My first friend

The first friend I had in life was my mamu, my mother's brother. More than an uncle, he was a buddy. Every evening, I would wait for him to come home from work. As soon as I heard the familiar phat-phat of his scooter, I would race out of my home and accompany him two flights of stairs up to his. There, I would wait patiently till he had his bath and ate a snack that my grand-mom had prepared for him, and then we would hang out together. We would go for a spin on his scooter around the colony or drop in to his friend Kersi's place or just go to the circle down the road to pick up a lottery ticket.

He had all sorts of nicknames for me. When I would go to him crying because I had been scolded by my parents, he would call me Kashmira, a girl's name. When he needed some help to fix something at home, I would be Begaari, labour. But his favourite name for me was Saparchand, apple or figuratively, simpleton. I would retaliate and call him Keru, banana. But it never had the effect I desired on him.

He clicked pictures of me and my sister through our childhood, and then lovingly mounted them himself in an album. We still have that album and treasure the memories of our childhood. The picture above is from that, of him holding my little sister. (Unfortunately, it's not of the two of us together.)

The album was kept away, locked in his cupboard, and we had to demand to see it. We weren't allowed to turn the pages. He would turn them himself. The first picture was his. He would point to it and say "Behesti (the late) Dara Bomanshaw Desai."

He took me to my first movie. He took me to Chowpatty to go up Bombay's first escalator and see the public Diwali fireworks. To the Don Bosco church where we waited in a serpentine queue to get a glimpse of a newly installed statue of Mary.

When I was in kindergarten, he made me bunk school on a Saturday and took me to Udwada for a weekend. When I asked him what do I tell my teacher when she asks the reason for my absence, he told me to say, "Heart fail." I chickened out, however. When the teacher indeed asked me why I hadn't attended school on Saturday, I truthfully said I'd gone to Udwada.

When I was a little older, he was transferred to Goa on work. I would wait for his vacations to Bombay with great anticipation, first counting down the days and then the hours to his arrival. On Thursday, my mid-week school holiday, he would take me out on a whole-day outing. We would leave in the morning on his scooter to his office at Wellington Mews, then to the World Trade Centre to buy shirts, always from Stanrose. The rest of the day we would visit relatives, his masis and mamas and cousins. My sister would be very jealous of these outings; Mamu was her friend too, but never such a big one as mine.

He had a signature whistle. Every time he bounded down the stairs, down from his house to mine, he would whistle. That was our cue to run to the door and open it. My first attempts at whistling were to imitate that signature tune.

That wasn't the only thing about him I tried to imitate. My ambition then was to be an engineer like him, and I even ended up studying in the colleges he studied in - Ruia and VJTI - before realising that my ambitions were actually elsewhere.

There are a couple of things though about me which I think are completely his influence, on reflection. A morbid sense of humour. And the way I behave with the children of my friends - more like a friend than as an uncle.

When I was 12, he married. Something ended then. Things were never the same after. He had his own family, and I moved on to newer friends. We became uncle and nephew.

Last month, as I watched him battle unsuccesfully with pancreatitis in the ICU at Jaslok Hospital, these memories came rushing back. And with them, the realisation that he was actually the very first friend I had.



Love you, Mamu. And miss you.

The Delhi-isation of India

I do not watch much television. I don’t read newspapers or magazines, either. Very little in them interests me or engages me any more. My viewing and reading is increasingly over the Internet where I can search for stuff that interests me.

Last week, however, I was in Lucknow on holiday, and without the laptop. I ended up whiling a few hours in the hotel room in front of the television. And I found myself having a perverse attraction to two shows on Channel [V] in particular – Love Net 2.0 and Axe Your Ex.

I say perverse because these shows (and others like Dare To Date on the same channel and Emotional Atyachar on Bindass) pander to two of our basest desires for their success – the first is the desire of having a fantasy coming true (meeting your chat friends, revenge on your ex, spying on your boyfriend, going on a blind date) and the second, the voyeuristic urge to know the personal details of other people’s lives.

While watching these shows, I couldn’t help reflecting on the journey of the music (now turned youth) channels over the past two decades. They were “cool” in the early 90′s when they launched, transformed themselves to “desi cool” at the turn of the decade, and now are just plain “desi”. In a way, the sensibility has travelled, very evidently, from South Bombay to West Delhi. From people in ivory towers in South Mumbai producing what they think we should be watching, we now have people in ivory towers in Gurgaon producing what they think we want to watch.

It’s not just our youth channels that have made this journey. It’s the trend across channels. Fantasies come true when an Akshay Kumar hosts Masterchef India. Voyeurism is the USP of Big Boss and our daily soaps. Our news channels are full of it. And then there’s the IPL.

There’s nothing wrong in this Delhi-isation. Of course, Delhi-isation is a harsh term to use. It reinforces the unfortunate stereotype of Bombay being sophisticated and Delhi being boorish (which they aren’t), and doesn’t do justice to the good work coming out of this phenomenon, especially in films and advertising. Filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerji are putting their Delhi sensibility to good use in their work and presenting a view of contemporary Delhi in much the same way as Hrishikesh Mukherji and Basu Chatterjee used to do with Bombay in the 70′s. And Piyush Pandey rewrote the rules in advertising by bringing Delhi to his work.

The reason for the increased Delhi-isation of our media is also due to a shift in our influences from British to American. Compare NDTV which started off as a BBC clone and transformed itself to a clone of Fox News. Or our cricket coverage whose packaging resembles that of any sport on American TV.

It may well be that Delhi-isation is a phase we have to pass through, before we become Kolkata-ised, like we were before the 70′s.

I’m reminded of a similar analysis of this phenomenon by the Bates planning team that explains it as a transition from Brahminical values to Kshatriya. You can read that here.

Badi Behenji is watching you

Step out of Lucknow’s Amausi airport and you are greeted by giant hoardings proclaiming Mayawati’s achievements with Behenji smiling benignly from them. Leave the airport and drive into the city, and you’ll be haunted by them at every street corner there is.

We had come to Lucknow for a leisurely break. An unlikely destination for one, for sure, as people kept reminding me. “Lucknow?! On a holiday?” We were prepared to stay put in our hotel and just enjoy our time together. But Lucknow surprised us, and pleasantly.

I looked around for hints of the city’s famed tehzeeb. But other than being called ‘janaab’ instead of ‘sahab’ by autorickshaw drivers, shop salesmen and sundry others, I didn’t find much of it.

We avoided Mayawati’s grand parks with elephants that cost a crore each to sculpt and her handbags immortalised in stone (“I refuse to see such a colossal waste of public money,” as the wife put it), and instead opted to visit Lucknow’s heritage.

Amid the ruins of the Residency, where the mutineers of 1857 laid seige, we found ourselves invading the privacy of numerous amorous couples. We bid a hasty retreat to the Bada Imambara where guides are trained to parrot out the same old information while giving it a fresh new twist. So we encountered medieval age ‘CCTV cameras’ and other modern-day security features.

All this while, Lucknow’s autorickshaw drivers made sure they had a good Diwali at our expense. I’d always thought the biggest rogues in India were Chennai’s auto-walas, but Lucknow’s, I discovered, beat them by a fair distance. The Lucknow autorickshaw driver only counts in multiples of 50. He knows no other numbers.

At Hazratganj, Lucknow’s colonial shopping district, there seems to be a law that all signage on heritage buildings have to be white on a black background. It was quite interesting to see the all-too-familiar Airtel and Vodafone logos shorn of their brand colours. If you are a brand manager with one of them, don’t visit Hazratganj. You’ll have the worst nightmare of your life.

I couldn’t take a picture of it, but here’s a photo I found at http://sites.google.com/site/lovelylucknow/hazratganj_lucknow that will give you an idea of what to expect.

Stray thoughts on Anna Hazare (in reaction to a post by Raj Balakrishnan)

Raj Balakrishnan I think most people support Anna without having an understanding of what he stands for. He stands for an unaccountable, undemocratic monstrosity called the Lok Pal, appointed by unelected civil society reps, which will stop development and become the fount of all corruption. The principle of fighting corruption is fine, Anna's solution is a disaster. Fasts unto death are intrinsically undemocratic.

The Congress of course has demonstrated continued incompetence

Kaevan Umrigar I don't know what Anna stands for, but I support him wholeheartedly. Why? Because he represents my angst with the system. I don't want his Lokpal Bill, I don't think he will even manage to get it passed. But I want his wake-up call to the Government. Let our politicians and business be less corrupt or more careful. The people have found a voice, and it will take some stifling.

Kaevan Umrigar I was watching Gandhi yesterday, and find the parallels unmistakable. Anna however is no Gandhi. Gandhi was a wily man who saw a virtue in being simple. Anna is a simple man who sees no virtue in being wily.

Kaevan Umrigar I have to add that I wasn't pro-Anna until today. I dismissed his Jantar Mantar fast as useless idealism. I laughed at the Baba Ramdev circus. But the way the government reacted today made it very clear that it has a lot to hide and a lot to lose. For a lone man to provoke such a response from a system makes him in my book worthy of my support.

From an email exchange with Mani Kaul

"The value of an image or a sound (in the cinematographic system) is not in what it is; rather, it is in what it is not."


"When the most important (the most hidden idea) is found (or even sensed), the film will show how rich people are in their minds and hearts, and not how rich the film is in its forms and ideas."


"You will have to think for the film a sequence of scenes and for each scene a sequence of shots that are repeatedly informed of this question on account of their various juxtapositions. Not just raise the question at the end of the film in an epilogue. The question then will simmer between shots. In other words you should not attempt to make a single shot 'say' a thing. Rather, use differences between two or more shots to make the audience raise the question. The difference may in extreme situations amount to a contradiction."


"The relationship between images, between sounds and between images and sounds alone determines the content ( a world view or if you like the question) for the film. Keep only necessary images and necessary sounds. The necessity is on account of their mutual relationship."


"Do listen to others (I being one of the others for you) but strictly follow your own impulse. The project of any film is to find oneself in the making of it and not to merely fashion an cinematic object of high emotional or intellectual kind that is external to oneself."


RIP