अपयश

एका शतकाच्या अथक परिश्रमांनी नावाररूपाला आलेलं, सहस्रावधी शिल्पकारांच्या योगादानाची समृद्धी लाभलेलं, तरीही काही अंशी अपूर्ण असं ते शिल्प त्या त्रिशूळधारी राक्षसाने पायदळी तुडवलं. शिल्पाच्या सुरेख मस्तकाचा क्षणार्धात चेंदामेंदा झला आणि चिखल मिश्रित रक्ताच्या थारोळ्यात निपचित जाऊन ते पडलं. त्याने फोडलेली किंकाळी केशरी वस्त्र परिधान केलेल्या गदाधारी जमावाच्या कोलाहलात विरून गेली. निमिषार्धात ती जनावरं त्याच्यावर तुटून पडली. शिल्पातून चहुदिशांना दरवळणारा, मंत्रमुघ्द करून टाकणारा तो सुगंध, त्या कृत्रिम, निर्जीव कालाकृतीलाही जिवंतपणाची झाक देणारा तो सौम्य, ऊबदार प्रकाश नाहीसा झाला. राहिला फक्त भकास धुराचा वास, स्मशानातली निरव शांतता आणि काचेच्या तावदानापलीकडून ते केविलवाणं दृष्य पाहत असलेल्या (माझ्यासारख्या) पोकळ बाहुल्या.             

भट्टी के नाम (ईद का चांद)

इस तीरगी-ए-शब को रौशन करने वाले व्याध थे तुम,

भटकी कश्ती को साहिल दिखाने वाले क़ुत्ब थे तुम,

हमें ग़म है, और बेहद ख़ुशी भी, कि-

चंद ही दिनों में ईद का चांद बन जओगे तुम   

Mima Ito

It was the 10^th of June 2018 and in front of a packed Kita-Kyushu gymnasium the score-line read 11-08, 11-09, 11-06, 09-04. Chen Xingtong, one of China’s rising stars, was just two points away from securing a place in her first ever Japan Open final. Things had gone awfully wrong for Mima Ito, the local girl. Apart from the closely fought second game, Ito had been outplayed throughout the match, largely thanks to her lack of consistency. Her trademark backhand punches with her “short pimples”, usually lethal, had just refused to land on the table. But just when it looked as if Japan would not be represented in the final, the audience got to witness the most remarkable comeback of the year. Ito won the next seven points in a row and then with machine-like efficiency went on to win the next three games. It was as if she had one job to do: forget about the previous point and play the next one to the best of her abilities. No matter whether a point ended in a disappointing error or in a spectacular winner after a long, hard-fought rally she betrayed zero emotions, quite a contrast to another Japanese teenager who has been making waves recently. 

Mima Ito (Photo by Hideyuki Imai, www.ittf.com)

A month ago, TableTennis fans had witnessed a similar Mima Ito at the World Team Championships at Halmstad. In the final match against China, she faced Liu Shiwen in the opening encounter and was staring at defeat when the score read 5-1 in the final set in Liu Shiwen’s favour. What followed was extra-ordinary. The next point would have been astonishing even in the training hall; but the context just made it super special. Ito served short on Liu Shiwen’s forehand, who pushed the ball long on Ito’s backhand. A rapid-fire exchange that followed was cut short abruptly when Liu Shiwen’s topspin hit the net and landed on Ito’s side of the table, who somehow managed to keep the ball in play. But, quite understandably, her retrieve popped high and Liu Shiwen had the entire table at her mercy. She smashed the ball with considerable force, but unfortunately directed it right into Ito’s hitting zone. An ordinary player would have been pleased with mere contact with the ball. But Ito smashed the ball crosscourt for a winner and nonchalantly walked into position for the next point. The rest is history.

Mima Ito has been around at the top for some time now. Her constant presence in the top ten, consistent performances on the Tour and especially the grace and maturity she displays while playing has made us all forget that she is still just 17. It’s another glaring example of the systematic bias against female sportspersons that her stupendous achievements (and those of her teammate Miu Hirano) have not received the kind of attention that has been generated by Tomokazu Harimoto’s meteoric rise. 

Ito’s ascent to the lofty heights she currently occupies was no less sensational. She won her first major international title in 2014 when the German Open (one of the most prestigious tournaments of the year) was held at Magdeburg. In the Doubles event she paired up with Miu Hirano and defied odds by winning the title. Both Hirano and Ito were thirteen at the time. Ito returned to the German Open next year and managed to win the Singles event this time, beating Singapore legend Feng Tianwei in straight games in the semis and overcoming the crowd favourite Patrissa Solja of Germany.¹ Her reaction after her win against Feng Tianwei was priceless- there wasn’t one. Her matter-of-fact way of going about her business and her calm, composed demeanor belied the fact that she was just 15! The moment that catapulted her to world-wide fame, however, came in 2016, when she upset Ding Ning in the Asian qualification tournament for the Olympics in Hong Kong. Ding Ning, who had won the 2015 World Championships, despite battling an injury in the final, was (and probably still is) by some distance the best player in the world. It was then that the Table Tennis world first took notice of Ito and her compatriot Miu Hirano (who had beaten Liu Shiwen in the same tournament). Today, Ito has, without a doubt, established herself as Japan’s best player, having beaten Kasumi Ishikawa in the final of the Japanese National Championships.    

Mima Ito has an aggressive playing style that is as different from from the Chinese style as it is possible to be. Most Chinese women, play rapid, spinny rallies close to the table. They use subtle changes of direction to manoeuver their opponents out of position and then exploit empty areas on the table, while keeping their own bases covered with their electrifying footwork. Ito’s game doesn’t fit this pattern at all. Firstly, she has short pimples on her backhand. Although they impart little spin of their own, short pimples aid in “lifting” opponent’s backspins. Furthermore, flat hits with short pimples have some degree of backspin and are therefore difficult to counterattack.² Her extraordinary reflexes notwithstanding, her short stature restricts her ability to cover quick, wide balls. Therefore, she relies on her super-effective backhand punches and devastating forehand smashes to keep her opponents at bay. The other weapons that Ito and Hirano, both have found useful are their serves, especially what are widely described today as “shovel” serves. Their serves are incredibly deceptive and even the best Chinese players have struggled to get a reliable read on them. It was her serves that helped Miu Hirano overcome Zhu Yuling, Chen Meng and Ding Ning at the 2017 Asian Championship, just a month before the World Championships, sending alarm bells ringing in the Chinese camp. When Ito beat Wang Manyu in the final of the 2018 Japan Open, her serves continued to serve her well, helping her gain a head start in points when she was serving. The fact that Wang Manyu, who had quite comfortably beaten Ito a week before in Shenzen, was having trouble with her serves, goes on to show the importance of the art of constantly evolving one’s game, something which Ito is an absolute master of. 

Japan has completely revolutionised international Table Tennis by introducing a fabulous crop of young players, who have established themselves as serious contenders in big events. Hirano and Ito are being closely followed by Hina Hayata, who has an added advantage of being left-handed. The left-hand right-hand combination of Hayata and Ito won Bronze at the 2017 Worlds, matching Hirano’s Bronze in the Singles event. Hayata has been no less impressive in singles. She was a hair’s breadth away from beating China’s Zhu Yuling at the Grand Finals in 2018. Miu Nagasaki and Miu Kihara aren’t too far behind either.

With the next Olympics hosted by Japan, we are all eagerly waiting to see the Chinese response to this extra-ordinary resurgence by Japan.    

¹ In the Under-21 event at the same tournament Ito was beaten in the final by another Japanese teenager, Hina Hayata.

² Despite being rare on the international scene, short pimples are remarkably popular in India. Many of India’s leading women (Mouma Das, Madhurika Patkar) have developed their games with short pimples.

Tomokazu Harimoto

What if you beat Timo  Boll (German legend, World Cup Winner and simply the best non-Chinese player of the 21^st century), Jun Mizutani (8 time Japanese National Champion, Olympic Bronze Medalist), Vladimir Samsonov (former WR1 and an evergreen tree), Fan Zhendong (the best male player on the planet currently), Zhang Jike (Olympic and two time World Champion) within a span of a year? What if you won the Japanese National Championship, reached the quarterfinals of a World Table Tennis Championship, won your first World Tour title, managed a top-four finish in a World Tour Grand Finals? What if you bagged the most sought-after scalp in today’s men’s Table Tennis - that of Ma Long (the most popular contender for GOAT) – in front of your home crowd?

Then you would have had a remarkable Table Tennis career indeed.

But imagine that you did all this before celebrating your fifteenth birthday! That would simply be - Ican’tfindasuitableadjectivevtodescribehowIfeelaboutthis.

Tomokazu Harimoto (Photo: Hideyuki Imai, www.ittf.com)

Over the course of the last year or so a fourteen year old Japanese teenager by the name Tomokazu Harimoto has got hold of the Table Tennis fraternity by the scruff of their necks and shaken them a couple of dozen times, poured ice cold water over them and “CHO-CHO”-ed till their ears went numb!

The first time I heard Harimoto’s name was when he beat Sharath Kamal in the semifinal of the 2017 India Open (one of the rare occasions when India hosted a World Tour Open). When he lost to Dimitrij Ovtcharov of Germany (who had a fantastic 2017 too) in the final, he missed out an opportunity to beat the previous record of the youngest male winner of a World Tour (or Pro Tour as it was called earlier) event by several years.  Although he was quite comprehensively beaten by Ovtcharov, the thirteen year old whose “cho”s drowned out a heavily partisan crowd at the Thyagaraj Stadium during the semifinal made a lasting impression.

Really young sportspersons competing shoulder to shoulder with their adult counterparts and managing to succeed is not unheard of. Nadia Komaneci is probably the most famous name that comes to mind. Although average ages of female gymnasts do tend to be on the lower side, in a sport like Table Tennis where players continue to perform at incredible levels right in their early forties (Vladimir Samsonov is currently 42, three times as old as Harimoto), it is extremely unusual to have a 14 year-old challenging the top players. Therefore I naturally assumed that Harimoto’s levels would soon drop and he would be remembered as just another “wonderkid” who caused an upset or two. But as the year unfolded and as Harimoto sent shockwave after shockwave through the Table Tennis world, his detractors, who had dismissed him earlier, had to eat their own words.

Although he had been well-known as a “Japanese Wonderkid” for some time, he really announced himself to the world at the 2017 World Championship in Dusseldorf. In the round of 64 Harimoto was drawn against his fellow countryman, Jun Mizutani. Mizutani has been among the best non-Chinese male players for some years now and the 8-time Japanese National Champion and the reigning Bronze-medalist from Rio 2016 was widely expected to pose the strongest challenge to the Chinese vice-grip on the World Championship. But Harimoto beat him and did it with astonishing ease. Throughout the match, Mizutani was the one chasing the ball. Harimoto, playing close to the table, from where his backhand was absolutely devastating, consistently managed to control the rallies, by pushing Mizutani wide with the help of his backhand and then exploiting the empty areas. Mizutani, who prefers to play powerful counterloops away from the table, failed to adapt to this super-aggressive, close-to-the-table play and eventually surrendered the match 11-07, 11-06, 14-12, 07-11, 11-08. Harimoto would eventually go on to lose 4-1 in the quarterfinal to China’s Xu Xin, but not before becoming the sport’s youngest ever quarterfinalist at a world championship.

If Harimoto missed out on a chance to become the youngest ever winner of a World Tour Open in Delhi, he had to wait only six more months before he stunned everyone into silence by winning the Croatian Open in August. It was an added bonus that his opponent in the final was one of the most popular table tennis players, Timo Boll.  From that moment on, he has just refused to slow down. He made the semifinal of the China Open, lost a close seven-setter against Xu Xin in Sweden and reached the semifinal of the World Tour Grand Finals, where he narrowly lost to an in form Dimitrij Ovtcharov.

If Harimoto had been successful on world stage there was one test he hadn’t yet passed. He hadn’t yet beaten any of the top Chinese players.

The new-year began with the World Team Cup in London, with fans excited with the prospects of a potential China-Japan clash. When China and Japan did meet in the finals, Harimoto was quite soundly out-muscled by an imperious Fan Zhendong.

Many had argued that the “pros” would soon be better prepared to handle Harimoto and he would quickly lose his edge.  But with the top Chinese players it was Harimoto who appeared better prepared with every passing encounter. Against Xu Xin, after his 4-1 loss at the Worlds, he played a competitive seven setter in Sweden. After his loss to Fan Zhendong in London, within no time Harimoto rocked the Table Tennis world again by beating Fan Zhendong at the Asian Cup in Yokohoma. But his crowning glory came late in May and early in June when he followed his China Open win over Zhang Jike (arguably China’s biggest superstar) by an unbelievable 4-2 win at the Japan Open over none other than the best player of all time (my opinion), Ma Long. Ma Long losing a match is a rarity and Ma Long losing a match to a non-Chinese player is just unheard of (he did lose to Timo Boll of Germany and Jeong Sangeun of Korea in 2017). If all this wasn’t enough he went on to win the tournament, beating Lee Sangsu of Korea (a Bronze Medalist at the Worlds in Dusseldorf) and then Zhang Jike again in the final.

Although I have highlighted his best moments, he did have several lows too. The ones that stand out are his loss to the German defender Ruwen Filus at the Qatar Open, his complete demolition by England’s Liam Pitchford at the World Team Cup and then again at the World Team Championships and his defeat (after having beaten Fan Zhendong) against  Jeong Sangeun at the Asian Cup. He does tend to be a little inconsistent. Having said that, thanks to his incredible run, Harimoto managed to break into the world’s top 10 in May 2018.  

Despite his Table Tennis achievements, he his famous for (and very commonly abused online for) his incredibly loud cheering. He cheers almost every point that he wins as if it’s the championship point. This excessive shouting has earned him some enemies among Table Tennis fans across the word. I, however, think Harimoto is an extremely fair and courteous sportsperson. His cho-ing is never in the opponent’s face. He never cheers after winning a lucky point and is prompt in offering his opponent an apology after a fortuitous net- or edge-ball.

What is the reason behind Harimoto’s unmatched ascent? What is the secret ingredient that makes him so lethal?  Based on my limited understanding of the game and whatever I have gleaned from discussion forums on the internet, there appear to be several reasons. Firstly, the game has evolved remarkably fast over the last decade or so. Newer playing styles have emerged. Strokes that were considered blasphemous earlier are now the most common weapons. For example, playing a backhand on the forehand side of the table was taboo until 13 years ago (that was incidentally when I last played competitive Table Tennis). But in the modern game, players routinely move to their forehand side and play a backhand, especially while receiving serves. Although backhands are generally less powerful than forehands, they have one big advantage: more wrist flexibility. Therefore, using lightning quick movements of the wrist, modern players can produce spinny, aggressive backhand strokes that require short backswings. Using these backhand strokes one can attack balls that are short and therefore expected to bounce twice on the table, something that is difficult to do with a forehand stroke. In the midst of this, the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), for some bizarre reason, decided to change the material of the playing balls in 2013. The newer balls are a shade slower and are less spinny. This has resulted in a more close-to-the-table, super-aggressive style of play becoming popular among the men, who have traditionally preferred counterlooping rallies away from the table. The women on the other hand have always played lightning quick, close-to-the-table rallies, involving shorter strokes. The bottomline is that the older players have had to slightly alter their style of play to suit the modern game. But the younger players have grown up playing this version of the game and therefore are slightly better placed than their older colleagues. In fact, Harimoto is not the only Japanese teenager, who has taken the world by storm. In the run up to the Rio Olympics two Japanese 16-year olds (Miu Hirano and Mima Ito) beat two of the most unbeaten Chinese women - Ding Ning (then already a two-time World Champion and now also an Olympic Champion) and Liu Shiwen (WR1 for a  long period of time). Although order was restored at the Olympics and China swept all the Table Tennis medals, Hirano and Ito have continued to spar with and sometimes emerge victorious against the top Chinese women. Miu Hirnao, won the 2017 Asian Championships, beating Chen Meng, Zhu Yuling and Ding Ning, a feat without a recent parallel. More recently, at the World Team Championship Finals, Mima Ito beat Liu Shiwen in the opening encounter, causing some nervous moments for the Chinese team, who eventually managed to pull off a comfortable 3-1 win over Japan. At the 2018 Japan Open, Ito matched Harimoto’s feat by pulling off a ridiculous come-back in the semis against China’s Chen Xingtong from 3-0 down in games and 9-4 down in the fourth, before beating Wang Manyu (the winner of three World Tour Opens this year) in the final.     

With Chinese dominance under assault (and Harimoto at the vanguard), these are exciting times for international Table Tennis. I think the Chinese will manage to defend their fort as the strongest Table Tennis playing country on the planet, with an endless conveyor belt of breathtaking players emerging out of that country. However, a Japanese gold  medal in the Singles event at the Tokyo Olympics looks a definite possibility, especially given the rule at the Olympics that no Association can send more than two players for the Singles event. Can Harimoto create history (if he hasn’t done it already!) by becoming the youngest ever Olympic Champion?

Only time will tell.    

In Defence of My City (sort of)

    It was one of those last few dying days of spring in Chandigarh, when the breezyApril gives way to an unforgiving May and walking outdoors becomes synonymous with getting cooked in a furnace..  I wanted to have a haircut, and  as I made my way to a barber’s shop - run by a  gentleman from Western UP - located in a Sikh-majority neighbourhood on the southern fringes of Chandigarh, I was thinking about an unflinchingly critical article (https://scroll.in/magazine/863986/seventy-years-on-chandigarh-hasnt-lived-up-to-corbusiers-expectations-or-nehrus-boasts) about the 70^th anniversary of Chandigarh, published a couple of months ago. As I sipped orange juice at a stall run by a gentleman from Bihar, I read the article once again and felt my annoyance with it grow. On my way back, now feeling much lighter, I picked up chicken momos and headed back to my institute plotting my response to an article that described my city as a “modern-day monumental fossil”!  If a modern-day monumental fossil is a place where a Marathi-speaking person could walk to a Punjabi Sikh-majority neighbourhood, to have his hair cut by a man from UP, sample fruit-juice at a Bihari man’s stall and have his tongue singed by the chilly chutney prepared by a Nepali momo-seller, only to return to an institute, where the single-largest language is Malayalam, then it is a pretty unusual fossil indeed.

    One of my main grievances with Harshawardan Raghunandhan, the author of the article in question (henceforth “the author”), is that he provides very few specifics. He begins the article by giving a glaringly incomplete historical overview of the Chandigarh project, then proceeds to give a horrifyingly ill-informed crash-course on Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh. The article ends, quite abruptly, with a handful of loudmouthed judgments about the city with little or no justification provided.

    With that little rant let me state at the outset what I propose to write in the following paragraphs. Am I planning to glorify the city of Chandigarh? Far from it. I am not going to add any new points of my own extolling the virtues of living in Chandigarh.  In fact, I will spend the first few paragraphs helping the author’s case by highlighting some really miserable aspects of life in Chandigarh. I will then try and address (and hopefully debunk!) some specific points raised by the author.

***

    One of the first things I noticed when I first moved to Chandigarh some eight years ago, was the city’s shambolic public transportation system. I remember being stranded on dark streets, having missed my institute’s shuttle, waiting helplessly for a Chandigarh Transport Undertaking (CTU) bus that would take me towards my institute 11 kilometres away from Chandigarh’s city centre. CTU’s connectivity problem is not just limited to the fringes. I recall having spent nearly an hour waiting for a bus at the Sector 43 ISBT, one of Chandigarh’s public transportation nodes. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in Bombay I still find this lack of reliable public transportation and the consequent reliance on auto-rickshaws and app-based cab services strange and a little unsettling. 

    This lack of public transportation doesn’t come as a surprise when viewed in the context of the overall layout of the city. The bottom-line is that the city was planned for the middle classes and above; and in doing so the planners made a fatal error that urban planners have continued to repeat throughout the country. They assumed that urban elites would clean their homes, cook their own food or even be able to sleep peacefully without having a man in a uniform guard their front door. In other words, they  completely failed to accommodate the large floating population of domestic workers, security guards, construction workers etc. This meant that this floating population had to find refuge into rapidly mushrooming shantytowns (which the author mentions in his article) sprawling open spaces in the city, or out into one of the many old villages (for example, Burail)* that weren’t displaced when the city was built. Not unlike in other cities in India, civic authorities in Chandigarh have, in recent years, waged a war against these people, displacing them from the city’s grid to villages on the urban fringe. Sandwiched between the city’s grid and the airport is one such villages called Jagatpura, which I had the good fortune to visit as a part of a course on cities (conducted by Dr. Anu Sabhlok) along with my friends (Arul, Aniket and Prajwal). A tiny fraction of Jagatpura’s population consists of local Punjabi Sikh landlords, who till some of the land there. But a vast majority of the village’s population is made up of daily wage earners from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and in one case, even Nepal. The number of kuchcha hutments that house these people has exponentially increased over the past decade. We discovered over the course of our visits to the place that the reason for this explosion was demolition drives carried out elsewhere in the city. 

    The other problem created by Chandigarh’s American Suburbia-like cityscape is distances. This coupled with the fact that Chandigarh has somehow evolved commercial neighbourhoods that specialize in (and monopolize) specific kind of goods (for example, bathroom related hardware in Sector 22, electrical hardware in Sector 18, surgical equipment in Sector 16, wholesale groceries and vegetables in Sector 26) means one inevitably ends up travelling from one end of the city to another.
    Compare this with my home in the western suburbs of Bombay, where within a radius of 200 metres, one could buy anything from vegetables to train tickets to giant metallic cylindrical things (whose use I haven’t bothered to find out) to fish (both edible and rearable) to laptop computers to – until a few years ago, when the State Government finally decided to shut down the local cattle market – even buffaloes.  

    To summarise, I will, albeit reluctantly, have to agree with the author’s final analysis that seventy years on, the city has failed to live up to expectations of its founders. 

This brings me to the main point of my essay. Although I agree with the author’s overall conclusion, I find his article to be incredibly sloppy. The author is guilty of missing out on important facts, making interpretations that can only be described as shockingly ill-informed and passing baseless, frivolous judgments. Let me try and elaborate.

    I do not know if omission of an important fact is a crime, but in his haste to discredit Corbusier’s city, the author fails to mention that Corbusier wan'ts, in fact,  the first foreign architect appointed to the Chandigarh project. If one visits the City Museum in Sector 10, one can find on display blueprints of a fan-shaped city, completely different from Corbusier’s regimented orthogonal grid. This initial plan for the city was prepared by American architects Albert Meyer and Matthew Nowicki, who were appointed by Nehru in 1949.  When Nowicki died in a tragic plane crash, Meyer resigned and the project was subsequently awarded to Corbusier (along with Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew).

Further light is thrown on the author’s armchair scholarship when he mentions the “square-shaped sectors” of Chandigarh. Anyone who has bothered to look at a map of Chandigarh (a highly recommended activity before writing an article on Chandigarh!), will tell you that the city is made up of rectangular sectors. In fact, each sector is 800 metres by 1200 metres, which results in an area of 960000 square metres, a figure the author quite correctly provides. 

    It is hard to tell if it is a deliberate falsehood or another example of the author’s apparent dislike for facts, but his claim that “[t]here would be no room for industrial or military activity in Chandigarh...” is just laughable. In the version of the author’s article that appears on Scroll.in there is a photograph of Le Corbusier posing next to a picture of his Master Plan. Tucked away in the right hand side of the Master Plan is a region shaded with slanting lines depicting – yes, you guessed it right – the Industrial Area. In fact, Corbusier designed the Industrial Area as an ‘arm’ of a metaphorical person. The Capitol Complex was probably the ’head’. As for the military, Chandigarh and its environs have always been home to numerous wings of the Indian military. The Air Force has its Base Repair Depot here and occupies a significant portion of the city to house its staff. The headquarters of the Western Command of the Army are located at Chandimandir (from where the city derives its name). With staff drawn from all over the country, these institutions (along with large campuses of paramilitary forces such as ITBP and CRPF) have imparted a fairly cosmopolitan flavour to a city that was designed to be a provincial capital.

    The author’s claim that hurt me the most is his fantasy that the city’s plan would prevent anyone from imagining a place for themselves in the city (with the notable exception of career bureaucrats). Other than countless rick-shaw-pullers, auto-drivers, fruit-sellers, barbers, small shop owners who, despite innumerable encumbrances, have found their feet in this city, the one group of people who disprove the author’s assertion are the city’s students. The other ‘arm’ of the Corubusier’s metaphorical person is an institution whose genesis lies in violent displacement from Lahore – the Panjab University. One of the better public universities in India, for students across the region (J & K, Punjab, Himachal, Haryana, Uttarakhand) and even outside the region, the University is a hotly pursued destination. Sector 14, which in its entirety is the University’s campus, and its adjacent areas completely defy the image of a dull, bureaucratic city the author works so hard to create in his article. 

    I wonder what made the author believe that Chandigarh does not hold the popular imagination of India. I would like to claim (although I admit I have no data to back this claim) that Chandigarh is the most sung-about city in the country. Every year countless songs mentioning Chandigarh in some way are released. Apart from uncountably many Punjabi songs (Yaari Chandigarh Waliye, Chandigarh Waliye, Chandigarh Rehn Waliye for some examples), there are Himachali (Hawa Lagi Chandigarh Ri) and even Bollywood songs (Kala Chashma, Kaisi Dhaakad Hai)  that talk of Chandigarh as some fancy, cool place. 

    The author concludes his article by saying, “ In Chandigarh’s case, plan and monument alone could not guarantee a city in full." I couldn’t agree more. No city is perfect; and Chandigarh with its numerous shortcomings falls well short of the image of an ideal city its planner had in mind. But contrary to what the author would have us believe this city is alive and it’s kicking.           

*Google Earth images of the city offer some fascinating views of how these old villages interrupt Chandigarh’s perfect grid.

PS: Here is an interesting read on the architecture of the city: https://www.archdaily.com/806115/ad-classics-master-plan-for-chandigarh-le-corbusier
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr. Syed Zeeshan Ali for his comments and suggestions and Karan "Bhatti" Bhatt for sharing the Himachali song with me.

Haiku (?)

हाय! कू-ब-कू है
छाई कमल की वो बू
सांस लें तो कैसे?

एक अजोका अजूबा (Ek Ajoka Ajooba or Today’s Wonder)

It was July 2016. While Sushma Swaraj and Nawaz Shareef were playing verbal table tennis, our taxi sped through the moderately busy market street of Sector 19 in Chandigarh, headed towards Tagore Theatre in Sector 18. With one eye on my watch, which was creeping with alarming rapidity towards 7 O' clock, I was reading the signboards that whizzed past us.  Two signs made me tear my eyes away from the watch. Nestled between ‘Gift Bazar’ and ‘Lifestyle’ was a shop with a stone patterned facade announcing its name in black capital letters- ‘Peshawar Supermarket’. Not too far away, proclaiming its expertise in ‘wedding suits, sarees and lehngas’ in white letters was an establishment called ‘Pindi Fashion Mall’.  I couldn’t help but wonder if this was but a small teaser of the five-day long celebration that we would witness courtesy Ajoka Theatre of Lahore. Every day for the next five days from seven in the evening Ajoka Theatre enthralled, entertained and won over an audience of men and women, both old and young by a dazzling exhibition of dramatics. It was a spellbinding display, the likes of which I had never experienced before.

It was early in the morning (by my standards) one day when my friend Zeeshan’s call woke me up. Mumbling some of my favourite swear words, I fumbled with the buttons of my mobile phone.

 “Manas! A Pakistani theatre group is going to perform at Tagore Theatre.”

My first reaction was that of disbelief. Surely, there must be a Tagore Theatre in Delhi or Calcutta. A Pakistani group in Chandigarh, despite the physical proximity, was a rare phenomenon. After all, the road between the two Punjabs goes via Islamabad and Delhi! During my six year long stay here, I have never heard of a Pakistani artist visiting Chandigarh for any kind of performance, let alone an entire group, barring the exception of the Pakistani Cricket Team of course. 

“Great”, I muttered with little enthusiasm and went back to sleep thinking all this must surely have been a dream. But to my delight it didn’t turn out to be a dream. 

Ajoka Theatre were going to travel to Chandigarh from Lahore for the 2^nd Humsaya Festival to be held at Tagore Theatre. It was quite a miracle that nearly fifty Lahoris got Indian visas amid all the muscle flexing on display in Delhi and Islamabad.   

Spread over five days from 23^rd to 27^th July, Ajoka Theatre performed five different plays during the Festival. All five plays, although themed on seemingly disparate topics, had a very obvious common undercurrent- a celebration of a shared past, a longing for peace, for religious harmony and most importantly an attempt to highlight human stories in face of multitudes of imposed, abstract doctrines- be it nation, religion or moral codes. 

The festival opened with Ajoka’s tribute to Dara Shikoh. In a play titled simply Dara, the tragic tale of Dara Shikoh was woven seamlessly with that of Dara’s contemporary, Sarmad, an Armenian Sufi mystic who lived in Delhi. Condemned to death by Aurangzeb, both men shared much more than just the manner of their death. Dara Shikoh’s attempts at religious syncretism- depicted beautifully in the play in a scene in which a classical dancer facilitates Dara’s interaction with religious leaders of all major South Asian religions while the live musicians sing Kabir’s Moko Kahaan Dhoonde Re Bande- and  Sarmad’s rejection of religious dogmatism have never been more relevant than in these troubled times of religious fundamentalism and nationalistic vitriol that goes by the name of patriotism in our country. Few relics of these two men survive today. The tomb of Sarmad, whose headless corpse is said to have ascended the stairs of the Jama Masjid proclaiming Anal Haq (अहं ब्रह्मास्मि), exists to date in Old Delhi and can be accessed by the public.  The fabled library established by Dara too has survived and can be located near Kashmere Gate.

The second play, Kaun Hai Ye Gustakh, celebrated the life and work of the most prolific Urdu short story writer of the previous century- Saadat Hasan Manto, a man whose life was probably as interesting as his stories. The play was a masterful interplay of enacting of parts of Manto’s stories (including Thanda Ghosht, Permit, Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do) and Manto’s own narration of his life story, including the harassment he faced for the “obscene” nature of his stories. The high point of the play, however, was the recurring conversation between Manto and a mysterious woman, who turns out to be Manto’s alter ego. 

If I had to pick a favourite out of the five, it would be Lo Phir Basant Aayi, a satirical take on what happens when fundamentalism suppresses daily life. It was the story of an aging Lahori kite-maker, who treats his kites as if they were human beings (a kite called Rani must not be treated in any fashion that would dishonour a queen!) and reminisces about those days before kite-flying was banned, when his kites could soar unhindered in the skies of Lahore. His family includes his daughter-in-law whose ambition is to constantly out-shout her neighbour (another formidable woman) in their fiercely contested slanging matches over the rooftops. His granddaughter is a confident young woman who wants to be a painter and is in love with an aspiring singer. This provides an ideal backdrop for a bunch of fundamentalists, led by an uncontrollably talkative and incomparably funny Pathan, to step in. Art, music, kite-flying, poetry, secular education are among the many soft targets.  Although the subject was quite serious, it was dealt with so brilliantly that every now and then the crowd couldn’t help but burst into spontaneous rounds of applause and whistles. Despite being set in Lahore, the play’s message is quite universal; be it Bombay- where fundamentalists dictate what name the citizens can use for their own city, who can work in the city (North Indians, South Indians and Pakistanis beware!) or even the UK, whose post-Brexit Tory government has banned foreign academics based in the UK from advising UK policymakers.

If there was a blemish on the five-day long festival, it was the fourth play, Kabira Khara Bazaar Me, the only one that did not elicit a standing ovation. This was the first time the play was being staged and the performers looked ill at ease throughout the performance, especially when compared to the other four plays which were simply flawless. The message of the play, however, was loud and clear. As expected, with the help of some very fine musicians, the play made ample use of Kabir’s poetry, which many in the audience were familiar with and could sing along in hushed tones. 

If the last play, Anni Mai Da Sufna, was meant to make people laugh and cry at the same time, it was a roaring success! It was a play that many in the audience with Partition stories could relate to. Anni Mai is a stubborn old Punjabi lady who was forced to leave her ancestral village and migrate eastwards in the wake of independence. Several decades later, now having lost her eyesight, her only dream is to visit her pind and relive all those moments with her friends who she had to leave behind. On the other side of the border is an old chunri dyer, dear to everyone in the neighbourhood. While his family migrated to India, he simply couldn’t bring himself to part ways with his beloved Lahore and stayed on. Now that his granddaughter is getting married in Amritsar his only desire is to attend the wedding. With visa applications being summarily rejected, the play tells the story of how these two individuals fulfill their dreams in two very different ways.      

What was striking about the Festival, apart from the simple fact that it was spectacular, was the sheer versatility of the people involved. One reason why the plays had such a powerful impact was that a variety of languages and dialects were used based on the context of the plays. Shah Jahaan’s stately Urdu in Dara, the fundamentalist leader’s Urdu in Lo Phir Basant Aayi, garbed in a beautiful, musical, sing-song accent that only a Pathan can produce, Anni Mai’s earthy Punjabi and Kabir’s Bhojpuri-Braj Bhasha were impeccable and made the characters sound real. While the multi-lingual genius who wrote four of these plays, Shahid Nadeem and the directors (Madeeha Gauhar, Usha Ganguly and Kewal Dhaliwal) are certainly kaabil-e-taareef, the actors, many of whom played multiple roles in the five-day festival stole the show. Uzma Hasan, who was Jahaan Ara in Dara, reappeared the next day as Manto’s alter ego. Usman Raj, who was Aurangzeb on Day 1, transformed into Manto on Day 2 and on Day 3 was an ordinary Punjabi-speaking, energetic young man. The ease with which these people could switch roles was astonishing. The transformations were so complete and the characters so authentic that for example, only upon careful observation could one tell that the Shahjahaan in Dara and the Pathan in Lo Phir Basant Aayi were the same person, Sohail Tariq.  

After every play, members of the audience would overwhelm the artists with greetings. Memories would be shared, complements given and taken. A lonely looking old gentleman in the audience, who would do some extremely odd things during the plays such as fiddling with tiny LEDs while sitting in the front row, would labouriously make his way to the stage and throw a fistful of rose petals in the air. But no post-play session was more charged with emotion than the one on the last day. Anni Mai Da Sufna and some lovely speeches were enough for some members of the audience and even some of the artists to break down. As the members of the Ajoka contingent were called on stage individually, the applause refused to die down. The gentleman with the rose petals had to be halted as he tried to perform his usual ritual while Madeeha Gauhar, Shahid Nadeem and others were about to speak. As the formal ceremony ended many in the audience, including us, went on the stage. Some took selfies with their favourite actors while others just shared their experiences. While the crowd refused to budge, in the end, the organizers had to shout above the din and beg the audience to let the artists go.   It was a fascinating evening; an evening that made me feel that there still was hope.

Two months have passed and murderous fires have erupted on both sides of the fence. Reports have emerged (read the Hindu’s report on Operation Ginger) of violence of such disgusting nature by militaries of both countries that it would make even an avid Game of Thrones fan cringe. The Central Government, with its eyes firmly set on the upcoming assembly elections, has discarded all attempts to even pretend to seek a peaceful solution to South Asia’s problems. Artists from across the border have been forced to leave the country.  Hideous chest-thumping on national television by the so-called protectors of our national interest, baying ever so loudly for the enemy’s blood, is now a daily sight. Voices questioning the increasingly violent language of our politicians and the dangerously violent conduct of our military have been drowned out or humiliated. Many across the country are celebrating the Army’s “valour”. “Annihilation”, “obliteration”, “massive casualties” are terms that are now being used in a celebratory tone. Even Amul, a farmers’ cooperative, has released a pathetic cartoon depicting gun-wielding soldiers, followed by a drone, with the captions- “Surigical Strikes” and “Amul- Paks a punch”; tasteless puns coming from a brand that claims to be “the taste of India”.  

  

I knew the window Humsaya Festival had opened was a tiny one, but I had no inkling that it would shrink so rapidly. A madness has gripped this part of the world and there has been a chilling surge in senseless hatred. There doesn’t seem to be a way out of this ever quickening spiral. 

May be Dara would know what to do. Kabir and Manto would definitely have a thing or two to say about this insanity. Maybe Toba Tek Singh would rise up once again from the No Man’s Land. The old kite-maker would remind us all of his kites gliding happily in the cloudless, blue sky of the Punjab in spring. Anni Mai would vividly describe her youth in her ancestral village and regale us with beautiful stories of her friends, of times when the word ‘enemy’ was yet to be invented.

But will anyone care to listen?   





Ajoka Theatre's Website: www.ajoka.org.pk