eMithilaHaat, a fledgling social enterprise, is on a mission to get Mithilanchal’s heritage the right due through its exclusive online store and onground efforts

The social enterprise has been just seven months in operation, but the impact is being felt far and wide— down to the impoverished artisans of Darbhanga and Mithilanchal in Bihar. Here technology and modernity have been yoked together in the most unlikely yet the holiest of matrimony with an ancient craft and tradition. The credit for the novel venture goes to a young techie—Ankit Jha.

Jha is candid about his choices in life and has no regrets about giving up a career that could have taken him to the heights of what a normal Indian dreams of—success, money and a cushy life. That he chose to float a social enterprise with rather limited chances of success, rather than go for a business plan that offered quick scaling and returns, show that Jha is made of a different mettle. So what prompted you to launch your exclusive e-market place for Mithila paintings—a techie bitten by the entrepreneurial bug becomes an art-e-preneur? We shoot at him curiously. The story that unfolds is a real tearjerker. Jha was moved by the plight of his aunt Sulekha (name changed), a reputed Mithila artist who was forced to give up her beloved painting due to financial constraints. Jha was at that time working at an IT firm in Bangalore and routinely spoke at lunch time to his cousin based in his hometown Darbhanga, to catch up on the local news. “I was taken aback to hear what he told me about aunty. We had grown up watching her work on her Mithila paintings sitting on a mat in the inner courtyard of her house.”

The disheartening news brought back a flood of sweet memories attached to Sulekha aunty. As a child, it was Jha’s favourite pastime, sitting with his brothers and sisters around her while she painted. Aunty gave the children sweets, snacks and sherbat and the kids just loved the afternoons spent sitting with her for hours questioning her on her work. “What is this? What is that? This does not look like a deer,” they would wonder childishly. All their queries Sulekha aunty answered with a laugh “Wait for three more days. Let me finish this and then I will ask which deer is more beautiful—a real one or the one I am painting.” The plight though was not of Sulekha’s alone. Jha learnt that almost all artisans in Mithilanchal were facing similar issues. “There confidence was low and they had begun abandoning their traditional occupation for more lucrative options— leaving something they loved truly. It was really painful to know all this.”

That lunch hour was pure agony for Jha. He returned to his cubicle to complete some pending work but found himself unable to push back memories of his happy childhood spent with Sulekha aunty. Unable to concentrate on work, he spent time mulling options on helping her. He knew his aunt would never accept financial help. Then, there were those other artists who were languishing too. It required a more strategic effort to ameliorate their lot. But Jha was determined to do something. For the next few days, he spent his time in exhaustive research. “I researched on Mithila art, talked to people in my village and was astonished with the kind of response this art had got.” It was the catalyst for Jha’s decision. “I had made up my mind to work for the artists and decided to resign.” His decision and sound business plan brought him a co-founder and investor in Gurmeet Singh Ahuja, who was working as Vice President-Strategy and Delivery and President-Human Resource in same company as Jha. Curious at Jha’s decision to suddenly quit, Ahuja confronted him and when he discovered that it was not for another lucrative offer but to set up his own social enterprise that Jha was quitting, impressed Ahuja offered a helping hand. “I was really bewildered when he offered me his partnership and investment. And this is how the foundation of eMithilaHaat was laid,” says Jha.

His third partner in the venture was not so easily convinced. Jha’s father, Jitendra Kishore Jha, currently COO of eMithilaHaat, is a teacher in the government high school, Siwan. Initially, he was furious with his son’s decision to resign. But when Jha showed him the roadmap of eMithilaHaat, Kishore was so convinced that he not only became an investor in the online venture, but an active operations and product procurement hand. Now he tours the villages meeting and convincing artists to partner with eMithilaHaat. The idea is noble; the spirit, genuine and the efforts hard. But what exactly is the business model and is the concept really sustainable? An exclusive e-tailing website for genuine Mithila paintings sounds good, but is there a market for it, is the model scalable? Jha finds the question interesting. Explaining the business model he says, “We work with more than 50 renowned artists from Mithilanchal and buy their paintings at a price higher than what they earlier earned. These paintings are put online on our eMithilaHaat webstore.”

scalability issue, while Jha accedes, “I would say it’s a bit difficult compared to other enterprises, he adds, “But please note that it is only a bit difficult.” The foundation is totally dedicated and focussed to making eMithilaHaat “a huge social enterprise with a wide range of products. We have plans of bringing Mithila art on home décor items and apparels. You will soon see our store flooded with new range of T-shirts, sarees, kurtis, gift items, stationery, etc., with these awesome paintings on them,” Jha shares his plan. Talking of market for the Mithila products Jha says, “We have a huge market and our target is to place our products in every house, from dining tables to study tables of your kid to office table and walls and even on your body with superb apparels that too at affordable prices.” Jha is not afraid of the competition or imitators in the marketplace. “Of course, the market is crowded with other players. But majority of products listed on these platforms are not genuine. It’s really heartbreaking to find imitators who are abusing the style of painting by not following the guidelines,” he laments.

eMithilaHaat, on the other hand, works with the legends in the field who have been working on this art their whole life and have won many awards and accolades like Padma Shri, Bihar Ratna, Guru Shreshtha Shilpa, National awards. etc., says Jha, explaining the competitive edge of his outfit. “We bring the art works from the root…from the masters. All the art works listed on our webstore are handpicked by experts who carefully evaluate the signature style of the art.” Additionally, at eMithilaHaat, every artwork comes with a certificate of genuineness which gives the buyer 100 per cent money back guarantee in case the work found to be an imitation. “This sets us apart from other sellers in the marketplace and imitators,” smiles Jha. Jha is confident that with his particular model he can make a difference in the lives of the beleaguered artists. “In past few months we have noticed a huge change in their confidence level and mindset. They are now positive and work hard to make eMithilaHaat as well as themselves successful,” says Jha.

Mithilanchal artists have been famously exploited by middlemen who sell their work at exorbitant rates in cities and abroad while paying a pittance to them. “We pay them what the artwork is worth. In addition, we have plans of sharing our profit with the artists every six months. There is no string attached to this. This is purely because of emotional attachment with them.” For Jha his reward comes when “their eyes light up with hope. I have seen people giving up on this art when they are not able to sell it. We don’t want them to be in the same situation again,” he vows emphatically. “It is truly heavenly to see these lost souls happy because of your organisation. We are mesmerized to see them regain their confidence and strength and return back to the canvases they had abandoned putting their soul and heart into their art.”

Though currently the webstore sells only paintings and to a narrow set of target buyers who are art lovers and love luxury, it aims to widen its offerings to include products ranging from `100 to ` 10 lakh. “We will widen our audience base with the planned with launch of new products. You are going to see a lot of updates in eMithilaHaat in coming days,” Jha promises. Jha is conscious that it is crucial for eMithilaHaat to have an inflow of continuous revenue for scaling up fast to match competition. “We have a projection of three years in which we think we are going to make it really big,” he is confident. eMithilaHaat is already exploring avenues to fund its ambitions. “We are currently working with our initial investment and dividend earned on it so far. It’s time now for a fresh series of A funding. We are actively looking forward to take a leap from our seed-funding stage to Series A funding.” Offers are pouring in says Jha, but they are “looking forward to those investing institutions which can spare the time and mentorship that we require.”

Jha dreams of creating a utopian village for legends of Mithila art. “We would like to draw all eyes towards this awesome art and culture of Mithila. This will impact our business and the living standards of the artists and their families. Basic education and healthcare for this artist community is on top of our priority.” The organisation is already working towards it. The outfit also organizes events and competitions regularly to “make the artists feel their worth in our lives and business.” Vocational training to improve communication skills and teach artists soft skills is also held. Jha knows he is on the right track. “I speak their language, I talk like them, I eat like them, I think like them. I was one of them who got an opportunity to get an engineering degree and was destined to live a different life. But there would not have been such contentment and satisfaction in that.” The folk artists understood this and accepted Jha as the one who had returned home as their saviour. eMithilaHaat is on a crusade to save their ancient heritage from oblivion.

Marryam Reshii on why it’s destination Hong Kong for her?

Everybody’s favourite question to a frequent traveller is “What is your favourite country?” That’s the most difficult one to answer. Usually, I cop out and name the most recent destination I have been to, but if I sit down and think hard, I will probably come up with Hong Kong. It is the one place that has exceeded my expectations every time I have visited it. It has the capacity to enthrall one, whether you are looking to shop till you drop, to eat till you burst or to sight-see till your feet cry out for mercy. But that’s not all. Hong Kong has the capacity to reinvent itself over successive visits and to let you discover facets of itself that you would never have dreamt of. Hong Kong has British names of streets and landmarks yet signs written in Chinese lettering. It has a western sensibility to it yet is completely South Chinese.

Hong Kong is actually a group of islands, of which the most dizzying is the eponymous one. That is the one with the unbeatable buzz and vibe and the perfect blend of China and the west. Other nearby islands (including Lantau where the airport is) have dramatically different skylines and population densities. You can trek, visit a monastery and a fishing village. All away from The Island, true, but owing to the superb connectivity, just an hour or so away. If shopping is your thing, you have the choice of waiting till nightfall and roaming the street called Ladies Market or the other one simply called Night Market. You can bargain for knock-off watches and silk purses and have change left over from 20 Hong Kong dollars! But equally, you can get down from your limousine at Central and get rid of a vast fortune in half an hour. You can choose from the best couture, jewellery, watches, footwear and handbags. But the magic of Hong Kong is that there’s loads more you can do with your credit card. You can, for example, take it for a walk to Cat Street, more properly known as Upper Lascar Road. There, you will find every curio and every collectible that you have dreamed of.

I dreamed of a Chinese painting of a peony rendered in water-colour with the foliage and other details painted roughly in black ink, rather like Chinese calligraphy. How, pray did I think up this impossible fantasy? I have no idea. I just knew that the one day that my Hong Kong Tourism guide and now a good friend, Fred Cheung, was off, would be the day I would scour the rarified air of Cat Street alone. I did feel a frisson of fear as I blithely made up a story about going to a spa for the day to put Fred off the track, and went to the street that is where the rich and the famous shop for antiques of South Chinese provenance. If Fred knew that I was about to embark on a Serious Expedition, he would have cancelled his leave and made sure he accompanied me for my own good! However, I was determined to have a bit of an adventure unchaperoned. As it happened, I was left alone by the majority of store owners after the initial glance at an unpromising foreign tourist who wasn’t wearing a single brand of note!

Everyone has a passion in their life. Mine is Chinese antiques. The simple curve of a table leg that echoes a bamboo reed sends a shiver down my spine and the sight of hundreds if not thousands of figurines, camphor chests, pickled ginger jars and a cornucopia of objects had me in a coma of oblivion for several hours. And then I saw it. Or rather, it saw me. It was the picture of my dreams. The watercolour of a peony was lovingly delineated in countless shades of pink and white and the tender petals at the centre seemed to be just about opening in the dim light of the store. The leaves and stalks at the periphery of the painting were just fillers for the central theme, and had been done by an artist who knew how to get the effect called ‘flying clouds’ in Chinese calligraphy. That is, you pass your brush with just the right amount of black ink over the paper so that you get a patchy effect, the better to contrast with the loving delineation of the central flower. There are, however, no retakes and second chances, so you have to have considerable practice in the art.

The price shocked me senseless initially but a bit of friendly bargaining whittled away a couple of dollars and before better sense could prevail, I had become the proud possessor of a painting that was to dominate my walls at home and give me hours and hours of sheer joy. Hong Kong is the only destination where my credit card got the workout of its life. No sooner that Fred Cheung had taken me to Des Voeux Road to see the dried seafood than I spied a shop selling Chinese medicine. And that is where I saw the largest single piece of cinnamon bark that I ever did. It was eighteen inches long and six inches wide. The store owner told Fred that it had to be boiled with several other ingredients, all herbal, to make Chinese medicine. I bought it and it adorns another wall in my house, framed in an ingenious glass box, where it looks nothing like a piece of cinnamon bark.

On my very first visit to Hong Kong, I was to hear of the cuisine of Chaozhou, but then, those few days were when I received a crash course in everything to do with Chinese food. For example, that seafood was what defined the cuisine of Hong Kong. Or that Fred could be so tiresome in his quest for the perfect Guangdong-style conjee as opposed to the Chaozhou style rice porridge! I learnt that expensive is not necessarily better. We went to a working-class eatery, shared a table with two middle-aged men who evinced no interest in us at all and had the only item on the menu: beef noodle soup with a few leaves of kale, two slices of beef and a handful of noodles that were being made with lightning rapidity in the little restaurant itself. The deep savouriness of the broth still plays around in my mind after all these years. It was the same for dimsum. It is not the first course in a Chinese meal, but a breakfast washed down with endless cups of tea. The yum cha house that we went to seemed to have elderly men, many with bird-cages. The men read their newspapers, the birds warbled beautifully and I stuffed myself silly.

When food takes centre stage, as a simile, a metaphor or a leitmotif in films it sends out more signals than just hunger pangs

AMONG ONE’S LASTING MEMORIES of the new American fi lm Chef are close-ups of succulent Cuban sandwiches being grilled just so—until they reach the exact golden shade required—and handed over to eager customers. For the fi lm’s protagonist Carl, earning a livelihood by making these sandwiches in a mobile van can be viewed as a comedown: after all, Carl used to be a restaurant chef supervising the creation of haute cuisine. “Cubanos”, on the other hand, are the most plebian, workmanlike meal you can prepare— basically just cheese and ham packed in bread. Anyone can throw them together, right?

But this story is about getting back to basics and learning that even the simplest things can be done masterfully if you put your heart and soul into them. Carl’s journey to this realisation begins when one of his prestigious restaurant dinners is trashed by an eminent critic—the incident leads him to quit his job and to hire that broken-down van instead. His new venture becomes a voyage of self-discovery, as well as a chance to bond with the son whom he never spent much time with earlier because he was too busy chasing his highbrow culinary aspirations.

In other words, though Chef is a “food film”—with many scenes that will have your stomach sending urgent messages to your brain—food is a pretext for examining larger ideas about people and their relationships. And this has also been the case for a few recent Indian fi lms that centre, in some way or the other, on eating. The best known of them is probably the acclaimed The Lunchbox, the opening sequence of which introduces a tiffi n lunch nestled in a greenandwhite cover, which makes its way—via Mumbai’s famous dabbawallah— from a home to an offi ce. Then come two wordless scenes that set the plot in motion. A middle-aged man named Fernandes (Irrfan Khan) unzips the green-white cover and starts to open the tiffi n, but we see that something is off. What began as an almost unconscious action becomes more deliberate; we can tell that this is not the sort of container he is accustomed to handling each day. In the next scene, the container has been returned to the doorstep of a woman named Ila (Nimrat Kaur), and her movements as she picks up the bag are just as mechanical, but then she hesitates, weighs the tiffi n in her hand, realises that it is empty—clearly not an everyday occurrence. A look of cautious pleasure crosses her face.

Together, these two scenes—almost completely bereft of dialogue—tell us that there has been a mistake in the delivery of a lunchbox; that Fernandes has eaten the food meant for Ila’s husband; and that Ila, who is used to leftovers being sent back and noncommittal grunts of acknowledgement later in the evening, is happy her cooking has been appreciated for once. The enthusiastically consumed roti-sabzi paves the way for a most unusual relationship between these two lonely hearts, who communicate with each other by sending letters back and forth in the dabba. A lunchbox is also central to Amole Gupte’s Stanley ka Dabba, in which Mr Verma, a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, bullies children into sharing their tiffins with him. But little Stanley, who doesn’t have his own lunchbox, soon begins to wilt in the face of adult hegemony. All this leads up to a revelation that makes this film a little pedantic in tone (it turns out the boy is from a lower-class family and has to work nights at a restaurant), but more intriguing is what we don’t learn about Verma. Some of the scenes involving this gruff, portly man invite us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It is possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise.

They both probably love rich Punjabi food too, in which case they would be well advised not to see Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana on an empty stomach. In this film, as in Chef, food is a plot device that facilitates a character’s coming of age. In a version of the prodigal son story, the self-centred, Londonbased Omi (Kunal Kapoor) returns to his family village mainly because he needs financial aid. But soon he learns to take on responsibility, and what gets him started is the need to trace an old family recipe for the Chicken Khurana dish, which was the piece de resistance of his grandfather’s dhaba. Home food becomes a metaphor for deepening relationships and the “lost” recipe seems to represent the loosening of ties in a world where youngsters are eager to leave family. At one point Omi asks a number of people about their Chicken Khurana memories, and the variety of responses include one by a married couple whose “proposal” happened over the dish, and someone else who remarks that daarji used to put his own mitthaas (sweetness) into his cooking. Mitthaas is not the principal ingredient of the gol-gappas prepared by Rani (Kangana Ranaut) in Queen. A wide-eyed but spunky girl who travels abroad on a single-person “honeymoon” after her fiancé calls off their wedding, Rani passes a big test when her Indian dish is a hit at an Amsterdam street-food festival. The gol-gappas don’t go down well at first: Dutch people with their sensitive stomachs choke, look like they are about to have a heart attack, and go away muttering angrily to themselves. But in a few minutes they return, because they are intrigued. Then, they are addicted. The food here is almost like a metaphor for what the India experience can be for non-Indians: initial alarm and doubt followed by a gradually developed affection. (The country, as the cliché has it, is an acquired taste.)

Food has played a symbolic role in many older fi lms too. In a lovely climacticscene in Satyajit Ray’s fantasy classic Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, pots filled with mithaai rain down from the sky, and hungry soldiers abandon their weapons and run towards them; this is very much part of the fi lm’s larger pacifi st theme. Kundan Shah’s Jaane bhi do Yaaro has the famous “Thoda khao, thoda phenko” scene where people throw pieces of cake about—this is slapstick comedy, derived from the pie-in-the-face tradition of silent films, but the fi lm is a hard-hitting social satire and the scene is also a comment on wastage in consumerist societies. And in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, Rajesh Khanna plays a cook who helps a squabbling joint family patch up their differences: Raghu the bawarchi is so skilled that even when there are only kachche kelay (raw bananas) and suran (yam) in the house, he comes up with an innovative recipe for kababs. The Sharma family, their stomachs pampered, can’t stay discontented for long. And no wonder the old patriarch, when he hears of the cook’s arrival, jokingly mutters “Call everybody. For them, God has arrived.”

Through a prism of self and society

Lives of Others is an angry book. It’s dark, brooding and unforgiving. Neel Mukherjee’s second book, though set in the City of Joy, is joyless. His rendering of a Calcutta of the 60s and the dysfunctional Ghosh family is gripping in its starkness. The book, a worthy sequel to his debut novel A Life Apart, marks out Mukherjee for his masterful rendition of post colonial human angst-ridden India.

Ripped of any redeeming humane spark, the characters fascinate you with their dark machinations and petty jealousies. There, did I hide a guilty blush somewhere? Yes, that is the effect of the book. You read on in horrified silence as in Mukherjee hands human foibles take on a dark sinister shape. The red nail polish sprinkled on new clothes of Purnima and daughter by her jealous spinster sister-in-law Chhaya, the dismembering of the tiny insects by a curious Som, Priyo and Chhaya’s ragging of Som—the carefully delineated acts of the main characters—take on a cruelty that is damning for the reader. These are incidents that many of us may have experienced as children. But in Neel’s hands the half innocent, half jesting childhood misdemeanours become manifestations of psychological and societal maladies.

It seems that the shadow of Prafullanath Ghosh’s own complexes have found a DNA imprint in his extended family of three generations. On a macrocosmic level, Ghosh, the patriarch is symbolic of India’s complex society in transition. The goings on within the urban upper middle class family exposes its total lack of civility. The same way as outside the family’s four floor house, the city and the nation burns through the decades shorn of humanity. Through India’s struggle for Independence, Partition, civil wars, famine and floods, the Ghosh family is only concerned with self, power and pelf. This selfcentered humanity at its worst level is depicted through Som’s depraved acts with the beggars who come for rice water, the beggar girl who licks it off the floor, Priyo the incestuous coprophiliac’s cravings, Charubala’s niggardliness and mistreatment of her widowed daughter-in-law, among other things.

Supratik’s inquisitions of his mother leave her shaken and the reader with a view into the smoldering class wars that would lead to the dreaded Naxalite movement, the Maoist repercussions with which the states are still grappling. The struggle for finite resources, the impunity with which the privileged classes appropriate the larger share of it is brought out as an interlocutory leitmotif.

Mukherjee’s focus is not so much on the uprising of the peasants. It is rather on upper middle class disenchanted youth, the so called ‘intelligentsia’ who joined movements like the Naxalbari, and fomented and supported it. Through Supratik’s self analytical letters, Neel tries to establish the psychological divide separating these youth from their families and society. Born with a golden or a silver spoon in their mouths, as they grow up, they become acutely conscious of the invisible line dividing them from the servants who cohabit with them. They are the few sensitive souls, perhaps the silver lining in society’s dark clouds—the conscience keepers of a world gone awry.

Along with Sandhya, you question your own role in society’s dysfunctions. Supratik represents that dark and ugly underbelly that for those of us sitting in our plush drawing rooms are mere statistics in breaking news items—forgotten with the next sip of Earl Grey tea. The Prologue itself, set in the draught of 1966, sows the seeds of ‘fissures and cracks’ in society that Neel portrays so pictorially through the eyes of marginal farmer Nitai Das. Das’s extreme act of familicide followed by suicide after he returns empty handed from the landlord’s place to his starving family, sets the tone for the larger design of the book. The contrast throughout the book is stark.

The juxtaposition of Supratik’s epistle expositions of a bigger, darker reality running parallel in the interiors of India’s countryside with this disintegrating, dysfunctional, at the edge of ruin Ghosh family, so oblivious to their own ominous ruin. Epilogue: An unputdownable book.

A debut novel that keeps you awake!

The title is intriguing and for a debut novel, the book more than fulfills the tantalising promises of the title. It has tragedy, pathos, bathos, comic moments—in short it is a complete human drama that is engaging in its universal appeal. Mira Jacob weaves the plot with innate finesse of a seasoned wordsmith. The novel’s protagonist is the 30 something Amina Eapen, an Indian second generation immigrant to the US. She is an ace lenswoman who has abandoned her budding photojournalist career after a controversy over a picture that she took of a suicide—a Native American activist jumping off a bridge. Now she spend time as a wedding photographer but stays away from her family. The story spans three generations, two continents, multiple lives and covers India of the 1970s, specifically south India to the suburban 1980s and moves to New Mexico and Seattle of the 1990s.

It is fascinating how the author has maintained an overall light tone and heartwarming comic appeal in the book despite the fact that each page is an exposition of familial wrangling, haranguing, personal loss and unmitigated tragedy, Amina’s father, an insomniac brain surgeon, unhinged by the death of his only son seeks escape in work. But as his insomnia aggravates, he starts seeing and talking to ghosts. The estranged son learns the lesson of loss of a beloved child in a rather hard way, what he had failed to see in his own relationship with his mother, whom he returns to India only to bury.

There are bitter family feuds, harsh words are spoken, wounds that never heal and bonds that that remain broken. All through this tale of Eapen family, sleep or more aptly the disorders related to it, are the central leitmotif. The insomniac Thomas Eapen, his sleepwalking brother Sunil, who destroys ‘things’ in his sleepwalking trips, Akhil, Thomas’s son, who suffers from a sleeping disorder and the tragedy caused by sleepwalking.

The story has been captured with photographic precision through the lens of Amina, the photographer protagonist. She presents an unbiased point of view of characters, a non-judgmental rendering of their human failings. It is for the reader to construct his point of view. In a family plagued by various varieties of neurosis, Amina is the voice of sanity, though highly imaginative and creative. The book is a tender rendering of human foibles, a witty and gentle look at the people you love.

Pablo Bartholomew’s works are a continuum of time and space—a study of human subsets from the outside.

The portraits are silent, hauntingly so. They stir you to speak. Just to hear some words, some chatter of nonsense that would deny the silent presence of these souls that look out as though from the edge. It’s that edge of pit feeling that hits your solar plexus as you find yourself being swallowed in their black and white reality. It’s as though a time machine has gobbled you up and you are guilty of voyeuristic participation in intensely personal denouement of self. There is neither approbation nor guilt, just a chilly matter of factness about the subjects.

They are the morphine addicts, Pablo Bartholomew’s friends, fellow hash users, the hippie generation with their free love and life motto. There is absolute disregard and apathy for social morality. There is one speaking image of Pablo, looking straight at the camera, stoned, yet defiant and proud of whatever he is. What is it that impels these young people to surround themselves in a haze of morphine smoke? Is there some pain, rejection, fear, or what?

Pablo let’s you read into silences. But this collection of work remains among the most precious to Pablo.“My first photo essay on the life of a morphine addicts is important because it was a very intimate look at persons like these and it got international recognition for being a strong portrayal.” This body of work on morphine addicts titled Time is the Mercy of Eternity fetched Pablo First Prize at the World Press Photo in 1975 when he was just 20.

This was a vindication of the immense talent of the school dropout who was expelled from school for drug taking. The morphine addict series is also special for the self taught photo essayist produced this classic work in his father’s the darkroom. He literally pushed the envelope of his budding genius and cheap technology to achieve these astounding results. The series was to be a precursor to Pablo’s dark, brooding works that cocked a snook at society for its ill-kept secret—the dark underbelly, the marginalized and then later the evils of a civilized world . It is here that he found his ready subjects—the offal of humanity.

“Again a few years later I photographed the Indian Chinese community in Calcutta. This was the first time that I attempted a large documentation on the lives of a community that was in transition,” says Pablo. If morphine addicts immortalises the self exiled urban youth in hypnotic trance, spaced out, with no cares, exuding a kind of self induced inertia of purpose in life, and a self centered disregard for all things outside their charmed circle; the photo essay on the Chinese of Calcutta transports us to another dark world, where an apology seems due but never sufficient.

“It was this feeling that drove me to explore the Tangra and Dhapa areas of South Calcutta, photographing amongst the Chinese community or whatever fragments of them that remained. Brutally mistreated, especially after the hate that developed against them as the ‘enemy’ following the national humiliation of India’s defeat to China in 1962.” It was a feeling of kinship, shared marginalisation, that drove Pablo on the assignment. Conscious of his mixed origin, it was a therapeutic exercise for the artist to give silent voice to the Chinese Indian community living in Calcutta since the first flux of settlers from Mainland China in 18th century. “My engagement with the Haka Chinese community in the Tangra area, this group who lived, owned and ran leather tanneries, and in a diminished way still does, was my first endeavour to document a community in transition, coming to terms with themselves, marginal, closed but proud, and friendly. It was also a way to look at my mixed Indian and Burmese origins and find away to deal with these churnings in my late teens and early twenties.”

The outcasts—so here perhaps was the reason for the angst ridden social exiles?

Pablo’s entry into photojournalism took a rather circuitous route. “In 1982 after earning enough money working in the Bombay Film Industry and Advertising and especially being paid quite handsomely on the sets of the film Gandhi, I was able to travel abroad for the first time and went looking for a photo agency,” recounts Pablo.

But before we jump ahead with our story, here’s a bit about Pablo’s brief brush with India’s great cinema factory—Bollywood. In 1982, Pablo was already a recognized name and working in films, fashion, theatre and much. His photo essay on the Chinese Indians of Calcutta came about during the time he working with Satyajit Ray on his iconic Satraj ke Khiladi for which he did the stills. In 1982, he worked with another masterpiece, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

From Delhi’s opium dens and domestic photography of his earlier phase he has graduated to the photographing those on the fringes and then the exiles—a progression of his artistic oeuvre—that exhibited his expanding world vision of human suffering in a world of painful imbalances.

Pablo’s progession into a renowned photojournalist came at this juncture. “I was able to travel abroad for the first time and went looking for a photo agency. It was through this process of finding Gamma-Liaison, a French American Agency that I started this part of my career in 1983 with some early assignments covering the Nellie Massacre in Assam, the start of small Sikh protests for more water and electricity that led to the Khalistan movement, to opertaion Blue Star and the storming of the Golden Temple, Indira Gandhi's assignation to the anti Sikh riots. The coming of Rajiv Gandhi to power, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, V. P. Singh and Mandal Commission, Babri Masjid and this list goes on as a documentation of what went on in India and some of the neighboring counties in South Asia from a period of 1983 – 2000.”

India and its tryst with various viscious hours have been captured for posterity through pablo’s lens. But why always choose the dark side of the moon as his subject?

There is a practical reason of course, for the delineator of harsh realities is no dreamer. “When you work in news, it's “Bad News” that is more compelling. And in the news business, photojournalism is the foot soldier in the process. So you are very much a part of a system that you feed and this beast mainly wants “Bad News”.”

He gave plenty of the particular feed to the beast. The graphic picture of a baby’s burial during his coverage of the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 won him the Picture of the Year in World Press Photo Award. International recognition and many key assignments later he remains the same Pablo.

Richard Bartholomew, an art critic and photographer was Pablo’s first teacher, critic and lifelong inspiration. “My father was my primary influence. Many things were learnt at home—watching, hearing and practicing. It would be no difference from let’s say a musician/ dancer family where the younger members learn from the elders. A lot of it is by watching and observing and practicing by yourself.”

Growing up in a modern liberal environment (Pablo’s mother was a Delhi University professor and a theatre enthusiast), Pablo, imbibed the multi-cultural influences that were present at home. His work and life are a reflection of this cultural sophistication.

With many critically acclaimed exhibits to his credit, when asked to name the most memorable to him, Pablo says, “For me the most important is the trilogy of exhibitions that deal with my teenage diary, 70s and 80s - Outside In, A tale of 3 cities (2007), Bombay - Chronicles of a Past Life (2012) & Calcutta Diaries (2012). Through these three exhibitions I am able to revive a time and an era of some of these cities and the way people lived in the streets. This is most important because there is very little documentation about urban India from that time, the culture and the aesthetics that exisited then.”

The stark realities of lives and times are reflected through the images of this era. They are portraits of real people, telling stories of everyday life. There are no models and no photoshopping. It’s stark truth that peeps out at the viewer and hits one with the reality of it all. The portraits are so revealing that you feel you are peeping into their lives through an open window, unknown to them, as they go about their activities and the business of life.

Part of it, seems like a coming of age and coming to terms with life through photography—Pablo has called it “slow photography”, from the lens of an outsider looking at marginal and urban subcultures that he unfortunately abandoned. Back from the world of fast photography and worldwide recognition, he continues “to work on very long term projects. I have been photographing the Indian communities in different parts of the world. I started this in 1987 in America and then gave it a break and did France in 2009, Mauritius and UK in 2010 and now will do Portugal in 2014-15. More recently, my father’s family in Burma found me. That part of the family I had no idea about and there is a whole documentation that I have started around them.” The other thing that has kept him busy is personally archived shows of his and his father’s photography. While “more time and money,” are on his wishlist going forward. “one is limited by one’s life that one has and within that how much time and money one can find and raise to do all the projects that I dream up, he says. But what he would definitely be leaving behind as his legacy for the world of art enthusiasts is “a great archive of my father and my work that will let the future generations enjoy and understand are past.” Padma Shri (2013) awardee Pablo Bartholomew has covered all frontiers of human frailty and documented them for posterity.

With Narendra Modi at the helm of affairs allegedly there have been quite a few changes in the manner we conduct our business: if the news reports are to be believed babus are now spending less time on golf courses—and more on their jobs. If we are to believe the dailies, the bureaucracy is finally growing up. Reading this (obviously light) report (meant to be taken with a pinch of salt) I found myself thinking about strong leadership. What makes a good leader? If you ask me, a true leader is a role model for his superiors and juniors, knowledgeable in his field, and worthy of respect. I cannot vouch for other people, but I count myself as fortunate growing up while being mentored by one such leader. July always, without fail, brings to mind my dear Father, the man who valued fairness, transparency, hard work, and compassion above all other virtues. If these are not measures of good governance, what is? Even as a daughter it is but natural that I would admire my father. However, what about the others in the office; his peers and juniors. I see them missing him every single day. I cannot help but be proud of the man he was. I miss him too: I miss him with every editorial decision that I take. Also, like every parent he also gave us “tough love” if need be. Long before he assumed power, our PM, too, had indicated that his government’s approach to economic reforms would be through tough love. Sometimes tough love is necessary—it is what mothers would tell you is the best for a child. Perhaps, this rail fare hike is just the beginning to a longer process. Because if our economy needs to more than survive, it needs to move towards a transparent pricing. That would include every item, rail tickets to resources. Not that we spoke a lot on the issues of money or those at the helm of power, but it was wickedly entertaining to talk to Shobhaa De about her country. Gracious, educated, sharp and witty, De has never been one to mince her words on what she feels needs to be said. Neither did she in this interview.

As usual there are the sections all lined up to entertain you. Marryam H. Reshii travels to Kerala to sample the food and talk to the people in God’s Own Country. We travelled a little less—to Khan Market in fact—and spoke to the owners of Mamagoto about food, fun and expansion. Do write to us and give us your feedback dear readers, especially about the Hindi row. What is your take on the issue?

Smart and sassy; writer, designer, and political and social commentator, Shobhaa De has worn many hats in her decades-long career. With DW she talks of her first love—writing...

In 2013 French champagne brand Veuve Clicquot honoured author and columnist Shobhaa De with the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award. Regarded as the ‘Oscars’ for female business leaders...

...Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award, celebrates entrepreneurial women who have made a substantial contribution to business, society and culture. De happens to be the only other Indian woman to be honoured with this award. An interesting trivia here; the very first Indian woman to be honoured ever was Bengaluru-based entrepreneur and Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. Well, that’s Shobhaa De for you. In her sixties, the writer seems far from ever slowing down. Indeed, her energy would rival a bunch of teens on caffeinated drinks. She continues to surprise everyone with her ventures while continuing to casually shrug away “comments” about her.

I remember a long time ago, an acquaintance (posh but generally alright) had casually remarked about meeting Shobhaa De at a party. As I quizzed her about the ‘meeting’, it turned out that it was never much of a meeting—rather a brief nos. I needed to know more—was De, well, all De? My acquaintance seemed confused by my interest. Perhaps because I am what I am—a stumpy and bespectacled journalist proof editing copies on sanitation—who should not show interest in “the glamour set”? However my interests in De had never been about “glamour” of being De. She has always cut a fascinating figure. You see, it is hard to not like a woman who is unapologetically herself in every situation. When we are done merely talking about gender, identity and feminism (which is about freedom to choose our words, our wars, careers, education and our lives), when we finally sit down to think, isn’t it exactly what we are telling our children to be? Be yourself? Anyhoo, about the acquaintance, she did use a few words to describe De (some favourable, some not), and two stuck for good; positively electric.

If you have been living under a rock, we should introduce De. She is an author of bestselling novels, a socialite, a former beauty queen and a model, a widely read columnist, a designer, the writer behind popular television serials; and, allegedly, the “Jackie Collins of India”. (I do not have a clue if De likes this comparision but she might be amused?) De is an icon for innumerable female fans both here and abroad. She is all these while also being a wife and a mother to a rather large family of seven. And in 2013, she became a woman with a vine named in her honour at the Veuve Clicquot Vineyards at Reims which is in the Champagne- Ardenne region of France. Yes, the lady simply makes the rest of us look lazy.

What sets De apart from the rest of her ilk—though does she really have any peers who have achieved this much and more?—is her incredible passion for writing. De popularised the Hinglish style. In other words, if you are reading the accessible, easy-peasy Indian authors or you love Chetan Bhagat, then thank De—she carved the path to plain Indian English that these boys and girls later followed.

Those of you who are wrinkling your noses right now, after the Sea of Poppies was released, author Amitav Ghosh conceded that his tone and language in this particular book owed something to the style used by De in Stardust years ago. Oh yes! De was also the youngest editor at Stardust. She was all of 23 years. She started as the writer of Nita’s Natter, giving readers a glimpse into the Hindi film industry. De re-invented Stardust and made it into the sensation that it was. In one of her earlier interviews, De admitted that like her, “Stardust broke all the rules” and that even today she is proud of her baby. “You can take the woman out of the magazine but you can’t take the magazine out of the woman,” she had said.

Perhaps it was because of her obvious successes that there were as many critics of De as there were admirers. Let us admit right at the beginning that Indian media went all creative when it came to criticising De. She was the Maharani of Malice, the Empress of Erotica and the Princess of Pulp (what’s with the alliteration?). But the mocking seemed to roll off her like water on duck’s skin. When asked about generally scathing reviews her books seemed to garner always, she commented that the reviews were “so predictable”—“Regardless of what I write, the reviews read the same” she believes. Guess having a hefty pay cheque at the end of the day really serves as a salve?

“I feel like, if what I am doing is not serious enough, then surely the world’s universities wouldn’t be studying me and surely there wouldn’t be over a 100 doctorate theses and dissertations on my work which are available in libraries around the world” she says, adding emphatically, “But all that is not my concern, for me it is as simple as if this is the book I want to write, than is this the book I want to write.” For those uninitiated, De’s novels are featured in the postgraduate popular culture curriculum of the University of London. Her dozen-odd novels all begin with the alphabet S, except one. Allegedly, she loves the sound that words with ‘s’ makes. Her novels include Shobhaa at Sixty: Secrets of Getting it Right at Any Age, Sandhya’s Secret, Superstar India , Strange Obsession, Socialite Evenings, Snapshots, Starry Nights, Spouse, Speed Post, Surviving Men, Selective Memory: Stories from my Life, Second Thoughts, Small Betrayals, Shooting from the Hip, Sultry Days, Uncertain Liaisons and Sisters. Yes, the S-obsession is serious. The author has also been on the list of ‘50 Most Powerful Women in India’ a number of times and has graced several literature festivals across India. De is not non-conforming to make a statement. It is simply the way she is. “In my process of writing there is no self consciousness, it is not a performance, and it is not an affectation. This is the way I write. This is who I am.” De was born as Shobha Rajadhyaksha in Maharashtra on the January 7, 1947. She completed her graduation from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and obtained a degree in psychology. But soon after she started off working as a model. In her sixtieth year, De released Superstar India, her 15th publication. Superstar India was a celebration of India’s booming economy. But it was not a La Vien Rose homage to the boom. As she said in an interview, “I have seen a lot of change, some good, not all of it good. The book is a truthful reflection of that change. Some of it pains me, others actively hurts me. What I know and am writing about are these things which we should do. Why aren’t we doing it”?

In the 2012 Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai, De released Sethji, her seventh novel, about the travails of a corrupt old politician from Delhi—which seems to be one of the interests that De has written extensively about. Though her most famous novels have been pulpy chronicles about the Hindi film industry and its socialite circles, Sethji represented a departure. While De’s fiction never tackled national politics, her journalism and commentary frequently concerned itself with the vagaries of power. “Power equations, the way they are changing and how they affect our landscape intrigue me,” she says in an interview. “I use fiction as a way of exploring that.” “Skills as a storyteller come to your help when you write about anything. Just like you don’t have to have travelled to the moon to write science. The world of politics has always fascinated me. More than the life of a politician, what fascinates me is the use, misuse and the application of power in today’s India. And you can’t do a preachy little book about power; no one will read it. I prefer to use fiction as my way of exploring that. You do not put your books into a weighing scale. You write the book you want to at the time. And I write in torrents; it gushes, it’s cathartic, it’s exhilarating. This was definitely one of those books— when I was keying it in sometimes I was so impatient I’d make mistakes. I was just trying to keep up. And this is the first book during which I had tendonitis. I had to have it surgically addressed. I wrote the first third of it in longhand, as I do all my books, but I had to switch to a laptop because I couldn’t hold a pen.”

One of the most prolific writers in English language in India, De seems to breathe and live her passion for writing. “It’s what I look forward to the minute I wake up and it’s what I take to bed. I write 1,000 words everyday. Just like your voice becomes more muscular if you do your riyaaz everyday, you get more confident about your range. Your voice acquires a certain quality over time. That doesn’t come if you’re lazy. And writing is my treat, by the way. When I feel really good, I write an extra 500 words just to reward myself.

Once readers actively hated De’s frank depiction of sex. But today there are more and more writers who are candid about not only their character’s sexual lives and sexuality— but also of their own. Does De believe that this is a welcome change? Well, for De, it is a bit of a double standard as the sentences may have changed but attitudes have not.

“When I began to write my intention was never to shock in the first place. There are two novels which have perhaps explicit sexual content. The rest are more suggestive about how a woman feels about her body. It’s not erotic in the classical sense of the world at all. But if you go looking for it, honey, it says something about you. But I think more than even writing about sex, it’s women with attitude, who speak their minds, who know what they want, are far more threatening. Humour, satire, sending yourself up; it’s never understood.” Like several other writers, De has her own modus operandi while writing. “When I write a book I avoid reading fiction altogether. It can get very demoralising. I’m essentially a magazine junkie: I read a lot of newspapers.”

At 60, nothing seems to have changed for Shobhaa De. She is vivacious, beautiful, outspoken (nay outrageous), and one of India’s biggest success stories. The critics love to hate her, but she remains one of India’s icons. Her columns have appeared in almost every Indian newspaper and magazines (Putting Sex in the Sensex led to a twitter storm). Personally, I hope I have the chance to meet her at a party with the “glamour set”. It would be a treat to hear what she would have to say.

Bitter Medicine that must be Swallowed for Economy’s Sake

Hike// Attacking the previous government, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu on June 22, 2014, said the hike in rail fares was “thrusted upon” by the UPA, but it was a “bitter medicine” that had to be swallowed in the interest of sound health of the economy. “It is the result of the misplaced populism of the UPA’s 10-year misrule. The railways are bleeding. Former Railway Minister (Mallikarjuna) Kharge had sought and received approval of the PM (for hike) ahead of interim budget,” Naidu told reporters here.

The Union Urban Development and Parliamentary Affairs Minister said, “The Railway Board has moved now to give effect to what then Railway Minister and Prime Minister had concurred.” Naidu explained the sequence of events relating to rail fare hike beginning with a proposal being made on February 6, 2014. Photocopies of an official circular dated May 16 regarding revision of passenger fares were distributed to the media. Noting that only 4,000 out of 12,000 trains announced by successive railway ministers during the last 10 years have been introduced, he said the present railway projects need Rs five lakh crore for implementation. He said the UPA has “derailed the economy” and tough decisions have to be taken to put it back on track.

Aplogise to BMC

Eviction// In June 2013, the Supreme Court had ordered families occupying illegal flats in Mumbai’s Campa Cola Society to vacate the building by May. Their deadline to hand over the keys ended on June 12, 2014, but the residents then threatened to pitch tents in the complex. The residents moved the Supreme Court to buy more time to help legalise their home of three decades. But the court on June 3 rejected their plea and ordered them to vacate their flats. Seven high-rises were constructed at what came to be called the Campa Cola Compound, between 1981 and 1989. The builders had permission for only five floors, but constructed several more. The residents have been fighting a legal battle since 2000, when they first went to the Bombay High Court to legalise their water and power supply.

The Campa Cola society’s battle, reflecting the housing struggles of Mumbai’s middle class, has been an emotive rallying point for politicians over the years and is likely to get more play ahead of the Maharashtra state polls later this year. “Why single out Campa Cola when there are thousands of illegal buildings in Mumbai? The government is not responsive,” said the BJP’s Shaina NC, who has also joined the protests. In their appeal to the President, the residents have mentioned about the ageing population living in the society. They have also suggested ways to legalise the structure. Much hinges on the President’s reply.