shouting, ‘Papa is just before me, Papa is just before me,’” says Dinar.
As he speaks, his face is streaming with tears, the cheeks are red and he is shaking his head from side to side. “I am unable to talk,” he says. “This is such a sudden tragedy. Just a few days ago, he was sitting on this chair and playing with my daughter Aditi and now…”
For several moments he is silent. Anjali, wearing a white salwar kameez, comes and sits on the opposite chair. Dinar, who works in the hotel industry, takes a deep breath and continues the narration: At the same time that Anjali sees her father-in-law on television, the police arrived at their door to inform them about the death. “My father had his senior citizen’s card and his monthly railway pass,” says Dinar. “Because of that, he was identified quickly. I did not have to search for him. Immediately, from my workplace in Juhu, I went to KEM Hospital. And then after all the formalities, we claimed the body, without too much problems.”
Girish Talpade, 66, worked as a custodian with Mega Safe Deposit Vault at Nariman Point. “He was a happy-go-lucky person,” says Dinar, whose mother died four years ago. “On the 9th of July, we celebrated Aditi’s tenth birthday. On Tuesday evening, he was supposed to see the video of the birthday celebrations; he had been unable to see it earlier.”
What do they feel about what has happened? Anjali, who is calmer, says matter-of-factly, “One man loses his life and the repercussions are felt by many people. They have targeted the bread-winners of every family. The families will be suffering so much. Why should they pay? What have they done wrong?”
There are no answers to these questions. Anjali is not finished: “This is not the first time this has happened. And it will happen again. I don’t know how many times it will happen.”
Dinar says, “Ultimately, it is the common man who suffers all the time.”
Double Exposure
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Photojournalists are at the forefront when it comes to covering war, earthquakes, disasters and bomb blasts. But they usually pay an emotional price for this exclusive access
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
Even though Arko Datta, 37, of Reuters covered the recent bomb blasts at Mumbai, what remains etched in his memory is this image from the 2002 Gujarat riots: At Gulmarg society, where more than 40 people were burnt to death, as he was led into the building he almost stepped on something and pulled back. “When I looked closely, I realised it was the hand of a baby,” he says. “It had tiny fingers and had been chopped and burnt.” Despite covering so many deaths in wars and disasters all over the world, this was a completely new experience for him: “Out here, right in the heart of Ahmedabad, in a residential complex, people who were living next to each other had become enemies.”
There were more horrors ahead: He was led towards a room, and when the door was opened, he saw a pile of bodies of women and children, all burnt to death. The people told him what had happened: “They had locked themselves in,” he says. “The rioters stood outside. Instead of breaking down the door, they played a little game. They poured water under the door and then slipped in live, electric wires. They tried to electrocute the victims before killing and burning them.” Later, when he enquired about Ehsan Jaffry, the former MP, who lived in the building, he was led back to the road towards some ash on the ground, near a skull and said, “This is Jaffry saab.”
For Manoj Patil, chief photographer of the Hindustan Times, the most vivid image was the bodies lying on top of each other in the first class bogie at Mahim station. “I had reached there within ten minutes of the blast,” he says. “There were dead people lying on the tracks, a couple of bodies were jammed in the wheels of the bogie and there were a few on the platform.” He was in a dilemma: how to shoot while people were helping those who were injured.
Aijaz Rahi, 33, of the Associated Press has a different image that remains vividly in his mind. He was standing outside the morgue of the Bhabha hospital on that Tuesday night. “There were people coming in with hope on their faces,” he says. “They really did not want their relatives to be found inside the morgue.” They had to wait in a queue to go inside. When some of them came out without identifying anybody, there was a sort of insecurity while at the same time, there was a sense of satisfaction, that maybe, their relative might have survived. “And then I saw people coming out after identifying a family member and breaking down,” he says. “It brought tears to my eyes.”
On a sunny afternoon, I meet Arko Datta at the Barista outlet at Phoenix Mills. He has just been back after covering two months of cricket in the Caribbean, and looks weather-beaten, with a mop of hair and a straggly beard, which is a mix of black and grey. Famous in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, for winning the World Press Photo 2004, for a picture of a grieving woman at Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu after the tsunami, and of Qutubuddin Ansari, who was the face of the Gujarat riots, he is not as well known in India.
Photojournalists, like their counterparts in Indian television, are regarded as foot soldiers. Yet, they play a vital role when natural disasters, earthquakes, riots and bomb blasts take place. They are nearly the first to arrive and it is their documentation of the event that shapes the sensibilities of people worldwide.
The emotional cost
So, do they get affected by all what they see? Sebastian D’Souza, 54, of the Agence France Presse, says he has no such problems. “I pray for the victims. And because I am so tired after a long day of shooting, I have a peaceful sleep.” D’Souza, in his 17th year with AFP, seems to have gained a measure of tranquillity, thanks to all those years of experience. But, for the younger photojournalists, it has been hard. “I know I will never forget these gory images, but life has to go on,” says Patil.
Datta, who has covered the Kargil war, says, “After I returned from Kargil, if someone closed the door hard or there was a loud sound, I would jump from the bed and hit the ground. The Kargil experience kept reappearing in my dreams for almost a month. I won’t say I was disturbed, but the images kept coming back.”
Datta takes a sip of his coffee, and as I watch a pretty blonde play with her daughter at a nearby table, he comes up with an eloquent explanation: “In the early part of your career, the camera acts like a wall and the victims are on the other side. But, over time, the wall tends to disappear completely and you become emotionally vulnerable because you tend to relate more.”
Because of this empathy, Rahi, who is a Kashmiri, and has covered more than a hundred bomb blasts during his seven-year stint in Srinagar, has occasionally suffered from trauma. “I could not go to sleep,” he says. “In my dreams, I would see all those horrible images.”
As to whether the trauma has affected his relationship with his family, Rahi agrees readily. “If you have witnessed a gory incident, you are not going to go home happy or cheerful,” he says. “You might shout at your wife, you might not want to eat dinner, you might not want to talk. For example, if my wife asks me something, I might react in an aggressive manner.”
Rahi, however, does not give the impression that he can blow a fuse. He is wearing a green Wrangler T-shirt and loose cargo jeans and sandals and looks at peace in the quiet, air-conditioned office of the Associated Press at Churchgate.
As for Datta, he says he gets his emotional sustenance from his wife, Jyothi, 34, and that helps him tide over the difficult times. “My wife gives me unstinted support and strength, even though it’s hard for her: In the last ten months, I have been home for only 20 days.”
So what do the wives feel about the situation? When I phone Jyothi, she says, “Being a journalist myself, at one level, I can understand the importance of his work. But, on the other hand, as a wife, companion and friend, it has been very difficult.”
Rahi’s wife, Iram, 26 admits her husband would get upset after he returned from covering the bomb blasts. “Once in a while, he would tell me about some of the images he saw,” she says. “To tackle this sort of situation, what a wife needs to show is understanding.”
Don’t get carried away
Despite their sufferings, most of them have a deep appreciation of life. Datta tells me that one evening, after returning home after covering the recent blasts, he just hugged his wife and said, with deep feeling, “We are alive!” All of them have seen life, in its extreme manifestations, sans illusions or blinkers, in so many different environments. And because of intense careers they have the experience of veterans. So what is their advice to those who are starting out?
“Don’t blindly rush in only thinking about your pictures,” says Datta. “Don’t be swayed by your ambition.” Rahi feels young photographers should be taught how to protect their lives, how to cover the incident and how to help people out.
A few years ago, his office sent him to do a week’s training in England by a group of former British Army officers. “They gave us the basic knowledge of first aid, arms and ammunition, booby traps and how to work in a hostile environment,” he says. “It was helpful and all news organisations in India should send their photographers for similar training.”
D’Souza says he has noticed a disturbing trend these days: the public readily beat up photographers and TV cameramen when they arrive at the scene of a tragedy. But he has an explanation for this. “As soon as these young photojournalists arrive at the site, they whip out their cameras and start shooting,” he says. “That is why the public gets angry.”
The method, he says, is to go in and mingle with the crowd. “You should enquire about what has happened,” he says. “You should also try to help. It is only after that, you should start clicking.”
James Nachtwey, one of the world’s leading photographers, when it comes to covering wars and disasters in the past twenty years, says the same thing. “When I approach people, I do it with respect and with deference,” he says, in an interview with American web site, salon.com. “I do it slowly and gently and I think about the way I move, the way I speak and the way I use the camera. I let them know I respect them and what they are going through. I could not take my pictures without their acceptance and participation.”
Last words
So what’s the future going to be like? Will there be any more blasts in the city and the country? The wise D’Souza says, “In India, the politician has brought religion into politics and divided the people. The poison has seeped deep into society. What is happening today is revenge and nothing else.” The Muslims, he says, have a lot of resentments, built up over the years and it is not necessarily because of the Gujarat riots. “The Pakistanis may be giving a helping hand, but the community feels very alienated today. The grudge has gone too deep. I am afraid it will never end.”
Photojournalists are at the forefront when it comes to covering war, earthquakes, disasters and bomb blasts. But they usually pay an emotional price for this exclusive access
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
Even though Arko Datta, 37, of Reuters covered the recent bomb blasts at Mumbai, what remains etched in his memory is this image from the 2002 Gujarat riots: At Gulmarg society, where more than 40 people were burnt to death, as he was led into the building he almost stepped on something and pulled back. “When I looked closely, I realised it was the hand of a baby,” he says. “It had tiny fingers and had been chopped and burnt.” Despite covering so many deaths in wars and disasters all over the world, this was a completely new experience for him: “Out here, right in the heart of Ahmedabad, in a residential complex, people who were living next to each other had become enemies.”
There were more horrors ahead: He was led towards a room, and when the door was opened, he saw a pile of bodies of women and children, all burnt to death. The people told him what had happened: “They had locked themselves in,” he says. “The rioters stood outside. Instead of breaking down the door, they played a little game. They poured water under the door and then slipped in live, electric wires. They tried to electrocute the victims before killing and burning them.” Later, when he enquired about Ehsan Jaffry, the former MP, who lived in the building, he was led back to the road towards some ash on the ground, near a skull and said, “This is Jaffry saab.”
For Manoj Patil, chief photographer of the Hindustan Times, the most vivid image was the bodies lying on top of each other in the first class bogie at Mahim station. “I had reached there within ten minutes of the blast,” he says. “There were dead people lying on the tracks, a couple of bodies were jammed in the wheels of the bogie and there were a few on the platform.” He was in a dilemma: how to shoot while people were helping those who were injured.
Aijaz Rahi, 33, of the Associated Press has a different image that remains vividly in his mind. He was standing outside the morgue of the Bhabha hospital on that Tuesday night. “There were people coming in with hope on their faces,” he says. “They really did not want their relatives to be found inside the morgue.” They had to wait in a queue to go inside. When some of them came out without identifying anybody, there was a sort of insecurity while at the same time, there was a sense of satisfaction, that maybe, their relative might have survived. “And then I saw people coming out after identifying a family member and breaking down,” he says. “It brought tears to my eyes.”
On a sunny afternoon, I meet Arko Datta at the Barista outlet at Phoenix Mills. He has just been back after covering two months of cricket in the Caribbean, and looks weather-beaten, with a mop of hair and a straggly beard, which is a mix of black and grey. Famous in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, for winning the World Press Photo 2004, for a picture of a grieving woman at Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu after the tsunami, and of Qutubuddin Ansari, who was the face of the Gujarat riots, he is not as well known in India.
Photojournalists, like their counterparts in Indian television, are regarded as foot soldiers. Yet, they play a vital role when natural disasters, earthquakes, riots and bomb blasts take place. They are nearly the first to arrive and it is their documentation of the event that shapes the sensibilities of people worldwide.
The emotional cost
So, do they get affected by all what they see? Sebastian D’Souza, 54, of the Agence France Presse, says he has no such problems. “I pray for the victims. And because I am so tired after a long day of shooting, I have a peaceful sleep.” D’Souza, in his 17th year with AFP, seems to have gained a measure of tranquillity, thanks to all those years of experience. But, for the younger photojournalists, it has been hard. “I know I will never forget these gory images, but life has to go on,” says Patil.
Datta, who has covered the Kargil war, says, “After I returned from Kargil, if someone closed the door hard or there was a loud sound, I would jump from the bed and hit the ground. The Kargil experience kept reappearing in my dreams for almost a month. I won’t say I was disturbed, but the images kept coming back.”
Datta takes a sip of his coffee, and as I watch a pretty blonde play with her daughter at a nearby table, he comes up with an eloquent explanation: “In the early part of your career, the camera acts like a wall and the victims are on the other side. But, over time, the wall tends to disappear completely and you become emotionally vulnerable because you tend to relate more.”
Because of this empathy, Rahi, who is a Kashmiri, and has covered more than a hundred bomb blasts during his seven-year stint in Srinagar, has occasionally suffered from trauma. “I could not go to sleep,” he says. “In my dreams, I would see all those horrible images.”
As to whether the trauma has affected his relationship with his family, Rahi agrees readily. “If you have witnessed a gory incident, you are not going to go home happy or cheerful,” he says. “You might shout at your wife, you might not want to eat dinner, you might not want to talk. For example, if my wife asks me something, I might react in an aggressive manner.”
Rahi, however, does not give the impression that he can blow a fuse. He is wearing a green Wrangler T-shirt and loose cargo jeans and sandals and looks at peace in the quiet, air-conditioned office of the Associated Press at Churchgate.
As for Datta, he says he gets his emotional sustenance from his wife, Jyothi, 34, and that helps him tide over the difficult times. “My wife gives me unstinted support and strength, even though it’s hard for her: In the last ten months, I have been home for only 20 days.”
So what do the wives feel about the situation? When I phone Jyothi, she says, “Being a journalist myself, at one level, I can understand the importance of his work. But, on the other hand, as a wife, companion and friend, it has been very difficult.”
Rahi’s wife, Iram, 26 admits her husband would get upset after he returned from covering the bomb blasts. “Once in a while, he would tell me about some of the images he saw,” she says. “To tackle this sort of situation, what a wife needs to show is understanding.”
Don’t get carried away
Despite their sufferings, most of them have a deep appreciation of life. Datta tells me that one evening, after returning home after covering the recent blasts, he just hugged his wife and said, with deep feeling, “We are alive!” All of them have seen life, in its extreme manifestations, sans illusions or blinkers, in so many different environments. And because of intense careers they have the experience of veterans. So what is their advice to those who are starting out?
“Don’t blindly rush in only thinking about your pictures,” says Datta. “Don’t be swayed by your ambition.” Rahi feels young photographers should be taught how to protect their lives, how to cover the incident and how to help people out.
A few years ago, his office sent him to do a week’s training in England by a group of former British Army officers. “They gave us the basic knowledge of first aid, arms and ammunition, booby traps and how to work in a hostile environment,” he says. “It was helpful and all news organisations in India should send their photographers for similar training.”
D’Souza says he has noticed a disturbing trend these days: the public readily beat up photographers and TV cameramen when they arrive at the scene of a tragedy. But he has an explanation for this. “As soon as these young photojournalists arrive at the site, they whip out their cameras and start shooting,” he says. “That is why the public gets angry.”
The method, he says, is to go in and mingle with the crowd. “You should enquire about what has happened,” he says. “You should also try to help. It is only after that, you should start clicking.”
James Nachtwey, one of the world’s leading photographers, when it comes to covering wars and disasters in the past twenty years, says the same thing. “When I approach people, I do it with respect and with deference,” he says, in an interview with American web site, salon.com. “I do it slowly and gently and I think about the way I move, the way I speak and the way I use the camera. I let them know I respect them and what they are going through. I could not take my pictures without their acceptance and participation.”
Last words
So what’s the future going to be like? Will there be any more blasts in the city and the country? The wise D’Souza says, “In India, the politician has brought religion into politics and divided the people. The poison has seeped deep into society. What is happening today is revenge and nothing else.” The Muslims, he says, have a lot of resentments, built up over the years and it is not necessarily because of the Gujarat riots. “The Pakistanis may be giving a helping hand, but the community feels very alienated today. The grudge has gone too deep. I am afraid it will never end.”
Mind over magic
Permission to reprint this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Deepak Rao stuns audiences with his key bending and mind-reading skills
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
Deepak Rao, 48, places the fork on the marble floor of his office at Mahim. He gets down on his haunches and stares hard at it. Then he stretches out his hands and placing it a few centimetres above the fork, he seems to be pushing the air. Incredibly, after a few seconds, the fork moves to one side, in a neat arc. As soon as the movement is over, Rao falls back, as if he is physically pushed and lets out a deep breath. A few minutes later, he composes himself, picks up the fork and holds it sideways, with a stretched arm. He moves it up and down in slow motion as he peers intently at the instrument.
Suddenly, in the middle of one such movement, the fork gets crumpled from the neck downwards. He shakes his head, blinks and takes deep breaths. He hands me the fork and it is bent. I am standing too close: there is no visible subterfuge. So, is Deepak Rao India’s answer to Uri Geller, the world famous psychic? Or is what he does “impossible”, as most people say when I describe what he has done.
“What I am doing is achieved through training,” he says. “There are no powers involved. It might look miraculous or supernatural, but I am just being extremely sharp, alert and observant. I just present shows, I charge a fee and I entertain people. That is all.”
Geller, 60, in an e-mail from his Blackberry, says, “I can’t comment [on Rao] because I have not seen the shows. Besides, I have moved away from spoon bending.”
Impressive skills
Meanwhile, Rao continues to impress. He calls his assistant Neha into the room. Then he asks photographer Santosh Harhare and me, to jot down our favourite single digit number next to each other on the back of a visiting card. As we do this, both of them stand facing the wall. When we finish writing the number, he asks us to place it face down on the table. He turns, sits down on a chair and says, “I need two minds to do this. I want you both to look into my eyes and honestly tell me the number through your mind.”
Both of us do so. He closes his eyes and wrinkles of concentration appear on his forehead. For a few seconds, there is a silence, punctuated now and then by the irregular hum of the air-conditioner. Finally, he says, “Neha, receive my thoughts.” She is still standing, with a pencil poised over another visiting card. “Write the first digit now, (Neha notes it down) and here is the second digit,” he says.
She writes the number and places the card on the table. It is right: 79. When I prod him to explain how it is done, he is unwilling.
In my two and a half hour conversation, it is this hesitation to explain his skills that made me feel that something is not right. In the end, he is honest enough to say, “It is a trade secret and I don’t want to reveal it.”
Busy as a bee
This former advertising professional is having a highly successful career of doing one-hour entertainment programmes, apart from mind opening training sessions, for corporate clients like Hewlett Packard, ICICI Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Nicholas Piramal, Standard Chartered, Hindustan Lever, Jet Airways, etc. He shows me several circled dates, on a table calendar, which are bookings for shows, for the month of August. He does around 80 to 100 shows a year, most of them in India but, sometimes, he travels to Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Europe and America.
So what exactly happens during these shows?
At one of his shows at a hotel in the city, for a corporate company, he is able to effortlessly hold the audience in his grip by bending a borrowed key, figuring out the name of a personality written on a folded slip of paper, and a ‘premonitions’ segment, which is stunning in its accuracy. The show is punctuated by clapping and sighs and cries of “Wow!” In other shows, he says, he also does telepathy, telekinesis, levitation and use of intuition.
The objective view
So what do others think of him? Narayan Gad, CEO of Panacea Biotec, who had invited Rao to do a show for the firm, says, “Rao is India’s equivalent of Uri Geller,” he says. “In India, I have not met anyone else who can do extra-sensory perception.”
Gad says there is nothing fraudulent in the bending of a key. “It is called focusing on the transfer of energy, like Sai Baba does,” he says. “Or, in other words, making the inanimate respond to a mental command.”
Says Joyita Bandopadhyay, who had seen an earlier show: “I am sure he has extra sensory perception. In other words, he has a genuine skill.”
But, there are the predictable stone throwers. Sanal Edamaruku, President, Indian Rationalist Association, says Rao’s claim that he can bend keys or forks with mental power is nothing more than a hoax. “Our people are gullible and sleight of hand tricks are not seen by them,” he says. “I challenge Rao to show his feat in fraud-proof conditions. He should allow our experts to verify the keys or fork beforehand.”
But Rao is not taking the charges lying down. “Any rationalist who makes comments on me, without seeing my shows, is hasty in his comments, brashly outspoken and absolutely irrational," he says. “My audiences are an intelligent breed and not village bumpkins or fools to be gullible.
“If I do bend objects, it is by using my mind.... not mind power. It is my ability and my technique.... I do not like to use the word 'Power'. In fact, I am more of a rationalist and those who know me will endorse the same.”
Rao goes on to say nobody has accused him of cheating people or extracting money. He says he is a recognised corporate trainer and entertainer with over 100 blue chip corporate clients, who “book me repeatedly, all across the globe.”
This global entertainer has an intense personality and yet there lurks within him a sense of humour. At the show I attended, he spoke about the problem of communications when he goes abroad. In Singapore, he called three women up on to the stage, and asked them to write a single digit number on a white card. “The first woman wrote her mobile number, and when the second woman saw that, she wrote her telephone number and…” he pauses, gives a naughty grin, and finishes with a flourish, “the third woman gave me her room number.”
Deepak Rao stuns audiences with his key bending and mind-reading skills
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
Deepak Rao, 48, places the fork on the marble floor of his office at Mahim. He gets down on his haunches and stares hard at it. Then he stretches out his hands and placing it a few centimetres above the fork, he seems to be pushing the air. Incredibly, after a few seconds, the fork moves to one side, in a neat arc. As soon as the movement is over, Rao falls back, as if he is physically pushed and lets out a deep breath. A few minutes later, he composes himself, picks up the fork and holds it sideways, with a stretched arm. He moves it up and down in slow motion as he peers intently at the instrument.
Suddenly, in the middle of one such movement, the fork gets crumpled from the neck downwards. He shakes his head, blinks and takes deep breaths. He hands me the fork and it is bent. I am standing too close: there is no visible subterfuge. So, is Deepak Rao India’s answer to Uri Geller, the world famous psychic? Or is what he does “impossible”, as most people say when I describe what he has done.
“What I am doing is achieved through training,” he says. “There are no powers involved. It might look miraculous or supernatural, but I am just being extremely sharp, alert and observant. I just present shows, I charge a fee and I entertain people. That is all.”
Geller, 60, in an e-mail from his Blackberry, says, “I can’t comment [on Rao] because I have not seen the shows. Besides, I have moved away from spoon bending.”
Impressive skills
Meanwhile, Rao continues to impress. He calls his assistant Neha into the room. Then he asks photographer Santosh Harhare and me, to jot down our favourite single digit number next to each other on the back of a visiting card. As we do this, both of them stand facing the wall. When we finish writing the number, he asks us to place it face down on the table. He turns, sits down on a chair and says, “I need two minds to do this. I want you both to look into my eyes and honestly tell me the number through your mind.”
Both of us do so. He closes his eyes and wrinkles of concentration appear on his forehead. For a few seconds, there is a silence, punctuated now and then by the irregular hum of the air-conditioner. Finally, he says, “Neha, receive my thoughts.” She is still standing, with a pencil poised over another visiting card. “Write the first digit now, (Neha notes it down) and here is the second digit,” he says.
She writes the number and places the card on the table. It is right: 79. When I prod him to explain how it is done, he is unwilling.
In my two and a half hour conversation, it is this hesitation to explain his skills that made me feel that something is not right. In the end, he is honest enough to say, “It is a trade secret and I don’t want to reveal it.”
Busy as a bee
This former advertising professional is having a highly successful career of doing one-hour entertainment programmes, apart from mind opening training sessions, for corporate clients like Hewlett Packard, ICICI Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Nicholas Piramal, Standard Chartered, Hindustan Lever, Jet Airways, etc. He shows me several circled dates, on a table calendar, which are bookings for shows, for the month of August. He does around 80 to 100 shows a year, most of them in India but, sometimes, he travels to Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia, Europe and America.
So what exactly happens during these shows?
At one of his shows at a hotel in the city, for a corporate company, he is able to effortlessly hold the audience in his grip by bending a borrowed key, figuring out the name of a personality written on a folded slip of paper, and a ‘premonitions’ segment, which is stunning in its accuracy. The show is punctuated by clapping and sighs and cries of “Wow!” In other shows, he says, he also does telepathy, telekinesis, levitation and use of intuition.
The objective view
So what do others think of him? Narayan Gad, CEO of Panacea Biotec, who had invited Rao to do a show for the firm, says, “Rao is India’s equivalent of Uri Geller,” he says. “In India, I have not met anyone else who can do extra-sensory perception.”
Gad says there is nothing fraudulent in the bending of a key. “It is called focusing on the transfer of energy, like Sai Baba does,” he says. “Or, in other words, making the inanimate respond to a mental command.”
Says Joyita Bandopadhyay, who had seen an earlier show: “I am sure he has extra sensory perception. In other words, he has a genuine skill.”
But, there are the predictable stone throwers. Sanal Edamaruku, President, Indian Rationalist Association, says Rao’s claim that he can bend keys or forks with mental power is nothing more than a hoax. “Our people are gullible and sleight of hand tricks are not seen by them,” he says. “I challenge Rao to show his feat in fraud-proof conditions. He should allow our experts to verify the keys or fork beforehand.”
But Rao is not taking the charges lying down. “Any rationalist who makes comments on me, without seeing my shows, is hasty in his comments, brashly outspoken and absolutely irrational," he says. “My audiences are an intelligent breed and not village bumpkins or fools to be gullible.
“If I do bend objects, it is by using my mind.... not mind power. It is my ability and my technique.... I do not like to use the word 'Power'. In fact, I am more of a rationalist and those who know me will endorse the same.”
Rao goes on to say nobody has accused him of cheating people or extracting money. He says he is a recognised corporate trainer and entertainer with over 100 blue chip corporate clients, who “book me repeatedly, all across the globe.”
This global entertainer has an intense personality and yet there lurks within him a sense of humour. At the show I attended, he spoke about the problem of communications when he goes abroad. In Singapore, he called three women up on to the stage, and asked them to write a single digit number on a white card. “The first woman wrote her mobile number, and when the second woman saw that, she wrote her telephone number and…” he pauses, gives a naughty grin, and finishes with a flourish, “the third woman gave me her room number.”
Monday, July 31, 2006
Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson!
To reproduce this article, permission has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Suhasini Mulay, who plays an older seductress, sets pulses racing in Yun Hota To Kya Hota
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“You have come early,” Suhasini Mulay, 55, tells me near the entrance of her building at Andheri. Yes indeed, I am ten minutes early for the 3 pm interview. She has just returned after lunch with friends at the Legacy of China restaurant. At first glance, without make-up, you can see the age: the tufts of grey hair hovering over the side of her temples, the tiny wrinkles and the crow’s feet, but her brown eyes are clear and honest: ageless. She is dressed casually in jeans and a white top and a large brown bag hangs from one shoulder.
The unmarried Mulay lives alone in her fifth floor apartment, which has little furniture and lots of space. Against one wall, there are rows of cassettes and CDs: Miles Davis, Chris Rea, Tracey Chapman, R.D. Burman and Kishore Kumar, among others. High up against another wall is a row of paperbacks, with the usual suspects: Barbara Taylor Bradford, Len Deighton and Jilly Cooper.
As we start to talk, she gets a call comes on her mobile. It’s actress Pratima Kazmi, who has just seen the movie and is calling up to offer compliments. Mullay laughs loudly as she says, “Thank you.”
Mulay is in the news for the erotic, love-making scenes she has done with Irrfan Khan in director Naseeruddin Shah’s debut film Yun Hota To Kya Hota. She plays the older women, Namrata, a dance instructor on whom Khan, (Salim Rajabal), a stockbroker, is passionately in love with. The movie has created a buzz among the multiplex crowd and is running to fairly large houses at present.
Sizzling scenes
So why did she take this role? “Because Naseerudin Shah was making this film,” she says. “Regardless of what the film was going to be, it would be something interesting and worthwhile.” She is frank enough to say the producers were looking for a bigger name but those who were offered it rejected it for various reasons.
“For me it was a role I don’t think I will ever get again,” she says. “Because, there are not many roles for a middle-aged woman. So far, I have always been typecast as a rich grandmother or mother. So, I was very happy but a little apprehensive.”
Shah was very clear when the role was offered to Mulay that there would be love scenes that would suggest love-making and they would probably be erotic in nature. “I told him you would still have to go past the Indian censor,” says Mulay. “He said, ‘I want them to be erotic, I don’t necessarily want to expose’. He is right: You can be very erotic without showing anything because, basically, people have a dirty mind.”
I raise my right hand and say, “I plead guilty here.”
“So do I,” she says sportingly, and bursts out laughing.
I ask Irrfan Khan, who is shooting in Kodaikanal, whether there was any awkwardness in shooting the love-making scenes. “Not at all,” he says. “No moment can be uncomfortable if we trust each other as an actor.”
Shah, who is away in Chandigarh, also says it was not difficult to shoot the love-making scenes. “Suhasini is a great sport,” he says. Actually, he says, he wanted the scenes to be titillating and funny at the same time. “The best sex scene is one in which there is a lot of laughter,” he says. “The power of suggestion is also much better than showing a nude scene, which tends to be distracting.”
Asked about her qualities as an actress, he says, “She has a great presence on screen and does not take herself too seriously as an actress.” Khan says she was very hard working and did the role “with a lot of enthusiasm.”
Mulay says the reactions to her role have been mostly positive. “Younger colleagues in TV serials appreciated my role,” she says.
One of them is Priya Badlani, who acts with Mulay in Jabb Love Hua, which airs on Zee TV. “I really appreciate the fact that Suhasini had the courage to do that role,” she says. “After all, what’s wrong with a 50 year-old single woman being in love?”
Mulay says colleagues of her age had a different reaction: they asked her why was it so necessary to do this role. “They felt sorry because they thought I needed to do this kind of role to give a fillip to my career,” she says.
Hot-shot activist
She’s had an unusual career. She began at age 16 when she acted in Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome and won a national award. But then, after acting in a few films after that, there was a 30-year lull before she returned with a bang in Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu and again won a national award. Later, she acted in Lagaan, Dil Chahata Hai and Humraaz.
So what was she doing in the interim? “I was making documentary films,” she says. “It is a kind of film-making that fascinates me because you are talking about real things. It is not fiction. Fiction will reflect reality but it is a manufactured reality.”
She has directed 60 documentaries, out of which four have won national awards, including one on the Bhagalpur blindings. Incredibly, almost all of them were funded by her. “I have gone broke at times,” she says. “Because no twit in India is going to pay for them. One of the reasons why I switched to acting was because I was broke. If you have some talent, the fastest way to make money is to act. It is the most over paid profession in the world.”
Early life
And she came into this over-paid profession thanks to her mother, Vijaya, who was a founding member of the Federation of Film Societies in India.
Mulay was born in Patna and spent her formative years in Delhi. Her father passed away when she was three and her mother, Vijaya, brought her up. “We are three sisters, so we were a household of women,” she says. “My mother was a government servant and got transferred from place to place.” Later, Mullay took degrees in agriculture technology and mass communications from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Today, she keeps herself busy acting in television serials and doing the odd film, which comes her way. Asked why she has not married, she says, “The primary responsibility of running the house and bringing up children falls on the women. To do this, she has to sacrifice her career. I looked at the options and opted out.”
And she does not look a whit unhappy at her decision. On the other hand, she revels in her freedom and at the end of the conversation when I ask her, which five actors she would like to do a love scene with, her reaction, unlike most Indian woman, is far from demure. “Only five,” she yells. “My list is much more than that. Give me some time to think, so that I can pick ONLY five.”
Five Hot Actors
(Suhasini Mullay would love to do a love scene with them)
1. Shashi Kapoor
2. John Abraham
3. Mahadevan
4. Saif Ali Khan
5. Kunal Kapoor
Suhasini Mulay, who plays an older seductress, sets pulses racing in Yun Hota To Kya Hota
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“You have come early,” Suhasini Mulay, 55, tells me near the entrance of her building at Andheri. Yes indeed, I am ten minutes early for the 3 pm interview. She has just returned after lunch with friends at the Legacy of China restaurant. At first glance, without make-up, you can see the age: the tufts of grey hair hovering over the side of her temples, the tiny wrinkles and the crow’s feet, but her brown eyes are clear and honest: ageless. She is dressed casually in jeans and a white top and a large brown bag hangs from one shoulder.
The unmarried Mulay lives alone in her fifth floor apartment, which has little furniture and lots of space. Against one wall, there are rows of cassettes and CDs: Miles Davis, Chris Rea, Tracey Chapman, R.D. Burman and Kishore Kumar, among others. High up against another wall is a row of paperbacks, with the usual suspects: Barbara Taylor Bradford, Len Deighton and Jilly Cooper.
As we start to talk, she gets a call comes on her mobile. It’s actress Pratima Kazmi, who has just seen the movie and is calling up to offer compliments. Mullay laughs loudly as she says, “Thank you.”
Mulay is in the news for the erotic, love-making scenes she has done with Irrfan Khan in director Naseeruddin Shah’s debut film Yun Hota To Kya Hota. She plays the older women, Namrata, a dance instructor on whom Khan, (Salim Rajabal), a stockbroker, is passionately in love with. The movie has created a buzz among the multiplex crowd and is running to fairly large houses at present.
Sizzling scenes
So why did she take this role? “Because Naseerudin Shah was making this film,” she says. “Regardless of what the film was going to be, it would be something interesting and worthwhile.” She is frank enough to say the producers were looking for a bigger name but those who were offered it rejected it for various reasons.
“For me it was a role I don’t think I will ever get again,” she says. “Because, there are not many roles for a middle-aged woman. So far, I have always been typecast as a rich grandmother or mother. So, I was very happy but a little apprehensive.”
Shah was very clear when the role was offered to Mulay that there would be love scenes that would suggest love-making and they would probably be erotic in nature. “I told him you would still have to go past the Indian censor,” says Mulay. “He said, ‘I want them to be erotic, I don’t necessarily want to expose’. He is right: You can be very erotic without showing anything because, basically, people have a dirty mind.”
I raise my right hand and say, “I plead guilty here.”
“So do I,” she says sportingly, and bursts out laughing.
I ask Irrfan Khan, who is shooting in Kodaikanal, whether there was any awkwardness in shooting the love-making scenes. “Not at all,” he says. “No moment can be uncomfortable if we trust each other as an actor.”
Shah, who is away in Chandigarh, also says it was not difficult to shoot the love-making scenes. “Suhasini is a great sport,” he says. Actually, he says, he wanted the scenes to be titillating and funny at the same time. “The best sex scene is one in which there is a lot of laughter,” he says. “The power of suggestion is also much better than showing a nude scene, which tends to be distracting.”
Asked about her qualities as an actress, he says, “She has a great presence on screen and does not take herself too seriously as an actress.” Khan says she was very hard working and did the role “with a lot of enthusiasm.”
Mulay says the reactions to her role have been mostly positive. “Younger colleagues in TV serials appreciated my role,” she says.
One of them is Priya Badlani, who acts with Mulay in Jabb Love Hua, which airs on Zee TV. “I really appreciate the fact that Suhasini had the courage to do that role,” she says. “After all, what’s wrong with a 50 year-old single woman being in love?”
Mulay says colleagues of her age had a different reaction: they asked her why was it so necessary to do this role. “They felt sorry because they thought I needed to do this kind of role to give a fillip to my career,” she says.
Hot-shot activist
She’s had an unusual career. She began at age 16 when she acted in Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome and won a national award. But then, after acting in a few films after that, there was a 30-year lull before she returned with a bang in Gulzar’s Hu Tu Tu and again won a national award. Later, she acted in Lagaan, Dil Chahata Hai and Humraaz.
So what was she doing in the interim? “I was making documentary films,” she says. “It is a kind of film-making that fascinates me because you are talking about real things. It is not fiction. Fiction will reflect reality but it is a manufactured reality.”
She has directed 60 documentaries, out of which four have won national awards, including one on the Bhagalpur blindings. Incredibly, almost all of them were funded by her. “I have gone broke at times,” she says. “Because no twit in India is going to pay for them. One of the reasons why I switched to acting was because I was broke. If you have some talent, the fastest way to make money is to act. It is the most over paid profession in the world.”
Early life
And she came into this over-paid profession thanks to her mother, Vijaya, who was a founding member of the Federation of Film Societies in India.
Mulay was born in Patna and spent her formative years in Delhi. Her father passed away when she was three and her mother, Vijaya, brought her up. “We are three sisters, so we were a household of women,” she says. “My mother was a government servant and got transferred from place to place.” Later, Mullay took degrees in agriculture technology and mass communications from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Today, she keeps herself busy acting in television serials and doing the odd film, which comes her way. Asked why she has not married, she says, “The primary responsibility of running the house and bringing up children falls on the women. To do this, she has to sacrifice her career. I looked at the options and opted out.”
And she does not look a whit unhappy at her decision. On the other hand, she revels in her freedom and at the end of the conversation when I ask her, which five actors she would like to do a love scene with, her reaction, unlike most Indian woman, is far from demure. “Only five,” she yells. “My list is much more than that. Give me some time to think, so that I can pick ONLY five.”
Five Hot Actors
(Suhasini Mullay would love to do a love scene with them)
1. Shashi Kapoor
2. John Abraham
3. Mahadevan
4. Saif Ali Khan
5. Kunal Kapoor
Monday, July 24, 2006
On navel duty
A Brazilian-Peruvian teaches the intricacies of belly dancing
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
Belly dancer Veronica Simas De Souza Rosas, (29), is wearing a beige cap. Sometime into our conversation, I ask her whether I can see her hair. “Sure,” she says, as she theatrically lifts up her cap with both hands and places it slowly on the low glass-topped table in front of her. Then she takes out the black hairpins and shakes her head. The golden hair falls in a cascade around her shoulders and the effect on her face is instantaneous: it is suffused with sensuality. The word, ‘Wow’ escapes from my mouth even before I can think of saying it. She laughs at my reaction and says, “Like it?” I nod, unable to speak, not sure whether my larynx has the presence of mind to produce some intelligible words.
We are sitting on sofas in a hall on the first floor of Zenzi restaurant in Bandra. Against the walls are placed multi-coloured cushions, while a thick carpet adorns the floor and a hookah in the middle gives the effect of an Egyptian living room. She has been conducting belly dancing classes here for the past two months.
Death and destruction
Sadly, as we talk, the horrific blasts on the local trains are taking place. She looks at her mobile and gets SMSs from students telling her they are unable to come for the classes later in the evening. After a while, she gets a SMS from a friend in Bangkok asking her whether she is safe A little later, there is a missed call from Peru. “My parents must be worried about me,” she says. This is instant global communications at work.
Sometime later, a group of girls, led by air-hostesses Rebecca Baz and Sanjukta Yolmo, come in. “We want to learn, Veronica, but because our parents are worried, we need to get back soon,” says Rebecca.
“Why did these blasts happen?” says Veronica, to no one in particular, and this is a question that has popped up in all our minds: Who can explain the minds and hearts of men who have no compunction in killing hundreds of innocent people?
To change the subject, I ask the girls why they want to learn belly dancing.
“Because of Shakira [the singer],” they say in unison. “What a dancer she is. Her belly dancing is awesome.” Says Isha Raju, who has just finished her graduation, “Everybody wants to move like her.”
Since there are no classes, Veronica inserts a CD in her laptop and shows us some dances on the monitor. Undoubtedly, the women are all sexy and their gyrations mesmerising. (Here is a definition from ‘learn to bellydance.com’: The characteristic movements include curving patterns, undulations, thrusts, lifts, locks, and drops. The focus is on isolated movements of individual parts of the body with little notice given to the footsteps. Arms and hands move fluidly, like serpents or ribbons in the air. Unusual strength and control is demonstrated in the belly area.)
Soon, there is a clip of Veronica dancing at a private party in Bandra and the amazing thing is that she is doing it on top of a table, with an Egyptian sword as a prop. In one scene, she manages to balance the sword on a fold of her stomach, without holding it, and is still able to gyrate sexily. Then she puts the sword on her head and again, is able to balance it and dance as well. She ends her performance with an Indian touch: the Nataraja pose. There are cries of ‘Wow, that’s great, that’s fantastic” from the girls.
The Brazil-Peru connection
Veronica, the daughter of a retired Peruvian army general and a Brazilian mother, grew up in Rio de Janeiro and Lima. She started dancing from the age of five—ballet, acrobatic gymnastics, the Peruvian dance, marinera, the samba and salsa—till at 21, she discovered belly dancing and fell in love with it.
“In belly dancing, you work with three parts,” she says. “The chest, belly and hips. You can make movements like walking around, and use your arms but it is mainly these three parts which are used.” To be aware of the movements, she says, you have to go back into your body and try to be aware of each part. “Dance should be a sort of meditation,” she says. To develop awareness, a knowledge of yoga helps, she says. She has been dancing for the past eight years and says it takes about fifteen years to master the art.
The Indian experience
So how did she come to India? Last year, after extensive travels in Europe, she ended up in Bangkok. “There were so many friends there who urged me to come to India because it is the mother of all cultures, history, art and religion.” She took the plunge last December and came to Mumbai and fell in love with the place instantly. “Mumbai is a place that welcomes everybody with open arms,” she says.
Her 25-odd students are also taking to the classes with open arms. When asked about the dancing capabilities of Indian women, she says, “They are pretty good because they have been exposed to dance from their childhood: through television, Bollywood movies, weddings, and on the streets during festivals.”
One of the regulars is actress Masumeh Makhija. “Belly dancing is all about isolating muscles and having grace,” she says. “It is a beautiful dance, and it is a great workout, as well.”
Joel Viegas, manager of Zenzi, analyses the response: “The classes are gaining in popularity through word of mouth. Initially, we were sceptical because there was a mind-set which felt that belly dancing was vulgar.” But now, he says, Zenzi has been getting a lot of calls from women, aged 18 to 40, who want to join. “The credit goes to Veronica who is a good teacher and very inspiring,” he says.
The inspiring Veronica plans to stay on for a year and then adds, with a laugh, “But if I fall in love with an Indian, I might live here forever.”
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
Belly dancer Veronica Simas De Souza Rosas, (29), is wearing a beige cap. Sometime into our conversation, I ask her whether I can see her hair. “Sure,” she says, as she theatrically lifts up her cap with both hands and places it slowly on the low glass-topped table in front of her. Then she takes out the black hairpins and shakes her head. The golden hair falls in a cascade around her shoulders and the effect on her face is instantaneous: it is suffused with sensuality. The word, ‘Wow’ escapes from my mouth even before I can think of saying it. She laughs at my reaction and says, “Like it?” I nod, unable to speak, not sure whether my larynx has the presence of mind to produce some intelligible words.
We are sitting on sofas in a hall on the first floor of Zenzi restaurant in Bandra. Against the walls are placed multi-coloured cushions, while a thick carpet adorns the floor and a hookah in the middle gives the effect of an Egyptian living room. She has been conducting belly dancing classes here for the past two months.
Death and destruction
Sadly, as we talk, the horrific blasts on the local trains are taking place. She looks at her mobile and gets SMSs from students telling her they are unable to come for the classes later in the evening. After a while, she gets a SMS from a friend in Bangkok asking her whether she is safe A little later, there is a missed call from Peru. “My parents must be worried about me,” she says. This is instant global communications at work.
Sometime later, a group of girls, led by air-hostesses Rebecca Baz and Sanjukta Yolmo, come in. “We want to learn, Veronica, but because our parents are worried, we need to get back soon,” says Rebecca.
“Why did these blasts happen?” says Veronica, to no one in particular, and this is a question that has popped up in all our minds: Who can explain the minds and hearts of men who have no compunction in killing hundreds of innocent people?
To change the subject, I ask the girls why they want to learn belly dancing.
“Because of Shakira [the singer],” they say in unison. “What a dancer she is. Her belly dancing is awesome.” Says Isha Raju, who has just finished her graduation, “Everybody wants to move like her.”
Since there are no classes, Veronica inserts a CD in her laptop and shows us some dances on the monitor. Undoubtedly, the women are all sexy and their gyrations mesmerising. (Here is a definition from ‘learn to bellydance.com’: The characteristic movements include curving patterns, undulations, thrusts, lifts, locks, and drops. The focus is on isolated movements of individual parts of the body with little notice given to the footsteps. Arms and hands move fluidly, like serpents or ribbons in the air. Unusual strength and control is demonstrated in the belly area.)
Soon, there is a clip of Veronica dancing at a private party in Bandra and the amazing thing is that she is doing it on top of a table, with an Egyptian sword as a prop. In one scene, she manages to balance the sword on a fold of her stomach, without holding it, and is still able to gyrate sexily. Then she puts the sword on her head and again, is able to balance it and dance as well. She ends her performance with an Indian touch: the Nataraja pose. There are cries of ‘Wow, that’s great, that’s fantastic” from the girls.
The Brazil-Peru connection
Veronica, the daughter of a retired Peruvian army general and a Brazilian mother, grew up in Rio de Janeiro and Lima. She started dancing from the age of five—ballet, acrobatic gymnastics, the Peruvian dance, marinera, the samba and salsa—till at 21, she discovered belly dancing and fell in love with it.
“In belly dancing, you work with three parts,” she says. “The chest, belly and hips. You can make movements like walking around, and use your arms but it is mainly these three parts which are used.” To be aware of the movements, she says, you have to go back into your body and try to be aware of each part. “Dance should be a sort of meditation,” she says. To develop awareness, a knowledge of yoga helps, she says. She has been dancing for the past eight years and says it takes about fifteen years to master the art.
The Indian experience
So how did she come to India? Last year, after extensive travels in Europe, she ended up in Bangkok. “There were so many friends there who urged me to come to India because it is the mother of all cultures, history, art and religion.” She took the plunge last December and came to Mumbai and fell in love with the place instantly. “Mumbai is a place that welcomes everybody with open arms,” she says.
Her 25-odd students are also taking to the classes with open arms. When asked about the dancing capabilities of Indian women, she says, “They are pretty good because they have been exposed to dance from their childhood: through television, Bollywood movies, weddings, and on the streets during festivals.”
One of the regulars is actress Masumeh Makhija. “Belly dancing is all about isolating muscles and having grace,” she says. “It is a beautiful dance, and it is a great workout, as well.”
Joel Viegas, manager of Zenzi, analyses the response: “The classes are gaining in popularity through word of mouth. Initially, we were sceptical because there was a mind-set which felt that belly dancing was vulgar.” But now, he says, Zenzi has been getting a lot of calls from women, aged 18 to 40, who want to join. “The credit goes to Veronica who is a good teacher and very inspiring,” he says.
The inspiring Veronica plans to stay on for a year and then adds, with a laugh, “But if I fall in love with an Indian, I might live here forever.”
Monday, July 17, 2006
“My life has been shattered”
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Student counsellor Meeta Shah struggles to cope with the brutal death of her husband
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
In the drawing room of the sixth floor flat of Meeta Shah, 44, at Dahisar, there are quite a few people, mostly women. Meeta is sitting on a dhurrie, beside a low windowsill, which has a garlanded portrait of her late husband Tushit, 44. Mita’s body is stiff with sorrow and her eyes have become red from too much crying. She sees me at the door and beckons with her hand. But in front of so many women, I prefer to stay where I am. Then one by one, they hug her, these colleagues of hers from the Oxford Public School at Charkop, where Meeta works as a student counsellor and they leave. “Be strong,” says one, in an orange saree.
It is a small drawing room, with a sofa at one side and a bookcase on the other, on which are placed a television set and a music system, while a guitar, encased in a cloth cover, is propped up against one corner. On the walls, there are three oil paintings of Lord Krishna, done in a deep hue of blue. She would tell me later that painting is a hobby. Besides Meeta, there is her brother, Hasit, her father and mother, two brother in laws with family, childhood friend Mayur Desai, and daughter, Esha, 16, wearing square black spectacles, and a white T-shirt with ‘Germany’ written across it.
I ask Meeta about how she heard the news and she says, “I was at a friend’s place when he mentioned the television was announcing bomb blasts on the local trains. I rushed home because that was the exact time when Tushit was usually on a train.” She tried several times to call his mobile, but could not get through. “I told my daughter Esha, ‘Keep on trying, keep on trying,’ she says. “All the lines were jammed. No calls were going through.”
In the end, it was a girl who was travelling in the compartment next to the first class compartment, which blew up at Jogeshwari, who got through to an uncle who called up Hasit. She had found the wallet and mobile phone. “I assume it must have fallen from his pocket,” says Meeta. “She told the uncle, Tushit was being sent to one of the hospitals but she could not say which one because she was not allowed to get into the ambulance.”
So Meeta and Esha, along with a neighbour and his wife, rushed to Goregaon, where they checked the municipal hospital there. But the hospital authorities directed them to go to Cooper Hospital in Vile Parle. From South Mumbai, Hasit and his parents, an uncle and a cousin had also set out for Coopers while Mayur set out from Dahisar.
When they reached Cooper’s, it was a complete chaos. “It seemed like a slaughter house,” says Meeta. “The bodies were all piled up, one on top of the other. We had to trample over different bodies to check.”
Says Hasit: “The hospital manpower and the management were grossly inadequate. The hygienic conditions were the worst that one could see. These government hospitals are a disaster.”
Finally, the authorities stationed the bodies in a streamlined manner and Tushit’s body was discovered by Mayur. After that, there was the hassle of getting the permission to take it away. “Initially, there was talk that all bodies would be released only after a post mortem,” says Hasit. “Naturally, this did not go down well with the people. Then a new order came which stated that the post mortem would be done on those bodies which had not been identified.”
There were more hassles: The police and the railway police had panchnamas to be filled. There were three copies to each but since there was a shortage of carbon paper and no photocopying machine, each copy had to be filled in individually or photocopied later. “There was a long queue,” says Meeta. But, thankfully, several JVPD volunteers were around to provide coffee, water, bananas and biscuits; people in the neighbourhood rushed to get forms photocopied. In the end, the Shahs were able to take Tushit’s body out at 3.30 am.
Meeta is shaking with sobs now. Mother and daughter cling to each other. Esha does not cry: tears just flow down her face silently. It is too painful to see. I look outside. There are plants placed on pots just outside the window on an iron grille. I can hear the chirping of sparrows. At a distance, there is a wide expanse of mangroves. When she recovers, I ask her of the last time she saw her husband alive.
“I saw him last when he left for his Worli office at 7.15 a.m.,” says Meeta. (Tushit worked as an equity dealer with Brics Securities Limited). “We had tea, he had toast and butter and he was very happy.” Esha, who had finished her Class Ten exams, had just got her admission confirmed in nearby Patkar College with great difficulty. “I had to formally get Esha’s admission that day,” continues Meeta. “So he told me, ‘Go fast and get everything done, we will go out for a celebratory dinner.’”
Tushit was wearing black trousers and a white shirt with thin, red lines. “It gives a tinge of pink from a distance,” says Meeta. “I had selected it and it was one of my favourite shirts. My husband loved light colours.”
When I ask her whether he had any hobby, she says, “He always wanted to learn to play the guitar, because when he was younger, he could not afford to buy one.” Wife and daughter presented him with a guitar on his birthday, three years ago.
How was your marriage, I ask. “Tushit means heaven in Sanskrit, what else can I say,” she says. “I had a most beautiful marriage. On December 11, we would have completed 20 years. He said that on our 25th wedding anniversary, our daughter would be celebrating her 21st birthday and we should have a big party.” Meeta bursts into tears but recovers quickly and says, “Tushit had a lot of dreams for us.”
He had wanted to take a loan and buy a larger flat, so that Esha would have a room of her own. He also wanted to buy some property in his hometown of Baroda. And he had dreams for Esha. His daughter had secured 88% and a family friend, Vivek Mahajan, a professor of physics at National College had suggested that Esha should try to get admission for IIT. “Aim for the sky,” the professor had said, and Tushit had seconded it.
Asked about her husband’s qualities, she says, “He was very quiet, loving, affectionate and caring. He would never get scared, no matter how hard the challenge. He would say, ‘Difficult days will come but we should never run away.’ He went out of his way to help people. My husband taught me to be strong. Now I will see how much he has taught me.”
The silence hangs heavy in the room as I say my goodbye. Downstairs, when I step out of the elevator, I see that the Shah’s post box has a few letters in it but it has not been collected. At the housing society office, I meet retired administrator G.M. Mehta, who used to work in Mafatlal. He tells me Tushit was the secretary of the society. “He was a gentleman, who co-operated with everybody,” he says. At the gate, Brij Mohan, the guard who works for the Shivam Secuity Services, says simply, “He was a very nice man.” I spot Mayur, who is rushing back to his TV repairing shop, and I ask him to describe the body when he saw it first. It is too heart-rending to put it in words.
Student counsellor Meeta Shah struggles to cope with the brutal death of her husband
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
In the drawing room of the sixth floor flat of Meeta Shah, 44, at Dahisar, there are quite a few people, mostly women. Meeta is sitting on a dhurrie, beside a low windowsill, which has a garlanded portrait of her late husband Tushit, 44. Mita’s body is stiff with sorrow and her eyes have become red from too much crying. She sees me at the door and beckons with her hand. But in front of so many women, I prefer to stay where I am. Then one by one, they hug her, these colleagues of hers from the Oxford Public School at Charkop, where Meeta works as a student counsellor and they leave. “Be strong,” says one, in an orange saree.
It is a small drawing room, with a sofa at one side and a bookcase on the other, on which are placed a television set and a music system, while a guitar, encased in a cloth cover, is propped up against one corner. On the walls, there are three oil paintings of Lord Krishna, done in a deep hue of blue. She would tell me later that painting is a hobby. Besides Meeta, there is her brother, Hasit, her father and mother, two brother in laws with family, childhood friend Mayur Desai, and daughter, Esha, 16, wearing square black spectacles, and a white T-shirt with ‘Germany’ written across it.
I ask Meeta about how she heard the news and she says, “I was at a friend’s place when he mentioned the television was announcing bomb blasts on the local trains. I rushed home because that was the exact time when Tushit was usually on a train.” She tried several times to call his mobile, but could not get through. “I told my daughter Esha, ‘Keep on trying, keep on trying,’ she says. “All the lines were jammed. No calls were going through.”
In the end, it was a girl who was travelling in the compartment next to the first class compartment, which blew up at Jogeshwari, who got through to an uncle who called up Hasit. She had found the wallet and mobile phone. “I assume it must have fallen from his pocket,” says Meeta. “She told the uncle, Tushit was being sent to one of the hospitals but she could not say which one because she was not allowed to get into the ambulance.”
So Meeta and Esha, along with a neighbour and his wife, rushed to Goregaon, where they checked the municipal hospital there. But the hospital authorities directed them to go to Cooper Hospital in Vile Parle. From South Mumbai, Hasit and his parents, an uncle and a cousin had also set out for Coopers while Mayur set out from Dahisar.
When they reached Cooper’s, it was a complete chaos. “It seemed like a slaughter house,” says Meeta. “The bodies were all piled up, one on top of the other. We had to trample over different bodies to check.”
Says Hasit: “The hospital manpower and the management were grossly inadequate. The hygienic conditions were the worst that one could see. These government hospitals are a disaster.”
Finally, the authorities stationed the bodies in a streamlined manner and Tushit’s body was discovered by Mayur. After that, there was the hassle of getting the permission to take it away. “Initially, there was talk that all bodies would be released only after a post mortem,” says Hasit. “Naturally, this did not go down well with the people. Then a new order came which stated that the post mortem would be done on those bodies which had not been identified.”
There were more hassles: The police and the railway police had panchnamas to be filled. There were three copies to each but since there was a shortage of carbon paper and no photocopying machine, each copy had to be filled in individually or photocopied later. “There was a long queue,” says Meeta. But, thankfully, several JVPD volunteers were around to provide coffee, water, bananas and biscuits; people in the neighbourhood rushed to get forms photocopied. In the end, the Shahs were able to take Tushit’s body out at 3.30 am.
Meeta is shaking with sobs now. Mother and daughter cling to each other. Esha does not cry: tears just flow down her face silently. It is too painful to see. I look outside. There are plants placed on pots just outside the window on an iron grille. I can hear the chirping of sparrows. At a distance, there is a wide expanse of mangroves. When she recovers, I ask her of the last time she saw her husband alive.
“I saw him last when he left for his Worli office at 7.15 a.m.,” says Meeta. (Tushit worked as an equity dealer with Brics Securities Limited). “We had tea, he had toast and butter and he was very happy.” Esha, who had finished her Class Ten exams, had just got her admission confirmed in nearby Patkar College with great difficulty. “I had to formally get Esha’s admission that day,” continues Meeta. “So he told me, ‘Go fast and get everything done, we will go out for a celebratory dinner.’”
Tushit was wearing black trousers and a white shirt with thin, red lines. “It gives a tinge of pink from a distance,” says Meeta. “I had selected it and it was one of my favourite shirts. My husband loved light colours.”
When I ask her whether he had any hobby, she says, “He always wanted to learn to play the guitar, because when he was younger, he could not afford to buy one.” Wife and daughter presented him with a guitar on his birthday, three years ago.
How was your marriage, I ask. “Tushit means heaven in Sanskrit, what else can I say,” she says. “I had a most beautiful marriage. On December 11, we would have completed 20 years. He said that on our 25th wedding anniversary, our daughter would be celebrating her 21st birthday and we should have a big party.” Meeta bursts into tears but recovers quickly and says, “Tushit had a lot of dreams for us.”
He had wanted to take a loan and buy a larger flat, so that Esha would have a room of her own. He also wanted to buy some property in his hometown of Baroda. And he had dreams for Esha. His daughter had secured 88% and a family friend, Vivek Mahajan, a professor of physics at National College had suggested that Esha should try to get admission for IIT. “Aim for the sky,” the professor had said, and Tushit had seconded it.
Asked about her husband’s qualities, she says, “He was very quiet, loving, affectionate and caring. He would never get scared, no matter how hard the challenge. He would say, ‘Difficult days will come but we should never run away.’ He went out of his way to help people. My husband taught me to be strong. Now I will see how much he has taught me.”
The silence hangs heavy in the room as I say my goodbye. Downstairs, when I step out of the elevator, I see that the Shah’s post box has a few letters in it but it has not been collected. At the housing society office, I meet retired administrator G.M. Mehta, who used to work in Mafatlal. He tells me Tushit was the secretary of the society. “He was a gentleman, who co-operated with everybody,” he says. At the gate, Brij Mohan, the guard who works for the Shivam Secuity Services, says simply, “He was a very nice man.” I spot Mayur, who is rushing back to his TV repairing shop, and I ask him to describe the body when he saw it first. It is too heart-rending to put it in words.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Staying afloat
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Despite a flood of criticism, BMC Commissioner Johny Joseph keeps his nerve and humanity
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“It is one of the few bungalows in the area, so it is easy to find,” says Reena Joseph, wife of Johny Joseph, the commissioner of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on the phone. And so it is: on the tony M.L. Dahanukar Marg, just behind Jaslok Hospital and beside the Port Trust bungalow is this cream-coloured heritage building.
As I walk into the driveway, the first thing that catches the eye are two geese soaking in the sun, on a grassy lawn, next to a small pond. Inside, the visitor’s room is tastefully furnished, with plush sofas, a thick carpet on the floor, an unsigned painting on the wall, and, on a wooden table pressed against the wall, ‘Happy Birthday to Daddy’ cards are placed standing up around a statue of Mother Mary. Joseph celebrated his 57th birthday on June 24.
The hospitality is quick: within minutes, a white uniformed butler brings tea, cakes, biscuits and some Kerala banana chips on a tray. Reena arrives first, wearing a white salwar kameez, with diamond earrings and a gold necklace, and is followed ten minutes later by Joseph.
One of the first things that strike you about the municipal commissioner is how short he is. Somehow, photographs and television images give the impression of a much taller man. He is around 5’ 3” but is dressed neatly in a black safari suit, with a Nokia mobile phone cradled in his right palm.
Battered by the press
For Joseph, the first thing he does in the morning is to wade through several English and Marathi newspapers, mainly the metro sections. “I have to see what is written against me,” he says, with a wry smile. “I study the complaints and set the agenda for redressing them. This is one valuable way of getting feedback.”
Is he happy with the coverage?
He looks at me steadily and there is a brief shake of the head. “Today, there is a continuous barrage of criticism,” he says. “It is not encouraging. There are people in the various wards who have worked days and nights during the recent rains but it has not been appreciated. Elsewhere in the world, like during 9/11 and Katrina, the coverage was constructive. You should focus on what we are doing, instead of just criticising.”
I ask Reena, 53, about what she feels about the criticism and she says, “Last year, I used to get hurt. But now I have got used to it and don’t care a damn.”
She is a nice foil to Joseph. While he is reserved and reticent, she is effervescent, ever-smiling and looks younger than her age. A former primary school teacher, she has become an expert in vermicompost. “No waste is thrown out in our house,” she says. “It is used to grow plants and vegetables. I have also set up a water harvesting system. Because when the BMC is preaching it, we should set an example.” She has been trying to spread the vermicompost concept in various places in the city. Suddenly, she says, “I have something to say to the people. As a citizen, please sit back and think for five minutes: Are you doing your duty? Do you not fail to segregate waste at home? Do you not throw garbage on the road? Do you not throw plastic packets in the gutter?” She pauses and then adds, “It is so easy to criticise the BMC.”
Early life
Joseph was born in Thiruvananthapuram, the son of an additional secretary in the state finance department. He did his schooling there and graduated from the Government Engineering College. He worked for three months at the Durgapur Steel Plant in West Bengal before he was selected for the IAS and embarked on a successful bureaucratic career (see box). Throughout his career, his wife has been his anchor. They have been married for 31 years and live alone in Mumbai. They have two children, George, 30, and Mary Anne, 22. While George---who is married to his classmate Smriti, a Saraswat Brahmin--is doing his doctorate in pharmacoeconomics in Los Angeles, Mary Anne is about to complete her final year exams for her MBBS degree at Pune.
I ask Joseph about the effect his career has had on the family. “They have had to make a lot of sacrifices, so I could roam around freely,” he says.
In public life, is it possible to balance career and family life?
He presses his lips together and says, “It is very difficult but my children are very understanding. At this moment, my career takes up 90 per cent of my time.”
Do you feel bad about it?
“Yes, I do feel bad about it. But if you want to do justice to the job, you have to devote many hours. I work for about 14 hours a day. The BMC has an annual budget of Rs 9000 crore, which is more than the budget of many states and there is a whole gamut of activities I have to oversee.”
Your children may be understanding now but not when they were younger?
“It was not so bad when the children were very young. Because, at that time, I was not the municipal commissioner.” And for the first time, Joseph laughs and continues to do so as he watches the antics of the geese.
Here a goose, there a gander
Photographer Natasha Hemrajani wants the geese to be involved in the photo shoot. But they are least interested. They flap their wings and run hither and thither on their webbed feet, as two workmen in khaki, chase them up and down the courtyard. It is good fun and it takes some time before both are caught. While this drama is going on, I ask Joseph: how do people react when they see you on the street?
“Most people react positively,” says Joseph. “I have got a lot of appreciative telephone calls from places like Chembur, Kalina and the Air India Colony, where we have managed to solve some problems. But nowadays, I am also getting a lot of hate messages through SMS asking me to RESIGN!” He emphasises the word.
“The job is not easy,” he continues. “The basic infrastructure, especially the drainage, cannot be set right in one or two years. And we also have to deal with the displacement and resettlement of human beings. But, to be frank, it is very difficult for the civic infrastructure to keep pace with the burgeoning population.”
Efficient guy
Joseph has been in the hot seat for more than two years and has withstood several calls for his removal. So what do others think about him? On a morning run in Santa Cruz, I overhear a woman telling a companion, “The disaster management cell of the BMC is a disaster.” When I stop to inquire, Celine Castellino says a tree had fallen in her garden in Willingdon Colony. When the BMC workers came, they were unable to cut it because the electric saw was not working. “Tell Mr Joseph he has no idea of what is happening at the grassroots level,” she says.
Kapil Gupta, a professor of civil engineering at IIT, says, “It is easy to blame Joseph but it is the rot of 40 years which cannot be corrected in one year. Thanks to his engineering background, he quickly understood the need of setting rain gauges all over the city.” Well-known architect Hafeez Contractor says, “He is very effective. He does not give false promises and is approachable.” And here’s the ever-loyal Reena with the last say: “He is calm, serene, intelligent and has a good memory. He also has a very good sense of humour.”
It seems so. Because when I ask him how he handles politicians in the corporation, he says, “A politician thinks of the next election, a statesman of the next generation.’”
Career:
Asst. Collector, JalgaonCEO, Zilla Parishad, AkolaCollector, ChandrapurDy. Secretary, Ministry of Steel, DelhiPrivate Secretary to Minister, (I & B)Dy. Director General, AIRCollector, MumbaiSecretary to Governor of MaharashtraSecretary (Relief & Rehabilitation) for Latur EarthquakePrincipal Secretary to Chief MinisterMunicipal Commissioner
Despite a flood of criticism, BMC Commissioner Johny Joseph keeps his nerve and humanity
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“It is one of the few bungalows in the area, so it is easy to find,” says Reena Joseph, wife of Johny Joseph, the commissioner of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on the phone. And so it is: on the tony M.L. Dahanukar Marg, just behind Jaslok Hospital and beside the Port Trust bungalow is this cream-coloured heritage building.
As I walk into the driveway, the first thing that catches the eye are two geese soaking in the sun, on a grassy lawn, next to a small pond. Inside, the visitor’s room is tastefully furnished, with plush sofas, a thick carpet on the floor, an unsigned painting on the wall, and, on a wooden table pressed against the wall, ‘Happy Birthday to Daddy’ cards are placed standing up around a statue of Mother Mary. Joseph celebrated his 57th birthday on June 24.
The hospitality is quick: within minutes, a white uniformed butler brings tea, cakes, biscuits and some Kerala banana chips on a tray. Reena arrives first, wearing a white salwar kameez, with diamond earrings and a gold necklace, and is followed ten minutes later by Joseph.
One of the first things that strike you about the municipal commissioner is how short he is. Somehow, photographs and television images give the impression of a much taller man. He is around 5’ 3” but is dressed neatly in a black safari suit, with a Nokia mobile phone cradled in his right palm.
Battered by the press
For Joseph, the first thing he does in the morning is to wade through several English and Marathi newspapers, mainly the metro sections. “I have to see what is written against me,” he says, with a wry smile. “I study the complaints and set the agenda for redressing them. This is one valuable way of getting feedback.”
Is he happy with the coverage?
He looks at me steadily and there is a brief shake of the head. “Today, there is a continuous barrage of criticism,” he says. “It is not encouraging. There are people in the various wards who have worked days and nights during the recent rains but it has not been appreciated. Elsewhere in the world, like during 9/11 and Katrina, the coverage was constructive. You should focus on what we are doing, instead of just criticising.”
I ask Reena, 53, about what she feels about the criticism and she says, “Last year, I used to get hurt. But now I have got used to it and don’t care a damn.”
She is a nice foil to Joseph. While he is reserved and reticent, she is effervescent, ever-smiling and looks younger than her age. A former primary school teacher, she has become an expert in vermicompost. “No waste is thrown out in our house,” she says. “It is used to grow plants and vegetables. I have also set up a water harvesting system. Because when the BMC is preaching it, we should set an example.” She has been trying to spread the vermicompost concept in various places in the city. Suddenly, she says, “I have something to say to the people. As a citizen, please sit back and think for five minutes: Are you doing your duty? Do you not fail to segregate waste at home? Do you not throw garbage on the road? Do you not throw plastic packets in the gutter?” She pauses and then adds, “It is so easy to criticise the BMC.”
Early life
Joseph was born in Thiruvananthapuram, the son of an additional secretary in the state finance department. He did his schooling there and graduated from the Government Engineering College. He worked for three months at the Durgapur Steel Plant in West Bengal before he was selected for the IAS and embarked on a successful bureaucratic career (see box). Throughout his career, his wife has been his anchor. They have been married for 31 years and live alone in Mumbai. They have two children, George, 30, and Mary Anne, 22. While George---who is married to his classmate Smriti, a Saraswat Brahmin--is doing his doctorate in pharmacoeconomics in Los Angeles, Mary Anne is about to complete her final year exams for her MBBS degree at Pune.
I ask Joseph about the effect his career has had on the family. “They have had to make a lot of sacrifices, so I could roam around freely,” he says.
In public life, is it possible to balance career and family life?
He presses his lips together and says, “It is very difficult but my children are very understanding. At this moment, my career takes up 90 per cent of my time.”
Do you feel bad about it?
“Yes, I do feel bad about it. But if you want to do justice to the job, you have to devote many hours. I work for about 14 hours a day. The BMC has an annual budget of Rs 9000 crore, which is more than the budget of many states and there is a whole gamut of activities I have to oversee.”
Your children may be understanding now but not when they were younger?
“It was not so bad when the children were very young. Because, at that time, I was not the municipal commissioner.” And for the first time, Joseph laughs and continues to do so as he watches the antics of the geese.
Here a goose, there a gander
Photographer Natasha Hemrajani wants the geese to be involved in the photo shoot. But they are least interested. They flap their wings and run hither and thither on their webbed feet, as two workmen in khaki, chase them up and down the courtyard. It is good fun and it takes some time before both are caught. While this drama is going on, I ask Joseph: how do people react when they see you on the street?
“Most people react positively,” says Joseph. “I have got a lot of appreciative telephone calls from places like Chembur, Kalina and the Air India Colony, where we have managed to solve some problems. But nowadays, I am also getting a lot of hate messages through SMS asking me to RESIGN!” He emphasises the word.
“The job is not easy,” he continues. “The basic infrastructure, especially the drainage, cannot be set right in one or two years. And we also have to deal with the displacement and resettlement of human beings. But, to be frank, it is very difficult for the civic infrastructure to keep pace with the burgeoning population.”
Efficient guy
Joseph has been in the hot seat for more than two years and has withstood several calls for his removal. So what do others think about him? On a morning run in Santa Cruz, I overhear a woman telling a companion, “The disaster management cell of the BMC is a disaster.” When I stop to inquire, Celine Castellino says a tree had fallen in her garden in Willingdon Colony. When the BMC workers came, they were unable to cut it because the electric saw was not working. “Tell Mr Joseph he has no idea of what is happening at the grassroots level,” she says.
Kapil Gupta, a professor of civil engineering at IIT, says, “It is easy to blame Joseph but it is the rot of 40 years which cannot be corrected in one year. Thanks to his engineering background, he quickly understood the need of setting rain gauges all over the city.” Well-known architect Hafeez Contractor says, “He is very effective. He does not give false promises and is approachable.” And here’s the ever-loyal Reena with the last say: “He is calm, serene, intelligent and has a good memory. He also has a very good sense of humour.”
It seems so. Because when I ask him how he handles politicians in the corporation, he says, “A politician thinks of the next election, a statesman of the next generation.’”
Career:
Asst. Collector, JalgaonCEO, Zilla Parishad, AkolaCollector, ChandrapurDy. Secretary, Ministry of Steel, DelhiPrivate Secretary to Minister, (I & B)Dy. Director General, AIRCollector, MumbaiSecretary to Governor of MaharashtraSecretary (Relief & Rehabilitation) for Latur EarthquakePrincipal Secretary to Chief MinisterMunicipal Commissioner
Monday, July 03, 2006
'I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown'
Permission to reprint this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Just-retired Justice B.N. Srikrishna talks about the riots commission and looks back on a distinguished career
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“How bestial human beings are. It was heart-rending. Before the Commission, [Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry], I used to know about human bestiality by reading about it in books and articles. But when a human being, who has been tortured and maimed, and whose dear ones have been burnt alive, gives evidence under oath, you live it. It was the most traumatic experience of my life.
“It changed my personality. For a person who never loses his temper, I became short-tempered and would fly off the handle. As to why this happened to me, it was because of this constant listening to these painful stories.
“Five years of exposure was too much. I could not sleep at night. I had nightmares. You must have read stories of how the Vietnam war veterans became psychologically disturbed. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But it was my personality, education, training, philosophy, daily meditation and religious training which pulled me back from the brink.”
Retired Justice B.N. Srikrishna, 65, clad in a dark blue T-shirt, sits behind a semi-circular glass-topped table in his first floor study at Matunga on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon. Through the open window, I can see the large green playing fields of the Don Bosco School. In the light drizzle, school kids, in white singlets and shorts are shouting and laughing as they run after a football, now slipping on the wet grass, now swerving around a pool of water in front of the goal. The football fever is on…
Inside, the judge’s eyes are pools of tranquillity and sadness. On his table, he has an IBM laptop and a personal computer. And all around are ceiling-high bookcases. Behind him, there is a large painting of his father, the late Narayan Swamy, who was once a leading labour lawyer, and various pictures of the Shankaracharyas of Sringeri. Last month, Srikrishna retired as a Supreme Court judge, and as he heads towards the autumn of his life, he looks back on a distinguished career in an exclusive talk with HT.
“There was a lot of pressure on me when I was in charge of the Commission,” he says. “My friends, colleagues and fellow judges kept saying, ‘Don’t do this, why are you wasting your time?’ ‘Wrap it up soon.’ Because, anyway, the Shiv Sena-led government would not implement the recommendations.”
Clearly, his severe indictment of the Shiv Sena, its chief Bal Thackeray and MLA Madhukar Sarpotdar, among others, was unacceptable to the then ruling party. So, after all this hard work, was he disappointed that nothing was done? “I did what my conscience told me to do,” he says. “Later, the affected people came and told me the report was not being implemented. I said, it was between them and the government. As a judge I had done my job. But I hope nothing like this happens again. It was a gruesome experience for everybody concerned.”
When asked whether he felt his life was ever in danger, he said, “Never.” And he tells me the story of how when he was appointed to the commission, the police commissioner said he would have to provide security. Srikrishna resisted by saying that, despite the best security, several American presidents and a couple of Indian and Sri Lankan prime ministers had been assassinated. But the commissioner said it was his duty to provide security. “So, I said, ‘Yes, please do your duty.’ Then he provided a van full of armed policemen outside my house. They were all sitting there one afternoon, and right behind their backs, a thief entered my house through the balcony and stole the VCR. So much for the security.” Srikrishna laughs when he recalls the irony of the situation.
Early days
Srikrishna, who was born on May 21, 1941, belongs to a family of eight siblings. And, right from childhood, the right values were instilled in them. “My parents taught me to be honest,” he says. “They taught me not to hurt people and to never cheat, not even at income tax, which everybody does.”
Srikrishna had originally enrolled for a masters in physics, “but one day, when I had an argument with my father he told me that it requires a special intelligence to be a lawyer,” he says. “So I said, ‘Okay, if you can be a lawyer, I can be one.’ The next day I went and joined Law College, much to the horror of my science professors.”
Later, he took his masters in law from Bombay University and an MA in Sanskrit from Mysore University. Like his father, he also had a successful career as a lawyer till his appointment as a judge in 1990.
View of life
When I ask him about his philosophy, he says, “Let me tell you a Sanskrit shloka.” He says the first two lines and then pauses, as he struggles to remember and then after a few moments of silence, it comes out smoothly: Akritvaa para santaapam, agatvaa khalamandiram, anutsrijya sataam vartma, yat svalpamapi tadbahu. (‘Without causing distress to a fellow human being, without having to go begging to a crook, without swerving from the path of rectitude, whatever little you earn, that should be enough for you.’)
He mentions the astonishing fact that he does not own any property anywhere and has been living in a rented flat since 1949. “Because I steadfastly refused to pay black money, I am unable to own property,” he says. “You go to the registrar’s office, you will get sick of it. For a child’s admission, people say, ‘Paise lao.” You want a ration card, you have to give money.”
Can anything be done about the corruption?
“Unfortunately, everybody talks about it but nobody wants to take action,” he says. “The only way to solve the problem is for each person to take a resolve that, come what may, I will not give bribes.”
An aunt of his brings two cups of steaming coffee on a tray and Srikrishna says, “Come, let us take a break. It is nice to have hot coffee in this cool weather.”
What other people say
One night, I call up Shiv Sena leader Madhukar Sarpotdar to find out his views of Srikrishna. He asks me three times whether Srikrishna has actually retired. “No need for me to check,” he says.
“No, no need,” I say.
“Okay, then I am ready to talk.”
Here is a bit of background: In the seventies, Sarpotdar was corporate industrial relations manager in Johnson India Limited, at Thane and Srikrishna was the legal counsel. They had a professional relationship, which lasted for more than a decade. So when I ask him about Srikrishna, Sarpotdar says, “He is a very good human being. And as a legal counsel, he was the best fighter.”
So what is his view of the report on the riots which indicted him?
“I don’t have any anger towards him,” he says. “After all, a judge is a judge. But Srikrishna is just a human being. He is not Bhagwan Srikrishna.”
Sarpotdar laughs when he says this and adds curiously, “When he entered the company of all those high court judges, he seems to have changed his views. He became a very secular person.”
Does that mean he was not secular before?
“I didn’t say that,” he says.
On another day, I go across to Worli to see S. Venkiteswaran, 66, a highly successful senior advocate who has known Srikrishna for close to half a century. I ask him about the judge’s qualities and he says, “The most wonderful quality is his absolute, blunt honesty. He will not tell a lie, nor will he countenance a lie. He is very patient and studious, and I have never seen him raise his voice or quarrel with anybody. Although I am told that during the Commission years, he did lose his temper a few times. Lastly, he is a very humble person, whose needs are very limited.”
But his knowledge is unlimited. Srikrishna is a polymath who can speak a dozen languages. He has an interest in refugee law and human rights' issues and has studied Indian philosophy. His passion is for Hindustani and Carnatic music. “It is said that music is an experience that falls only slightly short of the god experience,” he says. “That is, if you are listening to genuine music. There is a lot of trashy music nowadays. The test is this: does it move you or not? If it does, it is good. If not, it is bad.”
As we come to the end of an intense and exhilarating hour of conversation, and as the rain abates, I say, “Are you happy now that you are retired?”
He leans back in his chair and, for the first time in the interview, seems to be at a loss for words. “I don’t miss the fanfare of being a Supreme Court judge,” he says, slowly. “But I miss the work. Now I have so much time on my hands, I don’t know what to do. But I am sure I will find something to do.”
Just-retired Justice B.N. Srikrishna talks about the riots commission and looks back on a distinguished career
Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai
“How bestial human beings are. It was heart-rending. Before the Commission, [Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry], I used to know about human bestiality by reading about it in books and articles. But when a human being, who has been tortured and maimed, and whose dear ones have been burnt alive, gives evidence under oath, you live it. It was the most traumatic experience of my life.
“It changed my personality. For a person who never loses his temper, I became short-tempered and would fly off the handle. As to why this happened to me, it was because of this constant listening to these painful stories.
“Five years of exposure was too much. I could not sleep at night. I had nightmares. You must have read stories of how the Vietnam war veterans became psychologically disturbed. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But it was my personality, education, training, philosophy, daily meditation and religious training which pulled me back from the brink.”
Retired Justice B.N. Srikrishna, 65, clad in a dark blue T-shirt, sits behind a semi-circular glass-topped table in his first floor study at Matunga on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon. Through the open window, I can see the large green playing fields of the Don Bosco School. In the light drizzle, school kids, in white singlets and shorts are shouting and laughing as they run after a football, now slipping on the wet grass, now swerving around a pool of water in front of the goal. The football fever is on…
Inside, the judge’s eyes are pools of tranquillity and sadness. On his table, he has an IBM laptop and a personal computer. And all around are ceiling-high bookcases. Behind him, there is a large painting of his father, the late Narayan Swamy, who was once a leading labour lawyer, and various pictures of the Shankaracharyas of Sringeri. Last month, Srikrishna retired as a Supreme Court judge, and as he heads towards the autumn of his life, he looks back on a distinguished career in an exclusive talk with HT.
“There was a lot of pressure on me when I was in charge of the Commission,” he says. “My friends, colleagues and fellow judges kept saying, ‘Don’t do this, why are you wasting your time?’ ‘Wrap it up soon.’ Because, anyway, the Shiv Sena-led government would not implement the recommendations.”
Clearly, his severe indictment of the Shiv Sena, its chief Bal Thackeray and MLA Madhukar Sarpotdar, among others, was unacceptable to the then ruling party. So, after all this hard work, was he disappointed that nothing was done? “I did what my conscience told me to do,” he says. “Later, the affected people came and told me the report was not being implemented. I said, it was between them and the government. As a judge I had done my job. But I hope nothing like this happens again. It was a gruesome experience for everybody concerned.”
When asked whether he felt his life was ever in danger, he said, “Never.” And he tells me the story of how when he was appointed to the commission, the police commissioner said he would have to provide security. Srikrishna resisted by saying that, despite the best security, several American presidents and a couple of Indian and Sri Lankan prime ministers had been assassinated. But the commissioner said it was his duty to provide security. “So, I said, ‘Yes, please do your duty.’ Then he provided a van full of armed policemen outside my house. They were all sitting there one afternoon, and right behind their backs, a thief entered my house through the balcony and stole the VCR. So much for the security.” Srikrishna laughs when he recalls the irony of the situation.
Early days
Srikrishna, who was born on May 21, 1941, belongs to a family of eight siblings. And, right from childhood, the right values were instilled in them. “My parents taught me to be honest,” he says. “They taught me not to hurt people and to never cheat, not even at income tax, which everybody does.”
Srikrishna had originally enrolled for a masters in physics, “but one day, when I had an argument with my father he told me that it requires a special intelligence to be a lawyer,” he says. “So I said, ‘Okay, if you can be a lawyer, I can be one.’ The next day I went and joined Law College, much to the horror of my science professors.”
Later, he took his masters in law from Bombay University and an MA in Sanskrit from Mysore University. Like his father, he also had a successful career as a lawyer till his appointment as a judge in 1990.
View of life
When I ask him about his philosophy, he says, “Let me tell you a Sanskrit shloka.” He says the first two lines and then pauses, as he struggles to remember and then after a few moments of silence, it comes out smoothly: Akritvaa para santaapam, agatvaa khalamandiram, anutsrijya sataam vartma, yat svalpamapi tadbahu. (‘Without causing distress to a fellow human being, without having to go begging to a crook, without swerving from the path of rectitude, whatever little you earn, that should be enough for you.’)
He mentions the astonishing fact that he does not own any property anywhere and has been living in a rented flat since 1949. “Because I steadfastly refused to pay black money, I am unable to own property,” he says. “You go to the registrar’s office, you will get sick of it. For a child’s admission, people say, ‘Paise lao.” You want a ration card, you have to give money.”
Can anything be done about the corruption?
“Unfortunately, everybody talks about it but nobody wants to take action,” he says. “The only way to solve the problem is for each person to take a resolve that, come what may, I will not give bribes.”
An aunt of his brings two cups of steaming coffee on a tray and Srikrishna says, “Come, let us take a break. It is nice to have hot coffee in this cool weather.”
What other people say
One night, I call up Shiv Sena leader Madhukar Sarpotdar to find out his views of Srikrishna. He asks me three times whether Srikrishna has actually retired. “No need for me to check,” he says.
“No, no need,” I say.
“Okay, then I am ready to talk.”
Here is a bit of background: In the seventies, Sarpotdar was corporate industrial relations manager in Johnson India Limited, at Thane and Srikrishna was the legal counsel. They had a professional relationship, which lasted for more than a decade. So when I ask him about Srikrishna, Sarpotdar says, “He is a very good human being. And as a legal counsel, he was the best fighter.”
So what is his view of the report on the riots which indicted him?
“I don’t have any anger towards him,” he says. “After all, a judge is a judge. But Srikrishna is just a human being. He is not Bhagwan Srikrishna.”
Sarpotdar laughs when he says this and adds curiously, “When he entered the company of all those high court judges, he seems to have changed his views. He became a very secular person.”
Does that mean he was not secular before?
“I didn’t say that,” he says.
On another day, I go across to Worli to see S. Venkiteswaran, 66, a highly successful senior advocate who has known Srikrishna for close to half a century. I ask him about the judge’s qualities and he says, “The most wonderful quality is his absolute, blunt honesty. He will not tell a lie, nor will he countenance a lie. He is very patient and studious, and I have never seen him raise his voice or quarrel with anybody. Although I am told that during the Commission years, he did lose his temper a few times. Lastly, he is a very humble person, whose needs are very limited.”
But his knowledge is unlimited. Srikrishna is a polymath who can speak a dozen languages. He has an interest in refugee law and human rights' issues and has studied Indian philosophy. His passion is for Hindustani and Carnatic music. “It is said that music is an experience that falls only slightly short of the god experience,” he says. “That is, if you are listening to genuine music. There is a lot of trashy music nowadays. The test is this: does it move you or not? If it does, it is good. If not, it is bad.”
As we come to the end of an intense and exhilarating hour of conversation, and as the rain abates, I say, “Are you happy now that you are retired?”
He leans back in his chair and, for the first time in the interview, seems to be at a loss for words. “I don’t miss the fanfare of being a Supreme Court judge,” he says, slowly. “But I miss the work. Now I have so much time on my hands, I don’t know what to do. But I am sure I will find something to do.”
A whole lot of gas
Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times
Anand Karve wins the Ashden Award for an innovative biogas plant
Shevlin Sebastian
Pune
His office is spartan: a table, some chairs, an almirah and walls that are bare, except for a plaque given by the Entrepreneurs Club of Pune. But the man has a towering presence. At 6’, with broad shoulders, a straight back, a glowing face and piercing eyes, Dr Anand Karve, (70), radiates the energy and confidence of a much younger man.
The founder-president of the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) has every reason to feel on top of the world. The institute has won its second Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy (Food) last week and Karve was present in London to receive a prize of Rs 25 lakhs. Incidentally, the Ashden Awards are regarded as the Green Oscars. The ARTI has won for designing a compact biogas system where food waste, instead of dung, is used to produce gas for cooking.
So what exactly is this award-winning product? For the past hundred years, scientists had the conviction that biogas could only be made from dung. But, to produce one kilo of gas, you need 40 kgs of dung. One day, Karve had a brainwave. “In all the fermentation technologies, sugar is used as a substrate,” he says. “So I fed sugar, instead of dung, and discovered that with one kilo, I was getting the same amount as 40 kgs of dung. It was a Eureka moment.”
Apart from sugar, you can also use food waste like chapattis, rice, fruits or vegetables. But all this waste has to be put into a mixer and ground to a pulp. The reason? “The bacteria, which converts the pulp into biogas, have evolved in the intestines of animals, so they are used to getting their food chewed by somebody else,” says Karve.
So far, the popularity of the bio gas plant has been mostly in the rural areas: 800 biogas plants have been sold so far, mostly through word of mouth. I decided to ask an end user about the product.
Two streets away from the ARTI office, which, by the way, is located in Dhayarigaon, which is several kilometres from Pune, I go and meet Kavita Yadav. She stays in a cream coloured house, with an asbestos roof. Only 23, newly married, and though alone, she still shows me the biogas plant, which is at one corner of the plot. “We have been using it for the past six months,” says Kavita. “It is very good and cheap. All we need to do is to put a kilo of atta (flour) every day. We buy rotten atta from the ration shop at Rs 2 a kg.” She says all the meals are cooked using the biogas. “Except for chapattis, for which I use the LPG stove,” she adds.
Back at the ARTI office, Karve leads me to the back of the building. At some distance away, surrounded by trees and wildly growing grass, there is an open space where all the tanks are stored. To set up a plant, it costs Rs 9000. Two tanks are needed: the 1000 litre tank acts as the fermenter, while the 750 litre tank acts as the gas holder. “The two tanks telescope into each other,” says Karve.
There is a shed nearby and Karve’s assistant, Rahul Wagmare, beckons me in. On a wooden table, there is a stove, and several used matchsticks. Clearly, he has been lighting up to show many visitors. One more match is struck, and the gas bursts into a clear blue flame. It rises much higher than the flame from a LPG gas stove.
“With one kilo of feedstock, you can use it for two hours a day,” says Karve, from the door.
What happens if one has to cook an elaborate meal, with rice and chicken and fish curry?
“If you use the pressure cooker, you will be able to manage,” says Karve. “But if you are cooking in an open pot, it will take much longer. Almost 100 per cent of our clients also have LPG cylinders.”
For flat dwellers in the city, there is one major problem: the plant has to be kept in the sun. “The bacteria comes from the intestines of animals and they are used to operating at a heat of 38 degrees Centigrade,” says Karve. But he is planning to insulate the tanks.
So far, so good. What, then, is the expert opinion? In an e-mail, Sarah Butler-Sloss, Executive Chair of the Ashden Awards, writes: “ARTI’s biogas technology tackles the growing problem of disposing of food waste, which would otherwise be left in the streets. The other impressive aspect is the small amounts of feedstock needed and the rapid production of gas – 48 hours, rather than the 30 or 40 days needed in existing dung-based biogas plants.”
But there are dissenting voices. Says Dr Uday Bhawalkar, director of the Bhawalkar Ecological Research Institute at Pune: “It is a good technology, provided waste food is available. Should the food be eaten or should it be wasted? Should you put more food on your table and then waste it, in order to produce biogas?” It is a question that does not seem to bother Karve or the ARTI. Recently, the Shell Foundation gave Rs 1.83 crore to ARTI to fund a programme called ‘Commericialisation of Bio Mass Based Fuel and Cooking Systems’. The idea is to reach 15 lakh people in Maharashtra by 2009. Is it feasible? “We have a network of 20 NGOs who are working at the grassroots level,” says Karve. “Also, 20 project officers will go all over the state explaining the biogas concept to people.”
Anand Karve wins the Ashden Award for an innovative biogas plant
Shevlin Sebastian
Pune
His office is spartan: a table, some chairs, an almirah and walls that are bare, except for a plaque given by the Entrepreneurs Club of Pune. But the man has a towering presence. At 6’, with broad shoulders, a straight back, a glowing face and piercing eyes, Dr Anand Karve, (70), radiates the energy and confidence of a much younger man.
The founder-president of the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) has every reason to feel on top of the world. The institute has won its second Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy (Food) last week and Karve was present in London to receive a prize of Rs 25 lakhs. Incidentally, the Ashden Awards are regarded as the Green Oscars. The ARTI has won for designing a compact biogas system where food waste, instead of dung, is used to produce gas for cooking.
So what exactly is this award-winning product? For the past hundred years, scientists had the conviction that biogas could only be made from dung. But, to produce one kilo of gas, you need 40 kgs of dung. One day, Karve had a brainwave. “In all the fermentation technologies, sugar is used as a substrate,” he says. “So I fed sugar, instead of dung, and discovered that with one kilo, I was getting the same amount as 40 kgs of dung. It was a Eureka moment.”
Apart from sugar, you can also use food waste like chapattis, rice, fruits or vegetables. But all this waste has to be put into a mixer and ground to a pulp. The reason? “The bacteria, which converts the pulp into biogas, have evolved in the intestines of animals, so they are used to getting their food chewed by somebody else,” says Karve.
So far, the popularity of the bio gas plant has been mostly in the rural areas: 800 biogas plants have been sold so far, mostly through word of mouth. I decided to ask an end user about the product.
Two streets away from the ARTI office, which, by the way, is located in Dhayarigaon, which is several kilometres from Pune, I go and meet Kavita Yadav. She stays in a cream coloured house, with an asbestos roof. Only 23, newly married, and though alone, she still shows me the biogas plant, which is at one corner of the plot. “We have been using it for the past six months,” says Kavita. “It is very good and cheap. All we need to do is to put a kilo of atta (flour) every day. We buy rotten atta from the ration shop at Rs 2 a kg.” She says all the meals are cooked using the biogas. “Except for chapattis, for which I use the LPG stove,” she adds.
Back at the ARTI office, Karve leads me to the back of the building. At some distance away, surrounded by trees and wildly growing grass, there is an open space where all the tanks are stored. To set up a plant, it costs Rs 9000. Two tanks are needed: the 1000 litre tank acts as the fermenter, while the 750 litre tank acts as the gas holder. “The two tanks telescope into each other,” says Karve.
There is a shed nearby and Karve’s assistant, Rahul Wagmare, beckons me in. On a wooden table, there is a stove, and several used matchsticks. Clearly, he has been lighting up to show many visitors. One more match is struck, and the gas bursts into a clear blue flame. It rises much higher than the flame from a LPG gas stove.
“With one kilo of feedstock, you can use it for two hours a day,” says Karve, from the door.
What happens if one has to cook an elaborate meal, with rice and chicken and fish curry?
“If you use the pressure cooker, you will be able to manage,” says Karve. “But if you are cooking in an open pot, it will take much longer. Almost 100 per cent of our clients also have LPG cylinders.”
For flat dwellers in the city, there is one major problem: the plant has to be kept in the sun. “The bacteria comes from the intestines of animals and they are used to operating at a heat of 38 degrees Centigrade,” says Karve. But he is planning to insulate the tanks.
So far, so good. What, then, is the expert opinion? In an e-mail, Sarah Butler-Sloss, Executive Chair of the Ashden Awards, writes: “ARTI’s biogas technology tackles the growing problem of disposing of food waste, which would otherwise be left in the streets. The other impressive aspect is the small amounts of feedstock needed and the rapid production of gas – 48 hours, rather than the 30 or 40 days needed in existing dung-based biogas plants.”
But there are dissenting voices. Says Dr Uday Bhawalkar, director of the Bhawalkar Ecological Research Institute at Pune: “It is a good technology, provided waste food is available. Should the food be eaten or should it be wasted? Should you put more food on your table and then waste it, in order to produce biogas?” It is a question that does not seem to bother Karve or the ARTI. Recently, the Shell Foundation gave Rs 1.83 crore to ARTI to fund a programme called ‘Commericialisation of Bio Mass Based Fuel and Cooking Systems’. The idea is to reach 15 lakh people in Maharashtra by 2009. Is it feasible? “We have a network of 20 NGOs who are working at the grassroots level,” says Karve. “Also, 20 project officers will go all over the state explaining the biogas concept to people.”
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