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LOUBOUTIN’S
INDIA CONNECT
SATURDAY, MARCH 2 2024 Ahead of his fall-winter col-
lection show at the Paris
Fashion Week on 4 March,
designer Christian Loubou-
tin talks about how India
has influenced his personal-
ity, his design, his craft and
his sensibility
SEE PAGE 7

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DELIVERING A
KNOCKOUT NIKHAT ZAREEN, LOVLINA BORGOHAIN, SAWEETY BOORA,
NITU GHANGHAS—THESE FOUR WORLD CHAMPIONS HAVE
CHANGED THE SCRIPT FOR WOMEN’S BOXING IN INDIA

THINK
The plurality
of Art Dubai
TASTE
The trick to Insta-
perfect mushrooms
CULTURE
Raam Reddy on his
film, ‘The Fable’
BUSINESS LOUNGE
Meet Third Eye
Distillery’s Vidur Gupta
 02 SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi FIRST

PLAN THE WEEK

A NOTE FROM
THE EDITOR
NEW ON SCREENS AHEAD
Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ sequel, a limited series based on
SHALINI UMACHANDRAN James Clavell’s 1975 novel, and other things to watch

The women who DUNE: PART TWO

Denis Villeneuve’s delayed Dune
sequel is set to release this week-
end. The cast is loaded—Tim-

pull no punches othée Chalamet, Rebecca Fer-

guson, Zendaya, Austin Butler,
Florence Pugh, Léa Seydoux—but
an equally big draw is the
A PRACTICE UNDETERRED
BY CHALLENGES
director’s ability to conjure up

A
COURTESY BOXING FEDERATION OF INDIA wondrous CGI spectacle. The film new exhibition, Chitrak-
continues the story of Paul oodam, celebrates the life
Atreides, who slowly sheds his of artist C.N.Karunak-
scepticism about being a prophe- aran. Organised by the Sandeep
sied messiah and raises a mighty & Gitanjali Maini Foundation,
army of followers. (In theatres) Bengaluru, and Palette People,
Kochi, the show highlights the
practice of the artist, who played
a pivotal role in the modern art
movement post-independence.
Born in 1940 in Brahmakulam,
Kerala, Karunakaran was men-
tored by D.P. Choudhari and
K.C.S. Paniker. Undeterred by
challenges such as the loss of the
use of a leg due to typhoid, the
artist pursued painting and
design with a passion. In 1973, he
SPACEMAN founded Kerala’s first private art
A lonely astronaut on a solo mission at gallery, Chithrakootam. On dis-
the edge of the solar system is worried play at Maini Sadan, Bengaluru,
about the state of his marriage back on till 31 March, 10am-6pm, Mon-
Many years ago, when the roses and chocolates of fatuous, earth. Amazingly, counsel is offered by day to Saturday.
corporatised women’s day celebrations (which unfortunately an intergalactic spider. Based on the
continue) were annoying me more than usual and I was trying novel Spaceman Of Bohemia by Jaroslav
to (fruitlessly) explain to HR the idea of the day, I read a line on Kalfař, this film is directed by Johan
the official International Women’s Day website that went Renck (Chernobyl). It stars Adam Sand-
something like “when women are not present, we must ask ler, Carey Mulligan and Paul Dano.
‘why not?’.” It’s exactly what Nikhat Zareen did as a (Netflix)
12-year-old sprinter in Telangana when she saw girls
participating in every sport, except boxing.
And rather than just accept the answer, Zareen, and a num-
ber of other young women from smaller towns and villages,
including Nitu Ghanghas, Lovlina Borgohain and Saweety
Boora, have made space for themselves in the ring. Last year,
at the Women’s World Championship in New Delhi, India
won four gold medals. Ghanghas, Zareen, Borgohain and
Boora are our stars, who are now firmly focused on bringing
back medals from the Paris Olympics, as they tell Lounge ART fOR A CONNECTED
while also sharing the struggles they’ve faced. Their grit and WORLD
intensity is admirable and unquestionable, and yet, as our SHOGUN

G
cover story shows, there’s also a streak of fun at loving what A shipwrecked English sailor and a powerful feudal lord meet in 17th century allery Threshold is all set
they do, and a deep pride in how they are changing minds Japan. This limited series is the second pass made at James Clavell’s 1975 novel to present a solo show of
about achievement and ambition. Sportspersons’ pursuit after a 1980 series starring Toshira Mifune. It’s created by Rachel Kondo and works by Italian artist
of excellence is always inspiring, most of them having Justin Marks, and has an accomplished cast: Hiroyuki Sanada (Ring), Cosmo Tarshito N. Strippoli. Titled
transcended the gulf between the reality of their Jarvis (Lady Macbeth), Tadanobu Asano (Gohatto) and Anna Sawai (Pachinko). Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: The
daily lives and the dream of prevailing. (Disney+ Hotstar) World Is One Family, the exhibi-
This is an issue of contrasts, and therefore, on an entirely tion was shown last year at the
different note, Vidur Gupta of Third Eye Distillery, the mak- Bihar Museum. Strippoli has
ers of the popular Stranger & Sons, talks about creating a cate- LAAPATAA LADIES created the works in collabora-
gory for Indian gins, while French fashion designer Christian Somewhere in rural India in 2001, two tion with Indian artists special-
Louboutin contemplates his love for Bollywood and its influ- young brides get accidentally swapped ising in 25 traditional forms.
ence on his work. We meet the artists showing their work at on a train. This comedy marks a wel- This is in sync with his belief
the ongoing Art Dubai 2024, and the ways in which their art is come return to the director’s chair for that the world is indeed one
prompting people to think about ideas of identity, humanity Kiran Rao, who debuted promisingly family, with artists sharing
and existence. And as always, we have a host of recommenda- with Dhobi Ghat in 2010 but hasn’t affinity with one another, irre-
tions for how to spend your weekend, whether it’s sports, art, helmed a film since. Laapataa Ladies spective of differences in lan-
books, music, film or food that’s your passion. first played at the Toronto Interna- guages or cultures. On view at
tional Film Festival last year. Starring National Crafts Museum,
Write to the editor at shalini.umachandran@htlive.com Pratibha Ranta, Nitanshi Goel, Sparsh Delhi, from 5 March to 15 April,
@shalinimb Shrivastava and Ravi Kishan. 10am-5.30pm (closed on
(In theatres) Monday).

Compiled by Uday Bhatia —Compiled by Avantika Bhuyan

LOUNGE DINE PLAY LIVE MOVE

ONLINE
Toasting to a cherry
YOUR good time in Lisbon
FAVOURITE
WEEKEND READ
C T
herry wine made in India may
taste a bit like cough syrup, but
NOW THROUGH in Lisbon, the sweet and spicy
local liqueur made from cherries called
THE WEEK ginjinha (pronounced zhin-zhinya) is
one of the most unique, tangible cul-
tural icons of Portugal. Sour morello
The best of Mintlounge.in from cherries with pits are
soaked in a clear spirit
the week gone by and what to called aguardente or a
look forward to in the one ahead neutral spirit like vodka. A
boiled, cooled syrup of
sugar and spices is added
to the mixture and allowed to mature for
a few months before serving. It’s like a
mulled-wine-meets-cherry-brandy,
writes Raul Dias, who goes on a tasting
trail in Lisbon’s many, tiny hole-in-the-
wall traditional bars.
Women pro athletes
continue to struggle
he Women’s Premier League
(WPL) is back, and with it contin-
ues the global growth of women’s
sports that started gathering serious
momentum last year. In 2023, the Indian
women’s cricket team played two tests.
In England, the Hundred Women’s
Competition successfully
returned for a second sea-
son. Tour de France Femi-
nin was a close and thrill-
ing battle. Formula One
announced a feeder pro-
gramme for women drivers. This is the
best of times for women’s sports around
the world and yet, women athletes are
still deprived a seat at the table and their
sports remains an afterthought, writes
Shrenik Avlani.
Waiting forever to
bring a child home
M F
ore than three years after Smita
Pranav Kothari and her hus-
band filled in mounds of paper-
work to adopt a baby, they unexpectedly
brought home a little girl in December.
In the years between, they joined various
WhatsApp and Facebook groups, filled
more paperwork, pre-
pared for parenthood,
exchanged notes with
other hopeful adoptive
parents, created Excel
sheets to track their
progress, and tried very hard to crack the
Child Adoption Resource Authority
(CARA) algorithm for matching babies
with potential families. The wait seemed
endless, she writes, as she shares what it
feels like to finally bring a child home.
Six functional
exercises to do daily
rom Crossfit to boot camps, func-
tional exercise or functional move-
ment is a term tossed around con-
stantly but are the exercises that we do
at these fitness classes actually func-
tional movements? Do any of our real-
life movements ever mimic a bench
press or the inverted leg
press? However, there are
a number of exercises that
mirror movements that
we tend to repeat in our
regular lives. Incorporat-
ing such exercises into your workout
not only make you fit, but self-sufficient
too. Shrenik Avlani lists the six best
functional exercises that come into play
in our lives when we bend or lift and
carry things.

lounge@livemint.com In Food >> Drink In News >> Talking Point In Relationships >> Raising Parents In Health >> Fitness
@mint_lounge
@livemintlounge

ON THE COVER: NIKHAT ZAREEN; PHOTOGRAPH FROM PTI

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A writer of a divided world
RE READINGS
A monthly column on backlisted
books that have much to offer in
contemporary times
Qurratulain Hyder
closely observed and
commented on the
dilution of syncretic
values both in India
and in Pakistan
Somak Ghoshal
M
arch is Women’s His-
tory Month. It’s the
time of year to cele-
brate women’s writing
across the world. But
Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007), one of
the greatest minds of the 20th century,
would probably have disapproved of the
moniker.
Hyder, or Aini Apa (the pen name by
which she was known), was a writer first,
in her own right. Labels of religion, eth-
nicity and gender can scarcely do justice
to her prodigious vision of humanity or
the skill with which she expanded and
reimagined the scope of Urdu, the lan-
guage she mostly wrote in. As she said in
a tribute to fellow Urdu writer Anis Kid-
wai (1906-82), shortly after the latter’s
death, “The keepers of social equality
committed a grave injustice against capa-
ble women writers by compartmentalis-
ing literature into categories of ‘men’s’
and ‘women’s’ literature.”
Yet, few writers from the subcontinent,
or indeed from anywhere across the
world, deserve to be celebrated this sea-
son, and for all time, as Hyder. If you want
to taste her sheer genius, Aag Ka Darya
(River Of Fire), first published in 1959, is a
remarkable novel to start with. But, in
case you want a more panoramic view of
her life and career, At Home In India: Sto-
ries, Memoirs, Portraits, Interviews, edited
and translated from the original Urdu by
Medium Talk
Why apologies matter
HEART OF THE MATTER
A fortnightly column
about emotional well-being
A good apology involves
taking accountability for
our behaviour and
making a commitment
not to repeat it
Sonali Gupta
J
ust as rupture and repair are part of
relationships, so are apologies. At the
same time, in my experience, all apol-
ogies don’t lead to repair. How the
apology is worded and the tonality used
to communicate what must be said goes
a long way towards whether it is seen as a
good apology or not. Some apologies can
lead to further rupture and leave the per-
son receiving it more hurt, disappointed,
and angry.
Words like “thank you” and “sorry” are
what we learn early in our life. As a child,
when I said sorry, it seemed like a behav-
iour and an action step that allowed me to
address my own misbehaviour and move
forward. My understanding as a therapist
is that adults really struggle to apologise.
Whether it is in friendships, work or inti-
mate relationships, people often enter a
score-keeping narrative when it comes to
who apologises first in a conflict or when
things don’t work out.
An act of apology is a tender moment
that requires us taking accountability for
our own behaviour and owning up to it.
It requires awareness about the role we
played in a fight and how our choice of
words and actions left the other person
hurt.
A good apology requires vulnerability,
sincerity, courage and a deep desire to
move past the conflict, followed by an
intention and commitment to act in ways
that prevent or avoid the occurrence of
similar situations in the future. As adults,
we need to be mindful of how we choose
to word an apology.
What helps while formulating an apol-
ogy is to use sentences that begin with,
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Fatima Rizvi and Sufia Kidwai, and
recently published by Women Unlimited,
is pure gold.
Hyder’s literary as well as personal leg-
acy is one of the many reasons that makes
this volume required reading at this time.
The title is poignant and has been invoked
by others to talk about the lives of Indian
Muslims. (The former Union minister,
Salman Khurshid, who published a book
about the history of Muslim identities in
India in 2014 is a case in point.) In Hyder’s
case, this title is a double-edged sword.
Born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, Hyder
left for Pakistan with her family in 1947 as
the bloody violence of Partition broke
out. By this time, she was a feisty
20-year-old, brought up on liberal values
by her progressive writer parents, Sajjad
Haider Yildirim (1880-1943) and Nazar
Sajjad Haider (1892-1967).
Hyder spent the next few years as a
journalist and writer, and her stories and
Wording and tonality of the apology goes a long way towards healing.
“I’m sorry”. This needs to be followed by
specifying what you are apologising for.
My understanding is that a lot of adults
struggle to take ownership for their own
actions. As a result, apologies very often
come across as vague, unclear and not
explaining what behaviour or action the
person is taking responsibility for.
Being specific about how we hurt the
other person tells them that we have
introspected and thought about our
actions and behaviour. It indicates an
awareness. This needs to be followed by
the next step of articulating an awareness
about how our behaviour made the other
person feel. Our actions have consequen-
ces and as a result, when we openly
address the impact our behaviour had on
the other person, we give them a chance
to feel seen, heard and understood.
This needs to be followed by clearly
stating a sincere wish that given this
understanding, we will not repeat such
behaviour. I often suggest that clients
supplement this by stating some action
steps that they will take to avoid such a
situation again.
We need to pay special attention to the
fact that while making an apology, we do
not use conditional words like, “but” and
“if only”. These words take us far away
from an apology, and make it sound like
an excuse. I remember a conversation
FIRST
When Hyder visited the Urdu
Academy in Lucknow, she
remarked that the institution
had become stuck in a time
warp, like the language it
fostered. GETTY IMAGES
Hyder was able to hold her
personal histories of
belonging and alienation with
clear-eyed lucidity, refusing to
stray into sentimentalism,
blame-games or nostalgia
ISTOCKPHOTO
with a couple, who were clients, where
one person explained that their partner
had apologised and said, “I’m sorry that
I started shouting, if only you were listen-
ing and not interrupting, I would have
not gotten into this rage.”
I worked with the couple and we dis-
cussed accountability. In a later session,
the couple reported that how the apology
was worded made a difference to their
relationship. What the partner said this
time around was, “I’m sorry for my
behaviour of shouting and harsh words.
I have thought about my behaviour and
I feel shameful about it. I know how
much it scared and hurt you. My earlier
attempt at the apology seemed evasive,
I’m going to work on managing my anger
and rage. I promise I will not repeat this
behaviour in the future.”
We don’t have control of whether our
apology is accepted or not. That’s why it’s
important to remember to give people
time after you have made an apology and
then know that sometimes there may be
no response from the other person, or
forgiveness.
Sonali Gupta is a Mumbai-based clini-
cal psychologist. She is the author of the
book Anxiety: Overcome It And Live
Without Fear and has a YouTube channel,
Mental Health with Sonali.
essays appeared in a wide variety of publi-
cations, giving her prominence as well as
notoriety. Few writers in Urdu before her
had pushed the classical foundations of
the language into uncharted modernist
terrains, either to create genre-bending
narratives or in the service of a stream of
consciousness style. Until 1959, when a
huge controversy erupted after the pub-
lication of Aag Ka Dariya, a novel about
syncretism and revisionist tendencies,
and Hyder decided to return to India.
The stories, interviews, essays and
memoirs collected in At Home In India
capture this complicated inheritance
that trailed writers like Hyder, Attia Hos-
sain, Ismat Chugtai, Khadija Mastoor and
others. After growing up in the best tra-
ditions of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, where
syncretism was a way of life rather than
an acquired habit, Hyder was disturbed
by the deep-rooted conservatism of Paki-
stan, especially by the status of women
STUDIO EEKSAURUS
(from left) Stills from ‘Kanditunnd!’ and ‘Bramayugam’.
Reviving Chathan’s lore
With films like
‘Bramayugam’, mystical
characters from Kerala
lore continue to awe
new audiences
Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran
mahalakshmi.prabhakaran@htlive.com
I
can’t find my Insta post on Kuttichat-
han. I wonder if this mysterious disap-
pearance has to do with him,” joked
my friend about this supernatural char-
acter from Malayalam folklore, who is
known for his mischievous streak.
Currently, Kuttichathan is also the dia-
bolical antagonist (played by Mam-
mooty) spooking Malayali audiences
with his telekinetic and soul-sucking
abilities in the movie Bramayugam,
directed by Rahul Sadasivan. Set in a run-
down mansion and shot in black and
white, the period film has quite a few
spine-tingling moments but beyond that,
what it also did was it introduced me, a
non-resident Keralite, to a new facet of
Kuttichathan. Who was this vile shape-
shifting character who was the diametric
opposite of that friendly spirit in My Dear
Kuttichathan?
If you were a kid who grew up in the
1980s and the 1990s, My Dear Kuttichat-
SaturDay, 2 March 2024
there. At the same time, she wasn’t one to
look at the world through rose-tinted
glasses. As she said in 2005, “…when it
came to the freedom of women, the atti-
tude of all Muslims, irrespective of class,
was the same… Our values and morals
were framed by the middle class after the
1857 Uprising, and the intelligentsia from
Aligarh played a major role in this.”
In her 80 years, Hyder not only lived
through Partition, but also several wars
that tore through the subcontinent and
upheavals, like the vandalism in Ayodhya
in 1992, which shook
her profoundly. She had
been a hair’s breadth
away from violence
when in 1947, a mob of
rioters threatened to
break into the train in
which she and her
mother were travelling,
but they were protected
by three American mis-
sionary women. Yet,
Hyder was able to hold her
personal histories of
belonging and alienation
with clear-eyed lucidity,
refusing to stray into senti-
mentalism, blame-games, or
easy nostalgia.
If the stories in this anthol-
ogy are a class apart for the pace and sus-
pense with which they unfold, it is in the
memoirs and essays that we glimpse a
mind that is like a flintstone—sharp, flam-
mable, fiery yet unostentatious. Where
you would expect maudlin grief for the
lost world of the yore, Hyder weds her
journalistic rigour with the nuance of a fic-
tion writer to document the changes that
befell during her lifetime.
As a journalist with The Illustrated
Weekly Of India, among other publica-
tions, Hyder wrote about the film world of
Bombay (now Mumbai), the city she set-
tled in with her mother after returning
from Pakistan. Among the many gems in
this volume is a beautiful portrait of
Kaneez Fatima, the daughter of Jaddan
Bai, who attained stardom under her
screen name of Nargis. An Epoch-Making
Actor, which is largely focused on the life
of the heartthrob of the 1940s and 1950s,
is also Hyder’s account of the shifting
mores of the media and movie worlds.
More than small talk
han (Chhota Chetan in Hindi) was your
first introduction to this supernatural
entity. Released in 1984 as India’s first 3D
film, the 3D glasses were as much a con-
versation point as the young Chathan’s
antics. The 2022 film, Kumari, starring
Aishwarya Lekshmi, features the Chat-
han in a benefic role too. There have
been a few iterations of this supernatural
character in Malayalam films in the last
couple of years—the most adorable (no,
really) being from the 2023 National
Award- winning animation film, Kandit-
tund! (Seen It!).
Produced by Studio Eeksaurus, a
Mumbai-based film production house
and animation studio, the almost 12-min-
ute-long animation short that was
released on YouTube on 14 November,
2021, is a delightful documentation of
ghosts and ghouls from Kerala folklore.
Using hand-drawn animation by the
film’s director Adithi Krishnadas, sound
design by Resul Pookutty and music
score by Nandu Kartha, the short film
introduces the viewer to spooky charac-
ters like the eenampechi (pangolin) and
arukola (faceless spectre) through some
imaginative story-telling by P.N.K. Pan-
icker, the nonagenarian father of Studio
Eeksaurus’s founder, Suresh Eriyat. Pan-
icker’s sing-song voice describes Kutti-
chathan as a mischievous spirit who is
generally called upon when you want to
sort your adversary out. “By pelting
stones or scattering excreta, they pester
New Delhi 03
In her trademark digressive style, she
meanders down memory lane, remem-
bering the “Old Lady of Bori Bunder,” a
nickname for The Times Of India, known
at the time for its “thoughtful and mature
journalism.” She recalls Mehtab (1913-97),
the resplendent heroine of Chitralekha
(1941) and Jhansi Ki Rani (1953), who
opened a salon near Hyder’s home in
Bombay and worked as a hairdresser later
in life.
Her glittering humour and sardonic eye
notwithstanding, Hyder
had a keen sense of
pathos and irony that
defined democracy in
independent India,
especially its slow dilu-
tion into towards autoc-
racy.
As she wrote, “All
those intellectuals who
spent their lives strug-
gling for freedom from
the British were heart-
broken and, after
independence, took
refuge in the very
same Britain against
which they had
fought and slogan-
eered, when the
governments of their own
countries, India and Pakistan, placed
restrictions on them.”
Along with the post-colonial state’s
restrictions on free speech and cultural
policing, Hyder witnessed the gradual
erosion of values, knowledge systems, and
the double helix of Hindu-Muslim iden-
tity. And so, in the late 1990s, when she
visited the Urdu Academy in Lucknow,
she remarked that the institution had
become stuck in a time warp, like the lan-
guage it fostered. “Urdu had now become
like a modest woman sitting behind a veil
in a slow-moving palanquin.”
Back in the 1970s, Hyder observed, “It is
nearly thirty years that the subcontinent
won its freedom, and nothing has
changed.” Unfortunately, that undercur-
rent of fear and chaos has not been
stemmed by the democratic promises of a
Superpower India even in 2024.
Somak Ghoshal is a writer and editor
based in Delhi.
your enemy till he cracks,” he narrates.
Friendly ghost? Evil spirit? Mischie-
vous goblin? Who is this Kuttichathan?
The answer to the question depends on
who you ask. Part of folklore and reli-
gious culture of north and central Kerala,
for a lot of people, he is an entity who can
be used to do good or bad. Kannur-based
doctor Tradib Jayapal describes him as
“a god for the common man”. He is the
guy you go to when you want your prayer
to be answered fast, says Jayapal.
According to Tantric lore, Kuttichat-
han is a little spirit who can be conjured
up to do your bidding, explains Prem K.,
a Bengalurean who loves studying super-
natural phenomena. “However, the point
with all entities you conjure up is that you
end up having a battle between master
and the servant,” he says. It is this power
play between the master and servant that
forms the crux of Bramayugam’s story.
In a way, what the movie has done is
revive an old lore, presenting it to a
younger generation in a more aesthetic
way with high technical production val-
ues and a great cast. For Eriyat, it’s a win-
ning formula. “I have had Malayalis
everywhere telling me that Kandittund!
reminded them of their grandparents
who’d narrate similar stories to them,”
says Eriyat. There are requests for a
sequel. “People want to see more of these
stories,” he says, underlining an almost
universal truth—everyone loves a well-
made story. The scarier, the better.
 04 SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi
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Things to watch, read, hear, do—and other curated experiences from the team
AN ANDROID IN SPACE
very version of Android brings
E with it an Easter egg, a hidden
feature inside the phone’s set-
tings (go to “About device” and then
“Android version”). Finding the Easter
egg is like a treasure hunt. Down the
years, there have been many memora-
ble Android Easter eggs—the modi-
fied Flappy Bird game in Android 5.0
Lollipop, for instance—but Android 14
takes it out of this world. Themed
around space, the new Easter egg
shows the Android 14 logo as a space
mission patch floating among stars.
When you tap the logo repeatedly, fol-
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spacecraft—and the screen moves to a
hidden game where you control a tiny
spacecraft as it floats around in space.
The game also shows you the space-
craft’s coordinates, velocity and infor-
mation on the nearest star. Try it out
yourself. —Nitin Sreedhar
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LOUNGE LOVES
A HIGH FASHION DRAMA
ashion label Balenciaga has raked up so
F many controversies in the past few years,
it’s easy to forget the man who lent his
name, and life, to make it one of the most
storied couture labels we know. Disney’s
biographical series, Cristóbal Balenciaga,
which premiered in January, corrects that.
With Alberto San Juan in the titular role, the
Spanish series has managed to draw the
reclusive designer out from the curtain he
loved hiding behind. The show, aided by a
fleet of stunning dresses, also feels like a crash
course in fashion history. What I enjoyed
most were the quiet moments that show BALM FOR A SCRATCHY THROAT
Balenciaga bent down poring closely over the here is no denying that winter in
stitches of a dress.
—Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran T the National Capital Region has
been particularly brutal this
year. The chill, combined with high
levels of pollution, resulted in bouts of
ANGELS AND DEMONS cough, which simply refused to go
have been a fan of British author Janice away. I spent most of this winter in a
I Hallett’s mystery novels since her first, The
Appeal, came out in 2021. Hallett has now
written her fourth novel, The Mysterious Case
quandary as the usual home remedies
of turmeric milk and kaadha, made
with spices and herbs, didn’t alleviate
Of The Alperton Angels, using the same style: the scratchy throat. Then in the begin-
the “found footage” mystery where the reader ning of February, I discovered Makai-
pieces together a crime and its investigation bari’s white peppermint bark tea,
using seemingly disjointed emails, letters, which I had forgotten about, in the
newspaper clippings, text messages and other kitchen cupboard. Made with organic
epistolary material. Alperton Angels has a white tea grown in the estate of Makai-
dogged journalist and true-crime writer bari in Darjeeling, the tea contained
looking into the case of a cult that imploded hints of peppermint, which is believed
around 20 years ago in mysterious to soothe a sore throat. Since Febru-
circumstances, including several deaths and ary, I have been sipping away on this
the disappearance of a baby. The book is a bit comforting concoction, alternating
tough to get into at first, given the lack of between the tea and kaadha, and the
exposition, but it’s a delicious challenge for cough is finally showing signs of bid-
the crime nerd. —Shrabonti Bagchi ding adieu. —Avantika Bhuyan
STREAM OF
STO R I E S
RAJA SEN
Men who don’t
know better
A still from ‘Sand Job’.
first read Jerome K. Jerome’s comic masterpiece Three Men In A Boat (To
I Say Nothing Of The Dog), a novel published in 1889, when I was 11 years old.
The book about three Englishmen (and their dog) taking a two-week holi-
day coloured not only my understanding of Victorian fiction, but expanded
my horizons of the point of literature itself: that it could, quite simply, be a
lark. Here was a book considered a classic, but there was no discernible point
to it. There were no bad guys, no motives, no mysteries, no morals. There was
no conflict. Plotting a holiday could be the same as plotting an adventure.
I thought frequently back to Jerome’s novel while watching Sand Job, the
latest episode of automotive programme The Grand Tour, that came out on
Amazon Prime Video last week. The Grand Tour features Jeremy Clarkson,
James May and Richard Hammond—who all started out with Top Gear on the
BBC —and there really doesn’t seem to be much point to their misadventures.
These are petrolheads in an electric-car world, politically incorrect fogeys
desperately out of touch with the world as it stands today. They are just about
as relevant as King Charles.
Thankfully, they’re funnier. Sand Job is a jaunt I’d place right alongside vin-
tage Top Gear. The two-hour film captures a highly cinematic trek across the
Sahara Desert in a modified Aston Martin, a Maserati and a Jaguar. This fact
that they’re driving unfit cars—instead of picking desert-ready souped up
4x4s—is what makes the difference. Like the men driving them, these cars
have no business cutting across the dunes of Mauritania and doing the last leg
of the legendary rally race once called the Paris-Dakar, but both the men and
the cars improvise.
Back to the novel. Clarkson, the bombastic ringmaster, embodies a brash
charisma reminiscent of Jerome’s George, whose grand schemes frequently
devolve into uproarious calamities. From attempting to convert a Reliant
Robin into a makeshift spacecraft to pushing the boundaries of sanity with
audacious stunts, Clarkson’s larger-than-life (and often obnoxious) persona
has always dominated the screen, much like George’s leadership among his
befuddled companions.
May—unforgettably nicknamed Captain
Slow—is the epitome of refinement
and fastidiousness. Mirroring the
scholarly nature of Jerome’s
narrator “J”, his pursuit of
automotive perfection is STREAMING TIP
often thwarted by the OF THE WEEK
whims of fate. Whether Emma Stone is the frontrunner to
meticulously dissecting pick up her second Oscar this year for
the engineering marvels the film Poor Things. While we wait for
of supercars, or the his- that Yorgos Lanthimos film to come to
tory contained in ancient India, do watch his superb The
libraries, May’s dry wit
and pedantic tendencies
add a layer of intellectual
Favourite (Netflix) which stars
Stone, Rachel Weisz and
an Oscar-winning
depth to the trio’s escapades. Olivia Colman.
And then there’s Hammond,
the daredevil maverick whose
boundless enthusiasm mirrors the
adventurous spirit of Harris from the book, his
impulsive nature often leading to comedic conundrums. From ill-fated
attempts at DIY engineering to hair-raising feats of automotive acrobatics,
Hammond injects a sense of reckless abandon into the group dynamic, much
to the amusement (and occasional horror) of his comrades.
Sand Job sees our intrepid trio almost drive on to a minefield—then debate
whether putting up a cautionary sign for a minefield would be as effective as a
minefield itself. The nothingness of the desert is awe-inspiring, as is a
sequence where the cars go hunting for a great big eye, and we see a landmark
of the Sahara that takes the breath away. Meanwhile our three hosts thirst
constantly for beer and gin in a dry Muslim country, until finally Clarkson
announces that he knows an off-licence that has a branch in every capital city
in the world: the British embassy. Classic.
Clarkson is 63, May is 61, Hammond is 54. They may once have been spry
young coupes, but they are now creaking muscle cars that belong behind
glass. Yet there they are, looking at the longest train I’ve ever seen, and fill-
ing each other’s cars up with sand. An underlying feeling of romanticism
spurs them on, and their joy is infectious; they can’t believe their own luck,
playing with toys for a living. Even when the world, and their audience, have
moved on.
Drag races don’t mean what they used to. Once they were about cars gun-
ning it hard, obscenely burning rubber and fuel in a gloriously loud dash to a
finish line. Now they are a show about fashion.
This world has little room for these men—once television icons who ran
one of the most viewed shows across the world—who are now entirely out of
their depth. There is something to be said about them understanding their
own lack of significance. This is their penultimate adventure, they claim, but
there is little fanfare. There is, however, much fantasy.
Like in the book, we laugh at the characters more than we do with them.
This is what Britain has come to now. Three unwise men, daft as the UK’s poli-
ticians and as tone-deaf as their newspapers, bumbling across the world while
they still can. Rooting for these three feels like rooting for camaraderie itself. I
enjoyed Sand Job so much I wish it were their last go-around. Thank you, gen-
tlemen, for tilting at exotic windmills in shabbily customised supercars and
for always saying the wrong thing. Thank you for not knowing better. Thank
you for the memories—to say nothing of the cars.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about
killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.

K-drama is far from the real lives of Korean women
CHEAP
THRILLS
NISHA
SUSAN
I
know your eye is on Korea, no need
to tell you to look in that direction.
Back in 2014 when Euny Hong wrote
The Birth Of Korean Cool, the subtitle
went How One Nation Is Conquering
The World Through Pop Culture. If Hal-
lyu (“Korean Wave”) was in the middle
of its conquest back then, in the last
decade it has definitively hit the vici
end of the veni vidi vici plan. 2014 was
before Squid Game, before Parasite,
before billboards celebrating BTS went
up in Indore, before Chennai hosted
K-pop dance contests, before south
Delhi folks trekked to Ghaziabad
movie theatres for special screenings of
K-pop concerts, before The Vegetarian,
Cursed Bunny and Love In The Big City
and other Korean fiction became a sta-
ple of Booker lists. And it was well
before Korean dramas, original flavour,
no squid, became the happy place of
millions of people around the world.
I know you are looking Seoul-wards
and your gaze is warm but I wonder
whether you have the same difficulties
as I do in keeping Hallyu Korea separate
from real Korea where people live their
lives. I do, a little so every now and then
I like to read a few headlines from
MAKING AN
INQUIRY, NOT
A STATEMENT
The work of emerging
artists at Art Dubai
2024 leads viewers to
contemplate various
ideas of healing and
empowerment
Avantika Bhuyan
avantika.bhuyan@htlive.com
A
painting of a tree, laden
with tendrils, vines and
blooms, catches the eye.
Framed within an upside-
down jharokha (a stone
window), it seems suspended between sky
and earth, the sole sovereign presiding
over a vast empty landscape. Manjot
Kaur’s work,The Portrait Of A Tree In A
Jharokha, on show at Art Dubai’s Baw-
waba section, in her signature style, melds
the beauty of Indian miniature painting
with a compelling contemporary narra-
tive. The 35-year-old contemporary artist
from Chandigarh has always explored
speculative fiction, challenging human-
centred narratives.
“Manjot Kaur’s works explore what it
means to be human and what it means to
be non-human, and where these modes of
being meet and are at tension with each
other. Her paintings open up possibilities
for a post-gender and post-human world,”
explains Emiliano Valdés, curator, Baw-
waba and Art Dubai Commissions 2024.
Kaur, who is represented by Delhi’s
Gallery Latitude 28, is just one of the
Indian artists whose work Valdés is
excited to be featuring as part of the Baw-
waba segment of Art Dubai. Bawwaba,
which means gateway in Arabic, focuses
on emerging artists and is one of the most
compelling sections of the three-day fair,
which is on till 3 March at the Madinat
Jumeirah Conference and Events Centre,
Dubai. This year, the section is themed
around Sanación/Healing. Other artists
from India include Laxmipriya Panigrahi
(Anant Art), AVAF or Assumed Vivid Astro
Focus (Baró), Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai
(Blueprint12), Debashish Paul (Emami
Art), Manuel Chavajai (Extra),and more.
The annual fair has been showcasing
modern and contemporary works since
2007. The 17th edition, featuring over 100
presentations drawn from nearly 40
countries, continues to emphasise shared
histories in the Global South, while also
showcasing community-led narratives
and offering an alternative to Western-led
narratives of art. Many organisations and
institutions across Asia, and beyond,
choose the fair to reach a wider audience,
given Dubai’s location at an intersection
between the East and the West.
Moreover, people from all over the
This PDF was uploade To Telegram channel_https://t.me/Magzines_latest_Newspaper(send Me Message telegram ya WhatsApp This number 8890050582)
Korea. And if you have been reading the
occasional headline, you know that the
deeply romantic K-drama land is radi-
cally different from the everyday lives of
Korean women. And just as a viewer
from India, all the obstacles in front of
true love in drama land seems familiar,
as a woman from India, all the obstacles
in front of Korean women also seem
familiar.
If you read Cho Nam-joo’s 2016 novel
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , depending on
your fondness of realism as a genre, you
might be aghast or satisfied. The protag-
onist is the second of two daughters,
older than the much-awaited son
(sounds familiar?). School, college,
work, marriage, childbirth—it’s all
extremely grim. The novel spells it
out—Korean women have the cards
stacked against them from birth. The
book has sold over a million copies in
Korea. Now, I have a general allergy to
books that tell you the grim truth of a
gendered reality and vastly prefer con-
suming art and daydreams in which the
world is egalitarian and good-looking.
But it’s hard to look away when you read
news that a female K-pop star who said
she had read Kim Jiyoung got massively
trolled and threatened by male fans
(because how dare she?). This is the
kind of headline that is compelling and
again, familiar.
What is not familiar and I simply can-
not look away from is the next episode,
so to speak. Korean women have
responded to this situation with the 4B
movement, which started in 2019
(partly inspired, apparently, by the Cho
world, including a sizeable population
from the subcontinent, are choosing to
base themselves in Dubai. The fair
addresses such pluralities of cultures as
well through its programming, making it
an apt converging point for contemporary
galleries from India such as Shrine
Empire, Experimenter and Exhibit 320.
The theme of healing is pertinent in a
world that is still grappling with the
impact of the covid-19 pandemic, as well
as war and conflict, and the works exam-
ine the personal and the sociopolitical.
Valdés says the idea of healing is generally
positive, but the impact of our search for
a better relationship with ourselves and
the world on society remains to be seen.
“Sanación inquires into this relationship:
Is personal and spiritual growth necessa-
rily linked to a better society or has it been
co-opted by the individualism of the West
and is only an exacerbation of the self?”
says Valdés. “Art has historically been a
space for introspection, which, in turn, is
connected to spiritual notions but how are
these ideas connected exactly?”
THINK
Korean women are choosing being single over a life of following traditional gender roles.
Nam-joo novel). “B” here is an abbrevi-
ation for four words that start with bi-,
or “no”. The movement has a simple,
radical agenda —No Dating, No Sex, No
Marriage and No Children. Korean
women are actively and loudly choos-
ing single lives rather than being burnt
COURTESY GALLERY LATITUDE 28
The art on show explores such ques-
tions, looking at a series of practices,
which range from the deeply personal to
the collective, and resulting in a showcase
that is more of an inquiry than a state-
ment. Valdés hopes the art will prompt
visitors to draw their own conclusions
about how looking within might prompt
us to reconsider the way we relate to oth-
ers. “I believe that the way we treat our-
selves is our first political stance. Are we
empathetic? Are we compassionate? Are
we respectful?” he says.
The Bawwaba and the Art Dubai Com-
missions Programme both revolve around
similar ideas. While the Bawwaba focuses
on one-person presentations, the Com-
missions Programme has a series of per-
formances and activations during the fair.
Valdés cites the example of Guatemalan
artist Manuel Chavajay who draws from
his ancestral indigenous heritage to speak
about the importance of being connected
to one’s landscape and lineage in order to
deal with worldly issues. The artist’s self-
portraits show moments just after waking
up. According to the beliefs of his commu-
nity, this is the time when messages from
ancestors are transmitted to ‘aware indi-
viduals’. “This is an example of a practice
from non-Western cultures, and provides
a more rooted relationship with the
world,” says Valdes.
Another artist who is challenging set
norms around the body and intimacy and
who is part of the Bawwaba is Debashish
Paul from Bengal. The multidisciplinary
artist is known for his performances, and
uses site-specific photography to express
complex emotions and draw connections
between the body and the landscape. At
Bawwaba, Kolkata’s Emami Art is present-
ing his new drawings and photographs
along with sculptural costumes from a
recent performance. “Debashish Paul uses
ritual and performance to develop a high
sense of awareness with his body, his con-
text and his ideas. Movement and props
allow him to temporarily become crea-
ISTOCKPHOTO
out in a hypercapitalist society with tra-
ditional gender roles. This would
sound like one of those trend stories
you read in the international pages
with mild scepticism—nice photo but
really? Except, oh baby, there are no
babies.
(clockwise from top, left)
‘Turmeric’ by Manjot Kaur,
gouache and watercolour on
paper; a sculptural costume
and headdress by Debashish
Paul from a recent
performance, and his new
drawings and photographs.
The art on show looks at a
series of practices, which
range from the personal to
the collective, and resulting in
a showcase that is more of an
inquiry than a statement
SaturDay, 2 March 2024
Back in 1960, a Korean woman
would have had six children on an aver-
age. As of 2022, the birth rate became
0.78, the lowest in the world. And this
finally panicked the Korean establish-
ment. Instead of asking why women
were taking this position, they decided
to spend millions of dollars in propa-
ganda to get women back on the pro-
gramme. Propaganda is the only word
for it. Way back in 2016, the govern-
ment had the genius idea of publishing
online a birth map showing the num-
ber of women of reproductive age in
each district to shame low-achieving
regions; the website was shut down fol-
lowing a backlash.
Women have not budged and the
state’s panic about an ageing popula-
tion and dramatically declining fertil-
ity has continued. Given this situation,
it was disturbing to read about the
2022 national election which brought
an avowedly anti-feminist President
Yoon Suk-yeol to power. It was like
Andrew Tate, the controversial social
media influencer known for his misog-
ynistic content, had got all the votes.
But then isn’t that the case in most
right-wing establishments, a nice solid
bedrock of anti-women sentiment
upon which you add different toppings
and sauces?
This month, I was intrigued to read
new research that made Korean poli-
tics clearer and indicated where some
parts of the rest of the world might be
headed too. According to a Financial
Times analysis of Gallup data from
around the world, Gen Z is split starkly
tures through which he (re)thinks of the
relationship with himself and with the
world,” elaborates Valdés.
Another exciting and relevant section at
the fair is the digital one. In fact, Art Dubai
is the only international fair to have a ded-
icated digital segment. Benedetta Ghione,
executive director, Art Dubai, says artists
have always been among the first to exper-
iment with and embrace new technolo-
gies, and so it’s no surprise that this is the
third year they are presenting a digital
section. “The technologies around block-
chain, Artificial Intelligence and
Extended Reality (XR) are moving so fast,
and we felt it was important to create a
kind of bridge between what the artists are
doing, and the general public,” she says.
The visitors this year will see every-
thing from a show celebrating 10 years of
blockchain art presented by Dubai-
based collective MORROW to cutting-
edge robotics, AI and generative art.
“The idea of growing with the scene is
important, and we are launching a new
Digital Summit this year, bringing
together leaders in their fields to share
their expertise on where art and technol-
ogy coincide,” says Ghione.
While technology acts as a medium and
New Delhi 05
along ideological lines—boys on the
right and girls on the left. It explains
the wave that brought the current
Korean president to power. Back then,
the exit polls recorded that 58% of
women (in the 18-29 age group) had
voted for the progressive candidate
Lee Jae-myung while almost 59% of
men in the same age group had voted
for Yoon Suk-yeol. John Burn-Mur-
doch, the Financial Times columnist
who analysed the global Gallup data,
drew what he called a key insight from
political theorist Rosie Shorrocks.
Shorrocks has argued that religion
used to moderate women’s economic
left-wing tendencies but as religiosity
has become less important for younger
women, it has “led them to be more
left-wing in line with their economic
preferences”.
When I was in school, NCERT social
science textbooks had a very terse writ-
ing style—perhaps in response to the
vast millennia it had to cover over a few
grey pages. It did lead to some confu-
sion. For instance, I remember reading
a line that said men spoke Sanskrit and
women spoke Prakrit. I spent a lot of
time wondering how they spoke to each
other. (You can guess how good my his-
tory marks were from this revelation.)
Today, the idea that women and men
have been taught two different langua-
ges from birth does not seem that out-
landish.
Nisha Susan is the author of The
Women Who Forgot To Invent Face-
book And Other Stories. She posts
@chasingiamb.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY EMAMI ART
an aid in producing art, human thought
and creativity remains very much at the
heart of digital art. Alfredo Cramerotti and
Auronda Scalera, who are the curators of
the section this year, explain that the art-
ists address this tension and how it can be
experienced in daily life by from re-think-
ing notions of identity and the body in the
digital realm as well as rebalancing time
and awareness through virtual and phy-
gital experiences.
Stephan Breuer’s work, presented by
Espace Gallery, for instance, blurs the
lines between virtual reality and divine
consciousness, inviting viewers to explore
the transcendent through immersive
experiences. “Shirin Abedinirad’s trans-
formative installations at Sanji Gallery
beckon us to ponder the interconnected-
ness of nature, technology and spiritual-
ity. Through the incorporation of light,
digital technology and sound, Krista Kim’s
creations challenge viewers to contem-
plate their embodiment, well-being and
perception in a world increasingly shaped
by technology,” says Cramerotti.
For now, Art Dubai Digital remains a
platform for exploration, where art
becomes a catalyst for introspection, rein-
vention and societal transformation.
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 06 SaTurDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi TASTE

WHEN THE ‘SHABDEG’

ISTOCKPHOTO

TURNED BEET PINK FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

Reviving a lost Rampuri included a recipe of the Kashmiri shabdeg,

which is very similar to the Rampuri shabdeg
recipe in Bhopal except that the broth in his recipe was mixed
into the mince for the meatballs.
becomes a lesson in The most important ingredient in the Kash-
miri shabdeg is ver, a Kashmiri masala mix
understanding that which is added at the end. In Curry: A Tale of
food has to evolve and Cooks and Conquerors, author and food histo-
rian Lizzie Collingham writes that shabdeg
TEA NANNY
adapt to local tastes migrated to Awadh with the Kashmiri labou-

Tarana Husain Khan

rers in 1784 when Nawab Asaf-ud-daulah was
building the Bada Imambara in Lucknow—
the first food for work programme. While the
Time for tea to
large meat cauldrons bubbled all night super-

show its fun side

I
first came across a recipe for Rampuri vised by the local cooks to feed the workers in
shabdeg while flipping through the the morning, the shabdeg edged in and
cookbook Shahi Dastarkhwan writ- became quite popular in Lucknow.
ten by Latafat Ali Khan Rampuri, a Shabdeg also migrated to Delhi, a version
Rampur khansama, in the 1940s. described in Sadia Dehlvi’s book Jasmine And Aravinda Anantharaman
“Rampur style of shabdeg is very popular Jinns. There, it is a kofta curry with whole car-

and famous. In my opinion there is no
shabdeg as delicious and elegant in all
of Hindustan,” the book said. I
turned to members of the former
Rampur royal family who had
tasted the now forgotten dishes
of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh.
They remembered the Rampuri
shabdeg, a meat and turnip stew
with origins in Persian cuisine. It
had dropped off menus some-
time in the 1960s because of its
elaborate and complex cooking
method—a fate shared by many
other royal dishes.
Shabdeg became one of the 40
lost dishes of royal Rampur cuisine
that my team of Rampur khansamas
and I planned to revive under the
Forgotten Foods project funded by
the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, a UK organisation that funds
cultural research across the globe.
Shabdeg had not found mention in the
three 19th-century Persian manuscripts writ-
ten by Rampur gourmands, which are pre-
served in the Rampur Raza Library and
formed the core of my research. Aslam, a Ram-
pur khansama with whom I was working on
the revival project, remembered cooking
shabdeg with his ustad, Munna Bhai, when he
was a young apprentice in the 1970s. He
assured me that it could be done. Aslam is
unlettered but has a tremendous memory and
can immediately imagine a dish. According to
him, the real recipes are not found in books
but are passed on “seena dar seena”, an oral
repertoire.
For shabdeg, crushed goat trotters and
bones have to be cooked through the night till
they are nearly disintegrating to create a broth
that forms the base of the Rampuri shabdeg.
Aslam turned up at my place one day bearing
a pan filled with thick white bone broth and we
set to work. The turnips were peeled, forked,
boiled in turmeric and salt water to reduce
their pungent taste, and then deep fried. They
had to be soft enough to absorb the flavours
and yet stay firm. Then we made the meat-
balls—the mutton mince was flavoured with
aromatics like cardamom, mace, cinnamon,
nutmeg and ginger, garlic, fried onions, and
fashioned into meatballs and fried. The tradi-
tional shabdeg recipe calls for colouring the
turnips in a way that the person eating it can’t
distinguish between the meatballs and the
turnips––the USP of Rampuri shabdeg. Along-
side, mutton pieces were cooked separately in
a spice and turmeric masala with milk added
as tenderiser; fried and crushed onions,
almond paste and cream were added after the
meat was done.
The dish was finally put together by adding
the meatballs, the turnips and the all-impor-
tant broth to the meat curry. The pot was then
sealed and left to slow cook for over an hour on
coals. The shabdeg curry is rich, has a thick
consistency and a deep redolence. The recipe
Aslam and I tried out from Shahi Dastarkhwan
in my turned out to be superlative.
I had been under the impression that shab-
deg was a Lucknowi dish because I recalled
eating it on a wintry night at a Lucknowi aunt’s
place. (The shabdeg we ate that night was a
runny, fragrant curry with lemon-sized meat-
balls and turnips.) But my research revealed
that at least the Indian version of the Persian
dish was from Kashmir. Food historian Push-
pesh Pant, author of The Indian Cookbook, has
I
rots and/or turnips. Dehlvi explained that the
dish used to be cooked overnight but an
abbreviated version is prepared nowadays.
Soon Aslam and I were ready to take our
favourite dish among all the ones we had
revived to the world. The Rampuri shabdeg
was the showstopper at the grand finale of
the four-day Rivaayat Rampur Food Festival
at the Jehan Numa Palace Hotel in Bhopal
last year. The hotel’s chefs and I, along with
my team, were showcasing reimagined and
recreated dishes of royal Rampur cuisine.
Apart from shabdeg, we made dishes like
kundan qaliya, do gosht pulao, Taj kababs and
adrak halwa.
But we came across an unexpected hitch. I
was going over the dinner menu with Aslam in
the hotel kitchen when head chef Jeevan came
in. He had just seen the description of the
dish—a meat and turnip stew. “Bhopalis don’t
like turnips,” he said, and suggested potatoes
as a replacement. I reasoned with him. The
turnips, soft and soaked in the curry, were a
counterbalance to the meatballs. The texture
of potatoes was completely different; shabdeg
was not a variation of alu-gosht.
I pressed on with my case of turnips in shab-
deg through the morning of the grand finale
but to no avail. “Maybe we can consider substi-
tuting turnips with carrots or beetroot,” said
the head chef. True, beets had a similar tex-
ture, but the curry would turn pink.
“I think it would look amazing,” he said. He
The ‘shabdeg’ is had always insisted on yellow, green, red and
traditionally made brown colours in the dinner spread. A dark
with turnip. ISTOCKPHOTO pink would be brilliant. So, we cooked shab-
deg with beets that night and named it “Shab-
deg Chuqandari” (chuqandar is the Hindi
word for beetroot). When we had finished
cooking, I closed my eyes and took a bite. The
earthy taste of beets had intruded into the fla-
vours of the curry in a way turnips would not
have. The beets were soft and had absorbed
the flavours of the curry; in fact, Aslam had to
add some tomatoes to balance the sweetness
of the beets. It was a disorienting pink mush.
The diners found the new shade on their
platter an intriguing innovation. I had a culi-
For ‘shabdeg’, crushed goat nary epiphany—recipes move through time
and borders, transforming to become our
trotters and bones have to own. The revival of shabdeg had created a rei-
be cooked through the magined version.
night to create a broth that
Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and a food
forms the base of the historian. She is currently working on a research
Rampuri ‘shabdeg’ fellowship with the University of Sheffield, UK.
was in Guwahati in January to attend an event celebrating
200 years of Assam tea. There were sessions on topics that
the industry is preoccupied with these days. 2023 was not
a good year for the global tea industry. It’s struggling with low
prices, adopting technology, improving soil health to tackle
climate change and dealing with an oversupply of black tea.
Brands need to rethink how they market tea.
Interestingly, of the several cups of tea I sampled at the
event, no two were similar. I had some classic Assam orthodox
black tea from storied estates like Amgoorie, Harmutty and
Dejoo. There was a fiery and sharp black tea blended with bhut
jolokia and pepper by Assam-based Aromica Tea. I even
embraced the instant chai premixes that are proliferating
these days. Wagh Bakri, Goodricke and Chaayos offer a sweet-
ened range while TeaFit has unsweetened premixes. The
highlight had to be the tea brewed in a nifty new invention, a
chai machine called cha.i by Pune-based Carafe Werk. Cha.i,
which is not out in the market yet, uses AI and can be pro-
grammed to make everything from green tea to chai.
Returning from Assam, I have been thinking about what
can be done to support the tea industry. Buying directly from
farmers who have taken to retailing online, and choosing bet-
ter quality tea even if it costs a little more than the supermar-
ket fare are some thoughts that come to mind. However, our
problem is that we are habituated to a single tea—CTC with
milk and sugar.
One of the speakers at the event talked about tea being fla-
voured water, well suited for hydration. Another spoke of a
campaign being planned by the FAO’s Intergovernmental
Group on Tea, to promote it as the go-to cup for well-being.
Yet another spoke about all the cool tea stuff trending in China
beyond the classics—milk teas, fruit teas and ready-to-drink
options. In a nutshell, everything they said seemed to be about
displaying tea’s amazing versatility. Clearly, there’s a need to
overhaul tea’s image, and reimagine how it will be branded
and marketed, keeping new consumers in mind.
With a terroir-focused approach, brands like Araku, Blue
Tokai and Subko transformed the image of Indian coffee.
Recently, I was at the Maverick & Farmer café in Bengaluru
when a coffee session, titled Let’s make filter coffee sexy, was in
progress. It focused on brewing, flavours, hacks, adaptation,
even peanut butter filter coffee!
Tea needs to relinquish its image as an beverage for the
aged and show its fun side. It’s about time too, when you look
at the choices in India. There’s tea grown on mountains like
Darjeeling, the Nilgiris and Kangra, or plucked in the valley,
like in Assam; crafted by artisans like the compressed teas
from Woolah, or machine-processed like our CTC; freshly
harvested in spring like the prized first flush, or aged over time
like the puerh. There’s a tea for every kind of palate, with many
ways to brew, and numerous ways to enjoy them.
Tea Nanny is a fortnightly series on the world of tea.
Aravinda Anantharaman is a Bengaluru-based tea blogger
and writer who reports on the tea industry. She posts @Ara-
vindaAnanth1.

How to get Insta-ready golden-brown mushrooms

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NANDITA IYER

the world’s most prized gucchi (dried plus taxes. Ingredients

Himalayan morel mushrooms, ₹600 for 200g button mushrooms
DOUBLE 20g), which is foraged from forests in
the Himalayan slopes. The brand Food
SECRET INGREDIENT
MUSHROOM SOUP
1 small onion, finely chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
TESTED Library on Amazon has a few varieties of Serves 4 Half tsp chilli flakes
dried mushrooms such as shiitake, oys- Pinch of crushed black pepper
N A N D I TA ter and black fungus (wood ear). These Ingredients 3-4 tbsp grated cheese (processed or
IYER dried mushrooms are rehydrated in Quarter cup milk powder cheddar)
slightly warm water for at least 15 min- 1 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp dried mixed herbs
utes, then squeezed, chopped and sau- 6 cloves garlic, sliced Quarter tsp salt

N
ai kodai. It’s the cute name for
mushroom in my mother tongue
Tamil and translates to “dog’s
umbrella”. Being strict vegetarians, my
grandparents and parents don’t con-
sider the meaty texture of mushrooms
as vegetarian. As it was not cooked at
home, my exposure to mushrooms
started rather late in life, in my early 20s.
Later, I discovered button mush-
rooms are the vanilla flavour of the
mushroom world and there’s a whole
universe waiting to be explored. There’s
no dearth of choice, especially in big
metros. Loyal World Market in Benga-
luru’s Whitefield stocks oyster mush-
rooms, shimeji brown, shimeji white,
enoki and portobello varieties; Kaze
Living, which delivers in the National
Capital Region (NCR) has cremini and
portobello. A couple of years ago, I tried
the assorted box from Green Apron,
which delivers exclusively in Benga-
luru. They have the best range of exotic
varieties such as lion’s mane, elm oyster,
king oyster, pink oyster, pioppino and
the shimeji varieties. An assorted box
starts from ₹650 for 250g. They also sell
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teed. The water is full of umami flavour
so make sure to use it in soups or stews.
The best way to clean mushrooms is
by wiping them with a damp cloth. If
there is too much dirt, give them a quick
wash with cold water in a colander and
wipe dry thoroughly. A common issue
home cooks face is that the mushrooms
refuse to turn golden brown and glis-
tening, like one finds on Instagram and
in fancy restaurants.
Follow this very simple rule and you
will be dishing out golden-brown
mushrooms like a pro. Use enough but-
ter or olive oil (restaurants never skimp
on this) in the pan. Once the pan is hot,
add just enough mushrooms such that
each has its own space. This is manda-
tory to get them to brown instead of
getting them to steam in an over-
crowded pan. Adding salt at the time of
cooking will make the mushrooms
release water and turn them soggy.
Season with salt once nearly cooked
and golden brown.
Meatier mushrooms like portobello
and shiitake lend themselves beauti-
fully to slow cooking like braising. To
(left) Secret ingredient mushroom soup; and stuffed button mushrooms.in air fryer.
braise mushrooms, heat oil or butter in
a pan and sear the fresh mushrooms
(whole, halved or sliced, depending on
the size) in the fat at moderately high
heat, until golden brown on the outside.
Aromatics like bay leaf, sliced onions
and garlic can be sauteed along with the
mushrooms. Add a liquid like wine or
broth to the pan at this stage to pick up
all the browned bits, which is where the
flavour lies. Season with salt, pepper,
and herbs and spices of choice. Cover
and simmer for 15 minutes until the
mushrooms are tender. Serve as a side
with rice, pasta or mashed potatoes.
Braising or slow cooking amplifies
the savoury umami flavour in the mush-
rooms. If you are not one for slow cook-
ing, then there are many speedy ways to
prepare them. Enter the air fryer: Toss
mushrooms in a little oil and cook in a
preheated air fryer (180-190 degrees
Celsius for 4 minutes) until golden
brown. Add them to salads, wraps or
sandwiches.
Speaking of mushrooms in sand-
wiches, one of the best I have had is the
Smoked Shroom Sando at Neighbors in
Assagao, north Goa. Stuffed with mush-
rooms flavoured with smoked paprika,
this sandwich lives up to its name and is
worth the rather steep price tag of ₹625
400g mushrooms (mix or one kind),
chopped
1 veg stock cube
Salt as needed (depends on stock cube)
Method
In a heavy pan, over a low flame, dry
roast the milk powder until golden
brown. Remove to a plate and keep
aside. In same pan, heat oil. Sauté gar-
lic for 30 seconds. Add chopped mush-
rooms and sauté for 3-4 minutes until
almost cooked. Add crumbled stock
cube and keep stirring until well
mixed into the mushrooms, roughly
for 2 minutes.
Let this cool. Add to blender along
with 1 cup of water and roasted milk
powder and blend to a smooth puree.
Return to pan, add enough water to
thin as per your liking. Taste and adjust
the salt. Simmer for 2 minutes. Remove
to bowls and garnish as per your liking.
Serve with crackers or garlic bread.
STUFFED BUTTON MUSHROOMS
IN AIR FRYER
Serves 2
1-2 tsp oil
Method
Wipe the mushrooms clean and pull out
the stems. Finely chop the stem. In a
bowl, prepare the stuffing by combin-
ing the chopped stems with onion, gar-
lic, chilli flakes, black pepper, cheese,
herbs and salt.
Spray or wipe the mushrooms with a
few drops of oil. Press 1-2 tsp of the pre-
pared stuffing into the cavity of the
mushrooms.
In a preheated air-fryer (190 degrees
Celsius), air-fry for 5-6 minutes until
mushrooms are golden and cheese has
melted.
Serve hot.
This can also be done in the oven for a
larger quantity of easy appetisers.
Double Tested is a fortnightly column
on vegetarian cooking, highlighting a
single ingredient prepared two ways.
Nandita Iyer’s latest book is The
Great Indian Thali—Seasonal
Vegetarian Wholesomeness. She posts
@saffrontrail.

‘India
is at the
heart
of my
work’
Christian Louboutin on his
show at Paris Fashion Week
and the strength that
comes from loving oneself
Pooja Singh
pooja.s@htlive.com
T
he Paris office of Christian
Louboutin is buzzing with
activity for the showcase of
the brand’s fall-winter col-
lection at the ongoing Paris
Fashion Week, on 4 March.
“It’s quite a vast collection,” says Chris-
tian Louboutin, 61, the mind behind the
brand, over a video call. “I have gone a bit
flashy this time.”
Since opening his first store in the
French capital in 1991, Louboutin has
built a brand that goes beyond the red-
carpet favourite of red-soled shoes. The
brand, which has a minority investment
from the Agnelli family (owners of Fer-
rari and Juventus football club in 2021),
sells bags, belts, accessories, make-up
and toys for pets—all exhibiting his flair
for the dramatic.
Growing up, Louboutin used to draw
sketches of shoes, inspired by the fashion
of showgirls in Paris. As a teenager, he
visited Egypt and India, returning with
sketches of elaborate high heels inspired
by the landscape and people. At the age of
16, certain that he wanted a career in shoe
design, he interned at Paris’ famous thea-
tre, Folies Bergère, and created shoes for
the dancers. He later went on to work with
Charles Jourdan, Chanel, Yves Saint Lau-
rent and Roger Vivier.
He mentions India often while speaking
to Lounge, not because he has two stores in
the country—one in Delhi, which opened
in 2012, and a second that opened the year
after in Mumbai; because he has a joint
venture with Aditya Birla Fashion and
Retail Ltd; or because he presents an
annual India-special Wedding Edit collec-
tion. India has influenced his personality,
his design, his craft and his sensibility, he
says. Edited excerpts from the interview:
Tell us a little about the Paris collec-
tion.
The collection is inspired by New Mex-
ico, one of my favourite places. You will
see a lot of vibrant colours; it’s kind of
Western cowboy but more on the Ameri-
can Indian side of cowboy. It’s a vast col-
lection for men, women, kids, even pets.
We have sizes from very small to very
large. There are leather goods as well.
Is this the first time you are present-
ing such a big collection?
Perhaps. It’s quite big.... Sometimes you
are working on something, and it’s quite
easy to edit and remove styles that are
stronger than others. This time, we have
more categories, and it was difficult to
select and separate. We are growing the
(category) families. So, it came kind of nat-
urally to the design and selection process.
What’s your creative process like?
I isolate myself. It’s important for me to
stay in a city that I know well, otherwise I
will be out, eating and exploring the place.
For instance, I can’t work when I am in
south India. I want to see everything, eat
everything… just know the place from
every corner. But I can design a collection
in Italy, Egypt or Rio. I know what I will
eat, where I will go.
Secondly, I don’t get what the French
call “l’angoisse de la page blanche”, the
anguish of the white page (essentially,
writer’s block). I like to draw, even when I
don’t necessarily have something on my
mind. Just drawing lines and correcting
them reminds me of the simple joy and
pleasure of drawing. Once you are in that
zone, it all becomes easy. And sometimes
my drawings depend on the things I have
seen and heard, things that are floating in
my mind.
Do fashion trends on social media
define the way you approach your
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design process?
No. As much as I love
fashion, when I sketch it’s
more to do with style than
fashion… It’s more about
attitude than fashion. The
only time I think about
fashion is when I am work-
ing with someone. For
instance, we did a collabo-
ration with Maison Margi-
ela for their January cou-
ture show (in Paris). John
Galliano (the creative
director of Maison Margiela)
had this vision of the kind of
characters he wanted to
build for his show, and we
had a discussion of how to
translate that vision down till
the shoes. But even then,
nothing was trends-based or
what people are liking now. If you are a
designer, you either make it in an indus-
trial way and incorporate trends, or you
create what you want to, your vision, and
hope people like it. Trends are more for
the industry in general.
Any examples of how the travels in
India have influenced your work?
So many. Just this last collection. It has
some gold metal. Now, there are many
ways of thinking of gold. When I was
working on it (the collection), I was think-
ing of warm gold, like Indian gold,
because, for example, the 1920s gold is
very shiny and lavish. I wanted Indian
gold, a bit hammered, a bit less shiny,
almost close to copper.
In the same collection, we have some
pieces with embroidery that has colour-
ful stones, which are more milky and
Mughal-era inspired than bright, shiny
Harry Winston. I am also working on a
pair of glasses for men that are very
Mughal. In fact, it’s going to be called
Mughal glasses. India is at the heart of
my work.
Why do you like India so much?
I think it has to do with my childhood.
There used to be this cinema hall near my
school in Paris that specialised in Egyptian
movies and Bollywood movies. This was
the 1970s. I remember seeing a lot of Hindi
films from Qurbani to Sholay, and I was fan
of Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar, Hema
Malini. I became very interested in Indian
cinema, the dreamy Bollywood side. The
colours, the dancing—they spoke to my
14-year-old self who was already drawn to
singing and dancing. At that time, I had
this desire to design for showgirls; they
STYLE
(from top) Christian Louboutin;
from the ‘Wedding Edit’ collection;
a young Christian Louboutin (left)
with friends during an India trip;
and the Ginko Pump.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
French films were all about
existential crises which bored
me. My interest in India came
from watching Bollywood
films, not from gods, not
embroideries, not food.
were the rage then in Paris.
I also liked the elegance in Satyajit Ray’s
Bengali films. French films were all about
existential crises which bored me. So, my
interest in India came from watching Bol-
lywood films, not from gods, not embroid-
eries, not food. I have become a bit of a
foodie (laughs), but now.
You have been creating the India
‘Wedding Edit’ collection for over six
years. Why only weddings?
Because I have been doing a lot of wed-
dings, not necessarily Indian. It’s interest-
ing because for a bride, when it comes to
shoes, she gets very excited. As a designer,
it’s a good start. (The shoes are) part of a
wardrobe where everything is permitted
and there is no limit. So, you have to trans-
late that level of excitement into a shoe.
More so, if you are creating for an Indian
bride because weddings in India are major
productions. You can be more playful
with the design and colours. In France, a
wedding is, maximum, a one-day affair
and mostly shades of white. I
think India respects colour
because they see colour
around them, the bright
skies, the greenery.
What drives you?
That’s easy, my kids
(laughs). Their school is
next to my office, so it’s eas-
ier to get to work. When
you love what you do, it’s
not too difficult to wake up
and head to work. In gen-
eral, I am a very positive
person. A friend says this
one thing, which might
sound vain, but it’s true.
She says, when you love
yourself you are able to
love others too. My
grandma kisses herself at
night before sleeping to
show her love for her-
self. She also says that
when you love yourself
it gets transferred to others. This has
become a ritual for me. I kiss my fist at
night before sleeping by myself. Thoughts
of doubt don’t just come in the morning;
they are worse at night and when you have
your own quiet company and know you
are loved by your own self, it’s a better
place to be in.
Who are you when you are not a
designer?
I’m a father, that takes most of my time.
It’s also my favourite part.
What makes a perfect shoe?
That’s a difficult question. It has to do
with the equilibrium between the heel
and the face of the shoe. Whether it’s
pointed or rounded, it has to be in propor-
tion with the heel. Rest is
all cosmetic, you can
change the colour,
the body as
much as you
want.
SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi 07
Skip trends,
create your
own look
Beauty experts provide simple make-up tips and
techniques for people with mature skin
ISTOCKPHOTO
Mature skin can be drier, and layering too many products is not the best idea; and
(below) actor Zeenat Aman often talks about enhancing one’s features, instead of
hiding them.
Dhara Vora Sabhnani
U
nderpainting, blinding highlighters, loose powder all over the face—social
media generates new make-up trends almost every week. Many of these
techniques are aimed at a younger audience interested in hiding their age
rather than highlighting their unique features. Finding make-up for those over
the age of 40 that makes them feel great can be tricky. Mature skin is typically
drier, and layering too many products, whether it’s foundation, primer or lipstick,
is not the best idea, given they might make pores and fine lines more visible.
Make-up artists suggest simple techniques that can be used everyday to help
those with mature skin look their best.
PREP TIME
No amount of concealing and layering of products will help the skin if it is not
hydrated enough, a rule that applies to all kinds of skin at any age. Using excess
product can be an issue if one has mature skin, for it can settle into creases and
pores and highlight them.
“When we are younger, the skin’s elasticity is at its best, hence the prep can be
basic. But as we age, the skin loses a lot of its natural barriers, making prep cru-
cial,” says Mumbai-based celebrity make-up artist Billy Manik. “A good skin rou-
tine is a well-primed skin (essentially, well moisturised and hydrated). That’s a
golden rule.”
Next comes the base, and it can be tempting to pour creamy foundation straight
on to the skin, as you see influencers do. Stop right there, cautions Manik.
Less is more with foundation, she says, insisting that the key is “hydration
and light, well-blended make-up. Instead of going for a thick base or a matte
finish, opt for a high-quality hydrating product and focus on blending with the
lightest layers and try using it only where needed, such as on dark/red spots
or pigmentation.” She also prefers lightweight foundations to thick founda-
tions as does Mizoram-based make-up artist and trainer Mazari Thangluah.
Thangluah often uses Estée Lauder Futurist Hydra Rescue Moisturising
Makeup Foundation and PTI
Chanel Les Beiges Water
Fresh Tint, as they hydrate
the skin. When it comes to
using concealer for correct-
ing and coverage, Thangluah
suggests going lightweight
again, with a focus on sheen
to get that dewy and translu-
cent effect. She prefers
hydrating concealers like
Laura Mercier Real Flawless
Weightless Perfecting Con-
cealer or Elf Hydrating Camo
Concealer when working on
mature skin.
POWDER POWER
Celebrity and entrepreneur
Kim Kardashian might have
popularised baking, or setting
the make-up with extra loose
powder that can be dusted off
later, but too much powder
can emphasise skin dryness.
“Using a little luminance
and hydrant base helps. All
skin is different so use pow-
ders in limited quantity, and only if needed, not because it is a trend,” suggests
Manik. “I would also keep contour on mature skin very limited. More like a
shadow, no harsh lines.”
Thangluah prefers pressed powders over loose powders for sagging skin. “If
loose powders need to be used, I recommend using light brush techniques instead
of packing it on,” she says.
For blush, opt for cream-based ones. They give a more natural blush. Powder
works well only in one area—filling in brows, which get sparse as you grow older.
COLOUR ME PRETTY
Some beauty products really sing on mature skin, like matte eyeshadows. If you
want to add shine to the eyes, skip glitter. “Go for products that are jet-milled
(finely milled) in case you want some shine,” says Manik, whose go-to eyeshadows
are by MAC and Patrick Ta. If you want a lifting effect around the eyes, go for
a thin winged eyeliner, and don’t go too heavy on the mascara.
For lips, Thangluah says creamy lipsticks and liners are the best bet. Matte
lipsticks tend to exaggerate lip creases. If you really want a matte lip, look for
formulae that give a soft matte finish that don’t accentuate the creases as
much. “If you are going to use soft matte, prep your lips thoroughly by apply-
ing a balm,” says Thangluah.
HIGHLIGHT WITH CAUTION
Online make-up tutorials may promote shimmery priming oil and highlighters
but in real life, too much highlighter, much like foundation, primer and every-
thing else, is a no-no. Thangluah prefers not to accentuate mature skin using
highlighters. “Subtle highlights just on the high points are enough,” she says. She
generally uses Hourglass and Becca highlighters for their natural effect. “It is
important to enhance the beauty of ageing skin with lightweight and subtle
make-up, and not transform them with modern, thick, and heavy trends defined
by youth.”
Dhara Vora Sabhnani is a Mumbai-based journalist.
 08 SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi COVER

Delivering a
knockout
Nikhat Zareen, Lovlina Borgohain, Saweety
Boora, Nitu Ghanghas. These four world
THE OLYMPIC DREAM
Men’s boxing had been a permanent fixture on the Olym-
pic roster since 1904, barring the 1912 Games in Stock-
2021, after winning the
bronze medal at the Tokyo
Olympics.
holm because the sport was banned in Sweden at the time. You wouldn’t have
champions have changed the script for Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Sugar Ray
Leonard and Lennox Lewis were all Olympic champions
known it to watch her in
Tokyo, dancing fearlessly in
women’s boxing in India through their feats before they took the pro boxing world by storm.
But until 1996, Great Britain—the home of the first
the ring, always eager to
draw first blood. The Indian
of grit, determination, and a cussed will to women’s boxing club that was formed in 1920 in Lon-
don—had banned women’s boxing. Women were denied
boxer used every inch of her
5ft, 10 inches frame to close
win. Lounge celebrates their rise to the top a boxing licence in the UK till 1998 on the grounds that
“pre-menstrual tension made women too unstable to
the gap and land punches on
her opponents. In the quarter-
box”. But women’s boxing competitions started cropping final, she registered a 4-1 win
up around Europe and the Americas and Asia in the 1980s. over 2018 world champion
Deepti Patwardhan The first women’s boxing federation was formed in Chen Nien-Chin, an opponent
Miami, US, in 1989. The sport could not be ignored. In she had lost to in three previ-

N
ikhat Zareen likely didn’t want to sound 2009, the International Olympic Committee announced ous meetings. The dazzling
like a 19th century British writer, but here that women’s boxing would debut as a medal sport at the win guaranteed her a bronze
it was. “Every mother is worried about one 2012 London Games. medal.
thing,” she says, “Her daughters’ wed- Back in India, we already had the woman for the “I won bronze without a lot of
ding.” The story she is narrating is set far moment. In the inaugural edition in London, women preparation,” she says. “We lost
away from the genteel trappings of Jane Austen’s Britain. competed in only three weight categories: 51kg, 60kg and some time due to covid. It was my
It features a young Zareen, who, against the wishes of her 75kg. Mary Kom, a five-time world champion by then, first Olympics as well, so maybe I
mother, had attended her first boxing lesson and returned made the semi-finals of the 51kg event to win a bronze was nervous. I was disappointed
with a bloody nose and a black eye. medal and ensure that India was on the podium on what not to win gold.”
“When my mother (Parveen Sultana) saw me, she burst was a historic day for the sport.The same year Lovlina Missing out on gold had
out crying. She said, ‘This is why I didn’t want you to take Borgohain, only the second Indian woman boxer to win become something of a theme in
up boxing.’ She wanted to keep their child safe and happy. an Olympic medal, started her journey in the sport. her career. Borgohain had
My mother used to be scared for me, in case I get beaten “My father (Tiken) used to work in tea gardens in repeatedly proved her mettle on
up and ruin my face. Anyway, we are four sisters, and she Assam,” says Borgohain, who hails from the remote vil- the world stage, taken down
was worried about our marriage.” lage of Baromukhia, 3km from the nearest town of Barpa- some famous boxers. At big
For Zareen, it was more about proving a point. A few thar in Assam’s Golaghat district. “Once, he had returned tournaments, she would end up
days before the incident, Zareen, a 100m and 200m home with some mithai (sweets) that was wrapped in an in the medal bracket, but not
sprinter back then, had been training at the local stadium old newspaper which had an article on Muhammad Ali. gold, never gold. This happened
in Nizamabad, Telangana, where a multi-sport meet was My father narrated his story to me. That’s when I first at the 2018 World Champion-
taking place. Zareen, who was accompanied by her father heard of boxing.” It sparked her imagination. ships in Delhi, then again, a
Mohammed Jameel, noticed that girls were participating Before that, like her sisters, twins Licha and Lima, Bor- year later, at the 2019 World
in every sport, apart from one: boxing. gohain was a Muay Thai (Thai boxing) practitioner. But Championships in Ulan-Ude,
“Boxing bas ladke hi karte hai kya (Is boxing a male since the sport is not part of the Olympic programme, she Russia.
sport)?” she asked her father. He explained that women was keen on the switch. She started boxing in 2012, when Meanwhile, the 69kg wel-
did box, but that’s not what society expects of them. celebrated boxing coach Padum Boro took notice of her terweight category, which
Good girls didn’t box. In 2009, with her father as her first talent during SAI (Sports Authority of India) trials at the had been introduced as an
coach, Zareen set out to challenge these archaic, patriar- Barpathar Girls High School. But it meant she would have experiment at the Tokyo
chal notions. to move away from home, go to Guwahati. Games, has been scrapped
The feisty 27-year-old is now the face of India’s rise in “People would talk about the fact that I would have to from the 2024 Paris
women’s boxing. At the Women’s World Championship go to a city, stay and train alone in Guwahati. My studies Olympics. With that gone,
held in Delhi in March 2023, India won four gold medals: would take a back seat. They would taunt my parents,” she Borgohain stepped up to
Nitu Ghanghas in minimum weight (48kg), Zareen in light recalls. Even before that, her mother was regularly belit- the 75kg middleweight
flyweight (50kg), Lovlina Borgohain in middleweight tled for having three daughters. With only one earning category. “75kg is
(75kg) and Saweety Boora in the light heavyweight (81kg) member, the family struggled to make ends meet. To tougher,” she says. “The
category. make sure that Borgohain had money for her training and women competing in
It equalled India’s best performance in the competition, nutrition, her sisters quit Muay Thai and later joined the 75kg are stronger, more
when they had won four golds at the 2006 World Cham- workforce. powerful. In Europe or
pionships, which was also held in Delhi. Women’s boxing An introverted young woman, Borgohain was struck by America, they do better
was a nascent sport back then, and 180 athletes from 32 homesickness after she started training at the Netaji Sub- in higher weight catego-
countries had participated in 2006. The sport has grown has Regional Centre in 2012 at the age of 14. Even though ries. Traditionally, Asians
since it was included in the Olympic roster at the 2012 she had some experience in combat sport, Muay Thai is do better in lighter weight
(from left) Boxers London Games. And the World event in 2023 saw 324 completely different from boxing in terms of technique. categories.” In her new
Jasmine Lamboria, boxers from 65 countries compete. In 2006, M.C. Mary Which meant her coaches had to break her down before weight class, she had to
Nitu Ghanghas, Nikhat Kom had led the charge of the home team with a gold in they could build her up. play smarter, work on her
Zareen and Lovlina the 46kg category. If she had lit the beacon, the current “I was not self-confident earlier getting into the boxing defence and counters. It
Borgohain. PTI crop of champions is striving to make sure it burns on. ring. When I got into the ring, I was scared,” she said in took some time and cost
some tournaments before
she found her footing.
And that’s how she
finally reached gold. Dur-
ing the 2023 World Cham-
pionships in Delhi, Borgo-
hain showed that the warrior
in her had not dimmed, as she
defeated Australia’s Caitlin
Parker 5-2 in the final to clinch
the elusive gold. “Before that I
would get bronze in every compe-
tition. It was a very special
moment,” says Borgohain, who
doesn’t feel out of place in the mid-
dleweight category anymore. “Right
now, I feel fitter. At that time (69kg),
it was a struggle to maintain weight
for that category. I wouldn’t be able
to eat properly. Maybe that was one
of the reasons I shifted to a higher
weight category. That if I eat better,
perhaps I will play better.”
She sealed a berth for the 2024 Paris
Games, her second successive Olympics,
by winning silver at the 2023 Asian
Games. “Competing at an Olympics was
my father’s dream. Winning a medal at
an Olympics was mine,” she says. “This
time, I want gold.”

GOLD STANDARD
Pursuing excellence is like oxygen
for athletes. They need the re-as-
surance of medals; they are
driven by the prospect of
gold. Whatever it takes. (from top) Nitu Ghanghas, Saweety Boora, Nikhat Zareen and L
Whatever it takes. That’s Champions in the minimum weight, light heavyweight, light flywe
what Saweety Boora kept
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R STORY
telling herself dur-
ing the 2023
World Champi-
onships. She had
won a silver at
the tournament
in 2014, nine
long years ago, at
Jeju City, South
Korea. Now the
World Champion-
ships was being played at
home, this was her chance. The
only snag in the plot? She had just
about recovered from a groin injury
and was putting extra time in rehab. And
then, just ahead of the tournament, she
came down with a stomach infection.
“I was scared that if I tell someone on the
team about it, they will ask me to stay out,”
says Boora, who talks as fast as she rains
punches. “If I let go of this opportunity, it would
have spoilt my life’s work.
“I used to feel very tired after training,” she says
about her campaign. “Endurance used to be my
strength, but I didn’t have that in Delhi. I was getting
tired after one round. I was taking medicines for the stom-
ach pain. But there was a voice inside me telling me now
or never! So, I just struggled through. I went into every
round wanting to win. My target was to go hard in the first
two rounds, so I was a little at ease in the third.”
While Boora, 31, breezed through the first round, earn-
ing a 5-0 win over Belarusian boxer Viktoriya Kebikava,
she was thoroughly tested in the next two bouts. After a
hard-fought win over Emma-Sue Greentree of Australia
in the semi-final, she overcame former world champion
Wang Lina of China 4-3 in the final to seal the gold. First
came relief, then the tears. “It took me nine years of hard
work to change that silver into gold,” she says. Fourteen
years in all, she reminds me, since she started boxing.
“Do you know how I started?” she asks excitedly. Boora,
who hails from Hisar, Haryana, was always bold. She
proudly narrates that she would beat boys bigger and
taller than her in wrestling and started off as a kabaddi
player. “Bachpan se hi hatti katti thi (I was well-built from
childhood),” she guffaws.
In 2009, she and her elder brother had travelled with
their maternal uncle to the SAI centre in Hisar to try out
for some sports. “During the trial I was facing a
girl who had been boxing for some time,”
she says. “As soon as I entered the ring,
she punched me in the face. I couldn’t
see anything. My face was com-
pletely red. When the bell for the
first round went off, I came and sat
in my corner. My brother taunted,
‘dikha diye tujhe din me tare,
waise to bohot banti hai tu (she
has shown you stars in the day).
Now see if you can beat her.’
As soon as the second round
started, I threw an upper cut,
so hard that she fell down.
That was the first knockout
of my life.”
One of the reasons she
had taken up boxing was
because Boora’s father
Mahender Singh, a
state-level basketball
player, wanted her to
take up an individual
sport. Her mother
worried for her,
but always
backed her.
“Earlier we
used to train in
open farmlands.
It develops stam-
ina and strength
in legs. Those were
rustic methods of
training. In the farms,
the soil used to be very loose so our
feet would sink in. We had to sprint in that. I would
work harder than what the coach would tell me.
Sometimes I would work so hard that I would vomit
blood,” she says, gleefully diving into the details of
her boxing journey.
But Boora chokes up when talking about her
parents, and why she always felt the need to go over
and above in training: “Some of my relatives had
disowned my family because I was boxing. They
told my parents that, ‘nothing good will come out
of it, girls only go there and get spoilt. She will run
away with someone; she will bring bad name to
the family.’ Those thoughts would swirl in my
Lovlina Borgohain are the reigning World Boxing head. I was the first girl from my village to go
eight and middleweight categories, respectively. out and train. Succeeding was absolutely
important for me.”
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Nikhat Zareen during the Mahindra IBA World Women Boxing Championships in Delhi.
Boora is one of the few Indian boxers who has per-
formed consistently in the heavier weight categories.
Apart from the two world championship medals, she also
has a silver (2015 Wulanchabu), bronze (2021 Dubai) and
gold (2022 Amman) at the Asian Championships. She
does walk the talk.
YOUNG AND RESTLESS
In the boxing ring, nowadays, Nitu Ghanghas rarely
retreats. But there was a time when she was ready to give
it all up.
Ghanghas was born in the cradle of Indian boxing: Bhi-
wani district in Haryana. The place is fondly called “Little
My mother also used Cuba” for producing a number of international boxers and
came into the spotlight as one of its residents, Vijender
to be scared for me, Singh, won India’s first medal in boxing at the Olympics.
in case I get beaten a bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games. Soon after that, his
up. Now when I tell coach Jagdish Singh opened a boxing academy exclu-
sively for girls.
her I am hurt, she That is where Ghanghas’ father, Jai Bhagwan, enrolled
says...just put some her in 2012, to help her channel her energy. Though a dili-
ice on it. I am glad gent student, Ghanghas wasn’t a standout in the early days
that in my own little and considered quitting the sport.
“I live in a village (Dhanana), which was 20km away
way I have changed from the academy and I used to travel by bus. There were
that mindset. times when I would miss the bus and so couldn’t make the
training daily,” she says. Missing whole days of practice
NIKHAT ZAREEN sessions set her back.
“My performance was suffering. I told my father I won’t
go. Financially also we were struggling. I have a brother
and sister. My parents had to look after our school fees, my
The women diet, boxing kit, travelling allowance. My father even took
a loan, despite that there was a shortage of funds. I could
competing in 75kg feel the pressure building on my parents, so I thought I
are stronger. In should drop out.”
Europe or America, But her father, a Class III employee at the Haryana Vid-
han Sabha, was keen on her boxing. He took unpaid leave
they do better in for three years and ferried her to and from training on his
higher weight scooter. While supervising Ghanghas’ training and diet,
categories. he farmed a little piece of land they owned. Bhagwan also
Traditionally, Asians racked up loans as high as ₹6 lakh.
Her career took an upturn once she was selected for the
do better in lighter National Boxing Academy (NBA) in Rohtak, which is a SAI
weight categories. centre; she now had access to top notch training and
nutrition. At the NBA, they also oversaw the rehab of an
LOVLINA BORGOHAIN injury, a second-grade pelvic tear, that she had endured
for nearly three years. Results were quick to follow: the
southpaw won the 2017 Youth World Championships in
Guwahati, then defended her title in 2018 in Budapest.
Some of my relatives “Almost every youth tournament I competed in, I won
gold. That gave me a lot of confidence and motivation,”
had disowned my says the 23-year-old. Her first major medal at the senior
family because I was level was another gold, at the 2022 Commonwealth
boxing... I was the Games. She silenced a boisterous crowd in Birmingham
by beating home favourite Demie-Jade Resztan 5-0 in
first girl from my the final.
village to go out and “I was playing in the same weight category as Mary
train. Succeeding Kom. I felt like a responsibility to continue her work, and
prove that I could also do well in this weight category,”
was absolutely Ghanghas says. That year, she also competed in the World
important for me. Championships but went down in the quarter-finals. It
only strengthened her resolve to do better at the world
SAWEETY BOORA
event in 2023.
“The big mistake I made in 2022 was that I took my time
to suss out the opponent. But this time I was aggressive
right from the start. I played a very attacking game.” Speed
and accuracy are paramount for boxers in the lighter
weight categories. And Ghanghas delivered a heady mix
of the two in her first three bouts which ended in RSC
(Referee Stops Contest). In the final, she secured a 5-0 win
over Lutsaikhan Altantsetseg to clinch India’s first gold at
the 2023 World Championships.
All the gold medallists were handed a winners’ cheque
of ₹82.7 lakh. It went some way in helping Ghanghas, the
youngest of India’s world champions in 2023, and her
family pay off the loans. All the sacrifices they had made
as a family had been worth their weight in gold.
BATTLE READY
The boxing hall at the National Institute of Sports in
Patiala has been abuzz with activity since November.
Indian boxers, including Olympic-bound Borgohain and
Zareen, have been in the national camp for almost three
months. Vacation? No. Family time? Not yet. At the
entrance, a digital display counts down the days to the
SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi 09
COURTESY BOXING FEDERATION OF INDIA
Paris Olympics. The countdown has been ticking in
Zareen’s mind since the end of the Tokyo Games.
Choosing boxing had been an act of defiance. She had
picked up the gloves despite resistance from her extended
family and a conservative community. When she started
boxing, Zareen was the only female boxer in the district.
She honed her skills by sparring with boys and believes it
jumpstarted her career. Within a year, Zareen had won
the state championships. In 2011, she won gold at the
Youth World Boxing Championships. By 2015, she was in
the India senior national camp.
Back then, Indian boxers didn’t quite have the army of
coaches and trainers. In fact, Indian boxing was in turmoil
from 2012-16 over administration issues. As the federation
was suspended, boxers couldn’t represent India on the
international stage and had to fund their training and
competitions. Once Ajay Singh took over the reins as the
Boxing Federation of India (BFI) chief in September 2016,
things started to get better. Boxers now have better facili-
ties, access to scientific training programmes and coach-
ing personnel on par with the best in the world.
Even as Indian boxing was transforming, Zareen was at
a standstill. Apart from the shoulder injury that kept her
away for a year in 2017-18, Zareen spent a lot of time under
the giant shadow cast by Mary Kom since the two com-
peted in the same weight category. She rebelled against
it at times, most famously in 2019 when she requested for
a trial against Mary Kom to compete at the Olympic quali-
fiers for the Tokyo Games. The BFI had given Mary Kom
a last-minute exemption from the trials because she had
won the World Championships the previous year.
Depending on which side of argument you stand, the
move was either irreverent or brave. But how often do we
see a young woman take on the establishment and a leg-
end for what she believes is her right?
Zareen would rather move on. “I always believe what-
ever happens, happens for a good reason,” she says of the
years spent on the sidelines. “All those years that I
waited…if I had got those opportunities instantly maybe
it would not have stoked my hunger. The wait was worth
it, it lit a fire within me.” She finally got her chance at the
2022 World Championships. A ravenous Zareen gobbled
up the competition in the 52kg event, winning all five of
her matches, four of which were against southpaws, with
a unanimous 5-0 verdict to clinch the title. After beating
Thailand’s Jutamas Jitpong in the final, Zareen told the
press: “Aj final hai, aaj hi ke din history create karni hai
(Today is the final, today I have to create history): That’s how
I got myself ready for today.”
Her time on the sidelines have also made Zareen a can-
nier boxer. She knows when to bite down, and when to
step up. Making the most of her experience, the Indian
also clinched gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Despite dropping down to the 50kg category—she
mainly made the switch because the 52kg weight class will
not feature at the Paris Games—Zareen arrived at the
2023 World Championships as the favourite. Of the Indi-
ans competing, she was handed possibly the most exten-
sive draw.
“Even though I was the world champion, I was not given
a bye,” she says. “In my first world championships I was
the underdog, now I was the poster-girl. The crowd was
there to support me. It gives a different kind of confi-
dence. I used to push myself. If so many people had paid
to come and watch me, I had to give my best.”
Six bouts, ten days, that was Zareen’s schedule in Delhi.
She started off with an RSC in the opening round; then
toppled the No.1 seed, Algeria’s Roumaysa Boualam, in
the second. Zareen wasn’t quite as dominant this time
around, but she still packed a punch. By defeating Nguy n
Th Tâm of Vietnam in the final, Zareen became the first
Indian boxer to win back-to-back world titles. As soon as
the referee lifted her arm, bound by lean muscle, Zareen
let out a scream. Outside the ring, away from the spotlight,
her mother wept tears of joy.
“The Delhi World Championships was the first time
my mother was watching me live,” says Zareen, who won
bronze at the 2022 Asian Games to qualify for Paris
Olympics. “It was a great feeling being a world champion
in front of her. My mother also used to be scared for me,
in case I get beaten up. Mummy is now chill. Now when
I tell her I am hurt, she says don’t worry just put some ice
on it. I am glad that in my own little way I have changed
that mindset.”
Deepti Patwardhan is a Mumbai-based sportswriter.
 10 SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi
The
real
road to
heaven
The stunning yet desolate remains
of Dholavira are a lesson in the
impact of climate change
Vayu Naidu
T
he full moon is the timeless
ambassador of the Rann
Utsav. Dhordo in the Rann
of Kutch in Gujarat opens
its ice-white vastness of
gritty, granular, dazzling salt to thousands
of visitors from November till the end of
February every year. The sun smoulders
gold-orange-red in the west. The full
moon rises ivory amidst the blue, turning
gold then silver in the night sky. There is
the exhilaration of natural phenomena,
akin to the feeling of seeing the northern
lights of Iceland’s winter solstice. Thank-
fully at Kutch’s Rann, the desert wind
turns a soft chill, not freezing.
The Rann Utsav tent city has every con-
ceivable package for cyclists, sexagenari-
ans, honeymooners, extended family
reunions, budget travellers with arrange-
ments for delicious vegetarian dinners
and lunches, tour coaches, hybrid trans-
port and camel carts, living up to the eco-
village dream. The Contemporary Art Gal-
lery offers perspectives by new artists,
saluting Gujarat’s inclination for vibrant
colour against blanched deserts. The craft
bazaars slake the thirst for ajrakh textiles
and ethnic design-hungry generations of
tourists bargain with shop owners. From
Dhodra, our next stop is Dholavira and on
the highway via Khavda, we encounter
“The Road to Heaven”.
This is no euphemism. The 32km
stretch cuts through the Rann of Kutch
lake, offering unmatched views of the lake
and the endless salt beds. The whiteness of
the salt has the brightness of snow.
There’s no one to police or regulate this
IN THE ANCIENT CITY
OF THE SHOGUNATE
Kamakura, the former
political capital of
Japan, is an enchanting
melange of history,
spirituality and culture
Anita Rao Kashi
D
ense concrete clusters fall away,
giving way to wide open spaces
with scattered habitations as the
train leaves Tokyo. Quite unexpectedly,
the snow-capped tip of Mount Fuji comes
into view for a few seconds as the train
rushes along, heading south to Kamakura,
the former seat of the shogunate, the
hereditary military dictatorship in Japan
that was the de facto ruling establishment
from 1192-1867. Of this, the Kamakura sho-
gunate lasted from around 1192-1333.
An hour later, the train pulls into Kama-
kura, a maze of narrow lanes with pretty
houses sitting cheek by jowl with some 80
temples and shrines, in the Kanagawa
prefecture. For over a century in the
medieval period, Kamakura was the
reigning city of Japan.
A short walk from the station takes me
to the Hase-dera temple, one of Kama-
kura’s three most important temples.
Along the way, my guide points out several
old temples that date to the seventh and
eighth centuries and reels off their history
as proof of the city’s ancestry. It is only in
the late 12th century that Kamakura
became the seat of the shogun ruler. The
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32km single lane stretch with diggers con-
tinuing their metallic dinosaur scoop of
salt, soil and sea as they widen the road to
two lanes. Laying this single strip was a
four-year project that was completed last
year. In the distance, cowherds lead their
cattle, walking for miles, some on their
mobile phones, as they steer herds of
nearly 50 sure-footed Indian bulls with
the big horns that seem the living resem-
blance of the bull on the seals of Mohenjo-
daro. We pass the military outpost of the
India-Pakistan border, Karachi visible in
the hazy distance.
The white desert is a non-religious pil-
grimage to silence, salt, sand and reflec-
tion. On the sand-desert side, meandering
like painted stick figures in a prehistoric
cave painting, black water buffaloes wan-
der against waves of dry sand in search of
The main shrine in Hase-dera; and (left) the great Buddha of Kamakura.
Kamakura shogunate thrived till the 14th
century, when the power centre moved to
Kyoto. During the Kamakura period, the
city was a bustling centre for not just poli-
tics but also culture, arts and religion.
Once dislodged from its position of pre-
eminence, Kamakura never regained its
former glory, yet the plethora of temples
and shrines retain an inexorable attrac-
tion. My own visit bears this out as I climb
the steps of the Hase-dera temple. The
sprawling temple premises are spread
over various levels filled with lush green
gardens, water bodies with koi fish, little
shrines and various devout offerings. It is
not crowded but there is a substantial
number of tourists and devotees, yet it is
peaceful, the quiet broken only by strains
TRAVEL
Rann Utsav is held from
November till February;
(below) a cattle herder in
Little Rann of Kutch.
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ISTOCKPHOTO
Why aren’t migrations caused
by climate change today not
taken more seriously?
Engaging in and musing on
these ideas would be
the real road to heaven
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANITA RAO KASHI
of lilting sacred music, chants and bells.
What overwhelms me a bit is the profu-
sion of stone and cement statues of various
sizes—ranging from a few centimetres to
a few feet—dedicated to Jizo, the delight-
ful, baby-faced deity who is the protector
of women, children and travellers.
A winding path through all these ele-
ments leads upwards and opens into a
large space with a beautiful brown and
white structure that houses the main
deity, Hase-kannon or the Bodhisattva of
Compassion. According to legend, the
temple dates back to early eighth century,
built when the locals found a massive Kan-
non statue made from wood that had
washed up at Nagai beach nearby. The
story goes that a monk called Tokudo
a water hole. It’s dazzling—both for the
stark scenery and the sun that sizzles and
sparkles on the salt. Driving and stopping
we spot the grey flamingos in droves, ped-
alling the salt fray. You could, if you are
extremely lucky, spot the highly endan-
gered Great Indian Bustard on the clumps
of marshes just before the wide salt lands.
You see the white salt desert on one side,
and on the other, flat desert sand without
a shrub or scrub. Occasionally, a wild ass
comes into view. The sensation is of varia-
tion in bareness; Rothko experimenting
with blue, shades of latte and white.
To see the vanishing point for 32km is
in itself heaven, amid realities of bulldo-
zers turning up the earth and two vendors
walking a mile across the salt lake to set up
a stall on the roadside with Bhuj embroid-
ered fabric, the mirrors winking in the sun
found a camphor trunk so large that he
carved two giant Kannon statues in early
eighth century. One was installed in a
shrine in Yamato province. The other was
set afloat and turned up near Kamakura.
The story seems perfectly plausible as I
gaze at the deity rising over 30ft. Gilded in
gold, there are many details etched into
the façade, including multiple heads rep-
resenting the various stages of enlighten-
ment. Under the temple is a cave with a
low, narrow winding path. It is musty and
cold and a bit claustrophobic, but large
Buddhist carvings on the wall and hun-
dreds of Jizo replicas scattered through-
out work very well as distraction.
Once I am out, I wander to the terrace
adjoining the main temple to get a fill of
Dholavira, which is now a Unesco World Heritage Site.
amidst orange, pink and black thread.
After an hour of an eerie, empty yet
wondrous landscape, the cluster of villa-
ges, home mostly to cowherd families,
comes as a surprise. Some children are
going to school, pre-teen girls in home-
embroidered clothes fetch water in steel
tins. And then, bang! a sign for Dholavira.
DETECTIVES OF THE PAST
It’s 28 degrees Celsius with a swirl of fine
dust in the gentle breeze. Amrit, our
guide from the national museum at Dho-
lavira, takes us in Hindi back to
2500BCE. We trace layers of excavations
in the last century, and my memory of
reading R.C. Majumdar, H.C. Raychaud-
huri and K. Datta’s An Advanced History
Of India comes flooding back. Early
archaeological expeditions discovered
Indus Valley terracotta seals, amphora
and jewellery in pre-Partition India. Post-
independence, excavations in India took
place in three phases: 1968, 1972, then
again in 2000. Dholavira, now a Unesco
World Heritage Site, hosts the Harappan
dwellings that are the penumbra of the
Harappan civilisation.
The excavations indicate a detective
story that has a thriller element of disap-
pearances as well. A farmer, while tilling
the soil some metres away from where we
stand, found pottery pieces in the earth
churned up by oxen driving a plough in
the 1970s. Swift action by archaeologists
resulted in tracing flint, beads, pottery
and wheat husk 20ft deep, speaking of
three generations of people and their
dwellings. Flints and chisels, working
tools, found in the different digs and com-
pared reveal workmanship that is similar
to Mohenjo-daro.
A north face with a sports stadium-sized
wall of stones lays bare a seating area for
10,000 people. Within the walled city are
the remains of a fortified castle with a bai-
ley and ceremonial ground, revealing a
township that had robust trade and indus-
try. There are rainwater harvest houses to
the north, east and south of the citadel at
different gradients. Of the tiered housing
system, what remains are the chieftain’s
bathing chamber, stairwells and water
outflow systems.
In the remains of the round dwellings,
it is poignant to see the sitting stone,
where wheat was ground, and marked the
stunning views of the Sagami Bay in the
Pacific Ocean, the wide panorama serv-
ing as an antidote to the enclosed space
of the cave.
A short walk north of the temple takes
me to the nondescript entrance of the
Kotoku-in temple. A path leads to a bare
sprawling ground, in the middle of which
rises a giant Buddha. The sheer size,
spectacle and the unexpectedness takes
my breath away.The Kotoku-in temple,
also known as the Great Buddha statue
and Daibutsu, is one of the most recog-
nisable Buddhist temples in Kamakura,
and in Japan. As the initial astonishment
abates, I walk up for a closer glimpse of
the bronze statue of Amitabha Buddha,
the one of infinite light.
centre of the house. It is not impossible to
see that they once used the beadwork and
the clay utensils that continue to be used
by the Banni communities—a continuity
of living of the past in the present. The
stone walls and paved road to the water
troughs are sophisticated with mortar
made from dung, wheat chaff and clay.
These are ruins but there is no ghostly
chill of devastation. It is clear that this was
a thriving city with possibly four genera-
tions of dwellers who made their mark
with fortifications and the amenities for a
trading township.
What do we make of it now? The tone
of history books was undoubtedly
fuelled with the excitement of excavat-
ing the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation.
The books unravelled a highly civilised
community, marvelled at it because it
was possibly deemed “primitive”, of the
past. Older discussions about why these
settlements were deserted centred
around disease and plague, and not a
story of a people vanquished by an exter-
nal enemy. As Amrit brings us back to
2024, he explains how many mounds of
soft fine earth were removed to reveal
these bare stone walls and with it come
layers of understanding.
“Climate change” was not a term used in
the 1946 edition of Advanced History… that
I read. Today, environmental meteorol-
ogy engages with consequences of climate
change, resulting in a picture of no rain-
fall, a global megadrought, dying cattle
and trade depleting a prosperous settle-
ment to extinction. In the expanse of
stones in Dholavira is a lesson in what hap-
pens if we ignore changes in seasonal rain-
fall patterns and natural phenomena,
which wipe out food systems and ways of
living. As the water dried up, they reorga-
nised their large cities and moved towards
into smaller settlements, closer to water,
finds a recent University of Cambridge
study published in Nature. And moved
again. And again. It’s a story that is so simi-
lar to what is happening to communities
across India and the world. Why aren’t
migrations caused by climate change
today not taken more seriously? Engaging
in and musing on these ideas would be the
real road to heaven.
Vayu Naidu is with the Centre for Cul-
tural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at
SOAS, London, and writes historical fiction.
Rising more than 13m and weighing
almost 100 tonnes, it is hollow and people
are allowed to wander inside. Created in
the mid-13th century, it was originally
gold-plated. Now largely greenish owing
to the oxidisation of the bronze. My guide
tells me the statue is highly regarded since
it originally stood inside a temple but the
structure was washed away in a tsunami in
the late 15th century though the statue has
steadfastly stood since in the open air.
After a morning of treading hallowed
ground, I needed a bit of lightness. A short
bus ride to the north-east of the town
brings me to Komachi Street. A bright red
tori or ceremonial gate stands at the
entrance to the 350m street. On either
side are restaurants, boutiques, cafés, tra-
ditional Japanese sweet shops and kimono
and umbrella shops. It is completely
pedestrianised and buzzing with people.
Most seductive are the delicious smells
wafting from roadside stalls and I fre-
quently stop to sample sweets, bean paste
cakes, fried mushroom croquettes, and
savoury snacks on sticks.
At the other end of the street, the noise
drops dramatically as it leads towards the
entrance of the picturesque Hachiman-gu
Shinto shrine, belonging to the Minamoto
shogun. Going back to the mid-11th cen-
tury, it is dedicated to the deity of martial
arts. I wander around looking at the little
plaques with wishes or prayers hung by
the devout on large wooden frames. The
plaques swing and sway in the gentle
breeze; the faithful believe the wind car-
ries their pleas to the kami, Japanese spir-
its or deities. It is as endearing as the Jizo.
As I head out of the temple in the fading
light, I hear the clacking sounds of the ema
(wooden plaques) as they bob in the
breeze. It feels like the kami have
descended and are browsing through the
wishes and making note of the requests. I
regret not having left my own, but I come
away hoping the powers that be will grant
my wish of returning some day.
Anita Rao Kashi is an independent jour-
nalist based in Bengaluru.

‘FILM ITSELF IS
A CHARACTER’
Raam Reddy on shooting his second feature, ‘The Fable’, on 16mm, and why the setting
always comes early in his outline and feeds into absolutely everything
Trisha Gupta
R
aam Reddy was 26 when
his directorial debut Thi-
thi (Funeral) premiered at
the 2015 Locarno Film
Festival, winning several
awards on the international film festival
circuit and the national award for Best
Kannada Film in 2016. A marvellously
deadpan tragicomedy about three genera-
tions of men responding to the death of a
patriarch, Thithi was set in co-writer Ere
Gowda’s village of Nodekopplu in Karna-
taka’s Mandya district.
Now 34, Reddy has made a second fea-
ture strikingly different from Thithi in
terms of cast, language, setting and tone.
The Fable features Mumbai-based actors
like Manoj Bajpayee, Deepak Dobriyal and
Tilottama Shome, has dialogues in English
and Hindi, is shot on 16mm, and unfolds in
the shadowy glades of a fruit orchard in
Uttarakhand. Set in 1989, it’s about an
English-speaking business family not dis-
similar to Reddy’s own—except that the
man of the house (Bajpayee) spends a lot of
time surveying his surroundings, wearing
a pair of wings. The Fable substitutes Thi-
thi’s gentle philosophical realism with the
surreal and mysterious, exploring the fam-
ily’s transformation after fires begin to
break out on their estate.
Lounge spoke with Reddy at the
recently concluded 74th Berlin Interna-
tional Film Festival, where The Fable had
its world premiere. Edited excerpts:
The settings of both your films are
very different: a chaotically busy Kar-
nataka village and a vast, quiet Hima-
layan estate. What role does place
play in inspiring your work?
A huge role. Place always comes early in
my outline and feeds into absolutely every-
thing. My novel It’s Raining In Maya (2011)
is set in a fictitious town inspired by my
years in Delhi University’s North Campus.
I lived in Malkaganj. For Thithi, it was the
Britain’s literate punk revivalists’ album of love
FIRST
B E AT
SANJOY
N A R AYA N
R
ecently, Joe Talbot, vocalist and
frontman of the fiercely angry
post-punk British band, IDLES,
donned a new hat. He narrated a bed-
time story for CBeebies, the BBC-
owned free-to-air broadcast channel for
children. The story, Under The Love
Umbrella, was a tender little tale about
how wonderful a feeling love can be. For
those familiar with the IDLES’ and Tal-
bot’s ferocious music with literate yet
aggressive lyrics that deal with society,
life, and, importantly, politics, the
sound of him gently reading a bedtime
story for CBeebies’ target audience,
which is children aged six and under,
can come as quite a surprise.
As much a surprise as the IDLES’ fifth
and newest album, TANGK, might have
been for fans of the band. Five years ago,
when IDLES had just begun to be
noticed around the world—with much
acclaim, I might add—I had written in
this column about how they marry the
anger and irreverence of punk with
well-structured musical compositions
and highly literate lyrics that often com-
prise forthright and uncompromising
This PDF was uploade To Telegram channel_https://t.me/Magzines_latest_Newspaper(send Me Message telegram ya WhatsApp This number 8890050582)
village. Here it’s the mountains, because
they have an inherent magic in the air.
In ‘Thithi’, there was a real village.
But in ‘The Fable’...
It’s fictional.
So, was the germ of this film the set-
ting?
Actually, it was genre. The magical ele-
ments I have experienced in very moving
ways in literature, I wanted to translate
them into cinema. Then the setting: I
spent three months in the mountains. The
narrative structure comes from what story
the place wants me to tell. Thithi was
very... humorous? This time I was excited
by the challenge of holding attention
through mystery.
‘The Fable’ combines a real world
with the surreal. How did you
decide what those magical elements
would be?
I would love to clap on a pair of wings
and fly. Or be able to communicate with-
out words. I always wanted to be part of
that heightened reality. It gets a little
indulgent, but I wanted to abide a little in
these dreams, in a very pure way.
Do your scripts start as novels?
My novels look more like films scripts: I
think in cuts. But yes, this screenplay was
quite literary. I used language to create
moods that had to be executed in the
audiovisual domain. Quite hard to do if you
Joe Talbot of the British band IDLES, in June 2022.
views on contentious issues such as the
unbalanced state of world, immigration,
inequality, elitism, and cultural biases;
and of how their songs, mainly written
by Talbot, contain deep references to
history and society, particularly relating
to Britain.
The spittle-spraying anger that
marked the way Talbot delivered his
lines, part spoken word, part song,
CULTURE
have a lot of specifics.
Talking of speci-
fics: why fires?
When I was in the
mountains for the
first time, I went to
fight a forest fire.
And I like allowing
life to guide my sto-
rytelling hand.
You mean, it’s like
magic: the fire
happening while
you were there.
Exactly. Fire was
also exciting at the
narrative level: it’s the perfect crime
(there’s no way to know where a spark fell
in a pine forest) as well as the perfect cap-
sule to see how an unknown accident
affects a social ecosystem. Fire also signi-
fies many things, like regeneration.
Destruction is not always negative. It also
brings forth the new.
You have two songs, which seem cru-
cial to the mood.
Not just mood, but meaning. The lyrics
move me to tears each time, even in the
edit room. Shivoham says you are not your
body, or your mind: you are pure con-
sciousness. This is the deepest part of our
philosophy and I connect with it deeply.
As does the family. It takes them into a
GETTY IMAGES
quickly became IDLES’ hallmark and it
was a large part of what got the band its
fans across the world. In a short span of
time, IDLES have grown significantly in
popularity. Their albums Joy As An Act
Of Resistance (2018) and Ultra Mono
(2020) both reached No.1 in the UK
album charts, demonstrating their com-
mercial appeal. In the US, their multiple
tours have got them a solid fan base,
(clockwise from top,
left) Raam Reddy; stills
from ’The Fable’; and
Manoj Bajpayee.
‘The Fable’ substitutes
‘Thithi’s’ philosophical realism
with the surreal, exploring
the family’s transformation
after fires begin to break
out on their estate
THE LOUNGE
LIST
Five tracks by IDLES
from ‘TANGK’ to
bookend your week
1. ‘Gift Horse’
2. ‘Roy’
3. ‘A Gospel’
4. ‘Dancer’
5. ‘Grace’
drawn by the energy of their music and
their engaging stage presence.
At the core of IDLES’ live performan-
ces is Talbot. He throws himself into
every performance, moving around the
stage with a raw and unbridled inten-
sity. He often jumps, crouches, and
interacts with the crowd, creating a con-
tagious energy that feeds into the entire
experience.
His voice is a powerful instrument,
capable of delivering both aggressive
screams and soulful crooning.
That’s why TANGK could come as a
surprise for many IDLES’ fans because
it shows a shift, not a very subtle one, by
the band towards a more melodic and,
SaturDay, 2 March 2024
spontaneous meditation. The purity of
that space, from which the song comes, is
why the family were worthy of this story.
Naiharwa is about reaching the land of the
enlightened. Both have been sung by my
sister-in-law (Hindola Aguvaveedi). She
would sing these to us after she married
my brother.
How much does the film draw on your
own life?
I have spent time in a coffee estate, I
have seen those relationships as a child
and I wanted to question them. So the soul
of the film is personal, it’s my voice as an
artist. But the body—the north Indian set-
ting, the narrative elements, those are my
craft as a filmmaker. I almost don’t want to
be over-familiar with the place. Like in
Thithi—it wasn’t my village.
In ‘Thithi’ you worked largely with
non-actors. Here you have well-
known actors.
Unlike in Thithi, where we wrote roles
based on real-life charac-
ters, here I wanted to
write and then find actors
who could inhabit those
key roles, who could
transform. But there are
many non-actors: the vil-
lagers, the army men, the
gardener, the maid. They
served different purposes
within this tapestry.
Was the combining of
actors and non-actors
ever a challenge?
These are the challen-
ges I love. That dynamic
was exciting to me: having
a veteran like Manoj-ji do
scenes with Ravi Bisht,
who is a Pahadi villager, is
talented but never acted
before. Or Tilottama
(Shome) going into the non-actor world
and playing a villager. But mostly we
had an actor schedule and a non-actor
schedule.
I tried with this film to bring opposites
together. So it is realistic but also magical;
it is 16mm, 1980s in look and feel, but it’s
also VFX-heavy. (The fires, but also a lot of
the nature is VFX.)
Why did you want to shoot on film?
Multiple reasons. One, it was the
medium in use in 1989. Making it look like
it was shot then, that authenticity was
exciting. I also believe in a kind of transfer-
ence of consciousness in art; I think film
carries our emotions in a tactile way, more
probably, more accessible sound.
Whereas Talbot has often sounded
menacing and enraged on many of their
past albums, on TANGK, there are
songs that are distinctly soft, tender
even. On A Gospel, he sounds sad and
gentle as the song opens with the words:
“Lay me down/ On the floor/ I’ll take the
news better/ I am already torn.” It’s a love
song, about broken love. For those of us
who got hooked to IDLES by way of
albums such as Brutalism (2017), Joy As
An Act of Resistance, or even Ultra Mono,
it was the acerbic wit, and the hardcore
in-your-face angriness that drew us to
them. In contrast, TANGK can, at least
sometimes, seem mellow. Heck, the
album seems to also be about love, long-
ing and break-ups.
On Roy, Talbot, 39, who identifies as
bisexual, has a chorus that goes: “Baby,
baby, baby/Baby, baby, babe/ Baby, baby,
baby/ I’m a smart man, but I’m dumb for
you.” It’s quite an evolution for a band
that has, in the past, blasted xenopho-
bia; skewered politicians; and roasted
the elite in their lyrics. Have IDLES
gone soft, then?
There is, for sure, a change in tone in
TANGK. Some of that is because of the
music. The band recruited the English
producer Nigel Godrich, famous for his
association with bands such as Radio-
head, Beck, and Arcade Fire, for the
album and its sound is IDLES’ most
ambitious and striking work yet. Punk’s
urgent idiom of sonic rawness has
given way to a more swooning, melodic
New Delhi 11
potently than the digital medium. Film
itself is a character, the grain dances from
frame to frame. I do still photography on
film, so that was the entry point.
Creating this visual world was a beauti-
ful collaboration with debut cinematogra-
pher Sunil Borkar, and debut production
designer Juhi Agarwal. I love working
with first timers in key roles—it’s not like
I am so far away from being one—because
their visions are so uncoloured, coming
straight from the hearts.
Would you speak a little about the
film’s politics, and class in it?
First of course there’s the colonial hang-
over. And class has always fascinated me.
It is a cross-sectional analysis of a planta-
tion society. There is the family at the core.
Then the manager who is loyal to the fam-
ily but is a local himself, so he mediates
between worlds. Then there are the villag-
ers whose livelihoods are based on the
estate by choice, or at least within the
choices available to them. There is a loving
relationship between Dev (Bajpayee) and
his workers, but there is an obvious dispar-
ity. There is a shot in the film where the
workers are walking home, under suspi-
cion—and you cut to the family at a dinner
party.That’s just how much of India is. And
then there are the nomads: they surrender
to nature, they don’t speak.
The nomads seem to represent a dif-
ferent sensibility from your real-
world concern with class. They seem
almost fictitious.
Totally, almost like elves. They had to
stand apart. They are part of the question-
ing of our rights. Can we inhabit nature,
filled with trees and creatures, without
being persecuted?
Your shooting schedule was dis-
rupted for two successive summers
by the pandemic. What do you do as a
filmmaker when something stops a
creative process like that?
You stop, internally as well. I make one
film at a time. But I am a compulsive crea-
tor. I’m into photography, music, philoso-
phy, poetry, songs—not for an audience,
yet.
Do you think of ‘The Fable’ as politi-
cal allegory?
It is part of the layers, but you can
decide what you think is the core. As an
artist, that’s exciting to me—to leave
room for my art to be inhabited.
Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and
critic, and professor of practice at the Jindal
School of Journalism and Communication
and electronic soundscape on TANGK.
And on songs such as the aforemen-
tioned A Gospel, Grace, and Dancer,
Talbot’s vocals can seem less angry and
more full of gratitude and celebration.
The signature passion and energy of
the band remains, though, and that is a
good thing.
TANGK can disappoint some fans of
IDLES who might miss the menace and
confrontation that their earlier albums
conveyed. Yet, the new turn that their
music has taken on the album could be
timely. By the time the band released
Ultra Mono in 2020, a tiny bit of same-
ness seemed to creep into their music.
The obligatory rawness evoked a sense
of deja vu. This is something the band
might have realised earlier.
On 2021’s Crawler, which is an out-
standing album, probably because their
“punk” sound was beginning to grate,
the band tried incorporating other gen-
res: soul, electronic, and rock. And
instead of a trademark explosive opener,
MTT 420 RR (named after a powerful
motorcycle), the first song on that album
was softer and more contemplative.
On TANGK, IDLES take that evolu-
tion further up a notch or two. The lyr-
ics lean positive; the music is denser and
more crafter; and the mood is more
introspective. Those can’t be bad things
for an album, can they?
First Beat is a column on what’s new
and groovy in the world of music. He
posts @sanjoynarayan
 12 SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi BUSINESS LOUNGE

Vidur Gupta
STIRRING THE MARKET The co-founder of Third Eye Distillery aims to create a house of spirit brands
that disrupts the liquor space in India and abroad
Illustration by Priya Kuriyan
Jahnabee Borah
jahnabee.b@livemint.com

t’s 7pm on a Wednesday, and

I some would say it’s gin o’clock.

But in the Mumbai offices of
Third Eye Distillery, co-founder
Vidur Gupta asks for a black cof-
fee and settles down for the interview.
Third Eye Distillery is in expansion
mode—in India and abroad—and Gupta,
India needed a
who leads the investments, international
business and new projects, has spent the
past month travelling.
homegrown gin
The company owns gin brand Stranger
& Sons, the liquor brand Short Story Spir-
its with rum, vodka and gin in its portfolio,
with botanicals
and the cocktail consultancy Countertop
India. It also holds a 51% stake in the tonic
and mixers brand Svami Drinks. Estab-
lished in 2018, the company is run by
from here. The
Gupta and his two co-founders: his cousin
Sakshi Saigal and her husband Rahul
Mehra, who is also co-founder of Svami.
ingredients are
In the overcrowded Indian gin market,
Stranger & Sons is not just another option.
It has created a niche and a cult-like fol-
lowing, both for home consumption and
here, the
at bars. When it launched in end 2018, the
botanical-forward spirit, with hints of
black pepper and coriander, tapped into
the premium category at the price of
margin is here.
₹2,500 a bottle and went on to win multi-
ple international awards. In 2020, it
secured a gold-outstanding medal in Lon-
don at the International Wines and Spirits
Competition (IWSC), considered to be the
Oscars of the spirits world. The following
year, it brought home another gold at The
Drinks Business Asia Summer Tasting in
Hong Kong.
Participating in renowned drink com-
petitions is key to the brand’s strategy of

Third Eye will close the

current FY at 60,000
cases across their two
spirit brands, and
140,000 cases across the
non-alcoholic portfolio

gaining international recognition. When

they launched, Gupta, 31, says, they paid
equal attention to the domestic and the
global market. This stance has held them
in good stead. Stranger & Sons is available
in bars across the UK and Asia and had a
soft launch in the US last year. As per mar-
ket research company Insight Fusionist
Market, the global gin industry is valued at
$13,590 million (around ₹1.1 trillion) in
2024 and is expected to touch $18,220
million by 2031.
In the domestic liquor space, gin’s share
is just above 1%, but it is the fastest growing
segment, notes Anjali Batra, founder of
the Gin Explorer’s Club, which organises
gin festivals in India. Research by the mar-
ket advisory firm Allied Market Research,
points out, “India’s gin market was valued
at $914.7 million in 2020, and is projected
to reach $1,598.2 million by 2030.”
While Stranger & Sons targets the pre-
mium market with a distinct Indian iden-
tity, products from the Short Story Spirits
stable are priced below ₹2,000, and posi-
tioned for the affordable liquor segment.
When Third Eye started, the founders had
a clear objective: creating a “house of
brands” that was distinctly Indian with a
global appeal. “With these bottles, we can
communicate with a person who talks and
looks like us,” says Gupta. He is referring
to Indian millennials or Gen Z who are
proud of the made-in-India label, have
had international exposure and are curi-
ous about new experiences.
Gupta embodies these traits. Born in
Mumbai, he spent a few years in London
as a toddler when his father, Mohit
Gupta, moved there for work. On their
return to India, the family shifted to Goa
where his father set up a construction
business, Palacio Group. Gupta shuttles
between Mumbai, where he has a home
too, and Goa. Third Eye has a distillery in
south Goa.
Growing up, Gupta changed six
schools. “One of the reasons for this is that
I am dyslexic, and at that point it was con-
sidered a learning disability. My whole
team has realised that if my texts come
wonky, it’s their problem, not mine. You
just have to own it and move on. I don’t
think it makes us special; I don’t think it
makes us not special either.”
While pursuing his master’s in eco-
nomics and management from the Uni-
versity of St Andrews in Scotland, Gupta
interned at various places, working in the
impact investing division of consultancy
firm Intellecap, in business development
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at Indian multinational company Essar,
product development in UK food brand
Eat Natural and being a fund-raising caller
for his college. “I used to call Americans
through the night and was paid £11 an
hour, which was great. A day’s shift was
seven and a half hours and I had this great
ability to not sleep. So, I could work
through the night,” he recalls. After col-
lege, he joined Eat Natural full-time as a
business development manager in Essex,
UK, in 2014. “I always knew I would be in
food,” he says.
In 2016, he returned to India to help his
father with the family business. Mean-
while, his mother sold healthy brownies
and chikkis from home under the brand
Gouri’s Goodies. Drawing on his experi-
ence from Eat Natural, Gupta saw growth
potential. He moved the production from
her kitchen to a commercial manufactur-
ing unit and grew the brand exponen-
tially between 2016-18. One-and-a-half
years into the business, it came crum-
bling down when a fund-raising effort fell
through. They had to roll back opera-
tions. Gouri’s Goodies now runs as a
small-scale business.
In hindsight, he feels managing Gouri’s
Goodies was “like an MBA education”. “It
came at a high cost though,” he laughs.
Coincidentally, around this time his
cousin, Saigal, had returned to Mumbai in
2017, after studying at IESE Business
School in Barcelona. She was dating
Mehra who co-founded beer brand Gate-
way Brewing Co. in 2011 and Svami Drinks
in 2016, both in Mumbai. The three of
them began to notice a market gap: there
were no homegrown gins in the premium
segment with a global appeal. It seeded an
ambition to start a company.
For decades, gin in India was synony-
mous with the pocket-friendly Blue
Riband. In 2016, the bar and restaurant
Toast & Tonic opened in Bengaluru and
gave the spirit a premium makeover with
sophisticated cocktails. Meanwhile,
botanical-based gins were trending in the
West. In India’s spirit industry, those with
international exposure in food and bever-
age—Manu Chandra of Toast & Tonic,
Anand Virmani of Greater Than and the
founders of Third Eye—pioneered the gin
revolution.
“In the UK, we were drinking a lot of
gin. Sakshi and I met at a bar in Mumbai in
2017. There were hardly any gin options;
and nothing from India,” notes Gupta.
“Rahul had enough experience in build-
ing alcohol businesses, Sakshi had quit her
job (in the business development team of
a shipping company) and I had retail
knowledge. I think I was also trying to get
over the loss of failure (with Gouri’s Good-
ies).” The trio started the manufacturing
unit of Third Eye Distillery in Goa in 2018.
In the beginning, there were just six-seven
employees, including the founders. It is
still a small business—they are a team of
120.
The company was largely self-funded
with investments from a few high net-
worth individuals (HNIs). A 2023 Mint
story lists Third Eye’s marquee investors
as Priya Sharma Ranjan, an angel investor,
and Ashish Hemrajani, founder and CEO
of BookMyShow, among others.
How do you unwind?
By travelling
Current travel
interest
The forests of India
Do you have pets?
I rescued a dog from a breeder.
He is a mixed breed, and his
name is Bagheera
“The three of us are extremely ambi-
tious and we are India proud. We wanted
to create a company that reflected these
qualities,” he says. They also noticed that
gins like Bombay Sapphire and Jodhpur,
both made in the UK, were selling the
India story. “India needed a homegrown
gin with botanicals from here. The ingre-
dients are here, the margin is here. You
could make a brilliant product in almost
any category of food manufacturing seg-
ment that can compete in the interna-
tional market.”
By 2019, Stranger & Sons travelled to
London and started participating in inter-
national spirit competitions. Being listed
on the Savoy in London that year was a
milestone moment.
When they launched, gin was still a new
drink in India. Beverage consultant Dim-
itri Lezinska, who used to be the global
brand ambassador for Grey Goose by
Bacardi for eight years, designed their ini-
tial advocacy programme and helped them
create a brand-driven, polished cocktail
experience. Now, they have hired bartend-
ers like Jitender Rana and Feruzan B to
visit bars and create cocktail menus. In line
with this strategy, they sponsor bar take-
overs. Last year, when one of Spain’s best
bars, Paradiso, was in India, Stranger and
Sons was the official sponsor.
As part of their domestic expansion,
they acquired the beverage consultancy
Countertop India in 2022, which special-
ises in crafting unique drinking experien-
ces through their cocktail programmes
and has launched its own bars as well.
Since the acquisition, Countertop has
designed the menus for some of the buzzi-
est new bars in India, such as Spirit For-
ward in Bengaluru and Bandra Born in
Mumbai.
Although the gin space has seen a fair
amount of interest from homegrown
startups, and several international brands
have entered India in the recent past,
Gupta believes they haven’t scratched the
surface to reach their full potential. “We
are almost at 100% year-on-year growth.
We are looking at an 150% growth for the
next financial year, and clocking an
annual revenue of ₹120-130 crore,” he
says. In terms of volume, they will close
the current financial year at 60,000 cases
across their two spirit brands, and
140,000 cases across Svami’s non-alco-
holic portfolio. Goa, Mumbai, Delhi and
Gurugram are the biggest volume-drivers
for the company.
“Premium gin, though a small segment
of the overall spirits industry in India, con-
tinues to dominate the mindspace of aspi-
rational consumers,” says Gupta of gin’s
role in the Indian alcohol industry.
“Recently, Indian whiskies have garnered
attention and there’s a steady rise in con-
sumers preferring rums.” For the next
phase of international expansion and to
improve domestic distribution, Third Eye
is aiming to raise growth capital.
So far, the global market has been the
playfield of Indian brown spirits such as
Old Monk rum and Amrut single malt.
Third Eye’s biggest impact has been dis-
rupting the white spirits industry as a
homegrown company, and they believe
they are unstoppable.
 LIVEMINT.COM NEWS SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi 13

m MINT SHORTS
India signs $2.36 billion contracts
AI gets
basic work Record vehicle production
to buy nuclear-capable missiles
New Delhi: The Union defence ministry on Friday signed con-
tracts to procure nuclear-capable BrahMos missiles for the
Indian Navy at a total cost of ₹195.2 billion ($2.36 billion), the gov-
at law
companies
in Feb, retail demand key
ernment said in a statement. India had previously approved the
purchase of 200 BrahMos missiles. The defence ministry also FROM PAGE 16
signed a contract to purchase a ship borne missile system for
₹9.88 billion. REUTERS than replace human expertise. Long wait periods for delivery of cars coming to an end even as stocks pile up at dealerships
Collaborating with AI solution
providers is a viable strategy to
Nod to rice export to Tanzania stay competitive and meet Alisha Sachdev have been added to the stock. The stock
evolving client demands, they alisha.sachdev@livemint.com level is now 300,000 units, which is
Guinea -Bissau, Djibouti said. new delhi around 25-26 days of stock in the
REUTERS
“In the realm of legal tech, industry, he added.

many prominent law firms are
actively exploring and adopt-
ing AI-powered solutions to
enhance their operational effi-
ciency and client services,”
said Komal Gupta, chief inno-
vation officer, Cyril Amar-
chand Mangaldas, a Mumbai-
based law firm.
According to Gupta, while
specific initiatives vary, many
firms are investing in AI for
New Delhi: Indian on Friday allowed supply of 50,000 contract analysis, due dili-
tonnes of broken rice each to Guinea-Bissau and Djibouti gence, legal research, drafting
and 30,0000 tonnes of non-basmati white rice to Tanzania. and document automation, as
This comes in the backdrop of India’s export ban on these they look to streamline work-
rice varieties amid it championing for the Gobal South. flows and reduce manual
India imposed a ban on broken rice exports in September tasks. In terms of the impact AI
2022 and non-basmati white rice in July 2023 to ensure the could have on new hires at law
country’s food security and to curtail inflation. PUJA DAS firms, Gupta said there is a
recognition that AI imple-
mentation may reshape job
Urea consumption of 2.5 mt to roles, requiring a shift towards
be replaced with nano urea more strategic and analytical
tasks while reducing the
New Delhi: India will replace consumption of 2.5 million tonnes emphasis on routine, adminis-
(mt) of conventional urea with nano urea in FY 2023-24, said trative work.
union chemicals and fertilizers minister Mansukh Mandaviya on “However, we believe that
Friday. This comes on the lines of India’s pledge to achieve self- AI can enhance job satisfaction
sufficiency in urea production by 2025. There are three plants in by empowering lawyers with
India producing conventional urea to cater to domestic demand. relevant quality tools, allowing
Urea consumption till 31 January in the current financial year was them to focus on high-value,
31.7 mt and in FY23, it was 35.7 mt, Mandaviya said. PUJA DAS intellectually-stimulating
work, and that it will lead to a
more fulfilling and dynamic
JSW Steel to invest ₹1,282 crore legal profession,” Gupta said.
in its Italian steelwork mill site
BLOOMBERG
T
he era of inordinately long "So far since July of last year, we have
waiting periods for passen- seen pending bookings significantly
ger vehicles may be ending come down and stock in the channel
as carmakers continued to had come down. But not only is it pretty
ship a record number of high again, the luxury for OEMs to push
vehicles in February, building up stock wholesale against retail is not there
in the dealership network. Carmakers anymore," Srivastava told Mint.
will therefore have to keep a close However, inventory addition alone
watch on demand, as inventories, may not be cause for alarm.
which have already reached 26 days, According to Jay Kale, senior vice
are likely to pile up in showrooms with president, Elara Capital, it is normal for
original equipment manufacturers passenger vehicle makers to increase
having been able to fulfil pending dealer inventory in the fourth quarter
orders and incremental sales depend- of the fiscal as they normally bring
ing solely on the pace of fresh demand, SUVs continued to drive demand for passenger vehicles and accounted for 51.5% down production in December.
a top industry executive said. of all passenger vehicle sales in February MINT “Hence, wholesale is normally higher
The industry is expecting to end the than retail in Q4. For two-wheeler
fiscal year in March at a growth of 8.1% tures premium motorcycles such as the electric two-wheelers were up 24% makers, after a good festive season
at 4.2 million units, Shashank Srivas- Classic 350 and Himalayan, however, year-on-year (due to the extra day in dealer inventory had come down to
tava, senior executive director, Maruti wholesales grew at a mere 5% whereas February because of 2024 being a leap comfortable levels this year and hence
Suzuki, India's largest carmaker said. retail registrations shrank 1.3% last year to a certain extent) but were flat there is more scope for adding inven-
For two-wheeler makers Hero Moto- month compared to the same month compared to January at 81,963 units. tory this year. Also, with the prepone-
Corp, TVS Motor Co and In February 2024, the ment of the marriage season this year,
Bajaj Auto, factory-gate INDUSTRY SPEEDOMETER passenger vehicle indus- companies want to be well stocked for
dispatches clocked a try recorded wholesales demand,” Kale said.
strong double-digit THE industry is IN February, THE stock level is of 373,177 units as Sport utility vehicles (SUVs) contin-
growth in February com- expecting to end the
fiscal year in March
passenger vehicle
industry recorded
now 300,000 units,
which is around
opposed to 335,324 units ued to drive demand for passenger
pared to a year ago, even at a growth of 8.1% at wholesales of 25-26 days of stock of February 2023, grow- vehicles and accounted for 51.5% of all
as registrations of two- 4.2 million units 373,177 units in the industry ing at 11.3%, Srivastava passenger vehicle sales in February,
wheelers grew at a much said. with the segment expected to account
slower pace (13.2% for all The retail numbers are for just over half of the entire industry's
two-wheeler OEMs, including EVs, in in 2023. lower, estimated to be around 335,900 sales in FY24. “We saw that rural
February year-on-year), leading to Sales of electric two-wheelers, how- units against 301,900 units last year, growth cumulatively was at 11.7%
inventory addition at showroom, anal- ever, remained flat compared to last which is also an 11.3% growth. However, between April and February, higher
ysis by brokerage Elara Capital showed. month, reflecting a stagnation in the difference between wholesale and than growth in urban sales at 8%,” Mar-
For Royal Enfield, which manufac- demand. Registrations of high-speed retail is about 40,000 units, which uti's Srivastava said.

PMI at 5-month high in Feb Mkts rocket to new Beat early

FROM PAGE 16 showed that growth in GST reve- highs on GDP fuel profit path:
orders for 21 months.
The seasonally adjusted
nue receipts from domestic
transactions went up by 13.9% in
February, while the same from FROM PAGE 16 gins–a measure of profitability
investors
HSBC India manufacturing
purchasing managers’ index
import of goods rose by 8.5%.
Implementation of stringent State Bank of India.
for lenders.
“The momentum in the mar- crack the
(PMI) recovered further from compliance measures on the Stocks that surged to fresh ket could continue, led by large

New Delhi: Sajjan Jindal-led JSW Steel on Friday

December’s 18-month low of
54.9, rising to 56.5 in January
announced that it is going to invest €143 million, roughly and then to 56.9 in February.
₹1,282 crore to help relaunch its Italian steelworks mill site The latest reading pointed to
Piombino. The company, in a press release, said that its the strongest improvement in
subsidiary JSW Steel Italy SRL has signed a Memorandum the health of the sector since
of Understanding (MoU) with the respective Italian author- September 2023, S&P Global
ities to relaunch the Piombino site. NAMAN SURI said. The index ranges between
0 and 100, with a reading above
50 showing an expansion com-
Markets regulator clears Digit’s pared to the previous month,
and below 50 an overall
IPO after delay, letter shows decrease.
Mumbai: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has “The HSBC final India man-
given Digit Insurance the go-ahead to launch an IPO after multi- ufacturing PMI indicates that
ple compliance issues delayed approval for the deal originally production growth continued
planned in 2022, according to a letter. Digit, last valued at $3.5 to be strong, supported by both
billion, filed for an initial public offering in August 2022, but its domestic and external demand.
plans were halted twice by Sebi, which raised concerns over the Manufacturing firms’ margins
legality of some share issuances, Reuters reported. REUTERS improved as input price infla-
tion slipped to the lowest since
July 2020,” S&P Global said in
Lessors seek contempt notice a statement quoting Ines Lam,
economist at HSBC.
against bankrupt Go First’s RP Reflecting the growth
New Delhi: Many lessors of bankrupt airline Go First told the momentum in economic activ-
Delhi High Court on Friday that the airline’s resolution profes- ities, the Ministry of Railways
sional (RP) Shailendra Ajmera had failed to conduct any mainte- said on Friday its originating
nance on their aircraft and sought a contempt notice against. The freight loading saw more than
gave time to the RP to come up with instructions on the next date 10% jump annually in February
regarding whether the responsibility for maintenance should be to 136.6 million tonnes and its
given back to the lessors or to a third party. KRISHNA YADAV freight revenue jumped 9.98%
The seasonally adjusted HSBC
India PMI recovered from Dec’s
18-month low. BLOOMBERG
in the month to ₹14,931.89
crore compared to that of the
same month a year ago.
Meanwhile, automobile
companies Tata Motors,
Toyota and Mahindra and
Mahindra reported steady rise
sales in February, continuing
the trend of good growth seen
in the economy.
The strong revenue collec-
tion trend in GST, a tax on con-
sumption, comes in the wake of
an upward revision in the FY24
growth forecast by the statistics
ministry on Thursday to 7.6%,
up from the 7.3% made in Janu-
ary this year, aided by invest-
ments in plant and machinery,
manufacturing activities and
some improvement in the
trends in cross-border trade.
Finance ministry data
GSTN portal, which processes
tax returns, can be inferred to
have contributed to the growth
in GST collections, said Surbhi
Punshi, tax expert and lead
product manager at Cleartax, a
technology firm offering GST-
related services.
For example, businesses
cannot file their current
month’s tax return that sum-
marizing all sales unless they
have filed the previous month’s
self-declaration of transactions.
“The government’s efforts to
tighten compliance, along with
the digitalization of tax pro-
cesses and the introduction of
measures to curb tax evasion,
are likely significant contribu-
tors to the growth in GST col-
lections,” said Punshi.
GST revenue net of refunds
for February 2024 is ₹1.51 tril-
lion, which shows a growth of
13.6% over that for the same
period last year. After settle-
ment of inter-state sales, the
central government collected
₹73,641 crore, and states
₹75,569 crore in GST receipts.
gireesh.p@livemint.com
life-highs included Reliance private banks which have been
Industries (₹3,000 per share), lagging since the past few
whip
ICICI Bank (₹1,089.95), Tata months,” said Andrew Holland,
Motors (₹980.4), and Adani chief executive officer, Aven- FROM PAGE 16
Ports (₹1,349). dus Capital Public Markets
The broad-based nature of Alternate Strategies. ing platform Masai School, are
Friday’s rally was reflected by Holland said India’s robust expected to turn profitable
the Nifty Midcap 150 and the GDP growth was attributable to soon, Sinha said, joining a
Nifty Smallcap 250 indices ris- impressive tax growth and growing list of companies such
ing 0.8% and 0.64%. fewer subsidies. But weak as Niyo, BigBasket, Wakefit and
The biggest growth in private LEAD Group that have out-
sectoral gainers The Nifty ended c o n s u m p t i o n lined their path to profitability.
were the Nifty Friday’s trading expenditure, at There has been significant
Metal index, 1.6% higher at just 3.5% in Q3, overhaul on go-to-market
which rallied 22,338.75 points, warranted a rate architecture such as the chan-
3.62%, and the cut by RBI before nels companies use and
its highest
Bank Nifty, which the US Federal improving sales focus, refining
gained 2.53%. percentage rise in Reserve cuts its products and solutions that do
While metals six months interest rates. not make sense, and revisiting
gained because of India’s GDP price and margin structures,
the growth in the expanded at 8.4% Shaleen Sinha, head of growth
manufacturing sector, banks in the December quarter, much tech at BCG India said. “These
rose on hopes of an earlier- ahead of the 6.6% median fundamental pieces are now
than-expected cut in interest growth projected in a Mint poll resulting in much better unit
rates by the Reserve Bank of of 17 economists, and almost economics and companies are
India to address the tepid twice as fast as the 4.3% pace either achieving or being close
growth in private consumption. recorded in the third quarter of to Ebitda breakeven,” BCG’s
A cut in rates would mean FY23. For FY24, the statistics Sinha said. Ebitda is short for
that banks wouldn’t have to ministry on Thursday said it earnings before interest, tax,
raise deposit rates in a hurry, expected India’s economy to depreciation and amortization.
which could consequently grow at 7.6%, ahead of RBI’s 7% These comments come as
improve their net interest mar- projection. the pandemic-led funding
boom collapsed and valuations
for companies fell after higher
interest rates, uncertain mac-

Goodbye single-lane A golden age for stockmarkets is drawing to a close roeconomic conditions and
other geopolitical tensions
dampened investor senti-

national highways FROM PAGE 16 Techno-optimism is also the

basis, in some quarters, for bull-
may even be reversed.
Under realistic assumptions
ments. This has resulted in a
shift in mindset for both
founders and investors to
Despite a slowdown in China— ishness about economy-wide about what will happen to valua- become more prudent in their
FROM PAGE 16 such expansion is possible. whose sagging markets are an productivity growth. The lesson tions, interest and taxes, to gen- business decisions due to lim-
Officials said that single-lane exception to the global trend— from other fundamental tech- erate even modest real equity ited availability of capital.
would be taken up as national highways would only be availa- the IMF has been nudging up nologies is that it takes time to returns of 4% a year over the “There is now an under-
highways,” said Kushal Kumar ble in areas where further its global growth forecasts, too. work out how to exploit them. next decade, America’s firms standing on both sides
Singh, partner, Deloitte India. expansion was not possible due Adding to investors’ bullish- Businesses talk non-stop about would need to increase their (founders and investors) that
About 90% of the current to topography of the region or ness is their optimism about arti- generative ai but it remains at underlying profits by around 6% once the company has raised a
highway network comprises due to ecological concerns. ficial intelligence (ai). This is not the experimental stage. As a a year, close to their best ever certain threshold of, say, ₹700-
two lanes, two lanes with paved This would ensure that such a ChatGPT-like hallucination. result, even if ai is destined to post-war performance. No won- 800 crore, it’s high time it
shoulder, four stretches become The event that propelled stocks transform societies utterly, der Warren Buffett, a veteran becomes profitable. It has a spi-
lanes and more The proportion less than 5% of the into the stratosphere was the today’s investors may struggle investor, sees “no possibility” of ralling effect where the limited
than four lanes. of single-lane country’s total publication on February 22nd of to pick which companies will super returns for his fund. partners are not rewarding
The length of four national highways highway length in earnings by Nvidia, which has an Adding to investors’ bullishness is their optimism about AI. AP make money. Believers in the The long and grinding such fund managers and fund
lane and above has fallen from the next few years. iron grip on the market for chips dotcom boom were not wrong road managers are not rewarding
highways stood at The length of that are critical for training ai faster. In other words the enthu- tech stocks, such as Microsoft, about the transformative power Equities could underwhelm such founders who freely
30% of total NH
46,179 km (about single-lane models. In October 2022, just siasm that has lifted Nvidia close whose eventual commercial of the internet—but they still in many ways. Perhaps ai-exhil- spend money,” Ashish Fafadia,
32% of total high- length in 2014 to national highways before OpenAI released its now- to a stockmarket value of $2trn is strategies in the ai era are still far lost their shirts. aration will cause a dotcom-style partner at Blume Ventures said.
way length) while 10% now in the country has celebrated chatbot, Nvidia not built on dotcom-like hype, from clear. These firms are If things stay sane this time, bubble that pops. Another war “Investors have moved on
that of two-lane been falling since earned around $3bn in gross but cold, hard profit. hoarding Nvidia’s chips in the valuations will not climb much or crisis could lead to a crash. Or from market share development
and two-lane 2014 when it used profits each quarter, mostly Judging the boom to be justi- belief that, one way or another, further. The trend of rising prof- prices may stagnate in a gentle at all costs to gaining market
highways with paved shoulders to be 27,517 km or 30% of total from selling graphics cards to fied, though, does not make it their AI businesses will boom. its, as a share of the economy, bear market that takes years to share in a more sustainable man-
stood at 85,096 km (about 58%). NH length as compared to gamers. In the three months to wise to rush out and buy stocks. However, it remains to be seen also looks spent. Their outsize reverse. Whatever the path to ner. The expectation is that com-
The changes would mean 14,870 km or 10% now. Alterna- the end of January 2024 Nvidia What happens next is unlikely to how they will resolve basic issues growth in recent decades was a disappointment, in ten years’ panies generate profits within
that portions of the remaining tively, the length of four lane or earned $17bn in gross profits fill investors with glee. That is with their large language models. one-off, caused by the falling time nobody will be repeating 4-7 years or by their Series B
single-lane highways would more national highways had while enjoying a margin of 76%. partly because the extreme Plenty of startups want to eat the cost of borrowing and taxes. As the obvious conclusion of today: round,” 3one4 Capital’s DESIG-
also be broadened to bring increased from around 18,371 The company’s share price has excitement about ai extends Big 7’s lunch, and competition inflation lingers and govern- that investors in equities—espe- NATION Siddarth Pai said.
them above two-lane structure or 20% of total length in 2014 to climbed five-fold over that time, beyond Nvidia to other members will keep profits in check—even, ment finances remain stretched, cially American ones—have (With inputs from Samiksha
with paved shoulders wherever 46,179 km or 32% now. but its earnings have grown even of the “Magnificent 7” group of eventually, at Nvidia. that fall cannot be repeated; it enjoyed a golden age. Goel)
This PDF was uploade To Telegram channel_https://t.me/Magzines_latest_Newspaper(send Me Message telegram ya WhatsApp This number 8890050582)
 14 SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi NEWS LIVEMINT.COM

CDSCO proposes
norms to improve
Startups cry foul as Google India to see
warmer
biologics standards yanks apps off Play Store summer this
year: IMD
Somrita Ghosh
somrita.ghosh@partner.livemint.com PTI
NEW DELHI feedback@livemint.com
Google removed 10 popular Indian apps, including Bharat Matrimony and Shaadi.com NEW DELHI

T
he Central Drugs Stan-

I
dard Control Organisa- ndia is likely to experience a
tion has initiated a major Shouvik Das & Priyamvada C warmer summer this year
initiative to enhance the stan- NEW DELHI/BENGALURU: with El Nino conditions pre-
dards of biological products dicted to continue at least until

O
amid mounting global scrutiny n Friday, Google May, the India Meteorological
on the Indian pharmaceutical removed 10 popular Department (IMD) said on Fri-
industry. Indian apps, including day.
The apex drug regulator has Bharat Matrimony, More heatwave days than
come up with new guidelines Shaadi.com, and Kuku normal are predicted over
seeking to improve the quality, New CDSCO norms align with FM, from its Play Store, and warned northeast peninsular India—
safety, and efficacy of vaccines, international standards. MINT several others about possible actions Telangana, Andhra Pradesh
biologicals, recombinants, and for consistently failing to comply with and north interior Karna-
DNA products. The guidelines harm management, or unre- its billing policies. taka—and many parts of
align with international stan- lated to risk or harm manage- The move is expected to escalate the Maharashtra and Odisha, it
dards, including those set by ment, and annual notifications three-year legal tussle between Indian said.
World Health Organization regarding safety and efficacy. startups and the tech giant over the The country is likely to
(WHO) and regulatory bodies "Changes that have the mini- Play Store policies. record above-normal rainfall
of other countries. As part of mal potential to have adverse Despite protests from startups about in March (more than 117% of
the initiative, the regulator for effect on the identity, strength, Google’s sudden app suspensions, legal the long-period average of
cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, quality, purity, or potency of experts said the firm’s policy stance 29.9 mm).
and medical devices circulated the biological product as these could bolster their case in the upcom- India is likely to see above-
a draft, reviewed by Mint, for factors may relate to the safety ing Supreme Court hearing. normal maximum and mini-
consultation. The CDSCO has or efficacy of a product," it said. “Our apps were taken off the Play mum temperatures in most
invited stakeholders to com- The CDSCO also mandated Store on Friday morning along with a parts of the country in the
ment or raise objections by requirements for information notice and a blog post detailing Goo- March to May period, IMD DG
mid-April. to be displayed on gle’s policy on Play Store payments. Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said at
CDSCO has classi- The CDSCO product packages There were no prior intimations on this The move is expected to escalate the legal tussle between Indian startups and the tech giant over the Play Store policies. HT a press conference.
fied products also mandated such as the prod- matter, and we are going to look for Heatwave conditions are
under the new requirements uct monograph legal recourses against Google both for sathi. We have paid all invoices on time. Google said in a statement. paying their fair share creates an une- not expected over north and
guidelines for bio- for information (including stor- the long-term and short-term,” said We’re in touch with Google, and reply- “On 9 February, the Supreme Court ven playing field across the ecosystem central India in March, he said.
logical products age, title page and Murugavel Janakiram, founder and ing to the notice saying that we are also refused to interfere with our right and puts all other apps and games at a Lok Sabha polls are likely to
to be displayed
derived from liv- stability details, chief executive, Bharat Matrimony, compliant.” to do so…After giving these developers competitive disadvantage. Enforce- be held in April-May.
ing cells or orga- on product packaging, com- which had multiple apps with over 5 “For an extended period of time, 10 more than three years to prepare, ment of our policy, when necessary, Mohapatra said the prevail-
nisms like vacci- packages position, dosage million net downloads on the Android companies, including many well-es- including three weeks after the can include removal of non-compliant ing El Nino conditions—the
nes, genetically form and updated applications marketplace. apps from Google Play.” periodic warming of waters in
engineered DNA labelling informa- While several apps by Bharat ACTION SPARKS OUTRAGE Google’s action has sparked out- the central Pacific Ocean—will
products, off-patent bio-thera- tion), besides details on any Matrimony, which could be down- rage among startups, prompting continue through the summer
peutic products, cell and gene change in the drug substance loaded from the Google Play Store THERE were no SEVERAL apps SANjEEV GOOGLE’S action calls for the development of alter- season and neutral conditions
therapy products and blood nomenclature, and evidence of until Friday noon, are now inactive prior intimations,
said Murugavel
by Bharat
Matrimony are
Bhikchandani of Info
Edge said the notice
has sparked outrage
among startups,
natives to Play Store. However, are likely to develop there-
and blood products. recognition for the updated in India, others like People Group’s Janakiram of Bharat now inactive took the company prompting calls for experts it might not be easy consid- after.
"It will include an emphasis drug substance name. Shaadi.com apps received Google’s Matrimony in India by surprise alternatives ering Google’s extensive reach. La Nina conditions—gener-
on applying a science-based India faced global embar- notice but were not suspended. According to market researcher ally associated with good mon-
and risk-based approach to the rassment when In 2022 Gam- Info Edge’s matrimonial platform StatCounter, Android accounted soon rainfall in India—are
quality, safety and efficacy bia and Uzbekistan reported Jeevansathi, property search platform tablished ones, have chosen to not pay Supreme Court’s order, we are taking for more than 83% of the over 700 mil- likely to set in by the second
assessment of biological prod- infant deaths linked to cough 99acres and job search platform Naukri for the immense value they receive on necessary steps,” Google added. lion smartphone users in India as of half of the monsoon season.
ucts," it added. The guidelines syrups manufactured in India. were also suspended from Play Store. Google Play by securing interim pro- “While we always try to work with January-end. Startups alleged that The IMD chief also said that
outline regulations for labelling In response, the Union Sanjeev Bhikchandani, founder and tections from court. These developers developers to help them through our Google is abusing this power, prompt- India recorded an average
products and classifying them health ministry and CDSCO executive vice-chairman, Info Edge, comply with payment policies of other policies and find feasible solutions, ing them to seek relief from the Com- minimum temperature of 14.61
into different categories, such intensified efforts to monitor said the notice took the company by app stores. No court or regulator has allowing this small group of developers petition Commission of India (CCI) and degrees Celsius in February,
as supplements (safety and effi- drug products and implement surprise. “To our mind, we have been denied Google Play’s right to charge for to get differential treatment from the the Supreme Court. the second highest in the
cacy), changes related to risk or quality checks. compliant since 9 February on Jeevan- the value and services we provide,” vast majority of developers who are shouvik.das@livemint.com month since 1901.

NHIT to debut FIU fines Paytm Bank ₹5.5 crore for PMLA violation GDP-GVA disparity
private bond
placement
Subhash Narayan &
Gopika Gopakumar
that with charges brought out systems and reporting mecha-
by law enforcement agencies nisms to the Financial Intelli-
due to lower subsidy
and after scrutiny of docu- gence Unit (FIU).”
by April NEW DELHI/MUMBAI ments on record, a show cause Meanwhile, Paytm has Rhik Kundu trillion from the initially bud-
notice was issue to PPBL. begun cutting back business rhik.kundu@livemint.com geted ₹1.75 trillion. GVA quan-
Reuters

P
aytm’s trouble escalated After considering written ties with its banking subsidiary, NEW DELHI tifies value of goods and servi-
feedback@livemint further with the Financial and oral submissions of the Paytm Payments Bank, with an ces produced in a country,

T
MUMBAI Intelligence Unit-India Paytm Payments Bank Ltd, aim to appease regulators who he divergence in gross deducting cost of inputs and
slapping a ₹5.49 crore penalty director FIU-IND, based on the seek an arms’ length distance in domestic product (GDP) raw materials. It adjusts GDP

T
he National Highways
Infra Trust (NHIT) is set
to tap the domestic cor-
porate bond market via a
debut private placement of
bonds in the next two months,
four sources directly aware of
the matter said on Friday.
The company is likely to opt
for longer-duration bonds of
more than 15 years and would
look to raise around ₹2,000
crore to ₹3,000 crore, they
said.
“NHIT will go for zero-cou-
pon bonds of maybe 17-year or
18-year duration as that
becomes an attractive proposi-
tion for long-term investors
who do not want to get
involved in re-investments for
regular receivables for a longer
period of time,” one of the
sources said. The company is a
wholly-owned subsidiary of
National Highways Authority
of India and manages toll road
projects.
Another source said that the
company would conduct a
board meeting next week and
more details on the timing and
exact duration for the issue
would be finalised at that time.
The company did not
immediately respond to a Reu-
ters email seeking comment.
Long-term investors are
looking to aggressively invest
funds in higher-rated securi-
on Paytm Payments Bank Ltd voluminous material available the relationship between the and gross value added by factoring in subsidies and
(PPBL) for violating Prevention on record, found two entities. (GVA) data for the third quar- taxes on products.
of Money Laundering Act that charges The FIU found In a notification ter of FY24 could be attributed In the April 2023-January
(PMLA) obligations. against Paytm charges against to the stock to lower fertilizer subsidy dis- 2024 period, the Centre pro-
The penalty comes after were substanti- Paytm were exchanges, the bursements, said a senior gov- vided about ₹1.71 trillion as fer-
Reserve Bank of India’s action ated and thus vide substantiated, listed entity ernment official. tilizer subsidy, according to a
against PPBL on 31 January Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma. REUTERS order dated 1 One97 Commu- India's GDP spiked to a six- parliamentary submission by
hence imposed
where it directed the payments March under nication said that quarter high of 8.4% during Q3 Bhagwanth Khuba, minister of
bank to stop accepting deposits for illegal acts using the pay- illegal acts, including organis- PMLA, it was penalty as per both the entities FY24, beating estimates, while state for chemicals and fertiliz-
or top-ups in any customer ments bank’s channel. The FIU ing and facilitating online gam- f o u n d t o b e PMLA provisions have agreed to GVA growth was ers, last month.
accounts, wallets, FASTTags found that the charges against bling,” finance ministry said in appropriate to simplify the at 6.5%, showed In the April 2023- However, bud-
and other instruments after 29 Paytm were substantiated and statement. impose a penalty shareholders data from the sta- January 2024 geted estimates
February citing large scale non- hence imposed the penalty as “Further, the money gener- of ₹5.49 crore, the ministry agreement to support its gov- tistics ministry. period, the for fertilizer sub-
compliance of regulations and per provisions of PMLA. ated from these illegal opera- said. ernance. According to a person "The government Centre provided sidy, at ₹1.64 tril-
supervisory concerns. The “FIU-IND initiated a review tions, i.e. proceeds of crime Reacting to the develop- aware of the matter, the linkage operates on cash
about ₹1.71 trillion lion, for FY25 is
deadline was later extended till of the Paytm Payments Bank were routed and channelled ment, a spokesperson said: bet-ween a regulated and basis, not accrual, lower than the
15 March. Ltd on receipt of specific infor- through bank accounts main- “The penalty pertains to issues unregulated entity was the accounting for as fertilizer revised estimates
The FIU-IND action against mation from law enforcement tained by these entities with the within a business segment that main reason for RBI’s move on cash payments," subsidy for FY24.
PPBL follows leads given by law agencies in respect of few enti- Paytm Payments Bank Ltd,” was discontinued two years Paytm. Madan Sabnavis, The govern-
enforcement agencies over ties and their network of busi- the statement added. ago. Following that period, we subhash.narayan@live- chief economist ment revised the
movement of money by entities nesses engaged in a number of The finance ministry said have enhanced our monitoring mint.com at Bank of Baroda explained. fiscal deficit target for FY24 to
"With actual spending on food 5.8% of GDP, from 5.9% esti-
and fertilizer subsidies totall- mated earlier, following high-
ing 70-75% of the revised esti- er-than-expected tax collec-
A power scramble ahead of the general election mates, it suggests the govern- tions, and higher dividends by
ment has not fully disbursed public sector banks (₹98,000
subsidies, causing the dispar- crore in the first three quarters
ity between GDP and GVA." of FY24) and Reserve Bank of
FROM PAGE 16 as more people keep their fans power generation companies for ₹7.45-9.95 per unit for the (FY24),” said Vikram V., vice In the revised budget esti- India (a record ₹87,416 crore ).
and air conditioners running for procuring 7.14 GW of elec- period from 20 March to 30 president and co-group head, mates for FY24, the govern- “The Centre is trying to meet
power generation company on longer. To keep up with the tricity from April to September September, and the Kerala corporate ratings, Icra. ment increased the allocation its revised fiscal deficit target
condition of anonymity. increased demand, power dis- at ₹9.68-12 per unit, as per the State Electricity Board for 1.2 According to the Central for fertilizer subsidy to ₹1.89 for FY24,” the official said.
“Since both rains and wind tribution companies, or dis- Deep platform. GW at ₹9.59-14.3 Electricity Authority (CEA),
were deficient during April- coms, typically stitch up short- The Assam To keep up with per unit for April peak demand for electricity in CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS
May (last year)... leading to term electricity supplies in Power Distribu- high demand, to June. FY25 is expected to hit 256
lower supply from hydro and advance through the power tion Co. Ltd has discoms typically “Starting GW, exceeding last year’s Mint welcomes comments, suggestions or complaints about errors.
wind power plants, govern- ministry’s Deep platform and tendered for 5.6 stitch up short- March, the 239.9 GW.
ments will be more cautious other power exchanges. (Deep GW of electricity demand (for elec- Demand for power has been Readers can alert the newsroom to any errors in the paper by
term electricity emailing us, with your full name and address to
this time around in terms of stands for discovery of effi- supplies from tricity) is rising the past few years amid a
ensuring adequate power is cient electricity price.) April to Novem- supplies in expected to sharp economic recovery post
feedback@livemint.com.

ties as they are witnessing
heavy inflows, coinciding with
some slowdown in overall debt
supply. The company’s bonds
are rated AAA by rating agen-
cies, which implies the highest
amount of security.
tied up in advance,” the official
added.
Besides, authorities do not
want voters disgruntled
because of power cuts. Sum-
mers are notorious for inter-
ruptions in electricity supply
These are in addition to ber, of which it advance increase and the covid years. To top that, It is our policy to promptly respond to all complaints. Readers
long-term power purchase has so far only remain elevated India suffered a crisis in 2021 dissatisfied with the response or concerned about Mint’s journalistic
agreements (PPAs) that they managed 1.05 during the sum- and 2022 amid low availability integrity may write directly to the editor by sending an email to
have with power generation GW of power at ₹9.9 per unit. mer season. The peak demand of domestic coal for power asktheeditor@livemint.com
companies. The Bihar State Power in the upcoming fiscal year plants, forcing the government
Mint’s journalistic Code of Conduct that governs our newsroom is
The Uttar Pradesh Power Holding Co. Ltd has arranged (FY25) is expected to surpass to push for higher imports and available at www.livemint.com
Corp. Ltd has tied up with for 3 GW of electricity supplies the record hit this year blending of imported coal.

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 LIVEMINT.COM NEWS SaturDay, 2 March 2024
New Delhi 15

Westside revs up plan K12 Techno Services eyes robust growth

Samiksha Goel Decosta said. “At any point of and 400 this year, he said.

for digital expansion samiksha.goel@livemint.com

BENGALURU
time we have about 200
schools seeking to partner
with us, and we end up part-
The company plans to
launch an IPO in three to four
years, Decosta said. He said the

E
ducation and technology
services platform K12
Techno Services, which
runs the Orchids International
School chain, will see its reve-
Fashion and decor retailer also plans to open 20-30 stores next fiscal year nue increase from ₹383 crore
in FY23 to about ₹450 crore in
FY24 on the back of increased
Suneera Tandon demand for its services from
suneera.t@htlive.com schools, according to a senior
NEw dELhi executive at the company.
The startup, which reported
The edtech services firm
reported a profit of ₹39 crore
nering with 12 to 15. Before the
pandemic, we would have to
go out and actually meet
school officials and ask if they
would partner with us.”
Talking about service
requests from schools,
Decosta said one of the com-
pany’s top-selling products is
robotics and computer sci-
ence. “Schools want to bridge
the gap with what we can pro-
company would stick to its
core strategy, which has
worked well for it. Long-term
agreements, he said, have
helped it grow sustainably
even as the wider edtech
industry faces issues such as
high burn and a dearth of
funding. For instance, Byju’s
losses increased from ₹4,564
crore in FY21 to ₹8,245 crore
in FY22. Vedantu’s losses

F
ashion-focused department store
chain Westside is planning to open
between 20 and 30 stores next fis-
cal year and ramp up e-commerce
operations in the next 12 months,
said a top executive. Westside, a part of
Tata’s Trent Ltd, is on track to add 25 new
stores in the current fiscal. “We are contin-
uing store expansion at the same rate. We’ll
open the same number of stores next year.
We’d like to have more presence in north
and north-east India,” said Shailina Parti,
chief operating officer at Westside.
As of March 2023, Westside operated
214 stores across 90 cities. At the end of the
December quarter, it operated 227 stores in
89 cities. Westside started its e-commerce
arm in 2020-2021, which currently forms
a small part of its business.
“So, 50% of our online sales come via the
a profit of ₹39 crore in FY23,
will remain profitable in FY24,
said its founder and CEO Jai
Decosta, adding that Ebitda
should be close to ₹100 crore
in the same fiscal. The asset-
light company provides con-
tent, marketing, software, cur-
riculum, security and other
services to schools across the
country through its own
brand, Orchids International
School, and a curriculum and
technology platform. It pro-
Westside offers branded fashion apparel, footwear and accessories for women, men
and children, along with a range of home furnishings and decor.
in FY23. MINT
vides these services to school
partners who own the land, the
building and the licence. It
works with more than 1,000
schools, of which about 100
operate under its Orchids
brand. It plans to increase the
number of Orchids schools to
150 in the next three to four
years. The edtech startup has
seen increased demand from
schools since the pandemic,
vide.”
Decosta said edtech is a
huge market as India has
400,000 private schools, of
which about 30,000 follow a
national curriculum such as
CBSE and ICSE. As part of its
expansion plans, he said, the
company may look at interna-
tional schools (IB and IGCSE)
in the near future as their
numbers are growing rapidly.
There were about 150 interna-
tional schools in India in 2015,
increased 13% to ₹696 crore in
FY22. Unacademy, which
posted a loss of ₹1,678 crore in
FY23, has laid off more than
2,000 employees over the past
year to cut costs, according to
reports. “The contracts we
sign with schools are for 30-50
years. We don’t sign one-year
contracts or even 10-year con-
tracts. If I have to provide ser-
vices, I have to do so from nur-
sery through to grade 10,” he
said.

“Online growth in the last six months has

BLOOMBERG

company also operates Zara stores in India

app. We did not really have an app that was
working for us two years ago. Westside did
not really have an online business two years
ago, it was tiny. It's still small as a percent-
age of overall sales, sitting at 6-7% but that's
come through our work on customer deliv-
eries, website and app redesign, everything
that's needed to drive digital commerce is
being worked on. So, we should start seeing
those benefits unfold in the next financial
via its joint venture Inditex Trent Retail
India Pvt. Ltd. The retailer competes with
Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail's Panta-
loons, Shoppers Stop and Landmark
Group’s Lifestyle.
Chalet Hotels acquires Marriott property
Varuni Khosla Owned by the family of RC Sanjay Sethi, managing year (April-December), the
Varuni.K@livemint.com Juneja, co-founder and chair- director and chief executive company reported a net profit
NEw dELhi man of Mankind Pharma, via Chalet Hotels, in a recent of ₹195 crore, an increase of
Ayushi and Poonam Estates interview with Mint, had said 33% year-on-year. It boasts

where the opportunity is because we want
to grow that to over 10% over the next few
years,” Parti said.
“We are also conscious that the online
market drives huge revenues, but it's
always hard to drive profits (online). Our
dotcom sales are profitable,” said Parti. It
does not sell on any third-party marketpla-
ces other than the group’s e-commerce
platform Tata Cliq.
year,” said Parti, who joined Westside in
May 2022. In FY23, Trent Ltd reported a
revenue of ₹8,213 crore with a profit after
tax of ₹555 crore. Trent operates multiple
formats such as Zudio, apart from a super-
market concept operating under Star
brand. Westside offers branded fashion
apparel, footwear and accessories for
women, men and children, along with a
range of home furnishing and decor. The
Westside registered 49% like-for-like
growth in sales in FY23, according to the
company’s annual report. The retailer is
working on new product ideas to drive
sales of premium products in the apparel
portfolio and expand its non-apparel cate-
gory. “We’re looking at ensuring we have
a balance across the portfolio of brands we
offer. Increasingly, we’re seeing massive
growth in premium products,” Parti said.
C
halet Hotels, part of K
Raheja Corp group, has
acquired Courtyard by
Marriott Aravali Resort for
₹315 crore. This 158-room
property spread over eight
acres had been on the market
for about a year now, the hotel
company said in an exchange
notification on Friday.
LLP, the resort was launched
in July 2022, reporting aver-
age daily rates of over ₹15,000
a night. This was the Mankind
family’s first hospitality ven-
ture. It has another 141-room
hotel in Rishikesh, which is
also managed by Marriott-
owned The Westin Resort &
Spa Himalayas.
the company was looking to
add about 800 rooms to its
offerings for which it has ear-
marked ₹2,000 crore as cur-
rent capital work-in-progress.
The company intends to have
about 5,000 rooms in the next
three to four years in its entire
portfolio. For the first nine
months of the current fiscal
collaborations with operators
such as Accor, Marriott, Hyatt,
and Taj, managing properties
including the JW Marriott
Mumbai Sahar, Four Points by
Sheraton Navi Mumbai, The
Westin Hyderabad Mind-
space, and Bengaluru Marriott
Hotel Whitefield, among oth-
ers.

Musk sues OpenAI, Altman for

abandoning firm’s original goal
Bloomberg
feedback@livemint.com

E
lon Musk sued OpenAI
and CEO Sam Altman,
alleging they have
breached the artificial intelli-
gence startup’s founding
agreement by putting profit PASCHIM GUJARAT VIJ COMPANY LTD.
ahead of benefiting humanity. CIN: U40102GJ2003SGC042908
Regd. & Corporate Office, Laxminagar,
The 52-year-old billionaire, Nana Mava main Road
who was a co-founder of RAJKOT-360004, GUJARAT
OpenAI but no longer owns a E-Tender Notice:PGVCL/Project/DSM/PM-KUSUM-C-FLS/TN-10
stake, said in a suit filed late
PGVCL invites Request for Selection of Solar Power
Thursday in San Francisco that Generators for Purchase of Solar Power through ‘On-line’
the company’s close relation- competitive bidding process (followed by reverse e-auction) for
ship with Microsoft Corp. has Solarization of various 11 KV Agricultural feeders of selected
undermined its original mis- 66/11 KV Sub-stations in supply area of PGVCL under RESCO
sion of creating open-source Tesla CEO Elon Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI. BLOOMBERG mode of PM-KUSUM Component-C Feeder level
technology that wouldn’t be Solarization Scheme of MNRE, covering 192 Substations
subject to corporate priorities. soft.” Spokespeople for OpenAI suit that Altman, OpenAI presi- with aggregate Solar plant capacity of 355.5 MW.
Musk, who is also CEO of and Musk did not immediately dent Greg Brockman and Mic- Interested Bidders are requested to visit web-site
https://tender.nprocure.com (for RfS documents view, down
Tesla Inc., has been among the respond to requests for com- rosoft worked together to oust load and on line submission) and web-site www.pgvcl.com (for
most outspoken about the dan- ment. Musk, the world’s richest the majority of the startup’s view & down load only). Interested bidders are requested to
gers of AI and artificial general person, helped establish board, who had been responsi- regularly visit the above websites to check for amendment, if
intelligence. The release of OpenAI in 2015 but stepped ble for enforcing its original any in the Tender.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT more than away from the company some mission of developing technol- Date:29/02/2024 Chief Engineer (Project)
a year ago popularized advan- two years later over philosophi- ogy for the benefit of humanity.
ces in AI technology and raised cal differences about how to Since introducing ChatGPT
concerns about profit from the and GPT-4, the large language
the risks sur- Musk helped technology. In model that powers the chatbot,
rounding the establish OpenAI addition to leading OpenAI has set off a wave of AI
race to develop in 2015 but Tesla, he owns the adoption in enterprises around
AGI, where stepped away social network X the world. Microsoft has been
computers are as
from it two years and is raising one of the most aggressive in
smart as an aver- money for an AI incorporating the technology
age human. later over venture h e into its wide array of cloud and
“To this day, differences founded called xAI enterprise services. The case
OpenAI Inc.’s that features its marks an escalation in one of
website contin- own ChatGPT-type the highest-profile clashes in
ues to profess that its charter is chatbot, Grok. In the filing, the emerging field of AI, pitting
to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all Musk took aim at the restruc- two of its most prominent play-
of humanity,’” the lawsuit said. turing of OpenAI’s leadership ers against each other.
“In reality, however, OpenAI last year, a tumultuous period The lawsuit will have impli-
Inc. has been transformed into during which Altman was cations not just for OpenAI,
a closed-source de facto subsid- ousted as CEO and then quickly which is seeking to raise funds
iary of the largest technology reinstated with support from at a valuation of $100 billion or
company in the world: Micro- Microsoft. Musk argued in the more, but also for Microsoft.

Profitability buoys Zomato stock

Reuters the markets during the IPO “Investors are incrementally
feedback@livemint.com frenzy in 2021 jumped after list- appreciative of whatever
BENGALURU ing but slumped eventually on Zomato is trying to do and
investor scepticism over lofty there is a certain amount of

S
hares of food delivery
platform Zomato hit a
record high on Friday, as
improving profitability paves
the way for future growth, trig-
gering a turnaround in investor
sentiment.
Zomato is the most valuable
internet stock in Asia’s third-
largest economy, with a market
capitalization of more than
₹1.51 trillion ($18 billion). On
Friday, its shares rose nearly 5%
to ₹173.5. India’s several new-
age Internet companies that hit
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valuations and business mod-
els. Several of these firms also
fell below their issue prices.
Zomato, which was the first to
list among peers like Policyba-
zaar, Paytm, and Nykaa, had a
limited track record of profita-
bility, and investors fretted
over its strategic moves.
Now, with the company’s
results trumping expectations
for several quarters, sentiment
has “completely reversed,”
Sachin Dixit, internet research
analyst at JM Financial, said.
consumer love for the business
model too.”
Zomato’s “consistent earn-
ings improvement” and timely
delivery on growth targets sets
it apart from its peers who have
“no clear path to growing prof-
itability”, Elara analyst Karan
Taurani said. Nykaa, which was
an investor darling, is facing
certain macro headwinds for
the moment, Dixit noted.
Meanwhile, Paytm, under
the regulator’s scrutiny, has
tanked.
 NeW DeLhI, MUMBAI, BENGALURU, KOLKATA, CHENNAI, AHMEDABAD, HYDERABAD, CHANDIGARH*, PUNE*, LUCKNOW* VOL. 18 NO. 54 Rs. 10.00 . Price with Hindustan Times Rs. 15.50 16 PAGES

Saturday, March 2, 2024

FIU imposes ₹5.5 cr fine on Musk sues OpenAI, Altman

livemint.com Paytm for PMLA violationuP14 over contract breach uP15

SENSEX 73,745.38 1,245.08 NIFTY 22,338.75 355.95 DOLLAR ₹82.91 ₹0.00 EURO ₹89.68 ₹0.29 OIL $84.6 $2.86 POUND ₹104.72 ₹0.30

PMI at 5-mth high; Big jump

The broad-based nature of the rally was reflected by Nifty
Midcap 150 and the Nifty Smallcap 250 rising 0.8% and 0.64%.
A power
scramble
DON’T MISS
MINT

22,400
ahead of the
GST ₹1.68 tn in Feb
22,338.75 Top 5 contributors to the
change in Nifty 50 on Friday
(share in %)
22,300
ICICI Bank 15.63 elections
22,200 Nifty 50 Reliance Industries 13.61 Rituraj Baruah
GST collections grew 12.5% y-o-y last month; fiscal growth 11.7% intraday
movement
HDFC Bank 13.20 rituraj.baruah@livemint.com
22,100
Larsen & Toubro NEW DELHI
11.84
22,048.3
Record vehicle production in
Gireesh Chandra Prasad &

P
State Bank of India 5.19 ower distribution com- February, retail demand key
Rhik Kundu GROWING MOMeNTUM 22,000
9.15am 3.30pm Source: Bloomberg panies across the coun-
try are scrambling to
The era of inordinately long waiting periods
for passenger vehicles may be ending as
The strong revenue collection trend in GST—a tax on consumption—
NEW DELHI procure more electricity than carmakers continued to ship a record
comes in the wake of an upward revision in the FY24 growth forecast.
Mkts rocket to new they usually do for summers, number of vehicles in Feb, building up stock

T
he acceleration of the
Indian economy, under-
pinned by unexpectedly
high GDP growth of 8.4%
in the third quarter of
Year-on-year change (%) in GST collections India's manufacturing with hotter-than-normal tem- in the dealership network. Automakers will
purchasing managers' index
peratures expected until May have to keep a close watch on demand. >P13
15.1
11.6 11.5 11.7
10.8 10.8
10.2
13.4

10.3 10.4
12.5
59

58
56.9
peak on GDP fuel this year coinciding with the
national election.
On Friday, the India Mete- Startups cry foul as Google
FY24, was further bolstered by 57 orological Department fore- yanks apps off Play Store
equally impressive GST collection Ram Sahgal and proprietary trader pur- cast ‘above normal’ maximum
56 On Friday, Google removed 10 popular
data released on Friday, with a pri- ram.sahgal@livemint.com chases of ₹618.58 crore, BSE temperatures in most parts of Indian apps, including Bharat Matrimony,
vate survey showing growing 55 MUMBAI data show. Foreign portfolio the country until May. Plus, Shaadi.com, and Kuku FM, from its Play
55.3
momentum in manufacturing add- 54 investors purchased shares the general elections, Store, and warned several others about

ing to the general feel-good factor.
Central and state governments
collected ₹1.68 trillion in goods and
services tax (GST) revenue in Febru-
ary, 12.5% more than the revenue
collected February 2023, amid
strong manufacturing activity and
economic growth momentum.
However, the number was a tad
lower than January’s figure of ₹1.72
trillion.
The finance ministry said that
monthly average GST revenue col-
lection this fiscal has gone up to ₹1.67
trillion, from ₹1.5 trillion last fiscal as
“GST revenue figures demonstrate
continued growth momentum and
positive performance”.
So far this financial year, gross
GST revenue collection stands at
₹18.4 trillion, showing an annual
growth of 11.7%, the ministry said.
Manish Mishra, partner and head
Apr
2023
Source: Ministry of Finance
TAX BOOST
The GST number was
a tad lower than Jan’s
figure of ₹1.72 trillion
of indirect tax practice at JSA Advo-
cates and Solicitors, said that
increased revenue collection efforts
on the part of the authorities coupled
with continued issuance and adjudi-
cation of notices have been signifi-
cant contributors to revenue growth.
“Buoyancy in tax collections is
expected to continue in March,
being the last month of the financial
year, due to increased recovery
efforts by the authorities,” he said.
B
Feb 2023 Feb 2024
A reading above 50 denotes
Feb expansion, while one below 50
2024 indicates contraction.
Source: HSBC, S&P Global
SO far this fiscal year, GST revenue net of
gross GST revenue refunds for February
stands at ₹18.4 trillion 2024 is ₹1.51 trillion
SARVESH KUMAR SHARMA/MINT
Another high frequency indicator
showed on Friday that manufactur-
ing activity was going strong. S&P
Global’s survey of around 400 man-
ufacturing purchase managers
showed that production rose at its
fastest pace in five months in Febru-
ary, fuelled by the quickest increase
in sales since last September and the
strongest expansion in new export
TURN TO PAGE 13
enchmark indices
vaulted to record highs
on Friday, a momentum
expected to continue led by
large-cap stocks, after India’s
economy surprised the markets
with a faster-than-anticipated
pace in the December quarter.
The Nifty ended Friday’s
trading 1.6% higher at
22,338.75 points, its highest
percentage rise in six months.
The Sensex climbed 1.72%, the
most in over a month, to
73,745.35 points.
Banks, capital goods, and oil
and gas stocks catapulted the
Nifty and Sensex to record
intraday highs of 22,353.30 and
73,819.21 points on Friday. This
was driven by provisional
domestic institutional inves-
tors buying of ₹3,814.53 crore
worth a net ₹128.94 crore.
Investor wealth, in effect,
increased by ₹4.37 trillion.
“The impressive GDP num-
bers provide the ammunition
to the bulls to catapult Indian
indices to all-time highs,” said
Devarsh Vakil, deputy head,
retail research, at HDFC Secu-
rities, underscoring the bull-
ishness on the Street. “The next
upside targets to be watched
are around 22,500-22,600 lev-
els. Immediate support is at
22,200 levels.”
The top five stocks that con-
tributed almost three-fifths of
the Nifty’s 355.95-point rally
were ICICI Bank Ltd, Reliance
Industries Ltd, HDFC Bank
Ltd, Larsen & Toubro Ltd, and
TURN TO PAGE 13
expected to be held in April-
May, could spike demand fur-
ther as state governments tend
to ensure uninterrupted
power supply at that time.
Official data from the gov-
ernment shows that power
distribution companies
(referred to as discoms) of
Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar,
Assam and Kerala have made
arrangements for additional
power supply this summer.
“Usually, discoms are
directed by state governments
to ensure uninterrupted
power supply during and
ahead of elections. The Centre
also tries to ensure that there is
adequate availability of
power,” said an official with a
TURN TO PAGE 14
possible actions for consistently failing to
comply with its billing policies. >P14
Westside revs up plan for digital
expansion, to open more stores
Fashion-focused department store chain
Westside is planning to open between 20
and 30 stores next fiscal year and ramp up e-
commerce operations in the next 12 months,
said a top executive. Westside is on track to
add 25 new stores in the current fiscal. >P15
Drugs regulator proposes
norms for biologics standards
The Central Drugs Standard Control
Organisation (CDSCO) has initiated a
major initiative to enhance the standards
of biological products amid mounting
global scrutiny on the Indian pharmaceutical
industry. >P14

Goodbye, single-lane national AI gets basic work at law

highways. Hello, double lanes firms, to boost efficiency
Subhash Narayan India had a national highway Priyanka Gawande “We have created a
subhash.narayan@livemint.com network of 146,145 km, with priyanka.gawande@livemint.com ChatGPT model, we call it
NEW DELHI just around 10% being less than MUMBAI ‘Ask.Kai’ for Khaitan. It works
two lanes as of December 2023. in our environment, inside of

A T
ll existing single-lane The plan is to convert as many he AI prosecutor or our networks, and uses the
national highways will of these to minimum two-lane defence attorney isn’t outside learning, which
be converted to double stretches. Going forward, no on the horizon, but ChatGPT and models like that
lanes, and having two lanes highway will be made of less large Indian law firms are provide,” said Rohit Shukla,
Investors across stages, even in Series B rounds, now expect with paved shoulders will be than two lanes barring a few moving rapidly to adopt artifi- chief digital officer at Khaitan
positive unit economics and efficiency. ISTOCKPHOTO mandatory to get an NH tag in exceptions, the officials quoted cial intelligence to carry out a & Co.
future, two people aware of the above said. string of ‘simple’ tasks includ- Shukla sees a significant

Beat early profit road ministry’s plans said. The

new criterion will be defined in
the rules governing construc-
A query sent to road ministry
on details of the proposed
changes remained unan-
ing research, drafting and cli-
ent presentations, helping
them achieve efficiency and
opportunity for Khaitan’s cli-
ents to leverage this tech tool,
subject to regulatory and com-

path: investors
tion of national highways.
A paved shoulder is part of a
highway adjacent to the regu-
larly travelled portion on the
Single-lane highways may be swered. leaving the lawyers to focus on Large law firms are moving pliance requirements. Khaitan
continued in hilly regions. MINT “The above has been in dis- litigation. rapidly to adopt AI. ISTOCKPHOTO has partnered with Microsoft
cussions for some time now; it Those entering the legal Azure and OpenAI for this ini-
Mint that the changes in the would be a step towards main- profession, however, need not introduced an AI-powered vir- tiative. Following the intro-

crack the whip same level.

Priyamvada C the public market only values
priyamvada.c@livemint.com companies if they are profitable
BENGALURU or have a path to profitability,”
Fireside Ventures’ partner
However, single-lane
national highways may be con-
tinued in hilly regions. Broaden-
ing them would be considered
only after an environmental
impact assessment, and only if
highway criterion were being
worked out to ensure that such
alignments conform to today’s
mobility requirements.
The changes assume signifi-
cance given that India is imple-
menting one of the world’s
taining a basic minimum stan-
dard for national highways and
would be instrumental in
bringing a minimum uniform-
ity, safety and traffic carrying
capacity. From another view-
point, width of a road is also a
fear for their jobs, law firms
insisted, saying that AI tech-
nology would take over basic
functions only. New joiners
and interns at law firms—typi-
cally at the forefront of such
work as part of their learning
tual assistant KAI that was
developed using ChatGPT. It is
customized to Khaitan’s work
environment and helps the
firm draft emails, summarize
documents and prepare client
presentations, among others,
duction of AI in its work,
Shukla said, interns can now
spend a significant amount of
time learning and advocating
on the increasing number of
legal matters.
Experts believe law firms

A
rise in profit visibility of
listed startups has made
investors demand that
unlisted startups, too, show a
path to profitability or a prod-
uct-market fit early enough if
they want to receive funding.
Investors across stages, even
in Series B rounds, now expect
positive unit economics and
efficiency, said Alteria Capital’s
managing partner Vinod
Murali. The only exceptions
would be startups operating in
very deep markets where there
is a lot of demand and a longer
path to profitability.
“Almost all entrepreneurs
Dipanjan Basu said.
The change in sentiment has
happened even as many late-
stage startups and unicorns
that went public recently have
begun to show profits.
Groww, Physics Wallah,
InCred and Digit Insurance
were among the startups that
turned in profits in FY23, as per
data sourced by Tracxn. Shares
of Zomato and Policy Bazaar
(PB Fintech), which have posted
profits, have rallied. While the
Zomato stock is up three-fold in
the past one year, PB Fintech
has more than doubled.
The link between profits and
the project can be executed with
limited damage to fragile moun-
tain ecosystems, the officials
said on condition of anonymity.
Road ministry secretary
Anurag Jain had earlier told
A golden age for stockmarkets is drawing to a close
largest highway
building programmes, with
about 50,000 km of highways
to be constructed over the next
15 years.
As on November-end 2023,
Since 2010, the S&P 500 index
of American stocks has
returned 11% a year in real
terms.
These profits are all the more
function of traffic (current and
future projections) plying on it
and, therefore, only those roads
that have sufficient traffic
TURN TO PAGE 13
curve—would be able to cut
down on efforts that include
trawling voluminous data to
summarize and analyze infor-
mation.
Law firm Khaitan & Co. has
a move it believes will boost
efficiency. The new virtual
assistant was developed based
on specific use-cases within
the firm, with prompts specifi-
cally developed for its needs.
other measures, including con-
centration (the share of the
stockmarket that is made up by
the top firms) or value spreads
(the valuation of the most
are usually receptive to such
innovations, viewing new
technologies as strategic tools
to augment capabilities rather
TURN TO PAGE 13
warned about the danger of
recessions and falling corpo-
rate profits. At the start of 2023
Wall Street savants predicted
that in the year to come Amer-

have been pulled up by their
existing investors that until they
show a perpetual path to profit-
ability, it is unlikely that any-
body is going to give you
money,” India Quotient’s part-
ner Madhukar Sinha said. “And
that is exactly the reason why a
lot of companies at a smaller size
have started turning profitable.”
Even early-stage businesses
that are more growth-oriented
need to get their unit economics
right in order to strike a balance
and grow at a sustainable pace.
“Essentially, a lot of the end
game for companies is driven by
whether you can do an IPO and
S
share prices was noted by San-
jeev Bikhchandani, whose Info
Edge India has invested in both
Zomato and PB Fintech. “Maybe
there’s a causal effect there,”
Bikhchandani said at Info Edge’s
earnings call on 13 February.
The sentiment is filtering
down to unlisted companies as
well, albeit as Sinha pointed
out, this means longer wait
times to close deals, as there is
no longer the same kind of
eagerness to invest as before.
Companies such as Frnd, a
social discovery app, and cod-
TURN TO PAGE 13
tockmarkets TEND to
rise gradually; recently
they have soared. Ameri-
can stocks are up by 21% since
the end of October and stand
roughly 5% above their vertigi-
nous peak in January 2022. On
February 22nd Europe’s equi-
ties set a new record for the first
time in two years. India has
been enjoying a multi-year
boom as optimism about its
economy abounds. Even Japa-
nese stocks—a byword for stag-
nation—have at last exceeded
the level they reached in 1989
before a decades-long slump. It
has been an extraordinary run.
striking given what markets
have had to contend with. The
age of free money has been fol-
lowed by two years of interest-
rate rises—and even now bond
investors are betting against
imminent cuts. A trade war is
raging between America and
China; actual wars are raging in
Ukraine, the Middle East and
parts of Africa. Around the
world, governments are turn-
ing away from free markets and
globalisation in favour of
industrial policy and protec-
tionism. If all that has not extin-
guished this rally, whatever
will?
expensive companies com-
pared with the cheapest). The
value of the top 10% of Ameri-
can firms as a proportion of the
whole market has not been as
high since the crash that was
one cause of the Depression in
the 1930s. And don’t forget the
frothiest corner of the financial
At the start of 2023, Wall Street savants predicted that in the year markets: bitcoin is trading
to come, America’s economy would grow by just 0.7%. AP around $60,000 again, just shy
of its peak in 2021.
One conclusion might be as they were during the dotcom Yet there are also reasons to
that a bubble is waiting to pop, mania of the late-1990s and see markets’ exuberance as
especially in America. On Wall 90% as high as they climbed rational. As central banks all
Street, valuations—the multi- during 2021, before rock-bot- over the world tightened mon-
ple by which profits are scaled tom interest rates rose. Similar etary policy at a pace not seen
up—are on average 80% as high extremes are also to be seen in for a generation, many analysts
ica’s economy would grow by
just 0.7%. In the event it
achieved more than three
times that amount. A broad
range of firms are publishing
strong results, including retail-
ers, such as Walmart, and Japa-
nese carmakers, such as
Toyota.
The economy continues to
defy gravity. A popular regular
forecast of annualised Ameri-
can economic growth, pub-
lished by the Federal Reserve
Bank of Atlanta, stands at 3.2%
for the first quarter of this year.
TURN TO PAGE 13

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