Random observations

Touch me not: A K Anthony’s report analysing the reasons behind the failure of the Congress in the UP elections have been submitted and stashed away. The Congress had projected the UP polls as the semi-final for Rahul’s ascension to power in 2014. With the Congress biting the dust, Rahul immediately owned up responsibility for the failure and called it a big ‘learning’ for himself. The only place where he did not campaign was in Manipur and the Congress won the elections there. But after two weeks, Rahul came out threatening to take all the non-performers of the UP polls to task. In the Congress, the Gandhi family is beyond blame. The fault always lies elsewhere.

A falling house: While the Congress in a deep cess pool, the members of the BJP, instead of fighting the opponents, are busy fighting amongst themselves. In Karnataka, BSY is threatening to explode every other day. In Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje is showing signs of a rebellion. In Gujarat, Narendra Modi seems to be cut off from what is happening to the party and is on a non-cooperative mode. Even with a mediocre performance, Gadkari is set for a second term as the party president. Except for some mark of brilliance at the local level, the central leadership is in stupor (who is the leader, by the way?). The Congress has every reason to lose the next election and yet, BJP does not seem to be in a position to assume power. Never before has its hands been so weak.

Red Handed: Five young IPL players were caught on the cameras of India TV a few days back and have been suspended from their teams on charges of spot fixing and match fixing. The careers of these players crashed even before it could take off. The boys must have been all too excited after having been approached with these offers and before they knew what it was, they were clean bowled. The real culprits of the game are nowhere in the picture. It is a known fact that the IPL is a big hogwash, with a free flow of black money. There is little transparency in the financial affairs.  And yet, people throng to the stadiums,  displaying a spirit which is difficult to understand. The Prince of Kolkata Saurav Ganguly  is playing for Pune and the Bangalore boy Rahul Dravid is the captain of Rajasthan. In times of shifting loyalties, all these arguments make no sense anyway.

 A Falling Star: Shahrukh Khan is back in news again for the wrong reasons. This time, he was found picking up a fight with the security guards and officials of the Wankhede stadium in a drunken state. He is said to have abused the personnel and the Mumbai Cricket Association is planning to ban him for life at the stadium. Over the last few months, Shahrukh has been in negative news. The other day, he ended up beating Shirish Kunder (Farah Khan’s husband) at a party, when the latter cracked a joke about the failure of Ra.one. Before that his proximity to Priyanka Chopra resulted in an attack on Chopra by Karan Johar. The Shahrukh of today is an epitome of a star traversing a downhill journey. His movies are failing to click and his public image is on the wane. The earlier he calls it a day, the better it will be for him and for his fans, who can retain the image of a star, whose stardom has not been lost yet.

An epic conversation

This interview with the noted writer Ashok Banker was published in Madras Plus, the Friday supplement of Economic Times 

Mahabharata has been hailed since time immemorial as the greatest story ever told. After his successful series on the Ramayana, Ashok Banker has returned with The Forest of Stories, his new series on the Mahabharata.

How different is The Forest of Stories from the other retellings of the Mahabharata?

I have grown up reading the Mahabharata of C Rajagopalachari and Amar Chitra Katha. They are wonderful and serve their purpose. But my work is more comprehensive and I have stayed true to the original work of Vyaasa. I have placed my small feet on the large footprints of the giants of story telling, who have walked along the same route.

You took many creative liberties while writing the Ramayana series but have stayed true to the original this time. Is there any reason behind this?

In Valmiki’s epics, many portions are spare in details. Sometimes, I prefer Kambar’s Ramayana to that of Valmiki. It shatters the north-south divide about the Ramayana created by the politicians today. But Vyaasa has an eye for detail in the Mahabharata. I did not see any reason to add or remove any incidents or characters. People tend to lose track of the story while reading the Mahabharata. My attempt has been to reclaim the original story without resorting to any narrative gimmicks.

An entire generation has known the Mahabharata by watching B R Chopra’s television blockbuster. What is your take on the TV series?

To be frank, I find it horrible. The costumes are unauthentic and the actors seem ridiculous when juxtaposed with the characters sketched by Vyaasa. Actually it is the Bollywodisation of our epics that has hurt most, where aesthetics have been thrown out of the window. We have very few good historical and mythologicals on television. Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Chanakya was an excellent attempt in that way. I feel that we should have movies with Sanskrit dialogues. If Mel Gibson can pull of his epics in Hebrew, why can’t we do it in India? I would also be interested to see an interesting retelling of Ponniyin Selvan on the Indian screen.

You have talked about the hassles created by the MNC publishers in your book. Is that why you moved to an Indian publisher this time?

It might sound far fetched, but when I approached some MNC publishers with my Ramayana series, they refused to touch it. One gentleman even threw the manuscript into the dustbin saying they would not get into promoting Hindutva by publishing Indian epics. I being a person of Anglo Indian origin, failed to understand this diffidence Indians have in accepting their own cultural past. Most MNC publishers are in India to promote foreign authors than provide a platform for Indian writers. The top writers on mythology in India – Devdutt Pattnaik, Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghvi- are all getting published by Westland, an Indian company. They are also publishing my works now.

Is there a favourite character from the Mahabarata?

There are two people who stand out. One is Ekalavya. All the characters got their due, either in their life or in their death. But Ekalavya, in spite of being the greatest of all the warriors we know in the epic, was hushed up because he belonged to a lower caste. Everyone did something dishonourable to stay afloat. But Ekalavya did not live his story. Then there is Draupadi. She was abused and disrobed in a house of elders and warriors. Yet, she had the might to challenge the elders of the Kuru assembly and question them on dharma. She is an epitome of power.

Amar Chitra Katha Memories

In the early days of my childhood, I depended solely on my mother for my quota of stories. She was the first story teller I knew. Though her knowledge of the epics was limited, she chipped in her own imaginary tales as she serialized the Ramayan while feeding me lunch everyday. My father once read out a piece on Mahatma Gandhi that appeared in the Saudi Gazette and I was introduced to a contemporary figure for the first time. It was during my winter holidays in my second grade that my uncle got me a copy of Amar Chitra Katha’s (ACK) Jataka Tales (The Giant and the Dwarf) and Tinkle. Those were the first books ever gifted to me and I got one of the best companions in my books.

Since then, I made it a point to religiously build my collection of ACK, starting with books like Vali, Surya, Indra and Shachi, Chanakya and most recently, Anant Pai. I recently happened to interview Reena Puri, the current Editor of ACK. As I spoke to her, I could not hold back my excitement while the ACK saga. The interview was about Anant Pai, the master storyteller and its founder, whom we knew better as Uncle Pai.

ACK is not merely a story book for me. ACK is a snapshot of my childhood. I’ve been extremely possessive about my ACK copies and refused to hand them over to my younger cousins or friends. Such has been my fixation with these books that even now I clearly remember the culprits who failed to return the ACK copies borrowed from me during my childhood. I owe my love for History purely to ACK for I discovered an enjoyable way of learning things. Science became fun with Anu Club and I made rapid progress in my English over the years reading those volumes. In fact, I owe my proficiency in the regional languages also to ACK, for I read many of its titles in Malayalam and Hindi. I strongly believe that there is no better way of acquainting the young minds with India’s rich cultural past, without a tinge of jingoism, than introducing them to the world of ACK.

Every time I go home, I pick up a few random copies from my shelf and go through them. Sometimes, the ACK copies look like a snapshot of my childhood, a piece of my past, that has trickled down to the present. I don’t know if it is nostalgia or the stories themselves that work wonders for me. Perhaps ACK still works for me because it follows a rare style of writing which pleases the kids and the grown-ups alike. The illustrations are well researched and are capable of transporting you to a different era. I wonder if our filmmakers could borrow a leaf from ACK on art direction and scripting. Most of the period dramas that have been aired on television have been of late quite forgettable. I have my personal favourites as well like Chanakya, for its pace, crisp dialogues and wel-researched costumes, Malavika, for the breezy manner in which the reader’s mind is treated to the joys and pangs of romance, Draupadi, for a fair portrayal of the greatest of our epic women, all the titles of Birbal for its wit and the entire volume of the Mahabharata which can any day give a tough fight to its counterpart on television for its research, execution and scripting. I’m sure every child who has read ACK has his or her personal favourite among the titles.

Of course the joy of Tinkle is a story in itself. Was any train journey complete without a copy of the Tinkle sold at the railway platforms? Tantri the MAntri, Shikari Shanbhu, Kapeesh, Ramu, Shamu, Little Raji, Pyarelal and Suppandi have become a part of our collective memories.

The recent issue on Uncle Pai is a warm and enjoyable work. It brought me closer to the person who touched my life and many others' lives so deeply that people belonging to my generation owe a sense of nationalistic pride and thinking to the stories he brought alive in those umpteen volumes, each running into 32-pages. If nothing, it is the story of a man who walked alone with nothing but an enterprising spirit to build an empire in the world of comics

Random Ruminations

Sonia Gandhi wept on seeing the photos of the Batla House encounter, if we are to believe the statement of the Law Minister Salman Khursheed. How sad for Her Highness Madame Sonia to have shed tears for the hapless men, outrageously labeled as terrorists, by our devilish police force. The act of our policemen can put the villainous policemen of the cheap Hindi flicks of 1980s to shame. So many deaths have paralysed this nation. There were hundreds of deaths as terror struck the Mumbai local trains, the temples of Varanasi, the Ajmer Dargah, umpteen crowded markets on festive occasions and of course, the 26/11 killings at the Taj. Khursheed did not mention any of them. The perpetrators of these acts have either not been caught or are having a jolly good time in our prisons. But our nation is run by those who shed tears for the terrorists rather than the terrorized. Digvijay Singh, the upholder of the dynasty dharma soon chipped in to rescue saying Madam never cried. Meanwhile, Madam never spoke.

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Robert Vadara has suddenly emerged as a new player in the national politics. Astride on his bike, his comments were capable of inspiring the script writers of political dramas. He has signaled his political ambitions and his children are now being sashayed around with pride. The sixth generation of the Gandhis has been launched during the UP elections and the tiny tots are getting used to being garlanded and are waving joyously at boisterous rallies. Indians, who grow up on stories of rajas, ranis, rajkumars and rajkumaris, quite like to see some in real life too. The Gandhis are only eager to oblige. Very soon we will find Barkha Dutt interviewing the kids, who might ascend the throne of India two decades from now.

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Vijay Mallaya wants the help of the government and the public sector banks in helping his Kingfisher fly again. The airline was launched with much noise and fanfare, when Mallaya thought of redefining luxury for Indians. But reality clipped the flight of his dreams and the airline was pushed to the abysses of a budget airline. We didn’t complain when he blew up fortunes on panache and style as he positioned himself as India’s answer to Richard Branson, with private jets, islands and yes, plenty of girls. But sadly for him, style and glamour alone were not enough to run airlines. The Kingfisher’s wings have been clipped by its own master. Its staff has not been paid for the past few months. Now he wants the tax-paying public to pay for his stupidities. Hail capitalism to plunder wealth and turn the pages of socialism to seek cover. Meanwhile, the pilots of Air India, the biggest benefactor of India's confused socialism, are contemplating yet another strike.

Home is after all... home

Ever since I’ve started this blog, I’ve written a number of write-ups on some beautiful places I’ve visited like Fatehpur Sikri, Jhansi, Old Delhi and the city I now live in – Chennai. A short stay at my hometown over the last weekend made me realise that I’ve hardly written much about the place where my roots lie – my hometown. No doubt, I love Delhi and can write page after page about the place, its exquisite culture, history, food and its stories. During the two years that i stayed in Noida, I could imagine Delhi only as a living entity, with its constantly changing exteriors and unchanging soul. Delhi is one of its kinds and I will write a long tribute to that city one day.

There is much that I like about Chennai, for I had my first corporate stint in this city and it is here that I got a job of my liking after almost two strenuous years. It is here that I came for my holidays during my graduation years. But I cannot write about Chennai while I’m still here for I believe that a city is best written about once you leave it; for then you see the positive side of it and forgive the minor flaws it holds

But my hometown, that is a different world for me. I’ve always found flaws with it. I would myself complain a lot about the place, but would not like anyone saying ill about it. I would then become defensive. Thrissur has no history of epic proportions to tell like Delhi and it is not a transforming metro like Chennai and yet, it has a lot which these cities badly lack. After the culturally bankrupt life of Riyadh and Dubai, life in Kerala’s cultural capital was the best thing to have happened to me.

I went around the Thrissur Round this time and saw that quite a few things had changed. Current Books, the shop that marked the beginning of Round East, had been demolished. It was from here that I bought some of the first books since I had started reading and if I’m right, it was only here that you got a good selection of Amar Chitra Kathas and other English books. This was before I saw the Landmarks and Crosswords of the big cities. You never knew the capacity of Current Books. You could hardly locate the book you wanted. But tell the storekeeper and he would emerge in two minutes with that book from nowhere. I’m told Current Books has moved to spacious grounds elsewhere in the town.

Its sister shop Cosmo Books has also moved to a allocation near the Priyadarshini Bus Stand (Vadakke Stand). The bus stand boasts of a huge shop space for India Coffee House. The ICH with its turbaned waiters was the last word on coffee in Kerala. We did not have the Coffee House of Calcutta but prided ourselves for ICH, where people came and chatted endlessly over a newspaper, coffee and cutlets. But a few steps away from ICH I spotted two new coffee bars, with their couches, Italian coffees and fanciful interiors. Small town Thrissur also has its local version of Cafe Coffee Day now.

There are newer restaurants, more shopping complexes and more vehicles on the road. Education is in bad shape with hartals and bandhs. Companies are wary of opening shop in the state. Youngsters in Kerala usually move to Karnataka or Tamil Nadu for their education. But it is here that I did my graduation and I did it pretty well. I was into a load of extra-curricular activities, learnt classical music (perhaps the best thing I did to myself in life), read some of the best books and yet found enough time to study. These days, I always complain that I don’t get time to do anything. But I think time was quite inexpensive in Thrissur. I did a lot more work and there was still time left in my daily life. In all of my life, I’ve only spent five years in whole in Thrissur and have lived outside mostly. The town does not goad you to catch up with anything. It does not expect me to deliver on some target or meet some deadline. I know that at the end of the day, even when I’m nothing, I can come here and the place will take me back without complain. Perhaps that is what you call home.

Back to TINA?

I like the story "35 years ago" that comes with every issue of the magazine India Today. Sometimes the contrast between then and now tells a pitiful transition of some things. Like that of the BJP. 20 years back, the party was at the zenith of its Ram fever and had formed a government in UP, with Kalyan Singh as its CM. Today, UP is readying for polls and the party seems nowhere in the picture. For that matter, the Congress does not seem to be at any advantageous position either.

But think of it. The BJP has been given many opportunities on a platter. Over the last five years, Mayawati has been more busy building elephants and statues than building roads and highways. The Samajwadi Party has lost its way in the maze of Mayawati statues and its leader Amar Singh comes, vanishes and reappears, now looking beyond recognition.

The Congress, having abandoned the nationalist themes of Nehru, is busy with its confounding math on caste and religion, with quotas and night-stays at Dalit homes. The party has never been in a worse condition than it is now, ever since it came to power in 2004. Scams after scams have sullied its image, if any existed. Anna and Baba seem bent on teaching it a lesson. “Our PM is an honest man” is an argument no one seems to buy, the line smacking of Shakespere’s “But Brutus is an honourable man.” The party is unable to sail smoothly with the Bengali didi threatening to rock the boat. Thanks to the ilk of Digvijay Singh, the party has scored countless self-goals.

So where does the BJP stand? Forget the UP polls, where the party is anyway in the ‘also ran’ category, the BJP is least ready for the battle ahead in 2014. The party once boasted of a well-trained cadre, which ran in unison to propel the party to power in 1998 and 1999. The leaders were considered to be less corrupt and the BJP called itself the party with a difference. The much touted lotus in Karnataka has already started wilting in the marsh of mines and corruption. A party crying foul about corruption is busy inducting members who have been rejected from a party like BSP on corruption charges! The party seems to suffering from a multiple personality disorder after two successive defeats at the centre. Through their actions, they have done more to dent their image than to build it, having failed to define its ideology to the new voters. The party seems to be blinking in darkness when any question of the next PM candidate comes up. Does it have another statesman like Vajpayee who can win appeal across board? The party leaders seem more comfortable working from TV studios than in the arteries of India. If the party does not buck up now, the country will be pushed back to the TINA (There is no alternative) days of the 1970s, when Indira was voted back to power, not because the Congress was good at its work, but because the opposition was worse!

And the Bharat Ratna goes to....

The Republic Day will soon arrive and along with it will begin the fight for Padma Awards. For that matter, the awards season begins from this month and the papers will be splashed with exalted beings holding trophies. But the Padma Awardees always get special attention for it is an honour conferred by the Government of India. It is sad that over the past many years it has become a tool to reward loyalties by the government. But this post is about the highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna Award.

There will be many crying out the name of Sachin Tendulkar for the honour. But I would keep such silly assumptions away for a while. Sachin might be the reigning God of cricket and is an inspiration to millions. But honey, Bharat Ratna is not yet another award show telecast for your New Year entertainment. It is a recognition for achievement over a lifetime, for dedication to a pursuit and excellence in a field, whose zenith has been touched by the awardee. Sachin Tendulkar can wait and should contend with the Padma Vibhushan given to him last year.

Not many Indians today qualify to be called Bharat Ratnas. But the list here is for what I believe is an honour due by now.

R.K.Laxman: He defined the Common Man for us. His cartoons in Times of India have enthralled generations of readers and have celebrated the everyday travails of the man on the street in the most tongue-in-cheek fashion. ‘The Common Man’ cartoons are modern day classics for the cartoons sketched in the 1960s and 70s still seem relevant. Times have changed but the common man’s imagery and life remain the same. Many political parties have pledged support to the man on the street during every election that India has seen but none have remained steadfast in their loyalty like Laxman. An award to him will mean an honour to the common man.

Dilip Kumar: He is the Last Mughal of Hindi cinema. He brought in a style of which was a marked departure from the loud theatrics of the 1940s and defined what acting would remain to be in cinema thereafter. Mahesh Bhatt famously remarked that half the actors tried imitating him and the other half consciously tried not to imitate him. Comedy, tragedy, action, romance and drama were on his finger-tips, to be doled out on demand. For that matter, Dilip Kumar never acted. He lived each character to perfection. He is a symbol of India's catholic culture. He was Yusuf Khan in real life and Dilip Kumar on-screen. Both the characters would seamlessly merge and stand out as per the occasion. He was the first superstar of independent India and personified the ideals of a generation. This honour is for the most prized relic of cinema, which continues to inspire generation after generation.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee: It is a tricky and confusing business to bestow this honour on a politician, for it invites criticisms and praises in equal measure. Not many will support the idea of honouring a politician as it means extending support to an ideology. But I feel Vajpayee is a statesman, perhaps the last one India has had and one who clearly stood above party line. He could campaign as a member of the BJP and run the nation as a Prime Minister, who was looked up to as a non-partisan force to reckon with. In an era when politics has become a synonym for scams and scandals, Vajpayee is part of the group we call endangered species.

The list is not exhaustive. The last person we honoured with the Bharat Ratna was the late Pt Bhimsen Joshi. It is high time we recognize another gem in our country.