Category Archives: Articles

A selection of my articles on a wide variety of topics, written over the past two decades for leading publications such as Gulf News (UAE) and The Hindu (India)

December 6, 2010 · 1:20 pm

Book launch: “Another Chance” and “Urban Shots”

Chennai’s book lovers got a neat little two-for-the-price-of-one deal at a recent book launch at Landmark. You could even call it a three-for-the-price-of-one deal.

Two books – a romance novel and a collection of short stories were launched — and three authors were on hand to discuss the books with the audience that valiantly filled the seats in spite of the rain.

The books in question were ‘Another Chance’, Ahmed Faiyaz’s take on the rather complicated love lives of urban, upwardly-mobile yuppies in India, and ‘Urban Shots’, an engaging collection of 29 short stories by 13 Indian writers on life in our metros.

Both had Faiyaz in common – he’s contributed to three short stories in ‘Urban Shots’, and is the founding member of Grey Oak Publishers, which brought out both books. Their themes are similar too, with a focus on the urban experience in India.

“’Another Chance’ is reflective of our generation, where people are in a relationship but external and internal factors cause friction between them,” said Faiyaz, in conversation with Chennai-based writer Vibha Bhatra. “Careers make them move from city to city, they choose to go back to those they were in relationships with before, and so on.”

The story, then, sets up a love triangle (or should it be quadrangle?) between four beautiful, globe-trotting desi urbanites who’re trying to figure out what they’re looking for in life and love. “My greatest challenge was writing from a woman’s perspective this time, to bring out her point-of-view,” said Faiyaz, whose first novel, ‘Life, Love and All that Jazz…’ came out earlier this year.

‘Urban Shots’ (edited by Paritosh Uttam) touches upon relationships as well, dealing with themes of romance and infidelity. But it also takes on a whole lot else, from the loss of the child to domestic abuse, often with a great deal of sensitivity. Two of the contributors to the collection, Chennai-based freelance writer Malathi Jaikumar and journalist and author of travelogue ‘Chai, Chai’, Bishwanath Ghosh, were present at the launch and discussed why it was an important book.

“It’s very relevant as more and more people move to urban areas today,” said Jaikumar. “There are a lot of conveniences and chances for success, but also a lot of loneliness and depression. Anyone who reads these stories can identify with these situations, and feel like they’re not alone.”

Ghosh described the writers of ‘Urban Shots’ as spanning generations and providing different perspectives. “The youngest writer is 20 and the emotions one undergoes at 20, 25, 35 or 45 are different,” he said. “’Urban Shots’ is really many books in one book.”

This was a coming-out party of sorts for Grey Oak, set up earlier this year. These are its first two books and Faiyaz called ‘Urban Shots’ its “first big step.” “We thought why not make a statement by bringing young writes and noted writers together for a collection, and show our support for Indian writing,” he said.

The question and answer session that followed was a tad lackadaisical, punctuated by a series of mini blackouts. Still, there was time for a fairly in-depth discussion on short story writing and its evolution, and even a profound exchange on Somerset Maugham’s final book. Not a bad deal for the audience, overall.

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December 2, 2010 · 6:26 pm

Interview with… Ashish Rajpal

Every year Ashish Rajpal teaches science for fourth or fifth standard students at a school in Delhi. Not exactly business as usual for an MBA and the managing director of a company. But then teaching is Rajpal’s business at iDiscoveri and it was a similar stint of teaching fourth graders that laid the foundations of his popular XSEED programme a few years ago.

“I came back after doing my M.Ed at Harvard University eight years ago, with this crazy mission to change education in India,” says Rajpal, an MBA from XLRI. “Given that we have six million poorly trained teachers in India, I dove right into teacher training, but found that in itself did not change classroom practice or help the children ultimately.”

That’s when Rajpal himself started teaching science at a Delhi school. “And I found it’s incredibly tough to teach 45 children in a crowded classroom!” he says. “I realised that all this theoretical nonsense we’d been feeding the teachers meant nothing in a real-world situation. We needed something that worked in the classroom.”

The result was that iDiscoveri began to create minute-by-minute plans for the teacher to follow in class, including group work, experiments and other forms of experiential learning. And so XSEED was born. “Today we’ve created over 8000 lesson plans across all subjects for nursery to seventh standard, and XSEED reaches 450 schools across the country,” says Rajpal. “We’re hoping that number will reach 1000 by next summer.”

About a hundred of those schools are right here in Tamil Nadu, which is one of XSEED’s flagship states. “Although we stared in 2002 in Delhi, we found that the South was far more receptive to our ideas,” he says. “So we decided to focus on Southern states, and picked Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.”

Rajpal describes the programme as going inside the schools like ‘Intel Inside’ and doing not just lesson plans, but also teacher training, creating work books and doing quarterly assessments of students (“sort of like a stock market report”). Somewhat strange MBA-esque metaphors to use for an educational enterprise, but then that’s Rajpal for you – a mixture of starry-eyed idealism and businesslike pragmatism.

“I am an idealist at heart – I’d have to have been, to give up my well-paying corporate job in Paris, uproot my family and go do my M.Ed at the age of 31,” he says. “But my corporate experience for 10 years has also shaped me. Ideas aren’t enough – you have to make it work.”

He recalls how he applied in secret to Harvard, inspired by the birth of his children. And once there, he was “like a greedy hog”, making the most of the opportunities before him. “Intellectually, those were the best years of my life – I was getting to hang out with legends such as Howard Gardner and David Perkins,’ he says.

To ensure these ideals aren’t lost, iDiscoveri launched The School of Tomorrow conference here in Chennai last year, with the second, bigger edition around the corner (see box). Then there’s the leadership programme for young adults he’s working on, along with supplementary programmes to meet different needs of students and a national network of XSEED centres. Oh, and he’s considering diversifying to teaching English as well. It’s all in a day’s work for this educational entrepreneur.

BOX: The School of Tomorrow conference
The second annual edition of iDiscoveri’s The School of Tomorrow conference will be held on December 7, 2010 simultaneously in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad, using Internet and videoconferencing technology.

It will feature several high-profile speakers, including writer and columnist Gurucharan Das, who will give the India Education Address, and leading American educationists Peter Senge of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Perkins of Harvard University, who will present the International Keynote Address.

In addition, there will be a micro-panel of educationists discussing issues of classroom and school practices and a macro-panel of leaders from the corporate sector discussing society’s expectations from education.

For details call 044-42658585 or log on to www.schooloftomorrow.in.

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December 2, 2010 · 6:16 pm

Interview with… D.J.K. Cornelius

D.J.K. Cornelius has designed so many machines and workstations for people with special needs in the last forty years that he’s lost count.

None of them have anything to do with his regular job as an industrial engineer. And he’s never patented any of his designs. But they’ve made a life-changing difference to hundreds of mentally challenged young people across the nation. And they’ve certainly given Cornelius himself more satisfaction than any designing he’s done on the job.

“It’s far more rewarding than what I was trained for professionally,” says Cornelius, founder of the Navajyothi Trust, which completed 40 years in 2009. “Others may say creating an industrial conveyor belt is more complex engineering, but changing people’s lives this way is much more satisfying.”

His specially crafted workstations are based on a simple principle – that modifying the working environment to suit the needs of the mentally challenged allows them to maximise their potential. “Rather than focussing on what they can’t do, you look at what they can, and find innovative ways to make the most of their abilities,” he says.

This means that youngsters at his institute (with IQs measured at 50 and below) today perform highly precise and complex tasks for companies such as Delphi TVS and Brakes India Ltd., creating diesel pumps for cars, perhaps, or bicycle or motorcycle chains, and earn a respectable salary.

“They aren’t given these jobs out of charity,” he stresses. “This is a business agreement, and the companies’ requirements are rigid.  At Navajyothi, every person is a social contributor, and they can hold their heads high.”

His journey began back in 1968, when he helped diagnose two children of close friends as being mentally challenged (he was a consultant for the Industrial Therapy Centre at the Institute of Mental Health in Kilpauk at the time). An engineer with a love for medicine, he’d spent long hours reading his doctor father’s books on mental disability, and later in Presidency College, had worked with the psychology department, helping design equipment for experimental psychology.

“They came to me for assistance because they’d been running from pillar to post and hadn’t gotten a diagnosis,” he recalls with emotion. “When I broke it to them gently, they were shattered.”

Moved by the impact it had on the children and their families, he dedicated himself thereafter to the cause of mental disability.

“What I found sorely lacking was post school-age programmes, so that 16 year olds emerging from special schools were just left high and dry,” he says. “Employment facilities were more occupational than vocational – their income was a pittance and their products were just not marketable.”

And so he established the Navajyothi Trust in 1969, with a grand total of Rs. 3000 as the corpus of the trust (“A couple of friends pooled in Rs. 1000 each”) and designed his first workstation shortly after (“the more sophisticated the task it assisted them in, the more they’d earn” was his mantra).

Unfortunately, this project found no support in Chennai, and he began work instead in Bangalore under the aegis of NIMHANS, in a small rented residence with just three students, training them and introducing them to his workstations. Soon people began to hear about his work – a National Award came the trust’s way in 1981, and visiting dignitaries urged him to take his work across the country.

“They’d never seen anything like it before, and said it should reach more people,” he says.

That’s how he came to develop the Diploma in Vocational Training & Employment (DVTE ) to teach instructors to train the mentally challenged in his techniques. It became the first such course in India to be licensed by the Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI), and is today taught (in a modified form) at several institutes across the country, from Chandigarh to Thiruvananthapuram. In time, the little centre he started morphed into a full-fledged institute – training, creating research modules and publishing works, and of course, designing and developing his workstations. And in 2000, it finally shifted to Chennai entirely, after the trust was gifted land in Ambattur by the Tamil Nadu state government.

In these four decades, Cornelius has seen a lot change. “There’s greater awareness about disability today, and plenty of work has been done on the legal side, with a lot of rights being legislated,” says the 79-year-old, who is also one of the founding members of The Spastics Society of Tamil Nadu, was associated with the National Institute for the Mentally Handicapped, and has served on several expert committees for government ministries. “But there’s still a need to infuse more science and technology into the fight.”

He adds with a smile: “I would like to spread my work into other areas of disability as well; I only hope I have enough time.”

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November 13, 2010 · 5:03 pm

Book launch: Samit Basu’s ‘Turbulence’

It isn’t often that a book launch begins with a dramatic audio-visual presentation. Especially one that looks like a promo for a summer Hollywood blockbuster film. But then, not every novel has 17 superheroes fighting to save the world…

In spite of a delayed start, the launch of ‘Turbulence’, fantasy fiction writer Samit Basu’s ‘breakaway’ mainstream novel (his quirky version of one, anyway) at Landmark ended up being quite as lively as the book itself.

The event had Basu in conversation with author, poet and dancer Tishani Doshi, and it was refreshingly laidback, with both writers joking around (you know any conversation that begins with mildly off-colour references to the anthology of Indian erotica they both wrote for isn’t going to take itself too seriously).

That isn’t to say the packed audience didn’t get a feel for the book; both readings from the book brought to life Basu’s comic turn of phrase, and had the listeners chuckling more than once. And the chat that followed was full of information about random old superheroes (“Arm Tear Off Boy”, anybody?) that would make any geek giddy with happiness.

“After seven years of writing fantasy fiction, I decided to do the sort of novel Indian writers are supposed to, dealing with the realities of contemporary India and the questions 20 and 30-year-olds ask themselves,” says Basu, who became one of India’s youngest published authors when he came out with the first part of his GameWorld trilogy at the age of 23.

Somehow, though, his ‘big crossover book’ turned into a superhero novel, even as it covered a host of urban Indian issues – the media, politics, and terrorism, Bollywood, cricket and other ‘popular Wiki subjects’. “I realised our world is far more bizarre than any fantasy universe,” says the author, who’s also done comics, screenplays and a graphic novel. “I kept turning up the volume on the characters so they won’t be lost in the middle of it all, and in spite of myself, ended up with a superhero novel.”

‘Turbulence’ tells the story of a group of people who step off BA flight 142 from London to Delhi and find they’ve all gotten superpowers – and this is the cool part – linked to their innermost desires. A wannabe Bollywood star can now make anyone love her; an overworked mom can split herself into multiple copies; an Air Force officer can fly, and then there’s the guy who can control the weather with his stomach…

“I’m sure every superpower in this book has been done before by some insane comic book writer in 1940s America,” he says. “But I’ve done away with costumes (the good ones are all taken anyway), sidekicks and origin stories (gamma rays, radioactive spiders, etc.); I wanted this to be about a group of people dealing with real life situations.”

Except for the fact that they have superpowers, that is. Not surprisingly, the rest of Basu’s free-wheeling chat with Doshi and the audience was superhero-themed, from the sad state of Indian superheroes (“Shaktimaan? I mean, come on…”) to what superpowers he’d like, personally (“Not invisibility – I don’t think I’d use it for good.”).

And, of course, everyone wanted to know – what about a sequel? “I actually have it all planned out in my head, but I’m tired of writing series. Maybe I’ll do something completely different instead,” he says. Sounds like a plan.

DIVYA KUMAR

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November 13, 2010 · 4:49 pm

Movie Review: Legend of the Guardians – The Owls of Ga’Hoole

‘Legend of the Guardians’ is animated by the same studio that did the delightful ‘Happy Feet’, and boy, have they done it again.

Visually, this film is just a wonderful treat. Owls are naturally appealing creatures, what with those big ol’ wise eyes and the soft feathers (think Hedwig in Harry Potter), and this movie capitalises on that charm. ‘Legend…’ is filled with lovely close-ups of the huge, golden eyes of the owlets (the little babies are especially adorable) and of softly rustling white and gold or rust-coloured feathers. This movie also makes optimal use of 3D technology, beautifully capturing the smooth, swooping flight of the birds, and literally taking us along for the ride as they fly through deep canyons and blinding storms.

Now for the bad news – the storyline. Well, it’s not bad, exactly; it’s just that we’ve seen this one so many times, and done far better as well (think Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Narnia, etc.). There’s the evil army, lead by the scarred villain (the Pure Ones and Metalbeak respectively), and its rather convoluted plan to rule owl-kind that never quite makes sense (it involves regurgitated owl pellets. Honest). There’s the avenging Guardians of Ga’Hoole, lead by the white-as-snow good guys (quite literally – the leaders are snowy owls). There’s the pure-hearted young ‘un (Soren the barn owl) who leads the way to victory along with his motley crew of friends. And of course, there’s the final battle of good vs. evil (no prizes for guessing who wins).

At one point, you feel like rolling your eyes at the inevitably of it all. But then the movie, based on the ‘Guardian of Ga’Hoole’ books by Kathryn Lasky, manages to suck you in anyway. The credit goes in large part to its darkly brooding atmosphere, especially in the first half, and its gorgeous sceneries, whether it’s the menacing, fog-ridden forest Soren and his brother are kidnapped in by the Pure Ones, or the magical, lantern-lit Great Tree of the Island of Ga’Hoole.

The colourful side characters do their bit in providing comic relief, such as Digger, the goofy burrowing owl (who supplies the requisite ‘hoo’ jokes), Twilight, the lute-playing, poetry-spouting great grey owl, and Ezylryb, the wise but eccentric fighter screech owl.
This may not be particularly original or ground-breaking storytelling, but it’s certainly an appealing bit of entertainment. Go see it for the owlets.

Genre: Fantasy / Adventure
Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving, Helen Mirren, Sam Neill, Jim Sturgess.
Storyline: Soren, a young Barn owl is kidnapped by an evil owl army and escapes to try and find the legendary Guardians of Ga’Hoole to save owl-kind.
Bottomline: So visually delightful that the been-there seen-that storyline doesn’t matter.

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October 27, 2010 · 10:10 pm

Book Launch: Jaishree Misra’s ‘Secrets and Sins’

Photo: R. Ravindran

Popular fiction in India is coming of age, and Jaishree Misra, for one, is glad.

The prolific writer was recently in the city for the launch of her sixth novel, ‘Secrets and Sins’, part of her ‘Secrets’ series with Harper Collins, and declared herself happy to be churning out zippy, easy-to-read commercial fiction.

“In the West, my books are positioned as ‘The Big Beach Reads’, you know, the kind that are sent right off to airport bookshops,” said Misra, who recently moved back to Delhi after living and working in London for years. “I’ve tried a lot of different styles, and I feel this is more my natural calling. I quite like the idea of having more readers – one of the perks of commercial fiction!”

With the current changes in the Indian popular fiction market, there couldn’t be a better time for a desi writer to be in the business.

“Earlier, the assumption was always that Indian popular fiction would have poor language, be printed on poor quality paper, and just be rather cheap and tawdry overall,” she said in conversation with Anuradha Ananth at the launch event in Landmark. “But now, publishers are waking up to the fact that they need the buoyancy of the popular fiction market, thanks in large part to Chetan Bhagat’s books selling in lakhs. We have more well-produced and well-written books overall.”

‘Secrets and Sins’, the second novel in a three-part series commissioned by Harper Collins, certainly fits the bill, with its glossy cover design and a plot that’s all romance, glamour and infidelity with a dash of Bollywood masala. It tells the story of Riva Walia, a British Indian award-winning writer, and Aman Khan, a Bollywood superstar, both with troubled marriages, who rekindle their college romance after they’re thrown together at the Cannes Film Festival (minus their respective spouses).

Her first couple of books, particularly her debut novel ‘Ancient Promises’, were rather different. “I was trying to be literary, but even then my agent in the U.K. felt that my writing could end up falling between the two categories,” said Misra.  “Under the auspices of my current editors, I was shoved firmly into the commercial fiction category.”

And she feels no desire to change that categorisation. “One can tackle all sorts of themes in a light, easily accessible way – Marian Keyes, for instance, deals with domestic abuse in ‘This Charming Man’,” she said. “That’s the job of a good commercial fiction writer.”

In fact, she’s already completed a preliminary draft of the third and final book in the ‘Secrets’ series, about a young girl returning to find her birth mother. “It’s confusing to promote one book while writing the next – I get the character names mixed up sometimes!” she said, laughing.

But up next, she’d like to take a bit of a break. “I’m working on a big project on the outskirts of Delhi for people with disabilities,” said Misra, whose own daughter has severe learning disabilities. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do for the last 15 years. And then, of course, I’ll return to writing.”

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September 21, 2010 · 5:59 pm

How to… be a drama queen

1. Drama queens (or kings; this is certainly not restricted to the fairer sex) must live life as if all the world really were a stage, and the spotlight were perennially shining upon them. Any event at any time of the day can be cause for Drama – no happening is too trivial or small. What the rest of the world shrugs off as minor irritants, the drama queen must turn into grand Shakespearean tragedy. The milk boiled over! Oh the horror, the horror! You missed the bus! The agonising pain of it all!
2. What drama queens needs most of all is, naturally, an audience. In any emotionally charged situation, they must find a way to be the centre of attention, whether it’s warranted or not. In other words, become the bystander who bursts into hysterical sobs or faints away dramatically at the scene of an accident or crime and has to be comforted/sedated/revived, etc. (while the actual victim sits huddled sadly on the sidelines). Or the guy throwing a massive temper tantrum for having been kept waiting for 15 minutes at a government office, while about 100 others around him have been waiting in quiet resignation for the last several hours.
3. Perhaps the greatest pleasure in a drama queen’s life is the re-telling (and re-living) of these moments of great personal strife and tragedy. An audience, therefore, is once again a prerequisite, and the more incredulous, the better. Because with each telling, the tale must get more and more improbably dramatic, and the drama queen’s own role must get more and more tragic/heroic, until it loses touch with reality altogether. Being a stickler for the truth is a strict no-no.
4. That’s why drama queens must always have their own posse (P. Diddy has nothing on them) – after all, they need to have a mobile audience unit with them at all times to provide round-eyed responses to their stories and/or splash cold water on their faces when the histrionics go overboard. And what’s in it for the posse, you ask? Well, they revel in all that constant drama – It’s like being part of a real life soap opera, and the gossip never runs dry.
5. When drama queens/kings run short on ‘real’ audience members (even the posse tires at times), they can turn to the virtual. The possibilities are endless online – dramatic Facebook status updates! Cryptic tweets about (vaguely hinted at) tragic events! And to the big one, darkly emotional diary entries on the blog! And soon the Internet audience is clamouring for more. What could be more satisfying?

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September 21, 2010 · 5:56 pm

How to… be a bookworm

  • You don’t read books, you inhale them. Once you start reading, it’s going to take a pretty earthshaking event (or really, really rotten writing) to make you stop before you get to the end. (Skipping to the last chapter and reading the ending is simply not an option, as any self-respecting bookworm knows.)
  • Reading through the night and going to work / school bleary-eyed and half-asleep the next morning is a bookworm’s badge of honour. And nothing, of course, is better than having a day all to yourself to just read, continuously and obsessively (family and friends know better than to try and come between you and your book on a day like that).
  • Going to a library or a bookstore is both incredibly exciting and incredibly stressful to a bookworm. So much to read and so little time… you usually end up cross-eyed after hours of non-stop browsing and in a state of frenzied despair over what books you should choose out of the hundreds calling out to you.
  • Simple pleasures that make a bookworm’s day– that wonderful new-book smell (you’ve been known to stick your nose between the pages and breathe in blissfully), the joy of re-reading that well-thumbed old novel (in which you know every fold or tear of the pages), and that warm feeling you get when you see a stack of yet-to-be read books sitting invitingly on your bedside table
  • Book listings, literary review columns and such may be just something to skim over for most; for the bookworm, they’re the Holy Grail. If you find yourself constantly making mental wish-lists of what to read, and insist on lugging half a dozen heavy books with you even on a trekking holiday (because you’ll never get through your list otherwise!), you are firmly in book-geek territory.

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    September 3, 2010 · 12:17 pm

    Interview with… Andrew Logan

    Photo: R. Raghu

    The hotel room is all muted tones of olive green and cream, and I’m worried. It doesn’t seem like the right backdrop in which to photograph the famously colourful designer, sculptor and painter Andrew Logan.

    Then he emerges, resplendent in a bright pink, orange and green pant-suit (with sunny yellow socks and bejewelled black shoes) and a glowing piece of his signature mirrored jewellery at his neck. “You don’t need to worry about colour,” he says with a twinkle.

    That’s all right, then.

    An interview with Logan is a fascinating journey through four decades of fabulous art and fashion, and even more fabulous friends and parties. A distinctive figure in the world of British art, Logan has spent the time since he finished qualifying as an architect at Oxford in the 1960s being ‘determinedly alternative’.

    “In the U.K., there’s a system within the art world,” Logan says, adding wryly, “I’m not part of that system.”

    His objective from the beginning has been very simple – to infuse a little magic and happiness into people’s lives. “My work is about celebrating life and making people smile, if even for just a little while,” he says. “You’ll find very few artists doing that; it’s such as simple message, yet so little used.”

    So his quirky, one-of-a-kind jewellery pieces, for instance, are all bright colour and glittering pieces of mirror and glass, with, more often than not, a smiley face worked in. Even the vast art installation project he’s currently working on in Chennai for the new Hyatt hotel on Anna Salai is cheerfully, colourfully avant-garde, based on bees and flowers and the theme of interdependence.

    And his ‘Alternative Miss World’ event – which has been around since the 1970s and is the subject of a recent documentary film – is all about imagination, transformation and a lot of crazy, wonderful fun, where people (a colourful cast of characters over the years) turn out in outrageous costumes.

    “I call it a surreal art event for all-round family entertainment,” he smiles. “I carry on with it because it’s all in fun – there’s no huge money involved or sponsorship. People don’t enter to win; they just want to be part of the event. And I’ve always loved giving parties, ever since I was 10 years old!”

    That’s also the reason his museum – The Andrew Logan Museum of Sculpture– was opened in Wales, in 1991, making Logan the first living UK artist to have his own museum. “My sculptures are just there, to be looked after and to be enjoyed, without all the implications of exhibiting at a gallery,” says the artist, who grew up in the Cotswolds.

    While these otherworldly sculptures and installations reflect his love of the fantastic and the magical (the Cosmic Egg, displayed at the American Museum of Visionary Art, Baltimore, and his Pegasus series, for example), his larger-than-life abstract portraits of friends and family, the famous and the infamous reflect his love for people and their eccentricities (many are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, London).

    And all his works reflect his obsession with mirrors – specifically broken mirrors. “People tell me, ‘Oh, you must have so much bad luck!’. I say, if you remake the broken mirrors into the most fabulous thing ever seen, how could it be bad luck?” says Logan with a grin. “I just love how broken mirrors fracture images – it’s like looking through a hole and seeing another world!”

    Over the years, he’s become a well-known figure in a number of worlds – fashion, fine arts and performing arts — though he is frequently accused of not being a ‘serious artist’. “They say, ‘You can’t possibly be an artist because you like to dress up and show off’,” he says casually.

    But fans of his work aren’t complaining – they’re just glad to be part of his ‘Worldwide Happy Club’. And Logan is clearly not troubled. He just lives in his – what else – fabulous glass house, with its sunshine yellow walls, along with his better half, Mike Davis in London. He conducts workshops at the Jaipur festival every year and spends every winter in a 250-year-old palace in the middle of a coconut grove in Goa.

    “February in London is dark, cold and just miserable, and I’ve had enough of those,” he says, smiling. “For the rest of my life, I’ve decided to spend it somewhere lovely and warm.”

    It’s all quite as magical as his art, really.

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    September 3, 2010 · 12:09 pm

    Article: His Master’s Voice

    The Hindu

    The relationship between K. Balachander and Kamal Haasan defies categorisation. Director –actor, mentor – protégé, father – son… all those lines have been blurred in the 40 years that they’ve known each other, creating a bond that’s unique and unconditional.

    So when the veteran filmmaker couldn’t make it to Trivandrum to speak at the felicitation function of his protégé due to ill health recently, he grew upset. But his lovingly crafted speech reached Kamal Haasan nonetheless, one more in the series of touchingly genuine letters Balachander has sent to the actor over the years.

    “Here are his earlier letters to me, that I’ve framed,” says Kamal when we meet in his office, displaying the neatly preserved pieces of paper. “I call them ‘my degrees’.”

    They span the four decades that the two have known each other, beginning with the first one sent in 1977 after Balachander saw 16 Vayathinile. “I receive them only when he thinks I deserve it – I have to work for them!” says Kamal with a smile.

    This particular occasion was Kerala state government’s felicitation of Kamal Haasan for 50 remarkable years in cinema. In the letter, Balachander says, “From babyhood to childhood, from adolescence to youth, from manhood to middle age, I have been part of this magician’s life… Kamal has evolved into everything that I have dreamt he would be. Indeed, I should never be surprised by anything he achieves, yet I am constantly amazed.”

    It is high praise, so much so that Kamal himself was quite overwhelmed. “I had to read it out to my sister, who was witness to my early dark days, when my mother was afraid would happen to me,” he says. “But I knew I couldn’t without choking up, so I asked Gautami to read it out for me.”

    It is, he says, everything he always wanted to hear from Balachander, his guru, the man he thinks of as a father figure. “I use the word ‘guru’ for him in the mythological sense – all other educationists ask for payment for knowledge imparted; this gentleman paid me and taught me. What a journey it was for me, after I met him at the age of 17 and a half.”

    In the letter, Balachander describes this journey as one of mutual learning. “I did not teach him everything he knows. He just absorbed everything I knew. The rest he discovered himself by asking, probing, begging, watching, observing, reading, demanding, investigating, improvising, experimenting, experiencing, learning and not being afraid of stretching himself beyond his own limits,” he writes. “I only gave him the platform and the opportunity to discover himself. In the process, I was blessed enough to discover myself.”

    For all their mutual regard, however, Kamal describes their relationship as having remained respectfully formal. “I prepare even for a conversation with him – I never want to say too little or too much. And I never disturb him except when I feel I’ve done something worthwhile,” he says. “It’s a rare relationship – unconditional and professional.”

    The depth of the relationship is evident in Balachander’s letter. “I have long since lost the taste, appetite and hunger for personal applause. All I wish for now is to hear the applause, the cheers, the trumpets and the music singing [praises of] Kamal Haasan’s genius,” he writes. “No one has staked his reputation, repertoire and resources for the cause of cinema as much as he has. It is not mere pursuit of fame and fortune. In fact, he has lost more than he has gained. It goes beyond that.”

    As this special relationship turns 40 next year, it seems certain to continue to mature like fine wine. “To have won a place in his heart among all those he has mentored and created itself is a distinction,” says Kamal.

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