The Branding of Friendship

It began at 9 a.m. on Sunday.
The student-friend who is getting some research help cancelled her appointment. "I kind of forgot its Friendship Day today and my best friend called up…alll of us are planning to hang out."
Aah, I said, fine. Have fun, and all that.
On Radio City, celebrating Kishore Kumar’s birth anniversary, the RJ played "Yeh dosti, hum nahin, chodhenge…." And said it was for Friendship Day, too.
On the way to M.G. Road later in the day, Naga movie theatre shows a huge hoarding of a new release: Hrithik Roshan, with flaring nostrils, shining skin, overflowing eyes and that grinny-grinny, goody-goody papa’s boy face. Wanna see "Mujhse Dosti Karoge.?"
Down at M.G. Road and nearabouts, Bangalore’s new coffee house culture is vying hard with pubbing, and there are lots and lots of friends hanging out this Sunday. House full everywhere.
Most of the pubs, noisy and beery, feature groups of men or 20-something guys and "gals" taking time out from writing software code on weekends. Its quite common to see trendy jeans, shampooed hair and Bareilly Hindi mixing in Bangalore’s excruciatingly pleasant monsoon air.
But we are on to coffee houses this Sunday. And suddenly the sociology of the new culture seems blurred.
The three new icons who have jostled to replace ole, grimy-looking Koshy’s have their own unique airs, and also not sooo crowded. But not today.
Usuallly, Java City is for sit-down-service and old-fashioned ambience…you can smoke amid the dim lights and friendly bearers, and the music can range from fusion, Bollywood chic and live jazz at Church Street on Sunday evenings.
Barista is well lit, pizza-boy type bar tenders and its plush, spacey, airy, steely self-service interiors is naturally for the yuppies and with-its, most of whom are usually well dressed in a see-and-be-seen ambience.
Café Coffee Day, with a bright red logo and glassy exteriors, is sort of crowded with teenagers, many of whom buy cheaper takeaway coffees and squat on the stairs outside or watch TV inside with some contemporary pop.
Today, the difference has gone for a six over mid-wicket.
There are lots of excited kids, college types and high-school types feeling like college, and all are collectively killing these brands to build that bigger brand: Friendship.
I walk past a crowded Java City in Church Street and a crowded Barista at St. Mark’s past yet another crowded, spanking new Coffee Day at Lavelle Road and just about grab the only table available at another Java City.
Through the looking glass of dark espresso, I see more teens. A girl who seems undernourished wears lipstick and offers a card, presumably the Friendship Day stuff, to a goateed, bulky, young man in a flowered shirt. I see flowers clutched in hands at Brigade Road.
On the way back home, I see two pairs of girlie-teenagers cheek-cheeking as they say their byes to each other from scooters.
On good old All India Radio, the RJ, stutteringly, dedicates "Careless whispers" ( "Shoulda known better to cheat a friend…..blah) for Friendship Day.

*****
Does Anil Moolchandani know?
To think that some clever supply chain economics lies at the root of Friendship Day is both lilfting and depressing…
Aah, The Might of The Brand.
The tale of Dhirubhai Hirachand Ambani turning from a gas pump attendant to a cloth-meets-polyester-meets-petrochemical-meets-naphtha-meets-refinery-meets-petrol pump tale is part of the year’s folklore for the departed Gujubhai, but few would remember or know anything about the Clint Eastwood poster.
As a teenager selling his family’s cloth in Kamla Nagar, strategically next to Delhi University’s sprawling campus, Anil Moolchandani found a strange customer asking for a teenybop poster of Eastwood. (Is that for sale, the lady asked. It was really not).
The poster had been been acquired by Anil on one of his "phoren" trips in those Indira Gandhi days. One thing let to another, and Archies was born as a greeting card brand, growing from posters. Its tacky, unabashedly me-too brand is now a household name.
Its early rival, Giggles, must have stopped laughing while Anilji, working from his shed-like Naraina Industrial Estate factory in West Delhi thrived on the business of feelings and laughed all the way to his banks, listing on the Bombay Stock Exchange along the way.
Anil had cards for all the year around…or nearly.
From Raksha Bandhan to Ganesh Chaturthi to Dusshera to Id to Diwali to Christmas to Holi to what not, cards flow easily from Archies. But then, there was a supply chain and inventory issue. You see, August was not really card prone, unless you count August 15. You need to keep the distribution and card printing plants buzzing to make more business sense.
Uncle Moolchandani figured that youngsters loved the friendship-and-feeling thing, and invented the Friendship Day…like Uncle Sam’s Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
This is for the same reason why Domino’s wanted to build pizza parlours at Ambala. (Don’t know if they actually did).
With a centralised kitchen near Chandigarh and a key market in Delhi, one way to make use of the route was to build pizza outlets all along the route..like a Rath Yatra or something for the pre-whatevered pizzas before they get baked for the delivery boys and hungry-kya phoners.
Also a bit like Coca Cola, given free to school kids in early days so they could get used to the strange taste.
So Friendship Day was born…the first Sunday of August, he said…and so they all believed the Gospel of St Moolchandani.
You see, Moolchandani reasoned, August 6 was when the Yanks nuked the Japs…Hiroshima and all that. And Friendship being the first "chachera bhai" of Peace, what better day than Aug six. But you can’t hang out or make card journeys on working days...so make that the first Sunday of August.

Hiroshima, mon amour?
Just as well they didn’t make it on that very date.
I do not fancy holocaust memorials and teeny exchange of cards coinciding…though you never know these days.

P.S. Long after Moolchandani told me his tale and long after I wrote this piece, I heard that the Friendship Day was originally proposed in the US by some politician. Am still not sure.

Manohari Singh--The Man With the Sax Appeal

"Roop Tera Mastana"
A coy Sharmila, a besotted Rajesh Khanna, and what was then a sultry, sensual scene. The song from Aradhna was a milestone in Bollywood music, no less helped by the saxophone that sets the jazzy undertone of the scene.
Manohari Singh, the man who played that tune and many more, is no more. He died on July 13, 2010, aged 79.
I was hoping to meet him some day to catch up on R.D. Burman to whom he had served as an assistant.
Manohari has played with other music directors including Laxmikanth Pyarelal.
Samanth Subramaniam has written a fine obituary to the man in Mint but it omits an interesting development.
Towards the later part of his career, Manohari teamed up with Basu Chakraborty, another assistant of Rahul Dev Burman, to compose music for a couple of movies (perhaps more). The biggest of them was "Sabse Bada Rupaiya". Here is my favourite, "Wada karo janam"....
But I would remember Basu Manohari for the score in Yasmeen, a flop that perhaps never got released. The song goes, "Aa humsafar, pyar ki sej par, kuch kahen kuch sunen, jaag ke raat bar."
The songs have a definite Pancham (RDB) touch.

Paraguay vs Japan - The Fully Faltu Kavita

Paraguay, hara gaye. Hara kiri kara gaye

Duniya bhar mein tha tension
Tokyo ubharega ya Ascuncion?
Samurai ab kamar kasey
"Kami kaze, Kamikaze"

Mach raha tha khoob shor
Phir vuvuzela ka uspe zor
Par na idhar goal, na udhar goal
Bas, do shoonya dikehy gol-gol

Phir penalty ka woh silsila
Bas ho gaya ab zalzala
Idhar bhi paanch aur udhar bhi paanch
Japaniyon par laga aanch


Phir Japney saare tooth gaye.
Apney huey Paraguay


Paraguay, hara gaye, hara kiri kara gaye.

Japani mein kami nahin
Par ball woh thami nahin
Goal woh gira gaye
Kamikaze ghar aa gaye

Paraguay, hara gaye, hara kiri kara gaye

Shourie vs Mani: The Shoe joke

I love this old, apocryphal tale about the late 1980s.
Mani Shankar Aiyar was then joint secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, and considered close to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose lavish lifestyle was a matter of gossip.
Arun Shourie was executive editor at Indian Express, owned by media baron Ramnath Goenka, whose spartan looks are a matter of folklore.
The Congress government was at loggerheads with the Express over many things, including the Bofors scandal.
Shourie meets fellow ex-Stephanian Mani at a party.

Shourie says, "Mani, stop licking RG's shoes."
Mani says, "You too stop licking RG's shoes. At least mine are made by Gucci. Yours are made by mochi."

Five things you can do with a vuvuzela

1. Send them to Afghanistan and Waziristan. They can drive the Taliban out of their mountain caves

2. Gift them to your real estate agent before a purchase. He gets people to blow them. Prices fall. You buy.

3. Send it to your HR manager for use in office parties. You can report sick the next day, and they will understand.

4. Use it as a flower vase and offer it to sweetheart. Never has love and blackmail been combined so well.

5. Blow it in Lucknow. And hope like hell the statues will break

Private Dictionary of Shashi Tharoor

Twitter: A place where you first invite troubles, and where troubles later invite you

Pushkar: Brandname associated with the trading of cricketers like cattle

Cattle Class: The class you acquire when you buy cricketers as described above

Rendezvous: A secret meeting to discuss things with partners.

External Affairs: Affairs you have while sojourning abroad

Ban Ki Moon: An endearing Korean term that sometimes sounds like a Punjabi abuse

Hat Trick: When you bowl a maiden over, three times in a row while having a ball

Trivandrum: A place in India connected with Dubai, with a mysterious Gulf in the middle

Kashmir Problem: Something that Lalit Modi creates when he tweets across my Line of Control

Bizarre Chors, Motherly Whores: Ishqiya and the Underworld Chic

“Surrender,” the gangster moll tells her underworld lover, citing sections of the Indian Penal Code in which he cannot quite be convicted. She longs for the company of her fugitive mate, and the respect she must be planning for her child to be conceived some future day.
He says he plans to. He hopes his benefactors’ political party will come to power in three months. If not, he says, he will “cylinder.”
“Surrender,” she corrects him, “not cylinder.”
The mispronounced surrender becomes a teasing metaphor, turning a symbol of devotion into an explosive instrument, as Ishqiya winds through a tale of love, longing, sex, violence, competition and the eternal mysteries of life in the rugged gangster-land movie set in the rural zones of Uttar Pradesh. Here caste wars and crime meet the Freudian rivalries of men and women fighting over each other.
They are all lovers, or Ishqiya, in this hyper-realistic saga woven around the common attraction of a foster-father and young nephew duo (Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi) for the abandoned moll whose persona’s layers are as engaging as the thickening plot.
Look at Mushtaq, the caricatured gang leader who torments the duo, listening only to his wife who calls him on the cellphone that plays, “O meri zohra jabeen.”
Look at Iftikhar (Naseer), who plays a quiz mastermind on old Bollywood songs as he cuddles up with Krishnaji, the gangster widow that he tries to woo – and one who makes him peel garlic over musical banter.
Look at Babban (Warsi) who frequents whores but turns on his rugged, boyish charm to seduce the homely woman and anger his competitor-guardian.
Look at Krishnaji (Vidya Balan) who conspires for a crime, plays the tanpura, exchanges sublime musical notes and then gives in to the raw advances of a seductor.
Look at the woman who runs Mona beauty parlour as she plays the small-town mistress in cheap lingerie laced with promises of eternal love.
Look at her secret lover who stutters through industry, worship, prosperity and dubious devotion to mistress.
“So your love is love and my love is sex?” Babban asks his uncle of sorts, turning an unintended spokesman for the new sexuality of the Bollywood woman.
It is okay now for her straddle a troika of men, even as she craves for the social respect, mysteriously exhibited in a cocktail of wriggly filmsong shakes in jeans and shades on the one hand and the humming of a soulful classic as she flips phulkas in a seedha-pallu saree.
Is Krishnaji (played with surprising aplomb by Vidya Balan) for real?
In director Abhishek Chaubey’s saga schooled in producer Vishal Bhardwaj’s mentoring, the mother and the mistress dance in the same persona, surprising and shocking her menfolk as he does us.
This is a new idiom for Bollywood, mixing elements of Shyam Benegal, Quentin Tarantino and the eternal Shakespeare, who inspired Bhardwaj’s Omkara set in the same country.
Omkara, Kaminey and Ishqiya form an unintended triology of underworld chic of the Hindi belt, complementing and contrasting another uintended triology from the Karan Johar school – Kurbaan, New York and My Name Is Khan set in exotic overseas locations.
If the KJo school looks at the international terror that visits skyscrapers, the VB school peeps into the hearts and minds of the people that supply its raw version in the rural hinterland.
Ishqiya comes in the league that is spelling a new wave in alternative cinema--blending social realism with literary depth and yet somehow managing storylines and musical narratives that stay mainstream.
Pictured with a camera that makes a Cartier-Bresson or Raghu Rai photofeature come alive on celluloid, and musical motifs that blend with the mysterious motives of its multiple protagonists, Ishquia has elements of an epic narrative as characters plunge headlong into events that make them lose themselves in a labyrinth of violence, hatred and competitiveness – all in the elusive quest for love and acceptance.
This is not the message of love sent in a Page 3 half-page ad This is the focus on the human heart that is as capable of deceit as it is of sacrifice in its quest for love.
If you watch Ishqiya, the next time you chuckle at a Mayawati statue, you might connect it with a Dalit boy called Nandu, who takes the gun to defend his lot as they fight the Thakurs who dishonour their womenfolk.
If you watch Monica Bedi in a reality show, you might just spend an extra second spotting Krishnaji in her.
If you watch the Breaking News tag chronicling the heinous crime of a previously unheard-of Hindi belt gangster on AajTak, you might just pause and wonder if there is inside the gun-runner a Verma, going home in stealth to eat puffed phulkas burnt in the corners by a woman swathed in love unexplainable in editorial columns
You might just recall a woman called Phoolan Devi, who, long long before she became the Bandit Queen, was a gangster’s moll not far from Chambal river.
As the tale that weaves kidnapping and gangsters reaches its denouement, Ishqiya’s characters are lost, but not their quest for love.
As cylinders blow up in tall fires that burn a barnyard home with its beautiful-brown interiors in the tender village landscape, serene water flows in a canal over which the characters walk across a bamboo bridge.
The bamboo bridge is hard enough to walk over, but comes with an unmistakeable fragility. That bridge must be an Ishqiya torn between devotional surrenders and explosive cylinders.