A love for all seasons

Continuing my tribute to RK Films, a look back at the banner’s first success, Barsaat (1949). What was its place in Raj Kapoor’s life and career, and in Hindi cinema?

A moment between Raj Kapoor and Nargis from Barsaat (1949) -- Raj Kapoor's first hit as a filmmaker -- became first the poster (left) and then the RK Films logo (right)

Raj Kapoor’s second film as a producer-director was Barsaat (1949). His father Prithiviraj had been the hero of all the Prithvi Theatre plays he directed over 16 years. Raj Kapoor, too, cast himself as his own protagonist from his directorial debut Aag (1948) until Mera Naam Joker (1970). That penchant for playing the hero may have been connected to the semi-autobiographical quality he brought to his cinema.

The central tension of Barsaat is between the philosophical worldviews of two friends, Pran (Kapoor) and Gopal (Prem Nath). They are educated young men of the same class background, both babus from the city who end up romancing naive girls from the mountains. Kashmir is never named, but the clothes, the women’s jewellery and the shikara rowed by Reshma (Nargis) establish Barsaat as part of a long history of Hindi films in which the unhappy state has figured as a beautiful playground for mainland heroes, “pardesis” who love and leave. The metaphorical weight of that cinematic history is undeniable, especially as we watch it in August 2019, when what seemed an innocuous theme 70 years ago has come home to roost as an Indian ‘national’ claim on Kashmiri territory and women.

But to return to the film’s more frontal concerns: the two men stand for very different things. Pran is a sensitive violin-playing poet, waiting for his one true love, while the pragmatic Gopal has a girl in every port – taking his pleasure where he can and never looking back. As one of the film’s multiple brilliant songs went, “Main chanchal madmast pavan hoon, ghoom-ghoom har kali ko choomoon”. If wind was one metaphor for moving unapologetically on, a flowing river was the other: in the words of scriptwriter Ramanand Sagar, later of Doordarshan Ramayan fame, Gopal describes himself thus: “Bas dariya ke lehron ki tarah guzar gaya, laut ke phir us ghaat ka khayaal tak nahi aaya.”

Prem Nath had already played foil to Raj Kapoor in Aag, where Kapoor’s character Kewal describes Prem Nath’s artist Rajan as a worshipper of the body rather than a seeker of the soul. In Barsaat, too, Nath’s Gopal is a man of lusty appetites while Kapoor plays a true romantic, who believes love must contain pain as much as pleasure: “Jismein ansoo nahi hote, woh saccha pyaar nahi hota”. Barsaat cemented the persona Raj Kapoor had already begun to create with Aag: that of a man in love with love.

But while he constantly berates Gopal for saying that love is only lust by another name, Kapoor's romantic hero is not quite the pure disembodied lover he wishes to be. Raj Kapoor had placed that quandary about loving ‘inner beauty’ versus physical attractiveness upfront in Aag, with the hero saying his life might have been different if he hadn’t been so attracted to beautiful girls. There, Kewal went to the extreme of disfiguring his face as a test of real love. Here, in Barsaat a year later, Kapoor seems more at ease with his own vanity, letting his on-screen lover Reshma (played by his off-screen lover Nargis) refer to the depths of his blue eyes (she talks of them in Aag, too, but there her attraction is punished).

These were themes that lasted through Raj Kapoor’s life: vanity, physical beauty, lust versus love, body versus soul. A man of average height in a family of tall Pathans, he was always insecure about height: he once said he knew when Nargis was going to leave him because she came to see him wearing heels. His pride in his blue eyes was also legend: Madhu Jain’s book on the Kapoors tells of how he finally scheduled a long-needed eye surgery because the surgeon also had light eyes. Only a man who knew the value of those eyes personally would safeguard them from harm. Jain also mentions that Kapoor wanted to make a film called Soorat Aur Seeratstarring Lata Mangeshkar as a disfigured heroine with a magic voice. Many years later, he came back to it in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

Perhaps these are irresolvable questions. Barsaat came down emphatically on the side of one true love, the film’s Nargis-Raj Kapoor track suggesting the almost miraculous power of loyalty and longevity. It also made the Nargis-Raj Kapoor jodi the stuff of legend, their undeniable passion enshrined forever in the film’s posters, and later even more permanently and publicly, in the RK Films logo. The man who holds his woman and his violin in the same passionate embrace, suggesting that his art and his love were inextricably linked, may have been an accurate depiction of Raj Kapoor’s relationship with Nargis. And yet Barsaat was also the work of a man who had married his wife Krishna in 1946, a woman who sold her jewellery to help him make Barsaat. He met Nargis four months after, and had entanglements with other creative muses after her – Padmini, Vyjayanthimala and Lata Mangeshkar among them – but he never left his wife.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 Aug 2019.

Fire in the Belly

My Mirror column:

The demolition of RK Studios last week marked the end of an era. That era began with Aag, released 71 years ago this August

Raj Kapoor’s first film under the RK Films banner, released on August 6, 1948, wasn’t a commercial success. Perhaps with good reason, for it was in many ways a raw work, an early and rather theatrical expression of the sensibility of the man who would come to be known as India’s ‘great showman’. But Aag (Fire) also contained several elements that would often recur in Raj Kapoor’s early films: melodious, soulful songs, grandly choreographed stage sequences, a hero out to forge his own path in the world, and Nargis.

I watched Aag as a child, under the encouraging influence of my Nani and her RK-loving sisters. But although it features an adorable ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor daydreaming in history class (and at one point, even putting on a show of Bilwa Mangal, complete with a fake moustache), Aag really isn’t a film meant for ten year olds. All I remembered of it all these years was its opening scene. The just-married hero enters the room where his new bride is seated on the bed, bejewelled and veiled. There is some banter on his part about her ghoonghat getting longer; she laughs bashfully in response. We see him approach her, slowly working up to unveiling her face as traditional Hindu suhaag raat heroes must. He does, she lifts her eyes shyly to look at him for the first time – and lets out a scream. The reversal that Raj Kapoor engineers here is memorable – making all the verbal build-up about the woman's face, while it is the man’s face, burnt by fire, in which the story lies. Between that perfect bit of cinematic deceit and the almost gothic horror quality of the scene, Aag’s remains one of Hindi cinema’s most interesting suhaag raat scenes.

A ten-year-old Shashi Kapoor, as a child actor in Raj Kapoor's directorial debut Aag

Watching the film last week, though, I was struck by other things. The genteel hero estranged from his father, who leaves his comfortable home and is penniless in the big city, first appears in incipient form in Aag. The figure who would grow into the Raj Kapoor tramp archetype in later films like Shree 420 and Awara is seen in Aag in a short sequence that is a turning point in the narrative. The film’s runaway protagonist Kewal Khanna (Kapoor) walks into an apparently empty theatre, delivers a teary soliloquy about having left home, and is instantly embraced as friend and partner by the theatre’s owner Rajan (Prem Nath), who has been sitting silently through Kewal’s monologue and is impressed by his passion, for life and for theatre.

Kewal’s speech is interesting, because it is essentially a call for the young Indian to be allowed to decide his own future rather than follow in the footsteps of family. What makes it more interesting, though, are the possible biographical extrapolations. Like the fictional Kewal Khanna, Prithviraj Kapoor had been a young man from a bourgeois Punjabi family who failed his first year law exam and decided to leave Peshawar for Bombay to start a new life on the stage. But unlike in Aag, where the angel who invests in Kewal’s future is a theatre owner who’s male and Hindu, the 22-year-old Prithviraj was picked out of a line of extras at Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Studios by Ermeline, the Jewish star of Bombay’s then silent film industry. Struck by Prithviraj’s physique and Greek-god good looks, Ermeline decided she had found the hero of her next film, Cinema Girl. Prithviraj never returned to the extras queue.

The story of Prithviraj’s entry into the world of acting, as Madhu Jain tells it in her wonderful book The Kapoors, is filled with supportive collaborators and encouraging mentors like Ermeline, Ardeshir Irani, Sohrab Modi, KA Abbas and various others from the IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association). Earlier, during his undergraduate years, his theatre dreams had been nurtured by his professor’s wife from Peshawar’s King Edwards College, an Englishwoman called Norah Richards. To this delightfully mixed world of the colonial Indian city, Prithviraj Kapoor eventually added his own contribution in 1944: Prithvi Theatres.

Raj Kapoor, as Prithviraj’s eldest son, necessarily underwent an apprenticeship in the theatre. But the elder Kapoor was a hard taskmaster, instinctively socialist in his staunch egalitarian treatment of all troupe members – rather than the feudal Indian father who might spoil his own children or give them more. He was apparently worried that Raj was naalayak; Jain suggests that those who knew him believe he wanted Raj to “have a proper education, followed by a proper job”, though he had himself rejected that path. 

Odd as it may seem, then, the anguish of Aag’s hero was not just that of Prithviraj’s battle against his father – but also of Raj against his.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Aug 2019.

Book Review: Urdu Memoirs

A short book review published in India Today:

Yeh Un Dinoñ Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends by Yasir Abbasi; Bloomsbury India; Rs 699; 448 pages

Here's a bit of film trivia: which Indian actor (other than Rajinikanth) worked as a bus conductor? Would it help to tell you he was originally called Badruddin Qazi? Or that he landed his first major role because Balraj Sahni suggested he enter Guru Dutt's office pretending to be drunk? Or (last clue) that his inebriated act was such a hit that he later named himself after a popular whiskey brand?

Yes, it's Johnny Walker.

Yeh Un Dinon Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends is full of such tales. Editor-translator Yasir Abbasi's excavation of old Urdu film magazines lays out a new matrix of origin myths, loving details and vicious gossip involving not just actors, but directors, writers, singers and lyricists from what used to be called Hindi cinema.

Some get to tell their own stories, which means elisions and self-aggrandisements or, at least, careful public presentations of the self. Johnny Walker is keen to establish that he's really a teetotaller. Writing in Shama magazine in 1981, the 1940s star Veena lists the many famous films she almost did: Anmol Ghadi, Udan Khatola, Mughal-e-Azam, Jogan, Mother India, even an abandoned early version of Mahal. Dharmendra mentions a close "friendship" with Meena Kumari, but completely avoids his role in ending it: "it never occurred to me back then that one day she... let's just leave it at that."

Others are described by friends and admirers, or by writers who happen to be friends and admirers. So the brothers Ganguly (Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar) get a tribute from the actor Iftekhar, Hindi cinema's once-perpetual police officer. The composer Naushad tells of the director K. Asif's grand ways, including the tale of how Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was persuaded to be Tansen's voice in Mughal-e-Azam. Dialogue writer and playwright Javed Siddiqui has a charming fanboyish piece about working with Satyajit Ray on Shatranj ke Khilari. K.A. Abbas writes with acuity about Raj Kapoor, for whom he wrote many films: "If he loves just himself, then why do all of us still love him? Well, that's because there's something else that he places even before himself -- his work, his art."

The crisscrossing narratives sometimes produce a Rashomon effect. Eg: Dharmendra's coy elision is matter-of-factly undercut by Nargis, who frankly appraises Meena Kumari's passion for him and her heartbreak when he left. Whether reading that piece, or Ismat Chughtai on the singing star Suraiya, or the memoirs by Nadira, Shyama or Meena Shorey, it's clear that the Hindi film industry awarded its actresses particularly lonely, difficult lives.

I have many quibbles with his translation, but Abbasi has done film buffs a service.

Published in India Today, 18 Jan 2019.

Book Review: Modern love, ’50s style

Published in BL Ink:

What was Hindi cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ all about? A new book wants us to take off our nation-focused spectacles and open our eyes to how the ’50s Bombay film world shaped the modern Indian idea of romance.

Film scholar Aarti Wani shows how the public conversation around star pairs shaped our response to their onscreen romances. Seen here are Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman, with colleagues Dev Anand and Raj Khosla
(The Hindu archives)

The Hindi cinema of the 1950s has received so much attention, both scholarly and popular, that it seems an over-ploughed field. But film scholar Aarti Wani has written a book that casts fresh light on this familiar terrain. Rather than looking again at the ways in which 1950s cinema spoke to — and of — India’s new nationhood, Wani examines the models it constructed of romance. In fact, she argues, “the category of the national”, while explicating several aspects of post-Independence Hindi cinema, such as the creation of a national geography through travel and landscape, or of a moral economy based on a certain portrait of tradition, has failed to “account for the 1950s films’ overarching investment in romantic love.”

Wani’s principal argument is that love and romance were Hindi cinema’s fantasy of the modern in the ’50s. She starts with an obvious but important point — while romance was the ubiquitous narrative content of ’50s cinema, there was very little space for romantic love in the lived experiences of most Indians who watched these films. Of course, such an imbalance has existed with regard to literary depictions of love long before cinema. Sudipta Kaviraj has suggested that novelistic depictions of love “create an impression of commonplaceness of such action and behaviour”, whereas in fact, love relationships continued to be extremely rare in the society that was being described in these novels.

This modernity was signalled, among other things, by the fact that in contrast to films from later decades, ’50s Hindi films were marked by the relative absence of family. Most ’50s heroes had no father or mother, that is, no parental family. And most ’50s heroines, Wani argues, either had non-oppositional, even supportive, families, or they were shown with villainous fathers/father-figures from whom they needed to be rescued. Films like Awaara, Devdas and Mughal-e-Azam are exceptions. Very few ’50s film protagonists lived in joint families — thus freed from the “crippling family ties that would thwart romantic aspirations in real life”.

This cinematic vision of romantic love, Wani’s argument continues, was entwined with the experience of urban modernity; the city functioning as a site of “unexpected meetings and romantic encounters between strangers”. In contrast to love affairs in rural settings, which often had tragic ends — Arzoo(1950), Deedar (1951) or Devdas (1955) — the urban fabric seemed to allow for young men and women to choose and court potential partners. The primary locale for these filmi encounters, of course, was Mumbai (though Calcutta did feature in films like Pyaasa and Howrah Bridge).

The urban modern was closely tied to spatial exploration. Pointing to the many romantic connections made aboard trains, in taxis and buses, and in garages, Wani makes a rather lovely point: that romance in the ’50s film did not need transportation to an exotic or foreign location — “the dream remained eminently quotidian”. Of course, women and men — even those on the silver screen — did not have equal access to these city spaces, especially in a host of films that played up a noirish iconography, in which gambling, bank heists, thefts, kidnapping and even murders were deployed as sources of excitement. Still, Wani analyses some very interesting films — like 1958’s Solva Saal, starring Waheeda Rehman, and 1957’s Gateway of India, featuring Madhubala — in which the frisson is produced by the female protagonist’s adventurous, even dangerous, brush with diverse spaces in the city.

The other female figure identified with the cosmopolitan spaces of the city is, of course, the club singer/dancer. Wani notes that the role of the vamp/gangster’s moll in ’50s films was not reserved for particular actresses as it later became. The actress singing in a club might be the leading lady of that film — think Madhubala in Howrah Bridge — Geeta Bali, Sheila Ramani and Shakila all had roles that spilled across these boundaries.

Madhubala as a nightclub singer in Howrah Bridge (1958) was the film's heroine

Perhaps the most remarkable reworking of the split between the ‘heroine’ and the ‘other woman’ is in Pyaasa. Guru Dutt crafts a melancholic critique of the city as a calculating, inhospitable place based on the opposition between two female figures. But here the prostitute Gulabo (Rehman) is the true romantic, an appreciator of poetry, while the college-educated bourgeois woman (Mala Sinha’s Meena) is the faithless, money-minded one. (In a related aside, Wani points to the rising anxiety about women marrying for status rather than love, a fear expressed in mid-’50s films like Mr and Mrs 55 and Paying Guest.)

Wani’s next section, about the role of the song in the creation of a modern Indian romantic sensibility, is the book’s weakest. Several classic songs — ‘Yeh raat yeh chandni’ from Jaal, ‘Dum bhar jo udhar moonh phere’ from Awaara, ‘Do ghadi woh jo paas aa baithe’ from Gateway of India — are analysed in detail, and these analyses are usually interesting, if long-winded in a predictable academic way. Wani spends several pages, for example, on the framing of the Christian Maria in the Jaal song, and while I found fascinating the antecedents she claims for this character (in Ramamoorthy’s analysis of the interracial ’30s ‘Modern Girl’), I was often stopped in my tracks by sentences like “The spectacle of nature that frames the drama of this seduction marks Maria’s sexuality as natural” or “Maria’s performance, her expression, gestures and movement, along with the black and white mise-en-scene of the night saturated by the insistent sounds of the song give spatiality to desire that is cinematically spectacular and provides parallel moments of pleasure and identification”.

The rest of this section makes a shifting set of arguments about how space is used in the ’50s film song. Among Wani’s most specific claims is that duets were very rarely sung in a closed room (“which in fact offers a spatial setting for its possible consummation”). More broadly, she argues that romantic songs made for a fantasy in which the ‘public’ sphere could be occupied “for non-public, personal ends”. Moving onto songs of sorrow, she seeks to map songs sung by the heroine onto closed spaces and those by the hero onto open spaces — “a river bank, a sea shore, on a bench in a park, or on a rooftop”. I was less persuaded by Wani’s claims about how sound spills out of “the edges of the frame”, making songs in general a way of destabilising our perception and experience. Her conclusion seems particularly strange, using as it does a quotation on Hollywood “producing a new common sense about how love looked and what was required to overcome the manifold dangers that threatened it” to make her point about the film song. None of this is wrong, but it feels terribly unspecific. Perhaps the problem is songs are too slippery to stay put in neat analytic boxes — Wani herself goes from categorising the song as “a conduit of narrative meaning” to something that stakes claims “in excess of what the narrative allows”.

The final third of the book is where Wani abandons her laboured shot-by-shot analytic technique for a lively weaving together of film texts with journalistic and anecdotal texts about stars who had attained cinematic and public status as romantic pairs. Drawing on Neepa Majumdar’s pathbreaking work Wanted Cultured Ladies Only (2009), which locates the phenomenon of stardom in ’40s India within the context of a deep social ambivalence about cinema, Wani scrutinises how Bombay film stars in the ’50s were anointed as experts on love and romance — being asked to write articles and answer readers’ questions.

Returning to her framing argument about the rarity of love relationships in Indian society at the time, she suggests that stars began to be seen as authorities on the subject both because they performed love on screen and because they were among the very few people with any real-life experience of love affairs. Wani’s study of 1950s film journalism in English, Hindi and Marathi is attentive to detail, distinguishing between the different registers — sympathetic, gossipy, or judgemental — in which the stars’ love lives were produced as artefacts for public consumption.

Finally, Wani zooms in on the four legendary star-pairs of the decade — Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman, Nargis-Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand-Suraiya and Dilip Kumar-Madhubala. Her mapping of the contours of their real-life affairs onto some of their famous cinematic romances produces some of the most fascinating readings of these films. In moving beyond the official narrative on screen to the unofficial knowledge of stars’ lives which, without a doubt, informs the way we watch films, Wani offers an immensely productive lens with which to look at Hindi cinema. Work on Chiranjeevi and his fans, by SV Srinivas, offered a complex and thoughtful reading of film texts in the light of stardom and fan-expectations. Wani’s work is an allied but original project.

Despite its sometimes meandering and repetitive prose, Fantasy of Modernity is a thoughtful and enjoyable book, which contains several careful readings of films and offers a persuasive way of looking at both ’50s cinema and 20th century Indian ideas of romance. The many typographical errors — misspelled proper names, like ‘Ashish Nandi’ instead of ‘Ashis Nandy’, or ‘Chidanand Dasgupta’ instead of ‘Chidananda’, recurring errors like “libratory”, and completely erratic Romanising of Hindi lyrics (what should be spelt ‘anbujh’ is instead spelt, on the same page, alternately as ‘anbooz’ and ‘anbhujh’) — are extremely unfortunate distractions from an otherwise rich and immersive read.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 11 June 2016.

Manto's moviedom, moviedom's Manto

Sa'adat Hasan Manto may be long dead, but in his writing, the 1940s Bombay film world remains brilliantly alive.

Manto wrote himself an epitaph to rival all epitaphs, "Here lies Sa'adat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of storytelling... Under tons of earth he rests, still wondering who among the two is the greater story writer: God or he." But Manto's sister decided that his grave could do without unwelcome attention from God's little soldiers, and had it replaced with a Ghalib-inspired line - something to the effect of not having been the last word upon this earth. It is deliberately innocuous, quite the opposite of Manto. 

Whether Manto was or was not a greater story writer than God, I think he is the greatest writer to have written about the world of Bombay cinema. This is no small thing, given that the pieces I'm referring to - published in Urdu as Ganjey Farishtey, translated into English as Stars from Another Sky - were written between 1948 and 1954, over sixty years ago. 

Their world is one Manto had himself been part of, as a journalist and a studio screenwriter. When he first moved to Bombay in 1936 to work at Nazir Ludhianvi's weekly film newspaper Musawwir (The Painter), he was 24. Over the next decade and a bit, he worked as Editor of Babu Rao Patel's film magazine Caravan, and at the Imperial Film Company, Film City and Saroj Movietone. From his own references, it seems he also worked on films for Filmistan, Chitra Productions and Hindustan Cine Tone, among others. 

In line with the archival abyss that we Indians live in, very, very few of the 2000-odd films made in the 1930s and 1940s have survived - and none of those Manto was part of. How wonderful it would be to read what Manto wrote in Musawwir and Caravan - reviews of contemporary films? - but I doubt any of those exist either. 

But what we do have in Stars from Another Sky are sparkling accounts of some of the people Manto knew, and through them, a picture of the Bombay film industry that feels warmer, more intimate and acute than pretty much anything that has been published on it since. And none of it is touchy-feely. Some of the people Manto writes about remain instantly recognisable - Nargis, Ashok Kumar, the golden-voiced Noor Jehan and kathak danseuse Sitara. The latter, whom Manto labelled 'Dancing Tigress from Nepal' and who lives into her 90s as the venerable Sitara Devi, was the subject of his most unabashedly sensational piece. But here, too, Manto exhibits what I can only call his unique charm. Having gone on about her sexual appetite and her relationships for several pages, he ends, "Sitara, of course, would be angry, but after some time, she will forgive me because...she, too is a bighearted woman... I do not know what she thinks of me but I have always thought of her as a woman who is born once in a hundred years." Believable flattery is a very rare thing. 

The Nargis piece is one of my favourites: a remarkably unforced portrait of someone forced to live two lives. On one hand she is the naive young woman who enjoys girlish gossip, comparing notes about convent school life and asking for recipes for "toffee with raw sugar" (this turns out, in my Devanagari version, Meena Bazar, to be called gur ki bheli). Almost the whole piece is devoted to this unstarry Nargis, so starved for the company of ordinary girls her age that she actually seeks out those she encounters via an anonymous phone call (these happen to be Manto's saalis). But then it swerves, as if without premeditation, into a different space: Manto takes some visiting young men to Jaddan Bai's house to see Nargis. She emerges reluctantly, and her manner with these admirers is completely at odds with what we've seen so far. 

"Nargis's entire conversation was pure artifice. The way she sat, the way she moved, the way she raised her eyes was like an offering on a platter... It was a boring and somewhat tense meeting." Later he describes her talking money. The piece is among the most vivid portrayals of a star persona ever - alternately lonely and haughty, childish and businesslike. 

Other pieces describe personalities largely lost to public memory, like Rafiq Ghaznavi ('The Ladies' Man') or Neena ('The Inscrutable Housewife'). But Manto's unabashed narratives are not only about these protagonists - they are full of drinking sessions, tangential affairs and breakups, and the everyday life of the Bombay film studio - writing sessions, shooting hazards, comic interludes. 

Perhaps the book's most moving essay is about the actor Shyam, Manto's close friend who had died. But it is not Shyam's death that makes the piece moving. It is the fact that in writing it, Manto relives the events leading up to his 1948 departure from Bombay "where the communal atmosphere was becoming more vicious by the day". He describes advising Ashok Kumar and Vacha to dismiss him from service because "the Hindus thought" he was the one getting so many Muslims into Bombay Talkies. His description of his relationship with Shyam as Partition riots erupt is among the most powerful accounts of how individual lives can get folded into wider - that is narrower - identities. Nothing happens - it is just the inescapable feeling that it could. 

If Manto had lived, he would have turned 102 on 11 May, 2014. He died ridiculously, sadly young at 43, having spent his last six years in sorrowful exile from his beloved Bombay. May Bombay's moviedom keep his spirit alive in our difficult times.

This column was published in Mumbai Mirror.