A little secret: I’ve always wanted to start a religion. With the number of god-men and -women that we seem to produce, it couldn’t be that difficult. Get some decent research done, retrofit some promises to the findings, bring in a few image consultants, maybe persuade some of my old advertising buddies to help out with some communications, get some conjuring lessons from the PC Sorcar family, and grow a beard (I already have the hair). Selling the promise of happiness, here on earth or ever after, seems to me to be far easier than this journalism thing. People want to believe. They’re begging for easy answers and it seems to be a shame not to make their earthly stay a little less stressful, while ensuring that my corporeal self has the comforts it would like to be accustomed to.

So, I’m shooting myself in my hand-woven sandals with this issue. Because in our cover package (pages 27–38): we give you a very practical how-to on being happy, grounded in hard science, by Dr Vikram Sheel Kumar; we tell you where you have the best chance of finding a happy life (our young, but very well-travelled, colleague Shravan Bhat collates research on the happiest places on earth); and we round it off with a list of recommended reading, by Charles Assisi and Sumana Mukherjee.

And yes, those Sorcars: on page 83, Shamik Bag takes a deep dive into the best known family in the Indian magic world. Dinesh Krishnan and Jasodhara Banerjee also had a chance to spend time with the Symphony Orchestra of India, watching how they put together a performance (p 106). And Shishir Prasad and Dinesh again (lucky so-and-so) also hung out with Ustad Zakir Hussain, pretty much Indian classical music’s global ambassador (p 39). And if all that’s too intense, Kishore Singh has curated a set of paintings that rest very easy on the eye, a brief walkthrough of the history of the nude in Indian art (p 61). Of course there are all our usual coumnists sharing thoughts and ideas in their fields of interest. And for those of you who start flipping pages from the back-of-the-book, you’ll start with a set of extremely well-dressed men from the Republic of Congo.

Until next issue, then, fare thee well, mortals.

---

The above text is from my edit letter in the new ForbesLife India, which has just hit bookshops and all the better news-stands. Below, the Table of Contents pages, to whet your appetite. [Click on the thumbnails to see larger images.]

 

Of course there’s more than the stories mentioned above. Like our columnists Meenakshi Shedde on unusual cinematic experiences, Jai Arjun Singh on the literature of the underprivilged, Deepanjana Pal on art as décor, Uday Benegal on the music of protest, Manjula Padmanabhan with her quirky ‘inventions,’ Anand Ramachandran on games India needs, and the intrepid traveller Ashwini Kakkar on what to see and do in Sydney. And Madhulika Liddle gives us her pick of the (film) songs that defined our decades, Sirish Chandran lists five drives that test driver and machine, and Manta Ray Comics has a thought-provoking graphic story, Nila. Plus our team members Sumana Mukherjee on breakfast, and Rohin Dharmakumar on why you should acquire a few programming skillz. As usual, a few picks from our US edition: a very interesting home set up for espionage, a luxury resort in grizzly bear land, a fashion spread featuring golf icons, and the personal collection of a vintage car auctioneer. And to round it all off, our usual Interesting Tools, Objets, and Toys.

We look forward to your feedback, here, or via email, Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

p.s. You can subscribe to ForbesLife India here.

If you don’t know, I won’t judge you. I had never heard of the lady until half an hour ago or thereabouts, when I looked up a link a friend had posted in response to a Facebook status message.

The executive summary? She is the title character in an American television series created by Rob Thomas, which ran for three seasons (2004–2006), won a bunch of awards and not a few hearts, and was then cancelled. It featured a college student who solves crimes, with a little guidance from her detective dad. There’s more, including spoilers, at the IMDB page linked to above, and on Wikipedia.

Why would you want to know about a defunct TV series?

Well, yesterday or actually, today (13th March, which it still is in the USA(well, you know what I mean (never mind))), Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell (who played Ms Mars) launched an appeal on Kickstarter, which asked fans to pledge sums starting as low as US$ 1 to fund a production of a Veronica Mars movie. For every pledge over US$ 10, Thomas in turn pledges goodies of various kinds, starting with PDFs of the shooting script, going uo to T-shirts, DVDs, screenings of the movie in your home town for you and your guests, tickets to the premier, right up to being a featured background extra (just US$ 2500), naming a character (US$ 8000) and, top of the heap, one slot for someone pledging at least US$ 10,000 for a speaking extra role (you play a waiter who proffers the bill to Ms Mars and her dining companion, saying “Your check, sir”). No, don’t go breaking out your credit card, and don’t bother memorising the lines or your Oscar speech: that spot’s taken. As are most of the other slots for the bigger spenders. And most of the other incentives on offer require you to be a US resident.

But forget about that. You’re not some star-struck young American TV show groupie.

The reason, Gentle Reader, that I bring this to your attention is that Thomas set a target of US$ 2 million. Not chump change for me, and I’ll wager, not for you either. (Not you, Mr Ambani. Or you, Mr Ambani. Or any of you folks on the India Rich List.) And guess what? When i started writing this post, maybe 20 minutes ago, the page already had US$ 1,334,913 pledged. When I refreshed the page just now, that had gone up to US$ 1,439,739. almost three-fourths of the minimum sum required. Thomas and team are quite happy to raise more:

Keep in mind that the more money we raise, the cooler movie we can make. A two million dollar fundraising total probably means cross words are exchanged at the class reunion. Three million? We can afford a full-on brawl. Ten million? Who knows… For some reason the Neptune High class reunion takes place on a nuclear submarine! A Hobbit shows up! There’s a Bollywood end-credit dance number! I’ve always wanted to direct Bill Murray. We’ll figure out something cool. Hey, if that total goes high enough, I’ll bet the good folks at Warner Bros. will agree a sequel is a good idea.

Or, as one of the character in the cool promo film (see below) says, it will go into the ‘car chase and nudity fund.’

But for now, let me leave you with:
• A thought: What this means, I think, is that we’re going to see slew of similar campaigns, on Kickstarter and elsewhere. Expect also some bandwagon rider from India starting up sites that are ‘similar’ (read ‘ripped off’) but targetted at Indians. (Actually, I think there are a few out there already. Wiser readers, kindly provide links in the comments?) And you can definitely expect punditification in the media and the blogosphere analysing ‘new crowdsourcing finance trends.’ Like, er, yours truly.
• A caveat: Not everyone has a successful TV series to ride on the back of, or can put together such an charning, entertaining yet hard-working and effective fund-rasing page.
• A prediction: Soon, we will see online fund-raising experts offering their expertise to a gullible world. These will be the ones who were previously social media consultants. And before that, they were SEO consultants.
• Two links on our blogs: Sushobhan Mukherjee’s post on Kickstarter and Kiva, and Innosight’s post on disrupting the Hollywood business model.
• And this bit of information: It’s still less than one day since the Veronica Mars campaign on Kickstarter launched. And since I last looked, the sum raised has gone up to US$1,512,679
• And one bonus prediction: By the time you early risers read this the two million dollar mark would have been crossed.

Here’s the promo from the page:

 

Just after the Jaipur Literature Festival’s last on-stage event (and a little before the grand ‘Writers’ Ball’ at Amber Fort, where the attendees, and some invitees from Jaipur, all let their hair down a little), I chatted with William Dalrymple, who, besides being a well-known writer and historian, is co-director of the Festival. His portfolio is to bring in the foreign authors (Namita Gokhale, his co-director, brings in the Indian component, and Sanjoy Roy and Sheuli Sethi of Teamwork Productions are the producers).

We asked William how he thought the 2013 festival had panned out, and what the plans were for the years ahead (and took a brief digression on the way to talk about JLF 2012). Here’s the audio. (It’s a few seconds over 21 minutes long.)

At the Jaipur Literature Festival, on the 25th January, Jeet Thayil won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2013, for his book Narcopolis.
I spoke to him shortly afterwards, about how it felt to win, especially at Jaipur, where things had got controversial last year, about his opera, Babur which could not run in India, and about the book he’s working in now.

Here’s the audio.

Update:Added: the audio of Sanjoy Roy’s remarks to me, just below the transcript of an extract from the event in question, and before the JLF statement.

Just as many of us thought this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival would go off without controversy, the furore over Ashis Nandy’s remarks on Dalits and corruption (in the course of a discussion titled ‘Republic of Ideas,’ on Republic Day) broke out. I wasn’t at that event, but I did hear about it from several people who were, and the consensus was that a remark that at most could be considered not quite politically correct had been reproduced without context and then blown out of all proportion in search of eyeballs and controversy. Others said, rather vehemently, that Mr Nandy was… foolish and tactless. TV channels have played only small snippets, but the organisers have—finally!—put the video online on the festival’s YouTube channel. Watch for yourself, and form your own opinion.

I’d urge you to listen to the whole thing, but here, courtesy the Jaipur Literature Festival, is a transcript of the relevant part of the conversation (I’ve corrected a few typos):

(33:04) Urvashi Bhatalia: Ashis-da, your comments now on the ideas that have been discussed here: equality, the changeability, the need for change, the dreams of the founding fathers and mothers. Um, and on utopia generally, I mean what have you been writing about utopia? You want to tell us a little bit?

(33:29) Asish Nandy: Well let me first clear two things, I think you heard when you said that I’m a philosopher. I’m a philosopher only in the sense that philosophy can come from texts but it can also come from slums. So I’m talking about the second kind of philosophy and I do hope that I will convey some idea of it today. First of all I do endorse the view which has come, that a realized or successful utopia is the other name for terror. In Soviet Union they used to put dissenters in mental asylums after the psychiatrists have diagnosed them as mentally ill because anybody who dissents in a utopia is naturally insane. Normally, we should diagnose them as insane so utopias can be dangerous and visions can be also dangerous but on the other hand no collectivity, and for that matter no individual, can live without visions. A good life requires vision. But such visions must also have a touch of the imperfect. And unless you are sensitive to that, I think it will be very dangerous to mount a kind of informed movement, which strives for perfection. In the context of our discussion, if I may point that the only country which I know is close to zero corruption is Singapore and that’s not part of my concept of utopia, it can be very much a part of my concept of dystopia. I do wish that there remains some degree of corruption in India because I would also suggest that it humanises our society. Indian society, Indian republic if you would like to call it like that here, is that it has left only four sectors of the society where your true talents are recognised, your true capabilities and skills are acknowledged. Rightly or wrongly, that’s a different thing but at least they’re acknowledged, people think they only work for that. In other words, no considerations of caste, religion, sect enter your considerations. And these four sectors are: spectator sports, which is a very small sector because sports heroes are not that many. Two: entertainment industry, which is a very slippery category because contrary to our belief at least four-fifths of all Bombay films for instance fail in the box office, so it’s a very risky business. Actually all four sectors are risky but it is perhaps the most risky business. Third is crime, our criminal gangs are perfectly egalitarian. Do not forget that Dawood Ibrahim’s gang had a lot of Hindus in it. Totally secular. And finally politics. You fight it out in politics and make it. All this talk of dynasty is an illusion created by the middle classes. Mrs. Gandhi did not become prime minister of India when Nehru was living. There was a large and very noticeable gap between her ascent to the throne and Nehru’s demise. She fought her way up. She was seen as a very meek, very unskillful, politically naïve woman. And therefore the syndicate chose her. She knew that in Indian politics that you should not project yourself as either too intelligent or too shrewd or too clever or even too political and that helped her. She clawed her way to power and so have each one of the names which have come up whether it is Mulayam Singh Yadav or Laloo Prasad Yadav. In addition, in the case of Laloo Prasad and Mulayam Singh, and people like them, exactly because of the reasons you give, there is a sense of desperation, utter desperation and insecurity. Even if you make through corruption millions of rupees, you suspect that you will not be able to get away using the machinery of law or cleverly manipulating your investments in the right way with the right connections because you have none. If I may point out to you that to the best of my knowledge the only unrecognised billionaire in India today, in dollar terms, is Madhu Koda. Madhu Koda. He’s a tribal and I can assure you that Mr. Koda must have been a very insecure, unhappy, tense person. And in this kind of situation, the only people you can trust are your own relatives. Your son, your daughter, your nephew or your own cousins, where you can use them for keeping your money, keeping your political secrets or trusting them to remain loyal to you. And if you fit your experiences within this model, you will recognise, why this insecurity is there because politics looks a very impersonal/contractual work to a large part of Indians. They are new to politics. And your family members do not have the capacity to absorb the additional money in more clever, intelligent way. If I do a good turn to Richard Sorabji, he can return the favour by accommodating my nephew at Oxford, if it were in the United States, it would be a substantial fellowship. Ms Mayawati doesn’t have that privilege. She probably has only relatives whose ambition was to be a nurse earlier or run a petrol pump. If she has to oblige somebody or have somebody in the family absorb the money, she will probably have to take the bribe of having hundred petrol pumps and that is very conspicuous, very corrupt indeed. Our corruption doesn’t look that corrupt, their corruption does.

(41:20)
Tarun Tejpal: Urvashi, can I add something to what Ashis-da just said. You know on this corruption issue, I just want to put this corruption issue in a different kind of light along the lines of what Ashis-da just said. I just want to throw a thought amongst all of you, which I’ve said earlier on also, perhaps, I’m saying perhaps corruption in a country like India is also a great class equaliser. And I’m going to try and explain that to you. It’s not all bad, it’s probably a great class equaliser. I’m saying suppose in an extremely class-ridden society like India where somebody who works in my house, my driver or my cook, what chance do his children have in the way India is constructed today versus my children where for the last fifty years in many senses the class that has ruled India, the elite, the privileged, my class of people, have built a set of rules that makes things easy for them and makes things lucrative for them. I mean all the rules that are laid down, let me give you the dumbest rule of them all, that English is the kind of dominant, hierarchial language. You know almost everyone who exercises power in India in some sense has an advantage if he comes from an English speaking background, a clear advantage over everybody else. In a situation like this if you come from the wrong side of the tracks of which roughly a billion people in this country would, what chance do you have of breaking through to get your hands on the spoils of life and on the spoils of a country? I’d say almost nothing. What do people like that do? People like that subvert the rules; these are not God’s rules, these are man made rules. God’s rules are you shall not kill anybody, you shall not rape anybody, you shall not oppress anybody. Those maybe God’s rules. Men’s rules are rules of examinations, taxations, privileges. I’m saying what chance do you have if you come from the wrong side of the tracks where I would say roughly a billion people of this country do, of breaking into and getting your hands on the resources available to the 200 million. I’d say a lot of these people do that by subverting the system which is what we call corruption, which are these man-made rules. I’ll give you one the greatest examples of this which will easily strike a chord with most of you. There’s a man called Dhirubai Ambani. If he had not known how to subvert the rules; all the rules that he subverted today are now law. At that time they were not, at the time he was subverting them they were not, he would have still been filling petrol in a pump in Doha. And that’s how I’m saying, today you see all across the landscape in Delhi and Bombay, people coming from nowhere, from the wrong side of the tracks not having the privilege of elite education, of elite backgrounds, of admission to elite clubs, but breaking through on the basis of their wit, their intelligence and their hunger and very often subverting the rules that certain classes made.

(44:15)
AshisNandy: Just a response to this part, very briefly, he’s not saying the most important part of the story which will shock you and it will be a very undignified and, how should I put it, almost vulgar statement on my part. It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes and as long as this is the case, Indian republic will survive. And I give an example, one of the states with least amount of corruption is the state of West Bengal where when the CPM was there. And I want to propose to you, draw your attention to the fact that in the last 100 years nobody from the OBCs, the backward classes and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes have come anywhere near power in West Bengal. It is an absolutely clean state.

I also spoke to Sanjoy Roy, festival producer, about the whole thing, and here’s what he had to say:

[Sorry, I've been unable to put the recording online, but will try again later.]
Sanjoy Roy on Ashis Nandy

While we were talking, he got a phone call, which he then told me was good news: they could leave the city. (He and several other members of the organising team had been told earlier that they could not.)

He also sent me this statement from the festival:

This is a transcript of sociologist and scholar Ashis Nandy’s statement at the session titled Republic of Ideas at JLF. While discussing different aspects of India, Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal had suggested that maybe one way of looking at corruption is that it is a sort of equalising force in society as power structures are always created by the elite to keep the status quo in their favour and the poor can break through these glass ceilings created by the elite only by bending and subverting the system. Tejpal went on to give Dhirubhai Ambani as an example; that if he had not bent and subverted the system, he might have remained a petrol pump attendant.

Ashis Nandy picked up on this thread of argument and said he agreed with Tarun that corruption was a way of creating social mobility. He said the corruptions of the rich get noticed less because the rich have learnt to be sophisticated — and gave an imagined example of how he and another speaker Richard Sorabjee could be corrupt and nepotistic in ways that no one would catch on. The corruptions of the poor or those who have newly broken through the glass ceiling, on the other hand, are often more noticeable because they are more conspicuous. This, Ashis, argued was because they do not have the sophisticated mechanisms of the rich to hide their money. They only trust their families to be loyal so park their money only with close relatives — which again makes their corruption more visible. But, Ashis continued, according to him all of this was fine and part of a necessary social churn because this was the only way that the poor could break free from centuries of being downtrodden and access the power and entitlements that should be theirs by right. Another speaker had earlier criticised dynastic politics but Ashis explained that even that was part of social churn as Mulayam Yadav and the entire Yadav community that are seen as mainstream now were part of the historically oppressed classes barely 20 years ago. He explained how important it is for dalits and backward classes to break through centuries of oppression and access power and money so that society can become more equal. He spoke of the desperation they feel.

Ashis then went on to say that though what he was going to say would sound vulgar, he felt it may even be a fact that the SC\STs and OBCs were among the most corrupt today, BUT (and it is important to note this) he said he felt if this was true, and as long as the percentage of the poor or oppressed classes was more corrupt than the elite, he felt the Republic of India was safe because the necessary social churn was taking place. He went on to give the example of Bengal, where according to him, 40 years of Left rule had meant it was comparatively less corrupt but at the same time it meant no Dalits or OBCs had been able to even come close to accessing power and the social hierarchy was frozen with only the upper castes having a grip on power.

The statement that is being interpreted as offensive therefore has been taken wrongly out of context. It was part of a larger argument Ashis was making that corruption should not be read in narrow terms and sometimes can be an important social mechanism to correct the wrongs of history. In his reading the social churn is more important to India’s health just now than a perfect corruption-free society.

Ashis is a scholar who has always been pro-dalit and -backwards, and all his writing over the past 30 years would be proof of this.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the new issue of ForbesLife India. You, no doubt stirred by that list of goodness, went out and bought copies for yourself and your 50 best friends. So you’ve seen, among all the other great pieces, the ‘art + copy collaboration between Rajiv Eipe and Rahul Bhatia’ I mentioned in that post. This is for everyone else.

With the literary festival season in full swing, chances are you’ve puzzled over some of the, er, specimens you’ve encountered. Here’s a beginners’ guide from Rajiv Eipe and Rahul Bhatia.

All this and more in the current edition of ForbesLife India. At all the better news stands and in your favourite bookshops.

Scene opens on a conference room lit only by the light reflected off the projection screen. The camera pans around the table, over the faces of the ForbesLife India editorial team. The editor speaks.

“Right, so what’s popular, relevant, and something everyone in India loves and, more important, has an opinion about?”

Cut to the editorial intern, a fresh-faced lass with shining eyes undimmed by years of deadlines. She squeaks speaks:

“Cinema!”

The camera jump-cuts to the various faces around the table. All are smiling.

Pan to grizzled visage of the editor.

“Well that’s alright, then. Meeting over.”

There is a thundering noise as the editorial team stampedes to the pantry.

The end-credits scroll over and empty conference room.

That’s only a mildly-fictionalised account of how we decided what our cover story would be about. Ever since Dhundiraj Govind Phalke rolled cameras for the first time, just over a century ago, we as a nation have waited eagerly for the next movie, and the next, and the next. We love our cinema, and we live it. Continue reading →

The good thing about print is the finite space you have in which to say what you want to; it makes you think hard, prune, choose carefully. Sometimes that can mean having to discard stuff you would rather keep in. That was the case with our year-end issue’s list of books to look forward to.

We had started by asking publishers to send us four or five picks from their lists for 2013. They were more than generous, and sent us much, much longer lists. Which gave us a much, much, much longer long list than we had bargained for. We did an initial prune to around 50 books, then chopped it again to around 25, from which we selected 17 and then leaned back with deep sighs of accomplishment. Then, of course, our design team, as design teams are wont to do, said that was way too many and would we prune to 13. Which we did, and which you’ll see in print in our year-end issue.

But we felt that being, as we are, staunch lovers of good reading, we should point you to a few more titles than the tyranny of the page (and our demanding design team) allowed us. Here you go. More books to make space on your bookshelf for. (Note that this selection is guided by what I think our readers will find useful, with a few personal choices included as well.) Continue reading →

Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of Kali For Women and founder of Zubaan Books, is one of the nicest and most respected figures in publishing (and, in full disclosure, a very good friend).

When we asked her to be our expert on one of The Questions That Need Asking that you will read in our Anniversary Issue, she was, as ever, generous with her time and knowledge. The constraints of print, and the brief for the issue, meant that what you see on the page is a very abbreviated version of the conversation. Here, for your delectation, is the full conversation. One of these days, I must persuade her to write up a complete history of Indian publishing. Continue reading →

In response to the new-new Facebook guidelines (as opposed to the old-new guidelines and the new-old guidelines that have since been lost to history) I hereby declare that I would like to issue a declaration too.

Truth is, I haven’t a clue what Facebook owns or doesn’t. In any case, most of the time I’m linking to stuff other people have done, or telling you what I had for breakfast. But, as I was saying…

I just hope like hell that if I post something vaguely legal-looking that all my stuff, which includes (but is not limited to) my personal details, who I was in a relationship with, scintillatingly witty status messages, roguishly clever comments and photographs of colleagues or friends looking silly, will somehow become very valuable and therefore require Facbook to pony up some of its billions if it uses them without my written consent.

Of course I recognise that the last place I should be putting up anything that’s private and/or likely to earn me money and/or litigable is Facebook. Nevertheless If I post this and add something like..

Post this on your timeline and Mark Zuckerberg will give you money.

..then some people may just go ahead and share it.