An institution called College Street

I have just returned from Kolkata, my sixth visit in five years. You would think I now know Kolkata like the back of my hand. But that's not the case, sadly. These trips to the City of Joy have been what I call "flying visits" — I land at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose airport on a Saturday and I'm back at the airport to board my flight to Bangalore the following Monday. So, as far as sightseeing is concerned, I have been to Park Street (and eaten there), I have visited the Victoria Memorial, I know my way around Gariahat.

But, because of the paucity of time, I have never been to College Street. Which will come as a surprise to people who know me and my love of books.

By a coincidence, the latest issue of The Week carries a fairly detailed feature on College Street. Titled "The heart of Kolkata", the article by Rabi Banerjee explains why the street continues to be a popular hangout. It also gives us some history relating to the area:

Thanks to its proximity to famous educational institutions, College Street saw major student movements in the '70s. A number of brilliant minds from Bengal, who could have led the country in different spheres, joined the Naxalite movement. Many of them lost their lives in police encounters in the alleys of College Street. Political protests and demonstrations take place here even today. But elders who were witnesses to the bloodbath in the '60s and '70s warn students not to get embroiled in violent movements.

But College Street is not all about books. To know more, and to understand why College Street will definitely be on my itinerary when I next visit Kolkata, read Rabi Banerjee's article in its entirety here.

BOOKED FOR LIFE: COLLEGE STREET IN KOLKATA. (Photo courtesy: The Week)

Prakash and Mandakini Amte: The most inspirational story I have read in years

An e-mail I had sent out to my students, friends, and relatives in September 2009 (I did not have my own blog at the time):

Prakash and Mandakini Amte tend to a skeletal inmate at Hemalkasa.

In 2008, Prakash Amte and his wife, Mandakini, were given the Magsaysay award for service to humanity. (Twenty-three years previously, Prakash's father, the legendary Baba Amte, had received the same award.)

Our newspapers (mostly) carried the announcement prominently and the weekly magazines published some positive features. But it's Tehelka that put Prakash Amte and his achievement on the cover (August 23, 2009) and it's Tehelka that has devoted the most space to the Amtes and their super-human efforts to help some of the most under-privileged of India's under-privileged people.

The magazine also has some splendid photographs (the online edition has very few): pictures showing the work done for the Madia Gond tribals of Maharashtra; pictures that speak of the sacrifices that have been made willingly, of the tough lives that have been led, again willingly.

Prakash Amte with an orphaned leopard in his backyard.

In the magazine, there are also photographs of Prakash Amte with his menagerie of orphaned animals, one showing him frolicking with a hyena with his grandson by his side, another showing him holding a baby monkey.

Here is a telling extract:

Ask him [Prakash Amte] what kept him in Hemalkasa through all this, though, and his response is instinctive and quick. "Manda's companionship — and the people's faith. That is what keeps us here. I have never seen such tolerance for pain. They come to us from a radius of 200 kilometres, we try to help them. Sometimes when I cut their wounds, the pus sprays onto my face and body. We never had gloves but it never mattered. When I watch their wounds — black, poisonous, foul-smelling — slowly turning red and healthy, that is my reward."

And here is another:

A severely wheezing bare-breasted woman is slowly stopping to gasp. She had just raced past us at the river, perched on a motorcycle between two men. Now the generator has been put on, a nebuliser is breathing gentle breath into her.

In the open air shed a short distance away, Prakash and Manda dress an amputated foot. The patient — an old man — lies stoically on the hard floor; he does not want a hospital bed. A wood-fire smoulders near him. A few feet away, a ragged skeleton is recovering from tuberculosis next to a toddler with kidney failure. 

All of this would make an urban doctor faint, but in truth, it speaks of daily miracles over three decades. It speaks of lives saved without elaborate investigations or prophylactics. It speaks of urgent operations under torchlight, of emergency deliveries and complicated cataracts executed on the run with a textbook on the side.

And an excerpt that speaks of Prakash Amte's strength of character:

Four years ago, while showing a poisonous Russel's viper to a visitor, Prakash was momentarily distracted and it emptied its fangs into him. But nothing can perturb him, his children vouch: he always exudes a quiet, unflappable dignity in a crisis. He is the shade tree you take for granted, until it is cut down.

Now, instead of flinging the snake from him, he gently extricated it and put it back in its cage before walking towards Manda in the clinic. She, always the fit partner, the shadow he leans on, did not panic either.

On his way back to the house while she got the antidote ready, Prakash collapsed at the threshold and his blood pressure dropped to zero. A long hot drive took him to Nagpur; ten excruciating days followed. His body swelled like a balloon, blistering in a hundred places. Not once did he complain.

Both husband and wife — still visibly and palpably in love — have this understated sturdiness about them. Not for them the glib sentence, the worldly pitch. Instead, you sense the close workings of Nature in them, a kind of wise acceptance born of daily grappling with life and death.

"One good thing came of the snake bite," Gopal Phadnis, headmaster and co-traveller at Hemalkasa, laughs. "Prakash was never a talker, but he began to talk more after the bite."

To read the full story go to "The Quiet Soldiers of Compassion".

Better still, try to get hold of a copy of the magazine so that you can experience what I experienced when I read this awe-inspiring story: My head began spinning, I felt the hairs on my arms rising, and I kept asking myself: Are the Amtes flesh-and-blood like the rest of us?

CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME: Prakash Amte and his family in Hemalkasa.

After reading this article again today, March 21, 2012, I must reiterate that this heartwarming feature by Shoma Chaudhury remains the most inspirational story I have read in years.

• Photos courtesy: Tehelka

• Also read: "Fresh ideas, fresh writing" (on the vibrant quality of writing in the incomparable Tehelka. And also in the newish Open and in the relaunched Caravan).

A foreigner's experience of playing an "extra" on a Hindi film set

What does it mean to be a foreign "extra" in a Bollywood movie?

Writing in Open, a 20-year-old German student says that, for the first time in India, "we as whites are not at the centre of attention but mere background decoration".

In the piece, published under the "True Life" rubric in the magazine, Marian Brehmer gives us intimate details of the whole experience of being a "prop" in a Karan Johar film — he does not reveal the name of the movie, but tells us that Kareena Kapoor and Imran Khan are the stars, so it must be the upcoming Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu.

Here is Brehmer's desciption of the moment when Kareena arrives on the set:

Suddenly, she is there, among us. Like a fata morgana, the diva has emerged out of nothing. As soon as she sits down, Kareena Kapoor transforms the place. She is constantly cared for by a personal stylist who buzzes around her like a multi-armed Hindu deity: waving a comb, hairslides and a mirror at the same time. Kareena is in her own world and totally absorbed in the role. She constantly reads and rehearses the lines. “She didn’t practise her role?” a fellow extra asks me. None of us has great appreciation for actors we have hardly ever heard of — Kareena Kapoor, and then Imran Khan, who joins her later. Kareena seems utterly unreal and unapproachable to me. She is treated not as a star, but like a living goddess. Even the staring men are spellbound by Kareena’s invisible halo and keep their heads down.

The shoot, which was supposed to last only a few hours, goes on through the night, taking its toll on Brehmer and his fellow extras:

It is past 3 am and many of us don’t feel like moving at all. Nevertheless, I want to be productive and create my own show as a random shopper. In this scene I unfold and test the softness of a brown towel, smell soaps of different quality and compare the prices of milk chocolate. This continues for at least two hours. I take it in good humour, but I can sense the tension rising around me. The blonde lady starts swearing in Polish. It sounds ugly.

Finally, the two British girls burst out in anger: “We were to be dropped back in Colaba at 7 am! We need to catch a plane at noon!” Nobody takes notice of them.

It is 7.15 a.m. when the crew declares the shoot over. At the end of it, each foreigner is paid Rs.500. But this was not about the money, writes Brehmer, it's the experience.

Now each extra has a story to tell for a long time.

Read the article in its entirety here: One night in Bollywood.

• Also read: What are the ramifications of a white woman marrying an Indian man and choosing to live in India?

What is the link between India fast bowler Praveen Kumar and Indians' love of gold?

What a shining example of a good intro!

Writing in the Outlook issue of November 7, Arti Sharma begins her story on Indians' current craze for gold with this little incident that occurred during a one-day cricket match between India and England:

It happened once upon a time in Mumbai, last Sunday (October 23). Having strangled England with his banana swingers all season, Praveen Kumar rolled in to bowl yet another over in the revenge series, at the Wankhede. A boundary was followed by a wide down the leg side. Next ball, horror — another wide, this time even wider than the previous one. Skipper Dhoni lay behind the stumps, mystified at the Miser from Meerut uncharacteristically squandering away sundries.

After pondering for a while at the wicket, hands on knees, Kumar proceeded to return to his bowling mark. And, as he passed the non-striker’s end, the bowler suddenly seemed to realise the cause of his temporary strife. Nonchalantly, he put his hand inside his shirt, pulled out a gold chain thick enough to strangulate a 400-pound bear, handed it to the umpire at the bowler’s end, and returned to discover his line and length.

So what? Maybe your bowling hero is Shantakumaran Sreesanth. But that action, in the full glare of cameras, captured India’s magnificent obsession with the yellow metal that now cheerfully afflicts everybody: from city-slickers to the small-towners; from women to men to medium-pacers. And, unlike in the past, when gold was what you stashed away secretly in safe deposit lockers, away from evil eyes, now you flaunt it, if you can afford it.

PRAVEEN KUMAR

It would have been so easy — and so boring — to begin a story on gold consumption in India with the story of a young couple buying jewellery or the tale of a housewife stocking up on the yellow metal for the sake of her children.

But, like a good journalist, Arti Sharma looked for the unusual and found it in a game of cricket. Isn't that something?

From a newspaper article to a monthly newsletter and, now, a bimonthly magazine devoted to books and reading

Two years ago, Rohita Rambabu (Class of 2011), who was then the Books Editor of the Commits newspaper, had written an informative piece on the Just Books library chain. I had become a member of Just Books earlier that year and I was keen on encouraging young people, who formed the bulk of the readership of Your Opinion, to read books by joining the fast-expanding library. (I thought of this article as "reader service".)

Not long afterwards, the founder of Just Books, R. Sundar Rajan, read Rohita's feature and he asked her to help publish a regular newsletter (see inaugural issue pictured above) for the library. Rohita and her classmate Swaha Sircar collaborated on the project initially, but then Swaha began working full-time so Rohita handled the production tasks independently, under the supervision of Sapana Rawat of Just Books.

ROHITA RAMBABU

"I have grown so much with Just Books," Rohita wrote in an e-mail recently. "It is amazing how an article you suggested that I do turned into such a big opportunity.

"With my Just Books salary, I was able to pay off the loan I had taken from my parents for the Master's course at Commits.

"I have now been with Just Books for almost two years, and they treat me on par with a professional (though I know I am at a very junior level with lots to learn before I am good)."

NILOFER D'SOUZA

Some four months ago, another Commitscion had occasion to write about Just Books.

Nilofer D'Souza (Class of 2009), who is a Bangalore-based features writer with Forbes India, contributed a well-written and comprehensive article to the magazine on the technology used successfully by Just Books to "bring libraries back to the people".

NILOFER D'SOUZA'S ARTICLE IN FORBES INDIA.

And now, soon to hit the stands, comes a full-fledged magazine for book-lovers, backed by the company that launched Just Books, with Sapana Rawat as the editor-in-chief, and Commitscion Padmini Nandy Mazumder (Class of 2011) as the editor.

Padmini, who was a co-editor of the college newspaper (like Nilofer before her) and who gave up her job with CNN-IBN in New Delhi and came back to Bangalore when she was offered this assignment, is a voracious reader and passionate book-lover. She writes in her "letter from the editor" in the prototype issue of the magazine that reading defines who we are. She continues:

Reading can give a fresh perspective to a situation. Books transport us to another world. Books let you leave your humdrum existence behind. Stalk a devious murderer with Hercule Poirot, walk the corridors of Hogwarts, romp in the mud with Scout Finch, fall in love with Mr. Darcy, conspire with dependable Jeeves to get poor Bertie Wooster out of a sticky situation... Love, laughter, tears, horror, fantasy, mystery: you can experience it all in one afternoon with a good book.

I could not have put it better myself, Padmini!

THE COVER OF THE PROTOTYPE ISSUE OF INK.

Here Padmini explains why she loves what she does:

Imagine getting paid for doing something you love. Most are not so lucky. I happen to be one of the fortunate few.

After dabbling in a number of career choices (marketing, corporate communications, journalism) and a lot of soul-searching, the opportunity of my dreams knocked on my door right at the moment when I seemed to be losing myself all over again. An opportunity to head a literary magazine.

I love books. Let me reiterate: I LOVE BOOKS. Lock me up in a room full of books and throw away the key and I will bless you for it. So, you can imagine my glee when Sapana Rawat (my boss) called to tell me that she and R. Sundar Rajan (CEO of Strata) had chosen me as the new editor of a brand new literary magazine.  

PADMINI NANDY MAZUMDER

I would be making all major editorial decisions with Sapana and I would have a free reign on the topics we chose to cover.

I was beside myself!

It was a dream job for the likes of me. I'd be talking about books, meeting authors, attending literary fests, telling people about books, and, consequently, create more bibliophiles.

These three months at Strata have been all that I hoped for and more. I have met industry stalwarts, authors, publishers, attended a publishing conference, rubbed shoulders with the who's who of publishing, found out more about the books and authors that I love so much, and brought out a magazine which is exactly what I think is the need of the hour. In the process, I discovered that I am darn good at it too!

The opportunity to do what you love and what you are good at comes across rarely. When it does, grab it with both hands and don't let go!

The magazine should be available to the general public soon. Having had a chance to go through the prototype, I can tell you that Ink is going to be the answer to many a book-lover's prayers. (Ace Commits photographer Pratidhani Tamang from the Class of 2012 has contributed many pictures, including the cover image above.)

Incidentally, another Commitscion, also a co-editor of the college newspaper, Varun Chhabria (Class of 2012), will be helping to produce the Just Books newsletter from January. All the best, Varun!

• UPDATE (June 19, 2012): Books&More, which is the current avatar of Ink, is now on the web, thanks to the efforts of Varun Chhabria, the associate editor of the magazine. Check out the latest issue here.  

COVER OF THE APRIL-MAY 2012 ISSUE OF BOOKS&MORE.

Good ideas and good writing need to be backed up by good design

In this month's first anniversary issue of Fortune India, editor D.N. Mukerjea looks back at the cover stories and features of the past 12 months and, more important from the media student's point of view, explains what it is that helps these stories to grab attention:

[It] is not just how they are written but also how the pages look. Design, which includes photos, graphics, fonts, colours, and the overall layout, has always played a significant role. As I often remind myself, and tell whoever cares to listen, Fortune India stands on four pillars editorially — reporting, desk, photo, and design. Magazines are meant to be visually rich and, I dare say, Fortune India is the richest of them all. Our pages have won international design awards from the Society of Publication Designers and IFRA, and private art collectors are forever after me to sell them some of our images. (So far, I have resisted the temptation.)

Mukerjea's thoughts on the importance of design should find resonance with production journalists everywhere.

THE COVER OF THE LAUNCH ISSUE.

Fortune India does not have a website, sadly, so you will have to study the magazine itself to understand what Mukerjea is trying to say when he writes, and I agree with him, that Fortune India "is the richest of them all" in visual appeal.

I must add here that the magazine is also home to some brilliant story ideas that, thanks to the editors, have not just remained ideas; they have been executed so well that it is an undiluted pleasure to leaf through the magazine even when the articles, because of their business orientation, may not truly interest the general reader.

• Undoubtedly, Fortune India is the best-designed magazine in India. What would be the newspaper equivalent? My vote goes to DNA. As for the general interest magazine with the most intelligent writing, I think Time Out Bengaluru would win hands down if there were a contest.

How many magazines in India will let reporters work on a story for six months?

I can't think of any. Except perhaps for Tehelka, whose editor Tarun Tejpal in 2007 asked his reporter Ashish Khetan to conduct a months-long undercover investigation into the Godhra killings. But among Indian publications Tehelka is unique, as we all know, and it is the exception to many rules.

In the West, on the other hand, many magazines specialise in long-form stories that can take the writers weeks, if not months, to put together.

The latest issue (February 7) of Fortune has one such article — an investigation into the BP oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico last April. The magazine's managing editor, Andy Serwer, writes in this issue that two reporters and a researcher "spent six months interviewing scores of interested parties and travelling across the U.S. and to London to interview, among others, three BP CEOs, current and former, including an unrepentant Tony Hayward and his predecessor, the architect of the modern BP, John Browne".

Serwer also explains why Fortune took up this mammoth investigation:

To do the biggest business stories right requires a significant investment of time and effort. It's an investment that frankly is becoming rare these days, but to me and the rest of us at Fortune it's a risk well worth taking if executed properly. The payoff — a long-form magazine story that provides understanding well beyond the daily ticktock — has almost unquantifiable value. As in, "Ah, I finally get what happened." How much is that worth?

And what do readers actually get? Back to Serwer:

The result is a rich, highly engaging tale told here in this issue — all 10,500-odd words of it — that gives a holistic picture of BP and what led up to the disaster in an analytical and cinematic fashion.

Six months. 10,500-odd words. Again my question: Which Indian magazine will permit its reporters to spend six months for a 10,500-word story?

• PS: The BP story is not up yet on the Fortune website because this issue is still on the stands. Check back later and read "BP: 'An accident waiting to happen'."
• Commitscion Noyon Jyoti Parasara (Class of 2007) has sent me the link to another fascinating example of long-form investigative journalism on the ProPublica website: "Pakistan and the Mumbai attacks: The untold story". (For the uninitiated, ProPublica is probably the most well-known media outlet for public interest journalism.)