Sachin TendulkarLet’s begin with a thank you Mr Sachin Tendulkar! There comes a time when individuals have to perform that last job; write that last piece; say their last words; or pick up that bat for the last play. It is inevitable. But your last moment got me thinking of the time spent watching and knowing you when you were young. The first time I met you, you were a mere school student of 14, and there you were sitting cross-legged near Shivaji Stadium with a stern Achrekar Sir looking at me and judging me on whether I was “spoiling” you with too much attention.
The first time I met Tendulkar, I was there to write an article for Sportsworld; about the greatest school boy cricketer. I remember before the meeting, Ajit (Tendulkar’s brother), the unsung hero, gave me a cyclo-style sheet with a small introduction. It carried the cricket scores of Shri Sachin Tendulkar. That year he had scored a 5,028—I remember well. I still have that cyclostyled sheet of paper. I also remember Ajit giving me some of Sachin’s photographs. Sportsworld gave me `200 for the photographs as they were not mine.
On that day, I saw Tendulkar bat very briefly at the Wankhede Stadium. It was a Ranji match against Delhi. Tendulkar was barely a teen and boy! He was having fun!
The day I really saw Tendulkar in his true form was when he played for the Irani Trophy. By then he had already played cricket for an year. Despite his scores, Tendulkar had not been picked for the 1989 team which was slated to go to the West Indies. Tendulkar expressed his disappointment. Had he been there he would have faced an attack from stalwarts such Ambrose, Walsh, Anderson, Bishop and Marshal. Someone asked Tendulkar, but aren’t you afraid? What if you got hurt? Tendulkar said, I would learn if I did. He wanted to play—he wanted to learn at any cost. By the time Tendulkar had made his tonne in the Ranji, Dillip and Irani—and on the day he made his 100 in the Irani Trophy—that evening he got selected to play his first match against Pakistan.
For a 16-year-old it is a meteoric rise. When he was about to be officially selected, a debate raged within the official circles on whether Tendulkar should be picked. When the topic cropped up, Raj Singh, the chairperson of the board of selectors and a genuine cricket lover, asked Naren Tamhane about Tendulkar’s prowess and capacity. What if he fails? He asked.
confidently Tamhane said, Sacin never fails. So much confidence in a 16 year old who had just a year of playing cricket. That was the kind of buzz around Tendulkar in 1989.
By 1996, Tendulkar was embarking on a new phase in his career. Between 1996 to 2003, one could say, Tendulkar took batsmanship to an entire new level. That was when—if you were watching him—there would always be a little quiver in your voice, a slight tingle in your hands, when he went up to bat. You would think what is this little man going to do today to stun us? In those days, Tendulkar wasn’t the scientific batsman with his perfect slog here or a nod there. In those days, it was a full on passion play for Tendulkar.
His demeanor seemed to say, “This is me, you all are wasting your time by trying to scare me as this is how I am going to play.” I am choosing this phase’s starting point in 1996 World Cup at Mumbai.
His innings at the match was breathtaking. But if you ask me what are the five most breathtaking tons that Tendulkar played, I would also mention Edgbaston—Tendulkar was blossoming, hitting shots everywhere. Then in 1997 in South Africa him and Azzaruhddin made 220 in 40 overs. In two years Tendulkar had the world at his feet.
Chennai was perhaps one of Tendulkar’s favourite batting ground. In 1989 at Chennai, Tendulkar was pitted against Shane Warne. He got out in the first innings bowled by Warne, caught by Taylor. In the second innings, he allegedly looked around and said, “You know someone has to make a really quick 80 to win us this game.” People asked, who? He simply said, me. Tendulkar went to the crease, Warne went round the wicket, Tendulkar played a slog over mid wicket and just redefining the series then and there. In 1991 game against Pakistan—Tendulkar played with a back spasm and against a fabulous Pakistani line up. But one should have seen how he was stroking the ball at the edge. Between the two Chennai innings, he gave his defining ODI phase in Sharjah. During the same phase he also made a tonne in Melbourne. His bat always spoke for him. The 2011 World Cup was one of his life’s highlights at the end of his career. If throughout his career there’s been one shot that I wished Tendulkar would play over and over is standing up and punching through the back foot—to me that was always a pleasure to watch. And his last two matches, he gave us so many reasons to cheer! —As told by Harsha Bhogle
Raghuram RajanThe day that Raghuram Rajan, an economics professor who served as the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), took charge of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from former Governor D. Subbarao, he allegedly recited a poem by Rudyard Kipling. If by Kipling is about determination, to do “right” despite odds. To those who know him, his introductory speech did not seem odd. You see, Rajan, is a bit of a legend having predicted the 2008 economic meltdown three years before it struck the world. A graduate from IIT Delhi and a postgraduate from IIM Ahmedabad, the economist is also a prolific writer and has served a stint at the American Economic Review and the Journal of Finance as well. At 50, he is the second-youngest governor in RBI’s history (our present Prime Minister still remains the youngest governor).
But the timing of his appointment could not be more—to borrow a cricket parlance—“off”. India was failing to stabilise its financial markets, the Rupee was sliding against the Dollar, a deluge of negative factors were converging within the markets. The GDP growth in the first quarter of 2013 had slipped to 4.4 per cent the slowest pace of quarterly growth in four years. There was rising inflation; high consumer price inflation, and subdued factory output growth.
Despite the dismal economic weather, Rajan’s entry seemed to have a strange sunshine effect both on the market and on the common people. Investors cheered. In fact a popular writer and socialite in India, Ms Shobhaa De went to the extent of writing that the economist, “put the sex back in Sensex”. The effusive praise and the high expectations could be—should be—daunting. However, the governor, so far, seems unfazed. His approach was one of talking smaller steps and those closer home. His job at hand can be deduced to three simple steps; tame inflation, reduce interest rates and spur growth.
And so far he seems positive as is evident in one of his recent articles (yes, he is a prolific writer, did we mention?) he wrote, “...India can do better–much better. The path to a more open, competitive, efficient, and humane economy will surely be bumpy in Ahmedabadthe years to come. But, in the short term, there is much low-hanging fruit to be plucked. Stripping out both the euphoria and the despair from what is said about India—and from what we Indians say about ourselves—will probably bring us closer to the truth.” About the euphoria bit, strangely the governor himself made the comparison between cricket and economy when he said that Indian’s reaction to both was bi-polar.
In his article for project-syndicate.org titled The Case for India, Rajan writes, “Indian cricket fans are manic-depressive in their treatment of their favorite teams. They elevate players to god-like status when their team performs well, ignoring obvious weaknesses; but when it loses, as any team must, the fall is equally steep and every weakness is dissected. In fact, the team is never as good as fans make it out to be when it wins, nor as bad as it is made out to be when it loses. Its weaknesses existed in victory, too, but were overlooked. Such bipolar behavior seems to apply to assessments of India’s economy as well, with foreign analysts joining Indians in swings between over-exuberance and self-flagellation. A few years ago, India could do no wrong. Commentators talked of Chindia, elevating India’s performance to that of its northern neighbor. Today, India can do no right.”
Rajan sees the more immediate tasks (to help the economy recover) as more “mundane” and also more feasible: clearing projects, reducing poorly targeted subsidies, and finding more ways to narrow the current-account deficit and ease its financing. “Over the last year, the government has been pursuing this agenda, which is already showing some early results. For example, the external deficit is narrowing sharply on the back of higher exports and lower imports. Every small step helps, and the combination of small steps adds up to large strides. But, while the government certainly should have acted faster and earlier, the public mood is turning to depression amid a cacophony of criticism and self-doubt that has obscured the forward movement,” he said in a recent interview.
India does have some serious problems. Annual GDP growth has slowed significantly in the last quarter, consumer price inflation is indeed high, and the current-account and budget deficits last year were too large. Every commentator today highlights India’s poor infrastructure, excessive regulation, small manufacturing sector, and a workforce that lacks adequate education and skills. These are indeed deficiencies, and they must be addressed if India is to grow strongly. Given the challenges that our present strapping governor faces, his capacity to join the dots across both domestic and global economies will be put to test soon—if they have not been already. And only time will tell whether us Indians will truly see a Sachin in Rajan, our second hero.
Arushi Case EndsVERDICT// ‘Circumstantial evidence’ provided by CBI sealed the fate of Dr Rajesh Talwar and Dr Nupur Talwar in the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case in the end of November closing perhaps one of the most prominent murder cases in recent times. In its order, the court discussed 26 points that were brought by the prosecution during the trial to buttress its case. The court noted that in a case “where there is a fight between ocular evidence and documentary evidence”, the documentary evidence prevails. During the trial, the CBI had alleged there were only four persons in house—two were found dead (Aarushi and Hemraj) while other two (Talwar couple) committed the crime. To back its claim, CBI produced maid Bharti who was the first to visit the flat. The CBI had also told the court that the crime scene had been ‘dressed up’ by the dentist couple (parents to one of the victims) while forensic doctors claimed that Aarushi's private parts were post mortem. The defence's counter was that a poly-light test conducted in the flat did not bear out this charge of cleaning up of evidence. The post-mortem report, on the other hand, did not say that Aarushi's private part had been cleaned. The court accepted the CBI’s argument and said that from the evidence it was ‘adduced’ that the accused persons destroyed the evidence, cleaned the house, etc. It mentioned that there was tacit approval of the accused persons in cleaning of the apartment where the murders took place. On Nupur Talwar’s involvement in the murder, the judge noted that the manner in which the murders were committed, it could not have been a ‘handiwork’ of only one person.
Named Accused in Sexual Harassment CaseHARASSMENT// Tehelka founder-cum-editor Tarun Tejpal was arrested for sexual assault on his junior colleague (who resigned following the incident) in November, in Goa, sending shock waves across the country. On November 30, Tejpal was interrogated by Goa police crime branch at their office in Dona Paula. The interrogation lasted five hours after which he was taken to Panaji police station lockup.
Earlier, Tejpal was remanded to police custody for six days and was later taken for a medical examination later. Tejpal was interrogated by investigating officer PI Sunita Sawant. Police began interrogating, seeking to corroborate the sequence of events which the victim had stated in her complaint.
Police have seized Tejpal’s cellphone so as to secure the conversation between him and victim. During the hearing on the remand, Goa police had informed the court that Tejpal’s interrogation was required to bring on record the emails exchanged between him and the girl. The survivor had earlier gone public stating that her former boss had sent her incriminating emails and sms-es pressurinsing her to keep the incident under wraps.
In December, Goa police told the court that Tejpal must have sent the email either from his personal cellphone, laptop, office computer and friend's computer or from other sources which need to be seized. Goa police also said a police team will be sent to seize the items.
Police had sought Tejpal’s custody for 14 days. Tejpal’s lawyer Geetha Luthra argued in court that 14 days police custody was not justified.
Mixed Reactions in IndiaVERDICT// RJD chief Lalu Prasad was given five-year jail term in the fodder scam case. In December, Lalu Prasad moved the Supreme Court seeking bail. An apex court bench headed by Chief Justice P Satahsivam, before whom the matter was mentioned by senior advocate PH Parekh assured that the case would be taken up.
Lalu, whose Parliament membership was taken away after being convicted in the case, moved the apex court challenging the order of the Jharkhand high court which had dismissed his bail plea. The Jharkhand high court had on October 31 rejected the bail plea of RJD supremo, who is lodged at the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi.
Lalu, another former Bihar chief minister Jagannath Mishra and 43 others were on September 30 convicted by the special CBI court Judge Pravas Kumar Singh in the fodder scam case involving fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 37.7 crore from Chaibasa treasury during the Laluled RJD regime. Ailing Mishra secured provisional bail from the high court till January 8. The CBI court had pronounced varying prison terms to the convicted persons on October 3. RJD chief Lalu Prasad, who is undergoing a five-year jail term in a fodder scam case, on Monday moved the Supreme Court seking bail. The former Bihar chief minister is tending lawns, flower beds and vegetable patches at the jail in Hotwar, after he was allotted this work a week ago. The Jharkhand high court had rejected his bail plea on October 30. The other convicts in the scam 3 IAS and 1 IRS officer have turned teachers inside the jail. According to sources Lalu is enjoying the work as he is supervising work and instructing other gardeners. He will get a day off each week. Spread over 52 acres, the jail boasts of well-maintained lawns, gardens and vegetable plantations. Jail authorities decided not to allot him teaching due to security reasons, though Lalu holds a political science degree.
Around 30 per cent of the 3,000-odd prisoners at Hotwar are hardcore criminals and 10 per cent Maoists. But Lalu Prasad lives in the VIP ward. His room has an attached bathroom and he gets TV, newspapers, magazines, a mosquito net, cot, bedding with two pillows and separate cooks. “I allotted him gardening work after considering all aspects of his work. In case of a teaching job, Lalu needed to be in a hall with around 300 criminals, many of them extremely dangerous,” said jail superintendent Virendra Kumar Singh. Former IAS officers Fulchand Singh, Mahesh Sinha and Beck Julius, and IRS officer A.C. Choudhary, teach inmates pursuing distance learning courses.
State RecoversDISASTER// Very Severe Cyclonic Storm Phailin (sapphire) was the strongest named cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, caused substantial damage in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa, India, in early October 2013.
It was also the most intense cyclone that crossed Indian coast after the 1999 Odisha cyclone. The system was first noted as a tropical depression on October 4, 2013 within the Gulf of Thailand, to the west of Pnom Penh in Cambodia. Over the next few days, it moved westwards within an area of low to moderate vertical wind shear, before as it passed over the Malay Peninsula, it moved out of the Western Pacific Basin on October 6.
It emerged into the Andaman Sea during the next day and moved westnorthwest into an improving environment for further development before the system was named Phailin on October 9, after it had developed into a cyclonic storm and passed over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands into the Bay of Bengal.
And a quick look aheadI have a confession to make. As an observer for all things social, I’m often asked to predict the course of social media as it unfolds on the consumer and business landscape. Here’s the truth—I’d probably be in better shape trying to predict the USD-INR exchange rate or the fortunes of the BJP in the next elections. Because nothing, I repeat nothing, changes faster, and more unpredictably, than the social media landscape. That disclaimer in place, here are my informed predictions—call them educated guesses, if you will—about how social media will evolve in 2014.
Google+ Resurgence: Google+ has long been tagged as just another social attempt in a long line of social letdowns by Google. Not any more—it’s quickly gaining steam and currently ranks second only to Facebook in terms of unique monthly users! What’s more, it’s increasingly harder to ignore. Take Google’s latest moves in this space— the redesigned YouTube comment section now requires users to have a Google+ account or a YouTube channel to comment. No longer is it just another social network, disconnected from Google’s overall strategy. With Google using the social platform to collect personal information, such as demographics of its users, location of your posts, who you’re with when you’re out and about, Google+ is increasingly proving itself to be an integral part of Google’s grand scheme, both in terms of search engine optimisation, capturing vital social signals and providing a more personalised search experience. It also helps that brands love Google+ due to its heavy visual appeal, and I expect many to focus their social media marketing efforts onto the Google+ platform in the coming year.
Images over Text: What makes something sharable? If you see the skyrocketing popularity of sites like Pinterest, Slideshare and Tumblr over the past year, one common characteristic emerges—the ‘shareability’ of visual content. In 2014, how likely a piece of online content is likely to be shared among users will be directly related to how many visual it is—both in terms of the number and appeal of the images used. Visual content will progressively become a vital piece of any complete content strategy, and social networking site Pinterest will continue to widen its demographic from being largely a ‘women’s only’ network and become an integral part of merchants’ marketing strategies.
Video Gets Hotter: If a picture tells a thousand words, imagine what a video can do? Short videos, in particular, are a quick, inexpensive way for a brand to tell a story, and Vine and Instagram have only fuelled the fire that was already ripe for the lighting. Videos will take a key place in the social media marketing toolbox for brand professionals, and the challenge for marketers will be to get their point across in ten seconds… or less!
Facebook Plateaus: With well over a billion engaged users, half of which are active on a daily basis for an average of 20 minutes a day, Facebook is still the dominant force to be reckoned with in this space, both for consumers and marketers. Yet, in several developed economies, Facebook growth is slowing down, and in some cases, decreasing at an alarming rate in the teenage segment in particular. Platforms like Snapchat—that let you send out messages (text, photo or short video) that auto-destruct after a preset time limit— are snapping away at Facebook’s heels by addressing privacy issues that plague the popular platform. For brands and smaller businesses too, Facebook is akin to a noisy marketplace, where it’s getting increasingly difficult to have your voice heard and build an active community without allocating considerable investments, both in time and money, and it may push these smaller brands to niche less crowded networks.
The Rise and Rise of Twitter: Fresh off its IPO, 2014 should be the year that Twitter takes its rightful place in the sun. Granted, with a public presence comes increased scrutiny, but the attention will bring a number of latent users and curious eyes onto the platform. And Facebook’s loss will be twitter’s gain—a study recently conducted shows an increasing percentage of teenagers were jumping ship from Facebook to twitter simply primarily because ‘there is less drama’ associated with being on twitter, as also that it was easier to fly under parents’ radars on the 140-character social platform. Brands too have rapidly embraced twitter, not only as a customer service and outreach platform but also for generating leads for potential sales.
Be LinkedIn…or be LeftOut!: Still holding steady as the place to be for business professionals, LinkedIn will power through 2014 with its new Influencers Program and position itself not only as a job and professional networking site, but as one of the largest sources of content creation and curation for professionals.
Nowadays every time I need a laugh, I fall back on autocorrect optionsALL OF US have encountered this slightly irritating person at some point in our lives. Someone who claims to know the words in our mind better than we do so that when we begin speaking, he will prompt the next word, all this in the tone of a friendly conversationalist. There is even a genre of jokes about this category of people. The ones that annoy me most are about husbands half-answering questions meant for their wives. I find it insulting to the wife’s purported lack of intelligence of course, but I am also equally outraged by the portrayal of the husband figure who comes across as a traffic policeman giving directions before the change of signal.
Our phones—and our computers— now have this annoying beast trapped inside them. I do not know what gender to ascribe to this meddlesome person—Mr Autocorrect or Ms Autocorrect. How old is this person, I ask myself, and my answer usually varies between extremes, a brat and an intrusive old aunt. What exactly does Autocorrect do? It would be too simplistic to say that Autocorrect mind-reads. What it actually does is that it finger-reads, the way a person who has problems with hearing might lip-read. Well, if that isn’t irritating, why is Autocorrect so disliked? The primary reason behind that could be that Autocorrect behaves like a shrink who knows you better than you know yourself. It’s like your father telling you that you will never be happy with the person you’ve decided to marry because he knows you better than you do.
My introduction to the world of autocorrect was about a decade ago when it lived as the T9 dictionary option on my inexpensive cell phone. A Luddite for all purposes, I did not know about the existence of this resident genie. Every time I would type a text message to my mother in Bangla, the words would take on new lives. I would scold my fingers and retype. The results were hilarious: my poor mother would call me back with two questions – had she gone so old that she could not make sense of the English sentences that her daughter wrote to her? Her second response was confessional: perhaps English Literature graduates used a discourse that was unintelligible to most? Soon enough there were noises circulating in the family, all until my cousin turned off the T9 option.
Nearly half a decade of my Facebook life has made me a veteran collector of autocorrect malapropisms. A few days ago, harassed by the autocorrect option on my iPad, I put up this status update: Sometimes autocorrect can be a shrink. Like when it changes “pyar” to “pharmacy”. I had been trying to write down a stanza from an old song that had got lost from my memory, and suddenly, having caught it on a neighbour’s radio, I wanted to note it down. But autocorrect wasn’t in the mood for love. It wouldn’t let me write pyar, and corrected it to “pharmacy”. Where else could I vent my disgust except on Facebook? Soon my friends were lodging their own complaints. Bari turns to bride, complained a Bengali friend, angry at this metamorphosis of the house to the bride, but that was not all. Tomar bari was being changed into Tom Brown. That was grossly unfair, it was true, “your house” turning to “Tom Brown”. For another, “Gurgaon” had been changed to “purgation”, an error that gave many much pleasure, given the number of likes the comment received. And, of course, given the number of poets on my friends list, there were numerous comments about love, illness, pharmacy and the cure. The websitefunnpickens.com lists 25 hilarious autocorrect failures, but it’s the playing out of autocorrect when used in the Indian languages that yields the richest harvest of I-didn’t-mean-that-of-course. Having clapped from the fences for a few years now, I notice that autocorrect becomes censorious when it comes to PDA (Public Display of Affection). It is not only “pyar” that changes to “pharmacy”, but “muuah” is sobered down to “mutual ah”.
Nowadays every time I need a laugh, I fall back on autocorrect options. A few months ago, a friend faced this: ‘Every time I type hahaha, autocorrect changes it to bananas’. Comments about going bananas and banana republic were inevitable. The other time, the poet Divya Rajan complained about the difficulty of wishing her online friends on the occasion of Onam: ‘Not a political statement of any kind. Whenever I type Happy Onam, my autocorrect changes it to Obama’. I couldn’t decide which was better, that or my friend Priyadarshini’s problem— ‘Every time I type my name, autocorrect changes it into Oriya’; or my colleague Puneeta’s, who has had her name changed to “puberty”. The writer Sampurna Chattarji has had her name changed to “Samurai”. If you thought it couldn’t get worse, read this Facebook post by Pranaadhika Sinha Devburman: ‘... my surname is spelt “Devburman” and not “Doberman”. As much as I love you *repeats chin tickle*, I refuse to change that’. When I narrate this to my husband, he repeats his old complaint with a sigh—his surname is “Ghosh”, one that autocorrect changes to “ghost”. The best story about autocorrect changing names comes from the publisher Karthika VK. “Every time I write Ravi, autocorrect changes it to David”. Reading that in the context of Indian English publishing, with its back story about the publishers Ravi Singh and David Davidar, autocorrect takes on a new prescient role.
A few days ago, I made a note about Bimal-da, our carpenter, on my iPad. An amateur singer of kirtans, a raconteur of the best kind, a moralist always on the verge of calibration, a spiritual wanderer, Bimal-da is one of the most interesting people I have met. It is another matter that most people call him ‘mad’, a fact that he is acutely aware of. I was noting down a devotional Bimal-da had been singing. When I typed his name ‘Bimal’ on my iPad, autocorrect changed it to ‘normal’. I wanted to tell him that—he would have laughed, this joke returning on him, every time he said ‘I’m not normal because everyone else is’. I ignored autocorrect and typed his name again. ‘Bimal’. This time autocorrect changed it to ‘nomad’. When I paraphrased that for Bimal-da, he left immediately. Turning back near the door to speak to me, he said, ‘It’s a prophecy. It’s true. I cannot be at one place for a long time’. Autocorrect, also known as “Cupertino error” after the city where Apple has its headquarters, had got that right.
Kalki Koechlin talks about the art and craft of performance; both on the stage and on screen...A magazine recently pegged Kalki Koechlin as one “among the foreign actresses struggling to create a niche for themselves in Bollywood”. Apart from being problematic at several levels, the sentence indicates that Koechlin has a ‘long way to go’ despite an impressive CV—sure, who doesn’t? It also suggests that Koechlin is essentially ‘foreign’. Yes, Koechlin (pronounced as kekla) was born to French parents. But, since her birth (in a village on the outskirts of Poducherry), the young woman has been a part of this country’s billions. “My parents were the first few people to plant the trees when Auroville was just a barren land with sand dunes. But they left soon after, by the time I was three. They travelled to Ooty, Mysore and Bengaluru.” And the only time Koechlin left India, was to attend a degree in drama and theatre from Goldsmith College in London. After her degree, she worked with a theatre company—Theatre of Relativity—for two years. From eight till 18, Koechlin was in Hebron School where she remembers being influenced by her English teacher Mrs Angie Dodds. “She was an animated woman, who would narrate stories beautifully. She also started the school’s drama club. I was eight.” It also helped that she was quite the mimic and often landed into trouble for imitating the teachers.
So, what was her first role? “I was angry and disappointed when I was selected to play a sheep in the Christmas Nativity. I was not even an angel!” she answers with a laugh. Fortunately, it was a speaking... um... bleating role. Kalki’s first “proper stage role” was of Titania from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dreams. “I also remember a play called Beggar’s Bowl, which was my first dark role. My dark side had already come out at a young age,” she answers with a chuckle. “When Midsummer Night’s Dream was judged as the best play, I was thrilled! It led me to believe that I was a creative person, definitely useless when it came to mathematics or sciences. For me, it was always going to be either writing or theatre. So when I was applying for universities, the course offered by Goldsmiths seemed familiar.”
Script writing, set designing, acting and directing; it was quite a broad course that Koechlin took up. In her words, Goldsmiths was an unconventional theatre school with a heavy Left leaning, one which might have added to the overall ‘alternative’ life learning. Post Goldsmiths, Koechlin stayed on in London with the theatre group that her peers had formed, performing and touring. “We wanted to do relevant theatre. There were a lot of improvisations, the actors contributed to the script quite a lot. At the same time, I was trying to earn money by teaching drama at an all-boys’ school for about an year. My students were pre-pubescent and teenage boys. It was tough keeping their attention. I suspect they didn’t take me very seriously, but drama was a fun activity, and they liked me because I taught it.”
Despite the great start to a career in London, it was always about coming home for young Koechlin. “London is an amazing, eclectic city, but it is also tough to live in. If I had to choose any place in the world to stay, it wouldn’t be London.”
After she returned, Koechlin headed straight to Bengaluru were her family was. “Six months later, I had moved to Mumbai. I travelled to Mumbai basically to audition for a play, Casanova.” In between theatre to keep things floating, Koechlin tried her hand at modeling mostly for television before being shortlisted for the role of Chandramukhi (Chanda) in DevD. Thanks to DevD, Koechlin was soon being noticed and there were whispers about a French girl, a girl-woman with ‘beestung lips’ taking on roles both brave and different. Post DevD, industry people did seem to realise (a bit) that Koechlin was not interested to play the videshi bahu, the loose moralled white girl or the bimbette in the background. Koechlin also continued her work with theatre and remains one of those actors whose heart is strongly rooted in theatre—she calls it her acting gym. “As an actor the stage exciting. It’s not something I want to ignore or can. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to do simple commercial films,” she adds. Her following films were Shaitaan with debutant director Biju Nambiar, Girl in Yellow Boots with Anurag Kashyap, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara with Zoya Akhtar, My Friend Pinto, Trishna and the commercial success, Yeh Jawani Hain Deewani!
In between, Koechlin patiently handled the job of explaining to everyone interested, how she was not quite the “foreigner”. And her name. Or how her surname is pronouned.
Is it irksome to be constantly reminded of the so-called difference between her and the other actors around? “I don’t get offended but in some situations I feel conscious of it.” The constant reminders also stoked the creative fire. “Frankly, I never really knew where I belonged, which is why perhaps I wrote or got up on stage. I want to be understood, I believe all actors do. My affair with the stage is also about a curiosity— about me and the other. My parents let me be and there was never any code of conduct to follow or diktats on who I could be with. So, I have had a mixed set of friends. Perhaps that has fed my curiosity. I am always excited to meet people from all places. When I pick up a character I am far more excited researching her; what is she like, where is she from, what is she thinking.” Which leads us to pertinent point—what is the process of preparation?
“It really depends on the film that I am doing. For a commercial film there is a lot less detailing, may be because the character is more familiar. The film that I wrapped up recently Margarita With A Straw is one where I play a character with cerebral palsy. At the beginning, I was completely in dark about how to proceed. Then, I met, talked to and spend time with people who had worked with individuals with cerebral palsy and people who had the condition. I visited Adapt, an organisation run by my director’s cousin, they work with people with cerebral palsy.
“In this case, the preparation started with actual physical contact. I found it useful to start from outside and then internalise. I thought about the clothes that my character would wear. Stuff that is easy to slip on. Would she wear make up? No. How would her body be, how will her muscles develop? Afterwards, I peeked into the significance of what she is—how do people treat her and how does she react to the people? I always find it useful to start from the external.”
While she’s busy acting both in films and on stage right now, Kalki says she’s more comfortable on stage. “Writing does not give me the kind of high that acting does. Writing has always been therapeutic. I write poems and short stories when I get ideas. But you need energy for acting.”
An interesting bit about her; Koechlin is named after the Kalki avatar—‘someone who brings light in times of darkness’. So, no pressure then?
The scion’s stories... ends up being just terrifyingIN THE PAST month, Rahul Gandhi addressed campaign meetings in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram, the quintet of states that saw elections. He brought up a whole range of issues— his mother, father, grandmother, the assassinations of 1984 and 1991, religious violence and terrorism, the Muzaffarnagar riots and the allure Pakistan apparently holds for sections of Muslims in UP, the BJP’s alleged commitment to “capitalism”, the Congress’ solidarity with the poor, mosquitoes, infections and so on.
Before moving into an assessment of Mr Gandhi’s speeches and his possible motivations, it has to be made clear that his interventions were largely irrelevant to the state elections. They were on a tangent to immediate currents and political discussion and debate. Quite frankly, to use a colloquial expression, he was on his own trip. What was and what is Rahul Gandhi’s trip? An analysis of Mr Gandhi’s references to the assassinations of his grandmother and father, and to his recollections of October 31, 1984, and the run up to the murder of Indira, would suggest he was trying to garner sympathy before the coming Lok Sabha election. This may be unfair and untrue. Nobody believes, and certainly Mr Gandhi and his political confidants would be strange to believe, that a tragic event in 1984 will lead to an outpouring of sympathy and overtake all public issues in 2014. Politics doesn’t work like that.
What Mr Gandhi was perhaps attempting to do was introduce himself to his voter, or would-be voter, with the 2014 election in mind. Of course, it is possible his timetable is different. Admirers of Mr Gandhi and sections of the Congress helpfully point out that, “He is focusing on the election after the next one. That is what he is playing at.” If true, this is mystifying. The general election after next may come in 2015 or may come in 2019; before that, there is a big, challenging electoral battle in 2014. If Mr Gandhi is not concentrating on this task, as some of his acolytes argue, then it defies logic.
Why is Mr Gandhi trying to introduce himself to the voter? He recognises he is the face of the Congress in 2014, even if not declared prime ministerial candidate. He sees himself as someone who is in politics for the long haul. He sees it as useful and even imperative to establish a connection with his voters. As such, he wants to tell them about his thoughts and feelings, his emotions and inspirations, his hopes and his fears, his personal background and his social experiences. Inevitably, family memories come into the mix. As a template, this is unexceptionable. Take a parallel political phenomenon. Narendra Modi is travelling around the country, introducing himself to voters. He too is talking of his hopes and fears; he too makes references to his personal background, the struggles of his childhood, the fact that he sold tea in railway compartments as a young boy. So what then is wrong with Mr Gandhi taking a leaf from Mr Modi’s book and making emotional references to his adolescent years? The problem lies elsewhere. At a stage in Mr Gandhi’s narrative, his story stops being interesting and mildly emotive or even cringing and banal. It ends up being just terrifying. That stage is reached when the listener realises Mr Gandhi has almost nothing to say between the bookends of his engagement with India: between the stories of two assassinations and a boyhood full of innocent of not eating spinach; and the top-down poverty tourism of the past five-odd years that reveals itself in homilies—“There are two Indias, rich and poor”; “I met a poor woman, she wanted her son to become an IAS officer”; “I met a young man on a train, he had dreams”; “I slept in a village”; “I drank water from a well”. When Mr Gandhi resorts to simplistic axioms— “India is a country of inequality”; “A few hundred people run political parties in India”—he actually says nothing that this listeners don’t already know or that isn’t already patently obvious to them. Presuming Mr Gandhi means well and genuinely wants to be liked and understood, why is this happening?
The roots of the problem go back perhaps to the tragic assassinations of his early life. It is never easy to lose a loving grandmother and a father in the manner in which Mr Gandhi did. One would not wish that grief and trauma upon one’s worst enemy. Those events left Mr Gandhi with a sense of legacy and duty to the Congress and to India as he imagines it. Paradoxically, they also created circumstances that left him unprepared for public life. The assassination of 1984 ended all hopes that Mr Gandhi had of a semblance of a normal life in India. Security concerns shut him in an ivory tower, surrounded by a small peer group, many of whom were children of his parents’ friends. The paranoia of his grandmother—one that defined her politics and was born of her conflict with her aunts, and memories of the condescension with which Nehru’s sisters looked upon his wife Kamala—sublimated itself, in Mr Gandhi’s case, into an ivory-tower aloofness. As a result, he perhaps honestly believes his grandmother and father were spotless politicians and victims of conspiracies, and that Kashmir and Sri Lanka and Punjab were not of their making. This could well be his heartfelt perception, a centrepiece of the part-paranoiac, partepic family legend he has embraced. To add to this is a long absence from India, from the time he left to study abroad to his coming into politics in 2004. It is not that people who study abroad don’t understand India. Yet, in Mr Gandhi’s case his engagement with India was peripheral between his childhood–when he was engaged with a small aspect of India–and his recent political ventures. The latter have amounted to a rapid-speed attempt to come to grips with and sort of ‘invent’ an engagement with India. This engagement has obviously not been organic. At its best, this ‘invented’ engagement can be charming; at its worst it can appear stilted and artificial. In a nutshell, that is Mr Gandhi’s principal handicap.
When good karma goes badIn a popular couple, poet Kabir writes: “Guru Govind dou khade, kaake laagoon paye Balihari guru aapki, Govind diyo milaye.”
I have god and my teacher, both standing in front of me, whose feet should I touch first?
The lord then tells him to touch his guru’s feet first, for he was the one who showed him the path that helped him find god.
A guru has always been powerful in this country; he is the difference between an Arjun and Ekalavya; he can make or break lives. Add to this equation a bit of mysticism and divine intervention, what is born is someone who is not the one to show the path that may lead to god, but a version of god himself.
From Satya Sai Baba to Asaram, from Maharshi Mahesh Yogi to Nityananda, each of these has lived a life surrounded by controversies. Satya Sai Baba had several cases of rape and sexual assault trouble him all his life, yet his popularity graph was ever-rising, with famous people like Sachin Tendulkar becoming his devout disciples.
Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, who was popular for his friendship with the legendry British pop band The Beatles, also made headlines for the wrong reasons when he had a fallout with the band members after alleged sexual advances made towards Hollywood actor Mia Farrow and a few other women.
The notorious Nityananda has had several of such allegations, with a woman having accused him of rape for a continued period of five years. And, who can forget the case of the guardian of morality Asaram being accused of molesting a minor?
The neighbourhood where I grew up had a large number of followers of a sage from Poona. The family members of my childhood friends were devotees of the Baba. I remember going to their weekly gatherings where they would sing songs in praise of their guru, who called himself an Avatar of god. I used to be a regular to these 'meetings', as they were called, only because all my friends would be there and because I enjoyed the limelight as the lead singer of the pack. Not once in those meetings were the preaching of their guru discussed, these were only to sing paeans in his praise; it wasn’t educational, only blindly devotional. At that age, the lack of purpose in those meetings did not bother me, however, I stopped attending them and lost interest in the singing very soon. Also, the foremost disciple of this guru, behaved inappropriately with me. I was very young then, and he was in his seventies. It took me some time to understand that whatever was happening.
In the world of Godmen, in the business of faith, sexual assault is an everyday affair. It is done under the pretext of attaining enlightenment, it is done as a service to your guru, often, it is made to sound like a privilege that it is happening to you, for you are the chosen one, and you shall be bestowed with the wisdom of your guru. It is murky and dark, faith is a mind game, played with the vulnerable, the ones in desperate situations. In a recent article done by Open Magazine called The Sex Lives of Godmen, Mihir Shrivastava cites such horrific examples of violation done in the name of spiritual awakening or spiritual healing. For a man in position of power with several disciples at his disposal, misuse of that power is not too hard to imagine. In this drug-infested, dark world of sadhus, sex is often packaged as a cure, a route to self-awakening. As Shrivastava cites in his article, “Sex is the only way they get a high. Victims do resist the advances of godmen, but they often do not even realise when a red line of violation has been crossed. No consent is either sought or obtained, since rape is packaged as a healing process or some other form of blessing.”
With the changing times, as lifestyles are seeing a paradigm shift, where with the change of one’s socio-economic conditions, stress and insecurities are clouding one's mind, seeking asylum under the thick blanket of spirituality or religion seems like an apt escape from one's predicaments. However, what remains unexplained is the permanence of this faith that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continues to thrive. In the comment section of the Open, a reader asks for the other side of the story, the story of these sages. What is it that keeps us still hang on to these loose threads of faith? This quest for, what appears to be, a spiritual orgasm is as maddening as the thought of sex-starved sadhus on the loose. And yet, faith, in the minds of those hooked remains unquestioned. If one was to write the other side of the story, it would not be about the sadhus, it would be about the disciples who continue, with mad devotion, in the path of their assumed spiritual awakening.
After all, it was just last month when a local seer from UP called Shobhan Sarkar, the man who dreamt that over 1,000 ton of gold was buried under the ruins of a 19th century king, managed to convince the entire Ministry of Mining and the Archeological Survey of India to start the hunt for the dreamt gold. This incident, the gold that the ASI is looking for, if remained unfound, shall be remembered as a moment of madness, a footnote in the history of popular blunders. However, if the gold is found, it will bury this country into the same hole that the faith brigade has been ceaselessly digging for decades now.