The Darling Books of May

So what’s cooking this month at Westland/Tranquebar? Grab your seats at a banquet of infinite variety laid out by Prema Srinivasan in the Pure Vegetarian Cookbook. Like the best books on cuisine, this one doesn’t just dish up a boring list of recipes, but examines the ethos behind each inviting offering.

And here’s another view from the kitchen. Apparently, it’s a man’s place! Jugaad chef Samar Halarnkar’s comes with rare culinary advice in The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking,  directed at men only. There goes another female bastion.

More lessons—of a different kind—from Certified Speaking Professional Scott Friedman, the author of several innovative writings on business efficiency. Best of all, his Celebrate proves, point by point, that happiness at the workplace has an exponential effect on the bottomline.

Sometimes, 13 is not an unlucky number. Demonstrating that is Baker’s Dozen, an anthology of shorts by both new and established writers, brought out in a joint effort by Elle India and Westland-Tranquebar.

Soumya Bhattacharya’s next, with If I Could Tell You, which comes in tender compelling prose that conveys a father’s rendering of his own life to his daughter.

We’ve also got four new books by Deepak Dalal (all Silverfish-Westland releases): fun and useful reading for your children and—probably—you.

In Beauty Unleashed: A Comprehensive Guide to the Perfect Skin and Hair, international skin and hair care expert Dr Dinyar Workingboxwalla brings you comprehensive information on what to look for in grooming products, on how many of these can be found in your kitchen, and how to maintain the looks of a model. A sample passage is available in the May issue of our newsletter, Tranquebar Times.

And three generations come together to make up A Sense for Spice, Tara Deshpande Tennebaum’s lively description of what goes on in a Konkan kitchen, and what the diaspora has taken from it. Look for the interview with her in Tranquebar Times!

Multi-faceted writer, Adil Jussawala, has written Duckbill’s wonderful Right Kind of Dog, poems for young adults illustrated by Westland’s design chief, Gunjan Ahlawat, and you can find another interesting interview on Page 11, where Asha Nehemiah, author of Staying on My Toes Happily, elaborates on the joys of writing for children.

Celebrations are in order!

Extract from the forthcoming title, Longing, Belonging: An Outsider at Home in Calcutta by Bishwanath Ghosh

Extract from the forthcoming title Longing, Belonging: An Outsider at Home in Calcutta by Bishwanath Ghosh

THEN ONE EVENING, in the autumn of 2010, I found myself in the dimly lit confines of Trincas, the restaurant on Park Street. I was sharing a table—laden with bottles of beer and varieties of kebabs—with two men who were distantly related to my wife and were now my friends. The live band was in attendance, and all eyes were on the singer—a small woman, mildly plump, wearing a black cocktail dress that was short and tight.

‘How old do you think she would be?’ one of my companions asked.

‘Twenty-five, or twenty-six?’ guessed the other.

‘Are you out of your mind? I first came here some fifteen years ago and she was here even then. She couldn’t have been singing here at the age of ten.’

‘Then how old do you think she is?’

We all looked at the woman. Under the soft lights, it was impossible to even guess. We returned to the beer and the kebabs.

Later that evening, as we stepped out of Trincas, I asked the liveried doorman who had just saluted us, ‘That woman singing inside, how old do you think she is?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Since when has she been singing here?’

‘Since a long time ago.’

‘How long?’

‘Very long.’

‘And since when have you been working here?’

‘Since a long time ago.’

‘How long?’

‘Very long.’

‘Still?’

‘I don’t remember the year, sir. When I joined, Usha Uthup was still singing here.’

A long time ago. This was an expression I was coming across often in Calcutta. And the ‘long time’ would invariably be traced back not to a particular year but to the lifestyle indicators of the time.

One waiter I had spoken to at Olypub, also on Park Street, had come from Orissa at a time when one drink at the bar cost Rs 1.75 and a cotton vest was sold in the market for Rs 1.25. A little distance away, on Camac Street, is stationed a cart that sells dal vadas. The joint is called Victoria Vada because the owner had started off by hawking wares outside the Victoria Memorial a long time ago—when the rail fare from Jaunpur, the town in Uttar Pradesh where he had migrated from, was seventeen rupees and a meal could be had for ten annas. And now the doorman at Trincas was telling me that he had come from Bihar when Usha Uthup was still the crowd-puller at the restaurant.

Men like these expected me to do back-calculation on the basis of nuggets their memory could serve. But how was I to know which year a cotton vest cost Rs 1.25? As I prodded them for more clues about how long was a long time ago, I realised that these people have been living in Calcutta, doing the same thing they are still doing, from the time I was born—even before.

They are still around, so are the places. Except the escalation in the cost of living and biological aging, very little change seemed to have taken place in their lives and, by extension, in the parts of the city they were serving. This also meant I still had a chance to make up for not having grown up in Calcutta.

At the same time I could not think of relocating to Calcutta, mainly for the fear that its charm may begin to wear off once I had become a resident. Surely there must be other ways of knowing a city where I could not be born but would like to die—someday—to eventually mix with the soil that had given me my surname?

So that night, even as the age of the singer had remained undetermined, I became determined to write this book. That way I could return to Calcutta soon—and return more often.

By the time I hailed a taxi from outside Trincas, my mind had already begun working on a synopsis—even though I had barely finished researching a book about Chennai I had signed a contract for and was a long away from delivering the manuscript. Looking at one city as a subject had given me the courage to look at another. In a way, I was going to follow the footprints of the East India Company—first in Chennai, then Calcutta.

Interview with Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times

What made you do this book?

As a political journalist and writer I have always been drawn to successful political leaders who took decisions despite all opposition and not because of certain considerations. Without endorsing their position – even their seemingly authoritarian ways – there is need to understand the psyche and making of such personalities. Early in my career I was drawn to conflict reporting and when Hindu nationalistic politics came on the centre stage in the 1980s, I gravitated to its pursuit. Modi was a subject who fits the bill on both counts. It only helped that I had known him in his formative years.

Do you think Modi is one of the most charismatic/ controversial politicians in post-Babri India?

Without doubt, in post-Babri India, Modi is the most polarising political leader. Almost everyone has an opinion on him. His importance is more important because he does not have a political pedigree and no single patron like several of his peers. Modi is at the position where he is by sheer grit, astute positioning and remarkable leveraging of fault lines in his political fraternity. Modi’s preeminent position is also because of the ruthless manner in which he channelized the sentiment of hatred for his personal and political benefit.

Considering the subject alternated between hate and adulation, did you have to do the balancing act all through?

During the conceptualisation stage of the biography, I decided that the book would not be an essay or an opinion piece on Modi. Once I decided to distinguish between analysis of news, events and actions of Modi from my opinion on them, it became very easy to maintain the right balance between hatred and adulation – the two most important emotions that Modi generates. There are times when my opinion does reflect on my analysis, but this is rare and only when the situation makes it unavoidable.

What are the challenges in doing a book of this kind in terms of the lack of ‘enough’ history to back up a protagonist like Modi?

The biggest challenge was that this was a biography of a living leader who was still a participant in the making of future histories and that I did not want to write a hagiography, yet wanted access to him. The other challenge was to ensure that the research and writing did not get inundated in the post-2002 hatred that Modi generated while simultaneously making sure that I did not get swayed by sycophantic viewpoints that abound his personal terrain. I was also confronted by the fact that several facets of his persona are shrouded in matters that are sub judice and that most events pertaining to his life are too recent – even continuing – to take a reasoned historical look.

You are an expert on Right wing politics; do you think Modi has somewhere redefined the idioms considering he is seen more through the prism of development?

With the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Hindu nationalist forces played out their trump card. Its leaders argued that the Ayodhya agitation was not for a temple per se and instead to invert the prevailing understanding of the idea of secularism. But the BJP came to power only after compromising on key ideological issues and on its principal ideological mascot. Modi has revered this trend – albeit so far in a restricted sense, but also raising the spectre of doing so at a much wider, maybe even at an all-India scale. Modi revived the lost aggression of the Hindutva idea and has been steadfast in being unapologetic about it. Despite speculation he has made it evident that his availability is strictly on an ‘as-is-where-is basis’.

What was most riveting thing about Modi when you met him for the several interviews and what was that one thing that sets him apart from the others?

The most riveting characteristic of Modi is that he exudes power to hide certain obvious weaknesses. Like any emperor who owes his position to the awe he evokes and not the love that he generates, insecurity drives many of his actions – some of which he may later repent. But Modi is extremely methodical and disciplined. He is also a great seeker of information. He uses every tit-bit of information, so much so that many of his assertions after our meetings reflected some of what had been talked about. Unlike most political leaders, Modi is unabashed about everything. Be it his politics of hate, his fondness for a lavish wardrobe, fancy accessories or even his disdain for views that are contradictory to his. There is no wavering in his conviction that only his way is the correct one.

Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times will be released on May 1st 2013.

 

A Saga Waiting to be Told

Doing What is Right: The CRISIL Story is more than a corporate biography for Hemanth Gorur and Sumit Chowdhury. From conceptualisation to publication, it represents more than a year of whirlwind conferences, exhaustive research and painstaking recording of the remarkable events that transformed CRISIL from India’s ratings pioneer to a global analytical company. The authors, for whom this was their first corporate book, narrate in their own words how a call to arms from CRISIL’s management set in motion a series of events culminating in the book’s release.   

Quite by chance, CRISIL’s senior management was privy to one of the biographies previously brought out by our company, My Life Chronicles, and they liked our writing style. And so it happened that one fine day in July 2011, we received a call from them to commence an engagement to bring the CRISIL story to life. Prior to this, we had only brought out only personal biographies; so a book on CRISIL’s twenty-five-year evolution was a quantum jump in scale and execution. However, the project itself was so prestigious that we didn’t hesitate before saying yes.

The first thing we did was get an idea of the company’s story. As we listened, our amazement grew. Born in the stagnant Indian economy of the late 1980s, CRISIL seemed destined to fail. Instead, rock-steady values, visionary leadership and an obsession with ‘doing what is right’ at all times, irrespective of the consequences, made it one the most respected companies in the Indian and global markets. It all added up to a heady story that was ripe for the telling.

Next, we sat down to crystallise the vision for the book and set the tone. This set the stage for the creation of the storyboard — the high-level design document of the biography and the most crucial cog in the project. We decided on a biography based on ‘themes’ rather than a chronological treatment — an approach that worked in retrospect.

While the detailed storyboard evolved, the interview process with various CRISIL stakeholders took off in right earnest. Recurrent themes were identified and questionnaires carefully aligned to the themes. Over the next three months, Sumit assiduously conducted interviews with close to forty-five luminaries of the financial and management worlds, intent on knowing all that there is to know about CRISIL. Meeting some of the industry icons — Pradip Shah, Deepak Parekh, U.K. Sinha, Chanda Kocchar, K.V. Kamath, Rama Bijapurkar — face-to-face was an experience in itself. The result was a treasure trove of primary information with some startling revelations that prepared the ground for the next phase — actually putting words on paper.

Over the next eight months, Hemanth painstakingly recreated in words the events that dotted the twenty-five years of CRISIL’s existence. His ability to craft episodes and conversations from the maze of research inputs came to the fore as the chapters evolved. While he supplemented the information from the interviews with some old-fashioned web-trawling and various company artifacts, what also came in handy were the newspaper cuttings preserved by CRISIL’s founder Pradip Shah since the late ’80s!

Months of unrelenting effort paid off as the CRISIL story finally emerged. In true CRISIL style, it was a subtle, yet defining statement of the brand. What sets the biography apart from most other corporate stories in the market is that the book talks more about how things happened rather than what happened. Thus, it is a commentary on CRISIL’s personality, much less its chronology.

The journey of bringing the CRISIL story to life was as important as the destination itself. The response from readers to Doing What is Right: The CRISIL Story has been a delightful affirmation of the fact that there could not have been a better time to bring CRISIL’s saga to life.

Hemanth Gorur and Sumit Chowdhury are co-founders of My Life Chronicles, a Bangalore-based boutique writing house that crafts biographies of companies, individuals, families and institutes. Sumit Chowdhury is an IIM-B alumnus who worked at Infosys and Honeywell in his previous life. He loves devouring books and preserving memories. Hemanth Gorur is an IIM-C alumnus with long stints at IBM and Genpact under his belt. He is an author, biographer as well as humour blogger.

Aarthi Ramachandran explains why the Jaipur coronation marks a decisive moment in Rahul Gandhi’s political journey

When Decoding Rahul Gandhi went to press in July 2012, a bigger role for Rahul Gandhi was in the works. After months of speculation about designation and timing, the 42-year-old Rahul took over as Vice President of the Congress on 19 January, 2013. The long-awaited event happened at the Congress chintan shivir (brainstorming session) in Jaipur. It marked a decisive moment. If it was a personal milestone for Rahul, then it was no less momentous for the Congress. The baton had been passed to the next generation, the dynastic leadership tradition renewed.

For Rahul, it was also a moment of growing up. He was taking centerstage finally, eight years after he joined politics. In this period, he had been operating on the margins of politics as the All India Congress Committee general secretary in-charge of the Indian Youth Congress and the National Students’ Union of India. He shied away from the day-to-day running of the Congress and articulating his views on important national issues. The irony of the situation was not lost on anyone – Rahul was no marginal man. As the chosen inheritor, he was the de facto number two in the Congress.

The Jaipur coronation altered all this, simply but inexorably. He was now accountable, not just powerful.

Towards the end of an emotional speech at Jaipur, Rahul Gandhi, Congress VP, showed he understood things had changed, quite literally, overnight. ‘…for me the Congress party is now my life. The people of India are my life,’ he said, sharing with an auditorium full of Congress leaders and workers, how he woke up in the wee hours of January 20 to a sense of ‘responsibility’ for all those ‘standing behind’ him.

The rank and file of the Congress will have big expectations of Gandhi in the days to come, not to mention the polity as a whole. The biggest is correcting the Congress-led United Progress Alliance government’s image deficit as he spearheads the party’s 2014 general election campaign. His performance will be a measure of how much he has learned in the many years he spent preparing for his new role.

Aarthi Ramachandran is a political journalist who has worked with leading Indian newspapers such as The Economic Times and Business Standard. She has written about the Congress for the past seven years and tracked Rahul Gandhi’s political career closely.

‘TAMASHA IN BANDARGAON’ SHORTLISTED FOR THE SHAKTI BHATT AWARD!

Tamasha in Bandargaon

Tamasha in Bandargaon, by debut author Navneet Jagannathan, has been shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2012!

Congratulations, Navneet! We wish you all the very best!

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About the book:

In the fictional suburb of Bandargaon, tucked away in Bombay, there’s never a quiet moment. Dreams erupt, hopes shatter, in the heaving Sunrise Apartments, by a rickety tea-cart-Jinias Chai Hause, inside a seedy Jaanam Desi, and by the dilapidated Purana Qila.

Chagan, the dashing hero, who shines like a film-star, spends hours wooing a beauteous Shalini. Shalini, ever fickle, oscillates between him and a pining Vinayak. Vinayak, in turn, tries desperately to win the favour of Shalini’s mother, Lakshmibai. Elsewhere, the local politician, Sajjanpur, tries winning an impossible election; Miranda, a sullen mortician, seeks answers from an ailing priest; and Sultan, the irascible grocer contends with an overfriendly dog.

Reminiscent of R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days, Tamasha in Bandargaon, with its interlinked stories, with its effortless dialogue and wry humour, is at once enriching and entertaining. In the young debut writer’s imaginary world, there’s sound, fury and the distant glimmer of hope.

About the author:

Navneet Jagannathan spent the early years of his life in Mumbai and Bangalore. He then moved to Singapore, where he is currently based. He works for an FMCG major, and writes in his spare time. Tamasha In Bandargaon is Navneet’s first novel.

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Order your copy now on Flipkart!

http://www.flipkart.com/tamasha-bandargaon-938162626x/p/itmd45ghhfrwnuyr?pid=9789381626269&ref=82531a1f-49a0-4da7-8ac0-f0aa9c88bb3f

THE PANT THAT TRAVELLED INTO THE AFTERLIFE by SORABH PANT

Comedian and Author of, The Wednesday Soul, Sorabh Pant talks about the limited options for travelling into the world of death.

I have never died.

This is an extremely disappointing fact to live with, especially since I’ve written a novel on the afterlife. It saddens me that I’m denied the chance to do on-field research on the world I have written 226 pages about. It would have really helped if Mr. Thomas Cook and his BFF’s, Raj or Kasturi Travels had the courtesy to start a 7 day package into the world of the afterlife. They’re anyway running out of places to travel, this seems like the logical next step.

But, alas – my words have not been heeded and I’ve had to rely on my own twisted mind to figure out what the world of the afterlife would look like. I looked at some great travel books into the world of death, books written by people much greater/smarter/spiritual than I: guides such as The Bible, The Quran and The Garuda Purana (Hindu book of the dead). And, all these guide books on the afterlife constantly mention three places worth visiting in the afterlife: hell, heaven and limbo.

They also indicate that most of us would not get a visa for any place barring hell. Some of us may enter the land of Limbo – and even though, it sounds like a place where Spanish people dance – there’s little else to do there, aside from wait. It’s like a Doctor’s Waiting Room, but, marginally longer and with less magazines. Really, really bad tourist spot.

Obviously, Heaven sounds like a cool place – the Switzerland of the afterlife – but, the standards to get in are extremely high: you have to be a really, really, really (*8) good human being. You can’t even take a shortcut: you can’t bribe Mother Teresa or be Mahatma Gandhi’s relative or tag along with the last Dala Lama – you personally have to be a good person. The paradigms are just ridiculous. I mean, why create such an idyllic place if you refuse to allow more than a decimal point percentage of people to get in? Why can’t I get the chance to Instagram a photo of me standing in front of the Pearly Gates? People are so snooty.

Amidst the rules, here are some rules for heaven that if you don’t follow, you could land up in boiling vat of hot lava being laughed at by every dictator in human history:
- Any impure thoughts that would make a nun smirk.
- Saying, thinking, hearing, breathing or forwarding via email any thought/joke/meme that offends the name of God.
- Almost every kind of sensual delight that does not involve the production of children.
- Gluttony, sloth, impurity and all the byproducts of living in a world with the internet.
- Being part of the UPA Government. (This one is at least valid.)

All in all, as per most holy books – most of us are all sinners and completely beyond salvation. Fortunately, we have reincarnation that gives us another shot at life. Of course – the problem with reincarnation is it involves a whole circle of life and they’re no dancing lions involved! Once you die as a man, you’re probably going to come back as a three-toed sloth. That sounds fun – all you need to do is hang around on a tree, eat leaves and be called, “So cute. He’s the Shahid Kapoor of the animal kingdom”, by female anthropologists. However, you then have to be a crab, an insect, bacteria, toe fungus, an infection of the buttock of Osama Bin Laden’s cousin brother and over four thousand other living beings before you come back as a man. That, to use a Katy Perry term – sucks big time.

And, that’s the whole point – the afterlife is hard work, which is why I decided to write about an afterlife that was fun and logical because God has a sense of humor. I know this because Fardeen Khan still has a film career. The result of this thought is, “The Wednesday Soul”. It’s a book that I’m extremely proud of and I hope it prompts you to laugh in the face of Death’s bony face!

(And, maybe spend some of your money in this life.)

Sorabh Pant is “one of India’s top ten comedians” (Times Of India), a twitterholic (@hankypanty – http://bit.ly/Kgkegg) and the proud author of “The Wednesday Soul”.
You can buy your slice of this manic afterlife here: http://bit.ly/yB7hOH