RIGHT CHOICE: Moni Varma

All for the sake of goodwill

Madonna has said that she wants to adopt 13-month David Banda from Malawi because it is her wish to “help one child escape an extreme life of hardship, poverty and, in many cases, death”.

While international debate rages about the rights or wrongs of her decision, one senior Indian businessman in London has taken a remarkably sympathetic view of the pop singer’s actions.

He is Moni Varma, 57, managing director of Veetee, one of the biggest manufacturers of Basmati rice in the UK and a man with close connections to Malawi where he spent much of his early life.

“I am the Honorary Consul for Malawi,” he reminds me.

The unpaid post requires him to “promote” the Republic of Malawi, which was previously Nyasaland until independence from Britain in 1964.

Its people, Moni says, are among the friendliest in Africa. “Malawi is called the ‘warm heart of Africa’.”

Moni’s parents had emigrated from Punjab to the old Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland where Moni’s seven siblings were born. Only Moni, the youngest, was born in India. His education and early business career were in Malawi but after marriage to his wife, Shobah, he shifted in 1981 to Britain.

Today, his close friends in India include Sunil Munjal of Hero Honda. He has also been on good terms with a number of cricketers, among them Mohammed Azharuddin, for whom he once organised the gift of a Mercedes.

Although Malawi’s Indian origin population has dwindled from 30,000 to fewer than 5,000, Moni retains a deep affection for the hilly, landlocked country. He also fondly remembers the “beaches” which border the 350 mile by 50 mile lake situated in a great geographical rift.

Once a year he travels to Malawi, where he still has business interests, including a rice mill and a pulses plant. Malawi’s population has grown from 7 million to 12 million, though AIDs has taken a terrible toll and left a million orphaned children.

“Every few months someone disappears from my factories,” reveals Moni, who would like Indians to help by investing in the country.

Whatever Madonna’s motivation, he recognises her positive contribution in drawing the world’s attention to Malawi’s plight and in offering a donation of $3 million.

“If she can help feed some children and save one from extreme poverty, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” says Moni.

Reel LIFE: (from left) Kabir Khan, John Abraham and Arshad WarsiNEWSMAKER: Jessica LalTECH SAVVY: Charles Darwin with a laptop

London calling

Kabir Khan’s Kabul Express is one of my “must see” movies in the just opened London Film Festival — Kabir is a friend who was the principal cameraman on our documentary, The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl.

The director of the documentary, Ahmed Jamal, has been invited to Pune where he is giving Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a helping hand with their movie. I can think of no better man to do that.

While we were shooting our documentary in America two years ago, Kabir would chat about his plans for Kabul Express. It has now been shown at film festivals in Toronto and in Pusan in South Korea and is due for general release in India on December 15.

“I am hoping to get John Abraham (one of his stars) down for the London screening (on November 2),” Kabir tells me on the mobile from Goa.

According to the British Film Institute’s Cary Rajinder Sawhney, who has written brief snippets on the Indian films for the festival brochure, “after several documentaries in Afghanistan, Kabir Khan has made his first feature film, offering an alternative South Asian perspective on the conflicts and human costs of the Afghan war in this seemingly light-hearted drama. Cinematographer Anshuman Mahaley captures in wide screen the violent beauty of Afghanistan in this unusual offering.”

Carry is also enthusiastic about the Goutam Ghose-written and directed Yatra (The Journey), which he hails as a “superb must-see film”.

This is an opinion shared by Goutam Ghose (whom I bumped into a few days ago in Delhi as he interviewed commerce & industry minister Kamal Nath just before I did).

“You should see Yatra,” he said.

Cary has clearly been taken out to lunch by Goutam for he enthuses that the director “elicits powerful performances from an acclaimed cast including Nana Patekar, Deepti Naval and the ageless Rekha. Ghose’s sharp scripting and direction gradually build the drama into an electrifying sequence of events where fact and fiction tensely oscillate. Exquisite cinematography and costumes create a breathtaking world, reverberating with Urdu music, while Indian cinephiles will be delighted to see Rekha re-inhabit the courtesan role she immortalised in Umrao Jaan.”

Well, if Goutam hasn’t taken Cary to lunch, he should.

Today, there is a screening of Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.

I haven’t met Jhumpa but I am not sure what I feel about her — I have been told that journalists trying to cover her Calcutta wedding five years ago were unceremoniously kicked out.

Katara killing

Even the “Justice for Jessica” story has not had many takers in the British media, which is why it was intriguing to find the Evening Standard in London devote a page lead last week to the Nitish Katara murder.

“Politician’s daughter on run as her brother faces ‘honour murder’ charges,” was the headline over a story, which will have baffled Londoners, unused as they are to the complexities of how the law is enforced (or rather not enforced) in India.

Bharti Yadav, whose lover Nitish Katara was allegedly murdered in February, 2002, by her brother, Vikas Yadav, and her cousin, Vishal Yadav — they are said to have disapproved of the relationship — has apparently been living in the UK, doing business studies and then nursing. She has shown a marked reluctance to return home to testify against her brother and her cousin.

Bharti was supposed to be staying in a north London flat. “But when the Evening Standard knocked on her door, it emerged she had left last month without leaving a forwarding address.”

There was a significant passage in the Standard report: “In emails sent from the UK to the victim’s brother, it is alleged she blamed not only her brother for the killing but her father D.P. Yadav for purportedly sanctioning it. Mr Yadav, a former MP in the Indian parliament who stood down as a candidate after a row over allegations that he was linked to a number of criminal cases, is said to have connections to organised crime.”

Darwin’s day

Always at the cutting edge of science, Cambridge University is to put the entire works of Charles Darwin — he is the man who in 1872 proposed man descended from monkeys in Origin of Species — on the web. “50,000 pages of searchable text and 40,000 images of original publications will be available at the click of a mouse.”

What I like best is the picture Cambridge has uncovered of the bearded genius with a laptop.

Tittle tattle

The knives are out for Shoaib Akhtar, judging by the item, “Shoaib Sham”, in Paul Hayward’s sports column in the Daily Mail: “Shoaib is the only bowler timed officially at 100 mph. Like Ben Johnson’s 100 m world record, will that feat be annulled?”

I certainly hope not.