October 2, 2009.

‘An MoU on every mountain’

In an exclusive and in-depth interview to The Times of India, Arundhati Roy talks about the three elephants in the Indian living room

Nina Martyris

Some call her a cause-monger. Others say her views are unredeemed by optimism. But award-winning writer Arundhati Roy uses polemic in a powerfully non-violent way to talk about injustices that the middle class would rather not hear about. Roy was in Mumbai to launch her latest book of essays, whose pastoral title, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes of Democracy, contains a warning.
In 1915, the year in which the Turks massacred Christian Armenians, swarms of grasshoppers swept into an Armenian village. The elders were worried, they knew this was a bad omen. And sure enough, the end came in a few months. Roy’s essays, some of which have appeared in print, point to the locust of political grasshoppers in our midst, as a warning sign that democracy’s light is failing. Excerpts from an interview.

In your essay on the Mumbai terror strike, you cite the emails from the Indian Mujahideen, which said that the attacks were revenge for Kashmir, Babri and Gujarat. "Things we don't want to talk about any more". These are the "elephants in the Indian living room". What in your view are the most troubling, most invisible elephants in our living rooms?

To start with, we have to put on record that most Indians don’t have a living room. That having been said, the three big elephants in the room right now are: One, the military occupation of Kashmir (more than half a million soldiers in that little valley). It’s a very noisy elephant, but it’s a false noise that seeks to hide a deeper silence. The other — and there is no hierarchy of elephants here — is the continuing issue of caste and untouchability and the shamefulness of living in a society that practises this. And the third is the impending war on indigenous people and their land in the name of terrorism.
The government is waging a war against the poor. In the forest areas of our country, poverty is being conflated with terrorism. The poor are being criminalised. Their lands are being handed over to mining companies. Security forces are closing in on Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Lalgarh. In Dantewara district, something like 644 villages have been emptied, several have been burnt to the ground. Most of this has been done by an insane militia, the Salwa Judum (the state-sponsored force to counter Naxalism). Some 300,000 people are off the government radar. People have just gone missing. Anyone not in the Salwa Judum police camps is being called a Maoist.
How do you define a Maoist? I travelled to Orissa a few years ago, when the papers were full of the Maoist threat, but there were no Maoists then. This was what you call psyops…a way of justifying extreme police repression by calling democratic, non-violent protestors Maoist. Any kind of dissent, whether it is intellectual, violent or non-violent, everything is being crushed. It’s the Bush doctrine now. They’re going after everyone. If people are being imprisoned and tortured and called Maoists even when they aren’t, many are going to feel that it’s better to become one and put up a fight…

They haven’t gone after you yet?

It would be making a big international statement, which I don’t think they want right now. But they have gone after Binayak Sen, Himanshu Kumar’s Gandhian ashram in Dantewara was demolished. They are criminalising democratic space…none of us can be complacent.

The Indian middle class seems quite removed from this war in India's mineral heartland.

Either the middle class doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, that we are heading for a police state. A large part of India already is a police state. Home minister P Chidambaram says that his vision for India is to have 85 per cent of India living in cities. That would mean 500 million people being uprooted...If your country’s growth depends solely on the displacement of millions of people, obviously you are going to have to administer that unrest. Only the police or the army can pull that off. The army seems to be a little uncomfortable about being called out against its ‘own’ people (it is quite another matter that they feel comfortable in Kashmir and the North-East). So, for now para-military forces are doing the job. Like a good colonial power, the government sends Kashmiri CRPF to the North-East and Naga battalions to Chhattisgarh — they had caused havoc there. The British used to do this on a more global scale…Indian soldiers fought in the World Wars for them. The Prime Minister gave an amazing speech a few years ago thanking the British for everything — including democracy, which we have learnt from our colonisers.

The Listening to Grasshoppers essay is the transcript of the speech you gave in Turkey, in which you drew attention to how the Turks had massacred the Armenians, a Christian minority, in 1915. A few years ago when you went to Australia to receive the Sydney Peace Prize, you chose to talk about how the aborigines had been oppressed by the Whites. How did these audiences take to a foreign guest pricking their conscience rather pointedly on matters of national shame?

In the case of Turkey, where you are not even allowed to mention the Armenian genocide, there was a lot of tension in the room. (Roy was in Istanbul to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of a newspaper who was shot dead by “a child-assassin who was wearing a white cap” for writing about the genocide.) But I think what happened in both cases — Turkey and Australia— was that the audience felt that the criticism was evenhanded. (In Turkey, Roy talked about the Gujarat riots, in Australia about India’s caste system.) I didn’t come across as someone who is picking and choosing her injustices.
Having said that, I would like to say that I don’t think you can break things down ‘country-wise’. The elites of the world are joining hands and forming a country of their own somewhere in the sky. After I won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, I was the darling of the Indian middle class. And then, in 1998, the nuclear tests happened. I knew that if I said what I wanted to say it would be considered a huge betrayal by the class that I come from. But I knew that if I didn’t, I would be taking the first step towards constructing a prison around myself, a writer's prison made of cowardice, abandoning my writing, and becoming a politician. After writing on Narmada, I got a lot of flak in India, but in foreign countries I was still thought of as this feisty rebel. Then September 11 happened. I thought for a minute — but only for a minute —- now you’re going to antagonise those millions of readers of The God of Small Things in those countries too. But it didn't work that way. By antagonising the Indian establishment, I had come closer to millions of other people whom I wanted to be close to. A whole world of people fighting the same battle. That happened in other countries too. The Algebra of Infinite Justice — the piece I wrote after Sept 11 — was being read out by independent radio stations in the US. A few years later, when I went there and spoke at the Riverside Church, there were 3,000 people inside and 3,000 outside because they couldn't fit inside. So, of course, there are people who revile me, but there are also those who agree with me. There was a huge hatred for Bush after Sept 11 even within America. You can't equate anti-Americanism with being anti-Bush.

When you refer to the 2002 Gujarat genocide, you are at pains to point out that the word 'genocide' has not been used loosely, even quoting the United Nations' definition. Did you do this because critics say that your language is sometimes shrill?

I chose to cite the definition because people do tend to use the word genocide loosely and arbitrarily. Shrill? That's a common or garden-variety right-wing accusation. Mahmood Mamdani in his book on Darfur talks about how the US establishment has used that word and why (he says genocide is not genocide, but a huge land grab triggered by drought). As for being called shrill — some criticism I wear as a badge of honour.

But it's not always right-wingers who take objection. Even a liberal like Salman Rushdie went so far as to say that your comments after the Mumbai attacks, where you talked about how we could not ignore Kashmir and Gujarat, were “nauseating”.

Nauseating? That's a nice, un-shrill, temperate adjective wouldn't you say? On issues like ‘terrorism’, Salman Rushdie and I have major differences: Is it an insane piece of evil spinning in space or does it have a context? If Salman feels differently from me, that's okay. One of the attackers in Chabad House spoke quite openly and directly about the Babri Masjid, Kashmir and Gujarat. It was broadcast. It was not something I pulled out of my hat. I know Salman used some strong adjectives, but I don’t want to use them back. He’s a very talented writer, it’s just that we have completely different political perspectives.

Perhaps the reactions to your piece were so strong because it came so soon after the attacks, when passions were running high. When terrorists are tearing into your city, people may not be in the mood to hear about how this is payback for what happened in Kashmir and Gujarat, which they feel they had nothing to do with.

What about when the army and the police are tearing into people in other places? What about when women are being raped and people are publicly slaughtered in places like Gujarat and even years later there's no sign of justice? In this world that moves so fast, sometimes you have to say things when it's hardest to say them. Otherwise it's too late. Even before I wrote, there were letters against me. Vinod Mehta (the editor of Outlook) said that I should be careful, the mood was ugly. But that's when you write, when you put your foot in the door.
It was a time when the Indian media was being unbelievably irresponsible, TV channels were goading people to call for a war against Pakistan. Fortunately, the government was more mature. Shortly after the terror strikes, I was in Benares, and happened to hear an impromptu seminar on the banks of the river. A man spoke about India and its religions and cultures, and I thought to myself that from the same space from where vicious communalism can come, there can come a great wisdom.
Sometimes the most rabid people calling for war, calling for Pakistan to be nuked, etc, are those who live far away, who will not have to suffer the consequences of what they're saying. You see it all the time in the Letters columns of magazines and newspapers.

To return to the Maoist issue, the PM has said that the Maoist movement is India's gravest security threat.

It suits the Maoists and the government to inflate the danger. It makes it easier to come down with all the force of your security apparatus. The inflation is mischievous . And it creates a situation in which every other kind of resistance is subsumed into this mad binary and dealt with as such. The most frightening thing is the criminalisation of the democratic space. You're either with us or against us. Bush is back, if he ever went away.

Policemen have been killed.

Policemen are being killed. People are also being killed and that's not being reported . If it is, they just say they are Maoists. You can't extract any easy moralities out of these killings. You have to look at the principle. The debate can't be about whether it is okay to kill policemen or whether it's okay to kill tribals. Obviously, it's not okay to do either. How do you rescue the situation? We have to look at why this is happening. If you are going to say Maoists are as mad as Islamists and should be liquidated, it's not going to help. It would mean liquidating hundreds of thousands.

These are the poorest people of the country - they have no schools, no hospitals, no water, none of the amenities the state is supposed to provide. When the state talks about their well-being and development, it means displacement and mining. Bauxite mining in Orissa is one of the most devastating kinds of mining. To get one tonne of bauxite you have a stripping ratio of 1:13 so you have to mine 13 tonnes. You create radioactive red mud. This is dumped into rivers and belches carbon dioxide into the air. From bauxite you get alumina and then aluminum. For one tonne of aluminum you need 1,300 tonnes of water. All this for the weapons industry. Bauxite mountains are porous and function as natural water tanks that hold water and irrigate the plains. Bauxite mining is devastating a whole ecosystem . This is what the mining company Vedanta is doing. The bauxite in Niyamgiri in Orissa is called Kondolite after the Kond tribals in Orissa.

There's an MoU on every mountain and river. When profits are so huge, the capacity for cruelty is also huge.


In the last decade you have chosen to agitate on behalf of so many causes — anti-nuclear, Narmada, Bush's war against terror, Gujarat, Afzal Guru, terrorism, the tribal war, unlike say a Medha Patkar who is identified with the injustices of displacement.

Well, Medha Patkar is an activist. I am not. Wouldn't it be ridiculous for a writer to spend her whole life writing about one thing — dams, or displacement or privatization of infrastructure? In any case, if you see these things as 'causes', you're already in the wrong space. Looking at these things, trying to understand them, adds up to a way of seeing, a world-view. They are not unconnected. For example, the world spun around on its political axis at a dizzying speed after the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and so much of what happened in India in the last twenty years connects with that.
If you are an activist, you have to carry people with you, fulfill their expectations at the very least. As a writer, I sometimes do the opposite. I confound their expectations. I need to travel light, think my thoughts, whether or not people agree with me. I live on the edge of movements and what interests me is how the machine works. Very often, people's movements can be socially conservative but politically radical and those who are politically conservative can be socially radical. We don't have many Queer Gandhians do we? (By which I don't mean that Gandhi was always radical.)

Is your next novel set in Kashmir?
I haven’t worked on it for a while. I can’t talk about my fiction the way I talk about my non-fiction. Not while I’m writing it at least.

Comment

Edit Page, The Times of India

September 19, 2006

Leave Those Kids Alone

Keep politics out of the classroom

Nina Martyris

As the nation went through the paces of Teachers’ Day this year, the mood in many staffrooms was grim. A section of the academic fraternity even boycotted the celebrations and wore black armbands to protest the brutal murder of a professor by BJP-affiliated student rowdies on an Ujjain campus during college elections. Just two months ago, a senior lecturer at Mumbai’s Wilson College had his face blackened and was dragged through the streets on a distinctly fishy sexual harassment charge by Congress-affiliated student goons.

Even as India strives to become an economic world power, its most fundamental civilisational block, the classroom, is under attack as is its keeper, the teacher. The series of political degradations steadily visited upon the classroom have debilitated it both in body and spirit. The incursions have been at every level from primary school to higher educational institutions, the line of attack both surreptitious and shrill. From the fracas over saffronised and de-saffronised textbooks, the debate on the patriotic value of Vande Mataram, and finally and most worrying, the hate-filled reservations schism that has set student against student and plunged the country into a caste war, it is dangerously evident that this is not education’s finest hour.

There is an elephant in the Indian classroom clad in the whitest khaddar whom we can no longer ignore: the patriot politician with his truncheon of chauvinism. As society’s first sentinel in a child’s life, it is the teacher who must be alert to this invisible agent provocateur so set on sowing the seeds of divisiveness. The patriot politician has become the unlettered but fierce custodian of Bharatiyata, a tradition he is completely ignorant of but of which he will brook no criticism. He has zeroed in on the classroom as the perfect place to plant his flag and flex muscle.

The resulting sense of siege, overt in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, where Hitler is held up as an exemplar in textbooks, is being progressively felt even in a state like Maharashtra, known for its culture of academic debate. That image has been grievously compromised in recent years after a number of violent attacks on professors and institutions that a craven government has winked at, worse, condoned. The nadir of cowardice was the mindless pillaging of Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute by the Sambhaji Brigade (whose parent organisation has the tacit support of Sharad Pawar) in 2004 on the specious grounds of defending Shivaji. Not only did the state do nothing, home minister R R Patil in a display of perverse justice said he would take action against historian James Laine, whose book on Shivaji had triggered the controversy. Equally dismaying was the Maharashtra Higher Secondary Board’s astonishing decision to suspend five paper-setters who had chosen a passage on the saint-poet Tukaram for an examination paper. The reference to Tukaram’s simple-mindedness offended political hoodlums who, claiming they were Warkaris or disciples of Tukaram, barged into the board office and beat up the chairman. The board bent over backwards to apologise.

The growing attack on intellectuals was the subject of writer-activist Githa Hariharan’s 2003 polemical novel, In Times of Siege. In the book, Shiv Murthy, a liberal history professor, is threatened by fundamentalists of the Itihaas Suraksha Manch whose sentiments have been hurt by his writings on the 12th-century radical poet Basava, who challenged the caste system. Significantly, the attack comes not just from the fundoos who ransack Shiv’s office but also from colleagues in his department, who, like their real-life counterparts, are eager that he apologise and placate the ruffians. But in an unexpected act of courage, Shiv decides to take a stand and not be bullied by this sullen, intolerant nationalism.

It is unfortunate that the state of education has sunk so low in a country whose founding fathers took utmost care to set up an integrated system where the school would be a secular temple of learning, an equal space where the best ideals and values would be coded into a child’s mind and heart to help build a modern, more rooted India. Thanks to those enlightened minds, India was truly ahead of its times: in 1947, the US still had segregation in its schools, an apartheid demolished only by the historic Brown vs Board ruling of 1954; in Israel, Arab and Jewish children still study in separate school systems sealing them off from each other’s cultures and beliefs and promoting the suspicion that comes from ignorance; while in Iran today, ‘secular and liberal’ teachers are being purged in a repressive move to impose a national Islamic identity.

The schoolteacher must set the nation’s moral compass and undo the prejudices that a child may have picked up from the environment around. After all, the school is the first social laboratory that a child steps into after the familiar womb of his family, and any orientations and mindsets learned here are learned for life. Generations of Indian students who have been blessed with good teachers in progressive, enlightened schools where, for example, the Lord’s Prayer was taught alongside a Sanskrit shloka, and Diwali, Christmas and Id all celebrated with a shared togetherness, know the immeasurable worth of an inclusive, liberal schooling. This is where the fight against terrorism really begins, the good fight in which there are no losers and the only one capable of kneading this spectacularly diverse country together. It is this intangible heritage that should underpin every syllabus, and one that we must protect and preserve.

Architecture

Swiss Cheese and Jelly Bhavan

Nina Martyris Thursday July 04, 2009
timesofindiablogs

Mumbai's expensive new vertebra over the waters is arching its back like a cat that doesn't want to get its fur wet. Soon, salt, sun and SUVs will blister and burn this long sea bridge from Bandra to Worli, rusting its rope-like wires and peeling large petals of paint from its steel flanks. An Indian politician, has however, already beaten nature to it and successfully aged the bridge in the matter of a day -- by fatuously proposing that it should be named the Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link. Imagine RGSL for posterity. Such a fuddy-duddy and unimaginative name makes this newborn trophy of engineering sound like a clanking sarkari yojana. They might as well have called it the Benjamin Button Bridge.




But this is not a howl about how politicians inflict their nameplates or even their sartorial taste on the public, as in the case of Mayawati, who has made the boxy salwar-kameez and handbag immortal. This is about how we can easily subvert ponderous government names by doing something that we almost never do -- give our buildings, bridges and roadways cheeky nicknames.

One reason that public spaces in India are ugly and utterly devoid of humour is because we treat every lump of concrete like a holy cow beyond slaughter. We don't poke fun at large structures and we dumbly swallow bumbling abbreviations like BWSL or RGSL that don't have the grace to contain so much as a vowel. Why shouldn't we give the sealink a pet name, a bindaas Bambaiya signature, that captures either its shape or character or flaws? Wit is a bloodless guillotine that decimates with a wink and a chuckle and therefore is the sharpest weapon that can be used to fight the government's arrogant habit of vanity naming and renaming.

Nothing endears a building to its citizens more than a nickname. No matter how hideous or ugly its colour scheme, once it has a pet name it becomes like a wart that one moans about but grows kind of used to, or a beauty spot that is actually a blemish but which has become familiar and personal. The bridge that spans Sydney harbour is called the Coathanger because of its arch-shaped contour. New York's Guggenheim Museum is called the Corkscrew, and the two massive theatres on the bay in Singapore are known as the Durian, after the rather stinky national fruit of Singapore which has a hedgehog-like skin that the building mimics. In Barcelona, a crazy-shaped building with huge windows and balconies by the legendary Gaudi is known as the House of Yawns, bringing to mind a wry observation from an Arun Kolatkar poem that describes the Jehangir Art Gallery with its wide entrance as someone "sleeping with its mouth permanently open".



Architects the world over have resigned themselves to the fact that if their building is christened by the local wag, the wag will win. The nickname is usually spiked with malice, or good-natured malice, and the Brits are by far the best at this game. Celebrity architect Norman Foster's phallic tower in London sent scamps into raptures. The name that has finally stuck is The Gherkin, but earlier competitors included The Lipstick, The Suppository and The Lewinsky because of its slim cigar shape (the connection being self-evident). Facing The Gherkin across the Thames is the rotund City Hall, more derisively known as Ken's Testicle after Mayor Ken Livingstone stupidly said the building reminded him of one.

It's not only ugly buildings that are singled out for caricature. Anything radical or deviant from the cookie-cutter blocks that line our streets is in danger of being given a name, and indeed, architects feel secretly flattered at having been noticed. One chief reason why Mumbai's structures remain nameless, says prominent architect Raja Aederi is, "because we have no striking buildings." He adds modestly, "Except for mine.''

Aederi, who is distinguished by having worked for the great Frank Lloyd Wright, has designed the ICICI building at the Bandra-Kurla Complex, which he says is known as Watermelon Wedge, but somehow this analogy lacks snap. His other suggestions are far more appealing: the Municipality building should be called Ultipalti Building for its sins of omission and commission (the Calcutta Corporation is not-so-fondly cussed as Calcutta Chorporation) and the under-construction Bharart Diamond Bourse or BDB should be called BDB Chawl, a spiteful play on Bombay's working-class BDD Chawls.



So how many buildings or structures in Mumbai have nicknames? Unfortunately, not that many. The Nehru Science Centre designed by I M Kadri with its honeycomb facade is fittingly called The Pineapple, but the name hasn't really hit the street. A pity. How much more interesting it would be for school children to go on a day trip to the Pineapple instead of the high-sounding Nehru Planetarium. Even Chacha would be amused. The other lovely nicknames are Cement Saanp for the sinuously curving JJ Flyover and Jalebi Pul for the S shaped Mazgaon bridge, but even these are rarely used.



Recently, as we were inching over the Kemp's Corner flyover, a friend looked up at Charles Correa's soaring, buff-coloured Kanchenjunga tower and said whimsically that it should be called Swiss Cheese because it looked as though a mouse had nibbled out chunks of balcony down its sides. Swiss Cheese also smacks of an affluence that clads the building like an impenetrable coat of armour. Another suggestion was that the dumpy Vidhan Sabha building at Nariman Point should be christened Jelly, as much for its upturned mould-like look as for the quivering, slippery character of most of its inmates. I'm mot sure about Swiss Cheese but Jelly Bhavan certainly gets my vote.

Tyeb Mehta, hope over hype

The Times of India, July 2, 2009

Nina Martyris

Tyeb Mehta, one of India’s finest painters who courted only his canvas and recoiled from the blandishments of the media and the market—though both pursued him—passed away in a Mumbai hospital in the early hours of Thursday morning on July 2.

The 84-year-old artist was born in Kapadwanj, Gujarat, but lived in Mumbai for most of his life apart from brief but crucially important spells in London, New York and Shantiniketan. Long debilitated by a weak heart, he spent the last few months inching forward in his Lokhandwala flat with the assistance of a walker and found it an effort even to converse with the friends who dropped in to see how he was doing.

Poor health was one of destiny’s more underhand blows, given that it was only in the winter of his days that Tyeb’s work was given the financial recompense that is the due of all good art. The turning point came in 2002 when a vibrant triptych called Celebration sold at Christie’s for Rs 1.5 crore. This was the first time an Indian painting had crossed the crore mark, and it made for a historic sale. A few years later in 2005, Mahishasura, a muscular work in which Durga grapples with the demon buffalo went for $1.5 million, again the first Indian painting to murder the million-dollar mark. It was another matter altogether that the auction money did not reach him since both paintings were re-sales and fattened only their owners, but the glittering prices did wonders for his equity and esteem.




It would, however, gravely belittle both man and artist merely to use a string of zeroes, no matter how dazzling, as a measure of his excellence and commitment to the ideals of equality and freedom. When Tyeb was 22, India was partitioned, and so was his street. He could not cross from Mohammed Ali Road to his workplace, Famous Studios, then located at Tardeo. In the quickening bloodlust, he saw a young man being lynched and this horrifying little scene haunted him all his life. “The crowd beat him to death and smashed his head with stones,’’ he said in an interview to art critic Nancy Adajania for the book Tyeb Mehta—Ideas Images Exchanges. “I was sick with fever for days afterwards and the image still haunts me today. I am paralysed by the sight of blood, violence of any kind, even shouting...’’

Suffering was a giant theme that Tyeb confronted relentlessly and the pain of the human condition howls forth from his works like a long and silent Munchian scream. The influence of Picasso, Matisse, Bacon and Kandinsky is evident in Tyeb’s oeuvre, and Kandinsky’s chaos-control conflict is manifest in his solid planes of colour embedded with falling figures, lolling breasts, wounded flesh and bloodied mouths.

Many of the protagonists in Tyeb’s work—the rickshaw puller, the trussed bull, Kali—are rooted in autobiography: a vacation spent with his grandmother in Calcutta gave birth to the rickshaw puller. And after he shot footage at a Bandra abbatoir for a documentary Koodal (Tamil for ‘meeting point’; the film won a Filmfare Critics award), the vision of a bull bound and broken on the floor tormented him. Kali, powerful and dangerous, fascinated him, and he once said that he lived with the idea for three years before he had the courage to pick up a stick of red chalk and draw the first frightening images of a maw glutted with blood, a tongue thrusting out for more. Tyeb drew many Kalis, always choosing soft and lumpish contours for her body which had a nameless menace to them.

One of the most definitive leaps that Tyeb made as an artist—the introduction of the diagonal in his paintings—was the result of an accident. In 1969, he thought he had hit a dead end, and in a flounce of frustration he flung a black streak across his canvas. Then, as the jagged drama of the diagonal hit him, he knew he had made a breakthrough, for the slanting gash was the visual equivalent of the biblical verb ‘cleave’ that at once joins and divides.

M F Husain, whose association with Tyeb Mehta goes back to the time when they were both art students at the Sir JJ School of Art and members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay, has called him “the greatest figurative painter in our time, better than anyone else—and that includes myself’’. The other artist whom Husain singled out as “the greatest abstractionist in our time’’ was V S Gaitonde, who spent his last days alone and unsung in his Delhi flat, a blank canvas staring mutely at him. Until the very last, Gaitonde struggled to paint, just like Tyeb—-who, according to his wife and mainstay Sakina-—clutched at his brushes and tubes of paint and wanted nothing more than to return from hospital to the warm and healing embrace of his studio.

June 27, 2009

When Michael moonwalked in Mumbai

Rewind to November 1, 1996: Michael Jackson burst forth from a spaceship. Swung from a crane. And used Bal Thackeray’s toilet

Nina Martyris

The man with the most expensive crotch in the world visited India only once, when he came to Mumbai for a spectacular concert, the likes of which the city had never seen before and has not seen since. That was in the year 1996, when Mumbai was still the undisputed destination for Western gigs, when the 10.00 pm loudspeaker deadline had not yet been cast in iron, when Raj Thackeray was still a Sainik, and a brand of potato chips called Ruffles was all the rage. The Andheri Sports Complex was crackling with empty packets on the morning after the November 1 concert. Chips, snorted a young reporter, after any other concert it would have been joints.

The Michael Jackson visitation is remembered as much for the electric way in which the star blew the 50,000-strong crowd away with his music and dazzling sleight of bones as for engendering what is arguably one of Bal Thackeray’s most famous quotes —“He used my toilet" — after the singer called on him at his Bandra residence on his way from the airport.

Mumbai was under the Shiv Sena-BJP's watch in that year and the MJ show soon found itself absurdly enmeshed in the local politics of the city. The saffron ranks were neatly riven into two — the Sena, with Raj Thackeray in the lead, was starry eyed about the concert, having reached an agreement that Rs 4 crore of the proceeds would go to an employment co-operative for local youth. In the words of The Economist, MJ could not have bought himself “a better insurance policy’’. But the RSS and BJP were very grumpy that tax exemption of Rs 11 crore had been bestowed on a thrusting pelvis. Quit cribbing, Bal Thackeray told the RSS, if you haven’t protested ads for bras as being un-Indian, hold your peace now. Nervous about what he would say next, the BJP quickly shut up and said it had no problem with the show.

Thackeray’s younger brother Ramesh also threatened to commit suicide because the Jackson concert had been allowed at the Sports Complex while his own plans for a dandia raas in support of an AIDS charity had not. No one paid him too much attention either, except for an anonymous caller who threatened to shoot him if he dared disrupt the show.

As November 1 approached, the anticipation reached fever pitch, with every detail of MJ’s vegetarian regimen (masala dosa and orange juice) and luggage (three Russian aircraft of hardware and flummery like a four-poster bed and lamposts) being reported. The media, which was much more cynical then than it is today, was caught between being worshipful and snide. Unsavoury child abuse allegations had already soiled those spangled gloves, and as one correspondent wrote, “We heard someone say, ‘I wonder if he’ll say— ‘I am vegetarian but can I have two young Indian boys for breakfast’."

Reporters outpunned each other. TOI said ponderously that “with joint police commissioners and deputy commissioners busy at the ‘thriller’ show, the ‘smooth criminals’ may have had a day’’. The Times-Mode poll interviewed 323 people, threefourths of whom promptly declared that they would rather listen to Lata than Michael. A senior columnist wrote that it was no wonder that Thackeray liked him because he was a ‘Jackson-of-the-soil’ and that Mumbai’s builders loved him because he had so effectively captured their unique brand of ethics with his song, “It don’t matter if it’s Black or White.’’

But all this melted away when the boneless showman appeared on stage. The cheapest ticket was Rs 1,500 and the most expensive Rs 15,000, and devotees had poured in from all over India to catch the action. For more than an hour the crowd waited, clapping patiently through the opening acts of Bally Sagoo and Sharon Prabhakar. Then, a helicopter circled overhead, twice, and shone a beam down, and girls began to scream and demand that their nervous boyfriends hoist them onto their shoulders. This was Jackson’s HIStory tour and the screen flashed images of the Buddha, Gandhi and Mandela until a voice announced ‘Touchdown’ and a spaceship burst onto the stage. It was a deus ex machina moment with a glittering figure emerging in a spacesuit and tongues of flame exploding all around. “Michael, Michael,’’ chanted the throng as he flung highpitched bon mots of ‘Love ya’ and ‘Sabse Pyara Hindustan’ towards them.

Rapidly, he burnt his way through Billy Jean, Thriller, Black or White and Dangerous. During Smooth Criminal, a massive white screen pulled down, and a silhouette of Jackson moonwalked, flipped and strutted on it. Easily the most riveting moment came in Earth Song, when a giant crane lifted Jackson into the air and rotated above the crowd. With his body arching out in a taut semi-circle, he screamed out the lyrics to a sea of uplifted faces, among them Sunil Gavaskar, Govinda, Bappi Lahiri,Prabhudeva, the Thackerays, chief minister Manohar Joshi and moral cop Pramod Navalkar.

Next day, the newspapers were awash with alliteration. It was almost as if the city’s new name was bending itself for headlines which grandly announced, ‘Mumbai Moonwalks With Michael’ and ‘Michael Mania Moves Mumbai’.

The Times of India, October 16, 2008

The sword is sharper

Nina Martyris

The one ambition of the arriviste hero of this harsh novel is simply this: not to sink into the sucking mud of the Ganga. Driven by an almost deranged desire to escape from the India of Darkness to the India of Light, Balram Halwai heads towards the coal bowl of Dhanbad, and ultimately Delhi, escaping a rotting armpit called Laxmangarh, where the "sewage glistens" and the women wait behind doors to fall on the salaries of their returning migrant husbands like "wildcats on a slab of flesh". In the local school, where the teacher is a lying, thieving bully, a visiting inspector gives Balram the name White Tiger, the rarest of the rare, the only boy in a classroom of underfed dunces to identify the photograph of the Great Socialist, the politician who is an even bigger lying, thieving bully.

Balram escapes but carries with him a wound that never heals. The death by tuberculosis of his rickshaw-puller father eats into him, informing his every action and final act of madness. He is determined to be a man with a "big belly", not a man with a "small belly" like his father was. Behind the wheel of a Honda City, the White Tiger soon realises that he has exchanged one zoo for another. He is employed as a driver by the Stork, the man who owns the strip of river that flows by his village, and is ordered to drive his son Ashok, who has returned from America with his Christian wife, Pinky, who, for all her short hair, has a conscience.

Despite his fancy wage and uniform, Balram knows that he is still imprisoned in the coop with other roosters awaiting slaughter. Slaughter must be fought with slaughter, and blood stains his flight to freedom. Like Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, The White Tiger opens with murder. Most foul or fair is the larger question that the reader must answer, and it is this complex, aching morality that underpins the novel.

This is Adiga's first work of fiction and the leap from journalist (he worked with TIME Magazine) to writer, though successfully made, is not completely convincing. The constant ranting against the darkness seems more the writer's upper-middle-class outrage than the hero's own. The first half of the novel is riveting, and has a page-turning intensity, but the grip slackens and by the end the writer seems to have lost his cunning.

Where The White Tiger does succeed forcibly is its savage portrayal of India Unshining, and the depressing betrayal of the wretched of the earth by a system that dares call itself a welfare state. As dodgy tax deals are cut between the Stork and the Great Socialist whose goons pulverise a rickshaw puller for daring to vote, the public continues to obsess over the elections "like enunchs discussing the Kama Sutra''. Ashok, who is just back from the land of the free, and who is sickened by the bribing and spitting and bad roads, is no different__beneath the veneer throbs a zamindar, weak and cruel.

But more than an indictment of the venality of the old rural rich and their urban offspring, the penumbra of menace that encircles this novel is that of revolution and the flowering of Naxalism. Foreigners and others staggered by the poverty of India always marvel at the lack of crime, the absence of insurrection. Why hasn't the guillotine been sharpened so far, when there is no bread in one India and only cake in the other? What would happen if a million Balram Halwais awoke to the fact that the meek usually do not inherit the earth, and were to rise in rebellion? That confection would be red and sticky.

Richer still is the twisting irony of the thoughts that flow through Balram's mind as he sits in his Bangalore office beneath the scattered light of a chandelier__for all Bharat's evils, he knows in his gut that brown men and yellow men will rule the world, for the white man has been finished by buggery, drug abuse and talking on the mobile phone. The Balram Halwais will be the human hoardings of superpowerdom. India will shine, but not before the white tigers have had their kill.

One more bouquet for Saleem

The Times of India, Sunday Review, July 20, 2008

Nina Martyris

As trophies go, the Best of Booker that Midnight's Children recently won wasn't the most compelling. Many felt that there was a sameness to ­the award title--after all, the book has already been adequately feted with the Booker Prize in 1981 and the prestigious Booker of Bookers in 1993, and further, this new prize had arrived via the rather banal passage of the SMS vote. One even wondered snarkily whether the voters were from the same constituency of tiresomely patriotic Indians who had voted Amitabh Bachchan as Star of the Millennium in the BBC poll and ensured that the Taj Mahal was one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, a racket floated by a businessman in Switzerland.

Since praise for this tour de force novel has long lost its bite through repetition, it was left to the author Salman Rushdie to water the wilting laurel wreath. He did so through a simple pre-recorded acceptance message when he said that it was a wonderful alternative to have his real children (his two sons Zafar and Milan) accept the award instead of his imaginary ones. And with this casual, jokey reference, one was sucked back suddenly and helplessly to the epic world of Midnight's Children, with its array of characters so crazy that they had to be human, its mad plotlines plucked straight from the purple heart of Hindi cinema, and above all, for the readers of this city, its glorious rooting in childhood memory.

George Orwell rightly said that none of our memories come to us virgin, and in this book, Rushdie's Bombay is one that is endearingly tainted by nostalgia. It is a Bombay that he recreates as cosmopolitan and embracing and eccentric and that he always references as different from the Bombay of today where the "political gangs are all Hindu and the criminal gangs all Muslim". This, even though we know that in that unforgiving August of 1947, Bombay was insulated neither from the bigotry and hate nor the consequences of a bloody border freshly drawn. It was a dark place even then, where Gandhi's murderers met and plotted, where Sadat Hasan Manto had to leave his employment at Bombay Talkies because he feared for his safety, where India's best-selling artist Tyeb Mehta saw one man slaughter another because each prayed to a different God. Rushdie is no political ingénue-–in fact, his knowledge of history is remarkable – and so this roseate celebration of a lost childhood is even more touching.

To return to the author's mention of his "imaginary children", while his accomplished pen has given us a whole brood--Virgin Ironpants in Shame, the ultra-fast-growing Moraes Zogoiby in The Moor's Last Sigh, the doll-fixated Prof Solanka in Fury, and Shalimar, the bestotted, psychotic assassin in Shalimar the Clown, it would be safe to say that the character who has really stayed with us, and whom we carry around in our hearts, is his first-born imaginary offspring, Saleem. Saleem Sinai, the snot-nosed, cucumber-nosed. know-all narrator of Midnight's Children, whose life swings between exultation and suffering, for he has been "handcuffed to history", a coupling determined by his time of birth, midnight on August 15, 1947, when "clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting".

For a writer as gifted as Rushdie, and for one who names Dickens as a shaping influence, one of the most disappointing aspects to his writing has been his inability to create memorable characters. In an interview he gave a few years ago to Hari Kunzru, Rushdie said that Dickens placed big grotesque characters against a meticulously observed background, and that he had tried to learn this literary conceit from him. Somehow this has not happened. If one is asked to reel off from the top of one's head, some of his most memorable creations, only those intimate with his books would be able to name names. These characters have not become part of popular discourse the way that personas like Oliver Twist, Mr Bumble, Scrooge or Fagin have, or if one is to cite from popular fiction, the way a Sherlock Holmes or a Dumbledore or even a Mr Goon has. Salmeen Sinai comes close. We experience his pain and share his passion, despite the ridiculous caricature that he is and his infuriatingly jalebi way of telling a story. Perhaps this is because through Saleem's narrative of his family's life -- his parents, grandparents, friends and loves – we come as close as we can to peering into Rushdie's past and the watering hole of his imagination.

Saleem is not Salman (although he marries a Padma) and Saleem's grandfather Dr Aadam Aziz is not him too, but there is a touching prescience at work here. In the opening pages of Midnight's Children, Dr Aziz while bending down on his prayer mat, bumps his nose on a hard tussock of earth. His nose bleeds and his eyes water and he decides then and there that never again will be bow before God or man. "This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history."

Battered by a fatwa and one femme fatale too many, Sir Salman would have some understanding of this.

Reading Bond by torchlight, under the covers

The Times of India, June 9, 2008

Nina Martyris

Mumbai: The new James Bond book, written by British novelist Sebastian Faulks in perilously taut prose, has a special Mumbai connection. Faulks, who was commissioned to write the new caper in the centenary year of Ian Fleming, the man who created the suave English spy, has dedicated Devil May Care to two people: to Fleming himself and to “Fali Vakeel, who, when he and I were schoolboys, first introduced me to Bond’’.

Vakeel is sitting at the quietly lit bar at the Oberoi’s Opium Den where bankers and their credit cards are easily parted. A compact 55-year-old with a terribly polite manner and a remarkable ability to speak in full sentences complete with long dashes and semi colons, he indulgently goes through the parody of ordering a round of dry martinis, shaken not stirred. This affectionate nod is lost on the deferential barman but helps set the mood for the interview.

When Fali was ten years old, he was packed off to England to prep school, a rite of passage for Malabar Hill Parsi schoolboys at the time. At the “uncomfortably cold and brutish school’’, the curly haired Sebastian Faulks and Fali Vakeel became friends.

“Although I made many friends, many of them were friends for survival. Sebastian was clearly a cut above—intelligent, bright, he had a certain class. We were together for three years, and at 13 he went to Wellington and I to Rugby,’’ begins Vakeel. “After that, I got into London University—I was too precocious for Oxford—but chose to return to Bombay, to Elphinstone College, and then I went into advertising.’’

Now executive director of Lowe India, the country’s biggest or second-biggest ad firm after JWT depending on whom you talk to, Vakeel has been faithful to the profession except for one “brief and regrettable foray into accountancy, which was kind of like having a camel screw a poodle, and I’m not quite sure who was who’’.

At the Elsstree prep school at Berkshire, a lasting friendship was forged over Casino Royale, From Russia With Love and Live and Let Die. Young Fali had smuggled his father’s copies from Bombay into school, and the two boys read them eagerly under the sheets by torchlight. “The school was Calvinist and cold but Bond was always in Istanbul, Nice, Russia. While there were deeply unattractive males in the changing room, Bond was bonking Tatiana Romanova, and while we were eating boiled cabbage, Bond was drinking martinis. He was the perfect antidote to our lives.’’

The boys lost touch. Vakeel occasionally read about Faulks’s growing fame and the success of his book, Birdsong. Sometimes on a visit to London, he wondered whether he should wander in to a Waterstone’s or a Hatchett’s and catch up with Sebastian signing books there, but he never did. Then, one day in 2004, forty years after they had last met, an e-mail popped up in his inbox re-establishing contact. “It was quite spooky, really, because at that time I was just finishing his book, On Green Dolphin Street,’’ he says. “It turned out that he had googled me to find out where I was. A month later, I had dinner at his Notting Hill home with him and his wife, Veronica, who I must add, on the evening of the book launch, looked better than any Bond girl.’’

After Faulks was chosen by the Fleming estate for the coveted commission that many novelists would have killed for—with a stiletto if need be—he broke the news to Vakeel in a suitably clandestine way. “I was having a drink with them when he firmly shut the door of his sitting room and said he had been asked to do this book. I said, amazing. Later, on e-mail, he asked if I would be appalled if he dedicated the book to me. I replied that I would have to be a retard brain donor if I had to be appalled. Why on earth would I be?’’

Devil May Care has been praised for its spareness of style and authentic atmosphere. It opens with Bond in Rome on a three-month break to clear his head and reclaim his life. He is listless, a burnt-out case, repelled by his own reflection; his cummerbund still fits but is afraid that his mind is running to fat. He has been warned to stay off alcohol. And then, of course, things happen.

Vakeel enjoyed the book, describing it as “high on adrenalin and very sexy’’. “I continue to love Bond,’’ he says. “I’m talking about the books mind you, not the new films where it’s all about exploding arse holes and parachutes coming out of breasts. The books have a great sense of place. You can almost smell Istanbul, smell the girls’ shampoo. And, of course, Bond is every man’s fantasy—sex without commitment. Fleming once said that his books are positioned somewhere between the solar plexus and the knees. In boarding school, these books were an escape from a life of lumpy porridge and fish which smelt of extremely old underwear.’’ He pauses, and adds with a sense of fairness, “Mind you, that was boarding school food then. Today, it’s probably like Frangipani.’’

Adding clay, subtracting stone

The Times of India, March 31

Nina Martyris meets Dhruva Mistry, the sculptor who has held only one job in his life

Initially reticent, he gradually warms to the flame. As the conversation with Dhruva Mistry progresses, you learn to watch out for his dry-as-tinder remarks, delivered quietly with an anticipatory glee. His observations have a sharp edge to them but a pleasing snap as well. Alas, the more interesting ones are made off the record.

The Baroda-based Mistry is visiting Mumbai as the Artist of Focus at the Harmony Art show, an annual exhibition helmed by Tina Ambani, now in its 13th year.

With his sparse grey hair, unremarkable spectacles, and quiet clothes that would meld obediently into the linoleum decor of any corporate pit, Mistry is a far throw from the stereotype of sculptor as wildhaired, rumpled maverick attacking huge cubes of stone.

Beneath that HR-friendly exterior, naturally, a fierce individualism thumps alongside an idealism whose edges have been singed with cynicism. A devotee of the Gandhian prescription of self-knowledge and self-sufficiency, he has held only one job in his life—as Dean of Fine Arts at Baroda’s M S University (1999 to 2002). He resigned in two years repelled by a system which considered it kosher for diploma holders to lecture to postgraduates and where a government-anointed stooge demanded the respect due to a savant.

Which is why when Mistry happened to meet another victim of the system, Verghese Amul Kurien, at an airport, a remark by the milk cooperative visionary sloshed in his head. Kurien had said, “The biggest hurdle in the way of India’s development is the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats are the biggest employed trade union in the country.’’

At the Harmony show, 29 of his works—paintings and sculpture—are on display but all of them are from the last ten years of his career. Given that the 1957-born sculptor (“You can say I am running 51 or 51 run-out, it doesn’t matter’’) has been at it for at least 30 years, the selection does not track his evolution from lusciously formed figures to a more distorted, abstract idiom. But that is how he wanted it.

What the exhibition does showcase is diversity, the unifying factor of Mistry’s vast oeuvre.From the unforgiving hardness of stone to the craven softness of chalk, from
fashionable fibre-glass and polished stainless steel to rusty metal and good old wood, Mistry has worked with a distractingly varied range. Perhaps this is only natural for the boy who started out with anything he could lay his hands on—paper, wood, twigs and leaves assembled with the glue from the neem trees in his village of Kanjari.

“The material varies but the goal doesn’t,’’ he says. “I choose the best material depending on what I want to say. With clay you add things; with stone you subtract; with steel you add and subtract or weld; you use alabaster if you want a just-before-glass look; bronze is an expensive medium given the labour and metal costs.’’

Superlatives are scrupulously absent from Mistry’s opinions as is the sweeping pronouncement. He is wary of big anthems like freedom of expression, and adds wearily that few are ready to acquaint themselves with the nitty gritty of the problem. For instance, he says, Chandramohan, the Baroda art student who was arrested for his exam submission of a cross with a commode below and a goddess berthing a full-grown man, was a print-maker and had no business submitting an installation in the first place. And while he has no patience for puffed-up custodians of culture with their tilaks and cellphones, he is as unimpressed by liberals who dismiss him as an old-fashioned stickler for rules.

Encomia like “great artist’’ and “genius’’ are abstained from. “I don’t think any artist should go through what Husain is going through,’’ he says in response to how a great artist like Husain has been hounded out of his own country. “We are more a thrashing democracy than a thriving one.’’ As are judgmentalisms such as “young artists are being ruined by all that auction money’’. “Matisse came from a well-off background, that did not diminish anything, in fact the subjects of his paintings are at ease, at repose. So being commercially successful doesn’t make art good or bad.”

“To appreciate art you don’t have to be a critic—even a good journalist can do the job.” He cites Hemingway’s gripping reportage of the bullfights, told in spare prose with no flesh on the bone. “But you must remain a spectator. Art, like bullfighting is a gory business.” He adds wickedly after a pause, “I can use many other adjectives to describe the art scene.”

Remember Nikki Gandhi Bedi?

The Sunday Times of India, Times Review, March 2, 2008

Nina Martyris meets her in a rehab called time

Nikki Bedi is vacationing in Mumbai after an epic gap of two long years during which so much has happened. Ex-husband Kabir Bedi has acquired a new girlfriend, schoolmate Elizabeth Hurley has married a chiselled Bombay mannequin, and there are far too many Indian blondes around now. The diminutive 41-year-old, with the loud, cut-glass diction of a British chat show host, has taken these scattered changes in her stride—Kabir’s girlfriend, Parveen, is described with gushing warmth as “simply fantastic”, the fake blondes are dissed, eyes rolling, as “declassé”, Liz Hurley doesn’t trigger any early schoolroom memories.

On a February morning that has no redeeming winter nip, Nikki has set out from the Intercontinental Hotel for her power walk. By eight o’clock it is boiling but she has already rounded the salty curve of the seafront and conquered the steep shoulder of Walkeshwar to finally halt at a deeply personal public shrine, a standardissue shiny black municipal plaque etched in gold lettering with the name Sumant Moolgaokar Chowk.

Her late grandfather—the legendary Tata chief after whom it is rumoured the Sumo was named—lived at Mayfair Apartments, easily one of Malabar Hill’s most distinguished addresses. This is where the young Nikki spent her holidays, chasing cousins and siblings up and down the broad corridors, while Dadu with his Hasselblad and meticulous eye captured it all on film. Nikki is in Mumbai this time to “water her roots”. She has spent the afternoon in Juhu with Kabir and Parveen, and his daughter Pooja Bedi and her children (there’s a lot of watering going on here).

She asks permission to light up a Gudang Garam, throwing in that she had given up in May and should probably give up again. Life in Birmingham is demanding. She runs a radio show (Asian Network) and a TV show (Desi DNA), and this means reading at least three books a week, watching two films, and if there’s a band on the show, downloading and listening to all their music, “legally, may I add”. She is obsessive compulsive when it comes to research, she says, and though she has a team, prefers to do the slog herself. There is a research ban on Wikipedia for its sometimes dodgy information—for instance, on her page, her first husband Sunil Vijaykar is described as an economist, when in fact he is a food stylist or, at a stretch, a food economist. And when she googles, she does a “reverse google”, beginning on Page 9 rather than Page 1 because that’s how you’re more likely to get some obscure nugget.

This thoroughness was self-evident at the benighted Kitab Festival where she stood in quite expertly for several anchors who had pulled out, and had only a day or two to read a minor pile of books before interviewing authors Indra Sinha, Matthew d’Ancona, Sarfraz Manzoor and Julian West in a back-to-back Sunday session. In a stylishly quiet hessain dress with glittery paisley detail and skyscraper croc shoes, and wired on endless cups of coffee, she was sharp as a tack, friendly, and did her best to lighten what would otherwise have turned into a graveyard shift. When Sarfraz, who has written a book on growing up Muslim in Britain, commented on the curious mix of tradition and broadmindedness in India, citing that while there is a shaadi.com, there is also a secondshaadi.com for the divorced, she slipped in ingenuously, “And what about thirdshaadi.com for people like me?”

On her shows back home, she has what she calls a Total Fat Ban. “No, it’s not to do with people of different sizes. It’s a Fatuous Ban. So I will never have Paris Hilton on the show, and Posh Spice is out too.” They typify “celebutard ephemera”, retarded celebrities who live for their 15 seconds of limelight. The other thing she doesn’t like while on air is to be told when to stop asking risqué questions. “I don’t like being censored either,” she says firmly, and now one can feel the ghosts of Nikki Tonight beginning to circle. “I don’t like being safe. It doesn’t make for good TV.”

Many years ago when she interviewed Bal Thackeray on Bombay Chat, she asked him if he was anti-Muslim ( he was protesting the green coat of paint on Bandra Station, his reply was unclear and later he drew a cartoon sketch of her eyes); when Tisco’s Russi Mody boasted that he had seen Winston Chruchill naked, she asked, “So was he well hung?” (the answer was yes); Omar Sharif was asked if his Egyptian actress wife had had a cliterectomy (the answer was yes, in drawling bass) and followed up with, “And what did it look like?” (“I knew I was crossing the line there, but I am a gynaecologist’s daughter, so there was some medical interest...’)

She was much younger in 1995, and politically gauche, when Nikki Tonight went on air on Star World, “to fire counter-culture missiles into people’s living rooms”. She asked her guest, gay rights activist and journalist Ashok Row Kavi, why he was still stuck editing Bombay Dost when his colleagues had all moved on to bigger newspapers, and Ashok grumbled on about how, years ago, he had written an article for the Illustrated Weekly where he had called Gandhi a “b***** Bania”, and “that irresponsible bugger Khushwant Singh printed it and screwed my career” (at which point, she says, she gasped and laughed at the Khushwant reference). Since it was a reminiscence, the editors in Hong Kong didn’t think that it was remarkable enough to expunge, and focused their energies on editing out other broad hints that the guest had dropped about the sexuality of several actors, industrialists and politicians that would have had them libelled out. Then the show was aired.

“My driver came to me the next morning, shocked, with a Gujarati paper that had my picture next to Gandhi’s with the offending quote printed. He thought I had said it. I was monstored by the press. Tushar Gandhi led the charge. I needed to have bodyguards and was advised to leave the country before TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act) was used against me. Rupert Murdoch had gagged me, so I couldn’t give my side of the story and say that I had laughed at the Khushwant Singh bit and not at what had been said about Gandhi. But I suppose we were manna for the media and I was the foreign hand (her mother is British). I couldn’t come back to Bombay for years.”

This black farce reached its nadir when Ashok Row Kavi was beaten up, not for the Gandhi bit but for saying on the show that “Sharmila Tagore’s wig had boochies (lice) in it or something”. If the show were to go on air now, says Nikki, in today’s post-lib, liberal Mumbai, no one would bat an eyelid. Sadly, that’s not true.

The Sounds of Isolation

The Sunday Times of India, Times Review, December 9, 2007

Nina Martyris meets Anita Desai, whom Salman Rushdie calls ‘the Jane Austen of the Indian English novel’

Her red silk sari has a soft-spoken rustle to it, the pallu wrapped around to ward off the aggressive air-conditioning. The hair is neatly parted, plaited and coiled into a bun, the slippers are soft, flat and no-nonsense. And just as in her books there is at once about her an air of quiet observation and immense reserve. It is like a cordon sanitaire that wards off the intrusive question and clumsy attempt at flattery. In Anita Desai’s distilled world, there are no shortcuts to friendship or fine writing.

Seated in the clear light of day in a quiet corner at the Taj Land’s End in Bandra, Desai sips on a fresh lime soda, leaves the parrot-green wasabi nuts untouched and smiles at the lovely irony of it all: in the post-literate era, a 70-year-old Indian author being put up in a five-star hotel and given the treatment, all nine yards of it. The world has indeed turned. The same Indian author who as a young writer was turned away by journalism (“They had never heard of interns in those days”) and by the few publishing houses of the time (“It’s such a discouraging scene, they told me, why do you want to join and get even more discouraged?”).

The previous evening, Desai had been taken by her publishers to a big new bookshop in Andheri. “It was in a mall,’’ she says with the faintest wisp of comic disbelief at the grand commercial turn Mumbai has taken. “Well, not too many people turned up for the reading but those who did had read my books and knew my work, so it was nice.’’

Forty-four years ago when her first book Cry, The Peacock was published by Peter Owen, a small English publisher who liked to look out for idiosyncratic writing, she was paid 300 pounds. A Romanian imprint which wanted to translate it paid her all of ten pounds. “No one was interested in Indian-English writing then,’’ she says, “so we wrote in a complete sense of isolation. There was no community, only the rumour that Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan were writing. The publishers of the time were interested chiefly in bringing out reprints of foreign authors. The people too wanted to read the real thing, they didn’t want to read us. So one wrote for oneself.’’

The lid was blow off that isolation in 1981 when Salman Rushdie’s magnificent Midnight’s Children burst on the scene. “It was a terribly important book and its success gave a whole generation the confidence to write in English, and ask for big royalties,’’ says Desai. “But I do wish Indian authors didn’t all try to write a Salman Rushdie kind of book. We need to get that out of our system. Right now, in my hotel room, I’m reading a book by Rana Dasgupta called Tokyo Cancelled, and it’s written in an original way which is so refreshing.’’

Desai, who teaches creative writing at MIT, lives in New York in a quiet house by the Hudson Bay. Through the day, daughter Kiran writes upstairs and looks out at the hills, Anita works downstairs in her study. For the past year she has had to spend many days alone, what with Kiran jetsetting around the world after her Booker prize for The Inheritance Of Loss. “She never dreamt she’d see so much of the world in a year,” says her mother, who has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. “When she came back she was half her size, she had lost so much weight. She was so relieved when this year’s Booker prize was announced. She said now they’ll have someone new to chase.’’

Desai is in India for a number of reasons, all good. To start with, she has been made a lifetime fellow of the Sahitya Akademi, one of the few writers in English to have been accorded this honour. In order to mark the occasion, three of her best works have been reprinted—Clear Light Of Day, Baumgartner’s Bombay and In Custody with introductions by Kamila Shamsie, Suketu Mehta and Salman Rushdie respectively. And since we live in an age when awards, books, and films fuse and feed off one another, the luminous Merchant-Ivory film based on the third book, In Custody, has been re-released. It is a deeply moving film that scopes out the relationship between a famous decadent Urdu poet and a young devotee that captures at once the grandeur and grot of a florid, fading language, but when Desai first saw it many years ago, she was taken aback by how different it was from her own deathbed-of-Udru scene. Her world, she said, was grey, dull and dirty, not splendoured with colour.

Rushdie calls Desai “the Jane Austen of the Indian novel” for the acuity with which she perceives the minutiae of a housewife’s world. Her canvas is always a miniature one, the references to the momentous events of history always oblique. But although she is an extraordinarily gifted writer, Desai has never triggered the kind of electric celebrity rush that crackles in the wake of a Vikram Seth, an Amitav Ghosh or an Arundhati Roy. Some complain that her books are too weighted and grave, too stiff with descriptions of jacaranda and cicadas and scented spider lilies and koels. But those who stay with the prose and savour its spare bones come away enriched by the sharpness of her observation of human nature. She has the power to convey, in a few bracing words, a person’s character in Dickensian fashion. Take for example the descriptions of the faces of two separate characters: ‘Dr Biswas had a very honest face, she decided, painfully honest, like a peeled vegetable.’ ‘(The neighbour) had a face that was both sanctimonious and martial, like a hatchet in the hands of a fanatic.’

It is this unerring visual sense sucked of sentimentality that has given us so many unforgettable characters: Baumgartner, the German Jew in Mumbai, a cold, warty lump of a man who loves cats; Nur, the sluggish old poet who, at the prospect of money, opens one eye as if he had spotted a particularly tasty fly; Lotte, whose mouth is a tunnel of red from which might issue a trill or a howl; Ila Das with her shudder-inducing voice, her cracked tennis shoes, Christianity and poverty; and above all, the steely tall Nanda Kaul, erect on a hill in Kasauli, who wants to be left alone, to shut the world out. But like the twin towers, she is engulfed by devastation.

In most of Desai’s books, the opening lines hint at the quickening shadows beyond. Isolation is the thread that slips like a ghost through her novels, her protagonists hunger for it. Inevitably this cherished isolation is invaded, either by strangers or well-meaning busybodies or the blind hounds of history. A German Jew, a Muslim in old Delhi. The marching and the shooting. The shooting and the killing. The killing and the killing and the killing.

Mowgli Azam

The Times of India, June 11, 2003, Snapshot

Nina Martyris

Just as Bethlehem has been exalted by the birth of a baby in a manger two thousand years ago, the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai derives its historical heft from the fact that it was the cradle of the unofficial laureate of the empire, Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling, whose writings on India, it is said, bridged the gap between India and Britain more effectively than the Suez Canal, was born in the JJ compound in 1865, the year in which Mumbai's cotton boom had been teased to an impossible frenzy, turning the city into a powerhouse through which, to paraphrase a Kipling line, a thousand mills roared.

Babies have an unscripted way of stealing the show and Rudyard, or Ruddy baba as he was known, has appropriated the J.J. spotlight by the sheer fact of being birthed there. He will always be numero uno on the J.J. roster even though the only prints he ever left behind were the pug marks of the first five years of his childhood before being despatched, as was the expat tradition of the time, to the cravated confines of England. Away from his parents, ayah, household and city, he was miserable.

Despite the fact that the writer's connection with this city was more or less severed after these early years,Mumbai is loath to jettison its Kipling connection, treasuring above all, the ode where he thanks providence for allowing him to be born not in some wild rocky outcrop but in "no mean city" between the palms and the sea. In the poem, Bombay (as the city was known then) is described as 'Mother of Cities to me', a tribute which would logically make Kipling Mumbai's mowgli, or mulga, for official son-of-the-soil status.

But although this line is usually quoted when Kipling's Mumbai connection is recalled, frankly, it is a poor indicator of the emotional bond the boy shared with his birthplace. If one wants really to get an inkling of how that long journey across the seas turned him from "believer to beliefless", the story begging to be read is 'Ba Ba Black Sheep'.

It is a heart-breaking tale of a little boy Punch who has to leave Mumbai from Apollo Bunder in a P&O ship that makes him so seasick that he declares, "When I come back to Bombay.. I will come in a broom-gharri." The seasickness is only a prelude to the misery ahead when Punch is left with a disciplinarian aunt (who he initially confuses for a white ayah) who dislikes him, beats him and calls him Black Sheep. So, the last line of the nursery rhyme is altered—And none for the little boy who lives down the lane.

Critics have often commented on the strange dichotomy in Kipling's writing—on the one hand he was imperialism's chief pom-pom waver, the man who talked of the white man's burden.On the other, he shared an almost organic connection with this heathen burden and its traditions, complexity and richness. Salman Rushdie called it a conflict between two personas—Kipling Sahib and Ruddy baba. The latter sensibility, was shaped, most definitely in Mumbai.

It is as if his ghost is revisiting Mumbai in a broom-gharri now, for if you look around it is truly Kipling season, what with the recent bungalow brouhaha and Jungle Book II running in theatres across the city, and Mr Sher Khan himself putting in a real appearance by leaving a pug mark in Tungareshwar outside Bombay.

But evidence that the feeling of ownership really runs deep burbled forth last week when the students of J.J. rallied to protect what is popularly perceived as the poet's bungalow. Although city historians are at pains to point out that the original bungalow has long been pulled down, this factoid has few takers for nostalgia is remarkably free of the underpinnings of fact. Nostalgia has been leveraged to great effect—it has roused an otherwise moribund campus to action.

Once upon a time India's premier art school, J.J. has long lost its lustre, with an apathetic student body, no dean at its head and the famous bungalow uninhabited. But now, hearteningly, the voice of protest is splattering forth through posters and sitins. Ruddy, or so it would appear, has provided a much-needed rudder.

(This weekly column aims to capture that quintessentially Mumbai state of mind.)

From Ruddy baba to Kipling sahib

The Sunday Times of India, December 2

Nina Martyris meets Charles Allen who was in Mumbai to promote his new book on Rudyard Kipling, "that most awkard, most contentious son of Bombay"

As a boy in public school in England, Charles Allen was asked as part of a classroom assignment to choose his favourite poem. Having been born in British India (Cawnpore), lived for seven years in Bihar and Assam, and grown up in a house walled with Rudyard Kipling's novels, he happily picked the barrack ballad Gunga Din.

One of Kipling's most popular poems, Gunga Din reeks of the Raj. It narrates in rhyme the story of a poor bhisti or water carrier who throws his life away to save an out-and-out racist British Tommy who, after mocking the bhisti through the poem for being a 'heathen' and a 'grinnin', gruntin' fool, finally bestows the grating tribute, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

Charles's choice of poem earned him a rebuke and a detention. "The teacher thought I was trying to be sarcastic, that I had no taste,'' he says, blue eyes still widening with traces of surprise. "You know, at that time in Britain everyone was terribly conscious of the evils of colonialism and were therefore extra mindful of India's feelings.''

Indians would be rather bemused by the English schoolmarm's extraordinary sensitivity, given that Gunga Din continues to be declaimed here with relish at the annual elocution contest. But perhaps the teacher was not all that way out either, for in the post-Independence years, Kipling was viewed as an ultraright sahib whose early thoughts on Hinduism, the Congress, and the Bengali Babu in particular (effeminate, oily, giggling) were startlingly offensive.

But therein lies the rub, for as later writers who rehabilitated the misunderstood Rudyard are anxious to point out, Kipling was a formidable paradox__Salman Rushdie calls it the dichotomy between Ruddy Baba and Kipling Sahib. "I call it the Good Kipling and the Bad Kipling,'' says Allen. "He was the ultimate shape shifter. On the one hand, an arch-colonialist, on the other, a passionate India lover who made a special trip to Bombay to see his childhood ayah and who gave the world the beloved man-cub Mowgli and the great spiritual adventure, Kim. I think of Kim as a very pro-Hindu, pro-Buddhist book''. According to some sources the name Mowgli is a corrupted form of the Marathi 'mulga' or boy, which Ruddy's ayahs must have addressed him as in Bombay.

A veteran India hand, who has written almost 20 books on India including the memorable oral history tract, Plane Tales From The Raj, Allen was in Mumbai to release his new book. Kipling Sahib is an exploration of the India chapters__Ruddy's first six years in Bombay where his father Lockwood was dean at the new Sir JJ School of Art, and his return as a teenager who is anxious, neurotic and so rude that he's thrown out of the club three times. Lahore, though, where Lockwood was stationed at the Mayo School, was a city that drew the young Kipling like moth to flame. He was utterly taken by Islam which he thought of a manly, clear-cut religion. "And he also loved wandering through the red-light quarter, he was 17 and his hormones were raging,'' laughs Allen. "He had great affection for the whore.''

But his experience of Allahabad where he joined the Civil and Military Gazette (a newspaper owned by Allen's grandfather) was painfully different. Still shattered by the Great Uprising, the predominantly Hindu city was hostile and closed to the English, and Kipling despised it. Writing with pace and an eye for detail, Allen takes the reader through the dramatic turning point when Kipling goes from hating India to falling in love with it, after he is unspeakably moved by a servant's unflinching loyalty to him when he is stricken with cholera.

Speaking at the JJ School, Allen clarified, to the disappointment of the students, that the charming green-gabled Kipling Cottage on campus was not the house in which "this most awkward, most contentious son of Bombay was born''. He was almost certainly born at the same spot but under a much humbler roof__"you could call it a jhopri or a pandal or a little shed,'' says Allen. "You see, in 1865, when he was born, Bombay was only just beginning to be built into one of the grand cities of Asia. The JJ building did not exist as we see it today, nor did any of these other huge buildings. Alice, Ruddy's mother, complained that in the monsoon the mud floor in their shack turned slushy and sprouted fungus and mushrooms.''

From his extensive research, in which he was helped by Mumbai historian Sharada Dwivedi, Allen says that while Ruddy shared a rapport with his father__the little boy used to run into sculpture class and pelt the students with lumps of clay__his interaction with Alice seemed more limited. "It was a feature of British India to dump the children with the ayahs,'' says Allen. "All we hear about Alice is her going out to a dinner party or coming back from a ride. I think she was a neglectful mother. And the proof of that is that Kipling's best writing is about orphan boys. Mowgli and Kim are both brought up by surrogate parents. And, of course, the most harrowing thing to happen to young Ruddy was to be thrown out of Eden and sent back at the age of six to England where he was miserable. Decades later, as a family man in America when his daughter Josephine died and the shutters came down, someone asked Kipling what he wanted to do. He replied, "I don't want to do anything, I want to go back to Bombay.''

When legends changed hands

THE TIMES REVIEW, AUGUST 19, 2007

During Partition, many Muslim legends like Manto had to flee India but this was compensated by Hindu greats who fled Pakistan, writes Nina Martyris

Leave now and return when the madness passes. It was this injunction, so sane then, so naïve now, that made thousands leave their homes for new homelands born under the drip of a knife. They never returned, of course, except in meaningless form, such as the grand old man of cinema A K Hangal going back decades later as part of an Indo-Pak peace delegation only to find that "nobody in Karachi remembered me". Others like Sadat Hasan Manto, the bard of Bombay, who relished the decadent glitter of the film world as much as the low life, did not survive the betrayal of the city turning on him. Manto said that he began to die the minute he left Bombay. He carried it around like a wound, and in his last years in Lahore, drunk and displaced in a mint-new Islamic state that tried him for obscenity, his singularity epitomised the irony of his most famous character Toba Tek Singh, a lunatic trapped in a No Man's Land.

In that great and tragic human exchange, Bombay and Lahore, like every other big city and town in the northern part of the subcontinent, were permanently altered, their kindness and bigotry simultaneously put to the test. Lahore, then a thriving centre of the cinema world, lost its lifeblood, as Hindu actors, directors and writers, among them B R Chopra and Pran, fled by train, plane and on foot, leaving behind the mess of homes and films unfinished on the floor. Bombay Beautiful, as Gandhi often called it, was the receptacle of this exodus of talent, though the loss of Manto alone was a debit that the sleight of account books could not balance. Employed as a scriptwriter by Bombay Talkies, then co-owned by Ashok Kumar, Manto watched in growing fear as the mood in the city darkened. The studio, which had many Muslim employees, received hate mail from Hindus saying they would set fire to the premises, a threat which Ashok Kumar pooh-poohed, calling it a passing madness. "However, it never went away, this madness," wrote Manto. "Instead, as time passed, it became more and more virulent."

Before he, his wife and two children joined the human caravan out of the city, which included many elite Muslim families such as that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Manto met in Bombay a man who had made the journey in reverse. B D Garga, one of India's finest film historians, whose scholarly books on cinema have enlightened audiences in India and Europe, was a Hindu in Lahore. Before Partition, Garga was already in Bombay in the employ of the famous director V Shantaram but had returned to Lahore to work on a film. There, when the madness took over, a man clutching a knife that he had used and not bothered to clean, made a terrified Garga and his Muslim cook recite the kalma to prove they were not kafirs. Thanks to his fluency in Urdu, Garga passed the test, but it broke him. "I was certain that I would be able to return to Lahore one day," says Garga on email from Goa. "That this did not happen was heartbreaking. The senes of loss is hard to describe it is associated with so many memories – of streets, trees, friends, food etc."

Days later, he too was part of the caravan, getting on to a plane and flying to the safety of a Hindu city, Bombay, which had never defined itself by any religion except money. Garga called on a bitter Manto who offered him a drink, which, it being four o'clock in the afternoon, Garga refused. The meeting is recounted in the foreword to Garga's book The Art of Cinema. Manto complained bitterly about how the management of Bombay Talkies had fired all its Muslim employees. "Wishing to cut short Manto's painful monologue, Garga asked what he had been writing of late and Manto, with a blank expression on his face, replied: 'My pen does not move on the page these days.'

Unable to afford a plane ticket was a tailor in a Karachi jail. Hangal was told that unless he left for India, he would remain in jail. With his wife, son and twenty rupees, he boarded a steamer. "I was a communist and had IPTA friends in Bombay who came to Bhaucha Dhakka to pick me up. We stayed for some time in this fellow's house and sometimes in that fellow's house." A Kashmiri Pandit – his wife was Kamala Nehru's cousin – Hangal had defied his father and refused to work for the British, learning cutting to support himself. Even today at 90, after 200 films, 60 plays and a Padma Bhushan, the old actor is inordinately proud of his "scientific cutting skills" and the enviably high salary of Rs 500 it had earned him. In the 1930s, in Delhi, Hangal had cut khaddar suits for C F Andrews ("Have you heard of him?") and Bhulabhai Desai, and in Bombay, before he became famous in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, he had a little shop at Crawford Market, where among other things, he cut a suit for Pratapsingh Rane, who went on to become chief minister of Goa. "Many years later he saw me in Goa and he was very happy."

The director of Mughal-e-Azam, K Asif, also started out as a tailor – although as film writer Mihir Bose says in his book Bollywood A History, "He was keener on the ladies rather than making dresses for them." Asif did not leave for Pakistan, but the financier of his film, a Jinnah sympathiser, did, derailing a project that was to suffer monumental delay. Who did leave, albeit briefly, is the man after whom a bus stop in Bandra, Mehboob Studio, is named. Mehboob Khan, a Gujarati Muslim, crossed the border only to return, although no one really knows why. Bose writes that Mehboob came back to find that his studio had been declared evacuee property but managed to pull strings, get it back, and go on to make his Nehruvian classics, Andaz and Mother India.

Who did not return was the legendary singer Noor Jehan, who Manto said "had a voice like crystal", and whose departure created a vacuum that Lata Mangeshkar ably filled. Some film historians say that if Noor Jehan, who could both act and sing and whose baby wails were supposedly on pitch, had stayed, Hindi cinema might have gone down a different path, but others like Feroze Rangoonwala feel that she left because "there was no scope for her in India, her last few films like Village Girl had not done well, and Pakistan was always like a mirage holding out great hope". In Pakistan, where she had a legion following, she was given the title Mallika-e-Tarranum, which means Queen of Melody, a title that her friend "Latto" enjoys here, and who, according to Bose, spent many happy hours on the phone with Noor, singing songs and recalling the old days, before the madness.

How Israel copes with terror

The Sunday Times of India, July 23, 2006

After the Mumbai blasts, a TV anchor asked, ‘Should India go the Israel way?’ An Israeli pioneer in the study of stress has an unexpected answer


Nina Martyris

Last week in Jerusalem, we were drawn by the warmly lit window of a Chinese restaurant tucked away on fashionable Ben Yehuda Street. The door was inhospitably bolted from within, but a sign assured us that it was open. We rang the bell. A waiter answered, gave us the once-over and asked us in. Then began the routine procedure: Any weapons? A gun? Could he check our bags? Did we have an ID? Once we had been seated and profuse apologies proffered, the prickly reception receded as the table disappeared beneath platters of chicken and shitake mushrooms.

Inquisitions at restaurants and frisking at malls are de rigeur in this security-obsessed country, intensified since March 2002, after the harsh spike in suicide bombings announcing the second Intifada. Every week then delivered images of bombs and body parts. Therapists from the government’s Psychological Services, on constant call, rushed from one bereaved family to another as grief managers and safety-valves for anger.

As the attacks escalated, Ultra Orthodox Jews began an unsqueamish service called Zaka, arriving at the bomb-site within minutes to piece together shattered bodies and enable a dignified burial. Sudden death lurked in the simple act of grabbing a quick coffee. That heightened fear has ebbed — psychologists say that the initial human response to terror is a pervasive fear, which is gradually replaced by defiance and a determination to go on.

Coping with terrorism is now programmed into Israel’s genetic code. An anti-terror eco-system marries Bluetooth espionage with native intelligence and a vigilante citizenry which has learned the terrible price of ignoring an innocuous schoolbag. There are still between 10 and 20 warnings of terrorist intention every day. This daily jangle of alarm bells translates into hypersecurity, with guards poking through boots and back seats like dentists probing for cavities. This comes with its own problems. The authorities might claim that everyone is equally suspect regardless of the shape of his nose or quantum of facial hair, but local Arabs are fighting mad about racial profiling.

Even someone as venerable as Ziad Abu Zayyad, a minister in the Arafat government and now an editor, tells of the humiliation of being ordered to surrender his keys to a young Israeli soldier, probably a fresh migrant from Europe or Africa, and have his car frisked in Jerusalem, the city of his forefathers. Zayyad’s feeling of debasement and anger articulates that of the Palestinian people. A community in crisis thrust into the arms of extremism by historical circumstance and its own cynical leadership. “All the violence you see now is a symptom of Israeli occupation,” Zayyad continues, referring to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, a state based on biblical entitlement, sanctioned by the UN, and catalysed by the Holocaust.

To understand what the world believes to be Israel’s unbridled belligerence in dealing with its situation, academics summon their favourite word, ‘existential’. Eniat Wilf, a foreign policy expert, says that two ideas underpin Israel—the first is its pre-ordained journey through catastrophe and redemption, the second is a sense of existential fear, the legacy of 3,000 years of invasion and persecution which culminated in the Nazi gas chamber. “There is a feeling that any moment all this, everything, can disappear,” says Wilf. Iranian president Ahmadenijad played these fears like a violin with his “wiping Israel from the map” rhetoric.

“When we read the rhetoric of Ahmadenijad or Naserallah (the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon), I see the same powerful ideas that I see in Hitler. My children have a grandmother with a number on her arm,” says Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki went to a Jerusalem restaurant and thought nothing of the young man who entered with a guitar strapped to his back. Within minutes, Arnold and his wife had become members of a club they didn’t want to belong to — the Victims of Terror.

“To be a victim of terror is not romantic, not beautiful, not transcendental, not heroic,” says Arnold. “It is not like going to a movie that has an end. By being merciful to terror we are being intolerably cruel to ourselves. When victims of terror meet, the obsessive interest is not to kill Arabs, but to find ways to ensure that our grief does not cripple our children.”

Dr Nazmi Al-Jubeh, a moderate Palestinian, attempts an explanation. “They are starving in Gaza,” he says. “There is no employment, nothing. All they do is bring children into this world and become suicide bombers. Mentally they are in siege. They have no plans when they reach 22, so they think the best is to become a martyr, get a picture on the wall or in the paper.” Both Al-Jubeh and Zayyad condemn the extremism of Hamas, but are equally clear that Israeli tanks will only worsen, never solve. And many Israelis know this too. Despite the barbed wire, the espionage, the military might, terrorism has not been defeated.

Moderate voices on both sides say that the redemption lies in dialogue, and they quote the words of the prophet Isaiah, often cited by Israel’s founding father Chaim Weizmann, “Zion shall be redeemed with justice.”

After the Mumbai blasts, a TV channel asked: “Should India go the Israel way?” Should our tolerance level be zero? Listen to the wisdom of Shlomo Breznitz, the 70-year-old professor who in 1979, started the world’s first institute to study the impact of stress on the nervous system, in Haifa. “Israel is the natural laboratory to do research,” he says drily. “I would gladly give up this advantage for a little peace of mind.” An old India hand, he continues, “One thing that Israel can learn from India is patience. Today, the role of your country as a large democracy presenting this patience to the world is very important. Please do not ever lose this.”