by Roopinder Singh

UNOBTRUSIVELY the little black box added music to our life. When my wife came back from school one day, it was there; waiting for her, and the little startled smile that came on her face was reward enough.

Worldspace

Our mornings started with Asa Di Var, and kirtan. Later in the day, we would be humming to some old songs on Farishta, or the more contemporary film music on Jhankar.

Jansher enjoyed the latest English songs on Spin and Top 40, which we also liked, after a fashion, but then we had our own little refuge in Amore, that played mushy ol’e songs and spun its own magic.

The selection was great. Sound quality was crystal clear, except for the occasional day when clouds eclipsed a service that lit up our life at home.

It was the gadget aficionado A.J. Philip who had introduced me to Worldspace and its wonders. Typically, the receiver he had was not available in India, and thus we are relegated to using ones especially made by BPL for the service. Then Sunil got his Worldspace and started singing its praises… and then Shastri…

The thrifty logic in me, however, just could not warm up to the idea of paying for something that was free on the airwaves, and has been so ever since the inception of the radio. Let’s not get into details like licence fees, which have thankfully died a natural and least lamented death.

My father always listened to the radio, and normally by the time I woke up he had twisted the knobs of his trusty old Philips receiver and was au-fair with the latest events. Then it was time for music, which would continue all day, and sometimes into the night, providing a background to his reading and writing. So it was not that there was no music in the house, and to top it all, it was free and FM too was fairly good, becoming better by the day, or so it seemed.

All this was fine, till I realised that Jaspreet was pining for Worldspace, and that was reason enough to change my stance on free airwaves. I joined the gang, and realised what I had been missing all these years. Now it was an integral part of our lives. Yet there were clouds, and we are not talking of atmospheric disturbances.

Now that it has been announced that the New York-based Worldspace Corp has filed for bankruptcy protection, the last day of this year will be the end of service of this remarkable satellite radio that enriched our lives. We will still have music in our lives, Thank God for the free airwaves and the wonderful variety of music that comes through them.

This middle was published in The Tribune on December 29, 2009

I had written about how TV and FM radio in India are turning base in an earlier article.

by Roopinder Singh

THEY were a bunch of restive boys, whose visit to Chandigarh had begun with a pilgrimage to the Govt Museum and Art Gallery in Sector 10. They were tired after travelling back from the Queen of the Hills. A few had been sick, since they were not used to hill roads, but they perked up when their Principal told them the three-foot sculpture they were looking at was Buddha’s foot—“the other foot is in Lahore”.

Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, OBE, is uniquely qualified to talk about the two museums, and the treasures that they hold. He is chairman, Executive Committee of the Lahore Museum, and has been visiting Chandigarh since the mid-1950 when the museum was set up under the leadership of Dr M S Randhawa. Aijazuddin and his wife Shahnaz have fond memories of Dr Randhawa’s hospitality.

Aijazuddin wears many a cap — chartered accountant, with experience in automotive, fertiliser, oil and gas, insurance and investment banking sectors. He is also an author with many books to his credit, and now head of his alma mater, Aitchison College, Lahore, where many of the scions of the most-noted families of the region studied. He had come to India, leading a party of young students who had to join in the celebrations of another fine old institution, Bishop Cotton School, Shimla, as it celebrated its sesquicentennial this year.

My alma mater, Yadavindra Public School, Patiala, however, traces its lineage back to Aitcheson College because after Partition, the Maharaja of Patiala founded YPS around a nucleus of Aitchisonians — teachers and students — who had been displaced from Lahore. As a Yadavindrian, my friend Gurpreet Bhattal had asked me to join a delegation that met these Aitchisonians in Chandigarh, something I had gladly done.

“One-third of the Lahore museum came to Chandigarh,” Aijazuddin told his students, as he was escorted by the director, NPS Randhawa, who took them around, showing miniatures and sculptures of a heritage that preceded the international border. As Aijazuddin took diverse strands and wove them into a tapestry of artistic history of the region, he reminded one of Chandigarh’s own Prof B N Goswamy, interacting with whom is an education. No wonder the two families have strong ties.

“If we expect them to respect our culture, we must do the same,” he gently chided his boys, as they broke into giggles over some of the pictures, even as he explained the relationship between various gods and goddesses to them. Aijazuddin has studied pahari paintings as an art historian and I was reminded of the first time that I met Aijazuddin, at a seminar on “The Arts of Punjab” held at Punjabi University, Patiala, in 2006, where he gently supplied a detail that enhanced my caption during my presentation on the Murals of GuruHarsahai.  Aijazuddin  had earlier taken the audience on an impassioned trip of Lahore down the ages through painting and sketches.

Aijazuddin laments that young Indians and Pakistanis are not aware of each other’s cultural heritage these days. As the visiting children were told to go to Sector 17 for shopping and recreation for a few hours, their Principal said he wanted more exchanges between people who have not visited each other’s countries, not just those who have the nostalgia for the land that was once there.

Gurpreet Bhattal and Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, OBE

One reads of a Lahore in the grip of violence practically every day. The students of the elite institution and their principal represent the other side of our old cultural capital. Many of us like my friend Gurpreet and I, who live in Corbusier’s modern city, have never visited Pakistan, but we have a foot in Lahore and quite like the Buddha statue, our ties transcend the physical divide.

A shorter version of this article was published in The Tribune on December 3, 2009

Cathryn Donaldson is now following your tweets on Twitter,” said an e-mail recently. I racked my brains, but while the first name did ring a bell, the second did not. Cathryn is not an uncommon name in the US, and during my years there I had known a Cathryn or two … maybe the Donaldson was acquired after marriage….

For the uninitiated, tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. They are displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

Even as the brain was abuzz, the eyes were sending sensory data that broke through my reverie: “A little information about Cathryn Donaldson: 0 followers, 1 tweet, following four people. Ah! This was not a blind follower, just another newbie who had clicked blindly.

My exposure to tweets started long before Twitter.com came on the scene. I was a fan of Tweety Bird, a Yellow Canary cartoon character. Like many others, I thought that “tweet” was a typical onomatopoeia for the sounds of birds, but that was before the Internet began changing words and their context.

I must confess that I do not twit. My first and only tweet was on April 17 this year, an embarrassingly inane one-liner, and till date I have just discovered that it netted me 18 followers! Now, I thought that political and religious figures had followers, so it was a pretty heady experience, till I realised that these were my friends who were far from being followers, mine or anyone else’s.

I have steadfastly refused to include people I don’t know into my online orbit, and this works well on Facebook, where people mutually agree to let one another into their electronic lives. Twitter, on the other hand, by default, lets people share updates and links with anyone who wants to read them. Thankfully, it has an option: “You may follow Cathryn Donaldson as well by clicking on the “follow” button on their profile. You may also block Cathryn Donaldson if you don’t want them to follow you.” Since I don’t know her, I would rather not have Cathryn will follow my tweet, or two (another has been added now).

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide and is used by all — right from the White House to Shashi Tharoor, formerly of the UN and recently of the bovine fame. While some, like Veer Sanghvi, have thousands of followers and interesting tweets like the following: “We like hosting the Games because it gives us a national high for two weeks. Investing in sportsmen would give us a high for decades.” Most of the tweets are, well, just that, chirping notes, exactly what the word has meant since 1768.

Most of the tweets are not even cheerful or lively. Do they even have a meaning? Sometimes, I really wonder, ‘Will I tweet?’ Not unless I have something to say, something of some import. Meaningless words, even those well strung together, are just that — meaningless.

This middle was publiished in The Tribune on September 22, 2009

From Website

During an evening walk, a strange emptiness compelled me to look towards my right, behind the wall covered with a green hedge—nothing. A battered almirah jutted out from a demolished house, once home to one of the architects who built Chandigarh.
Urmila Eulie Chowdhury was an extraordinary phenomenon—a pioneering architect, teacher and designer who contributed so much to the making of Chandigarh, right from planning the bricks and mortars to laying the foundation of cultural activities along with her friends Champa Mangat Rai and N.C. Thakur. She also established Alliance Françoise de Chandigarh in 1983. The dapper author, N. Iqbal Singh, was a neighbour and a frequent companion.
“Why I hate Children,” came by mail soon after I joined The Tribune. It was a witty, perceptive article and before long Eulie was a regular contributor to the Saturday Plus supplement. She wrote a well-informed piece about Male Cooks of Chandigarh, and once admiringly about a woman who could “drink any man under the table”. The lady did protest too much, but when Eulie retorted that she had much more to say, and the tirade became a simper.
What a woman Eulie was! Petite, fiery and totally cosmopolitan. She was born in Shahjehanpur in UP in 1923 where her uncle worked in the railways; got her Cambridge School Certificate from Kobe, Japan; studied architecture and music in Sydney, and got a diploma in Ceramics from Englewood, New Jersey, USA. That her father was in the diplomatic service explains the globe trotting.
I had just returned from New York, and was familiar with Englewood. In time we became friends, and I would walk down to her house to meet her.
Eulie had come to India in 1951 to work with Le Corbusier. Her husband, Jugal Kishore Chowdhary, was a consulting architect with the Punjab Government.  Eulie would narrate many anecdotes about the time when the city was taking shape and of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanerette, Jane Drew and Piloo Modi with his dogs.

A photograph of Eulie published in The Tribune on July 29, 1990

From Website

Eulie was awarded a gold medal by the President for design of low-cost furniture in 1954. A 1996  article by Sumit Kaur, who is now Chief Architect, Chandigarh, says: “All the furniture in the buildings of the Capitol complex and the Panjab University’s Gandhi Bhavan, library building and the Guest House had been designed by her,” says the article.

The International Archive of Women in Architecture says she was the first woman to qualify as an architect in Asia. Eulie was Chief Architect Chandigarh (1971-76); Punjab (1976-81); and Harayana (1970-71).  She was Principal of the Delhi School of Architecture and Planning (1963 to 1965). The main block of the Polytechnic for Women and the Hostel Block for the Home Science College were designed by her.

She contributed Sinners and Winners, a column in The Tribune that pointed out mistakes that had crept in the paper. She also wrote for a variety of architectural journals. Till the very end, she was active, and cause-driven. She joined hands with Mac Sarin in advocating euthanasia.
Eulie, who died on September 20, 1995 , entertained with poise and grace. She would greet her guests as they walked over the black concrete floor that always had a mirror-like finish. What a home it was—witness to history in the making, soaring intellectual discussions, petty party squabbles and delicious gossip. It was also a living example of Corbusier’s design. Seeing this lovely home reduced to rubble left me with a heavy heart—I found it difficult to come to terms with what the home of one of those who built Chandigarh had been reduced to.

A photograph of Eulie published in The Tribune on October 12, 1996

From Website

A slightly shorter version of this article by Roopinder Singh was published as a “middle” in The Tribune on September 1, 2009

An integral part of our growing up years, Readers’ Digest was a window to the wonders that lay beyond our immediate geographical constraints. The news of its US parent filing for Chapter 11 to reorganise the company brought along a flood of memories and this resulted in my writing a small piece that was published as middle on the editorial page of The Tribune on Tuesday. From the number of phone calls that I received from complete strangers, it stuck a chord among others also for whom Readers’ Digest was a staple. Please click here to read the article.

I can’t cook to save my life, though I love food and like to experiment with various cuisines. Indian Takeaway was a title that intrigued me and as I read it, I enjoyed it, which was reason enough to review the book by Glasgow-born Hardeep Singh Kohli. He writes well, is funny and I liked his idea of cooking western food in India while travelling around.
Lately, thanks to my spouse, I have also been introduced to Nigella Lawson’s TV show on cooking—I normally work on the laptop or read while it is on, but no one who’s seen it would blame me if my gaze strayed towards the TV more than a few times—the lady speaks very well and is also quite easy on the eye.
Seeing that Hardeep had splattered himself all over the cover, I made a somewhat uncharitable comparison of his appearance with that of Nigella in the review. It’s is like comparing apples and oranges, I know, but sometimes we “just do it”, as the Nike ad says.
Moments before submitting the copy, I decided that I had to nail that Nigella, know more about her, now that she was figuring in my writing. Googling was the shortcut, yielding among other things, a Wikipedia entry as well as a link to her website.

I was on a roll and things were making sense! We had often observed that Nigella Lucy Lawson’s language was as classy as her looks—comes with having graduated from the University of Oxford, and you don’t become the deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times at age 26, just like that, you know!
There is much about her that subtly announced old money and breeding, easily understood when you find out that she is the daughter of Nigel Lawson, Baron of Blaby, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Vanessa Salmon, whose family owned the J. Lyons and Co empire, a large British business.
In the show, she refers to her children, 14-year-old daughter Cosima and son Bruno, 12 from her marriage to the late journalist John Diamond. Her husband, Charles Saattchi, the marketing mogul, has a daughter, 13-year-old Phoebe from his first marriage.
She is a millionaire in her own right. Living Kitchen, her cookware, has a value of £7 million, and she has sold more than three million cookery books worldwide. Nigella is also married to one of the richest men in the UK, worth more than £110million.
However, says Nigella: “I am determined that my children should have no financial security. It ruins people not having to earn money.” She does not want to leave her wealth to her children, something that her husband does not agree with. His opinion would find resonance among those who label their vehicles “Pappu te Tinki di Gaddi”.
We live in a culture where inheritance is taken for granted. Patiala, where I grew up, had many a home of a once illustrious family brought to ruin because children who did not work for a living and eventually ate into their inheritance, often at a blazingly fast rate.

It takes a great mother to recognise this fact and show tough love. Nigella’s statement reflects what one would call her pragmatic positivism, as a tribute her stepfather, the philosopher A J Ayer, the famous exponent of logical positivism, whose book Language Truth and Logic influenced one’s college days. From Lawson to logic, you just don’t know what a good chef can rustle up, really.

In India, the expression “do number ka mal” roughly translated as “number 2 stuff” is often used for underhand dealings and the like. The Palace of Westminster shook as the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, about the misuse of the fund meant for expenses for a second home for the Members of Parliament. public reeled from the exposures, artfully doled out in driblets, by

The public outcry has led to the ousting of the Speaker for the first time in 300 years! While “cleaning the moat” simply indicates excesses, a friend called me to say that I had spared the British MPs by not writing about their hiring pornographic movies and billing the expense to the British taxpayers!

Please click here to read more!

Summer often reminds Stephanians like me of the good times we had and of Rothas’ Nimbu Pani. “There is hardly any nimbu, some sugar and a lot of water in Sukhia’s Nimbu Pani, but we all love it,” said a fellow student, yet the dhaba is rightly a part of college lore.  I wrote a little piece on it which  you might enjoy reading. Please click here to read it, and see some pictures.

Yes we can, seems to be the new mantra with Indian politicians. What works in the good ole US of A should also work in India, be it slogans or blogging. Age no bar, blog karo bar bar, is the new mantra. Please click here to read  my take on this:

Even those who have met Marshal of the Indian Air Force Arjan Singh, DFC only once cherish their encounter with him and read whatever is written about him with great fondness. I received many calls, starting with one by Mrs Rama Sharma of Shimla early on Saturday morning, when my middle on him was published in The Tribune. His memories bring out positive vibes from a range of people, young and old, and I am glad to be the scribe whose writing helped bring them out. Please click here to read my reminiscences of interaction with this great man