kindle magazine august 2012

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Critical Refl ective Journalism

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Editor in Chief: Pritha KejriwalManaging Editor: Maitreyi KandoiSenior Editor: Sayantan NeogiAssistant Editor: Sayan BhattacharyaWeb Editor: Shubham NagRoving Editor: Mukherjee P Feature Writers: Paranjoy Guha Th akurta, Novy Kapadia, Raza Rumi, Abhishek Chatterjee, Nitasha Kaul, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia, Joykrit MitraColumnists: Amit Sengupta, Teresa Rehman, Th omas Crowley, Luis A. Gomez, Mainak Bhaumik, Rohit Roy, Shabbir Akhtar, Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, Agniva ChowdhuryArt Director: Soumik LahiriArt Executive: Shuvam Dey Sarkar, Sumit DasMarketing Manager: Priyanka KhandeliaSenior Executive Marketing:Souvik SenMarketing Executive: Priyanka NairFinance Manager: Binoy K JanaFinance Executive: Dibyendu Chakraborty, Vishal K Th akurCo-ordinator: Priyanka MullickHead - Logistics: Arindam SarkarPrinted at: CDC Printers Pvt Ltd, Tangra Industrial Estate - II (Bengal Pottery), 45 Radhanath Chowdhury Road, Kolkata - 700 015.Distribution:India Book HouseVol 3 Issue 5 August 2012For subscription queries:SMS kindle (space) sub to 575756 or write to [email protected] advertising, write to us at:[email protected] marketing alliances, write to us at:[email protected], printed and published by Pritha Kejriwal on behalf of Ink Publications Pvt Ltd. Printed at CDC Printers Pvt Ltd and published from Kolkata. Ink Publications Pvt Ltd is not responsible for the statements and opinions expressed by authors in their articles/writeups published in ‘Kindle’. ‘Kindle’ does not take any responsibility for returning unsolicited publishing material.

Visit: www.kindlemag.inRNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013

Mushkilen Mujh Par Padi Itni Ke Aasaan Ho Gain As India turns 65, and Kindle turns 4, the

world outside my window is spawning black humour... Th e suddenly rich guy who makes more than Rs 28 a day, the gold medalist athlete whose gender becomes a national issue, the under-achiever Prime Minister, the rioter who means business, the outraged man who asks all the right questions every night at 10, the answers to which the nation has the right to know, the gun toting Gandhian, the skimpily dressed, soon to be victim of rape woman, hanging out at a night club, the slut-woman, walking down the street, the disfi gured fasting woman, the man who stares into your eyes straight from the TV sets, with glycerine tears in his eyes or the man who stares into space, waiting hopelessly, hopefully for the rains… It’s a puzzling landscape of romanticized contrasts, of cardboard caricatures of we-the people, of bizarre events that happen in such frenzied continuum, that in no time, the poignant turns pointless, the tragic turns comic… so, when a lovely tall woman writes against this ugly tall building, it all seems a bizarre waste, because we, in strangely morbid ways, aspire for both, with equal lust…and when a four year old magazine, keeps going around in circles, saying the same things over and over again, in relentless

repetition, it seems another colossal waste… In such times, the last resort is to laugh at ourselves… And we still celebrate, Kindle at 4 and India at 65. And here’s what the party looks like… half naked, dark, nubile men, bending backwards, to light up our streets, our ‘c-aaaars’, and our chandeliers at home, with their sparkly smiles, as we dance the night away…the perfect ‘happy – dent’ in the picture… Funny, eh?Consider it black humor… But let’s try not to be cynical, because there is always some joy in the darkest of laughter, and we should laugh, just because… So, in such tragi-comic times, we bring to you, the Kindle black humour special. Aft er all…as the song goes Barbadiyon ka sog manaana fi zool thaBarbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya…

Editor’sNote

Pritha KejriwalEditor in chief,

Kindle [email protected]

KINDLECritical Reflective Journalism

INDIA

TM


Cover:

The cover is inspired by the Jan, 1973 issue of ‘National Lampoon’,

an American humour magazine. The cover is a parody on contemporary

India and our collective conscience, and the

threat, if any, is directed at our sense of humour,

which inevitably, needs to get darker, if laughter has

to survive.

PLEASEDO NOT TAKE IT LITERALLY!


ContentsVolume 3 Issue 5 August 2012

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COVER STORY

The Black Humour Laboratory: The Joke is on us

Mumbai v Delhi: The Battle

by Thomas Crowley

In Conversation: Deborah Baker

The God Damn Particle

by Sayantan Neogi

Interview: Sneha

Khanwalkar Satyendranath Bose as a father

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

Wildl Wild West

by Luis A. Gómez

Dastaan-e- Dastageer

byAnuradha Bhasin Jamwal

Woody Guthrie:The Centenary Year

by Saswat Pattanayak

Being Nora

by Mainak Bhaumik

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DEAD SODA VS. SPARKLING WINEWhere is Jaganmohan Reddy delivering and where is the Crown Prince failing? Ashtadhyayi comments.

Rahul Gandhi is like a compulsion for Indian politics; supposedly the biggest youth face of Indian politics. But where is the zest and dynamism?

His party treats him like a king on the chess board and behaves like his soldiers and shadows, but baba refuses to grow up and emerge as a real leader while his party continues to face one electoral defeat aft er another.

At the other end, there are many faces from the youth political brigade who are doing well; performing and achieving results

but still they are not being projected as much as RG.

Th e big questions are- Who is the youth face of Indian politics? Who do the youth relate to? Do these faces even have a roadmap for the country’s future? I see a complete vacuum in this regard. Th e actual ground workers never come to the limelight. Th ey organise rallies, mobilise support for leaders, hire tents and do the entire spade work. Th ey help their leaders win elections but never get their dues.

So who are these leaders? In most cases, they are from the families of the existing leadership. Take a look at any


OPINION

prominent party in our country, from INC to BJP, Biju Janata Dal to Samajwadi Party, DMK, NCP, Shiv Sena to many others… most of them have reserved the fi rst line seats for their children. Some of them could be considered youth faces of Indian politics. Th ere are many names- Akhilesh Yadav, Jagan Reddy, Sachin Pilot, Omar Abdullah, Asaduddin Owaisi, Sukhbir Badal, Raj and Udhav Th ackeray, Kanimozhi, Supriya Sule, Jyotiraditya Sindhia, Meenakshi Natrajan, Naveen Jindal, Agatha Sangma and others. Th ey have the ‘affi davits by default’ to rule and acquire power. But even then, who is the prince? Who wields the maximum authority? Who is projected as the future Prime Minister? Th e answer is Rahul Gandhi.

Th e more he is attacked, the more his partymen come to his defence. A Gandhi aft er all. Yet look at his careergraph— the more he tries to concur, the more he faces defeat. He looks like a kid trying to ride a bicycle for the fi rst time. He has courage but no competency. See the very recent examples; he campaigned in Bihar for the party but nothing came of it. Eating with dalits, riding on motorbike to Bhatta Parsaul village of western UP, road shows and public meetings, rallies and press conferences… nothing worked; the poll results of Congress in the assembly elections in UP were dismal. At the same time, when he was on these media hogging activities, the other youth leader from Samajwadi Party- Akhilesh Yadav was going from door-to-door in the entire state. Th e complete communication gap between Chief Minister Mayawati and the people of state was cashed in by Akhilesh Yadav and he became the CM. During the elections, maximum air time was devoted to RG and his family. Th ough, SP ‘managed’ to get suffi cient coverage, many other political faces were not even mentioned. But the prince failed. His colour of skin, glamour nothing helped.

Th e second example is Jagan Reddy. If you consider political understanding, hard work, management, connections, leadership qualities, Jagan stands far ahead of Rahul. Jagan, like his father, knows how to connect with his people and at the same time, how to use power, money, muscle and emotion. YSR’s closeness to the Reddys, his command on executives and his relations with the High Command always refl ected

in his political performance. At the same time, he was also dealing with mega projects throughout the country; from Uttarakhand to down south, he achieved targets and made money by all possible means. Jagan followed in his footsteps and that’s translating into success for him. Th e recent victory in bypolls is enough proof of his increasing strength. Sitting in jail is helping him gain sympathy and giving him enough time to strategize for the upcoming election. Now that he is emerging as the biggest and mightiest leader in the state, Congressmen in Andhra Pradesh are unoffi cially acknowledging it.

In Congress, the Prince’s position has become the biggest impediment to the party’s growth. Positions in the party are not on the basis of performance but on connections with the mother-son. Others who could do better if they were given a free hand are not getting the chance to replace or even stand parallel to the Prince. Others have to just follow him. Th at’s why Jyotiraditya Sindhia is fi ghting the battle of being the most important face at the state level against Digvijay Singh; Rahul is not his target. Th ese young leaders never dream of being future Prime Ministers because it has been reserved for the family. Th ey can be, like Manmohan Singh, only if the family decides.

Another problem is that the Prince is not ready to learn and evolve. He was missing from the whole political scene when the UPA was trying hard to decide on a candidate for the presidential elections. Even aft er the announcement of Pranab Mukherjee’s name as the presidential candidate of UPA, he didn’t appear. Anyone else, leading the party or the nation would have assumed the leading role instead of remaining closeted in some unknown location.

Th e tale of Kalawati or dinner at a dalit’s house isn’t enough; it’s mere tokenism which is not sustainable. If he is actually serious about his political career, he has to have a vision for the nation and people need to have faith in his leadership skills. But is he listening?

In Congress, the Prince’s position has become

the biggest impediment to the party’s growth. Positions in the party

are not on the basis of performance but on

connections with the mother-son.


THTHTHTHTHTHTHHHTHHTHTHHTHT EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWEWEWEWEWEWEWEWEEWEEWWEWEWEWEWWWEWEWWWWESTSTSTSTSTSTSTSTTSTSTSTSTSTSSTSTSSTSSSTTTSTTTTTTSTSTSSTS EEEEEREREREREREREEEERRERRRRRREREEEEEERRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNININININININNINNNNNINIIINNDDDIDIDIDIDIDIDIDIDIDIIIDIDIIIDIDDIDDIDIDIID ESESESESESESESESESSSESESSESESSSSESESSSESSSESEESEEEEEEEES

By Luis A. Gómez

So the President of Mexico launched a war on drugs six years ago, as some Colombian ruler had ten years before him. Both were funded by the US government to buy arms, choppers, radars, uniforms etc.

And it worked. Both countries are now a paradise for drug traffi ckers. US arms dealers and military contractors are making a lot of money, banks laundering massive amounts. Drugs (like cocaine) don’t suff er from infl ation or shortage in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles and people keep dying everyday. In the Mexican case, about sixty thousand people, more or less.

Living in the country of tacos and tequila can be dangerous. Every single day someone gets killed by a hitman or dies in the middle of a gun fi ght—just because s/he was invited to that party or s/he was going out from that store at 11:48 am, and not a minute before or 30 seconds later. Bodies are found everywhere, in mass graves or abandoned cars, dismembered

or mutilated.

Some people even lose their head. I mean, literally.

Over the six years of his tenure, President Felipe Calderon, a short man in his late forties, did what he was told (by George W. Bush and Barack Obama) and used the Army and the Navy to fi ght the drug cartels. Naturally, the guys in uniform have been accused of more than ten thousand abuses, violations of human rights, rapes and robberies.

Take the Almanza family as an example. Six people in a white truck, three of them minors, going home to Reynosa, a small northeastern city, were shot at a checkpoint by the military. Bryan (5 years old) and Martín (9) died because of the wounds infl icted by a 40mm grenade. And when it was probed in court, Calderon’s government held on to two diff erent ‘offi cial’ versions: a) they were attacked by the soldiers because they shot fi rst, and b) they died in the middle of a confrontation with a group of hitmen.

WILDWILD WEST

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crime— keep coming back. One disastrous strike (or a wrong move) and everything comes pouring out, centering around the theme of ‘azadi’. Th e enemy for all ills continues to be New Delhi, and to a lesser extent Islamabad. Everything is believed to emanate from the central theme of political dispute.

Partly, this tendency to locate the Enemy outside is akin to the usual human tendency of passing on the buck but it is more rooted in the belief that everything else pales before the unattended core issue. Th e slogan of ‘Azadi’ becomes a kind of security blanket the Kashmiris wrap themselves in, even though the slogan remains just as vague as the ways in which it is used. It means diff erent things to diff erent people. For the direct victims of the armed confl ict, ‘azadi’ means grant of legal justice. For those who are happier with some kind of a status quo, it means autonomy. For the young, born and brought up in a stifl ing atmosphere, it means ‘azadi’ from Indian security forces. For some, it means aligning with Pakistan. For some, it means exercising the right to self determination or implementing the UN resolution on Kashmir. Complete separation from India and Pakistan, however, remains the most popular defi nition of ‘azadi’. Whatever be the notion of ‘azadi’, for Kashmir, it continues to be an antidote to all kinds of anger.

Th eir only other oases of hope are the centuries old Sufi shrines, in which they continue to profess their unfl inching faith. And with that fi ery fi re consuming Dastageer sahib, which still fi nds resonance in the oft used refrain ‘Ya Peer Dastageer’ used by people in distress, Kashmiris are a much sadder lot. Th e burnt walls of the shrine symbolise a far bigger desecration and destruction than what actually happened.

The fi re incident may have had nothing to do with

the Kashmir dispute or a movement for ‘azadi.’ But

a symbol that for years had inspired love, harmony, peace,

resistance and resilience in a community, provoked rage which has accumulated over a period of decades, though

a history of oppression of several centuries lies buried

beneath it.

COLUMN: VALLEEWARD


COVER STORYTHE

USonJOKE

IS


THEBlackHUMOURLABORATORYACIDIC REACTIONS FROM

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skills at making complex issues palatable to all, glossing over sub topics too unaesthetic, he can apply the same treatment to the fi lm as well. So the political undertones can be snipped. Indira Gandhi’s photo need not be replaced by Sonia Gandhi’s or ‘We shall overcome’ need not be sung. Rather Prasoon Joshi can come up with some Ummeedwali aasha. And unlike the original, Vinod need not go to jail, He can deliver a 15 minute tear duct jolting speech to get the police to arrest the corrupt netas and bureaucrats! 250 crores? What say?

And did I say that Aamir should coproduce the fi lm with the Reliance Foundation?

Nation

So here I am. Between my favourite shows, newspapers, websites, icons and books. Someday I wish to climb up the Antilla, not to reclaim the night (I do not get fat signing amounts for writing lucid, poetic sentences in English magazines) but to stare at it… the stars, the planes whizzing past. Can I build a home taller than Antilla?

A tea joint has come up with a pop kitschy décor that will

make for some cool profi le pic backdrops… they also sell

colourful kettles, painted by the disabled. So cream laced tea,

hundred likes, and social work in a matter of few hours!

COVER STORY

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Triptych of three entries in my black humour logbook By Mukherjee P. (all transcreations in this piece are by the author)

BLACK AND WHITE NIGHTMARES IN TECHNICOLOUR TIMES:

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OF FALSE STARTS AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

Why the Rio +20 fi nal document is fi t only for lighting bonfi res. Writes Rohit Roy.

Last month, the world was abuzz with expectations from Rio +20. Th is column too saw its fair share of speculation and discussion

on the subject. Th roughout the world, environmentalists were again daring to hope for a fresh lease of life for sustainable movement. Leaders fl ew into Rio along with a host of representatives for NGOs, and the private sector. Th e buzz was present, the agenda ripe and no one could deny the urgency required. But what came of it was disappointment, yet again.

Th e post Conference press release quotes Ban Ki-moon saying, “Rio+20 has affi rmed fundamental principles – renewed essential commitments – and given us new direction.” Contrary to what the Secretary-General will have you believe, this is far from the truth. Th e leaders did not come up with any substantial agreement at the end of the conference. Instead what we have is a toothless voluntary working paper named ‘Th e Future We Want’ which is non-binding, at best ornamental. It merely reaffi rms already existent commitments and documents for the most part.

If you recall last month’s discussion,

two familiar outcomes were clearly present throughout the conference– the rhetoric and the eventual fi zzle-out. Several promises and (voluntary) commitments have been made of course, but looking at them, one cannot help wonder how realistic they are. Take for instance the ‘Sustainable Energy for All’ initiative which hopes to double energy effi ciency as well as the share of renewable energy by 2030. Do these deadlines really mean anything anymore? So many deadlines have come and gone without an iota of accomplishment in sight. Th ey work as fast relief painkillers, making us forget the pain for the moment but never really curing the problem. Along with the deadlines come the fi nancial commitments and the ‘promise’ of planning and programmes. What is perhaps even more exasperating are the open ended commitments cleverly disguised by rhetoric, which are nothing but empty promises and the substitution of eff ort, real commitment and planning with cold guilt relieving cash. An example is the $175 billion pledged to supporting sustainable transport in developing countries by 2020. On paper this looks impressive, but if the money

is not put to good use, and without further planning on its distribution or of its expenditure or, perhaps most importantly, the accountability once it reaches developing countries, then this is nothing but a hand out that serves zero environmental purpose.

Countries do tend to use monetary pledges as a way of showing they care while the blatant hypocrisy in the background proves otherwise. Th e UK’s pledge to contribute $234 million to small holder farmers is one such instance. Th e pledge is seen as a generous and clever contribution to the Zero Hunger Challenge initiative, but the UK’s small farmers are themselves plagued by economic hardship and the threat of supermarkets. In light of that, can the UK really be serious about small farmers in other countries, or is this again a show of money temporarily absolving them of more concrete commitment? Not that the money is not welcome, but developed countries need to do so much more. In case of food and agriculture, for example, a strong commitment for the transfer of technology and know-how would be more valuable and long term than just money.

Th e biggest failure for Rio +20, however, has been the non-binding nature of the fi nal document. In international law terms, this makes the document useful only for lighting bonfi res. Th e conference has been a waste of time and eff ort and yet again a disappointment for those who really care, while the people making the decisions go away with a fall sense of achievement.

COLUMN: KEEP OFF THE GRASS


ortrait of aPBiographerI N T E R V I E W

A photograph of a burqa clad women posing for the camera and then a

cache of letters and Deborah Baker had the subject of her third biography, Maryam Jameelah. ‘The Convert’ is the story of this woman, her journey

from being Margaret in NYC to her conversion in Pakistan. While

the book confronts us with several questions on faith and civilization,

here’s the author’s journey of introspection through her characters, their beliefs and fi nally the realisation

that there is no absolute truth. By Sayan Bhattacharya.


ARTS & CULTURE

know, like anybody does. When they sit down as an old man to write their memoirs, the stories that they told themselves about their evolution as a person, get refi ned and sharpened and mythologized the more you tell the stories. Th e more you tell the stories, the more perfect stories they become with complexities, more details. Which is the way most people live their lives, you know, it’s never a perfect story. It is always a little more complicated than that. Th at’s why your version of what happened to you on your 10th birthday is going to be diff erent from the way your mother will describe it. You know what I mean? I fi nd the stories that people tell when they are older are more perfect narratives than the actual researched ones with dates and facts.

I would like to go back to the Freud quote again here. If you are reading Deborah Baker, what conclusion would you draw from that quote?

First of all, I had to put something on that front page of the website. Actually that’s the epigraph of ‘Th e Convert’. Seeing this book, my editor told me I had to write that note at the end. For a long time I didn’t think that the book would ever be published. So I didn’t feel like I had to explain to any one why I wrote it the way I did. I just wanted to get it out of my head so that I could start another book. Well, I thought I was just going to bury it. Of course I started with the actual letters. I typed them all in. But then I began cutting them, I rearranged them and aft er a while you lose track of what the original letter was. First you start by putting in ellipses, so you know that you took something out. But then you think, well, if I am a reader and I see there were ellipses I’d think “Oh. What did she take out?” I didn’t want them to be thinking about me when they are reading Maryam’s letter. I want them to just read Maryam’s letter as if it was the real letter. So that’s a little sneaky, you know. But I want them to be totally in her head. Not keep thinking about me when they’re reading her letters. I wanted to have complete control over how I imagine what the reader was going through. So I did that. But then the editor said that I had to explain what I did. So I said, “Okay, I’ll write this.” Th en he said, “Well, maybe we should put this in front of the book.” And I said, “No! Because I wanted the reader to be sucked in and if they begin the book with this quote, they’d be completely suspicious of me.” I wanted them to fall, well not in love, but to accept Maryam on the terms that I accepted her when I fi rst started reading her letters, before all the complications started crawling in. So he said, “Okay, but then you have to come up with an epigraph that will raise the red fl ag.” So that will plant the idea in the reader’s head that may be the way the book is, is not completely kosher.

I was reading this novel, or paranovel ‘In the Lake of the Woods’ by this wonderful American writer, Tim O’Brian. It’s a novel but it is more about trying to reconstruct this character. It’s about a crime and they are trying to fi gure out who did it, or what his motivation was. So it sort of mimics the process of biography, this novel. So yes, that’s that.

How do you deal with criticism?

As in?

As a biographer when people question the veracity of your research?

People really haven’t raised as many questions. I had expected a lot more than what I got. But also, I am very honest. Like you can read this letter she wrote to me, and here is this other letter that she wrote and you can read that too and how do you decide between these too letters. How do you decide who’s telling the truth?

Since we are talking about Maryam, we’d really like to know your opinion on what’s happening in Europe vis-à-vis the ban on burqa, in France, for instance?

Well I am not French. So technically I don’t have to have an opinion. But I do think it is important to make a space for a secular culture. If I’m going to parade my Christianity around and that makes other people uncomfortable and especially in a school-type situation… You know Maryam talks about the way she was treated by the Catholics and the orthodox Jews. During Easter, the Catholics feel very catholic and very anti-semitic, so they would throw rocks at her, and beat her with pom poms. And you see this happening all the time. Th ere should be a space, and school seems like a good space, where everyone should basically be the same.

On a more personal front, when we talk about Amitav Ghosh, this new term is coming up: “anthropological novel”. And your kind of books, too require exhaustive


I WASIN THE

REVOLUTION…“He unlearned his racism as much as

he learnt his communism. He chose his progressive comrades and he fought for

the collective principles. He picked his radical songs and he used them as effective weapons.” Saswat Pattanayak celebrates

Woody Guthrie in his centenary year.

MUSIC


Although Hal Ashby’s fi lm ‘Bound for Glory’

portrayed Guthrie as “Saint Woody” in an attempt to

dissociate his communist activism, Guthrie was no saint. He was a radical, a

revolutionary who believed if imperialists raised their

ugly heads, it was time to battle them in bloody

struggles.

And who but Guthrie can provide a better rationale?

“I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. Th e radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”

He never lived in the gray. He unlearned his racism as much as he learnt his communism. He chose his progressive comrades and fought for the collective’s principles, picked his radical songs and used them as eff ective weapons. He taught us that an artist must not be confi ned to the world of imagination alone. Th e battlefi eld is an unequal world and the war against injustice is absolutely on. Until that war is won, the artist must not be satisfi ed!

MUSIC


WOMANIYAOHow did Gangs of Wasseypur happen?

Anurag Kashyap off ered me the fi lm even before the script was fi nalised and the screenplay locked. I didn’t even look at the story; because I knew Anurag would allow me to experiment and break out of the mould of Punjabi folk music that I’d been cast into aft er ‘Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!’

What kind of research went into making ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’?

It was lots of travelling to Bihar and Trinidad, where a big chunk of Biharis have settled down. Back in college, I had heard some cool music in a documentary about Indian labourers migrating to Trinidad. I chatted with the Indian diaspora online and booked my tickets to visit them. Patna, Darbhanga, Muzaff arpur, Gaya, Ranchi and Dhanbad are some of the places I went to in India. A Patna storekeeper gave us his friend’s number, who headed a school in Muzzafarpur. With him, we went to meet a couple of local singers and

poets. Most of these Biharis have forgotten their traditional instruments like Dhantal, Dholak and harmonium which their contemporaries in Trinidad still use. Indian music has come a long way in a few hundred years and much of its character has been lost in the process. But the music of the Bihari community in Trinidad still retains the essential character. It is popularly called Chutney Music. Characterised by lots of high percussion and Bhojpuri lyrics, these songs are huge hits within the East Indian Caribbean community.

Aft er the basic research, I got down to making music with Piyush Mishra’s lyrics and two songs from Varun Grover’s collection. Th ey are a talented bunch, the two of them. Ek Bagal Mein Chaand Hoga, Ek Bagal Mein Rotiyan was originally written by Piyush bhaiya for his play staged in Delhi. We got him to render the song for the movie as well. It’s a strikingly beautiful song about blanketing oneself from moonlight with rotis, a lullaby that looks at a bright tomorrow. Piyush is a very cool singer too, by the way.

After a long time Bollywood witnessed a soundtrack that is refreshingly original and well researched... songs that add to the screenplay and do not impede its fl ow. Meet the lady behind Gangs Of Wasseypur’s music, Sneha Khanwalkar. By Nidhi Dugar Kundalia.

I N T E R V I E W


RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013

RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013

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