Today Times

Garam Masala: The survival of Roma traditions

Times Of India
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I wonder if Indira Gandhi would have protested France’s ongoing expulsion of the Roma. That it is worth protesting is not in doubt, and condemnation has come from home and abroad. By deporting the Roma, or Gypsies as people once called them, the French are violating European rights to free movement and basic human rights by stigmatising a particular community. The rationales given, of criminal habits and non-native status, simply repeat arguments used over the centuries in anti-Roma campaigns, which reached a peak in the Nazi attempt to exterminate them in death camps. Comparisons with Nazis should never be made lightly and France is, of course, hardly similar. Yet the fact is that no civilised country would think of expelling Jews and homosexuals, not least because of the memory of what the Nazis did. But the French government feels it can do it to the Roma.
  
The current Indian government seems to have no Roma policy, but Mrs.Gandhi was a supporter. “I feel kinship with the Roma people,” she declared at the second International Romani Festival in Chandigarh in 1983, and praised the way the Roma had preserved their culture, despite the efforts of time and human agency to wipe it out. It was, she said, “an example of nationalism within internationalism, beyond prejudice…” and she concluded in both Romani and Hindi: “Upre Roma! Roma Zindabad! Sastipe!” If a rather more local nationalism had not ended her life soon after the speech, perhaps India would be leading the protests now.
  
The reason for Mrs. Gandhi’s involvement was, of course, the Indian origin of the Roma. This has been disputed by those who claim it as an orientalist fancy, and it is possible that the Roma label is too easily applied to many migrant communities. But with any community that speaks some variant of the Romani language, the link with India is startlingly obvious. Despite centuries of wandering from India across Western Asia and towards Europe a core of the language has remained recognizably linked to Western Indian dialects. Isabel Fonseca, in Bury Me Standing, her haunting book on the Roma, gives an example in the lines from which she gets her title. “Bury me standing,” a Roma activist tells her poetically, “because all my life I have been on my knees.” What he actually says in Romani is: “Prohasar man opre pirende – sa muru djiben semas opre chengende.” The words at the centre, “sa muru djiben/all my life”, could come from Gujarat or Rajasthan today.
  
Wherever they travelled, the Roma had to learn the local tongue, so naturally much in the language has changed. Linguists claim they can even trace the path taken over the centuries through word traces left behind: little Arabic, more Persian, lots of Armenian. But like djiben, or manush for man, many of the words for their bodies or close possessions are Indian, and so too are many food words. Sheep is bokro, meat is mas, salmon is bauromatchi (big fish), cabbage is shok (shaak), to drink is peeve and water is pani. The word for bee is pishom, which may not seem Indian, but honey is pishomgudlo, the sweet of bees and gudlo/gur is a link again.
  
This connection has been made repeatedly over the years. Perhaps the first was Istvan Vali, a Hungarian who, in 1753, met three Indians at the University of Leiden and took down lists of words from them, which he later found the Roma he knew back at home could recognise. In her book Fonseca meets Saip Jusuf, a Roma living in Macedonia who was part of the 1983 conference, and still maintains shrines to Ganesha and Mrs.Gandhi. Jusuf had learned of the Indian connection from an uncle who a Turkish soldier in the First World War, and had been imprisoned in India, where he realised he could understand words that his jailers were speaking.
  
The main force behind that conference, and the reason it was in Chandigarh, was W.R.Rishi, an Indian diplomat. Born into a poor Brahmin family in Punjab, Rishi had managed to move from a minor civil service job to the new Foreign Ministry in 1945 thanks to his willingness to learn Russian. This gave him extensive exposure to the Soviet bloc, where he encountered the Roma and had that wake-up moment when he heard their words. His interest became an obsession. He got in touch with Roma activists, who must have been suspicious about this non-Roma diplomat, but who realised his sincerity, and perhaps also value as a link to influential support.
  
Rishi used Indian diplomatic lobbying with the Yugoslav government to get them to recognise the Roma as an official minority. He founded the Indian Institute of Romany Studies at his home in Chandigarh and edited a periodic international journal called Roma. (I don’t know if either is still extant. Rishi died in 2002, and his son is supposed to have carried on his work, but the only number listed online for the Institute no longer works). At some point Rishi must have told Mrs.Gandhi about the Roma, and she seems to have been captivated by their story. There was no political advantage in championing the Roma, but she went to both their conferences in 1976 and 1983. At the latter event, the Times of India’s reporter noted, in rather clichéd terms that “she almost got into the gypsy carefree mode. Her cheerfulness and pleasantness of manner was infectious.”
  
No other Indian politician had her interest in the Roma, which is why the French expulsions haven’t got any particular Indian response. Perhaps the Roma are also not keen to push the connection. There is a sobering picture in Fonseca’s book of four Roma killed by a pipe bomb in Austria in 1995. The bomb went off when the men were trying to remove a sign that said “Gypsies Go Back To India.” Fonseca comments that the Roma have been in that part of Austria for more than 300 years.
  
Why have the Roma always faced such hostility? The distrust of the transient by the settled, the constant temptation to blame outsiders for all ills, fear of foreignness (even positive reports of the Roma always emphasise their exotic nature) and simple racism. The fact that the Roma were not allowed to ply many jobs has always forced them to marginal means of survival, and that reflexively brings the charge of thievery. We don’t need to look far to see the roots of such prejudice since this is exactly how we respond to our own marginal tribes in India, the ones branded by the British as “Criminal Tribes’. An early hypothesis about the Roma links them directly to such tribes fleeing such prejudice in India, but tragically never quite shaking it off.
  
This is disputed by some Roma scholars, who indignantly refuse such demeaning origins, and some have drawn up elaborate hypotheses about exiled kshatriya warriors, which would suggest that caste obsessions never leave Indians wherever they are. Such theories apart, it’s true that along with language, the other striking link with India is the elaborate system of hierarchies of purity and ritual cleanliness that govern traditional Roma life. Again this is seen most vividly with food. For example, women cannot cook, or touch anything, when they are menstruating. Even among the Roma there are divisions, which is why they all carry knives, so that they can eat food with their own implements wherever they are.
  
Fonseca writes: “In conservative Romany culture (called Romipen or Romanipen), liquids are poured into the mouth through a container held away from the lips… Anne Sutherland describes a meal with some Rom-American friends in an Illinois diner, during which they prefer to eat with their hands rather than risk the diner’s forks and knives.” In Albania Fonseca notes that her Roma helper never comes inside the homes where she meets regular Albanians. She realises that this is not just fear or prejudice, but also his own issue: Albanian hospitality requires the hosts to give the guests food, but he could not eat it without risking pollution. (Actual Roma food tends to reflect the food of the countries they are in, simply because their marginal status means they have to take whatever food they can get. The Indian food connection comes in their attitudes towards food in general, rather than the food itself).
  
Such habits, which are so strongly reminiscent of many Indian communities, are what have helped preserve Roma culture through their rootless travels, yet it also fixes their otherness, their refusal to integrate with the societies they are in. None of this does justifies the prejudices the Roma face, but occasionally one can understand the exasperation of the authorities. Roma women are given inferior status, their children go uneducated, they refuse vaccinations, they dispense community justice through thuggish sounding tribunals that sounds like Jat khaps, again, the insistent Indianness comes through.
  
For a modern European government, dealing with the Roma clearly poses as much of a problem as many persistent community habits do for Indian central and state governments. But there, as here, the only possible answer is engagement and education, and not expulsion as the French are doing. It may seem like the simple solution, yet it is morally destructive and demeaning, and ineffective too, since the Roma will survive it and return unchanged, as they have done at similar times and with similar persecutions over the centuries.

The Speech Rahul Should Have Made at Lanjigarh

Times Of India
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LITTLE LUXURIES: Sneaky Seduction

Times Of India
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Imagine if spices were people. This is admittedly fanciful, but given their strong and unique flavours, it's easy to put personalities on them. Cinnamon and nutmeg are the friendly, gregarious ones, outgoing and eager to get on with others, but ultimately perhaps a bit too much. Pepper is the strong, dependable spice, whose power conceals a poetic side, in its surprisingly floral aroma when freshly ground.

Vanilla is dependable too, in a warmer, sweeter way, while clove is defiantly individualistic, spiky both in form and feeling, always striking its own distinctive note. Fennel is the sunny spice, always fresh and summery, while anise is her more introverted sister. Cumin and coriander are siblings, very close yet unlike since cumin is sharp and slightly cutting while coriander is mellow. Ginger is the subaltern of spices, low in cost, but passionately fiery and preaching revolution, while saffron is the aristocrat at the other end, giving little away overtly, but ultimately dominating.

Cardamom is the sneaky spice. At first acquaintance it can seem sweet and fragrant, mild and pleasant, but just when you let down your guard it delivers a viciously powerful kick. I am wary of cardamoms in pilaus because while they add to the appetising aroma with their perfumed, slightly citrus notes, it is also easy to overlook them when you're eating, so suddenly you find yourself chewing the tough pod and it is flooding your mouth with an almost medicinal taste. Cardamom can seem enticing, but can also make you want to spit it out. I know people who loathe it, and while I think this is sad, I know where they are coming from.

Harold McGee explains that this is because the spice contains two distinct types of aromatics, lurking just below the seed surface: "a group of floral, fruity, and sweet terpene compounds (linalool and acetate esters), and more penetrating eucalyptuslike cineole." The latter is why elaichi is so favoured for self-medication or for its palate clearing pungency, but it does complicate its culinary use. Using cardamom is always a balancing act between getting what is good from it, but not so much as to make the taste too strong.

One way to do this is to pair it firmly with other strong flavours. Like all sneaks, cardamom turns cooperative when it cannot bully things its way. This is why, despite the traditional usage, I am not a great fan of elaichi in tea. With any good quality tea, elaichi overpowers the delicate taste with its rank authority; it is only the crudity of dust tea that is brewed long for potency, with lots of milk and sugar, that puts elaichi in some balance. Kashmiri kahwa, flavoured with cardamoms and almonds, is also made from a raw tasting green tea that can stand up to the cardamom (if anything, it is the cardamom that makes it palatable).

Chocolate's suave richness is quite incompatible with cardamom, but coffee pairs brilliantly with it, which is how the Arabs drink it. The stronger taste of coffee keeps cardamom firmly in hand, making sure that only the fruity aromatics survive to add a delightful lingering note. I don't often make coffee at home, since I figure coffee shops do a better job without me having to invest in expensive equipment. But if I do make it, in a saucepan, I usually add some cracked cardamom pods to boil with water before I add the coffee (Bedouins have special teapots where you can put a couple of pods in the spout for the coffee to pass over as you pour). Sometimes I do it in the thick Turkish style, using plenty of cardamom and sugar, and letting it all boil a bit before adding lots of coffee for a super strong, yet fragrant brew.

Another contrast is between mild tasting chicken, which would be mauled by excessive cardamom, and stronger tasting mutton, which is not, for example in the delectably energising Sindhi dish of elaichi ghosht. Sugar also does a good job of controlling cardamom; we forget that its sweetness is a strong flavour in itself. Our use of cardamom in sweets is so ubiquitous that Madhur Jaffrey calls it the vanilla of India. It is not a coincidence that one of its most memorable uses of cardamom is, I think, in one of the richest sweets I know — the chandrahara made by Mavalli Tiffin Rooms in Bengaluru on Sundays, where a triangle of sweet fried dough is soaked in an insanely rich syrup made of ghee, sugar and lots of cardamom, which helps prevent the concoction become too cloying.

Cardamom is such a typically Indian taste that it can be surprising to find it in other cultures, and such instances are, in fact, rare. Cardamom has a long history in the spice trade from India — it was known to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, was used by the Romans as a perfume (it is still used in perfumes to add exotic, oriental notes) and may even feature in the Bible (the attribution is unclear). Yet it has largely dropped out of most foreign cuisine, perhaps due to its expense — after saffron and vanilla, it is one of the most expensive spices, something we often don't realise here because we grow and use so much that its price remains relatively cheap. Abroad it is not, and perhaps as a result it is sometimes substituted by related species, which do not have quite the same taste. Many people never realise the real value of cardamom because they never get to try the real thing.

One place which does is Scandinavia. In Sweden and Finland, cardamom is perhaps the most popular spice, with the highest consumption after India. The Vikings are said to have brought it home from one of their raids on Constantinople, but no one seems able to explain exactly why it was cardamom that caught on in these far Northern countries. Yet it did, and they have learned a lot about managing its unpredictable nature. For example, they make a cardamom spirit by steeping the seeds in alcohol, which keeps the flavours in check. To do the same, just crack many pods and put them in vodka, which will then take on a yellow tinge and a wonderfully aromatic, elusively citrus flavour, almost sweet, even with no addition of sugar.

They also use cardamom seeds in baking, and this too tames it a bit. Paul Freedman in Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, speculates that such recipes were common in the past, but most vanished with the advent of flavours like chocolate. If this is true, we must give thanks for their survival in Finland and Sweden because these cardamom cakes and breads are wonderful, with warm, slightly musky aromas. Indians love them, thanks to how we are conditioned to like cardamom. Appropriately, the best cardamom cake recipe I know is Swedish, but from an Indian cookbook — Niloufer Ichaporia King's My Bombay Kitchen, where she writes of receiving it from a Swedish friend.

It is a wonderful cake, plain looking, but packed with taste, so full of cardamom seeds that they crunch as you chew, lighting up your palate without searing it. I don't have space to give the recipe here, but if readers e-mail, I'll send them a version, so they can appreciate the sneaky seductions of cardamom.

Be wiser for your elders

Times Of India
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More often than not, we hear stories of how the elderly, being ignored by their families, have to live alone on the city with no one to care for them. While one may think that they would not be faced with such a situation, things are often known to go against the tide. I have come across many people - friends, relatives, clients- who are often caught off guard when it comes to dealing with health care for their elders or an aged family member.

Listening to them made me realize that more than being ignorant about the situation; they were just caught in a whirlpool of making decisions relating to their kids’ education, future, retirement etc. One needs to realize that such a situation can be avoided, if planned in advance. So when a health crisis does strike, you are prepared for it.

Understand the financial position: Most family members do not talk about finances with their elders. They feel that “it’s not in their culture to do so.” But what they forget is that lack of communication and understanding leads to bigger issues. Sit down with your elders to understand their situation and how you can plan to tackle any problems that may arise.

If required, you can always ask your financial planner to accompany you to your place and explain to all members the current financial position and how best it can be tackled. This may put your elders at ease that there is an expert involved to handle finances optimally.

Paperwork is important: It is very important to have all the relevant paper work in place. This should include insurance papers, medical records, will of trust, instructions about health care. You don’t want to be running back and forth with such work, when in time of crisis.

Comfort is important, but so is the cost: You would want the best care for your elders. But it is also necessary that you keep the cost in mind. You cannot splurge on something you cannot afford. Sit and brainstorm with your planner to plan your finances and care in such a way that it is financially viable to you and at the same time acceptable to your family.

Research your options: We don’t believe in putting our elders in old age homes or nursing homes. We rather do it ourselves. However, it is important that you research all your options. It is better to have full time care and attention. Before doing the same, explain to your elders about the options and how it can help them. If you cannot afford full time help, you can plan for part time helpers, who can handle work at home, if you and your elders are not comfortable with the idea of nursing or old age homes.

What matters most to us is our family. If we can plan how to tackle such events in advance, we handle them in a better way if and when they do strike. By planning your finances you allow yourself to face situations with a calmer mind and ensuring that your elders have access to the best facilities in your budget. 

Garam Masala – V.S.Naipaul and food

Times Of India
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Sir Vidia Naipaul's has been making news again for his latest work of non-fiction The Masque of Africa. I haven't read it yet, but the reviews suggest that the book is a serious attempt to understand real African attitudes - in The Guardian, Aminatta Forma notes approvingly how Naipaul's sources on Africa are mostly Africans themselves, rather than expats or aid-workers ' "you'd be surprised how rare this is". But the parts that have made news are where Naipaul's always strong sense of disgust takes over him, particularly over the news that several African communities eat cats. This is what has lead to headlines about Naipaul describing Africans as primitive pet-eaters. Without reading the book I'm not going to make any comment about it, other than to say that disgust over food and strong judgments about the type and way food is consumed, has long been something of a theme for Naipaul. This column, from a few years back, examines this more fully:
 
V.S.Naipaul’s essential attitude to food is shown in what is possibly the earliest piece of his writing to find its way into print. This is in a letter dated September 21, 1949 to his elder sister Kamla which starts the collection Letters Between a Father and a Son (1999). Naipaul is describing an agonising Old Boy’s Association dinner: “Special arrangements, I was informed after dinner, had been made for me but these appeared to have been limited to serving me potatoes in different ways – now fried, now boiled.” The others were served turtle soup which the vegetarian Naipaul would not eat and he asked the manager for corn soup instead. “He ignored this and the waiter bought me a plateful of green slime. This was the turtle soup. I was nauseated and annoyed and told the man to take it away. This, I was told, was a gross breach of etiquette.”
 
In that first page you have Naipaul’s vegetarianism, food that disgusts him, his feeling of being ignored and angered, his sense of offending people, and a lot of potatoes. Little, it seems, changes for him on the food front over the rest of his life. (‘Potatoes’ was the title of an early story about the misadventures of a young woman trying to sell potatoes; in his recent biography of Naipaul The World Is What It Is Patrick French notes that in it this story “he found his voice for the first time, poignant and funny,”. And as the letters show, potatoes were what Naipaul mostly survived on as a student at Oxford).
 
Writing a food column on someone who doesn’t seem to like food much may seem perverse (and given Naipaul’s probable scorn of something like food writing I hope he never gets to see this!) Yet as that first printed letter shows, Naipaul often does write about food, if not in terms of any relish. Rather, as a writer who builds on carefully noted details, he uses observation of food – its preparation, rituals, consumption – to convey larger points. In The Middle Passage (1962), his Caribbean travelogue, he with horror how in an Amerindian hut in Guyana food is kept exposed to the dirt inside: “I felt then that reverence for food – rules for its handling, interdictions – was one of the essentials of civilisation.”
 
Reverence doesn’t translate into much liking. In Naipaul’s novels if food is consumed with enjoyment it usually has disastrous consequences. In A House for Mr.Biswas (1961), Naipaul’s most famous protagonist comes a cropper when he over-indulges, in bananas in one finely comic scene, seafood in another. He eats 26 oysters and a tin of salmon and soon regrets it: “The raw, fresh smell of oysters was upsetting him now. His stomach was full and heavy, but unsatisfied. … Secret eating never did him any good.” Mr.Biswas’ 26 oysters are topped by the 100 that the narrator of the title story in A Flag on the Island (1967) puts away, causing a queasiness that colours his perception of all subsequent events.
 
Physicality in general doesn’t come off well with Naipaul. His distaste for food is generally matched by his unappetising view of sex, but in The Mimic Men (1967) food still comes off worse. The narrator visits prostitutes, and “once, more quickening of self-disgust than any other thing, I had a sight of the prostitute’s supper, peasant food, on a bare table in a back room.” It seems to make what he is doing worse, that he has been intimate with someone who eats that way. The same book has one of Naipaul’s few pleasant depictions of food, an elegant spread at a cocoa plantation: “Cocoa and pawpaw and fried plantains, freshly baked bread and avocadoes; all served on a tablecloth of spotless white…” But this is a vision, something the narrator would have loved for his retirement, far from the reality of the grimy pubs of his exile where all he dares eat is a cheese sandwich.
 
Naipaul doesn’t fare much better in his travels. In his last Indian travelogue A Million Mutinies Now (1990), despite misgivings, he accepts food from a man in Madras who lives to the strictest Brahmin standards (which prevent him from eating with his guest, something that, instead of finding annoying, Naipaul characteristically rather seems to admire). But eating the food “did make my writing fingers oily. This became hard to ignore; it called for a more than ritual washing outside – Kakusthan pouring for me, not complaining, wasting precious water from the well…” But this problem is minor compared to that in the climactic scene of An Area of Darkness (1964) when he finally reaches the Uttar Pradesh village that his grandfather left for Trinidad. A female relative insists he has food, or at least water. But Naipaul is adamant against this. Finally his companion suggests a compromise: “The IAS officer said, ‘You see that field? It is a field of peas. Ask for some of those.’ We ate a pod of peas each.”
 
An Area of Darkness also starts with Naipaul using food to begin his condemnation of India – but this could also possibly be a hilarious mistake. Arriving in Bombay harbour he is met by a tout who asks him: “you have any cheej?” Naipaul writes: “He required cheese. It was a delicacy in India. Imports were restricted, and the Indians had not yet learned how to make cheese, just as they had not yet learned to bleach newsprint.” This is probably the only case ever noted of organised cheese smuggling in India, and French in his biography, after praising it as “a harsh and perceptive observation,” admits with some embarrassement that it could have been a mistake thanks to Naipaul’s poor Hindi: “It is likely the tout was asking in rough Hindi whether the young traveller had ‘cheez’ – meaning stuff.”
 
Food is a key element in what has almost become Naipaul’s third creative genre after his novels and travelogues – the generation of stories about his obnoxious behaviour. Paul Theroux provides a feast in his muckraking, but irresistible memoir Sir Vidia’s Shadow. They first meet in Africa where Naipaul’s vegetarianism causes problems (“Omelettes were a frequent solution”) and carry on in England over meals in restaurants (Theroux notes that Naipaul never pays) and a lunch at Naipaul’s country house where his long-suffering wife Pat gives Naipaul a special plate of salmon while the other guests just get plain brown soup. Theroux keeps hearing stories of Naipaul’s behaviour and while he recognises some may be exaggerations, “Any story related to fastidiousness, and especially food, was unquestionably true.” At one dinner party, for example, the hostess had ensured there were plenty of vegetables all around for Naipaul’s sake, but he refuses them. “‘Those were not my vegetables,’ Vidia said. ‘Those were everyone’s vegetables.’”
 
French, in his excellent biography, puts this fastidiousness in context.  Naipaul’s maternal grandfather Capildeo Maharaj was a Brahmin, a rarity among Indian labourers in Trinidad, and maintaining this distinction was crucially important to him (Naipaul’s father also claimed to be a Brahmin, but this was less clear). According to family legend, after being driven to enlist for Trinidad due to famine in his native village, he still went to great lengths to avoid eating the meat that was given as standard ship rations on the journey there, almost starving until a superintendent ensured he was given a separate ration of rice and potatoes to cook himself.
 
French does wonder whether an indentured labourer would be allowed to cook for himself onboard, and if Maharaj was a “Brahmin-by-boat”, quietly elevating his caste during the voyage. But the point is that the family clearly believed in their Brahmin identity and maintained it in their diet. They ate fish and chicken, but beef was taboo and in general they had a very Indian suspicion of food from outside the house. Only sweets, Naipaul writes in An Area of Darkness, were exempt: “We bought cassava pone from street stalls; but black pudding and souse, favourite street-corner and sports-ground dishes of the Negro proletariat were regarded by us with fascinated horror.” Yet Naipaul notes that their cooking was influenced by such foods, assimilitating them at home: “Everything we adopted became our own; the outside was still to be dreaded…”
 
As it happens, some idea of what this food was like, has been provided by a food writer, Robb Walsh, an ebullient American, whose culinary adventures are collected in his book Are You Really Going To Eat That? One chapter is about his trip to Trinidad where he meets Naipaul’s sister Savitri Akal who feeds him a Trinidad Indian feast: “fried okra; tomato chokha, a dish of roasted tomatoes sauteed with onion, garlic, cumin and pepper; steamed pumpkin; spinach with garlic and onion; curried green mango; curried potato and string beans; curry chicken; dahl, the yellow split-pea puree that is served over rice, cucumber and yogurt; and, of course, roti.” This isn’t just any roti, but a fascinating type that Mrs.Akal calls dosti roti which she makes by taking two balls of dough, putting a little ghee between them and then rolling them out and cooking them on the griddle together. When they are done she carefully peels the two ‘friends’ apart to get two super-thin, soft rotis.
 
This is such a neat trick that I wondered if it was invented in Trinidad. Purobi Babbar’s book on Indian breads, which is inadequate but still the most comprehensive book on the subject, has no mention of it. But then in Dadimano Varso, the fabulous Palanpuri Jain cookbook that I’ve written about before, I found a recipe for Bapada Rotis which are not dostis as much as full joint family rotis! Several balls of soft dough are piled up with a little ghee in-between, and then rolled out as a multi-layer roti that is cooked and then separated (the book notes, with typical precision, that the two outermost ones inevitably become too crisp; they can be dried into khakras).
 
This is not easy to do – my one attempt left my kitchen covered in atta, ghee and deformed rotis – but if you can pull it off, its evidently a way to get some luxuriously soft rotis, which the book says are perfect to eat with aam ras when, as now, mangos are in season. In a Naipaul novel such feasting would doubtless have dire consequences, but less conflicted by food, we can simply enjoy it.

Will the Real India Please Stand Up

Times Of India
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 I often hear myself say to a foreigner visiting Mumbai, Delhi or a big city, "Well, this is not the real India, to experience that you need to go to the villages." Admit that this has happened to you too.

We have grown up believing that the 'real India' resides only in its villages and rightly so since 70% of Indians live there. Perhaps even more because it represents what India has come to mean for us and the world: a complete lack of infrastructure, power, water, transport, communication, decent education facilities and healthcare. It is also the place where our traditions are more alive and visible; folklore, superstition and unsavoury customs are practised even though they may be deemed illegal.

Strangely, our cities do not actually present a very different picture.

Here too there is a shocking lack of infrastructure, poor public transport and sanitation, ever growing slums in the shadow of multi million dollar apartments in spanking new sky scrapers, poor quality and erratic supply of water forcing people to buy water tankers almost daily, power outages, voltage fluctuations, flooded streets…and if that were not all….frequent epidemics of typhoid, cholera, dengue or malaria. Cities have the same disparity of incomes as in villages, as well as similar levels of prejudice and superstition.

With rapid urbanisation the distinctions between our cities and villages will blur even further.

A McKinsey study predicts a sharp growth in the urban population to reach 40% of the total by 2030 and more importantly contributing over 70% to the GDP.  This continued migration from the villages will add 250mn, more so to the bottom of the pyramid. Even now almost 75% of people in cities live at $1.80 per day; this will only get worse. We will have 68 cities with over a million population; some mega cities will have GDPs more than those of countries. Given the absolute lack of urban planning, all of this will happen in the classic "Chalta Hai" model. This could lead to a huge shortage of almost 80% in terms of affordable housing, 50% less water than needed, 70% of the sewage being untreated as well as significant shortages in public transport, and such like.

It would just mean that the villages will have moved to our cities and we, in the cities, will be able to say this is the real India.

Niyamgiri to Delhi, via London

Times Of India
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A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into a visiting Indian corporate type. We were naturally chatting about the Vedanta issues. He bet me that its bauxite mining project in Niyamgiri would go through, but maybe its Cairn deal wouldn’t . I bet the opposite. “How can Jairam Ramesh stop it? That whole thing’s been cleared by the Supreme Court,” is what I was told.

Well, yes. That’s precisely the reaction I had a few years ago, when UKbased Survival International called me and introduced somebody called the Dongria Kondh to me. Like most urban Indians, I’d naturally never heard of them before, or their sacred mountain, and am still mostly fuzzy about where exactly in Orissa Niyamgiri is. Though Bianca Jagger does, she’s been there.

I’ve been to some of their demonstrations, but to be honest, I’ve not yet met an actual Dongria Kondh tribal. I’ve met street-loads of activists though, of every colour, creed and shape. The lady explained to me that Supreme Court or no, there was still scope to ‘create awareness’ about the plight of the Dongria Kondh.

I’ve been tracking this whole episode from that day, right through to now. Gradually, various sceptics like me, and then London-based analysts and investors, and most of us Indians based in UK, began to write off the project. ‘It’s not going to happen’ was the general conclusion. It’s one of those episodes that so highlight the way things are seen differently in different cultures.

Survival began its campaign by portraying Vedanta as ‘British company’ intent on colonisation and decimation of native cultures. At which point, I’d be rolling on the floor laughing. Imagine casting Anil Agarwal in the role of evil colonising Briton. How the world has changed.

Still, the local media lapped it all up. And then came the celebs, high-profile ethical investors like the Church of England voting with their feet, and more. Ah, Bianca Jagger and Joanna Lumley.

Now that kind of stuff we take intensely seriously here, and so do investors. After all, we’re pretty much aware of what the likes of a Joanna Lumley can do.

She’s the one who bullied her way into Downing Street, embarrassed the daylights out of the Labour government , and got the Gurkhas the right to settle in UK, something they’d been denied for years. For those of you who might be interested, some Gurkha regiments continued to be part of the British Army till recently.

But in that peculiar form of racism that immigration departments practice, they weren’t given the same rights as other British Army veterans, from elsewhere in the erstwhile empire like Singapore or Australia. Nobody took it a jot seriously in India. Bollywood doesn’t have that breed of celebs who are also serious social activists in their own right, like a Bob Geldof or Joanna Lumley.

Even after Jairam Ramesh’s committee turned in a negative report card, most of the people back home — the kind I talk to — were completely cynical about the eventual outcome. Not to mention a deep suspicion of ‘foreign’ bleeding-heart activists thinking they have the right to put a spanner in India’s ‘internal’ affairs, even after the Supreme Court has had the last word. Step back a bit, and it’s not an unusual attitude.

In India, the judiciary has often been forced to intervene in what should be the job of the legislature, and dispense community justice. It’s pretty much the argument that Vedanta itself has been using, except when it’s dismissing the agitation as misguided.

Overnight, everything has changed. Now that the celebrity to beat all celebrities , Rahul Gandhi himself, has weighed in on the side of these tribals, the game’s over. A wee bit of clarification first. I see a lot of coverage in the Indian media that confuses this case with environment.

Now just because the environment ministry is in charge, environment isn’t what this is about. Okay, so back when the agitation started, even environment was a ‘Duh? What are you talking’ about concept in India. That’s changed, but this is different.

The Dongria Kondh aren’t agitating about deforestation and things. They’re arguing that the ugly mine and alumina factory will fundamentally change their traditional way of life, much as what happened to native Indians and Australian aboriginals way back, and as a distinct native culture, they have the right to protect their traditional lifestyle, religious beliefs and sacred mountains. It’s like you aren’t allowed to pull down a heritage or listed site just because it might make complete economic sense.

I’m now going to take another side bet with the next visitor I meet. Overnight , every possible and probable NGO, even the ones who haven’t heard of Kalahandi or Orissa in India, will jump on to the bandwagon and take the credit. Urban liberals, now it’s been endorsed by Mr Gandhi, will appropriate the cause.

I’m aware that truckloads of serious Indian activists have been fighting as hard as anyone else. But this particular battle was fought, and won, in Britain, however much that upsets national sensitivities. It’s something every globalising Indian company should keep in mind.

Satyam eve Jayate!

Times Of India
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It’s been a good year for corporate fraudsters the world over. In India Ramalinga Raju, founder and former chairman of Satyam Computers has been granted bail by the Andhra Pradesh High Court 20 months after he confessed to defrauding thousands of investors of crores of rupees in the country’s biggest financial fraud to date.

Those at the receiving end of Raju’s skullduggery might find it hard to forgive the Court for its leniency but he’s not the only scamster to have got away lightly.

In the US, Jeffrey Skilling former CEO of Enron, presently serving his 24 year jail sentence following his conviction for fraud in 2006, was granted a reprieve in June with the Supreme Court ruling that the ‘honest services’ law under which he was prosecuted could not be applied to his case.

Based on the ruling, Skilling’s lawyers have asked an appeals court to release him on bail and some of Skilling’scharges could be dismissed and his 24-year sentence reduced.

Meanwhile, Asil Nadir, tycoon and alleged fraudster, the man behind the spectacular collapse of the Polly Peck business empire from where he is reported to have secretly transferred 34 million pounds to his own account, is set to return to Britain almost 20 years after he jumped bail.

He will not face any punishment for fleeing the country as a UK court has ruled that his bail was never properly set. Of course for every corporate fraudster who seems to get away lightly, there are others who have got their just desserts.

Bernie Madoff, the convicted mastermind of the largest and most sweeping Ponzi scheme ever, was sentenced by a US court to the maximum sentence of 150 years. The government seized all his property and also forced his wife to give up homes and property worth millions.

Closer home, China’s one-time richest man and founder of a major retail chain, has been given a 14-year jail term for bribery and insider trading. Huang was fined $87.88 million and had property worth millions confiscated.

Madoff, Conrad Black, Kenneth Lay, Raju, Huang, Nadir, Ivan Boesky, Bernie Ebbers, Steven Madden, Michael Milken, Harshad Mehta, John Rigas, Dennis Kozlowski are all part of the growing tribe of corporate fraudsters, or while collar criminals.

From the Indian perspective, the good thing is that at least for now such crime does not seem as commonplace as in the US (though whether this is because we are less vigilant in detecting it is a moot point).

The bad thing, however, is that unlike in the US, convictions for white collar crime are rare and far between. Take the case of Ramalinga Raju. It will be years before we see closure of the case (remember the right to appeal is a fundamental right that cannot be taken away) so that investors who have suffered will, for all practical purposes, never see justice.

To be sure we have a Serious Fraud Office. But it is a toothless body. Worse, we do not have a separate judicial set-up, with separate courts, to handle such crime. Nor do we have judges with specialised knowledge of corporate fraud.

Today, unfortunately, there is no separate criminal law system for white collar crime in India. The anachronistic Indian Penal Code 1860 does not distinguish between white collar crime and other criminal acts.

But as TV Padmananbhan, a senior advocate in the Madras High Court points out white collar crime ought to be treated differently.

Why? Because mens rea or guilty mind (which is a pre-requisite in any criminal act) is directed at society at large in the case of white collar crime, not at any particular individual or group, as of any other crime such as murder or rape.

Moreover, the fact that corporate scamsters are often in a position to influence the course of justice means we need to be extra vigilant.

The objective of the criminal justice system in dealing with white collar crime should be two fold, says Vageshwari Deswal, Assistant Professor in the Law Faculty, Delhi University: to make good the losses incurred by investors and to award suitable punishment so that it serves as a deterrent to future scamsters.

So what is the way out? Better public vigil, for one; separate courts that deliver speedy justice and harsh punishment (including stripping fraudsters of their ill-gotten gains and more) for another and last, but not the least, social opprobrium.

Little Luxuries – baby potatoes

Times Of India
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India is among the top five producers of potatoes in the world and that might seem impressive enough. But K.V.Peters, in his useful handbook Tuber Crops (National Book Trust), makes a valiant attempt to go further. Potatoes are really a temperate climate crop which is why most cultivation in India takes place in winter, when the temperature is suitable, but the shorter length of day is really not.
 
Yet, Indian farmers still manage to raise bumper crops, which leads Peters to devise a measure of production which is not the regular parameter of productivity per day, but productivity per hour of solar radiation and “then India tops in productivity in the world.” Will the government please send a sack of potatoes to Mr.Peters for his efforts to enhance the image of India Aloo Shining.
 
Whatever the exact statistics, we clearly grow and eat a lot of potatoes. What’s more, we don’t eat them as a staple starch, like rice or wheat, but as a vegetable, which means that we have thousands of ways to cook it, whether as aloo bhaji, aloo curry, aloo pakodas and so much more. It might be assumed then that we are potato connoisseurs, carefully selecting the right type for each dish and able to find several varieties in any market.
 
But in fact, for most of us, there is just one type of aloo, a standard, mealy specimen that looks, cooks and tastes much the same in most parts of the country. Supermarkets abroad may highlight potato varieties like King Edwards, Pink Fir Apples, Russet Burbanks, Maris Pipers and others, each variety with its own virtues. But here an aloo is just an an aloo. Many Indian varieties have been developed by the Central Potato Research Institute in Shimla, but they are either meant for manufacturers, or to allow farmers to grow them under different conditions, but the potato always tends to taste the same.
 
One potato option does exist: baby potatoes. These miniature aloos are now quite widely sold, and at around Rs10-12 per packet in Mumbai, are still fairly cheap. I am not sure what exactly they are – whether a special variety bred to be harvested in infancy, young members of established potato varieties or just undersized specimens of these, which would not be accepted as proper aloos by shoppers, but when packed and marketed separately can suddenly get a premium. Quite possibly, given the variations in taste and texture I’ve found with baby potatoes, it’s a mix of all three.
 
The first new potatoes of spring are a great delicacy in the UK, especially those grown on the island of Jersey, fertilized with the seaweed that washes up on its shores. They are treated with great respect, cooked only just enough, served with minimal seasoning and usually only scrubbed, but left unpeeled. Indian baby potatoes might not match them in quality, but they should also be left unpeeled – in fact, because I’m lazy when it comes to preparing food, I sometimes think the real reason I love baby potatoes is because they don’t need peeling (though that doesn’t stop some masochists from doing it).
 
Not peeling potatoes is also nutritionally smart. Potatoes are unfairly maligned as being only unhealthy carbohydrates, but in fact they have a fair amount of good quality protein and nutrients, which is one reason why in so many poor places they are a staple food – just potatoes, along with some milk and a few greens, makes for a balanced, if boring diet. A lot of the nutrients, and also dietary fibre, are concentrated in the peel or just below, and peeling removes them. Unpeeled baby potatoes, due to their size, have a higher percentage of peel, and to that extent might be considered healthier.
 
Not peeling also has a distinct effect on the taste, partly because the skins have an interesting minerally-bitter taste themselves, but also, because they guard the interior during the cooking, they change the way the dish feels when it is eaten. A peeled potato easily absorbs the flavours it is cooked with, with parts even dissolving over long cooking, to meld in more completely with the dish. But with baby potatoes you get contrast – each one, as you break in, has retained more pure potato character, which then acts as a great contrast to the rest of the dish.
 
I think this distinction is often overlooked in Indian cookery books where recipes for baby potatoes are oddly rare, and when they are given, you are often told that you can substitute chunks of regular peeled potatoes. Well, of course you can, but the effect won’t be the same. If cookery books don’t recognise this, I think many cooks do, because when you ask, a lot of people do have favourite recipes meant specifically for baby potatoes. Riddhi Shah, for example, recently wrote on Salon.com about the spicy-sour chhote aloo cooked in the style of her husband’s Bhargava community, which she learned from his grandmother. CD’s editor, on learning about this column’s subject, went into rhapsodies about how in Pahadi cooking they are made with buttermilk, which sounds delicious.
 
Whatever the flavouring used, I think with Indian baby potatoes some kind of steaming works best. Boiling makes them bland, dry roasting seems to shrivel them and makes the skin sandpapery, while leaving them unpeeled makes frying them tough. But steaming cooks baby potatoes without leaching away their flavour and leaves the skin moist and easy to eat. Jane Grigson gives the best way to do this in her wonderful Vegetable Book – stoved potatoes, a recipe she asys she got from a Scottish cookbook, but whose name probably derives from the French étuvé, “meaning stewed, in this case potatoes stewed in their own juices, with only a tiny amount of water and butter to prevent them sticking.”
 
It is wonderfully easy to do. Just scrub the baby potatoes clean and put them in a layer in a deep pan with a good dollop of oil (I use either olive or a nutty sesame oil). Drop bits of butter over the potatoes, add lots of pepper, salt, garlic and, if you like, some herbs (experiment as you go along). Then pour in water till just below halfway up the side of the potatoes, cover the pan and cook. As the water boils, it steams the potatoes and then, just as they are getting done, you remove the lid and let the water boil off, which leaves a bubbling butter-oil mixture in which the potatoes finish off frying. You just need to roll them around a bit to make sure they don’t stick and are coated with oil and flavourings, and that’s it.
 
It’s a great dish to make for parties, because it can be assembled and left to cook as friends arrive, and then when you uncover the pan, it sends out wonderfully appetising aromas. When it’s done, because it’s semi-dry, it can be eaten as a snack, or as a side dish to the main course. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like them and the only recipe I’ve found that comes close is for potatoes rendang in Cradle of Flavour, James Oseland’s fascinating book on Indonesian food. Rendang is a very interesting style of cooking which involves ingredients being boiled in coconut milk, which is then left to cook until the water evaporates and the coconut oil separates out, which finishes off by finally frying the dish.
 
As you can see, rendang uses the natural properties of coconut milk to reach the same result as stoving – with the addition of the rich, silky taste of coconut. The flavouring paste for rendang is very spicy, involving lemongrass, ginger, garlic, galangal, fresh turmeric and lots and lots of chillies. All these are added to the coconut milk and cooked for a bit, before the potatoes are added, along with herbs like lemon basil, and everything is left to cook till its dry. In the process the heat of the spices gets tamed to give a rounded savoury taste with a lingering kick, and the baby potatoes are cooked till they are meltingly soft, but still just held together by their skin. This sort of steam-frying is something that I’m sure Indian cooks can experiment with, to come up with even better ways to cook baby potatoes.

After finishing this column I received some interesting information on baby potatoes from Dr.Bir Pal Singh, director of the Central Potato Research Institute (CPRI). This Shimla based government institute works to develop potato varieties suitable for Indian conditions and Dr.Singh tells me on email that baby potatoes are on their radar.
 
First though, he confirms my suspicion that what’s sold on the market are not real baby potatoes, but probably just “regular potatoes being marketed after grading and selecting small sized tubers from the farmer’s fields.” Real baby potatoes, writes Dr.Singh, would have “round shape and uniformity in size (<40 mm), which could further be fine graded for evenness; shallow eyed having white or red skin and creamy, yellow or coloured flesh.” There are a few other technical specifications.
 
At CPRI they have investigated which among their varieties best meets these specifications, and have indentified one called Kufri Himsona. Dr.Singh writes that it matures at 60 days, has more tubers per plant, has white skin, white flesh, a good typical potato flavour, and meets the other criteria. Of even further advantage to farmers, he says, is that field trials indicate that Kufri Himsona baby potatoes can be grown with one fourth the usual fertilizer levels and farmers can get two crops in the regular season.
 
That’s excellent news since it would suggest there are good reasons for farmers to grow them – as well as all the excellent reasons for us to consume them! Dr.Singh writes that they expect ‘baby potato’ to have a good niche in the future, and I hope he’s right.

Very elitist, Ms Usha Thorat

Times Of India
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RBI deputy governor in charge of financial inclusion Usha Thorat told ET that banking correspondents are the only means to financial inclusion (ET, Aug 12). This deliberately leaves out some entirely viable policy options centred on new technology and innovative licensing. Such a choice comes dressed up as prudence but is little more than pure elitism, out of place in an agenda of inclusive growth.
   Banking performs some vital functions: intermediation of savings and payments. People who have surplus savings find a safe borrower in a bank, and the bank, in turn, passes on the savings to those looking for capital. In this process, the bank brings two additional services to the table. As a safe borrower, it lowers risk for the savers, and thus lowers the cost of capital for everyone. Further, by aggregating large numbers of deposits and repayments of past loans, as well as leveraging its ability to raise credit virtually at will, a bank also is able to give out long-term loans even though its own deposits are returnable in the short-term. This is called maturity transformation.
   The bank also facilitates payments, allowing people to issue cheques on them, then honouring the cheques, issuing debit cards and credit cards. If one bank suddenly proves unable to honour the cheques drawn on it, it could disrupt the ability of other banks to honour their cheques as well, because of the interconnectedness of payment flows.
   Both because banks handle people’s savings and because one bank’s failure has the potential to disrupt the entire payments system, banks are regulated and banking licences are given out very selectively. This is entirely fair. What is unfair is for the regulator to eschew new technological possibilities.
   The word bank derives from Italian banca meaning bench or counter — from which Florentine bankers operated in the 14th century. Then they built a brick and mortar building around the counter. Brick and mortar remain the RBI’s paradigm for banking. It keeps urging banks to build more branches in rural areas. Banks don’t, because it is not viable — thousands of villages have less than a thousand inhabitants. The banks thus leave the field open for moneylenders. Last year, the RBI liberalised the system of banking correspondents (BCs), to allow a larger variety of people to play this role, including small shopkeepers and electronics-wielding agents of specialist organisations that work for financial inclusion. This is a big step forward for the regulator, which is why Ms Thorat considers BCs the last word in inclusion.
   BCs collect money, deposit them with the banks, travelling tens of km every few days to the nearest brick and mortar bank branch for the purpose. This is better than not having BCs, but not enough.
   The least controversial innovation is to use technology to lower the cost of maintaining a bank account. The architecture used for holding dematerialised shares and for the New Pension System (NPS) can be deployed to build low-cost bank accounts. One single agency can maintain these accounts, which would naturally be operated by different banks. An account holder should be able to even transfer his account from one bank to another, operate it in Madhepura, Bihar with the same ease as in Mohali, Punjab. Multiple points of presence — post office branches, authorised handheld device users, etc — can be used to credit funds to the account as well as to withdraw funds. Nothing but regulatory indifference stands in the way of such a common infrastructure for electronic banking, which would reduce the banks’ costs on no-frills accounts.
   A more controversial but equally sensible step is to allow the mobile phone to be used for banking. One has to distinguish between using an internet-enabled phone to do internet banking or simply doing phone banking, on the one hand, and, on the other, using the mobile phone as a portable, virtual vault to which money can be credited and from which money can be withdrawn electronically. Universal identity numbers will fit in neatly to uniquely identify account holders.
   The prepaid sim is a stored value card, which regulation says can be used only to transact calls. But that is an artificial limitation. It can be used to transfer money for a migrant worker, to make payments. It is possible for a third party to transfer money to the card, for the phone’s owner to transfer his ‘balance’ to a third party. If the phone account is linked to an electronic bank account, full-fledged banking is possible. The physical cash can be handled by pretty much the same people who sell pre-paid cards now.
   Phone companies know how to make money from millions of small transactions. This capability must be tapped for inclusive banking. The most sensible course would be for the RBI to grant a new banking licence to at least one joint venture between a phone company and an existing commercial bank, with a specific mandate for inclusive banking. The bank would ensure prudence and the telco, bring in its unique expertise.
   Eschewing this possibility is not safety, Ms Thorat; it is elitist disregard for the masses.