Manmohan Singh: State-sponsored lethargy

MEGHNA MAITI

Mumbai

Now we know what it takes Manmohan Singh, the unusually cautious and phlegmatic technocrat, to leap into action and show some emotion: Keynesian ‘animal spirit’ in the country’s economy. When Pranab Mukherjee cracked a shot into Raisina Hill’s goal in the few minutes of so called “presidential poll game” on Wednesday, Manmohan waking up from his deep slumber raised his hands over his head and cheered like a jubilant supporter. Sporting the same black bandhgala and blue turban Singh swapped high-fives with the power team comprising planning commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, PMAEC chairman C Rangarajan, chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu, and top finance ministry officials. The opponent team fans that had earlier jeered and hissed when Manmohan appeared on the field were reduced to silence.

They would have their moment of celebration -- a goal by Manmohan (as finance minister) in the few days that tied the game and prompted an announcer to declare, “The economy is revived from its inexorable slide into another abyss!” But the Indian celebration did not last long. One year after India scored in the year 2008, Wall Street and euro crisis booted home a thunderous volley, and sometime later, high fiscal deficit and still higher inflation scored with a similarly fearsome shot. Economy of India (if you may, please) -- supposedly the third largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity -- scoring negative, was on its way out of the global tournament.

The score might not have been respectable but, in truth, the game was just as one-sided as it could be, with Sonia Gandhi and Pranab dominating from beginning to end. At half time, the emphatic announcer of the Indian team said the highlight of Manmohan’s stint as the erstwhile finance minister has been the very first kick of the game. “In India, one is supposed to be motivated by nobler and refined pursuits. Speaking loud is vulgar, even sordid in evolved societies,” the game announcer commented about Manmohan sarcastically. When in the second half, the opponent scored another goal against Manmohan, the announcer promptly said, “There’s no shame in losing to a wonderful team. Let the country go to dogs! Our refined, intellectual leader can go home with his head held high.”

The Indian team knows all about humiliations at the hands of other nations, and of course, they are not above drawing on the historic ones as well as the more recent. Nevertheless, where from our iconic leader Manmohan draws his reserves of strength? Born on September 26, 1932 in Gah, Punjab, British India, into a Sikh khatri family, his family migrated to Amritsar, India after partition. Terming him as the best example of integrity, Khushwant Singh stated, "When people talk of integrity, I say the best example is the man who occupies the country's highest office. He won the Wright's Prize for distinguished performance in 1955 and 1957. He was also one of the few recipients of the Wrenbury scholarship. In 1962, Manmohan completed his studies from the University of Oxford."  

It is not likely that the ‘animal spirit’ in the game will revive soon. And Team Manmohan, based on his performance at least, looks to have a good chance of creating another quiet, sensational journey in the economic arena.

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

ENDS

Stuck In Island City

Trapped in Mumbai’s flamboyance and endless verbal torrents of thousands of humans, I often feel like a disgruntled loner in a colony of chattering, gluttonous, complaining zebras stuck amid shades of light and shadow. We all are so far from our souls that existence is irrelevant.

If crossing the Arabian Sea is an exercise in insignificance, thinking about financial markets since early morning is in equal parts chaotic and a colossal mind game. The sea is inconceivably enormous, but, it is also infinitesimal. I, the lone inhabitant of my body and life, am inescapably large to myself, but also, ridiculously, and inconceivably small. In Mumbai, my sense of scale oscillates wildly. 


The voyage feels more like a function of time than space. There is the clamour of the people, the noise of railway engines, the churned-up fan of wake, the roll of the swell and forward motion becomes almost impossible. I am always at the centre of the disc, beneath the apex of the dome. A never-ending reel of upbeat synthetic music reverberates as temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure, swell height, along with a map of the ocean, position us as a dot at the end of a green line stretching back to the ocean.

When I am along the journey, and the guru makes his announcement that I am very, very far from my hometown Kolkata; tossing and turning in a vortex. I watch a swarm of bees heading north, their wings popping up and down with a businesslike clip, the only signs of life I’d seen all day except for a pigeon cheeping its confusion under one of the lifeboats.

I too seem to have become one of those ‘modernists’ not willing to bloom in attractive ways. In addition, I accept I am a confused person in a tacky getup. It has the odd effect of making me feel, at first, as if the months away had never happened. Living in Mumbai, is not very different from floating in one place. As if, there is nothing to do at the bottom of the gateway, but hop on to a cab and get on with it.

Meghna Maiti

Bold economist

“Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution. The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.” — Ayn Rand 

Instances of radicalism wherein people insist on thinking for themselves and reject party-mindedness are rare to come by. Perhaps that is the way with Duvvuri Subbarao, as he steadfastly debunked government’s theory leaving interest rates and cash reserve requirements unchanged citing inflationary pressures despite economic growth slumping to a near decade low.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which is as hushed inside as an Egyptian sphinx, is a place for establishment reserve. The office occupied by Subbarao, a soft-spoken, affable, sixty-two-year-old economist, has high ceilings, several wood-panelled shelves of economic textbooks, overlooking the Mumbai harbour. Its echoing hallways are lined with sombre pictures of past governors.

At IIT Kharagpur, where Subbarao was the recipient of director’s gold medal, he was known for his ‘way with numbers’ and ‘mastery of macro-economic issues’. Armed with tag of an ‘IAS’ topper, he is known as a gentle and accessible officer who has everything except the trappings of a bureaucrat. With a World Bank stint as a background and almost daily parleys with outgoing RBI governor YV Reddy in his role as finance secretary as current experience, he has played a hands-on role in carrying out the government’s agenda on inclusive growth.

Since his appointment as the 22nd governor of RBI on September 5, 2008, he has faithfully followed the policies of free-market conservative Alan Greenspan, and adheres to the central bank’s formal mandates: controlling inflation and inclusive growth. However, since the financial crisis struck the country in 2008, he has hiked interest rates over 13 times since March 2010; cut CRR by 125 bps in two stages since January, infusing about Rs 80,000 crore into the banking system. Though these measures are yet to have any major impact on the economy, in the eyes of many supporters and opponents, they represent a watershed in Indian economic history. Subbarao, who seemed to have been selected for his predictability as for his economic expertise, is now engaged in the boldest use of RBI’s authority since its inception.

Subbarao cannot be likened with Ben Bernanke, chairman of US Federal Reserve. In pure economic terms, these are the classical stances — one dovish, the other hawkish — being taken by Bernanke and Subbarao. Nevertheless, some economists agree that the similarities are uncanny and staggering. Both respect minority opinion and give people the feeling that they have been heard even when they are outvoted. Also, both share the conviction that, in an emergency, pragmatism trumps ideology. We see that in the way they realise that their respective institutions do not have the necessary resources of democratic legitimacy and it is important that government steps in and take control of the situation.

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

Rain

This evening smelled strangely similar to my adolescent days, just when the cavernous cloud swooped down from nowhere to dance across the Kalaghoda road and then vanish just as freakishly, as if its sole mission had been to romance with the curves and the bends of the art hub of Mumbai. The sky glowed a greyish black. Air pressure felt low and I knew something definitely was headed this way.

I could see the damsel snuggling up to her biker Romeo as the first burst of rain pounded its windshield. Cold rain pelted on the corrugated roof of the music store ‘Rhythm House”. The soaked cat laid swelling on the pavement beside the drain. Water ran freely through man holes on the tarred road, the symphony of navigating water through a dozen channels merged with a sound of men urinating onto the corners.

Behind the surreal tiffany, the buildings looked abandoned, something melancholic about their streaked windows. The limping beggar squinted against the grime and dangled his muddy bare feet from the cemented staircase across the museum. An old man waded through water and leaned against the lamp-post with a cup of tea, all eager to settle the dust of his life when the rain trickled in. An avalanche of rain blurred the orange glow of the lamppost. Was this the hour of sunset or sunrise, good-bye or just the beginning? Impossible to say. Rain is a noisy but a harmless nuisance- a squealer but innocuous. We take comfort in it, often love it and we like to be consumed in its many shades.

The rain is a lethal combination of acid, dust and sometimes breathes of strained relationships. It builds its waterfront homes, the somewhat dreamy, beloved abode that speaks of love and passions. It drives you north upwind and along the river hidden from the view of half-dozen two-storey plumes. Then suddenly on a whim, on days with stiff north-westerly wind, it collapses the house and disappears.

Meghna Maiti

We the people

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."  - WB Yeats, The Second Coming

It cannot get more surreal than this. With alarm growing in democratic circles over presidential election, our politicians have lost all sense of probity. These are just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and marvel at the bizarre mindlessness.

Quite in an Orwellian fashion, the politicians in their confined space resemble zoo animals from a distance — Mamata Banerjee a fierce middle white boar, Sonia Gandhi a small white fat porker, Pranab Mukherjee a maddened squealer. Each one displays a definite set of behaviours: while Banerjee plants herself strategically a few inches away from the Congress, and clamps down her hands on the party; Pranab Mukherjee calmly seeks support from the UPA. The hullabaloo in political circles continues throughout the day, and during the long night one of the few that rise above the muffled drone is that of Mamata didi, who says to the UPA government, “APJ Abdul Kalam is the first choice for the next president of India. And he will win the election!” Sporadically, a sharp cackle emanates from the Congress, where partymen notice the slight gap between Yadav and Banerjee and intends to fill it with a wider chasm.

The drama for the race to Raisina Hill only intensifies with Sonia slumping at her desk, yawning painfully as the party cannot accept didi’s diktat and it must have its own man, Mukherjee as president. Living with Samajwadi Party seems unlikely for Congress, which sees Mulayam as a demanding ally.

Since everything in the election depends on unanimous consent, the main business of the place is a continuous negotiation between the two unsentimental ladies — Mamata who shows no love and Sonia who exhibits no remorse. The game of chicken could soon be joined in by smaller regional parties such as BJD, AIADMK with Trinamool to play rope-a-dope, ally with BJP and fend off amendments.

Armoured with aides, prodded by hourly jolts from electronic media, racing from the hearing room to the sumptuous lunch to the power hour at the airport, politicians no longer have the time to listen to each other — least of all, the people of the nation. We, lesser mortals, just gamble with our votes, with no clue whatsoever about the right candidate. The politicians are aware of civil society and the rules: yet they backstab one another over dinner, and then drink cocktails and exchange ideas on Saturday nights. Sadly, in the process, we too become a part of this tomfoolery, crying out to win credibility with the world.

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

Heady Entrepreneur

profile: newsmaker 

We believe in destroying what we have created,” Kishore Biyani once famously said. India’s retail czar likes to identify himself both as a ‘creator’ and ‘destroyer’ of business, when he believes his GenNext played passive ‘preservers’ of family fortunes. Grant it to Biyani that such exotic nomenclatures give him the licence to indulge in huge open-ended experiments with chances of big-time failure, without being shamed by the prospect of public ridicule. But then, you have to give it to his gut instinct that led him to embrace the hitherto uncharted territory of mass merchandising to emerge as India’s biggest retailer in just about two decades. From his experiments with the hypermarket format and supply-chain management to food retail, dramatically undercutting competitors, Biyani has ridden the roller-coaster through the past 20 years, culminating in this week’s stake sale in flagship Pantaloon Retail to Aditya Birla Nuvo.

The maverick entrepreneur probably realised that great empires can be built with passion, but cannot be preserved with uncalculated risks, nor by expanding too fast to drive mind-boggling valuations. The move to sell stake in Pantaloon will partially ease his debt burden, as once the deal is complete, the group’s debt will be pruned by Rs 1,600 crore, or roughly 20 per cent of the current outstanding. For far too long, many have been mesmerised by Biyani's rapid ascent to the peak rather than the soundness of his business strategies, to draw parallels with Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton. So what if much of his posturing was a result of acquired arrogance and well-crafted media manipulation over the years?

And then one day, the dreamer was hit by reality. Biyani, who had invested way ahead of the cash flows from his network, found himself trapped on a debt treadmill. His empire was saddled with an outstanding of around Rs 5,800 crore on a consolidated basis, and obviously, the company found it difficult to service high interest-bearing loans, with interest costs alone eating up 90 per cent of its profit before tax of Rs 270 crore during the December 2011 quarter. The stock market pummeled him and his net worth tumbled. Biyani had little choice other than to give away Pantaloons, his most profitable format.

Armed with a degree in commerce and five years after joining the family business of textiles, Biyani launched the first branded ready-made trouser, Pantaloons, in Kolkata. He marketed the trousers through The Pantaloon Shoppe. By the time, Pantaloon Fashions, the company he had formed, went public in 1992, Biyani had set up 60 exclusive stores. Looking at ever-expanding opportunities in the retail space, Biyani decided took to direct retailing in 1994, and launched a new division of the company, called Pantaloon Direct Retailing. In its first year, this division generated business of over Rs 18 crore.

Within a short span, the group expanded into verticals such as apparel, furniture, electronic items, restaurants, food and insurance. Biyani spoke about his vision of making the Future Group a $20 billion enterprise by 2020. He internally restructured his group's operations; drove technology to bring efficiency in the backend; hired top leaders from multinationals such as Unilever and PepsiCo, while deciding to focus on four key businesses — food and grocery, home, apparel and electronics. Two of his companies, Future Capital Holdings and Future Ventures, went public. The unassuming and shy entrepreneur of yesteryears, Biyani gained in stature and recognition over time. His clairvoyant, shrewd yet rustic demeanour won him public adulation. Yet as he climbed up the ladder, his newfound aggression and success turned him heady and indifferent to the external forces that shaped him.

Will Biyani revert his focus to retail by divesting his non-core assets, such as Future Capital Holdings and Future Generali, to pay off his remaining debt? Only time will tell. Who knows Biyani’s future may well be the story of the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes.

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

  

Spotlight on kitsch

On its 14th year, Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda art festival goes ‘Let there be light’, but offers the unusual mix of art, glamour and glitz

Why is the fair so dimly lit?” bem-oans a dazed visitor, shivering on an unusually chilly Mumbai evening. “There’s light behind you,” sniggers his girlfriend, as he gawks at the levitating Buddha that represents the theme ‘Let there be light’ in Kala Ghoda art festival this year.

Mumbai’s biggest art festival, organised by Kala Ghoda Association, draws an eclectic crowd that mingles in the open space, and lingers in galleries where world cinema and short documentaries flicker across the screens. The fair is as much about about glamour, glitz as cutting edge alternative art — more like a multi-media, multi-locational experience, meandering through the fabric of the island city.

“We have seen around 8 to 10 lakh visitors so far. Considering the low-cost budget of the entire event, we are enthralled with the responses,” said Pallavi Sahney Sharma, chief executive of Kala Ghoda Association. The festival in its 14th year now, offers kitschy fun for the art enthusiasts.

The venue itself, tucked in an enclave bounded by Mumbai’s dockyard, Fountain and Oval Maidan, near the cacophonous Colaba Causeway in an affluent South Mumbai business district, neatly embodies the contrasts of modern India. It draws designer cotton-saree draped industrialists browsing through the ‘madhubani’ painting stalls to street urchins gaping at the art installations on the street. While most Indian galleries focus on commercial prospects of art, Kala Ghoda fair maintains an alternative, artist-led ethos.

The festival has drawn art performers from almost all states of the country and international destinations such as Germany, USA, China, Austria and Pakistan, informed Sharma. “The festival this year is bigger than previous years in terms of the number of art performances, though there are lesser stalls this year. While we have 400 events spanning nine days, we have seen maximum crowd in visual art and street performances such as puppetry,” said Sharma. The crowds particularly throng the chirpy, colourful folk song and dance shows from Rajasthan and Manipur, among others.

The event had international acts such as Guangdong Art Troupe and Pakistani music band Raga Boys. A dash of hiphop, salsa and Bollywood moves lightened up the high-brow air.

Some quintessential concepts such as Mumbai’s cutting chai and tapri (small tea stalls) have been transformed into art work by students of Mumbai city-based Rachna College. The students have built a 14-feet tall pyramid with 4,000 chai glasses symbolic of the three aspects — tapri, cutting-chai and Mumbai.

Though the fair’s supposed to be strictly non-commercial, it is mildly funny to overhear hushed conversations about a business deal, new job opportunity or even invitation to a party. The objectives are met, boundaries are taken forward.

Also, it is interesting to watch the numerous stalls and NGOs dotting the streets, rake in moolah for their overpriced artistic wares. Lasting less than 10 days a year, this high-wattage art fair has nevertheless infused the burgeoning contemporary-art scene in Mumbai with an unmistakable swagger. The festival is on till Feb 12.

Meghna Maiti

Randomness of life

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
— The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe rightly echoed this thought in his seminal African novel, Things Fall Apart. Sometimes, our lives achieve its effect as a collage of hallucinatory, random fragments flapping against our ruins. Their contiguity is all their meaning; the meaning takes into account the ‘randomness’ and discontinuity of modern experiences.

Faced with strange mundane circumstances, for instance, three suitors for a single woman, may be just as purposefully chaotic beneath its skin of deliberateness. The woman in question may ponder over the role of destiny in the situation and even resign herself to a hopeless soul. By this time, her sense of dislocation is real; she fails to connect emptiness with emptiness. Her inner war becomes real, as life imitates art and vice versa with disastrous consequences. It is then that she can put on the persona of a seduced photographer and try to capture the entire meaninglessness of existence. To quote Jean Paul Sartre here, “Why do we need to call a cat a cat?” It is then, the gulf widens, and, people with any serious aspiration towards realism take into account the fact that reality bypasses perspective and logic.

When you realise yourself to be a product of ‘randomness’ you develop a miming way of looking at the world where objects become clear for a moment and then blur, adjacent phenomena get compressed into deep homogeneity and clear outline abruptly turns illegible. One can sense a certain fluidity in the movement and occurrence of mundane objects, when suddenly, we feel all-powerful and enabled to make decisions about even simple questions like finding a soulmate for oneself. Suddenly, the crusty gentleman from southern India plays the role of yuppie gadfly in Mumbai, warms up to your inner life and imminent stagnation.

Meghna Maiti

Office Romance

When the little blue clerk, in the middle of his work, starts a tune to the moon up above; it is nature that is all; simply telling us to fall in love.” How better to distract yourself from a weighty workspace than with an unlikely affair between two hapless colleagues. Working together can sometimes become like an aphrodisiac, dealing with people, venting out bitter feelings over a cup of coffee or lunch. Some day, when an ‘Elizabethan’ girl walks into an office, she can be asked to spin a globe, place her finger on a random spot and decide to move there. If she were from real life, people would turn their back towards her. But, she can still be essential to male fantasy and even if a colleague is boring, he may want a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to plunge into a stranger’s pool.

Why should people only limit their emotional lives to fend off desires of their spouses? In a mundane office, where ethics precluded romantic liaisons with one’s colleagues, one might feel doomed to celibacy. And then, one needs to think and act. In a series of subtle and intense gestures that follows, two colleagues may unravel companionship, a sense of happiness where realism contends with fantasy and shadow and romance intermingle.

These liaisons excite but alert us; like magic and monsters; whether or not the actions are correct. Monsters act as moral compass. In such situations, people are often left with a mixed feelings, thoughts about cultural expressions and sense of ethics. Yet, people go ahead sometimes for a brief while into a zone of idle fancy, embracing a monster with rare humanity and entering a phase of childhood errancy, timelessness. There is always lingering danger of these exegesis interpreted as too murky and obscure. But, still one can keep these threats at bay, flow upstream on a high tide and probably dream of a different kind of offspring at some time of life.

Meghna Maiti

God's new avatar

Profile:  Newsmaker


“I have seen a medicine, That’s able to breathe life into a stone, quicken a rock, and make you dance canary. With spritely fire and motion,” — All’s Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare.


In life as in a work of art, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is like that potent medicine that breathed life into cricket almost magically and to a greater degree with his Mozart-like passion. His life is to an astonishing extent the product of the Darwinian theory of “channelising aggression to a purposeful end.”


Born into a middle-class Mumbai household, he grew up in Dadar Shivaji Park. A student from Sharadashram Vidyamandir (High School), the young Sachin was quick to lend glory to international cricket. The game, known for its glorious uncertainties, became Sachin’s life. Under the able guidance of his cricketing mentor, Ramakant Achrekar, he rode to mindblowing success. Early this week, he took a totally improbable entry into democracy’s gilded hall when he was sworn in as a Rajya Sabha MP.


It is anybody’s guess whether Sachin can improve the sports world or the state of cricket, and his nomination to Rajya Sabha may have raised a few curious eyebrows. The reticent batsman, who silenced his critics with his willow time and again, has an uphill task this time. In cricket, as much as in life, there is time for entry and exit and one cannot perhaps go on eternally. Sachin’s stint in politics may bring sports into the limelight of parliamentary decision making without playing politics. It may also give him the courage to shed the cricketing gear. But, that’s something only time will tell.


Cricket is all about statistics, and Tendulkar has a series of records to make him the greatest batsman of cricket ever. In November 2011, he became the first batsman to score 15,000 runs in Test cricket. He is also the first player to score 10,000 runs in one-day internationals. On February 24, 2010, Tendulkar became the first man to score a double century (200*) in an ODI against South Africa. Playing for over two decades, he also holds the world record for playing the highest number of Tests and ODIs.


His latest triumph was his 100th century during an ODI against Bangladesh in Dhaka. That is 29 centuries more than the man in the second place on the list, Australia’s Ricky Ponting. Sachin, 38, who started playing at the age of 16, has 100 centuries, 51 scored in Tests, to his credit. Nearly 22 summers after the legend arrived on a caparisoned horse, laden with battle honours, he is now the $2 million man of Indian Premier League (IPL), synonymous with the short format, 20-over match.


The curly-haired, cherubic boy who was determined to avoid the usual traps in life, with its attendant cynicism, worked as an adult workhorse from Lord’s to Lahore and Jamaica to Johannesburg to chase the rainbow. For someone who has been blessed to achieve nearly everything he wanted on the cricket field, the nation is touched to see the calm, collected young man, almost god-like in his ability to remain untouched by applause and adulation.


meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

The gleeful knight

Profile: Newsmaker

The iconic stallion-riding knight exerts a kind of mesmeric control over his warriors. ‘Divinity’ is but a step away as he slowly alights from the horse and finds himself amidst collective identities. The blurring of the boundary line between brand Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) and Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) has almost taken romantic, epic proportions. Such is his charisma that anyone’s life, even yours or mine described in Shah-ruesque’s detail, could seem like a fairy tale.

Shah Rukh, the underdog from Delhi who went on to rule Bollywood, acted in over 70 films and tasted pinnacle of ‘pelf and power’. Yet the man had done less to lift his spirits; had the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent his clothes from rubbing against the sunburned skin. In a recent conversation with media, he excitedly speaks about the KKR win in Kolkata but he is often indignant, in a way that is linked to professional regrets and a period of tabloid notoriety, when an angry voice from the public ranted at him. The IPL victory has filled up the sense of emptiness in him, almost like a personal triumph. With an intense often, moving involvement KKR victory changed the flow of identification to the masses.

Shah Rukh embraced KKR like his misbegotten offspring and added to its stature, psyche with his passion and unrelenting effort. Nourished on SRK’s romance, the underdog KKR team can remain severely disciplined, keep doing what they have been doing, believe in themselves and fight together as a unit, say brand experts. While KKR has already usurped the number one slot, it now has a reputation to live up to, grow up and mature, say experts.

Shah Rukh’s exploits on and off the field can be likened with Roman Abramovich, the owner of the companies that control Chelsea Football Club, who was as passionately involved with Chelsea. Quite like SRK, he is also present at almost every game Chelsea plays and shows visible emotion during matches, a sign taken by supporters to indicate a genuine love for the sport. Interestingly, Abramovich’s success story is also that of an underdog from Komi Republic, then Moscow to his ascent as a multi-billion dollar businessman. Both the men are self-made, ruthless in their approach and passionate about their dreams. 

Shah Rukh had an entire generation at his command, delighted the teenagers with his cherubic smile, dimples and stammer. The first seeds of romance were often sown in the minds of youngsters from his performances in Dilwale Dulhania Le Ja Yenge or Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. His charm is unique, almost childlike all out there to win the world with his innocent mimicry and glee. Let us remember him as a cherub and forget his dark, plebeian twin.

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com