Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju’s 2009 revelation that he had for years been overstating profits in a massive accounting scam sent shockwaves throughout Indian industry, and took the country’s fourth largest outsourcing firm to the brink of destruction. Zafar Anjum’s new book, The Resurgence of Satyam, is the story of how the government and industry came together to save over 50,000 jobs and the country’s reputation overseas. In an interview with Ajachi Chakrabarti, Anjum says we must wait for the next scandal in order to know if the establishment has learnt any lessons from the Satyam saga.
The media has called Ramalinga Raju a messiah, a visionary, an old-style businessman who adapted to the new economy and a simple crook. What is your assessment of the man?
I find him a very interesting person with shades of grey. From everyone I talked to, right from the top executives to simple employees, I got the sense that this man was held in great respect and some people even saw him as a God, as somebody who gave them a job and a life. The philanthropic work he was doing in the villages of Andhra Pradesh as well as innovations like the EMRI ambulance service also gave him a sort of halo as a messiah and do-gooder. Nobody had anything bad to speak of him. So that’s why everybody was so shocked when he revealed what he had been doing for the last eight years. My sense of him was that he was very intelligent and a great entrepreneur with great vision, but he had this darkness inside him, which he had very successfully hidden for all these years.
Do you subscribe to his version that he made a small lapse, which compounded over the years, or do you think he had planned this over all those years?
I feel that he must have started out with good intentions, and as the IT industry was making large profits, as other companies started doing really well, and as his company was unable to show similar results, he did this because it was very important for him to get good value for the shares he held in the company. For that, he had to show very good results, and that is when he started fudging the numbers. He has admitted that it started small, but the hole kept getting bigger and bigger, so the lie had to be magnified as the company rode the wave of success. On the way, he probably thought that he could cover it up by buying out the two companies (Maytas Infrastructure and Maytas Properties), but when that did not work out, he realised there was no way out (but to confess). I believe, and many people I spoke to believe, that if the merger had gone off and alarm bells not sounded, nobody would have known anything and he would have successfully covered it up.
Do you think the Indian media deliberately ignored Raju’s scam, and was this symptomatic of a general blind spot that the media affords corporate India to get away with murder for the sake of projecting a certain image of India Inc?
Yeah, I believe that with the kind of journalism that the media has done in the political and social space, the same kind of focus has not gone into the business field. It is happening now, with the Radia tapes and other disclosures, but even these might be happening because of some vested interests. A dispassionate attitude towards covering business practices is missing from the media, and they are not unearthing scams like their counterparts in the West. There is a very cosy relationship between business journalists and business houses, and the distance that one should observe is not present.
Are we better prepared today to detect such scams in the future, rather than inchoately dealing with crises when they come up?
I think it depends on the company’s culture. The Satyam scam made all businesspeople in India aware that they need to have better corporate governance, ensure compliance with all rules and regulations and put checks and balances in place. This is what Mahindra did when they took over Satyam.
But what about the regulators? Self regulation is well and good, but are the regulators better equipped to detect corruption now?
I don’t know. They will always say that they have learnt lessons from Satyam and will do whatever needs to be done, but their efficacy ultimately depends on them. I can’t speak on their behalf. Unless and until we stumble upon another scandal, we don’t know.
Of course, your book deals with how Satyam pulled together and survived, something you attribute to a certain ‘Spirit of Satyam’. In a nutshell, what is this spirit, and how does it differentiate the company from others?
The spirit of Satyam is more of a metaphor, I would say. It came from a canvas picture that I had seen in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. Two or three days after Raju’s confession, I saw a photo of Satyam employees putting their handprints on the canvas and writing messages (in support of) the company. The canvas had a phrase in big letters: “Spirit of Satyam”. The image stayed with me; at that time, nobody knew what was going to happen to the company. When I met all these people, I got the sense that there was a lot of commitment and devotion among these employees for the company. Even though many employees applied on online job portals, a lot of them said they did not want to jump ship, that they were going to stick together. That is why, on the day the scandal broke, all the regional leaders of Satyam issued a joint statement that they were with the company and had to take it forward. A lot of regular employees were working in client spaces and premises, not in the company headquarters, and irrespective of whatever happened to the company, they believed that they had to keep on working and delivering services. When I am alluding to this spirit of Satyam, I am talking about all these qualities.
Would you say that the creator of this spirit was Raju himself?
I would. He was like a prophet, you know; he had his own theories and philosophy of management. He had this thing called The Satyam Way, a 250-page book that used to be distributed to the employees, which enumerated the qualities of a good manager and how Satyam would do business. He was committed to the company, and from Day One, he was hiring and nurturing people. He had a big leadership school, he had brought in people from abroad to train the next generation of leaders. So all these things helped put in place this spirit of Satyam.
Even with this spirit of Satyam, the company couldn’t have survived without the extraordinary support from the government, could it? Was such support by the government for an independent corporation that had perpetrated such a scam justified?
Yeah, I think so, because if the government had not stepped in, the company would definitely have imploded. And it was not the case of just one company; it was about the whole Indian IT industry and how it was going to be perceived abroad. People abroad would have thought that if one Indian company is such a big fraud, what about the others? You know how much outsourcing the IT industry provides business and employment to India. I applaud the government’s intervention since it did not spend any money from its pocket. They did not bail it out, but helped it stay on course and not implode. It was a question of more than 50,000 people losing their jobs.
Why did you call the aftermath of this crisis “corporate India’s finest moment”?
Nowhere else in the world have we seen this kind of example when a company goes to the brink of destruction and comes back in a heartbeat. This is also a fine case of public-private partnership, and they came together to save such a company, which was at that time India’s fourth largest outsourcing firm. The kind of doom and gloom its impending destruction created and the way it was salvaged was noticed around the world, and that is why this was one of corporate India’s finest moments.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
Can’t put a finger on it
Performance art may exist in a moment, but Inder Salim tries to pin it down, says Aradhna Wal
Photo: Arun Sehrawat
IN 2002, Inder Salim cut off his finger and threw it in the Yamuna to protest the pollution and slow death of the river. When that reputation precedes, it’s almost fair to assume the man is a kook. However, for this 47-year-old performance artist from Kashmir, everything carries meaning. He deliberated for months, before the actual act materialised as a sincere, if dramatic, ritual. Life for Salim, down to his name, is a carefully constructed performance. “I’ve forgotten what my original name was. What does it matter,” he says breezily.
Dressed in an oversized black Kashmiri kurta, his jeans discarded on the floor, flowers in his hair and his buttonhole, Salim leans back against the wall. “I started performance art in the 1990s after I failed as a painter. I couldn’t sell a thing. Soon, I couldn’t even afford paint,” he reminisces. Now, he leads his collective Harkat: The School/Unschool of Performance, which is holding a meeting at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon. Currently participating in the Sarai Reader 09 exhibition, the Delhi-based artist works with a number of performance artists to enact, display and discuss their creation. His proposal for Sarai was to document performance art through Harkat’s revolving door. This week, Ranjit Singh from Patna lamented MF Husain’s death in exile, marking his chest, forehead and knee with dirt collected from different parts of India. Earlier, artists accompanied Salim to the dhobi community on the banks of Yamuna. As some interacted with the washermen, Salim climbed into vats of washing and bleaching fluids, to literally immerse himself in thesubstance of their lives. Both performer and observer, he plans to pen down these varied contributions to Harkat.
‘School/Unschool’ — unlearning preconceptions to better understand art — is integral to his work and he freely merges ideas and dismantles structures. He says, “It is a shift in the art world, where rules of aesthetics are being broken and different forms are coming together. I’m trying to write down what is created when these different ideas meet. Let’s see how it goes.” That undercurrent of anxiety perhaps haunts all artists.
Salim keeps mementoes of every performance, pays special attention to pictures taken and is now trying to use words to impart them an afterlife. Capturing something as temporary as performance art could be an exercise in futility. Sarai Reader 09 curator Shuddhabrata Sengupta says, “It may be a paradox, but it is a productive one. Performance art underscores the relationship between memory and the ephemeral. The trace a recording holds may be valuable, as something to look back on as a memento of a moment of intensity and value.”
The Sweet Nothingness
Jab Tak Hai Jaan
DIRECTOR
YASH CHOPRA
STARRING
Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif, Anushka Sharma, Anupam Kher
By Ajachi Chakrabarti
SHAH RUKH KHAN isn’t the only person to suffer from amnesia in Jab Tak Hai Jaan. As the layers of melodrama pile up, interspersed with shots of Khan’s quivering lips and Katrina Kaif staring into nothingness, the humble viewer who had braved Delhi’s Baghdad-like streets and smog to make it to the Diwali release could be excused for losing track of what’s going on, what happened half an hour ago and wondering when, and whether, the whole thing would ever end.
JTHJ is really two movies piled into one. There’s 2012 Shah Rukh Khan playing a bomb squad maverick right out of The Hurt Locker, defusing IEDs without donning any protective gear in Ladakh (chosen more for its scenic beauty than reputation as a war zone). And then there’s 2002 Khan, a London immigrant playing Jack Dawson to charm rich NRI Katrina Kaif before tragedy strikes, à la Titanic. The iceberg here is the curiously knighted ‘Sir Jesus’, as Kaif prays for Khan’s survival after a motorcycle accident and promises to never see him again to sweeten the deal. Khan gets pissed with the deal, and decides to embrace death by joining the bomb squad. Unfortunately, he gets good at it, and is soon called ‘The Man Who Cannot Die’.
Anushka Sharma enters the scene at this point, reads Khan’s diary and is sufficiently moved by his emotional story to want to shoot a documentary with him. Sharma, who earns all the acting chops that can possibly be handed out in such a film, convinces Khan to come back to London to confirm his story with the network executives, where he naturally gets hit by a car again, this time with attendant coma and amnesia. Katrina re- enters the story, leaving what little storyline was left in her wake, and there follows such an interminable sequence of will-he-will-she-which-she, that when the end did finally come, only the filthy state of the floor outside the hall kept me from kissing it in relief.
There are, admittedly, things to like in the film. The locales, in typical Yash Chopra fashion, are stunning, and there is some raw emotion in at least the first iteration of the epic romance. But there’s plenty of ham and even more sugar, and the film rapidly degenerates into the Shah Rukh Khan experience. If that floats your boat, you’re welcome to it.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
Screen Saver
Son of Sardaar
DIRECTOR
ASHWNI DHIR
STARRING
Ajay Devgn, Sonakshi Sinha, Sanjay Dutt, Juhi Chawla
By Ajachi Chakrabarti
Whenever there is a family feud storyline, be sure that a guy and girl from the two families will fall in love. Even the Flintstones’ intergenerational family feud with the Hatrock family ended when Pebbles befriended the Hatrock baby and almost drowned, but for Fred’s heroic rescue. In Bollywood regurgitations of the trope, a tearful reconciliation followed by the wedding of the star-crossed lovers if it’s a comedy, or their melodramatic deaths if a tragedy, is inevitable.
Ashwni Dhir’s Son of Sardaar is the comic variation of that idea, along with a premise borrowed from Bollywood’s latest mine of story ideas, SS Rajamouli. Extending the idea of atithi devo bhava, Rajamouli’sMaryada Ramanna and this film base most of their humour on the fact that a good host (cartoon villain Sanjay Dutt, here) cannot kill a guest in his house. Devgn channelises a trans-Vindhyan hero that has him dispatching murderous crowds with Rajnikanthesque ease, if not panache, hours after he holds forth on the topic of love and marriage like a flat Shah Rukh Khan.
Unfortunately, this film takes the worst of both worlds and throws them together in the forlorn hope that the star power of Messrs Devgn, Dutt and Salman Khan (in an equally star-crossed cameo) pulls it through.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
‘Dark matter and dark energy are the two most outstanding questions facing physicists today’
Photo: Arun Sehrawat
WHEN THE 20th century dawned, the electron had just been discovered. We knew that the electron went around the atom, but no one knew what was inside it. Then Ernest Rutherford discovered that there is a nucleus in the centre, then Niels Bohr came up with his theory of atomic structure, then there was the quantum revolution. We have made tremendous progress in the past 100 years.
Towards the end of the 20th century, cosmology, which had never been considered a science at all, was accepted as one. This is because for most of the century, we had only one fact: that the galaxies are moving away. Nothing was known about where the universe came from. It is really the theorem of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking that gave a scientific basis for the thinking that maybe there was a beginning.
This very great progress itself, which made cosmology a science, has led us to the unknown. We ask, what is dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of the universe? We know it is there, because it exerts gravity, but we have not been able to detect it. And we know little about it. The acceleration of the universe tells us that the energy, which is causing this cosmic repulsion, cannot be the energy of matter. For one, there isn’t enough matter: the energy per unit volume is four times as much as what would be generated if all the matter was converted into energy. That leaves us with only vacuum. We used to think about vacuum as only empty space. But now, we find that this empty space has energy and pressure associated with it. But what is this energy? We don’t know. These — dark matter and dark energy — are the two most outstanding questions facing physicists today.
Interestingly, the most outstanding questions for physics at the turn of the 20th century came from the microscopic world of atoms and nuclei, whereas these questions now concern the infinite universe. And what is known about them is that dark matter and energy exist because of what happened when the universe was 10-45 seconds old and 10-33 cm in diameter. By contrast, an atom is an enormous 10-8 cm in size. What is extraordinary, in my mind, is that what is happening to the universe at a scale of billions of light years today, seems to have been decided by the laws of microscopic physics when the universe was 10-45 seconds old. For Rutherford and Bohr and the other great physicists of the early 20th century, this notion would have shocked them. But I suspect they may have enjoyed the beauty of it.
As Told To Ajachi Chakrabarti
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
The great leveller
Marcus du Sautoy would have you look beyond the numbers and find that mathematics is as much about literature and history. By Ajachi Chakrabarti
Photo: Rohit Chawla
IN 1637, lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat famously wrote in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica: “It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.” He was right; it was too narrow. Three hundred and fifty seven years later, when Cambridge professor Andrew Wiles finally proved what became known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, earning him a knighthood and many other honours, the proof was more than a 100 pages long, and incorporated a number of new branches of mathematics created after Fermat’s death; branches that, to a large extent, had been created by generations of mathematicians trying to prove the infernal theorem.
Marcus du Sautoy does something similar when asked to autograph one of his popular books on mathematics. Especially when asked to sign one for a school student, he often prefaces his signature with “2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23… Find the pattern,” presumably in the hope that some kid somewhere will someday do just that and find a truly marvellous function to predict prime numbers, solving one of the great mysteries of mathematics and rendering all computer security systems, which rely precisely on the lack of such a pattern, redundant.
Du Sautoy, who succeeded Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, works primarily for students and adults to appreciate the beauty of maths and be inspired to explore the complexity of the subject. “I don’t do my maths because it’s useful,” he says. “Ultimately, it may be useful, but I do it because there’s something extraordinarily beautiful about the subject.” He’s done this by writing books, hosting television and radio shows, and talking to all who listen — and there are quite a few who do — about the power of mathematics. But the real problem, he feels, lies in the way maths is taught in school.
“The one thing that is really lacking in maths curriculum the world over,” he says, “is telling the big stories of maths. We concentrate very much on the technical side of mathematics, but we give students very little insight into what it allows you to access. I think in any other subject in school, such as learning a musical instrument, you’ve got to do a lot of technical things like scales and arpeggios. That’s boring, but necessary, because it gives you the facility to play fantastic music. The thing that a music teacher will do is play for the students the wonderful music they’re aspiring to play. The kid will be inspired to want to achieve a level that allows him to play, compose and create his own music. Then they put in the hard grafting, because you can’t get away without hard work.”
In Goa, du Sautoy was often stopped by people who had heard him speak and wanted him to know that they wished they had a maths teacher like him in school. The difference between university and school maths education, he says, is that in university, you are preaching to the converted — students who love the subject enough to choose to study it — whereas in school, you get a much greater diversity, and the disenfranchisement of the student often means that teachers are talking to them at the wrong level.
“There are many different ways in which people access information,” he says. “You need to use a multiplicity of tools in order to bring each of your students into your ideas. Some people really love technology, so understanding that primes are the key to Internet cryptography or that eigenvalues and matrices are used to run Google, that’ll bring them in. Other people respond to more artistic things, such as music, art or architecture. So showing them the maths in those will be their way in. Some people like history, and the history of mathematics will draw them in. And some people like maths for its own sake. So there can’t be one way to teach maths, and different things work for different people.”
Du Sautoy says he is planning to approach the British government to introduce a course on the literature of mathematics. “I’m trying to talk to the British government and say to them, ‘Why don’t we be the first country to say that yes, we need our kids to know about sines, cosines and logarithms, but why don’t they learn about how Fibonacci numbers are present in nature or the power of prime numbers?’”
Telling the big stories is not useful merely to inspire students, he says. “I understood my subject in a much deeper way by going through the lives of people like (Bernhard) Riemann,” he says, “and understanding things like how he created the Riemann zeta function. It was a bit of a tangential journey. He was interested in a new analytical function he could put complex numbers into, and it somehow unlocked the secret of the primes. I think you learn strategies by understanding how the people in history arrived at solutions.”
He calls it a tragedy when told that most Indian students memorise proofs for examinations, saying that you are missing the whole point if you are learning the proof. “The power of mathematics is that you need no memory,” he says, “because once you actually understand the ideas, you can always reconstruct them. One needs to really wean people off the idea of memorising for exams. This can be done through exams that cannot be answered by pure reproduction of proofs, where you have to understand the proof to answer the question because there’s a slight perturbation. I think it’s really essential that the education somehow celebrates the power of proof as a tool for relieving you of memory.”
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
‘By changing the environment, you can improve people’s lives’
Photo: Sarang Sena
WHEN I think about the one idea that inspires me and my work, I’d rather not talk about epidemics, because I think that’s easy. The tools that are required to identify infectious agents that cause outbreaks are becoming less expensive and more rapid, and the real challenge is trying to understand the roots of disease that are laid down in infancy, or even before, and how as a result of exposure during life, you change the way genes are expressed.
We thought when we began sequencing the human genome that the answers to why people are the way they are would be resolved. But the more we have delved into this, the more we have learnt that the most important bit is not the coding sequence, but the way the genes are modified over the course of life. It results in cancer, modifications in height and intelligence, longevity of life, obesity, all kinds of things. And we have learnt that the types of exposure that you see in early life can have an enormous impact.
Now, the exciting thing about this, from the vantage points of democracy, productivity and evolution, is that by changing the environment, you can improve people’s lives. We have learnt from patterns of disease in mice that how you feed an animal when it is pregnant determines whether its offsprings will be obese or not. Similarly, if you consider intellectual aptitude and social intelligence, if you get exposed early to a social environment that is rich, you can improve people’s lives in the longer term. This means that you can take someone who comes from a poor background and give them a better life by adjusting their early environment.
The last thing I find exciting is the notion that you can think about social behaviours like infectious diseases. When I think about infection, I actually mean the concept of transmissibility. If you have a positive or negative relationship with someone, that influences their behaviour, which, in turn, influences somebody else. There is some truth to the notion of karma. Children who grow up in areas where there is a lot of violence, for example, will influence others to be violent. Instead, if you can intercede and contain that violence, that would have a huge impact on the spread of violence. You can immunise people against violence.
As told to Ajachi Chakrabarti
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
“We need to ensure a vibrant future instead of glorifying a dead past”
National Award winning director Onir, 43, has taken up the cause of independent filmmakers by launching an online petition along with a number of celebrated actors and directors, asking the government to set up centres for exhibiting independent films. In an interview with Ajachi Chakrabarti, he explains why it is necessary for the government to rescue independent cinema.
What prompted you to start this petition, and what do you hope to achieve?
A lot of us independent filmmakers have been discussing this issue for a while now. We agreed that the problems we faced were not related to the actual making of the films, but with distribution. It is extremely difficult for us to get space to display our work to audiences. In Europe, for instance, television channels regularly show independent films, because cinema is seen as art. The government is spending Rs 600 crore to restore old films to mark 100 years of Indian cinema, but where are these films going to be seen? We need to work to ensure a vibrant future instead of glorifying a dead past.
We have historically had support from the NFDC in making films, but what is the point if we only get to show our films in international festivals? Now, I’m not saying that an audience will be created overnight. It needs to be nurtured. But there is talk of our films crossing over internationally, but if one can’t see a Rituparno Ghosh film in Mumbai, it means we are not crossing over among ourselves. Encouraging independent cinema is important for the government, as it will bring down walls between different regions.
Have you had any feedback from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on the petition?
We haven’t had any direct feedback, and when some journalists contacted officials in the ministry, they said they had not heard of the issue. We are hoping to get a chance to meet with them and initiate a dialogue on how to protect Indian independent cinema.
You have asked multiplexes to have one dedicated screen for independent and regional films, but a case can be made that the audience has voted with its wallets for mainstream films. Why should for-profit multiplexes not cash in on this by giving the public more of what it wants?
Multiplexes were given hefty tax breaks by the government in order to promote independent cinema alongside mainstream films. Therefore, we have the right to demand that they work to do that. However, this is not a permanent solution, as the government needs to create dedicated spaces for independent films. Multiplexes have been given tax breaks for ten years and we are asking them to do this for two to three years only. It’s the same with kids and classical music today. Children do not appreciate classical music because a love for the music has not been nurtured in them. It does not mean that classical music is inherently inferior. The moment you start exposing people to good films, you will start building an audience. When we were growing up, we could watch bothSholay and Aakrosh on television, which is why I have a taste for both types of films today.
A lot of your petition castigates Doordarshan (DD) for not showcasing independent cinema today. However, in an era where DD has nowhere close to the popularity it had 25 years ago, isn’t going after it rather irrelevant?
Nothing is irrelevant. Today, satellite channels are a lot like multiplexes in a sense that they also focus only on mainstream films in order to maximise revenue. However, as a government organisation, DD has the duty to provide a platform for art. And even if you say that DD is irrelevant because it is crap, it can still penetrate untouched areas and take our films to virgin audiences. We are trying to take our films to smaller towns, as our films still get released in the big cities; and even if DD can show our films in the afternoon slots, it would make a difference. However, they are only interested in blockbusters. I had to fight for six months before DD agreed to show I Am, which had won two National Awards. Even then, they only paid Rs 5 lakh. There was no question of negotiations.
You have asked the government to invest in spaces to screen independent films. But the spaces you talk of are small, 100 seat theatres. Why hasn’t the industry started these on its own? Why wait for the government?
Who would start these spaces? The big studios that have the money, just like the multiplexes, have no interest in promoting independent cinema. It is essential that the government work for these, because it serves the national interest. The government generates a large amount of money from entertainment taxes, and it should use these revenues to promote cinema as an art form.
Ajachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.
ajachi@tehelka.com
The coming out party
By Ajachi Chakrabarti
DIRECTOR
Karan Johar
STARRING
Sidharth Malhotra, Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Rishi Kapoor
PERHAPS I should apologise to Dharma Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment for allowing outside events prejudice this review of their Parent’s Day-cum-Debutante Ball that is Student of the Year. Maybe I would have thought more favourably of the film — unlikely, but possible — if I hadn’t seen it hours after Yash Chopra’s death. Karan Johar, like so many other cogs in the Bollywood machine, has never shied from borrowing tropes from the man who wrote the very formula the industry strives to emulate. However much he tries to hide it in the stratospheric heights of an über-elite Dehradun school, Johar falls back on the tired narrative devices of song-and-dance sequences in exotic locales, where romance is expressed only through Urdu poetry, and the world revolves around the lovebirds’ daily drama.
Unlike Chopra, Johar does not understand the power of empathy in the Bollywood formula. Chopra would construct very Indian social barriers that audiences identified with, however contrived they were. Johar’s protagonists are Delhi-brattified characters straight out of The OC, surrounded by a bunch of stereotypes masquerading as a supporting cast. Rishi Kapoor is hamstrung by playing a closet homosexual whose raison d’être is to get a cheap laugh. He spins it by playing a Mr Weatherbee instead of a Dean Pelton. It makes him likeable, but doesn’t add depth.
Likeability is the only thing the actors strive for in this most commercial of films. What little negative traits seep in are caused by, and blamed on, an illogical Triwizard tournament decided on the basis of a triathlon where male and female students compete in the same race. The events serve to eliminate all who threaten our two sculpted alpha males, There is the cheesiest of reconciliations by the dean’s deathbed.
Likeability is something the film should have strived for itself. It is very difficult to watch it without a negative attitude with your overpriced popcorn. The blatant nepotism does it no favours. Neither does the spectacle of the protagonists infesting your TV for weeks before to shill for soaps and ecommerce websites. I’d love to say that the new generation’s youthful energy helped, but like India’s political dynasties, the young simply bring more of the old. Just with fewer wrinkles.
‘Going to jail 14 times has sharpened my skills’
WHO Tenzin Tsundue is a poet, writer and Tibetan activist based in Dharamshala. The author of three books, he has written for various global publications and won the first Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction (2001).
You’ve been arrested, beaten, starved, thrown out of Dharamshala. What keeps you going?
We’re fighting China, the biggest colonial power in the post-colonial era. It runs the largest slave labour force of about 900 million Chinese with investments from the West. The Tibetan faith and practice of non-violence pushes our idealism further into impossibility. But without a seemingly impossible dream, what is life about anyway? These experiences, like going to jail 14 times, sharpen my skills and they enrich my life.
Is the movement to free Tibet turning violent?
If you call self-immolation — one of the most non-violent acts, carried out with a calm serene mind — “violent”, what word are you left with for organised terrorism? Our people have given their lives to speak to the conscience of the Chinese. They have not hurt anyone else. Till date, 57 Tibetans have set themselves on fire. The freedom movement is growing stronger, even confrontational, but must remain non-violent.
What is more effective, your daredevil stunts or your activism through your writings?
When I climbed the Mumbai hotel scaffolding in 2002, it caught the attention of a consumerist world hooked on cosmetic beauty. But culturally empowering activities using various arts help sustain the movement. Although Tibet today is battered by the military, the police and multiple waves of consumerist market economy, artists and intellectuals are leading the movement from the grassroots. While jailed Tibetan singers and poets are loved and idolised, the military dictators and puppet babus are feared and despised.
How effective is poetry against the economic and military might of China?
The first man who inspired the voice of India’s freedom was not a politician or an activist, but a poet — Sri Aurobindo Ghosh. At the time, India’s condition under British occupation was similar to that of Tibet under Chinese occupation today. Art inspires people to free themselves and reach for beauty and glory. Then, they can neither be threatened by fear nor bought by greed.
Aradhna Wal is a Sub Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
