Anil Ambani

Reliance Communications is "converting the whole of India into a hot spot", says company chairman Anil Ambani. "Wherever we have voice communication we have internet access." The 47-year-old business magnate looks pleased. As he should -- it's a good day and been a good year, as Reliance Communications announces its first dividend of 10% to celebrate profits of $734 million. It wasn't always this way. Two years ago when Anil Ambani took over Reliance Communications -- along with Reliance Capital and Reliance Energy -- in what was perceived as his less than fair share of the great Reliance industrial empire of India, it came with CDMA technology he wasn't particularly partial to. There was a huge dispute over call re-routing with state telecom companies. And he had a frequently defaulting low-arpu subscriber base. Today profits are up a staggering 612% over last year, subscribers have crossed the 30 million mark, arpu is up at 371 rupees ($9.08) a month and the network is booming. Some of this is, of course, due to the expanding market -- a market which is adding over six million subscribers a month and in which rival Bharti recently reported $1.05 billion profit. But industry observers credit Anil Ambani, junior brother to Mukesh -- who now heads the crown jewels of the empire, the petrochemical business -- with the astute financial restructuring that this Wharton School alumnus is best known for. Within a year of the split with warring brother Mukesh, Reliance Comm was listed and restructured. Today Reliance Comm's acquisitions -- such as the once loss-making submarine network Flag Telecom are doing well. Flag has expected revenues of $450 million. And Reliance, like arch rival Bharti, is betting big on the telecom infrastructure and towers business. The towers have been hived off to form a separate company, RTIL, with a valuation of $735 million. "It has got no debt, and so the rollout of 20,000 more towers this year can be achieved based on the company's own balance sheet, without Reliance Comm putting in any more capital," says Ambani. "All the new towers that we are building will be multi-tenanted and multi-technology. And lastly, since RTIL is debt-free, all the funding that the tower company needs will be on its own balance sheet, with Reliance Communications as its anchor customer and with other potential customers."

Tower auction
Ambani is ebullient on the matter of the towers and certainly it looks as if he has reason to be. For Reliance recently emerged as winner on crucial tower sharing auctions conducted by the Indian government of India out of the universal service obligation fund, to which all telecom operators contribute 5% of their revenues. "In the recent auction we've been the number one leader," says Ambani. Reliance will have to construct 500 of the total 8,000 rural towers, but this will give the company "access to towers that are likely to be built by BSNL in the remaining of 8,000 locations", he says, "and in these locations we don't have to pay any rental for the first five years". This is a major strategic advantage, says Ambani: "If anybody wants to come even close to operating in 8,000 locations, which is what we have achieved from the universal service obligation tender, it will require a multi-billion-dollar capex to do that. Also, the tower infrastructure that is being created is good for 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 4G -- whether it is GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, EVDO, or WiMax. So, we are investing for the future, and as and when these services have to be rolled out, we'll have a time-to-market advantage, apart from a cost advantage." The multi tech towers tie in with another Reliance ambition: the rollout of GSM services nationwide. This is a shift from its current position where it dominates the mainly two-player CDMA market with a 60% market share. It still has a small 3% presence in the GSM market. Reliance may have initially used CDMA to its advantage from 2003 by building subscriber growth by bundling cheap handsets and by reducing churn rates, but Ambani is keen to roll out nationwide GSM services. "We chose at that stage due to non-availability of spectrum to go CDMA," he explains. So Reliance has applied and is awaiting along with a whole slew of other telecom hopefuls, for spectrum allocation.

Spectrum auction
"They've been announcements coming out of Delhi that a large quantity of spectrum is due to be released in the second quarter," Ambani explains, "and we are waiting to receive GSM spectrum." Reliance has already pre-emptively invested in passive infrastructure. "We can, at an approximate cost of $1 billion, roll out nationwide GSM coverage in the space of one year," Ambani declares. Indeed nationwide network expansion is a prime concern for all the telecom operators operating in this market, with a remarkably low teledensity. Ambani is proud to point out Reliance's strategic advantage in this area, specially as private players go -- the state-run BSNL with its vast network of fixed lines is in a class of its own. Reliance is going "deeper down", he says, moving to towns with a population of 5,000 plus. Down and up as well: all the way up to the Hindu pilgrim site of Badrinath and Kedarnath in the Himalayas, situated 3,000 metres above sea level. There's a personal significance in this, for Anil Ambani who is deeply religious -- as was his self-made billionaire father Dhirubai Ambani, who founded Reliance Industries and developed it to become the first Indian company in the global Fortune 500 list. Dhirubai Ambani died in 2002. Flamboyant lifestyle notwithstanding, the younger Ambani makes it a point to visit the country's ancient Hindu shrines with his film star wife Tina Munim and his two sons, or with Hindi movie star friends the Bachchans. Today Ambani has an interesting little anecdote about inaugurating services in the Kedarnath pilgrim site: "When I met the chief priest there, a young man in his thirties, his first question was about internet access and email." Clearly Reliance's moves to data are being taken seriously at the highest level -- and just as well, for Ambani feels voice arpu could decline to as low as $2.47.

Talking SMS
There's clearly a market for value added services, Ambani says, and not just in the metros. Yet it's an undeveloped market, where the typical customer is a man who goes to a public call office to make one rupee -- that's two-cent -- call and doesn't know how to send an SMS. Reliance plans to address this segment with innovative products like "talking SMS". From talking SMS for rural customers to IPTV for the metros, Reliance is clearly looking to straddle it all. A look at the group's acquisitions over the last couple of years reveal as a larger plan at work. For if Sunil Mittal of rival company Bharti is referred to as telecom czar, Anil Ambani is clearly moving towards being entertainment czar. Reliance has 150,000 km of fibre optic network and it is looking to use this connectivity as its takes over some key content providers -- Adlabs, a multiplex major and film production house, TV Today, Big FM, Zapak, a the gaming portal, BigAdda, a social networking site -- to fashion a giant entertainment empire. "We're very much on track for both IPTV and DTH," says Ambani, referring to direct-to-home satellite television services. "We expect a nationwide launch of DTH towards the end of this year." And what of the battle for telecom market share? "In circles [licence areas] that we are operating both GSM and CDMA we have more than 25% share of the market," he says, adding that one of his objectives "is to shoot for a 25% market share across India in the services". Reliance has a much higher market share in a lot of its other businesses, he points out, "and naturally we would like to retain and maintain that. However we are not only committed to having market share. We are also committed to our EBITDA and our profitability -- so market share at what price is something we constantly evaluate internally." And yet Reliance, with deep pockets, has had a history of slashing prices to gain market share and I ask Ambani whether this will continue to be an area of focus?

Lower tariffs
"From a pricing perspective we're already seeing that the lowest levels of tariffs probably in the world are existent in India," he points out, adding significantly: "If there is room for more, more will come." Interestingly a few days after this conversation, more price cuts did come, with Reliance starting a virtual price war by slashing tariffs on roaming rates and on its international calling cards -- calls to the US and Canada at the equivalent of five US cents a minute. The company also introduced its lowest price handset ever: at $19 each, and the company was reported to have won a million new customers in the first week. Rivals immediately followed suit: Bharti and Hutch dropped rates and Tata Telecom lowered its bundled handset prices as well. Then Vodafone announced its emerging market handsets, priced at $25-$45 range in a move widely seen as one to challenge Reliance's economy handsets. In all this, Anil Dhirubai Ambani is clearly upbeat. He may have lost the competition for Hutchison's operation in February 2007 to Vodafone -- and with it the chance to be the biggest telecom operator in India -- but he remains unfazed. "I don't see much change," he replies to a question as to whether he considers Vodafone will intensify competition. "There was a five-six-seven player market, and there's still a five-six-seven player market. No there's no change at all: I think that if Vodafone is clear about the price that they've paid then they'll be far more cautious in trying to make money on their investment." At any event telecom in India is definitely a good place to be and as he says "the overall pie will grow and grow".

Alexandra Pringle

Editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle is in Mumbai and she’s being mobbed. Not surprising, considering Pringle presides over Bloomsbury, the world’s most glamorous publishing house. “I’d no idea there were so many writers”, Pringle quips, as member after member of the audience at the lit-fest discussion got up to tell tales of publisher woe. Later the array of aspiring authors surrounds Pringle, for tips on getting published in the West.

Two days later, we meet across town, at the Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. Pringle is there to attend readings by Bloomsbury authors like Esther Freud, soon-to-debut Tishani Doshi and Kamila Shamsie. We talk about Bloomsbury. Being at Bloomsbury, the house that is making its fortunes on publishing the amazing Harry Potter must surely be exciting in these Potter struck times. Little surprise then, that Pringle bubbles over with enthusiasm and animation. With a lively repertoire of tiny tales. Like the time she met Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. “It was at a fiction writing workshop in the States”, she explains.”Kamila’s was the only story in the whole bunch that was any good. So we got talking, and I discovered I had years ago, published her great aunt the Pakistani writer Attiya Husain.” The two kept in touch as Shamsie honed her writing . Today Bloomsbury is publisher for Kamila Shamsie’s novels, with her fourth novel ‘Broken Verses’ due in 2008 .

Alexandra Pringle prides herself on such personal connections, “As an editor you need to share an empathy with your author, especially for fiction. If there isn’t a personal connection it’s not going to work very well”. Bloomsbury is like this, she says. “It’s just the most wonderful company”; she applauds” Everybody at Bloomsbury really cares tremendously about the book”. It’s not always so in publishing and Alexandra is quick to point this out. Having moved to larger corporate publishing house Hamish Hamilton, after a beginning in the young feminist Virago Press, Pringle was put off by the culture .“Everybody was fighting for their own careers”, she complains. So much so that she quit publishing, becoming instead a literary agent, for little under 4 years, till Bloomsbury beckoned. And now it’s at “Bloomsbury till I retire, I hope. There’s nowhere else I want to be “, she confesses.

You’d expect the editor –in-chief of the world’s most record breaking publishing house to be passionate about books. And she is. Like a good publisher she shortlists at first, Bloomsbury authors like young Nigerian Helen Oyeyemi, Donna Tart and Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje’s new book ‘Divisadero’ , the story of a family getting fractured as a result of a passionate love affair, will be launched soon and Pringle sounds entranced. Austen is an old favorite , and Dodie’s ‘I Capture the Castle’ a recent one.

But Alexandra’s also passionate about other things. Like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald. And her houses. One in the south west of France and the other, her London houseboat.” It’s like a New York loft on the water”, she marvels, ”When you wake up , you hear the ducks and the swans and the water lapping, all this in the middle of London”

Also appropriately enough, she‘s a publisher who’s crazy about India. This is one place she keeps coming back to . The first visit was to Delhi and then to Rajasthan. ”That was it!”, She exclaims , ”I was besotted.” Then there was the trip with author Manil Suri ( The Death of Vishnu), that included a trip to Kerala and Madras. ‘The Age of Shiva’ Suri ‘s second book is forthcoming soon . “It’s stunning. One of the most beautiful and important novels to be set in India in years”, Alexandra raves.

And now there’s another India connection for this very animated, very elegant publisher. Alexandra has a nephew whose moved to Calcuta to work with ‘The Telegraph’. This is not counting her other close association with recently appointed editor-in-chief of Random House, Chiki Sarkar. “Chiki came to me fresh from Oxford”, Alexander reminisces,” and we worked very closely for seven years”. I ask her about Bloomsbury’s India plans, restricted right now to an association with Penguin.” Who knows”, she speculates,” I would love it if something would happen in India. Who knows what’s round the corner?”

This appeared in the Deccan Herald May 2007

Tishani Doshi

If dancing by day and writing by night seems fairytale like, it’s because a lot of Tishani Doshi’s life is like that. Five years after the half-Welsh half-Gujarati Tishani returned to hometown Chennai to write, she’s sharing the stage with literary heavy weights like Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka and Margaret Atwood at festivals round the world. “Countries of the Body’ her collection of poems has won poetry’s prestigious Forward Prize (the poetic equivalent of the Booker). And next year will see the launch of her debut novel ‘The Pleasure Seekers’ by power house publishers Bloomsbury.

Talk to Tishani and it’s hard not to be charmed. She’s earnest and speaks with a thoughtful, wonderfully deliberate intonation. Slim and fair with kohl rimmed eyes and long shiny hair, Tishani would do any book promoter proud. “Tishani looks lovely”, publisher Alexandra Pringle of Bloomsbury tells me when I mail her a photograph of the two together at the recent lit-fest in Mumbai. The meeting with Pringle, like Doshi’s introduction to dance and indeed much of the other exciting things in her life was serendipitous, when the two shared bed and breakfast lodging during the Haye literary festival. Pringle, who was so impressed with the prose and poetry Doshi showed her, got back to London and contacted Doshi’s literary agent, to sign her on in a successful scout for new talent process that will culminate next year in the publication of Tishani’s The Pleasure Seekers

Certainly there is something about Tishani that gets her powerful patrons. Take Peter Florence for instance, the organizer for the prestigious Guardian festivals. Florence who has an impeccable track record for spotting talent (having prompted Arundhati Roy long before she was recognized by the Booker) put the young debut poet on the same stage as Margaret Atwood and Seamus Heaney, as each read 7 minutes of their poetry to an audience 1200 people strong. That was last year. This year she shared the same forum as Nigerian poet Soyinka at Cartagena in Colombia.

And then there was the legendary Chandralekha who taught Tishani, when she was over 70 and Tishani 25 years, how to dance. “Come and meet me”, the Chandralekha asked the young Doshi five years ago, in a meeting in Chennai, soon after Tishani had come came back from a John Hopkins, USA. “And six months later, we were in Taiwan performing to an international stage and I was a dancer”, Doshi marvels. “It was like the best love affair”, she reminiscences of her bond with Chandralekha,” I had gone all over the world but never had this quality of relationship. For me it was being in contact with somebody who you could look up to at many levels, not just as a guru “. Dance for Tishani became a way of exploring the possibilities of her body, possibilities she never knew existed.

For a writer working ‘in great patches of solitude’ dance turned out surprisingly , “rewarding at a different level”. Like Tishani’s other passion – travel, and there’s been much of that for this young bag packer – from Ladakh to as far away as the South Pole. “The only thing I’m greedy about is travel”, she confesses,” anybody would say come and I’d go. If I can afford it, I just go”. Mostly the journeys turned out well but sometimes, like on a solo trip to the Greek islands, they didn’t feel all that great. Still as Tishani reasons “I don’t want to be too comfortable. I don’t want to have a house and two kids – for me that’s not where my writing comes out from .I want to experience somebody else life I want to be a fly on the wall “. It’s a creative position comes with its own particular perils. In a humorous take on singledom Tishani writes for a daily on ‘The Rains have come and you’re not married ? ‘. “It was borne out of frustration that piece “, she admits “The whole thing about being a 31 year old unmarried Indian woman - everybody is concerned about your well being – why aren't you getting married – you can be a writer and be married at the same time .I’d had it up to here if I have to hear about the M word anymore “, she exclaims. But the feature was “, she continues seriously “a deeper thing to examine the urban Indian woman … she has so many possibilities ..she can be a many armed goddess. Why not? Let’s do it.”

At 31, poet, traveler, dancer and writer Tishani Doshi is as many armed as many armed can be.
She talks about the differences of writing poetry and prose, the difficulties she faced in writing a novel “When I started writing I realized I hate narrative. I didn't want to write ‘He got up and opened the door’. But you have to write that sometimes , because otherwise the reader doesn’t know how it happened.” Doshi’s favorite writers like Marquez or Michael Ondaatje are not the most sequential writers either “what I love about them is their language – sometimes it doesn’t matter if you don t know what’s going on “. Ultimately though she analyses, “a novel requires great stamina because you have to hold the entire thing in your head , like a 100,000 words at a time ” . A poem is different,” like a little jewel”. Sadly today poetry has become a marginal activity, with none of the following a poet like Pablo Neruda inspired. “80,000 coal miners would come to his readings “, she exclaims.

But then, as she concludes “ultimately you have to do what you love – if you want to make money you become an investment banker or something”

This feature appeared in the Deccan Herald April 2007

In Search of the Perfect Swimming Pool

Bombay for me has turned out to be the city of swimming pools. Never mind that I grew up in Jamshedpur, where club memberships (complete with pools) were offered to us all on a platter. I still didn’t know how to swim. And so it was that when I arrived in Bombay, 24 years old and with a newly acquired job, I couldn’t so much as float.
But where could you swim; in a city were club pools were the preserve of those with old money or of those with new? Where the vast Breach Candy swimming Pool across the road from my exorbitant paying guest pad, was still ‘Mostly European only’?

Plenty of places, it turns out, though this was a discovery I was to make in need-to-know driblets. First there was the YMCA pool at Agripada , the generously populated pool my banker friend and batch mate K went to. Despite a childhood full of air force station postings, K like me could not swim. Now driven by hitherto undiscovered aquatic instincts, she woke every morning at five, to trek to the crowded pool where coaches stood out of the water and desultorily directed the cork float trussed up tenderfoots . 30 coming-to-work-with-dripping-hair days later, she had , for less than the price of a restaurant meal, learnt to swim.

As for me, I had would have to wait four years , two shifts of residence and one baby later, to begin my aquatic apprenticeship. Those were the days of the Juhu Centaur, whose sea –overlooking vast lawns would be hired out for parties and parades. The pool, sparkling blue and ringed by palm trees that swayed in the sea breeze, was all of 25 metres long. And the crowd that swam there was wonderfully rambunctious, Lorena who lived in the hotel and swam with lipstick and long hair, Simran the stunning sardarni who swam 40 laps in long and powerful free style and middle aged Ashok who swam his constitutional mornings and evenings. And Hilary, who taught me to swim, coaching neophytes with casual ease , setting up coin chasing competitions and other scuba fun. Alas, today the pool, when you espy it on Google Earth, is a rectangle of white, all drained after months of legal wrangling over the hotel and what’s worse the discovery of a dead body in the pool.

There were other hotels whose pools one could swim in like the Ramada or Sea Princess or Sun-n-Sand , for a per day charge of a few hundreds, or an annual amount of 15 or 20 thousand. But they all seemed small, puddle like even, you couldn’t tread water endlessly or lie on your back and watch the jets go by, like you could at Centaur.

Still , my girls were now 4 and 6 , and as summer came, a swimming pool became a hang out zone the holidays were hot and bothersome without. I stumbled eventually upon in what would turn out to be a wonderfully educative pool – the Andheri Sports Complex pool. Post all the queuing and the paperwork ( and there was lots ) the diving pool and the Olympic size main pool were great places to swim in , where groups of of lithe young swimmers flipped and snorkeled, crawling, diving ,and skimming the water like inspiringly energetic sea creatures. All for an annual fee of Rs.1200. But then I guess pools like other Piscean personalities also have their life cycles. It’s been three years since the Andheri Sports Complex pool closed down for repairs. Now like a nomad I wander, with a butterfly stroke here, a dog paddle there and free style everywhere.

Sometimes at National Sports Club, an old fashioned Bombay Gymkhana kind of pool or at Bandra’s lagoon-like pool at Otters Club . In building pools, like the nicely clubby one at Hiranandani Powai, where our friends live. Occasionally at the posh ‘The Club’ next door, where you can pay a few thousands to swim for a month. This month it’s at the little Renaissance club off Four Bungalows where Ujjwal Sir, the greatly dedicated coach who’s rumored to live in the water, trails tiny groups of learners in methodical breadths across the shallow.

This feature appeared in the Sunday Times April 2007

IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT CHILDRENS BOOKS

Dip into the voluminous heaven that is the American Public Library system, and you will be hooked forever. I certainly was. The malls may have been magnificent, but it was the libraries with their kiddie sections that saved the days, days I must add of diapers and dishes and of no domestic help. What delight then to dash into the library and deposit my daughters in the children’s section. Here where low lying shelves crammed with books were set amidst chairs, they picked up their favorite Barney and Big Bird cushions and settled down with piles of picture books and giant jigsaw puzzles. Leaving me free to scour the stacks nearby. All too often though, I’d double back, gazing at the rows and rows of older children’s fiction, dipping into all the Judy Blume’s and Madeleine L’Engle’s I missed in my small town childhood days.
And then the Sales. What Sales! Doors open, and we’d be there, our exchange rate disadvantaged brains delirious at the prospect of books for free. Well, maybe not free, but it certainly felt that way. Eleven rupees (25c) for nicely bound Sesame Street stories, like the ones in which Elmo learns the days of the week, or Big Bird learns to read. Thirteen rupees (30 c) for the Prize winning Frog and Toad Series by Arnold Lobel and eleven rupees again for Eric Carle’s captivating ‘Thank you Brother Bear’. The princely sum of Rs.22 for Margaret Wise Brown’s comforting classic ‘Good Night Moon’ and so on.
Moving back to Bombay, I began the hunt for a good children’s library, or even a browsable bookshop. Old favorite ‘Strand’ simply didn’t qualify anymore. Its one thing to browse in an old curiosity shop and it’s quite another to tote toddler, baby and baby bag up the shop’s steep wooden stairs to get to their minute mix of kiddie delights.
‘Crossword’, which to the connoisseur, is like confusing cream cheese with camembert or Nescafe with café-au-lait, so solely bestseller-centric is it’s book collection, actually ended up faring better on my kiddie scale . It’s Hogwarts Express; with space in it for kids to climb in and read was always a hit. The staff smiled (So what if they never knew where any book was or whether they had it at all). It was secure and it never raised your expectations - you knew you’d never stumble on a rare book, one you’d heard of for ages and never found (like Noel Streatfield’s ‘The Circus is Coming’ or ‘The Random House Book of Poetry’ ) or even an unusual one you might be looking out like eleven year old Samhita Arni’s self illustrated rendition of the Mahabharata from Tara Publishing.
You’d have to travel northwards from the city to ‘Landmark’, a branch of the Chennai based store, to source these books. But it was a mixed thing taking kids there. The store’s so full of other things, Barbie and Batman sets and other toys, that the wide selection of kiddie books was rather lost . And then there was no space to sit.
Ultimately it was old college favorite BCL that saved the day. The place to be, for atmospheric old issues of the Times and classic Brit novelists, the British Council Library had, I discovered, a wonderful children’s section too (complete with the Barney and Noddy cushions!) For a totally- worth- it annual fee of Rs. 2500 , we could borrow an unheard of aggregate of eighteen books , that ran the gamut of prize winning fiction to gorgeously illustrated hardback non-fiction. Space Travel, the Animal World, the Magic of Numbers piled onto Dave Pilkey’s ‘ Captain Underpants’, Lemony Snickett’s ‘Unfortunate Events’ and Philip Pullman’s ‘The Fire Makers Daughter’. The library has all these holiday programs for young readers, like ‘Little librarians’ where the kids actually kid the library (as in man it). So it’s a wonderful chill out place to be in, and when you walk out with your eighteen books (or fifteen books and three DVD’s) it’s like you have the keys to the kingdom.

This feature appeared in the Sunday Times March 2007

In Search of the Perfect Backpack

IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT BACKPACK


We’ve decided, now that our youngest has turned four, to go on a Himalayan holiday. Four villages and two valley towns in 10 days and no baggage except the rucksacks on our backs.

Adventurous indeed but for the catch – four years of airplanes- to- grandparents holidays and we possessed nothing remotely resembling backpacks. Which is why I found myself, as prime convener and mover of the expedition, on the hot and humid streets in search of the ideal haversack.

With a list of specifications a mile long (most of which I have to say did sound reasonable) So it seemed obvious that the backpacks in question should be large enough. And large enough to take clothes, maps, sketch books, medicine kits, cameras, food and water (and piles of books that must be taken). With enough nifty compartments around the sides for need- to- fish- out- in- a -second items like money or a mobile or even mint . And with zips that won’t suddenly give way in the remote fastnesses of Jalori Pass 10,000 feet above sea level. And swoosh-like styling. After all if you’re going to huff and puff your city self through the mountains you might as well feel sporty about it!

“Buy a Nike , or a Reebok, or some other brand”, advised my sister Salone , who swears by the Jansport she bought during her years in America. “The copies look good, but then the zips will come off”, she said sagely and expertly. And so brand hunting I went. “No Tara Rum Pum”, I begged my friends “I need rucksacks”. We wandered the mall at Infiniti, Versova flitting from Nike ( with all of 6 small sized models priced Rs. 800 upwards) to Reebok. At Samsonite we picked the largest of them all – a cavernous black with a profusion of bright red pockets. “Why is it Rs.3999 ?”I gasped to my friend Sonal.”Parachute material ?” she hazarded. “Parachute Material” said the man at Azad Bag House on Station Road Andheri, of the very same red and black, “ 350 rupees final”. I must confess that I was tempted . Maybe not by the parachute material “fully waterproof”, but certainly by the many others , the fake Jansports and the Reeboks that ranged from 160 rupees to 350. Still somehow they didn't quite look right. The straps for add ons like water bottles were clearly frayed. And the material just didn’t feel the same, like really really light and almost not there .

Six days to go before the train to Delhi, to Kalka and then to Shimla and I was still stuck in decision tree deadlock . No brand or brand ? 250 rupees for now or 1200 rupees for life ? And then serendipidity in the form of a trip to Crawford Market intervened. Here’s where I found backpacks and more backpacks. In different nicely pocketed styles as well. And then the most delightful backpacks of all - those that came with a little strolley . So if you got tired of carrying all that stuff on your back and wanted to , like on a station platform or on a level road just walk , you could wheel your haversack alongside. All at rupees 450 apiece. Shimla, Naldehra, Narkhanda, Jalori, Gosaini, Manali here we come!

This appeared in the May 20th 2007 Sunday Times

The Class Wars

The Sunday morning round of golf starts late for Anand Krishnamurthy, co-head of global banking at HSBC. Before he can get to the putting green, Krishnamurthy must keep another appointment—with the roller-skating rink, where his six-year-old Sahana attends a weekly class. Every weekend at 7am, 20-odd kids descend on suburban Mumbai’s Hiranandani complex, to twirl, loop and spin with various degrees of proficiency, as their parents look on, read the papers and hand out water at break time.
Several kilometres across the city, in Andheri, writer Chatura Rao does the same with her six-year-old. Only the venue changes to the cavernous state-run Andheri Sports Complex. And Rao uses her daughter’s skating session as a chance to go for a run at the stadium next door.
But if Krishnamurthy and Rao seem to enjoy carting their children around, there are plenty of folks in the opposing camp. As summer sets in and the list of kids’ activities climbs mercury-like, the class lovers and class haters are slugging it out with quiet ferocity. To the observer, it sounds like a case of the Joneses. A “My son goes for chess, swimming and computers. What does yours go for?” sort of thing. Or of the mommy wars: “Working mothers have to send their children for back-to-back classes. I believe in being there for my child” (That’s when the other party sniggers, “Yeah, we know her child watches Toon Disney every day while she vegetates. At least our children learn life skills in a fun way!”).
But it’s really more than that. Most children enjoy painting and pot-making at the classes they attend. And there are additional benefits as well. “Kids learn discipline,” analyses Krishnamurthy, having watched Sahana progress and have fun with skating.
Where in a city are the gardens and open spaces that children can play in? All too often, they veer towards watching TV
Certainly, parents, like good penguins, can be extraordinarily discriminating about the things their children do. Rao, for instance, has tried other classes with her daughter Pratya. Some, like pottery, proved enjoyable. Others didn’t. “Keyboards as an activity was a complete flop show,” she confesses. “At six, Pratya was probably too young to be learning music, she’d be climbing on to the back of the instructor’s chair,” she laughs.
Talking to parents like Neepa Shah can be akin to getting a crash course in kiddie classes. After much qualitative and quantitative research, Shah has settled on a mix of classes for her six-year-old son. On Mondays, Aditya and his group of friends go to a reading class, where they pore over Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl and play word games. On Fridays, they have a Geeta class, in which they’re introduced to Hanuman Jayanti or taught the significance of certain shlokas. Other days are for swimming or football (“We tried the Leander Paes Academy of tennis at The Club, but it didn’t work. There were just too many children in a batch, and Aditya doesn’t enjoy cricket that much,” explains Shah).
And while Aditya’s football teacher is a “talented-with-kids” sort of personal trainer, his “Swimming Sir” is another story. Unlike most coaches, Farzad Billimoria (Tel: 098211 61595) takes on just three to four kids at a time. “I get down to their level,” he says. He also uses underwater strikers and props like colourful fish to encourage the children to try out new things. “Before they know it, they’re diving into the water, but otherwise ask three-year-olds to put their head down into water and they’ll scream.”
Billimoria is an example of the new generation of teachers—an expert who believes in incorporating fun and games into children’s education. Like Bangalore-based IBM engineer Kuntal Kapadia of Creative World (Tel: 093428 22369), who returned from the US 10 years ago, and now runs a creative centre for toddlers and children. “She’s amazingly energetic and sources the best pottery teachers or dance instructors to conduct sessions for the children. I wouldn’t even know how to look for such things,” says Suparna Mitra, the marketing head for Titan, whose nine-year-old daughter, Shreya, regularly attends workshops and summer programmes at Kapadia’s centre.
Kapadia’s of the same mould as partners Amrita Singh and Bindu Bhide of The Little Company in Bandra, Mumbai (Tel: 098202 54642). One is a business school graduate from Symbiosis, Pune, the other, a BITS Pilani engineer; they got together to set up a daycare and activity centre after their children were born. Besides a wide range of music, dance, yoga, and art and craft, they offer several “on-the-move” programmes such as visits to a planetarium or a museum.
Or like Jyotsna Shourie of the Dance Centre, Delhi (Tel: 011 2411 3454), who’s used her classical training in Bharatnatyam to teach children different styles of music and dance; Shourie’s troupe has performed their specially designed ballets all over India and other parts of the world.
There are several more, like and unlike these—from specialized individuals like Billimoria to franchised chains such as those of Shiamak Davar (Tel: 022 2353 7930) and Raell Padamsee (Tel: 022 2287 1851), to more common brands like the YMCA (Tel: 022 2307 0601). Ballet to Bharatnatyam, name it and there’s a kids’ version available. So much so that city folk sometimes seem to look down upon this abundance of choice. But to an outsider like myself, who grew up in small-town Jamshedpur, where our piano lessons came to a premature (and permanent) halt when the town’s only teacher eloped with her lover, such scorn seems rather presumptuous.
Mumbai’s prestigious Cathedral and John Connon School endorses and participates in various summer camp activities, such as the annual eight-day summer camp organized by alumna Shyla Boga at Manori Bell, a seaside town outside Mumbai, in April and May. Forty-five students from Cathedral attend this workshop, along with 25 children from Manori fishing village. “It’s very different and loads of fun, with activities like chocolate-making, kite-making, astronomy, music, magic, birdwatching and football,” says Boga.
The most important aspect of the workshop is the interaction between the kids from the village and those from Cathedral, as they make nets and gaze at stars on Manori beach. “The children at our school are in a privileged position through no merit of their own, and this is a good way for the two groups of the same age to interact,” explains Meera Isaacs, Cathedral’s principal.
If such interesting extra-curricular activities exist, then why aren’t they accepted as something every child needs, an opportunity for exposure to activities parents and day schools can’t provide? Why are they a bad word, insinuating pushy parents or, worse still, neglectful ones? Or even seen as an expensive indulgence?
Clearly we, as a society of nuclear families, need them. Working or even stay-home parents can’t do it all; neither can day schools. “The curriculum is too strenuous and too many children have to be attended to,” explains Shourie of the Dance Centre.
Besides, where in a city are the gardens and open spaces that children can play in? All too often, they veer towards watching TV. “You want a situation where children are not sitting at home watching TV,” explains Kapadia, echoing the concerns of some 50 parents, who send their children to her summer classes.
Education experts like Shalini Advani, former principal of the British School, Delhi, concedes an “ambivalent approval” of such classes. It is triggered by many of the new brain/learning theories, which prove how new neural connections develop with exposure to new kinds of activity. “The physical brain development triggered by a karate class is different from that of an art or chess club,” explains Advani.
If that sounds reason enough to diversify, to add that extra speech and drama class to an itinerary that already includes dance and tennis, it isn’t quite enough for the critics.
“It’s peer pressure,” says lawyer mom Neeta Joshi. “There’s a subtle competition among the mothers. Then there’s always the flavour of the season, it could be chess or basketball or anything. And if your child doesn’t go for it, you feel why am I being left out? Why is my child being left out?”
And if pushy wasn’t bad enough, there’s worse: preoccupied and pushy. The latter sort of parents are widely vilified for having little time for their kids because they are too busy doing their own thing. “Parents want their children busy, occupied and out of their hair, and they’re pushing, pushing. The children have to achieve, but why should that be their only business, why not relax?” exhorts Cathedral’s Isaacs.
Psychologist Sonya Mehta agrees, and wonders about the “angry dynamic that comes with parents programming and packaging their kids to be more and more competitive, by shuttling them from one class to the next”. Peer pressure and pushy behaviour—they’re both usually bad for kids, but a few years from now, these could very well be credited as the reasons why Indian children are successful adults (much like the Indian education system is today applauded for the success of the Indian IT industry).
As for the ‘shuttled’ children, most seem happy enough with their pottery, painting, dance and drama. “I like all my classes,” says five-year-old Vikram Singh. “I go for swimming, I go for drama class, I go for piano class, I go for drawing class and then I go to school.” Seven-year-old Sanya Khorana is more selective. “I like my swimming class and my computer class, but I don’t like tennis. They make me run and my legs pain,” she complains.
Ten-year-old Bhavya Vora, who attends a mix of back-to-back extra curricular activities (at least one for every day of the week), has a two-step approach to help decide his activities. “My mom tells me about the different classes, and then I decide,” he explains. So, would he prefer to drop Wednesday’s Science Experiments class, the one activity he doesn’t like? “No,” he says promptly. “Sometimes it’s boring, but then sometimes it’s nice. And in June, my friends are going to join, I’ll have fun with them.”

This appeared in the April 21st edition of Mint Lounge Supplement

The Bad Book Club

The Princess Diaries heroine, Mia, is fuming. Her mom is pregnant with her algebra-teacher boyfriend’s baby. “Why weren’t she and Mr. Gianini using birth control?” explodes Mia. “Whatever happened to her diaphragm? And what about condoms? This is so like my mother. She can’t even remember to buy toilet paper. How is she going to remember to use birth control?”
Ellie, heroine of Jacqueline Wilson’s Girls in Love, is not happy either. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. “My tummy’s round and my bum is round. Even my stupid knees are round. Still,” she consoles herself, “my chest is round too. Magda has to resort to Wonderbra to get a proper cleavage, and Nadine is utterly flat.”
And so it goes. Kidlit has never been so crammed with pulpy paperbacks. Many are cleverly packaged to appeal to readers as young as seven or eight, even though they may be designated as ‘teen’ books. There’s the ‘dreadlit’ of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps, teeming with titles such as Go Eat Worms, Dance of Death, Killer’s Kiss and Who Killed the Homecoming Queen? There’s the pink world of party girls, who exist only to weight watch and boyfriend hunt. And then, there are the Pokemon/Power Ranger/Barbie product placement excuses for books, in which the franchise rules. So, if you’re a believer in any form of censorship or even in a guide-them-gently-towards-the-right-books approach, it’s time for you to read the print.
You might be shocked at your pile of rejects. I was. No Mary Kate and Ashley for my tweenie girls. This, after I read about the twin heroines of Billboard Dad, where they spent all 100-odd pages trying to set up their dad with a date (even as they went to diving class and admired the very athletic diving instructor, Brad). No ‘Animorphs’, where children are morphed into creatures, speaking in staccato: “Yeah and you know how he feels about that guy. Or creature. Or whatever the Ellimist is. Ax says to watch your butt?” No R.L. Stine. No Baby-sitters Club, where Stacey is “in luv again. There’s only one problem. Wes is Stacey’s substitute math teacher. Can Love Conquer All?” And definitely no pink princesses.
Many will disagree. As Scholastic publishing director Sayoni Basu explains, “Children should be allowed to read everything. Well, almost. There is no other way that they will develop a sense of discrimination and appreciation of the good.” Certainly, we’ve all read our share of Star comics (where love did conquer all), Mills & Boon and Sidney Sheldons. But there’s stuff in the current crop that’s disturbingly insidious.
“I’d rather my children picked up Archie comics and read them rather than these stories of ultra-bratty, sassy girls, all eight going on 18, forever plotting and scheming,” says author Meher Marfatia of pink-jacketed kid chicklit. Ex-banker and stay-at-home mom Soundari Mukerjee agrees. “I wish we could go back to the basics and do away with this pink/blue thing. When I grew up, we were reading Russian books such as Baba Yaga.” Baba Yaga has morphed into Barbie, and the cash registers are ringing.
“There’s not a lot you can learn from such marketing-tool books,” says writer Samit Basu. “Names of the Pokemon,” scorns Basu, referring to what children learn from reading the Pokemon books. Or Step-Into-Reading Barbie books, which dress you up with ‘silver crowns and golden gowns’. No trace of any subliminal house-of-straw and house-of-brick lessons or of how the small boy with brains can triumph over the evil giant kind of exciting adventures.
Evil is exciting, and no writer knows this better than best-selling R.L. Stine. Kids love him. “He’s scary and he doesn’t linger only on one thing,” says eight-year-old Goosebumps fan Zain Lokmanji. But should his brand of horror and violence be in school libraries? “It’s disturbing,” maintains Marfatia. “It’s creating a culture where children are resisting joys, where that’s uncool, where it’s trendy to be twisted.” Forbidden fruit is all very well. But you could be excused for protesting, as mom Mukerjee does, “When there is so much good stuff to read, why read bratty books?”
This feature appeared in the Lounge Supplement Mint dated May 19th

Taking Kids to Work

If six-year-old Aditya Shah knows what the word ‘budget’ means, it’s because Daddy talks shop with him. On holidays and other special days, Keais Shah, his father, takes Aditya to work at the big retail showroom the Shahs run.
Certainly, there are benefits of taking your child to work, besides the obvious ones, such as having your child around you all day long. Chances are that your small wonder will fiddle with the office software, pick up the paint or just soak in the atmosphere of your workplace. In the West, many offices even have a take-your-child-to-work day.
Aditya tells me the share market is down after this year’s budget. I ask him what a budget is, and pat comes his reply: “The money you get and the money you spend for the whole country.” He’s visibly impressed by the scale of it all.
“I take him to work, so he gets a macro idea of what business is,” explains Shah, a partner at C. Bhogilal, the bathroom interiors store.
Aditya plays ‘shop-shop’ much like Puffin editor Vatsala Kaul’s children play ‘meeting-meeting’. Or like actor Konkona Sen Sharma who, when she was 10, played ‘director-director’. “Ever since I can remember, there would be production meetings at home,” says Konkona, who’d sit with her mother’s assistants and draw up make-believe production schedules and cost sheets.
So, is this something you should do? Reinforce nature with nurture, stepping back into age-old systems of ancestral apprenticeships? “No,” says NDTV business analyst Ashu Dutt. “Stock markets and exchanges are not conducive to kids. Let them grow up as kids and enjoy their childhood.” Rohit Gupta, executive vice-president, Sony TV, agrees with the no-shop-talk policy. Rohit’s teenage daughters don’t discuss work with their father, unless it’s a one-off career counselling sort of thing. “He doesn’t like to bring work home,” says Gupta’s wife, Rina. “He keeps home and the office compartmentalized.”
Most corporates choose to do that. Parents who are into the arts are far more inclusive. Paris-based painter Sakti Burman tells a wonderful story of how he kept baby canvases in his studio for his children to mess around with. Suchitra Krishnamurthy does the same with six-year-old daughter, Kaveri, taking her along to her Juhu studio to paint.
Does exposing your child to your workplace pressurize him or her to emulate you? Kaveri’s father, director Shekhar Kapur, who takes her to work all the time, cautions, “I would love to share my work with my daughter. But sometimes, children can perceive that as subtle pressure to follow in the parent’s footsteps. It’s also a kind of peer pressure.”
Anjali Raina, training director at Citibank, looks back at her branch manager days at Grindlays when her little toddler would come in to work after school hours. “I’ve never kept her away from my work. She’d meet my office colleagues, say hi and play on the playground opposite.” It could be serendipitous having a playground opposite the office, or being dispatched like my brother was, to my father’s office (Dad was director of budgets then) on Sundays because that was the boys’ day together, no matter where. But exposure like this can benefit children a great deal. “Being part of my work world built self-confidence in my daughter and helped her deal with all sorts of people,” says Raina.
It could also mean travelling together and introducing children, like six-year-old Kaveri on the sets of The Golden Age, to the mechanics of film-making. “Kaveri could be introduced to an infinite world of audio-visual expression, a world that encompasses not only film-making and storytelling, but also concepts of new media such as YouTube,” says Kapur.
The little boy who doodled figures in his director-of-budgets father’s office has now returned from Wall Street and works in private equity. The little girl who divided time between her mother’s bank branch and her father’s is artist Maya Burman

This feature appeared in the May 5th Lounge supplement Mint

Vodafone's expensive road to India

It's a market where customers queue up for phone connections, and where one new mobile subscriber signs on every two seconds. India, with its explosive rate of growth, has overtaken even China, to become the world's fastest growing mobile market, with 6.5 million new subscribers a month — 200,000 a day.
That means every three months Indian companies add as many mobile phones as Canadian or Netherlands operators have since the industry started.
Little wonder that global giant Vodafone, beset by sluggish growth and saturated markets, is making an $18.8 billion entry into this massive market. In a hotly contested auction Vodafone has bought a controlling 67% stake in Hutch, India's fourth largest telecom company— with 24.4 million subscribers — from Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Telecommunications International (HTIL).
Vodafone's winning bid beat three rivals: Indian telecom operator Reliance; the London-based Hinduja brothers; and Hutch's minority stakeholders, Essar, controlled by the Ruia brothers.
The big question doing the rounds of analysts and market watchers is: Did Vodafone pay too much?
"India is worth a lot more to Vodafone than it is to HTIL," says Tucker Grinnan, senior telecoms analyst at HSBC. Indeed the move to India is in line with Vodafone's larger strategy of exiting from stagnant subscriber markets such as Belgium and Switzerland — where it sold its minority stakes last year — and investing, as the company outlines, "in higher growth emerging markets" with the aim of increasing the company's EBITDA from what it calls EMAPA — or Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and affiliates. The target increase in EBITDA is "over a third by FY 2012".
India, with its investment-friendly policies, clearly fits this billion dollar bill. Government regulations permit up to 74% foreign investment in telecom, compared with Vodafone's 3.2% stake in China Mobile.
The UK based telecom operator has been trying for the last four years now to enter India, settling two years ago for a 10% stake in market leader Bharti Airtel. Now, buying 67% ownership of Hutch has given it management control in the world's hottest market, a market where penetration rates are still as low as 13%.
Sunil Mittal, head of Bharti Airtel — former collaborator and soon-to-be competitor — told the Daily Mail during 3GSM in Barcelona: "In Vodafone's place I could have spent a couple of billion dollars more. In my place, probably $3 billion-$4 billion less."
Still, as analyst Harit Shah of Angel Broking points out, "eventually what Vodafone is paying for is for growth".
Explosion in capex
And what growth: "There's an explosion in capex, there's an explosion in numbers of base stations," says HSBC's Grinann. "Bharti has announced the construction of 20,000 base stations in the next year alone. A market like Korea has 8,000 base stations in all. Even Vodafone's total tally of base stations in the UK is only 30,000."
So what changes will Vodafone bring to the Indian market? Certainly, its entry is being greeted as a major event by all sections of the Indian economy, including the media.
After Vodafone's successful bid Arun Sarin, the group's Indian-born CEO, arrived in Delhi and Mumbai to a red-carpet reception.
"There's a new ring master in town" yelled the headlines of the country's largest daily, The Times of India, "and he says rates are going to fall further". Indeed Vodafone announced a whole host of goodies, from low-priced handsets — from its procurement agreement from Chinese manufacturer ZTE — to lower tariffs and better coverage, through savings in opex and capex through infrastructure sharing deal with Bharti Airtel.
Here's where Vodafone encountered its first road block. Not everyone proved equally ecstatic with these offerings. Vodafone's minority partners, the Ruia brothers, whose Essar company holds 33% in Hutch, were reportedly miffed by Sarin's triumphant announcement of an infrastructure sharing deal with Bharti.
What followed was weeks of wheeling and dealing, as the Ruias sought to bargain for more operational control and a higher value on their "put" option — their ability to sell out their minority stake, if at any time in the next five years they should choose to. Questions were raised in parliament about the legality of the amount of foreign investment in this deal. A lobby group, Telecom Watchdog, filed an objection with the Delhi High Court. That now seems to be sorted out.
Vodafone will pay Essar $415 million extra and grant it a put option to buy back its shares in three to four years of operation for the amount of $5 billion, leaving Vodafone free to get on with the business of slugging it out in the Indian market.
It's a market that is looking clearly at growth. "It's a marathon which is not anywhere near its close — it's a little beyond the start," says K A Chaukar, managing director of Tata Services, the promoter company for Tata Indicom.
Six big telecom operators and several small ones have made this market unusually competitive. Tariffs, at one or two cents a minute, are the lowest in the world. "Mobiles have become a grocery item," exclaims entrepreneur and telecom consultant Amit Bose, who points to SIM cards selling for 90 rupees ($2.07) — "less than a bottle of Horlicks", he notes. Mobile recharge cards are less than the price of a Coke.
Average use runs at 187 minutes a month and declining, while ARPU is $7.60 a month and also declining. But Indian operators continue to report healthy EBITDAs of 30% and above.
The secret of their success is volumes. "The market is expected to grow to 400-500 million subscribers in the next 48-60 months," says Bose, and indeed these are estimates echoed by every telecom major.
Mobile money transfer
High growth areas include mobile broadband, as wireless connects remote areas that have never seen fixed-line phones. "We are introducing instant messaging and also money transfer through mobile phones,", says TV Ramachandran, chairman of the Cellular Operator Association of India. "With up to $22 billion being repatriated to India by the migrant population, GSM systems would be much more cost effective than the current £8-£10 pound surcharge by banks on a money transfer of £50."
Now with the imminent allocation of 3G spectrum, such value added services will receive a fillip, and operators are lining up in droves.
Historical underinvestment in telecom networks and capacities has made the country a more flexible area in terms of technology standards. It has also made the market an opportunity for a whole host of technology providers such as Ericcson, IBM, Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent.
"Unlike other emerging markets like Korea and China, where the government tells the operator what technology to deploy, the operators here are able to choose their own technologies, making India an even more attractive emerging market," explains Grinann at HSBC.
So which are the telecom titans that Vodafone must now tussle with, in its quest to be market leader?
Bharti Airtel — nurtured by owner Mittal to the number one position with 34 million subscribers — is in a sense its biggest competitor. "We are an organization with entrepreneurial DNA," says company president Manoj Kohli, "and we have always welcomed competition."
Indeed Bharti, which will lose a collaborator once Vodafone sells out its stake and will probably experience a setback in its 3G programme, has reaped some benefits both from its infrastructure sharing deal and its status for three years as Vodafone's preferred vendor for national long distance and leased line services.
Its biggest strength however remains its first mover advantage, as it grabs high-ARPU customers along with high market share in regions hitherto unexposed to any telecom at all.
Then there is state-run BSNL with its 25 million mobile subscriber base, and its 34 million fixed-line subscribers. Numbers come easy to this concern, the best network in rural areas. "We are present completely all over India," says chairman and managing director A K Sinha.
Broadband subscriber target
BSNL has the advantage of an extensive existing landline penetration and is targeting five million broadband subscribers in the next three years, up form the current sector total of 2.1 million — aside from subscriber additions in basic mobile connections.
Voice ARPUs, especially in the rural sectors, are among the lowest in the world, and BSNL by bundling broadband with existing fixed line connections is hoping to maximize revenues.
Sinha is unperturbed by Vodafone's imminent entry: "For us it doesn't matter so much. In the last five years we have gained considerable experience, we will continue to price ourselves aggressively," he says.
Reliance Telecom, the largest CDMA player and the third largest telecom operator in the market, also counts in the numbers game. It was a late entrant into the Indian telecom market, but it dug deep into its pockets for petrochemical cash to achieve critical mass very quickly.
The company launched with an offer of 501 rupees ($11) for handset and connection, suddenly making the mobile phone a mass-affordable communications device. Its mobile subscriber base is now 31 million.
Last year Reliance announced a strategic shift to provide GSM services as well. But its unsuccessful bid for Hutch has been a major setback in its ambitions of achieving number one position.
Value added services
Tata Indicom, promoted by the $17.80 billion Tata Group, also uses CDMA technology and has a 7.2% share of the mobile market with a subscriber base of 10.7 million. It also has 4.7 million fixed line and fixed wireless subscribers. Its focus on value added services is buttressed by the acquisition of former state-owned telecom services company VSNL.
In a sector where rapid growth is going to lead to major spectrum shortages, Tata Indicom plans to emphasis its superior quality, especially for value added services, as compared with the existing 2G GSM providers. "Technology gives us the competitive edge," says K Chaukar, managing director of Tata Services. "We have a superior combination of data and voice on a CDMA spectrum efficiency."
Idea Mobile, promoted solely by the $12 billion Aditya Birla group, has 13 million mobile subscribers and 8.7% of the total market. It recently had a successful IPO to fund its ambitious expansion programme; planning to invest about $2 billion in services over the next few years as well setting up national long distance networks.
So that's the market in which Vodafone must achieve its declared target of 25% market share by 2012. What it has is the Hutch brand with 24 million subscribers, its nationwide network and an experienced management team led by CEO Asim Ghosh, widely credited for making Hutch what it is today.
Vodafone seems to have a lot going for it despite its history of reverses in Japan and parts of Europe. It has the advantage of being the only international brand in the Indian market, giving it the ability to leverage its vast global experience. It has access to international technology and procurement and it has deep pockets to fund cap ex on much needed network development.
Ghosh, CEO of the company, soon to be renamed Vodafone Essar, sums it up: "There will be more penetration. There will be more investment. We'll get our share of the growth." GTB

Appeared in the March April issue of Global Telecoms Business

Bradshaws for Breakfast

Am I a factoid philistine? Boorishly unfervent about the nuances of narrative nuggets?

Should I on that Saturday night, have applauded the curiously cubic chronicle of the number ‘1729’ ?

A Saturday night that began at eight pm with a million multicolored balls in the air. Tickets to a to nine o clock play at Prithvi Theatre with free seating that ensures that the later you get the worse corner bench you’re squashed in. Yoghurt I HAD to set for tomorrow’s cream cheese dip, and then a call to the shop next door. Dosa batter, soda and bread for Sunday breakfast that I must remember to order just as I finish ironing this silk blouse. Oh and the strawberries too, and these from the fruitwala. So what then, if spouse and soul mate (lounging on the sofa with ‘A History of Numbers’) found me unappreciative and inattentive . Yes , mathematicians Hardy and Ramanujan did meet a century ago. And Hardy remarked that he had arrived in a taxicab whose number, 1729, was quite uninteresting. But then Ramanujan replied that, on the contrary, 1729 was quite interesting as it was the smallest positive integer which could be written as the sum of two (positive) cubes in two different ways: 93 + 103 = 123 + 13. So ?

It’s not like I’m mathematically challenged. Seat me at a desk, a laptop or even in a silent space and I can juggle numbers as well as any man.

And so it goes with other stuff. But no, I can’t co-obsess about coordinates on a wonderfully scenic drive. Or swoon over the survival instincts of the Savannah centipede. Or expand enthusiastically and endlessly, on where Sachin Tendulkar scored centuries .

Call me crass , but I’d rather read a thriller, than read up on the origins of the ektara. I don’t, like my fact obsessed better half , browse through Bradshaw’s for breakfast. And if you do inform me in tones of newly discovered awe, that the Rajdhani takes 20 mins less than the August Kranti in its journey to Delhi, I’m more likely to be busy with the Bombay Times.

Does that then make me then the archetypal enemy of the arcane – the ‘soft’ sex with more EQ than IQ , more right brain than Left ?

It seems it does. And what’s more I’d like to state ( in my statistically unsupported stance!) that this maybe all to the good. Life’s way is most likely to be the highway, never mind all those beguiling branch lines to eternity.

What’s it then with this male mania for trivia ? Are narrative nuggets the new age medallions ? ‘ Mr. Know It All’ Esquire magazine Senior Editor and author Jacobs would agree. And he should know. Jacobs spent a whole year reading the Encyclopedia Britannica . As he says in an interview shortly after, having just read about a long-dead ruler of Saxony who hunted and killed more than 42,000 deer during his reign,” I’m worried I'm not much better than John of Saxony. I'm just trying to fill my wall with the stuffed heads of deer and lion and bears, though in my case, my wall would be filled with facts about lions and bears - for example, bears are not true hibernators - their body temperature doesn't dive and they are easily awakened. Is all this a macho accumulation?” It’s an accumulation that serves Jacobs well and not just on the cocktail party circuit, though it works well on that too. Too much trivia maybe a tad tiresome, but it certainly has its uses and these are not just limited to BBC Quiz Time, topic ‘The life and times of Martina Navratilova age 26 to age 28’.
In the end it seems more about a male craving for the comfort of cold fact. As one blogger confesses,” I can only speak for my own gender, and I can reveal that men are mostly dragged kicking and screaming into grown-upness. They never give up the secret hope that complexity will go away and leave them alone. They take refuge in trivia because facts, nice orderly facts, are psychological balm to the friction burns inflicted by contact with real life.”

In Man's World January 2007

Uprooted

A giant tamarind tree stood tall behind our house. Its tiny leaves, perfectly shaped, looked viridian green on cloudy days, emerald on sunny ones. And it made a fantastically foresty Venetian Blind for our block of flats. I'd look out from my fifth floor corridor and all I'd see was green and a bit of brown-black. Occasionally a parrot or a mynah might alight, but that was all.

It made me think of my neighbour and friend Anisha’s astonished question. I’d once told her the price of land was the same in our Juhu neighbourhood as the newly developing Parel. And that my brother was buying a flat in a gigantic Parel complex. “Why would he want to live in Parel if he could live in Juhu for the same price?” she’d puzzled.

Why indeed? Maybe Juhu-Versova is far far away from the Fort-Fountain finance and heritage hubs, but it’s a most pleasant spot to live in. And wonderfully wooded as the many walkers in the area will vouchsafe.

I’d have expected coconut palms in this suburb by the sea, and they’re there too, sometimes five storeys high, like the ones that sway in the breeze outside my window.

But there are many more trees as well — the rain trees, the Ashokas, the mango trees and of course the Gulmohars. Streets in the JVPD scheme, like the Gulmohar Cross Roads 1-10, stand testimony to these leafy wonders.

They surprise me, these trees. I trudge through Juhu Market’s traffic jammed streets into the Isckon Temple and there they are. Peepul trees in the marble arched inner courtyard. One moment I’m in an unruly medley of autos, and the next I’m in arboreal heaven.

And then there’s the road I always take, no matter which direction I must go – the Juhukar Gandhigram with great big trees on either side. At its very end is the road’s most magic spot, where stands an ancient banyan whose earthy roots envelop all space. But the tamarind tree... it toppled over in last fortnight’s deluge. Smashing the boundary wall, flattening two cars. Some say it was old, 90 years or more and that it had to go. But the gnarled old Mali who tends these trees all year long, says that like the raintrees that fell last year, this too could have lived. If only its roots hadn’t been so crowded out by concrete.


This appeared in Mumbai Mirror dated August 5th

Racists by Kunal Basu - Book review

It’s 1885. Off the coast of Africa, where the slave ships ply , lies the island of Arlinda. Here a black baby boy and a white baby girl are being raised by a mute nurse, as par of an experiment in race studies. Arlinda is an interesting setting : Islands lend themselves well to powerful denouements or at the least to idyllic romances, as anyone who has read Goldings ‘The Lord of the Flies’ or seen ‘The Blue Lagoon’ will testify. Add to this the extra dimension of genetic theory , and you could with artful plot and perspective have a provocative piece of ‘Frankenstein’ meets ‘Never Let Me Go’.

Management Professor Basu has written earlier about 'The Opium Clerk' and then 'The Miniaturist' a court painter in Akbar's Court. The two warring scientists in this, his third novel, book certainly add depth to this varied repertoire. Bates , the Englishman collects skulls, in an office referred to appropriately enough as the Madhouse. According to him the White race is superior to the Black and skull measurements confirm this hypothesis. Belacroix, the Frenchman is less defined. He is subject to a basketful of weird skin conditions, but mostly he takes notes and he also engages Bates in pages and pages of pseudo scientific argument. His thesis remains that the races are different but doomed to hate each other. The Arlinda experiment is the statistically half baked consequence of this disagreement. The White girl will emerge as superior , says Bates. They will fight and one will kill the other says Belacroix. It’s a macabre menage-a-trois, Bates and his assistant Quartley, antagonist Belacroix , and the two ‘savage’ children with their dumb nurse. They circle each other , like gladiators in a ring, for most of the book, which sounds suspenseful, except that nothing happens. It’s all dependably dull. Bates, Belacroix , Norah and specially the children never come to life. The denouement isn’t overly dramatic either, but it comes as a relief all the same.

This review appeared in India Today June 2006

Mommy Lit ? Momoirs ?

Is motherhood, that most primeval of states, much maligned in today’s mommy lit? Methinks so, a Martian might be moved to venture, on reading the current crop.

With titles that run the gamut from ‘Misconceptions’ to ‘Oh Yeah Get a Life’, you don’t have to delve too deep to figure that all-effacing motherhood is not the formula for the new millennium. Motherhood maybe our biological bug bear, these books say, but the times they are a–changing and we no longer care to pretend its mere child’s play. Such books, and there are now a whole bunch, ranging from activist analysis to easy breezy ‘momoirs’, don’t shy away from displaying their diapers, poopy or otherwise. The most sensational of them all, Orange prize winning ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’, tells the story of Eva Khatchadourian , an otherwise fulfilled career woman who can’t bring herself to like her child. That he kills seven fellow students in a high school shooting before his sixteenth birthday, is one of the questions this powerful novel asks – was Kevin innately bad or did he get twisted ? Analysing the runaway success of her book, journalist author Lionel Shriver says in an interview to the Guardian ,”I think Kevin has attracted an audience because my narrator, Eva, allows herself to say all those things that mothers are not supposed to say. She experiences pregnancy as an invasion. When her newborn son is first set on her breast, she is not overwhelmed with unconditional love; to her own horror, she feels nothing. She imputes to her perpetually screaming infant a devious intention to divide and conquer her marriage. Eva finds caring for a toddler dull”.

The metaphors of dullness , imprisonment and indeed, lack of feeling are not new ones. Betty Friedman in her 1963 cult book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ famously exploded the happy housewife mother figure. The real life women in Friedman’s book, in ‘smiling empty passivity’ or in ‘morbid depression’ tell their stories , one young mother of three even describing herself ‘ready for a padded cell’ before half the day’s work was done. But it took Erma Bombeck in the 1980’s to cleverly convert this maternal angst into daily diary humour in her bestselling ‘Motherhood : The Second Oldest Profession in the World’. It’s here she asks -"If someone was to run an ad in the New York Times which read: WANTED: Household drudge, 140 hour week, no retirement, no sick leave, no room of own, no Sundays off. Must be good with animals, kids and hamburger. Must share bath, would 42 million women still apply?" Sounds like a snappy bit of humour , and yet there’s no missing the serious satire. It would be two decades however, before another woman writer, this one an economist , would address Bombeck ‘s question with real numbers . Anne Crittenden in her ‘The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued’, quantifies the loss of lifetime earnings of the average college educated American mother as a million dollars. In a revealing anecdote Crittenden talks about the genesis of her book , a few years after she left her job at the New York Times to be full time mother ,” I ran into someone at a party who said, "Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittenden?" That’s when I knew I had to write this book.”

Crittenden’s book joins other activist titles like ‘The Myth of Motherhood’ and ‘The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars : Who decides What makes a Good Mother’. But it’s the Bombeck tradition of mommy lit that currently rules commercial roost ( even though the phrase ‘mommy lit’ appeared later, in a sort of maternal elder sister extension to the ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ inspired ‘chick lit’.) The Divine Secrets of the Mama Sisterhood have never been more readable and the last decade has seen a proliferation of such titles. They crib and they complain – some stridently and others satirically, and yet to read them is to see that they’re also crying out for help.

Of these, the best known is undoubtedly Allison Pearson’s 2002 novel ’I don’t Know How She Does It’. It tells the story of Kate Reddy, working fund manager mother of two and the multiple juggling act that is her life. Frantically defacing perfect factory made meat pies to look as if they’re homemade Kate Reddy reflects , “I already understood the world of women was divided in two: there were the proper mothers, self sacrificing bakers of apple pies….and there were the other sort” . And as she spars , singly with the Corporation she says, “It’s possible to get sway with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man’s Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny…are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine ’The car broke down/was broken into.’ ‘You should have seen the – fill in scene of mayhem-at the –fill in street’ Either of these will do very well.”

This appeared in The Sunday Times Bookmark on May 8th - mothers day

Allan Sealy

Allan Sealy doesn’t read newspapers. He lives, like fellow writer Ruskin Bond, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The only concession this 54 year old Anglo Indian writer makes to modernity is his mouse. Also his computer and his net connection.
So even as Sealy loves his solitude, he delights little-boy like in the marvels of technology.

‘Red’, the book Sealy is here in Mumbai to promote, is about many things. It’s also the first book Sealy has written on a computer. Three threads, colour coded run through the book. The red thread tells of billionairess Aline and avant garde musician Zach, who meets in front of Matisse’s painting entitled ‘The Red Room’. The black tells of Gilgitan, earthy and energetic, a Dom who blackens his face with soot and grease, and yet wins the love of an unlikely woman. The third wire is a green one and the most obviously autobiographical. It tells of N, the Narrator, who lives in Dariya Dun, his work and his relationships with his estranged wife Olivia and his daughter, Mandalay. I ask Sealy if he has a daughter as well. ”Yes”, he says after the briefest of pauses,” But she doesn’t look anything like N’s daughter in the book.” Deepa Rose is the same age as the book’s Manda, and she lives in New Zealand (unlike Mandalay who lives in America). Sealy and his New Zealander wife, live like N does, in a little house in Dehra Dun with a walled garden. It’s a house with a newly acquired resident. One that becomes, as Sealy tells me “one of the characters”. Acquired after much frustration with having to access the net from seedy centres -“I was a prisoner of these cybercafés”, Sealy tells me “and they were filthy little places, horrible holes.” So Sealy bought himself a computer, a flat screen monitor and a wireless mouse. Like N in the novel, who encounters, besides the picture of a ‘ dripping Bipasha Basu’ , “something sticky on the floor under my shoe and it’s not chewing gum. It’s- o my god’. So N gets himself a computer too, on which he types in www.hermitagemuseum.com and then ‘Matisse’ in the search box, to watch ‘The Red Room’ download.

We talk about the book’s sense of colour. It’s easy for Sealy to engage with these themes, he’s a painter himself. “I never carry a camera. Instead I do small sketches “, he tells me. I ask him if he’s done any of Mumbai. ”The view from here”, he says gesturing to the sea and South Mumbai green outside. It’s a little pencil sketch on a small President Hotel pad. But it has point and perspective, with the morning star, the taxis and the World Trade Centre.

‘Red’, also has poetry, a quality Sealy’s earlier books have often been praised for. Right from the ‘The Trotternama’ a chronicle of Anglo Indian history, to ‘The Everest Hotel’ . In Sealy’s love story novel, ‘The Brain Fever Bird’, the city of Delhi comes alive in lyrically poetic prose. Here’s Lev, the out of work biological weapons scientist from St. Petersburg, in Delhi – “India Gate, his map says. The wide road leading to it is heroic, out of another sort of dream. Its vaunting scale is familiar : he recognizes the bullying note from his Moscow days”. And of the brain fever bird –“a shy bird, furtive in speckled fatigues, a cuckoo with a liking for babblers nests…and a call that climbs and climbs maddeningly through the hot June afternoon and the burning nights : brainfever! brainfever ! brainfever ! higher and higher till the crazed listener sits down on a stool and prepares a noose that could either be for the bird or for himself.”

We talk about his first name ‘Irwin’ – “it was my father’s name as well, so I was always called Allan. Subconsciously I must have resented it , because I decided to resurrect it, but only the initial. “ And then Sealy tired of people asking him what the ‘I’ stood for.So now ‘Red’ is the first book that features the author’s full name on the jacket - ‘Irwin Allan Sealy’.

What do Sealy’s literary awards mean to him- ‘Trotternama’ won the 1988 Commonwealth Writers prize and ‘The Everest Hotel’, The 1998 Crossword Award . Sealy’s philosophical – “ It’s nice to get a lakh or two. Prizes may probably quicken a writer’s career, but they can also deaden some impulse in him – they can interfere with the flow.” And all those hefty advances overseas writers get ? “It doesn’t touch me “, Sealy maintains. We talk about the huge advance the Harvard student author Kaavya Vishwanathan received “It’s a huge wallop on the head – she doesn’t realise it - at the moment she’s floating but she could sink “ - a prophecy that was to prove uncannily true a few days later.

Sealy himself , may travel but always goes back to his Himalayan Retreat , safely distant from the big bucks. Is money an issue ? “Not a serious issue, in other words I’m not seriously poor!”, he jokes. It’s a joke like most, with some truth. It’s N the narrator in ‘Red’ who answers it most poetically- “When I’m anxious for the future, I look up at the hornbill in the palm tree with a single areca nut in his beak, and think that’s his whole pension too, his provident fund, his retirement package, his future, and then my fears are quelled. Not answered, put at rest. You have to sit quietly on your branch and offer up your self entire, to the world, to the universe, to the next passer-by”.


This appeared in The Week April 2006

KIran Nagarakr

I meet Kiran Nagarkar at his beautiful Breach Candy bungalow – raintrees outside, brass urns, and mahogany tables inside. It’s a friend’s house, he tells me, he lost his own . How that happened is a story that could be an aside in any of Nagarkar’s novels. A sinister version of the ‘Water Wars’, the squabbles the chawl protagonists in his famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ are subjected to. It’s an urban nightmare both sad and scatological, and the writer is upset in the retelling.

But today is a hopeful day – the 63 year old Marathi English novelist is back after a break of eight years. Like ‘Cuckold’, his historical Sahitya Akademi winning 1998 novel, this present work is another voluminous saga. It tells in 584 pages, the coming of age story of a young Indian terrorist - Zia Khan. Early reviews have been mixed. Nagarkar is back last night from a reading in Germany, and is off the following day for the books launch in Delhi. Mumbai and Calcutta follow next. So Nagarkar is all keyed up. A new book is always a tense occasion ,and must be particularly so for Nagarkar, a writer who has risen from humble beginnings through constant re invention, moving from Marathi to English, and from novel to screenplay to a play.

So we talk. About Zia, Nagarkar’s terrorist hero. About the art of the novel. A subject he’s eloquent on, and obviously impassioned about,” I keep going back to these classic tales”, he confesses, ”you can live your life by these stories, Homer has you by the collar, and Kabir has you by the throat… I mean gosh, how many times have they buried the novel?” he demands. “All this post modernist fixation of -I have to be different, I have to be original… “.

I ask him if he enjoys any contemporary writers- Amitabh Ghosh , he answers , pausing to wonder at Ghosh’s genius for unravelling fascinating nuggets ,”I mean he found out that the Burmese King actually lived in Ratnagiri”, constructing much of his ‘The Glass Palace ‘around that little fact.

And Rushdie ? In Nagarkar’s new book, his terrorist hero Zia , is obsessed with killing Rushdie. Zia, who has been sent by his family to study at Cambridge , updates Allah with Yeatsian status reports on SR/Essar’s whereabouts “The Beast has gone underground…All the heathens and disbelievers of the world have conspired to throw a smoke screen around it “. I ask him where all that graphic imagery of ‘the evil one reading from his satanic book ‘…and his ‘hooded eyes’ came from ? “Well that’s Zia’s perspective “, he clarifies. Nagarkar himself doesn’t enjoy Rushdie’s prose anymore – “he’s trapped “, he analyses . Nevertheless he fumes those who criticise at Rushdie– “these are people who have no idea of the value of life”.

Nagarkar should know. In 1977 Nagarkar wrote ‘Bedtime Stories’ a scathing retelling of four stories from the Mahabharata. The play had a chorus that was represented by a Nazi , and the perpetrators on trial were the audience themselves. The play was attacked by the RSS even as rehearsals themselves became an impossibility , to say nothing of an actual performance. But then Nagarkar’s non novelistic endeavours have always been somewhat jinxed. The famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ began life as a screenplay for Dev Benegal, but was abandoned mid-way. And in this latest book Zia’s novelist brother Amanat has a run in with a couple of such fickle film producers who “keep him hanging for months on end, destroying whatever fragment of self esteem he had left”. Why does this happen , I ask him ? Maybe they are just horrid people , he replies post a thoughtful pause. Yet Nagarkar confesses he is still extremely fond of Benegal, even though the two scarcely speak.

Like Nagarkar and the Marathi establishment. Once hailed as a shining gem of Marathi literature, Nagarkar reveals how today he is persona non grata . It’s an episode that has been particularly painful for this Marathi writer. Right from 1991 when Nagarkar was in Chicago on a fellowship (“cleaning bathrooms “, he tells me in another delightful aside “the fellowship was so shoe string”). That’s when he made the decision to switch languages “For days I couldn’t get out of bed “, he confesses , “the move seemed a betrayal”. And yet Marathi readership with its abysmal numbers was slowly killing the writer in him. Nagarkar hadn’t written for 12 years. As he explains,“ Saat sakkam trechalis’ is called a milestone in Marathi lit… But what’s the use of a milestone if it sells only 1500 copies in 25 years?” .

I ask him how he spent those non writing years . “We struggled to make ends meet, he confesses. Arun ( Kolatkar, the poet) and I were partners for 20 years. We wrote ad copy but then our agency closed down,. We were out of a job. We’d go around together, and we just would not get any work – me in my kurta pajama, Arun with his long hair .God knows why, he, Arun had a reputation for unreliability. Our rejection fee used to be Rs.1500 for an assignment and Rs.3000 if our work was accepted. Somehow we got by. And now after his death Arun gets all this recognition. What damn use is it ?”

So will this new book change all of this ? ‘God’s Little Soldier’ is contemporary. It’s come after eight years of writes and rewrites. “I struggled”, Nagarkar explains “with the character of Zia.” The first draft, 800 pages plus and handwritten, was rejected when Nagarkar realised that the rigid idealistic terrorist hero he had created could take no humour. Zia was emerging as a vastly different character from the tongue in cheek chawl boys in Ravan and Eddie. Where Ravan and Eddie coped with recognizable evils like errant fathers and school bullies with zing, Zia created his own monsters. Like keeping Ramadan to please his aunt, by pretending to eat (to satisfy his liberal Muslim parents) and then throwing up post every meal. Or by flagellating himself. All of which makes ‘God’s Little Soldier’ very dramatic. Also cinematic, as locales move from Bombay to Cambridge and then worlds away to a Trappist monastery atop a ledge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s been described a book which has the ideas and events for three or four different novels, and certainly as you follow Zia through his childhood , and see him moving from Cambridge dons to gay priests to arms dealing god men, you begin to see why. Colourful, kaleidoscopic and quite the dance of life, even if it is macabre.

IN the Week April 2006

I Love Juhu

I love Juhu

Marshland and a sandy island called Juhu Tara metamorphosed into this queen of the suburbs- Bollywood’s own Beverly Hills. Juhu, with its film-famous beach , coconut palm skyline and its barricaded bungalows is a movie goers Mecca. Crowds congregate every evening , via wide bodied Volvos , or by BEST bus rides from the Vile Parle Station to take in the temples, the sand and the sea . Also to scour the streets for that single second serendipitous glimpse of their favorite film stars – a scene they will describe many times over to enthralled audiences in the great Indian hinterland.

Almost every road in Juhu seems to have own little story. The mini Gandhi ashram, the temples, the tanks, the Bollywood homes  all these are local reference points, as estate agents and autowalas inform all prospective buyers and passers-by with pride. [Even for the suitably inured resident, it is rather a thrill to encounter Shabana Azmi strolling on the beach or wheel one’s trolley past Hema Malini at the Foodland supermarket. At the hip Nalini and Yasmin beauty parlor, you could be flanked by Farah Khan in the midst of a power hair wash and dry, and Dimple Kapadia on the other side. And at Rain and Vie, the beachfront bar, you’re likely to spot Kareena Kapoor, Bobby Deol or Bipasha Basu in animated conversation at the little tables perched atop a softly luminous floor.

But it isn’t all high living in our neighborhood. Next to the giant glass-windowed Shoppers Stop (with its very own Crossword and soon-to-come Moshe’s) is Chandan Cinema. Here, for the princely sum of Rs 40 you can sit back in air-conditioned comfort and watch the latest blockbuster. Crowds of college students, Sindhi and Gujarati families and the inevitable complement of unemployed /part time /playing hooky? young men line up for matinee shows.

Life is lively on the Juhu streets. Spicy vada pav and sweet steaming chai at many street corners find conversational crowds of takers, discussion veering from film star employees to cricket controversies. College students congregate in coffee shops and householders wax expansively with their families over generous dollops of ice cream and milk shake . Gyms, saunas and Jacuzzis dot the area as their many patrons – the yummy mummy’s , the actor wannabe's and the adventuring Buntys and Bablis scour designer boutiques for sensational strappy wonders, as they ready themselves for nights of net working in the areas chic pubs and lounges.

Mostly though, it’s just good to be home. Mornings bring birdsong – emerald green parrots pecking at the coconuts on the palm trees, tiny grey sparrows, shimmering sunbirds and maybe even a mynah. And everywhere, the feel of the sea, just there, or a couple of lanes away. You can see it if you climb high enough – that and a wide open vista beyond foam flecked waves and a blue grey Arabian sea.

NEIGHBOURHOOD GEMS

Juhu Beach All roads in Juhu lead to this stretch of sand and sea. The beach has something for everyone – sports enthusiasts play Frisbee, football or beach cricket mornings and evenings. Walkers, laughter clubs and suryanamaskar practitioners congregate mornings, while evenings turn almost carnival like. Picnicking families set out little rectangular cloths, women unwrap carefully packed parathas and theplas while their kids tuck into pink candy floss, build sandcastles and dip in the sea.

The ISKON Temple Complex With its black and white marble floors, its generous tree- shaded quadrangle and great teak and gold doors that open onto ornate Krishna figures, the temple is worth a visit. There’s also an excellent auditorium that hosts classical dance and music performances. Gourmet meals at the in-house restaurant ‘Govinda’, that connoisseurs delight, with its trademark ‘chappan bhog’ in shudh ghee, are the icing on this cake. At Hare Krishna Land, Juhu Tel 26206860. Temple opens from 4am – 1 pm and 4-9 pm. ‘Govinda’ open all days of the week from 12.30 -3 pm and 7.30-10 pm . Meal for two Rs.1100

The Centre for Arts and Crafts. Originally Contemporary Arts and Crafts, this store has a new name, but retains its distinct feel. It’s crammed with mix of irresistible artifacts - pottery, lamps and even a warm wooden bar. Tribal masks, silver Ganeshas and wicker furniture too. This a great store to pick up unusual presents and the displays are gorgeous. They play Buddha Bar, but don’t let that put you off. There’s a smell of freshly roasted coffee from the tiny café. Seating is outside, under dark blue canopies  nice, except when it’s raining. At 9, Juhu Supreme Shopping Centre, Gulmohar Cross Road no 9. Tel 26204668 . Open all days of the week from 10am -8 pm

Bharat Scouts and Guides Grounds – Turn off the Juhu Military Canteen road at the police Chowky, past Rutumbara/ Sanghavi College and suddenly out of nowhere, you have an amazing, almost endless expanse of verdant green. There’s a series of tennis courts here , six or more and often a cricket game in progress too.
Off Juhu Military Road, past Ritumbara College Most games between 7 am to 6 pm


Prithvi Café Sip mint tea or coffee, splurge on brownies or get serious with chicken tikka at this arty outdoor café, ringed by bamboo trees. The crowd here is an interesting mix of intense artists, articulate writers, hippie girls and lets-hang-out-in-an arty-place others. Besides Prithvi theatre there’s also The Corner Bookshop for a bit of browsing. At Janaki Kutir, Off Juhu Church Road. Tel 26149546 Open all days from 12.30 in the afternoon to 11.30 at night.


Mahesh Lunch Home Spicy tandoori pomfret, tiger prawns, Mangalorean fish bathed in satisfyingly rich coconut gravy. Mahesh Lunch Home is a branch of the original thing in Fort and located very accessibly on Juhu Tara Road promises all that and more. Only, one wishes the décor was not so Udipi-turned-prosperous plush. At Juhu Tara Road, next to Hotel Tulip Star Tel no 56955554, 56978966/8967 Open all days of the week for lunch from 12-3.30 and in the evenings from 7 - 12.30 PM. Meal for two Rs.500

Natural Ice Cream The winning combination of fruit and creamy kulfi-like ice cream was born here. Today Natural of JVPD has branches all over Mumbai, but the original Juhu outlet continues to do brisk business. Crowds converge at all hours Seasonal specials are posted on boards – strawberries, sitaphal, watermelon , cheeku or tender coconut….all very hard to choose between , even after sampling tiny white plastic spoons of each.
At 13th North South Road, Opp.Lotus Eye Hospital Tel 26707558, 26206053. Open all days of the week . From 10AM – 12.30 midnight. Prices range from Rs. 25 a scoop of ice cream upward

An edited version of this appeared in Timeout January 14th 2006

Party time in Juhu

January in Juhu and it’s party time. The Citizen’s Group is taking a break from clearing road blocks and battling beach encroachments. Earlier in the week, slim blue and white flyers are slipped into mailboxes and under doors in most households in the area. ‘Volunteers required’, they invite, ’for the Juhu Hamara Festival 2006’, details set against a beguiling logo of a radiant sun on the sea.
So calls flood in - a few want to help, others to attend festivities and many to see the stars.
Juhu Citizen members dash around in different directions – Hansel is putting together the free film screenings, Gulu Gadekar makes the round of local schools for kiddie activities and Adolf processes entries for Sunday evening’s talent night. So much classical music and dance, he discovers. Age old traditions from ‘Nandan’, the celebrated Bharat Natyam School opposite Amitabh Bachchan’s shrub filled and fenced palatial house ‘Pratiksha’ . From ‘Sangeet Mahabharti’, the singing institute in the striking old world house and garden across the road.
Song and dance, and the grounds opposite the Shoppers Stop Mall are beginning to look festive. Here’s where Hema Malini will inaugurate the festival and Ahana Deol will perform a traditional Ganesh vandana dance. The Mall itself with it’s strings of fairy lights and giant glass windows will be host to a series of literary readings. It’s sprawling basement Crossword will see an enactment of Dalit writer Urmila Pawar’s gritty autobiography ‘Ayudaan’, stories of the sea by Juhu Versova born poet Saleem Peeradina, Arundhati Subramaniam and Anand Thakore’s poetry of the sea and a reading from ‘The Girl’, journalist Sonia Faleiro’s haunting debut novel of love and betrayal set on the sea.
A few streets away, the Kaifi Azmi Park with it’s carefully coiffured landscaping, paths and podiums will be another scene for much bustle and buzz – pot painting, craft work and kite flying. At Juhu Jagruti, Javed Akhtar inaugurates the film festival with a mix of Mumbai gems like Anand Patwardhan’s classic commentary and Paromita Vohra’s neighbourhood documentaries. Oh, and there’s the Juhu Dream Run , Sunday 8 am everybody, the gorgeous Pooja Bedi’s going to flag off runners from the spacious Jamnabai Narsee School Grounds, deep in the heart of the gulmohar tree lined JVPD Scheme.

This appeared in the Mumbai Mirror Jan 18th

Papa, Pass the Pullman

How many children read the dazzlingly inventive adventures of Artemis Fowl, boy genius and criminal mastermind? How many venture into the incredibly complex, richly textured parallel universes of Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy? Do tweenies and teenagers really dip in, of their own accord, into the time travels of Jonathon Stroud’s infamous djinn Bartimaeus?

Certainly not as many as the multiple displays in the Children’s Sections of many bookstores would have us believe. Armed with a basketful of questions based on these bookshelves, at a recent children’s literature quiz, I was greeted by staggering silences on these bestsellers. And yet the same kids were competently conversant with Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, with Janus and Jules Verne.

So why are these titles all over children’s sections? Why isn’t Pullman, like HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’, tucked into the crowded recesses of adult science fiction and fantasy? Perhaps it’s because booksellers, like movie makers have discovered the secret of wholesome family fare. If ‘Shark Tales’ with its Robert de Niro and Martin Scorcese voiceovers can net in entire families, books targeted at teenagers and yet complex enough to hold their parents attention are sure volume winners. Spawning a separate category called ‘crossover’. It’s a category that’s largely publisher created and it features a lot of complex fantasy like Pullman , Stroud and Ursula Le Guin. Also other intricately nuanced books like Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time ‘ , a story of an autistic child which makes the grade because of it’s simple language and it’s child protagonist. But really a book that is, in the reading far more complex, than a standard Hardy Boys roaring river mystery. Interestingly, both Pullman and Haddon, never intended their books to be for children. Yet both ended up being wildly successful after being slotted by their publishers, in the children’s fiction category. For children’s fiction shelves are by all accounts , burgeoning, and how ! What’s debatable is who exactly is driving that boom.

Post Potter, it is no longer infra dig or dumbing down to read children’s books. More and more adults are doing exactly that – maybe because these books are well marketed, they stand out from the clutter and are exceedingly well written. They feature powerful and very primeval stories that engage with the always fascinating metaphysical confrontations of good and evil. Harking back to days when, crossovers’ ancient predecessors , ‘The Arabian Nights’, ‘The Odyssey’ or ‘The Mahabharata’, enthralled all ages in the telling . Or even their modern day variations that work so successfully at various levels. Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Tolkien and CS Lewis . Rushdie in that delightful children’s tale of ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’. I loved reading it out to my six year old who delighted in the action of Haroun on a boat in a lake, while I marvelled at Rushdie’s scrumptious satire as Snooty Buttoo speaks through the Mists of Misery, on the Dull Lake, in the Valley of K. A great story - but not one you’d find the average child reader rushing off into a cosy corner with.


This appeared in the Sunday Times of India Bookmark page 5 th Feb 2006

No God in Sight

Nestled amidst the clean lines of Tyrewala’s debut novel, lie a million voices. Voices that belong to many protagonists. Faceless people you see all the time, but rarely look at - a housewife, a butcher, a beggar, an Urdu teacher.
They could come from anywhere and yet they also belong exactly where Tyrewala situates them – among the congested streets of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods. They tell their stories simply – a chapter for each character. But their voices when you hear them are like the unborn-baby voices in the head of the illegal abortionist protagonist, “discordant and raw and numbing “.
It’s an unusual novel - spare and simple but strangely dispersed. Yet Mumbai based Tyrewala navigates the six degrees of separation between his pavement protagonists with cinematic ease. Beginning with ‘Mrs. Khwaja’ who tells us,”I used to be a poetess and would dwell on minute metaphors for days. Now all day long I cook for Ubaid and Minaz, spend the thousands their fathers earns every month, and contemplate television absentmindedly.” And ‘Mr. Khwaja’ on the next page,” Twenty six years ago I married a mediocre poetess. She gave me two kids”. One of these kids will now visit Akhbar, the abortionist. Kaka , the father of the abortionist, is a shoe salesman. Everyday, for the last thirty years, he climbs to his place of work , where he stays crouched “between the shop’s false ceiling and real ceiling, the mezzanine, where boxes and boxes of footwear are stocked.” Only , Amin-bhai, the shoe shop owner and a disillusioned man, will soon sell the shop and emigrate on an aircraft whose “projection screen will show a blue India, with our plane’s route-so- far outlined in white like an anemic tapeworm in the belly of a diseased nation”.
Strong metaphors these, but expressive of the sense of isolated hopelessness most of Tyrewala’s Muslim protagonists feel . Like Rohington Mistry’s impoverished Parsis who are remorselessly squeezed into smaller spaces , the characters in this book no longer seem to belong . Sohail Tambawala’s wife must borrow her maid’s mangalsutra before she registers a missing person complaint in the local police station, Suleiman obsesses about his Muslim identity , his great-grandpa’s conversion that “turned us into outsiders to be driven out of villages..”, Tambawala recoils from the disgust of the Honda City passengers face ,”staring out at what must seem just another filthy Muslim ghetto”.
Simple yet soulful , this is less that is definitely more.

This review appeared in the Deccan Herald December 25th 2005