Iconic: Manet’s painting Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets

Why can’t we have an Indian Manet?

Since the Indian Air Force is supposed to be buying 126 Rafale fighter aircraft worth $10 billion, the least the French can do in return is send the Manet exhibition, which has just opened at the Royal Academy in London, to India.

Since we have long had a poster at home of one of his iconic paintings — that of fellow artist Berthe Morisot — it was fascinating to note it compared favourably with the original oil painting from 1872. I bought another poster (it is the exhibition image) for £4.95 for putting up somewhere at home in the heat and dust of Calcutta. I also bought a soft cover catalogue for £17.50 (discounted for journalists), partly because I would like to show it to family and friends in Calcutta, say, one afternoon during the monsoons. Displacement does funny things to art.

The exhibition, which ends on April 14 — this life enhancing experience is a must for anyone who comes from India — includes some of Manet’s finest portraits. He painted his family, friends, leading celebrity artists, actors and writers of his day, plus models.

Manet’s painting of the writer Émile Zola is typically more about Manet than about Zola, for scattered around the room and on the table are books and pamphlets about Manet. It’s like Amitabh Bachchan painting Shah Rukh Khan and plastering the room with images of Big B film posters and books.

Portrait painting has sort of gone out of fashion but how I wish there was an Indian Manet in London to capture the leading Asian personalities of our age. In an 1862 painting, Music in the Tuileries, Manet imagined and drew a collection of his many celebrity friends. This was the same garden, incidentally, where Lakshmi Mittal had a reception during his daughter Vanisha’s wedding in the halcyon summer of 2004 (long before steel prices came crashing down).

Edouard Manet, the “committed portraitist”, (not to be confused with his friend, the impressionist Claude Monet), was born in Paris in 1832 into a well-off family and died at only 51 in 1883.

We were lucky enough to see a preview of the exhibition but on the train there was an elderly lady from the Home Counties who revealed she would be queuing outside the Royal Academy at 7am on the day it opened to the public.

In many ways, France is today a country in a mess and it will be in a bigger mess after Mali. But Manet gives you an insight into its past greatness.

Controversial: Pervez Hoodbhoy

Osama’s case

The famous if controversial Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy has offered an intriguing explanation of why the military authorities professed ignorance about Osama bin Laden’s presence in the country.

Hoodbhoy is in Britain promoting his book, Confronting the Bomb, on the possible consequences of an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war — basically, the end of life as we know it in South Asia.

Over lunch with the Indian Journalists’ Association, I told him that the film, Zero Dark Dirty, on the CIA’s hunt for Osama, skips the subject altogether — even though the al Qaida leader apparently had been living undetected in a large mansion in Abbottabad for five years.

“Well, it’s either incompetence or complicity — no other way out,” began an engagingly frank Hoodbhoy.

But there is another possibility. “If the Pakistan army high command had really wanted to know they could have found out but they were not keen. They might have known there was a possibility that he was around but they said, ‘Let things be as they are.’”

“Let’s say (army chief General Ashfaq Parvez) Kayani had known — well, he would have been confronted with a dilemma what to do now that he knows,” speculated Hoodbhoy. “Is he going to act against Osama? If he does, then his rank and file rises up against him — he is considered a traitor, a sell out. If he doesn’t, then the Americans say, ‘You’re our enemy.’ So to avoid this dilemma it is a question of looking the other way.”

Incidentally, Hoodbhoy admits the establishment is none too happy with his savaging of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme — “they consider me a traitor”.

Snow pain: Making light of the snow

Cold comfort

At the supermarket checkout counter, the man next in line smiled when I caught him looking at my copy of Private Eye.

“I always like the covers,” he said.

The latest cover makes fun of how, as a result of the recent snow, millions of people couldn’t (or wouldn’t) go to work; schools were closed; motorists were either stranded or skidded into other vehicles; train services were delayed; and flights were cancelled at Heathrow.

Looking at the cover, you couldn’t but laugh at the balloons emerging from the stranded vehicles on an icebound road — “How can I get my kids to their closed school?”, “You should have taken the delayed train”, “Oh no, I’ll never make it to Heathrow for my cancelled flight!”, and “At least this horsemeat won’t go off.”

Eye to eye

Among the media stories covered this time in Private Eye is a reference to a Financial Times exclusive on how the investment bank Goldman Sachs was somewhat cynically delaying paying huge bonuses to its staff. This was to enable them to extract the full benefit from the government’s decision to bring down the top rate of tax to 45 per cent on earnings of over £1,50,000.

As Private Eye points out gleefully, this disclosure could jeopardise the FT’s close relationship with Goldman Sachs — they jointly sponsor the prestigious Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year. It is unlikely Lakshmi Mittal will comment — the chairman of ArcelorMittal, a favourite of the FT, is one of the judges. He also happens to be on the board of Goldman Sachs.

Maths, please

There were some familiar friendly faces from Calcutta (e.g. Sujata Sen, Debanjan Chakrabarti, Shonali Ganguli) when the British Council held a daylong seminar in London last week, aimed at promoting the teaching of the English language in India so that people are equipped to get better jobs.

One senior delegate from India used his excellent spoken English to pop round to Lillywhite’s, the sports store in Piccadilly, to negotiate the purchase of a tennis racquet.

It is remarkable what Indians can do with English. According to Chris Brandwood, Delhi-based director of English for the British Council’s South Asian region, teachers in India are using Skype to teach maths to “American kids in their homes in America”.

I am glad Brandwood used the abbreviation “maths” rather than “math”.

Tittle tattle

New role: (From left) Chairman of governors Mark Stephens, Lord Noon, and acting vice-chancellor John Joughlin

Lord Gulam Noon is an enthusiastic cricketer but Britain’s “curry king” will need his strong bowling and throwing arm more than ever.

Last week, I went to the House of Lords where a function was held to mark Noon’s appointment as the new chancellor of the University of East London (UEL).

As chancellor, Noon will have to officiate at the graduation ceremony. Since UEL has “a global learning community with over 28,000 students from over 120 countries world-wide”, Noon was warned “you will have to shake an awful lot of hands during the graduation ceremony”.

That works out to 7,000 pairs of hands in one session.