Shoba Narayan

Feedback

Shoba Narayan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:59:40 +0000

I welcome your feedback. What can I do to improve the class? Please post your thoughts below if you wish.

Thanks very much and it was wonderful getting to know you all.

Please stay in touch.

Shoba

Filed under: Uncategorized

Parenting dilemmas

Shoba Narayan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:54:02 +0000

This piece is heartfelt. The problem is that I don’t see any solution to this. Sometimes, parenting seems like a crapshoot– you make certain decisions and hope they work out. My elder daughter still hasn’t asked for a dog! Did we make the wrong call?

Here it is at The National’s site and pasted below.

Smart choices or luck? Good parenting demands both

Shoba Narayan

Feb 21, 2012

Save this article

On the day our much-adored but very sick Labrador died, we pulled my teenage daughter out of school. Our dog, Ginger, had suffered a chronic kidney failure and had been on antibiotics for six weeks. We had taken our pet to the vet every morning and afternoon for three hours of intravenous fluids, which included a cocktail of drugs.

Ginger had stopped eating for weeks. Towards the end, she stopped drinking. One afternoon, the vet informed us that the E coli infection that had invaded her kidneys had affected her brain. There was no recovery. She would die tomorrow if we stopped the fluids.

The next morning, our vet came to our home to administer an injection that would put our pet out of her misery. My husband and I debated over whether the kids needed to be present. We both agreed that it would be too much for our 10-year-old to watch her pet being put to sleep. It was our teenager that we were unclear about. Would it help her gain closure to be present? Or would it hurt her?

Parenting presents many dilemmas – each with no clear answer. You make decisions on behalf of your child and hope for the best. Your child is unhappy at boarding school. The teachers are mean, he says. He is getting bullied. The curriculum is uninspiring. He wants to come back home. You agonise over your child’s pain.

Here is another situation with no clear answer. Do you pull him out of school or do you leave him there in the hope that it will toughen him up? It’s a fork in the road and each choice will have consequences for your child.

Most parents solve such dilemmas by talking it over with other parents and friends, while recognising that the circumstances of their lives are different and that their child – like all children – is unique. One size definitely doesn’t fit all. But still, the first thing I do when I encounter parenting dilemmas is to phone friends who are going through similar experiences. Talking to them helps me process the situation. Even if I don’t follow their suggestions, knowing that they are in the same boat helps.

Sometimes external events can also help. We call this luck. My friend sent her son to boarding school. He hated it for years but later, much later, after he graduated as head boy and valedictorian, he thanked his parents for not pulling him out of school in spite of his weekly complaints.

What the boy didn’t know was how close his parents had come to driving up to the hills where the boarding school was and discharging him from the school he hated. They had to postpone their trip because a landslide had blocked the roads. Two weeks later, when the weather cleared and became sunny, so did the boy’s disposition. He stayed at the school that moulded him for life.

Recently, some friends have been asking me whether to get a pet. They know how much we enjoyed having our dog and how sad we were when she died. They also know that we will probably get another pet once we get over our grief. They call us to find out if having a dog in the house will be “good for the kids”.

Frankly, I tell them, having a pet often seemed like more work than it was worth. But there were also tender moments when I caught my kids lying on the floor, curled into a ball with our burly Labrador retriever. When they came home in a bad mood, or when they cried, Ginger would put her head on their lap and make them feel better. Every morning, she would come into the bedroom and our oxytocin levels would go up, simply because of her wagging tail and oh-so-beautiful eyes. Those benefits are hard to measure, I tell my friends.

But pets also involve chores – walking the dog, cleaning up their messes. The benefits of having one, much like parenting dilemmas, are not always obvious.

We pulled our teenager out of school so that she could be present during Ginger’s last moments. We still aren’t sure if we did the right thing. Did it give her closure or scar her for life? She says she is fine, but when we talk about getting another dog, she is the one who hesitates and asks us to “wait a while”.

Our younger daughter who wasn’t around when our pet died is ready to get another dog. So we sigh and wonder again and again: did we do the right thing?

We don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Shoba Narayan is the author of Monsoon Diary: a memoir with recipes

Filed under: Comment Essay, Op-ed and Comment, Parenting Tagged: decisions, dilemmas, Parenting

Food- North Indian versus South Indian

Shoba Narayan — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:05:34 +0000

This appeared in Silkroad magazine’s Feb 2012 issue

North Versus South Indian Food

Filed under: Food Writing, Silkroad Tagged: fish moily, ITC Hotels, kebabs, Manjit Gill, Naren Thimmiah, North Indian food, north versus south, South Indian food, Taj Hotels

Yoga Journal

Shoba Narayan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:55:31 +0000

About Vishnu in the Yoga Journal

Super Man

Vishnu lives in luxury, but this Hindu god will abandon his opulent ways to take human form and save the world from evil.

By Shoba Narayan

In Indian films known as “god movies,” Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi, the pale-skinned goddess of wealth, are shown living in absurdly luxurious surroundings, wearing golden crowns, glittering jewelry, and silky robes, and surrounded by clouds of fragrant incense.

But Vishnu is known as the preserver of the good, and in keeping with that role, he repeatedly assumes human form and goes forth to rid the world of evil. The most famous of his incarnations are Rama, a devout and dutiful prince, and Krishna, a born prankster and the revealer of the profound teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.

Rama, the hero of the great Indian epic poem the Ramayana, epitomizes the virtues of filial obedience, loyalty, and honesty. When his own father is tricked into banishing him, Rama utters no protest and continues to serve the full term of his exile even though his father dies long before its end. In return, Rama commands extreme loyalty—from his wife, Sita, who follows him into exile and willingly undergoes trial by fire to prove she has remained pure while kidnapped by another man; from his brother Lakshmana, who leaves his own wife to accompany Rama; from the monkey god, Hanuman, who spends his life in Rama’s service; and, to this day, from legions of Hindu devotees all across India. Mahatma Gandhi died uttering the name of Rama, and in North India, a common greeting is “Ram Ram,” instead of “Hello.”

Mischievous Krishna is Rama’s opposite. He’s usually up to no good, whether enlisting his pals to help steal the butter pots stored high in his mother’s kitchen; hiding the clothes of the gopis, the cow-herding girls, as they bathe naked in the river; or playing sensual music on his flute, driving the gopis faint with longing. Despite these tendencies, Krishna is the teacher who reveals the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. Exploring some of the most difficult of spiritual issues, including the nature of reality and humanity as well as the central problems of human existence, the Gita remains one of the most important books for any yogi as well as one of the world’s great spiritual classics.

The idea of karma yoga—the yoga of right action—is a centerpiece of Krishna’s message in the Gita. He teaches the importance of striving to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing, not because of the spiritual merit it might bring. Like all of Vishnu’s incarnations, Krishna reminds us to do our best to make the world a better place.

Filed under: Comment Essay Tagged: Hinduism, Vishnu, Yoga Journal

Yoga Journal

Shoba Narayan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:53:32 +0000

Yoga Journal

Parvati Power

This Hindu goddess, consort of Shiva, proves that dignity and smarts prevail.

By Shoba Narayan

Parvati is one face of the divine female energy, often called Devi (the shining one) or Shakti (power), that many Indians worship as the power above all deities. The goddess is personified in many forms, including Saraswati, goddess of learning and consort of Brahma, and Lakshmi, goddess of fortune and consort of Vishnu.

Parvati came into being when a female demon was terrorizing the world, smug in the knowledge that only a son of Shiva could kill her. But Shiva had withdrawn from the world to practice ascetics high in the Himalayas. He wouldn’t even look at a woman, much less sire a son.

In an effort to woo Shiva, Shakti, the great mother goddess, took the form of Parvati. Shiva scorned her until she engaged in austerities of her own. Impressed, Shiva accepted her as his wife, and they produced a son who destroyed the demon.

Smart and curious, Parvati questioned Shiva about the Vedas and other sacred texts, whose secrets he whispered into her ears. But the couple also had their spats, one of which resulted in Ganesha: Parvati was frustrated that none of Shiva’s ganas (attendants) would swear allegiance to her, so she created a boy and instructed him to let no one enter her home. When Shiva arrived, the boy blocked his way, so the god chopped off his head. Parvati was sick with grief. To appease her, Shiva fused the head of an elephant onto the boy’s body and breathed life back into it—and named him Ganesha, “leader of the ganas.”

Today, Parvati is the epitome of determination and discipline. She refuses to let Shiva’s scorn intimidate her and doesn’t take no for an answer. Instead, she wins with grace and dignity, something we can all aspire to.

therefore, all sages worship him. He is there before anything else was there in the world. Whomever Narada approached could not give him an answer. Therefore, finally he approached Lord Shiva and asked this question. Lord Shiva replied that he mediate upon his guru. Narada satisfied and went back and told to other gods that he got his answer. Then the other gods asked Narada- who is Lord Shiva’s guru? The sage, then only realized that he did not get the answer to his question so far. So he went back to the Lord and praised him. ‘O Lord’, you are above everything. You can destroy the whole world and can create it back even better way within seconds. So, please be kind enough to understand all my doubts instead of asking you silly questions. Then, Lord Shiva replied with a smile. ‘Oh Narada, The person you and the entire world worship as their mother is my guru’. Narada surprised and replied; But, she is your wife? Then Lord Shiva said; Yes, that is the reason why she is my guru. Then he showed Narada his mediating form which we normally see in pictures. So, Narada saw Parvathi as Kundalini rising across Shiva’s spine and going across his neck and realized the reason why he is called ‘Nataraja’. Finally, he saw Parvathi at Shiva’s Crown Chakra in woman form just like the universal mother and water falling out of her mouth to feed the entire living beings. Then, Lord Shiva told to Narada: ‘Oh! Great sage, Narada, please spread the knowledge to the entire world that when one respect and believe their wife to the most, their Kundalini will start aligning with her and they will have the perfect married life. Then only, she will yield to him willfully’.

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Filed under: Comment Essay Tagged: Hinduism, Parvati, Shiva, Yoga

Yoga Journal

Shoba Narayan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:47:37 +0000

Thanks, Naomi, for sending me these links in the Yoga Journal. Wrote these pieces a long time ago. Didn’t know they existed.

Quite Contrary

Kali is both a fierce warrior and a compassionate mother goddess, reflecting the range of behavior available to us all.

By Shoba Narayan

Many of the female deities in Hindu mythology are powerful and full of contradictions. The goddesses Kali and Durga are perfect examples of this: They mix fierce destructive power with maternal protectiveness.

Durga, often shown riding a tiger, is one of the names given to the consort of Shiva. When one of their sons was battling a demon, Durga came to her child’s aid by assuming the form of Kali, a fearsome, bloodthirsty figure with a long, protruding tongue. The demon’s power allowed every drop of his blood to turn into a hundred copies of himself as soon as it hit the ground, but Kali’s tongue caught each drop in midair, and the demon and all his copies were vanquished.

The victorious Kali danced on the corpse-strewn battlefield, adorned herself with skulls, and, fueled by blood and gore, ran amok, wreaking havoc on the three worlds—the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.

To stop her, Shiva turned into a corpse on the battlefield. When Kali stepped on him, she stopped short, fearing she’d slain her husband in her rage. As she paused, Shiva became an infant and began crying. Kali instantly picked up and suckled the baby Shiva, transforming from a fierce warrior to a benevolent mother goddess. This story illustrates how Kali’s destructive power can bring about good, though it needs balance and direction.

Portrayals of Kali are symbolic in many ways. She is depicted as black-skinned, which means she’s without form: infinite and changeless. Her girdle of hands looks horrific, but it suggests the way for devotees to free themselves from the cycle of death and rebirth; our hands can free us from the karmic wheel. Her garland of 50 skulls signifies the 50 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, the destroyers of ignorance. Like Shiva, Kali has three eyes, meaning she knows the past, present, and future.

An incredibly powerful female icon, Kali is full of contradictions. She’s naked but not vulnerable, motherly yet unafraid of battle and blood. She’s a warrior but a compassionate one; she brings death but also gives life. Like Kali, we’re all capable of fierce opposition to evil as well as tenderness and compassion.

Kali is both a fierce warrior and a compassionate mother goddess, reflecting the range of behavior available to us all.

By Shoba Narayan

Many of the female deities in Hindu mythology are powerful and full of contradictions. The goddesses Kali and Durga are perfect examples of this: They mix fierce destructive power with maternal protectiveness.

Durga, often shown riding a tiger, is one of the names given to the consort of Shiva. When one of their sons was battling a demon, Durga came to her child’s aid by assuming the form of Kali, a fearsome, bloodthirsty figure with a long, protruding tongue. The demon’s power allowed every drop of his blood to turn into a hundred copies of himself as soon as it hit the ground, but Kali’s tongue caught each drop in midair, and the demon and all his copies were vanquished.

The victorious Kali danced on the corpse-strewn battlefield, adorned herself with skulls, and, fueled by blood and gore, ran amok, wreaking havoc on the three worlds—the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.

To stop her, Shiva turned into a corpse on the battlefield. When Kali stepped on him, she stopped short, fearing she’d slain her husband in her rage. As she paused, Shiva became an infant and began crying. Kali instantly picked up and suckled the baby Shiva, transforming from a fierce warrior to a benevolent mother goddess. This story illustrates how Kali’s destructive power can bring about good, though it needs balance and direction.

Portrayals of Kali are symbolic in many ways. She is depicted as black-skinned, which means she’s without form: infinite and changeless. Her girdle of hands looks horrific, but it suggests the way for devotees to free themselves from the cycle of death and rebirth; our hands can free us from the karmic wheel. Her garland of 50 skulls signifies the 50 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, the destroyers of ignorance. Like Shiva, Kali has three eyes, meaning she knows the past, present, and future.

An incredibly powerful female icon, Kali is full of contradictions. She’s naked but not vulnerable, motherly yet unafraid of battle and blood. She’s a warrior but a compassionate one; she brings death but also gives life. Like Kali, we’re all capable of fierce opposition to evil as well as tenderness and compassion.

Kali is both a fierce warrior and a compassionate mother goddess, reflecting the range of behavior available to us all.

By Shoba Narayan

Many of the female deities in Hindu mythology are powerful and full of contradictions. The goddesses Kali and Durga are perfect examples of this: They mix fierce destructive power with maternal protectiveness.

Durga, often shown riding a tiger, is one of the names given to the consort of Shiva. When one of their sons was battling a demon, Durga came to her child’s aid by assuming the form of Kali, a fearsome, bloodthirsty figure with a long, protruding tongue. The demon’s power allowed every drop of his blood to turn into a hundred copies of himself as soon as it hit the ground, but Kali’s tongue caught each drop in midair, and the demon and all his copies were vanquished.

The victorious Kali danced on the corpse-strewn battlefield, adorned herself with skulls, and, fueled by blood and gore, ran amok, wreaking havoc on the three worlds—the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.

To stop her, Shiva turned into a corpse on the battlefield. When Kali stepped on him, she stopped short, fearing she’d slain her husband in her rage. As she paused, Shiva became an infant and began crying. Kali instantly picked up and suckled the baby Shiva, transforming from a fierce warrior to a benevolent mother goddess. This story illustrates how Kali’s destructive power can bring about good, though it needs balance and direction.

Portrayals of Kali are symbolic in many ways. She is depicted as black-skinned, which means she’s without form: infinite and changeless. Her girdle of hands looks horrific, but it suggests the way for devotees to free themselves from the cycle of death and rebirth; our hands can free us from the karmic wheel. Her garland of 50 skulls signifies the 50 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, the destroyers of ignorance. Like Shiva, Kali has three eyes, meaning she knows the past, present, and future.

An incredibly powerful female icon, Kali is full of contradictions. She’s naked but not vulnerable, motherly yet unafraid of battle and blood. She’s a warrior but a compassionate one; she brings death but also gives life. Like Kali, we’re all capable of fierce opposition to evil as well as tenderness and compassion.

READER COMMENTS

K-km	YEP: “mix fierce destructive power with maternal protectiveness” dat’s what I am, but WASTED a so much of my life FEELING GUILTY about the CONTRADICTORY nature of me; little did I know: I AM GODDESS KALI
kali	this is so weird. my name is kali and yes, i am young, 13 to be exact but my mom reads this magazine and showed it to me. she was freaked out about how close this resembled me. i can say no to anyone and stand up for myself and my friends. i was coming on here to find the article to put on my myspace, my friends would agree with my mom.

Filed under: Comment Essay Tagged: Hinduism, Kali, Shiva, Yoga

Flowers

Shoba Narayan — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:39:37 +0000

Columns
Posted: Thu, Feb 9 2012. 7:54 PM IST
Earth laughs in flowers
All over the world, people are moving towards handmade, handcrafted local objects—made to measure and customized right in front of your eyes
The Good Life | Shoba Narayan

I am at a flower market in New Delhi en route to dinner at a colleague’s home. I want to take some flowers for my hostess, Anita, but everywhere I see, there are strings of bright yellow marigolds. Where are the cut, long-stemmed roses or Oriental lilies?

I want a big bunch of yellow roses, I tell the vendor behind the wooden bench. In response, he lifts a string of marigold he is braiding. It is only after walking through six stalls with no rose to show for it that I pause and reflect on the irony of the situation.

Street blooms: The Dadar flower market in Mumbai, on a recent winter morning. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
All over the world, people are moving towards handmade, handcrafted local objects—made to measure and customized right in front of your eyes. Here I am, doing the opposite. All around me are fragrant, beautifully stitched strings of native Indian flowers. Why am I harking for a bouquet when stringing flowers together is the Indian way? So this Valentine’s Day, as you search for flowers for your sweetie, I submit to you an alternative: Rather than buying those obligatory long-stemmed red roses, why not braid some intoxicating Madurai jasmine in your hair instead? Instead of dazzling her with a bouquet, caress her with a rose garland instead? Or hang chains of tuberose all around the bed. Why? Because here in India, it is possible; and when done right, it is wonderful.
As this issue points out, there are 99 Sanskrit words for love. There are just as many Indian flowers that are available to us if only we cared to look: champa, mogra, neel kamal, rajnigandha, raat ki rani, nithyakalyani, jati, parijat, kadamb, punnaga, the list goes on. A wonderful site called Flowersofindia.in has photographs of native Indian flowers and their historical significance. As collector and scholar Kamala Vasudevan points out in her essay, Ancient Gardens of India, the Aryans of Vedic times were great nature lovers. They called flowers sumanasa, which means “that which pleases the mind”. A hymn that I listened to while growing up begins: Sumanasa vandita sundari madhavi, and was dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi.

I am crazy about flowers. When I die, I want to be surrounded by them: fragrant tuberose, strings of heady night jasmine, Oriental lilies, roses, gardenia, if possible, all of the above. Why do Western societies collect their flowers in bouquets while here in India, we string them together? I have two theories to explain this. One has to do with cheap labour. It is far less labour-intensive to cut flowers into bouquets. Stringing them into garlands takes work. Visit the flower markets in any city to see men and women busily stringing fragrant flowers into garlands that we all take for granted. Tuberose with a dash of green tulsi in between; yellow and orange marigolds alternating; scented mogra, mixed with green, differently scented marugu; orange kadamba; rose garlands encased in a silvery net—the varieties of ways we string flowers together reflects an aesthetic that pays attention to pattern and ritual. The fact that early European societies used to string flowers into their hats lends credence to this theory of labour-intensiveness contributing to the fall of handwork with respect to flowers and the rise of easy-cut bouquets.

The second reason, I believe, has to do with adornment. Indian literature is full of flower references. They are viewed as symbols of auspiciousness and adornment, which is why no Indian function is complete without them. Flowers are also symbols of “shringara rasa”, as depicted in pretty much every miniature painting and all our dance forms. The adornments are usually the same: sandal paste; strings of jasmine flowers coiled through black hair; and little else. The whole effect is simple, sensual, divine.

I wear strings of jasmine in my hair when I am home but take them out when I go out, mostly because I stand out. In Bangalore, philanthropist Sudha Murty appears in public with flowers in her hair but I haven’t seen anyone else. Mostly, we wear our hair loose these days and how does one attach flowers to loose hair? Chennai weddings, thankfully, are still full of young girls in half-saris, as we call them, with long strings of jasmine pinned on braided hair. The scent and sight are intoxicating. Western adornment with flowers usually involves just one, if that. You may pin a flower behind your hair, or in the place of a brooch but that’s it. Complex adornment, the way we Indians do it, requires the flowers to be stitched or strung together. The practice may be dying though.

According to an essay, Cut Flower Production in India by the Delhi-based Narendra K. Dadlani, editor-in-chief of the journal of Indian Society of Ornamental Horticulture, there are about 65,000 hectares of land under cultivation for flowers. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are the states with maximum flower cultivation and the bulk of it comprises loose flowers used for our strings and garlands. But slowly, stemmed flowers for bouquets are gaining ground and there may come a time when strings and garlands will become too expensive to produce. Until then, enjoy.

So this Valentine’s, take your lover out for a candlelit dinner by all means. Buy them expensive foreign brands—I want a handbag by Moynat, if you must know. But when it comes to buying flowers, why not visit one of our flower bazaars, chat with the guy sitting on the wooden bench and get a custom-made string or garland to take home? The Rs.3,000 that it will cost you to get a nice bouquet will buy you enough fragrant strings to suffuse every corner of your home with the scent of love.

Shoba Narayan buys Oriental lilies for her vases and strings of jasmine every day. She floats marigolds in her uruli and wears whatever she can get in her hair. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com

Filed under: Mint Tagged: bouquets, flower market, Flowers, garlands, indian flowers, jasmine, lilies, marigold, native flowers, Oriental, oriental lilies, rajnigandha, valentine s day, yellow marigolds

Design & Architecture

Shoba Narayan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:26:47 +0000

It seems like we are racing along. I am enjoying all your presentations, and glad you are keeping it to ten minutes. Design is a huge sub-culture for those of you who decide to get into it. Meanwhile, here is a recap of our final presentations.

Our guest lecturer who will cover dining, cocktails, and table etiquette will not be able to make it on Monday, Feb. 13th. Instead, they are coming on Monday, Feb. 20th.

So I am moving forward all your presentations.

Monday, Feb. 13th presentations: Ravi, Kaustubh, Shekhar, Sunil, Vikas, Jeffrey, Deepak, and Pranav.

Tuesday, Feb. 14th: Hari, Smita, Sudhanshu, Abhishek, Vivek, Gurmeet, Yogesh and Harish

Monday, Feb. 20th: External presentation.

Tuesday, Feb. 21st: Last class. Amit, Agnel, Sabibrata, Ashwin, Himanshu, Suresh, Karthik, Amit Arora.

Anyone else? Please sign up.

Filed under: Teaching IIM 2012

About Starbucks

Shoba Narayan — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:57:48 +0000

Starbucks has to wake up and smell the coffee in India

Shoba Narayan

Café Coffee Day, an Indian coffee chain, will offer serious competition to Starbucks, which aims to open 50 outlets by the end of the year. Aijaz Rahi / AP Photo

Feb 5, 2012

There is a great line in the movie When Harry met Sally, in which the hero differentiates women as “high-maintanence” or “low maintenance,” and proceeds to tell the heroine she is a “high-maintanence who thinks she is a low-maintanence”.

Coffee lovers in India are high-maintanence drinkers of the brew who think they are low-maintanence. I am typical. I come from Tamilnadu, the state that drinks the most coffee and live in a state, Karnataka, that produces 54.6 per cent of coffee in India, according to statistics from the Coffee Board of India. As with 70 per cent of Indians, I drink the bulk of my coffee at home: a ground mixture of Arabica and Robusta beans with 20 per cent of chicory mixed in. In south India, we call this filter coffee, and all we coffee drinkers ask for when we go out to a cafe is a cup of “decent coffee”.

Therein lies the “slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip”, to quote an old English proverb that seems particularly appropriate for this topic.

“Decent” coffee for a committed south Indian coffee connoisseurs such as me involves a long, very specific list: it has to be piping hot; the foam must be on top; it has to be bubbly and the bubbles have to be breaking down; it should be served in a stainless-steel tumbler and “davara”, which is the Indian version of a saucer; the colour of the drink should not be as dark as cocoa, but not too milky either; and the amount of sugar should be just enough to take out the bitterness but without adding any sweetness to the taste. That’s what I would call decent coffee. You see why I think Indians are high-maintenance coffee drinkers who think they are low maintenance?

And here is why Starbucks should worry: there are millions like me in India.

Last week, Starbucks announced it would enter India through a US$80 million (Dh293.8m) joint venture with Tata Global Beverages. The chain had planned to come in on its own, but daunting regulations prevented the move. A recent ruling has allowed 100 per cent foreign ownership of single-brand retail outlets. Costa coffee has recently arrived in India and will be Starbucks’ biggest foreign competitor. Café Coffee Day (CCD), an Indian coffee chain, offers much more serious competition. With some 600 outlets in more than 95 cities, including Vienna and Karachi, CCD owns two thirds of all the chain coffee houses in India, by some estimates. It is ubiquitous at airports and malls and has stand-alone outlets in most neighbourhoods. Yet, in terms of outlets per person, its market penetration is one forty-fourth that of Starbucks, according to the Espresso News & Reviews website.

Starbucks hopes to change that. It hopes to convert tea-drinking north India into a nation of coffee-drinkers. RK Krishnakumar, the chairman of Tata Coffee, said the company planned to move aggressively and could have 50 stores by the end of this year. Brand consultants caution Starbucks should not assume that just because it is a well-known global brand, it can just walk into India and attract customers. Part of the problem is just the differential pricing of coffee in India. My dad drinks four cups of coffee a day and pay 10 rupees (75 fils) per cup at his neighbourhood, no-name café. I pay 35 rupees for a cup of espresso at Café Coffee Day. It still costs under a dollar for the most expensive cup of coffee in India. How is Starbucks going to get price-conscious Indian consumers who think they are coffee experts to pay US$4 (Dh14) for a tall latte?

The company’s biggest outlay will be on property.

Santosh Unni, the chief executive of Costa Coffee India, has said the consideration for a coffee chain is not so much about rent per square metre but to keep the “rent-to-revenue percentage in the ballpark of 25 per cent”.

Café Coffee Day has used it first-mover advantage to set up outlets in every premium location imaginable, from the hills of Coonoor where Bangalore millionaires go in the summer, to motorways and urban malls, with extremely high footfalls. Starbucks needs to think through its strategy for India quite significantly so that its failure in Israel is not replicated.

Lastly, it needs to figure out what the Indian consumer means when they say, “All I want is a simple cup of decent coffee.”

Filed under: Business Column, The National Tagged: Arabica, Cafe Coffee Day, coffee board, coffee connoisseurs, Costa coffee, decent coffee, english proverb, India, indian coffee, Starbucks, Tata Coffee

About Jitish Kallat and Reena Saini Kallat

Shoba Narayan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:18:15 +0000

Columns
Posted: Thu, Feb 2 2012. 7:45 PM IST
Walking the art talk with the Kallats
Jitish and Reena are charming and polite—to me and to each other. They don’t interrupt and listen intently to each other as they describe their 18-year-old relationship, seven-year-old son and the trappings of fame and wealth that have come to them
The Good Life | Shoba Narayan

I am trailing artist-couple Jitish Kallat and Reena Saini Kallat through the white-cubed maze that is the India Art Fair in New Delhi. By the time you read this, the fair would have finished. My goal is to give art-loving readers in other cities a “Take on Art” through the prism of this event. There are many options open to me. Should I go to every gallery and ask for the name of one upcoming artist they are considering? I don’t think I’ll get an honest, agenda-less answer.

There is the scene surrounding the fair, the after-parties, the things people said. Cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote at a speaker’s forum, describing how he approached the India pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale “through the rhetorical trope of the non-sequitor”. Say what? An English-accented lady in the audience accusing Sophie Duplaix, the curator of the recent Paris-Delhi-Bombay… Through the Eyes of Indian and French Artists show (from 25 May-19 September) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, of curating a condescending “colonialist show with an orientalist’s perspective”. I don’t know these words so I cannot decode them for you. A simpler response came from an auction house representative who called the Centre Pompidou show “rubbish”. A lady performance artiste at the opening party held at The Park, New Delhi, to a male academic (name changed), “Raman, I’ve been told that dancing with you is better than having sex.” Collectors Rajiv Savara and Harsh Goenka at the VIP preview, eyeing their next acquisitions. Artist Sudarshan Shetty having a Chinese lunch in the backroom—his work in front was priced at Rs64 lakh. Subodh Gupta glad-handing a contingent of Pakistani students at the entrance. Hoarse gallerists continually answering questions: “We have been having more conversations with journalists than collectors and I am not sure that is a good sign,” said an exhibitor at White Cube’s booth. The freezing terrace of the blueFROG, The Kila, where Khoj, the acclaimed artists’ association, held its live performance shows. A lady walking through a performance piece asking a performer for a cigarette before doing a double take. The alcohol lubricating every event…and I still hadn’t come up with an angle for this column.

Fair company: (from L) Jitish Kallat; Reena Saini Kallat. Photos: Courtesy Arndt Berlin.
Perhaps I could trail a couple of top artists through the fair and view it through their eyes. But who? My instinctive choice was Sudarshan Shetty because of his massive public art project in Mumbai. But I wanted to see the work before writing about him.
I ran into Jitish Kallat, 37, at Aman New Delhi, where Outset, a philanthropic arts organization, had breakfast forums. He was wearing what appeared to be a smartly cut blue khadi jacket, which was my initial reason for approaching him: an artist I admired who also shared my love for Indian textiles. The jacket, it turned out, was from fashion boutique Bombay Electric and I am not sure it was khadi. But by then I had already popped the question and he had accepted: Could I trail him through the fair and view it through his eyes? Kallat liked the idea, and when I saw his wife, Reena Saini Kallat, 38, nearby, I asked if they could do it together. So it came to be that we walked through the fair to a quiet table in the back. It took me 10 minutes to get them to open up.

Jitish and Reena are charming and polite—to me and to each other. They don’t interrupt and listen intently to each other as they describe their 18-year-old relationship, seven-year-old son and the trappings of fame and wealth that have come to them. Like every artist, they claim to be untouched by the market. “I don’t know that I was any ‘purer’ as a poor student artist than I am now,” says Jitish. “You have to maintain that level of uncertainty and probing that one had in arts school; and be aware of the slippery grounds that you walk on.”

“We were completely comfortable with the idea of a humble living when we got married,” says Reena. “It was a privilege to be an artist, not the privileges in the usual sense, but to engage with the world in a different way. No artist cares for anything more than the trajectory of work that they leave behind.”

14 Lives, an acrylic on canvas and bronze by Jitish at the India Art Fair held in Delhi in January. Photo: Courtesy Arndt Berlin.
We discuss the forums we all attended. I rant against the jargon that overtook the previous one. Why use such phrases as “colonialist with an orientalist’s perspective?” I ask. Why not simple English? But all these people are cultural theorists, says Reena, quietly demolishing my argument. “Why would you want them to dilute their expertise just to cater to the general public? Investment bankers apply their graphs and terminology artists don’t seem to understand, so why should there constantly be an expectation from theorists to oversimplify their views? You cannot expect an artist to cater to an audience,” she ends.
“When you make an object, you stand the risk of that object speaking to an audience of one: you,” says Jitish. “Visual arts isn’t a populist medium to begin with. I would hope that through events like the art fair, various constituencies would come together to rejuvenate our museums, reincarnate our art schools from their current state of coma, establish private museums and build institutions.”

We talk about their working relationship, about whether they discuss their works during the creation. “I am a bit more chatty in the sequence of creation,” says Jitish.

Just when I think that Reena is proper and polite, she gives me pause. “He might discuss every crappy idea with me while I am more selective about what I discuss with him,” she says. The couple burst out laughing.

Shoba Narayan has a lot of crappy ideas and she is not selective about who she discusses them with. Disclosure: she was a guest of the India Art Fair. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com

Filed under: Art, Mint Tagged: centre pompidou, non sequitor

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