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| Director’s take: Pavan K. Varma |
Pavan has written a dozen books on topics as diverse as Ghalib, the havelis of Old Delhi and the “Great Indian Middle Class”, and translated Kaifi Azmi’s poems into English. Vajpayee submitted 50 of his poems to Pavan and was lucky enough to get 21 of them translated into English.
Pavan will be in Delhi on April 11 to launch his latest book, Being Indian: The truth about why the 21st century will be India’s, which he assures me will be “controversial”. Pavan’s Anthology of Erotic Indian Literature is also due out this year.
Seriously, how does he manage all his this and diplomacy, too? His wife, Renu, confides: “He never has to write anything twice.”
Pavan modestly demurs: “It’s not entirely true. Since I don’t have extended time, I have to have great concentration.”
As director of the Nehru Centre, he has to ponder how to use Indian culture to promote Indian foreign policy, what is Indian culture, as well as who or what is an Indian.
His book, Being Indian, is “an honest portrait of a people who needed to portray themselves honestly,” he says. “Finally, we seem to have a critical equilibrium which could take us where want to go.”
Being Indian has much to say on everything from the violence lying underneath the non-violence to cruelty to animals.
It’s a thoughtful work. Judging from this line on the remarkable lack of opposition to Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, it is also provocative: “The most spectacular capitulation was among the so-called guardians of the right of free dissent and free expression — the media. They crawled when they had only been asked to bend.”
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| Gourmet’s delight: William Sitwell |
Bengali cuisine is likely to receive much deserved recognition following a recce in Calcutta by William Sitwell, an English food critic and member of a khandani family of poets and authors.
“Edith Sitwell was my great-aunt, Osbert Sitwell my great-uncle and Sacheverell Sitwell my grandfather,” he confirms. William, who writes a snappy Food Spy column, comprising “Restaurant Bites”, in the London Evening Standard, has been doing the rounds in Calcutta.
He found Kewpie’s “wonderful” and Oh! Calcutta “fantastic” — and refreshed himself with street drinks such as mango and lassi.
William has been to India twice before. “I taught briefly at St Columba’s School in Delhi, toured the country on a cricket tour and got engaged to my wife, Laura, on the roof of the Shivnivas Palace in Udaipur,” he says.
He has had a deeper insight into Calcutta because he has been seeing it through the eyes of Udit Sarkhel, the Indian chef whom he rates exceedingly highly and who runs Sarkhel’s Indian Cuisine and a new establishment, Calcutta Notebook, in south London.
William, who also edits Waitrose Food Illustrated, which is brought out by the supermarket chain, is profiling Udit and five other top chefs, including Gordon Ramsay and Antonio Carluccio, for the magazine.
“I take them back to the cities which inspired them, Udit to Calcutta, Ramsay to Paris, and Carluccio to Venice,” explains William. “I am the only Indian in the group,” says Udit, who has just returned to London after a three-week adventure.
He piled his elderly parents into a Tata Sumo and, as a way of celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, took them on a 3,800 km round trip to Jamshedpur, Cooch Behar, Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Gangtok, picking up rural recipes on the way for “posto with sharshe bata, kumro and various fish dishes”, which he now intends to introduce to lovers of good food in London.
Talk about the empire striking back.
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| Women of Substance: Pushpinder Chowdhry and Harvinder Nath |
Over in London briefly on their way home to Antwerp, proud parents Rashmi and Swati Mehta have been showing me video footage of their daughter Grishma’s glamorous wedding in Mumbai to Ambuja Cement heir Pulkit Sekseria. This was the biggest wedding since Sahara.
For a fashion show at the Oberoi, Rashmi, a diamond dealer, had nearly a million dollars’ worth of the sparking stuff flown over. The “palace” at the Turf Club, where the festivities were held, attended by the top industrialists and celebrities of India, was designed by Nitin Desai.
Film stars provided a Bollywood night. From London, a specialist was flown over just to build “an ice bar”, Rashmi tells me. However, most impressive of all, I find, is the attention given to chocolate. Belgium, his home, is world famous for its chocolate, after all. “I had a chocolate chef and a special machine flown out from Belgium so that all the chocolate desserts and ice cream could be made fresh,” explains Rashmi sweetly.
Bars of Cadburys will never taste the same again.
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| Razzle dazzle: Rashmi Mehta |
Buddhadev Dasgupta’s film about a colony of prostitutes in a Bengal village, A Tale of a Naughty Girl (Manda Meyer Upakkhyan), attracted an appreciative audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It was screened as part of a festival of films dealing with women’s issues, called Tongues on Fire, which is now in its sixth year.
According to the two women, Pushpinder Chowdhry and Harvinder Nath, who run the festival, “it was the ICA which was particularly keen to have the film”.
I was intrigued to see a poster for the film at the Cannes Film Festival last year, not because the poster was on display but because it was on display in just about the most expensive and high-profile spot in the resort — bang in front of the Carlton Hotel.
Anyway, the film, which tells the story of a little girl, Lati, who would much rather go back to school than be handed over by her mother, Rajani, to be the mistress of a much older man, deserves an audience beyond festivals.
Every year, Pushpinder and Harvinder bring over a chief guest. In the past, it has been Shabana Azmi and Aparna Sen. This year, when the theme is “violence against women”, Nandita Das flew over.
Pushpinder and Harvinder were previously full-time housewives, who decided one day to run a women’s film festival. They have a hitherto unrevealed secret.
Regular as clockwork, they and a small group of women pay out of their own pockets to cook a mountain of tasty Indian vegetarian food in their own homes, then get their husbands to help them take the chapatis, rice and sabji out in vast utensils, and quietly feed hundreds of London’s down-and-outs.
The latter, who are more used to traditional soup kitchens, are said to have developed quite a taste for spicy Indian cuisine.
Today, in the gurdwara in Havelock Road, Southall, the biggest Sikh temple outside India, Steve Norris, the Tory candidate in London’s forthcoming mayoral elections, will be “presented with a ceremonial sword in line with Sikh tradition”.
Norris, a former Tory transport minister, is a colourful character who apparently had five mistresses in the past, although presumably not all at the same time.
He also has two sons from his first marriage and another from his current wife.
The man trying to swing the Sikh vote behind Norris is Rami Ranger, a senior Indian Tory who hopes the sword will be used to good effect (symbolically speaking) against the current mayor, Ken Livingstone. Livingstone’s congestion charge has eased traffic in central London but in the process decimated many businesses, hundreds of them Indian. He has introduced the silence of the grave.
Tony Blair loathes Livingstone and threw him out of the Labour Party in 2000 when he stood as an independent and trounced the official Labour candidate, Frank Dobson, who quit the Cabinet to run for mayor.
But since the prime minister suspects Livingstone is going to win again, he gritted his teeth and welcomed his old enemy back into the Labour fold.
Livingstone wants to extends his congestion charge to other parts of London, which is why Norris might win new converts in Southall today. I certainly hope so.
