A: Anil, you’ve worked for the Debonair magazine in the past. What was the most unexpected thing about being an editor there?

AD: Too many unexpected things. And it’s been a long time, so I don’t even remember one particular incident, or two particular incidents. But I do remember having unexpected visitors from way back who suddenly would meet me somewhere and say, “Hey Anil, we must meet,” and I would say, “Of course, shall we meet at the club?” and they would say, “No, no, no, no, no…let’s meet in the office.” And I couldn’t this figure it out till one-day a very famous writer came up, a young man no doubt, and sat there across the table, and all the time he kept looking outside the door, and then I realized he expected naked ladies to walk by, which of course didn’t happen. I had the most boring looking secretaries on earth. I tried to glamorize them but failed badly.

That was actually a good introduction to anyone coming to my office at Debonair because when they came in, it was all very staid…nothing flamboyant. We didn’t have any posters; it was a very elegant office. The thing about Debonair when I took it up…I went in clearly with the understanding that the center of attention was the aptly named ‘centerfold’. And unlike my predecessor Vinod Mehta who treated it is something which he had to get rid of quickly, and did a very shoddy job of it, I said we have to pay attention to it, which I did, and with the result that we got a lot of good looking young women coming up, and volunteering to shed their clothes. Uh, for some reason most of them made the condition that I should not be present at the shoot, which uh, was slightly disappointing, but it really was a different time you know, you must realize we are talking of 1980 and India was different then. I don’t think I would have trouble getting good models now, but then no one is interested in looking at centerfolds.

A: Why do you think that was though? The fact that they didn’t want you around…

AD: Why didn’t they? I took it as a compliment. They thought the photographer was neutral, he was going to look more into the camera, whereas I would look at them, which perhaps was the reason. Having no option, I treated it as a compliment.

But just if I may continue with Debonair, because there’s something I’m proud of, which is that we did emphasize the writing part. Much like Playboy did. Playboy interviews were famous, and so were ours. I did a lot of them, running into 8 or 10 pages. We had long, long articles, and which now I realize would be called long-form; no one called them long form then. We had short stories. Now what I did was, which was very inventive…the centerfold as you can see would be a double-spread. So I said, “What do we do behind the centerfold?

Not only do we get two pages, but the facing page…so we are getting a three-page spread, which is not possible in any magazine. Why not use that for the short story?”And I got this incredible illustrator called Avinash Godbole, he is still around, works in advertising…got him to illustrate all our stories and they were kind of cutting edge, absolutely cutting edge and wonderful illustrations, one of which got me into trouble, which was…that someone had written about, and it’s actually now that I think about it quite topical about the abuse by staunch believers in Hinduism of Hinduists, of the religion. And to illustrate that, he had that classic picture of Hanuman tearing open his chest to show Ram, Sita, Laxman inside.

What he did was, that Hanuman tears open his chest and inside are Ram, Laxman, Sita, quite recognizable by their bows and arrows and so on, but they are skeletons. So I apparently hurt the religious feelings of all Hindus so there was a court case. I had this policeman landing up from Yavatmal who’d come to arrest me, and I quickly said, “You know it’s lunch time, why don’t you go for lunch?” because I was trying to contact my lawyer who was absent. So one of the minions took him for lunch, I disappeared, then I was summoned to Yavatmal. I went there in court, and as I came out of court there was a long line of people waiting to meet me. The last man there was a puny little guy who warmly shook my hand and said, “I’m the one who brought the case against you!”

There are many such stories of Debonair. The other thing which happens and it happened even just last week – I meet people slightly younger than me uh, who are all in eminent positions. They are great, they are CEO of hospitals, they are great engineers, and so on. They say, “Debonair…we read Debonair in college.”

So it had an impact, it certainly had an impact, and what happened actually, and I like to believe that the picture led them to buy the magazine, which incidentally was the highest selling magazine in the country, more than India Today, and then they read it, and what I achieved I think was that people were not then hiding it. Even in drawing rooms, you saw the magazine.

A: Legitimized it in a way.

AD: Yes. Absolutely. And then I had my little daughter looking at it. Uh, she pointed out to the nude, “Look!” And…my wife and I said, “Yeah, she’s not wearing any clothes.” We treated is as absolutely normal, which I think influenced her attitude. Instead of saying, “Chee, chee, chee!”

A: Over the years your career has shifted from *left to right brain, but what about the world of Math and Engineering that you left behind…is there anything that you miss about it at all?

*Left and right brain: Although scientifically speaking, the jury is out on this one, in common parlance, left-brained refers to people with an aptitude for all things analytical while right-brained refers to people with an aptitude for all things creative.

AD: Uh, I don’t think so. I don’t think I miss anything of what I have finished doing because I treat it as a phase of my life, a phase of my career. Uh, it was very different work as an engineer or doing mathematics, one dealt with a different set of people to start with.

A: You even taught, didn’t you?

AD: Different set of problems…as an engineer, I would be going on building sites, I would be talking to people I would not meet socially, it was a very different world. The first thing I learned because I spent a lot of time in Britain, and unknowingly my accent had become very British, and what I found was that when I was speaking to engineers on the phone, they didn’t understand a word of what I was saying. So I had to deliberately Indianize my accent, which stuck, but uh, that was one thing. And the second thing was that I think we underrate the kind of work that engineers do because unlike let’s say what a journalist does, it’s not seen. I think an engineer’s work is best done when it’s not noticed…because then it’s working.

Like building services engineering, which I specialized in. If it’s done well, you won’t have a fire, for example. If you notice it, which means that the building is burning, something has gone wrong. So you know, it’s a different world altogether, and you deal with it because that’s part of your life, that’s your whole career at the moment. Then you switch, and something else becomes your life. Like when I went to cinema, cinema was my life.

But, why would you regret it? You’ve done a good job. There was a lingering regret…it was very small, which…when I announced to my clients, well Feroze Kudianvala…the architect’s clients that I was leaving.

State Bank of India was one of the biggest clients and there was a Mr. Borkar who was the chief engineer and he said, “Why are you abandoning engineering? You can’t!” And he said, “I am making you an offer. You do what you want…journalism, whatever, whatever, but on the side, you set up your own company and I’ll be your first client.” What an offer that was!

A: That’s high praise.

AD: Yeah, something I remember with pride.

A: Anil, why don’t you tell us a little about your time as the head of the NFDC when the film Gandhi was made?

AD: Well, when I went in as a young man, and I think I was taken there because I was writing a lot about cinema. Now my first job was to look at the scripts and all these young men in kurtas and jholas coming in…

A: No women?

AD: Um…not really, well the women directors came later. But initially it was people like Saeed Mirza, Ketan Mehta, uh…Vidhu Vinod Chopra. I mean you name them, a whole galaxy of people, the parallel cinema types would come from FTII and had these wonderful scripts, and we gave five lakhs, and people actually made films in that. Their contribution was their talent, which we monetized so that you know, we are giving actual money, and they are giving their talent. That’s how the films were made. And the five years I spent there were very, very enjoyable. There were so many new people coming into it with all these wonderful scripts…you know they had these ideas of making a different kind of cinema, and they did, and we tried to show them to the public, which was a challenge, but it was wonderful.

And then one-day I get a call…the operator who was overly excited, which she normally wasn’t. So she said, “Sir Richard Attenborough on the line.” And I knew she wouldn’t take the liberty of joking with me, so I said, “Put him on.” I talked to him and he said, “Richard Attenborough here, and can you give me an appointment? I’d like to meet you.” So I said, “Of course Sir Richard.” He came the next day. Our office was at Nariman Point; he was staying The Oberoi. He came across, and of course I could barely contain my excitement, obviously, and he wanted money to make Gandhi, the film. And I said, “What kind of money are you looking for?” And he said, “Five crores.” And I started laughing…and I think he was slightly offended; he said, “Is that funny?” and I said, “In a way it is, because the figure five is fine, but the problem is with the zeros.

And that’s what we give. And five crores is…we’ve never had as much money as that in the whole of NFDC!” So anyway, we parted. He called me the next day and said, “May I see you again?” So he came and he said, “I will take it,” and he said, “Give me a letter saying you’re going to part-finance the film. Don’t mention a figure, and I will use that as leverage to get funds from abroad.” I said, “I will gladly do that.”

The story doesn’t end there, because what happened was, Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, and she used to read a book before going to sleep and somehow, Richard managed to smuggle his script across to her. And she being a cultured person must have heard of Richard Attenborough anyway, so she apparently read it. Because the phone the next morning rang and the minister of broadcasting said we must do this film.

So then of course the bureaucracy swung into action because the PM’s involved. Then the bureaucrats looked at this saying, “Yeh Gandhi pe film banayega…yeh bhi gora aadmi…kaun dekhega yeh film?” And then they said the PM has not given written orders, we certainly have this thing, and we have to do it, and it’s going to be a huge flop. Later on, there will be an enquiry as to why this money was given, and 5 crores at that time was a lot of money. Why was this money given? On whose authority? And then we will be posted out of our jobs into some remote area. So we must protect us…our backsides, which is how our bureaucrats always work. So they decided to set up a separate film company called Film India consisting…the shareholders being all the top producers of cinema in this country, the commercial cinema.

A: The bureaucrats decided this?

AD: The bureaucrats thought of setting up this company. So people like GP Sippy, BR Chopra, you just name them…whole lot, and each was supposed to contribute a small amount and by the way, guaranteed by the government of India. So should the film fail, they would get their money back. But in spite of that they didn’t want to be a part of this. “Yeh kaha phasaa diya yeh?” and Richard Attenborough had this theater habit of calling everyone darling, so, “Yeh darling ne kaha phasa diya?” We went in a plane and I thought to myself if this plane crashes, the whole film industry of India is gone. Everyone who was anyone was in that flight, and they were making fun of this darling, and gora, and stuff like that, because they all believed that no one would want to see a film on Gandhi to start with.

Anyway, I read the script, I was moved to tears, and I remember meeting Richard for breakfast…and the script wasn’t being bandied about, very few people had it, but he had given me the copy. And when I told him how much I liked it, he got off the table, embraced me, hugged me, and wept, and said, “I’ve been dying to hear these words.”

A: Wow

AD: Anyway, uh, I later fought with the ministry saying all these guys, all these producers don’t want to do this. “The Government of India is guaranteeing this, why don’t you give NFDC the money? And we want to do this. I believe in this film, and if the film fails, you’re going to be guaranteed the money. If it succeeds, NFDC will get money it needs.” Finally, that view prevailed, the film went on to make huge amounts of money, and still comes into NFDC…it keeps being shown on TV, and so on, and it won all the Oscars! That’s my contribution…but, I was a bit of a villain for these young filmmakers. They said you give us five lakhs, and you give this foreigner five crores.  Well, but the young film makers, now no longer young are still my friends…so that’s the story.

A: As Queen of Naboo in Star Wars, your daughter said in a quote that packs a punch but drops a punctuation, “The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.”  What about India’s democracy is working Anil, and what isn’t?

EDIT-A: I for one, comma, think you’ll have lost it, period.

AD: Yeah, we’ve lost it, and…but I don’t know when this interview is going to go on but it might get dated, and I hope it gets dated. I hope by the time this comes out and people watch it or listen to it, Indian democracy will be back on track. Um, that’s the hopeless optimist in me talking because I think we are at a very bad stage in our national life, completely. Recent events, the attacks on students, and so on are I think an example of that… a very vivid, and very unsavory example of that. And what amazes me is that the political dispensation which on the one hand seems so keen to get international attention in a favorite way does not see the repercussions of what they do in this country and how they manage this country.

And that is one part, the second part is that there has been now created for the first time since independence an actual divide between communities…and it’s not just between communities, it’s also a divide between those who are considered not “patriotic enough”…uh, the anti-nationals, the Khan Market Gang, the tukde-tukde gang, and phrases like that which are so awful. Everyone forgets that we are all Indians, and almost all of us, and I would say without exception believe in our country, and we want it to be a good country, a better country, something which is good for every citizen. And then what happens is when you divide it, and you create these ‘us and them’ kind of feeling…it is detrimental to what happens in the country. And it affects every walk of life…not just social, but it’s going to hurt the economy, it’s going to hurt everything that you hold dear, and everything that’s important.

A: Is anything working though?

AD: Well, I don’t know if anything’s working. Certainly, what has come out, is hate. You know I’d like to go back since we are talking on this subject to what happened around 1947…and don’t forget partition, which must be one of the most traumatic beginnings for nationhood with lakhs and lakhs of people killed, a kind of communal divide between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, so on…manifested in the most violent, brutal ways across the north, and in Bengal. Now to have recovered from that, and I give full credit to Jawaharlal Nehru; Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in ‘48 so he didn’t have enough time, and Sardar Patel died soon after. It was the towering personality of Nehru who by his own example was so beyond all these divides that people even after the trauma of partition, lived together.

Now that it something people forget about…that it is such a towering achievement, that it’s something we must really not forget at all that India lived as a secular nation, the enmity between communities somehow got submerged. I don’t think the feelings ever went away, but what now has happened in the US for example that you may have anti-black feelings in white Americans, but he or she will not express them. And when you stop expressing them, pretty soon it becomes submerged in you. What is happening now is it’s perfectly okay to express these feelings…you know, which is the beginning of the end, for me.

A: You grew up around strong, independent women; your mother was even a badass feminist writer and your father was a lawyer, but in what ways was he also a feminist?

AD: By the way my father was not a lawyer, he was a finance guy.

A: Oh, sorry.

AD: I am glad he was not a lawyer, because he would’ve not have let me talk, but finance people are generally quieter. My mother was a feminist, but again, she was a quiet feminist. So…we never had a kind of rhetoric at the dining table, feminist rhetoric. And it’s only later when I grew up and got aware of things like feminism and so on, I realized my mother was one of the first feminists, and if you look at her short stories, they are a very early expression of feminism. Her stories had these very strong women at the forefront, and you know that plus my father’s attitude, he went to study in England, we travelled all across India since he was in the railways. We did not talk about caste, we did not talk about religion, and it sounds almost corny to say so, but without knowing it, we’d became real Indians because these divisions didn’t matter to us.

We had friends, we liked them or didn’t like them depending on what they were…not because you know, because of the kind of people they were, not what their religion was, or what their caste was. All these things didn’t matter; we didn’t even think about it. Even today, and I find this a bit of a handicap if I am writing about politics and elections, that I don’t understand caste equations, and it’s still important in India to understand that. My mother was a very strong woman, but in a quiet way. She led the mahila samiti, she was the president of this and that so on, and as a young woman of course which is an aspect I don’t know except through photographs, she learnt horse riding…wearing a nine-yard saree.

Can you imagine that? She did hand to hand combat fighting, she learnt to use a sword, clubs…all that! And don’t forget we are talking of 1930’s. It’s quite amazing actually. And I actually didn’t understand what an incredible woman my mother was till very late. Uh, now, when I look at the pictures I say, “Oh gosh, I underestimated her!” And as a child you know you are always critical of your parents. And she learnt English much later in life because of my father, being married to him. She did her graduation in Sanskrit, but I used to think to myself as a teenager, “My mother doesn’t speak English so well;” we are always critical like that. It’s only as I grew up, when I became a little wiser, I realized what a remarkable woman she was.

A: One of my favorite writers Muriel Barbery said, “Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.”

EDIT-A: And the beautiful truth is that single malts can only belong to the beautiful, rich souls.

A: Anil, you’ve said that you’re OK with people drinking their whisky* any way they like it because it’s ultimately about personal taste – but if taste is what ultimately matters, then why not just start just a whisky club? Why a single malt club?

*Whisky: A whisky must be made from one of four grains – barley, corn, rye, or wheat. A single malt whisky is blended from whiskies from a single distillery. Many Indian whisky brands are instead made from molasses, which technically makes them rums.

AD: What’s a whisky club? Whisky clubs mean any social gathering. People come for dinner, people go to the Taj, people go to friends’ houses…they all drink whisky. How is it different from anything else? Single malt is a specialty – there is something to savor, something to discern one bottle from another. There are different flavors, different tastes, there’s the degrees of maltiness, the degrees of smokiness, where the whisky is made – that makes a difference, the waters makes a difference. You look at what the Japanese did, they tried, Santori tried to do something with scotch, which they couldn’t call scotch…whisky, and they tried to imitate it for years and years and years and failed, and their whisky was pretty miserable.

Rumors were that they were importing water from Scotland but that didn’t seem to help. But then something changed, and no one has figured out why, and suddenly Japanese single malts have become about the best in the world. We have single malts in India…well we had one made in India, made by Mc Dowell’s, which was probably the worst single malt in the world I thought, till I tasted an Australian single malt, which was even worse. But we now have three or four Indian single malts which are pretty respectable. So you know, everyone is learning the art because there is the demand, because I suppose single malt clubs start, people begin to appreciate it. So, if you have a discerning audience, uh discerning…

A: Palette?

AD: Palette, but no, if people who make these whiskies say OK, if there’s a market for it, there is a discerning audience for it, then they will devote their attention to it. They’ll get specialists…they’ll take care basically, which is how everything improves.

What does a single malt club do? In a sense we are like critics. A critic is important to books for example, or to music, so on…but there are not too many critics who write about single malts. But the fact there are clubs, people talk about it. I think that news filters to the people who make the malts.

EDIT-A: I think he should have started a whisky education club, because most Indians think they are drinking whisky but it’s actually rum, and even their rum isn’t technically rum!

A: Yes, because clearly no one gives a dram*. Interestingly though, one reason scotch gets its unique taste is because the soil in Scotland apparently holds a lot of salt. There are I believe recurring themes in all of our lives Anil, and salt may just be yours!

*Dram: A somewhat arbitrary measure equating to a single pour of whisky. In Scotland, a single dram is either 25 milliliters or 35 milliliters, which is (not surprisingly), considerably lesser than a standard pour in America.

EDIT-A: The man did put salt to paper.

A: And he worked for a rather salty magazine once.

EDIT-A: So, this previous question made me think, genetically, Indians, like single malts, are also mostly single origin*, and yet this country is more like the Unblended States of America.

A: You had prophesied albeit regretfully at one of your lit fests, that Hindus and Muslims cannot co-exist. What kind of an ‘un-blendery’ is that?

AD: Who said that?

A: Actually, at the 2019 Lit Fest, you did.

AD: I did?

A: Yes.

AD: I said Hindus and Muslims…

A: …cannot co-exist, and you expressed regret at saying that.

AD: I said that because I think present examples are showing that. Uh, I don’t think I would say that as something which is a blanket condemnation of this country, because I’ve just given you an example of how secularism, in spite of partition…

A: Was it just repressed?

AD: Secularism worked, and it would have continued to work unless a villain called L.K. Advani, who has now become a respected figure because he has gone old. Uh, he started that Rath Yatra, and which went and the demolishment of the Babri masjid, and that’s where the rot started. I would also say that Hindus and Muslims have this, particularly from the majority Hindu’s side, an antagonistic feeling, a feeling of great historical hurt, which is ridiculous, uh, because the Moghul invaders, actually even before that, they destroyed temples and so on. Now if you’re a mature person, you say okay, these things happened…that’s history. You can’t say that with today’s attitudes and perceptions and today’s knowledge. You can’t then transpose it back a few hundred years and say they should have behaved like this. Because that never happens.

A: But there isn’t a statute of limitation on these things, right? I mean people don’t seem to forget.

AD: People don’t seem to forget because they are not allowed to forget, and I think this is a point I have been making right through this conversation, which is that if people are made to forget because of  let’s say the example set by people like Nehru, and those who followed him like Indira Gandhi, for example. People will not forget, but it stops being important, and that is what we must realize. That is it top of your mind, or is it submerged? What I think I meant to say from that quote which you have unearthed from somewhere is that human beings are deeply flawed and vastly prejudiced…across the world. I think civilization comes in doing away with those prejudices. And doing away with them very, very consciously…very deliberately. It’s not a process which happens, but it’s a process which you can make happen. And the way it happens, and the way it happened with me and my two sisters was because of what my parents were.

A: Omission…

AD: Yes, so it’s possible to get rid of these feelings however old they are, however ingrained they are in your psyche if you’re brought up in that way…to consider them unimportant.

A: So do you think that by not talking about these issues like you didn’t, growing up, it’s the first step in making them less important?

AD: Absolutely you have to talk about it. And you have to talk about it, not shout about it.  And I think that’s the difference between what’s happening now…people are shouting about it. And there’s an incident in today’s paper where a friend of ours who is a sailor goes to Thailand and he wants to hire a crew, and the people say, “but are you Hindu?” Now he is a bit taken aback…he is in Thailand, he said, why is this question relevant? And they said, “No, no…it’s because we’ve had a lot of Hindus coming in, and they want a Hindu crew, and we only have a Muslim crew left.”  He was shocked out of his wits you know hearing this in another country. This is what is happening now, and this is what we have to overcome by talking about it, by writing about it…uh, it’s not going to be easy because the seeds of division have been planted very deliberately, they are being watered every day, and they are growing very fast.

A: You have also in the past argued against the notion that freedom of expression is being undermined in India. Do you remain on the same side of that debate?

EDIT-A: You know that by qualifying freedom of expression, you’ve essentially disqualified it?

A: Maybe, she has a point?

AD: Well, look who’s being clever…but freedom of expression is of course being undermined today, without the slightest doubt. And I’ve dismayed that journalists are now not being fearless. You know when I was part of journalism, when I was an editor, what was on our minds? It wasn’t uh, these divides, and we weren’t scared of saying that we shouldn’t write this because the government will do something. It was always a question of, all right, is your proprietor on your side or not? Proprietor of the newspaper, magazine or whatever, is he on the same page? You never worried about retribution from the powers, from authorities.

Now what is happening is, the moment you’ll say something which is strong, considered anti-national just because you are being critical, apparently you get a phone call from Delhi…and it has happened to a lot of owners, and the example of NDTV, which is one of the few independent channels…being constantly being harassed with tax cases and so on. Now these are something new, these things are new but what dismays me is that very few journalists are actually fighting back. Major newspapers with one or two honorable exceptions are getting very subdued.

A: How much of this fear do you think is fear of you know, retribution as you said from the government vis-a-vis you know, just the people?

AD: I think the fear of retribution of the government is very real, because the government has shown in many cases and not just with the media, but in other cases…whether it’s with the Statistical Institute of India, whether it’s the election commission – the one dissident member of the election commission, you might remember out of the three election commission members, one was constantly questioning things and he seemed to be in that sense, anti-establishment. Once his term is over, he has been raided, his son has been raided, his family, everyone, is facing now harassment. Now these are not subtle hints.

A: Not at all.

AD: And I think this is where things have changed. They are in your face, they are blatant, they are unashamed. The power of the government is being wielded like a huge giant club…by club I don’t mean the club where you go and drink single malt, but something you beat people with…a stick, um, an iron rod is being flashed very deliberately. Fall in line or else! So we are in terrible times.

EDIT-A: These days the problem is that you humans are constantly in an offensive state of mind.

A: What! I’m so offended by that!

EDIT-A: Well the world may be getting warmer Greta (Thunberg), but India is full of snowflakes!

A: You know it couldn’t be truer what Salman Rushdie rather poignantly said, ”What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

EDIT-A: As do I. I offend therefore I am.

A: There is a remarkable account Anil in your book The Romance of Salt about this massive hedge the British planted in order to control the passage of salt within India. Everyone knows about the Dandi March, but very few know about this early form of hedging…

AD: Well, I didn’t know about it either until I started doing research, and it was remarkable that they actually built a hedge right across India from west to east uh, just to control the salt trade! Of course now salt is so ubiquitous and so cheaply available that it’s no longer an important commodity, but we forget that salt at one time was very precious, and that’s why in that book I also talk about all the options that Mahatma Gandhi considered for a major march, and there were many, many options which were discussed…and Mahatma Gandhi being the genius he was, found the simplest, but most effective, and the most telling symbol, which was salt, which is so central to a human being. But the hedge was an incredible thing which I don’t think is talked about, and I think most people don’t know about it, and actually, I must confess I have not seen it; I would like to see it.

A: Well, apparently there’s not a whole lot of it left…

AD: There is a lot of it left…

A: There isn’t actually from what I read… there were a couple people who tried looking for remnants and they couldn’t really find anything, but it was 2,500 kms per your book, at one point.

AD: Well it may still be there, but I’m not hedging my bets.

EDIT-A: Well, I’m going to tweet Trump that idea so he can kill two birds with one hedge! He can stop border crossings, and…

A: …it’s great for the environment?

EDIT-A: Shit, never mind then. Also “Plant that hedge!” doesn’t really have the same ring to it anyway.

A: George Orwell said in his book 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Isn’t the trend of enhancing Indian mythology to make it seem more progressive, and cool, also a way of controlling the past?

AD: Well, I’m not sure it’s a way of controlling the past, it’s…I think it’s…Amish Tripathi was the one who I think started the ball rolling, possibly Devdutt Pattanaik, and though we’ve all have been brought up with these stories from childhood, how did I learn about Indian mythology? Through my mother as a child telling me these stories, which all seemed wonderful and so on, but they were very clearly belonging to a time, a mythological past, and you appreciated them as such.

Amish Tripathi by the way if you can indulge me…I can tell you the story of this young man being sent to me by a friend saying that, “Look, he’s a banker but he thinks he is a writer and he’s written a book.

Would you take a look at the manuscript?” Now that’s something I discourage, because who wants to read manuscripts when there are so many books to read? But I couldn’t say no to my friend, so in walks in Amish with this manuscript which I read diligently over the next few days making copious notes for improvement, and so on. But what I didn’t like was the fact that he’d made Shiva…we are talking about the first one, the very first book, and he had made Shiva into…to speak very contemporary language saying, “Oh hell!” and stuff like that, and I thought it was taking away the majesty of you know, the God. Plus, it was written more like a kind of a thriller kind of a thing. So Amish came to me after I read it, I gave him all the improvements, which later I discovered he had ignored completely, which probably why he sold the book, sold massive quantities of it. Uh, he did think I was a good mascot because I’ve launched every book of his subsequently too, and he still after so many years will not call me by my first name. He calls me Mr. Dharker.

So what he did, and what subsequently other people have done is, to make all these mythological stories as something that we can relate to…uh because the language is more immediate, more contemporary, the stories are told in a fast-paced fashion. I don’t think it’s a throwback, which is probably your question. I don’t think it’s a throwback, I don’t think it’s wanting to cling to a glorious past or something like that. It’s just the fact that we suddenly discovered that we have this huge mine, a gold mine of stories which we have not used because being a writer, you had to be westernized, and I think that’s the part of the problem. So we were second rate novelists because we were not going into our own field.

To diverge a little, someone like Chetan Bhagat, why is he so successful? Because he addressed contemporary issues of interest to young people. When he wrote about a college campus, all the students who lived in college campuses said, “Hey, that’s us!” Uh, so the whole…I think writing in India has changed in that way. You have one stream which is mining mythological stories, the other one is writing about contemporary issues in a more relatable way to the young, so they think of these things as something that could happen to them, or have happened to them.

A:  And the mining is fine, even rewriting maybe in a more contemporary way…I think the question was more you know, when you enhance what you have mined by adding your own narrative to it, you know are not in a way trying to change the past narrative of India?

AD: Well I’m not sure that uh, at least the writers I know, I don’t think they’re trying to change the past.

A: Not deliberately anyway…

AD: …not deliberately. Of course now it’s a bandwagon so…and it’s not something I read, so I don’t know, I really am not an expert on this and how it’s developed, but I think the enhancements of the past which you refer to comes more from people who do not read anything at all.

A: Which is true of a lot of people.

AD: Which is true of a lot of people; unfortunately, it’s true about most politicians, especially the present lot of politicians. And therefore if the Prime Minister of the country says that India invented plastic surgery because of Ganesh, uh…and then you realize that he hasn’t got his tongue in cheek, he actually means it, or people say that India invented flying because there are references to you know little vehicles going into the air…and all these people who take these things literally deny the power of imagination, which I think is also part of our problem – that we are denying the power of imagination, and the people who wrote all these stories had that power of imagination, so they could imagine flying in the air when there was no flying in the air. So we are actually denying our real past.

A: That’s interesting, yeah.

A: Cricket is a very different game today from what it was even T-minus-20 years ago. And a lot has been gained no doubt, but has anything been lost?

AD: Well, I think a lot is lost because T20 is a thrilling game no doubt, but it is for people who don’t understand the subtleties of the game. And I think anyone who really knows cricket, knows that it has to be a test match; now they are talking of shorting the test match to four days, which I think is ridiculous. A five-day test match is what it should be because there are so many variables unlike a stupid game like baseball which T20 aspires to be in a sense, which is just you know…you hit cross-bat, and hope for a six.

A: They even have the cheer leaders.

AD: Or in baseball you hope for a home run, and they even have cheer leaders, yeah, all that. So whereas what distinguished cricket, was there’s so many variables which you’ve to look at. First of all, unlike baseball, the ball is hitting the ground, therefore the state of the ground, the pitch comes into play. Then over five days, the way that pitch changes, the deteriora…uh, deterioration of speech (laughs), the deterioration of the pitch, uh, how that affects the game. How in the beginning, the fast bowler is effective; as the pitch degenerates, the spinner comes into play. How weather conditions affect it…the ball swings more if the atmosphere’s heavy. How in England it’s different because of the weather there, how in Australia the pitches are hard…the ball bounces more.

India the ball spins more. It’s all these factors, and there are many more that I can relate that make it so interesting, intriguing…it’s a challenge for the batsman, it’s a challenge for the bowlers, and that’s what makes a game complex. You see when you play T20, you take the complexity out of the game. You do introduce other factors, which now there are a lot of variations in the way people bowl, etc., etc., which then carries on in a way into test cricket people play – they score much more quickly than they used to, which is why actually test cricket now has improved from what it used to be. You are too young to remember, and actually even I’m too young to remember an era where the fifth match of a series had no time limit. It was a match to the finish. Now England had gone to South Africa and the fifth match, the test match, hadn’t finished by the tenth day…tenth day mind you!

A: Wow.

AD: And they had to catch their ship back so the match was abandoned, as it had to be because they couldn’t afford to miss the ship. So that became incredibly boring, and the most boring matches were – when I was growing up were India and Pakistan, because India and Pakistan had too much riding on cricket because national pride was involved, so no one took risks. So if you had a 180 runs scored in one-day, that was considered okay. And it was terrible to watch, and your greatest achievement was drawing the match, which is was happened to all the matches. But with the advent of one-day cricket and now T20’s, people score faster.

A: It’s very much in the favor of the batsman now, isn’t it? I mean, the game?

AD: Not in test cricket for sure.

A: The T20’s and the one-days.

AD: T20’s definitely a batsman’s game. The poor bowlers are cannon fodder kind of a thing, but the crowd loves it, and this is where I think there is a problem…that if you see the crowds coming to see T20, are packed stadiums everywhere. Even now with one-day internationals you don’t get a packed stadium. Uh, it was very sad when India had gone to the West Indies, you had empty stands…it never happened before. Test matches hardly draw a crowd except in two countries, which is in England and Australia. These are the two countries which still have some regard for the game.  In England even in county matches you get a nice crowd, so in India, who goes to see a Ranji Trophy match?

No one does. But instead of tinkering with the game what people have to do is, especially in India, is to make the game more attractive for the crowd in terms of facilities. I will never now go to a stadium having been to Wankhede. It is a trial. You’ve to walk distances, the seats are hard, you’re packed in, and the loos stink, the food is terrible. Now these are things which can easily be changed.

A: That’s a good point.

AD: You make it comfortable. You make it attractive to the crowd to come in. And if they could just start with that, I think you would have a change. Now in Australia, people sit on the grass! They are drinking beer, and there are little pools so people actually go for a little dip…you know?  I mean these are little things, but they make a difference.

EDIT-A: On SOL, he called the upcoming mixed gender matches a farce, but I ask, what could be more romantic than men and women bowling each other over after over after over…

A: And then running for the ‘covers’ after that?

EDIT-A: On that note, I think we’ve officially ‘run out’ of things to talk about.

AD: Well, and now you both need to, because my ‘maiden’s over’!*

A: As is this interview.

EDIT-A: But if you do want to save the seahorses, visit www.theseahorsetrust.org

*Maiden Over: An over in cricket in which no runs are scored.

Name: Anil Dharker
Occupation: Journalist, writer

Anil Dharker is among other things a journalist, writer, and organizer of Tata Literature Live! - an annual literature festival held in Mumbai. Outside of his literary interests, he is also a keen cricket enthusiast.

Books:
The Romance of Salt
Icons: men & women who shaped today's India
The Man Who Talked to Machines: The Story of Om Prakash Jindal

Location: Vidyalankar Group

Lights: Photoquip India

Black chair: Details Décor

Anil came across as a serious literary figure at first, but we had to only scratch the surface for a witty, and (unexpectedly) animated punster to emerge - a punster with a penchant for the extempore.