Ervad Frazan Adil Kotwal has recently participated in the first ever national competition for Western classical singers, ‘Voices of India’ and secured second place and the top audience choice award. The competition was exceptionally tough as there was no age limit and different Indian singers at different technical levels from all over India and abroad came together to compete and make music with one another. The competition took place over three days at the NCPA. For the finale he chose to sing Ibert’s Chanson de la Mort, Handel’s Why do the nations from the Messiah and Mozart’s Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen which he sang with full passion and charmed the audience with his theatrical and singing prowess.

After being accepted into prestigious music universities in New York, Vienna and Germany, Frazan chose to study at the renowned State Music university in Stuttgart under Ulrike Sonntag.  Even though it’s only been a year since he’s moved to Stuttgart, he has already achieved a lot like receiving many Solo concerts, Scholarships, the baritone solo in Puccini’s Messa di Gloria,  a prize winner from the Fritz Wunderlich foundation and also being featured and interviewed on German Radio, magazine, newspapers and television. Frazan is being supported by the Christel Guthörle endowment and the Holtzbirnk group in Germany.

We are thrilled to inform that two of our very dear friends and eminent Zarathushtis in North America have been presented the Distinguished Scholars Award by NAMC.

At the last North American Mobed Council (NAMC) Annual General Meeting in Washington DC, it was unanimously decided to confer the Distinguished Scholar Awards to Mobed Dr. Jehan Bagli and Mobed Soli P. Dastur.

The award was presented to Jehan at the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario’s Navroze Function in Toronto by Past NAMC President Mobed Kobad Zarolia on August 18^th.

The award was also presented by NAMC President Mobed Ardaeviraf Minocherhomji to Jo Ann and Mobed Soli P. Dastur at the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale/Boca Raton Zoroastrian Association of Florida Navroze function on Saturday August 18th, and at the Orlando CFG Group Navroze function on Sunday August 19^th and at the ZATAMBAY function on August 26^th by Past FEZANA President Rustom Kevala and Hoshedar Tamboli.

In the words of Mark Twain, synergy is the bonus that is achieved when we work together harmoniously. With exactly this in mind, the Empowering Mobeds(EM) and Xtremely Young Zoroastrians(XYZ) programmes collaborated together to create a memorable Sunday for the lovely kids, who are the future of our community across 2 centres in Mumbai today.

 The J.B.Vachha School in Dadar hosted 50 kids which included some students from the Dadar Athornan Institute, while the A.F.Petit School in Bandra had 70 of their boarding school girls participate in the same. 11 am ushered in and  excited kids in the age group of 5-12 years  clad in topis, scarves and colourful XYZ tshirts kickstarted the day by invoking Almighty Ahura Mazda with Humbundagis led by their respective Mobed sahebs. The Dadar centre was ably managed by Er Kaizad Karkaria, Er Khushroo Makihatana, Er Firdaus Pavri and Er Jehan Darbari while the Bandra centre was handled by Er Sheherazad Pavri and Ms Delphi Wadia.  The core team members of EM –  Mrs Binaifer Sahukar and Mr Dinshaw Tamboly weren’t far, cheering on the kids and amply applauding the efforts of the Mobeds while Hoshaang Gotla, the man behind XYZ made it a point to be around at both the centres to encourage everyone.

  The kids were quickly introduced to the EM initiative and explained how the Mobeds  intended to bring about an impact by increased interaction with the laiety, changing perception towards the priests, encouraging the future and empowering the preachers. The initial activity was an interactive questionnaire , a “Queen of Sheeba” parody termed the “Mobed wants to know” . Here, based on their personal experiences, the kids were run through questions about the name of their priests, Fire temples, what they wear etc intertwined with some melodious Ashem Vohu and Yatha Ahu Vairyo prayers in groups. The kids also learnt about the difference in a Dastur and a Mobed, the landing of the Parsis in India and the difference between Nirang and Taro. Questions were encouraged and the very thought of earning chocolates had the kids sprinting to the Mobeds present to answer questions and recite prayers.

A video clip of the  young participants.

  Creativity and young zoros go hand in hand, and to bring that out the kids were divided into groups and given the task of writing down any word related to Zoroastrian history, culture, religion, tradition and practices. While some of them cheekily mentioned O for orange and B for Banana as fruits used in prayer ceremonies, it wasn’t surprising to see the quintessential egg as E for Eedu. The girls at Petit School whose champion XYZ group is named Ketayun’s Conquerors  quickly performed a Mexican Wave choreographed by Delphi , joyously screaming the letters E,M, X, Y and Z.

  This was followed by a Word Search game where each child was handed out a grid to mark out words pertaining to the religion. With quite some words fresh from the previous round, it wasn’t long before the scramble to get more chocolates had started.

  To learn about their understanding of Agiary Etiquette, the kids were made to enact scenes in each of their groups, highlighting a visit to the fire temple and pointing out the do’s and don’t’s. These were sprinkled with some jingles and Monajats to add to the “Parsipanu”. At the end of this, the Mobeds present added their valuable feedback based on their own experience emphasizing that the Holy Fire is a venerated entity. Keeping that in mind, it is the responsibility of every Zoroastrian to be educated on maintaining the decorum and dress code while visiting a fire temple.

  Finally, the kids were run through a kusti prayer demonstration by the Mobeds. Equipped with more knowledge about their religion and prayers, the kids were deservedly treated to some lip smacking Malido and Papri, courtesy of Er Hormuz Dadachanji and Er Kaizad Karkaria.

  It was truly a fulfilling Sunday morning for the organisers and the participants. The parent volunteers of XYZ were truly appreciative of the efforts behind this and suggested more of these collaborated programmes with the participation of parents and grandparents to make it more interesting and informative. KUDOS to the EM and XYZ Team for uniting together to make a positive change and we look forward to many more events like these. Kshnaothra Ahurahe Mazdao!

Maxie Cooper’s art exhibition, Now Showing, reels back in tribute to her movie mogul father Keki Modi and the golden cinema years he brought Bombay

Brothers Sohrab Modi (extreme left) and Keki Modi with their wives Mehtab and Ellen

It was irony heaped on irony. Four years ago, the last poster tore away from the New Empire walls. The film? 300: Rise of an Empire. It marked the fall of that iconic single-screen cinema which had limped along, suffering losses with viewers whittled to under 20 at any show. A double whammy closed those curtains forever on March 21, 2014, Navroze, the Spring Equinox festival of fresh beginnings.

Article by Meher Marfatia | Mid-Day

How I longed to revisit the hall, witness to me weep buckets in the dark. Watching schmaltzy flicks like Love Story, which told smitten teens love means never having to say you’re sorry (absurd advice, we soon realised) and left girls pining equally for Ryan O’Neal’s baby face and Ali MacGraw’s thick eyebrows. So I walked through the deserted yet stunning New Empire within days of its closure, with owners Maxie and Burge Cooper, delighting in the theatre’s vintage machines and Deco design bands cemented on the proscenium.

Painter-photographer Maxie is the daughter of movie mogul Keki Modi (whose South Bombay properties were New Empire, Excelsior and Strand), younger brother of legendary actor-director-producer Sohrab Modi. I couldn’t miss noticing the final film’s tagline, “Seize your glory”, smite a third blow. Gone for good were the glory years of a structural gem that switched avatars graciously. Built on Victorian Baroque lines, Empire welcomed audiences to gala live performances in 1908. Modi bought the Bombay Improvement Trust-owned Empire in 1935, prefixing “New” to Empire some years after. Asia’s first theatre with a cantilevered balcony underwent a 1948 overhaul in the prevalent Art Deco style.

I’m back at New Empire this month, where Maxie readies an intriguing collection of works for her exhibition titled Now Showing. Opening on September 2 at Rukshaan Art Gallery, Lion Gate, this is an intended tribute to her father and the heady mid 20th-century Hollywood magic he brought the city. “Coming from a family associated with cinema before I was born, I’ve grown up steeped in it, fortunate to see the last decades of its golden age,” Maxie says. Her earliest memories are of inviting friends to Sunday morning screenings of children’s films at their Central Studios preview theatre in Tardeo.

Now Showing presents an evocative set of abstract prints, segueing Maxie’s unusually angled photographs of nooks in her beloved theatres she knew were doomed. Focused on New Empire, the series pays determined homage to Hollywood’s heyday in 1950s-’70s Bombay when cinemas favoured certain distributors: Metro eponymously exhibited MGM movies, New Empire aligned with Paramount and Warner Bros till Eros exclusively screened Warner films, Strand was partial to Columbia and Excelsior to the British studio The Rank Organisation. Tracing the decline of the single screen, Maxie says, “I saw piracy in the form of videos, and then advanced tech, affect beautiful old cinemas across the country. Most were forced to shut. Those converted to multiplexes from the 1990s struggle to keep their heads above water.” The imminent loss of the Modis’ Elite Cinema in Calcutta, which clanged shut its gates in June, inspired Maxie to shoot there as well. “I photographed the two cinemas I still had as a record of what used to be. Later, I thought of sharing the prints with movie buffs.”

Deftly meshing the elegiac elements into collages, Maxie experimented with artworks of the shots in a trial and error process of sorts. Once she taught herself Photoshop and layered these, what evolved on drawing paper were mesmeric black and white abstracts — she admires mid 20th-century abstract expressionist Franz Kline. “I prefer each as a one-off artwork rather than straightforward photographs which can reprint in editions of many,” she says. “I toyed with painting or drawing on them but couldn’t come up with a relevant enough theme. Until the idea struck me, wandering around Empire: of using the actual marquee lettering in capitals to stencil directly on the prints.”

Listing studios, equipment and classic film memorabilia, Maxie pared them down to terms no more in use… RKO Pictures, Cinemascope, D-150, RCA Photophone, Westrex and Ashcraft, besides signage that glowed in theatres at various levels, like Dress Circle, Daily 3 Shows and, of course, Now Showing. She stencilled in contrasting white Conte over the black parts and in charcoal over the white. The resulting 26 frames display a different phrase overwritten on every unique composite image.

The old Excelsior theatre, rose in 1887 as Novelty, to compete with Gaiety in the neighourhood (later called Capitol). It was renamed Excelsior in 1909 and New Excelsior in 1975 after Modi’s death

70 MM Todd AO is one such, superimposed in salute to Keki Modi’s genius. Maxie says, “My father always wanted to be first with any new format or technology invented in the West. At Strand he introduced the 70 mm screen with Todd AO sound and projection.” Brother Sohrab made the first Technicolor film — Jhansi ki Rani, bombing at the box office in 1953, divesting Keki of several theatres to settle debts from loans that financed it at high interest rates. And when the old Excelsior was razed, it was to be replaced by the first cinema uniquely resting on one level, without a separate Balcony.

Keki Modi died in 1972 without realising that dream refurbishment. The boy from sleepy Deolali had been a self-made, hands-on movie man. Bicycling between mofussil towns with brothers Sohrab and Rustomji, he showed countless silent era films of the 1920s in tents they packed and moved with. From changing reels in a little hall in Khadki, outside Poona, for Rs 2 a day, he came to control over 100 cinemas under the Western India Theatres banner by the 1940s.

His success cemented in Bombay, Modi paid morning visits to his trio of theatres, spending afternoons at Central Studios which hosted previews. These were far more exciting than launches because films would release six long months to a year following international premieres. It was a really big deal to get to them. Regulars were an engaging mix, from filmdom’s JBH Wadia and Nutan to business baron JRD Tata and movie-mad politico SK Patil who’d arrive at 9.30 pm on the dot to sink into his seat as the house lights dimmed. A charming incident is narrated about JRD watching Goodbye, Columbus, a film from 1969, year of the moon landing. When an orb flashed centre-screen, he exclaimed softly, “The moon.” Only to find the shot pan out revealing the tiny “round” of a feminine navel.

Another “first” Modi must doubtless have revelled, in is of Excelsior being the venue for an acclaimed French film fest in 1967. Erected by Parsi drama doyen Khurshedji Baliwala in 1887 as Novelty, to compete with Gaiety in the neighbourhood (later called Capitol), the theatre was renamed Excelsior in 1909 and New Excelsior in 1975 after Modi’s demise. Patrons declare unforgettable Excelsior’s garden cafe which served rolls, chicken broth and Bombay’s very first sizzlers, supplied by the family behind Paradise Restaurant in Colaba which we just bid farewell to. Firoz Irani, uncle of Paradise proprietor Jimmy, ran the soda fountains at the Modi theatres. “Firoz’s second wife, Tachiko, was Japanese. That’s how he started The Sizzler at Excelsior,” Maxie says. “Jimmy took this over when Firoz and Tachiko moved to the Isle on Man.”

As much philanthropist as pioneer, Modi screened innumerable free shows for troops of soldiers at Excelsior. Creditably, his largesse went way beyond cinema. When grande dame Hima Devi struggled to stage Birth of Our Nation, 20 dancers rehearsing and living with her and not a paisa in her purse, she said, “Keki Modi was our saviour, a saint for the theatre world. He ensured our existence.”

Few know that dearly departed Strand Book Stall on PM Road started as a small kiosk inside Strand Cinema, where Westerns like Mackenna’s Gold enjoyed smash hit runs. Vidya Virkar, daughter of the city’s best bookseller, TN Shanbhag, said in an interview, “Though my father sought permission to set up two shelves in the lounge, Modi, touched by his passion, had these erected himself.”

The romance and thrill of going to the movies, when premieres were black-tie affairs attended by glamorous stars and everyone dressed smart, is a relinquished pleasure. But instead of decrepitude, Maxie’s abstracts exude an assured energy.” One needn’t look back with sadness, we must progress,” she says, greeting her Labrador who woofs answer to his macho Hollywood name, Brando. “This exhibition, with its ephemeral images tending to disappear into each other, is a metaphor for reality, which too will fade.”

That positivity has kept Maxie from inscribing “The End” on a single of her prints.

Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes monthly on everything that makes her love Mumbai and adore Bombay.
You can reach her at mehermarfatia@gmail.com www.mehermarfatia.com

Raise a crore with help from top Parsi businessmen to provide interest-free loans to promising entrepreneurs from the community, keep target of Rs 5 cr

Article by Arita Sarkar | Mid-Day

Tavadia’s battery pack is easy to install in bikes

Parsis at the top of the business world are now extending a helping hand to start-ups from the community. The World Zarathushti Chamber of Commerce – India (WZCCI) has shortlisted 8-10 entrepreneurs for interest-free loans up to Rs 25 lakh. The organisation has already raised Re 1 crore in donations from high net worth individuals (HNWI), and the goal is to raise Rs 5 crore to make the initiative self-sustaining.

WZCC has taken up the project in collaboration with the World Zoroastrian Organisation. Yazdi Tantra, vice president (Global) of WZCC, said the funds have been donated by around 10 HNWI from the Parsi community. Once they collect Rs 5 crore, the loan repayments will keep the initiative going.

Urvakhsha Tavadia and his father Rayo

“We have received around 28-30 entrepreneurs’ proposals so far, from different parts of the country, and have shortlisted 8-10 of them. The loan amount will be between Rs 5 lakh to Rs 25 lakh, and there will be a moratorium period of two years, after which the applicant will have to start repaying the loan,” said Tantra. Each of the shortlisted candidates made a detailed presentation of their product, and WZCC’s business advisory committee is evaluating their prospects. Tantra added that the process of finalising the first set of candidates will be done in another couple of months, after which the amount will be disbursed.

The applicants spanned across various age groups and presented a variety of services and products. Tantra recalled that there were proposals for chemical manufacturing, school equipment and facilities for container terminals, among others.

One of the shortlisted contenders that stood out was Urvakhsha Tavadia, 25, who set up Ruzen Inc with his father in June 2017. After pursuing a Masters degree in power engineering from The State University of New York, Tavadia set up a factory in Asangaon with the help of his father, Rayo. The company builds axle release hub motors, battery pack assembly kits for bikes and plastic injection moulded products.

The battery pack assembly kit, particularly, can be set up on a bike by anyone. “We supply efficient connecting systems that do not require equipment like spot welders, which can cost around $280. Instead by using our all-inclusive kit, one can arrange the battery pack the way they want,” said Tavadia.

What started with a factory of 1,080 sq ft, now has expanded to 3,000 sq ft. His business also employs 13 women at the factory. After marketing his products in several countries Tavadia is now planning to venture into the health industry, for which he needs a loan of around R4 crore, and the WZCC funding could be just the launchpad he needs.

What: Vintage Tales by Ashdeen

Where: 85 Lansdowne, 85B Sarat Bose Road

When: September 7 and 8; 11am-7.30pm

Ashdeen Z. Lilaowala travelled back to the decade-old “studio culture” among the Parsis to bring to life Vintage Tales, the festive line that he is getting to Calcutta. The designer chatted with t2 ahead of his showing at 85 Lansdowne.

What is Vintage Tales about?

We were looking at photographs from 19th and 20th centuries of Parsi families, which were clicked in the studios. Very regal! Photography was a new medium and the community was rich. So, they kind of invested in this. We have an archive of photographs which showcases this. The inspiration of the collection is from there.

We have taken the traditional motifs and changed the scales and fabrics. There is this motif called Kanda Papeta which is onions and potatoes… it’s polka dots basically. We have blown it up and made them very graphic and modern. We have worked with organza and we have used blush pink, which you generally don’t see in Parsi embroidery.

We have heavy saris which can be worn to a wedding and lighter ones that can be worn for cocktails. We have a lot of add-ons like stoles, clutch bags, jackets; different things that make the collection festive.

What about the retro archives attracted you?

I have a huge collection of these photographs and it so happened that I opened the book and it was in front of me. I was like, ‘Oh my god… this could be the theme’. Because we do classic stuff which is more like an heirloom, the focus is not necessarily on making something trend-driven.

What did you reconnect with from that era and fell in love with once again?

There were lots of these rules that were followed when they’d go for these portraits. You couldn’t move because the exposure was so long. Because it was all black and white or sepia, there were certain colours which turned out quite nice in the pictures. Smiling was off the charts. They composed the image in the studio. The matriarch would be seated in the centre and sons would be on the side. So, it was also to establish the family chart. The photographs would tell their stories. So, that’s why we are calling it Vintage Tales.

Any new motif that you discovered?

There is this grid, like a barfi, very geometric. We found these saris which were completely filled with that design. We have kept that in the main part of the sari and the pallu is floral. Many people didn’t know Parsi embroidery had geometry.

How did you find craftsmen who could bring to life such fine embroidery?

We have been very lucky with craftspeople and I always say that our country is a pool of talent. You just have to patronise them and give them the respect that they deserve. We work with over 150 craftsmen and we don’t push them. If they get the time, they get paid adequately and if they can see a livelihood in this, they are ready to do it. We largely work with people from Bengal.

While the tweet is a way to deter the use of mobile phones in religious places, it also has a humorous take to it. It did not take long for the post to go viral with many complimenting the priest for his sense of humour. In over a day, the tweet has received over 1400 likes.

When people visit holy places, they are expected to be devoted to the almighty. However, with technology and social media being omnipresent, it is not an easy task to disconnect completely. However, a Parsi priest found an interesting way to discourage people from using their phones while visiting the Fire temple.

“When you enter this Fire Temple it may be possible that you hear ‘the call of God’. However, it is unlikely that he unlikely that He will call you on your mobile phone. Thank you for turning off your phones. If you want to talk to God, enter, choose a quiet place and talk to him. If you want to see Him, send him a text message while driving,” read a post by Twitter user @TaroIrani.

Parsi Priests got zero chill. pic.twitter.com/77xrMkIEYm

— Taronish Irani (@TaroIrani) September 8, 2018

While the tweet aims to deter the use of mobile phones at religious places, its sarcastic tone has caught people’s attention. It did not take long for the post to go viral with many complimenting the priest for his sense of humour. In over a day, the tweet has received over 1400 likes. Visiting a temple? Watch out for the priest’s warning.

It is because of a private member’s bill introduced by Feroze Gandhi in 1956 that it is possible for media to report Parliament proceedings.

New Delhi: He was just 48 when he passed away on 8 September 1960. But the inscription on Feroze Jehangir Gandhi’s gravestone at the Parsi cemetery in Allahabad best describes how full and glorious a life he led: “He is not dead who lifts Thy glorious mind on high. To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

To those who don’t know much about him, Feroze Gandhi was Indira Gandhi’s husband, grandfather to Rahul and Varun Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra.

But, more importantly, the two-time MP from Rae Bareli, a constituency now represented by his daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi, was a fighter, who never shied away from taking on his own party’s government when his father-in-law Jawaharlal Nehru was the prime minister of the country.

Personal life

Feroze Gandhi was born in a Parsi family in Bombay on 12 September 1912. He was youngest of his five siblings. After his father’s death in early 1020s, his mother along with the kids shifted to Allahabad. It is where Feroze spent a good part of his life. In 1930, he came in contact with Kamala Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s wife and later quit studies to take part in India’s freedom struggle. His surname was Ghandy, which he changed to Gandhi after getting inspired from Mahatma Gandhi. He actively participated in freedom movement and soon became a known face in Allahabad.

He was regular to the Nehru family’s ancestral house, Anand Bhawan, in Allahabad and came close to all the family members. When Nehru’s wife Kamala fell ill, Feroze took care of her and even went to Lausanne in Swtizerland, where she was recuperating from her tuberculosis. Kamala Nehru died in February 1936.

In the later years while studying in England, Feroze and Indira came close and they got married in March 1942. During the Quit India movement both Feroze and Indira went to jail. The couple had two sons Rajiv and Sanjay born in 1944 and 1946 respectively.

A journalist-turned-politician

Having started as a journalist, Feroze Gandhi understood the importance of freedom of press.  After independence, journalists were not allowed to report on the parliamentary proceedings and it could attract a suit against publication of any such proceedings. Feroze had won the first general elections of independent India in 1952 and was an MP in the House. He was a backbencher who would prefer listening to talking. But when he spoke he made relevant observations and in the later years created trouble for his government.

Noted Swedish journalist Bertil Falk in his book Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi describes the incident which allowed press coverage of the parliament proceedings in India

In 1956, Feroze Gandhi introduced a private member’s bill advocating press freedom that later became a law as Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act 1956.

During his speech in Parliament on the bill brought by him, Feroze Gandhi said, “For the success of our parliamentary form of government and democracy and so that the will of the people shall prevail, it is necessary that our people should know what transpires in this House. This is not your House or my House, it is the House of the people. It is on their behalf that we speak or function in this chamber. These people have a right to know what their chosen representatives say and do. Anything that stands in the way must be removed.”

This was one of the rare occasions in Parliament when a private member’s bill was passed by all and became a law, which made it possible for the media to report Parliament proceedings.

Today, when we have two channels — one each for Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha — which telecast live proceedings from Parliament, we should thank Feroze Gandhi for facilitating it.

That, several years later, in 1975, a Congress government led by his wife, Indira Gandhi, enforced Emergency in the country, almost destroying the idea of free and independent press, is a different story.

A Congressman in opposition to his own govt

In the years after independence, the Congress was the largest party in government and there was virtually no opposition. But even as a Congress MP, Feroze Gandhi made an exception and at times played a crucial role in keeping the democratic fervour alive by raising issues that trouble the government of those days.

In fact, Feroze Gandhi unravelled a financial scam that led to the resignation of then finance minister.

On 16 December 1957, Feroze Gandhi raised the issue of a scandal in the newly nationalized Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) in the Lok Sabha. He raised flag on an investment of Rs 1.25 crore by the LIC in different companies of a Kolkata-based industrialist and stock speculator Haridas Mundhra. Despite the fact that it was a Congress government and it was headed by his father-in-law Nehru, Feroze didn’t hesitate in making sharp allegations against the government.

During his Lok Sabha speech he said, “Mr Speaker, there is going to be some sharpshooting and hard hitting in the House today, because when I hit, I hit hard and expect to be hit harder. I am fully conscious that the other side is also equipped with plentiful supplies of TNT.”

It was possibly independent India’s first financial scam. In his address in Parliament, he presented his well-researched facts and demanded an inquiry by an in-house committee. He was not in favour of a judicial inquiry as in his speech he said, “I am not much enamoured of the word judicial.”

“When things of such magnitude occur silence becomes a crime. Public expenditure shall be subject to severe public debate, is a health tradition, especially so in an era of growing public enterprise,” he explained why he, as an MP, was raising an issue that could embarrass his own father-in-law’s government.

However, a one-man commission was formed under former chief justice of Bombay High Court, M.C. Chagla. Within two months, the commission submitted its report indicating involvement of then finance minister T.T. Krishnamachari. Krishnamachari was forced to quit on 18 February 1958.

After India got independence in 1947, Feroze and Indira stayed in Allahabad. Feroze at the time worked as managing director of  National Herald newspaper. In 1950 he became member of provincial parliament and in 1952 contested the first general elections of the country from Rae Bareli. He got elected as an MP and moved to Delhi. In 1957, he got re-elected from Rae Bareli. He died on 8 September 1960 after suffering from a heart attack at Willingdon Nursing Home which is now Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital.

Anahita Dhondy doesn’t like being called ‘female’ or ‘celebrity’ chef, though she fits both definitions. Over a couple of rushed phone calls and food orders, we talk to this 28-year-old on why there aren’t enough women chefs in India.

By Devika Chitnis, yourstory.com

The chef’s coat, hair tied back, shuffling pots and pans in a high-pressure kitchen and delegating tasks while making Mutton Dhansak at SodaBottleOpenerWala in Gurgaon, Anahita Dhondy is as close to the perfect definition of a chef as can get. 

Anahita used some yogurt, overripe strawberries, and some stale bread to make her recipes. She believes in local and sustainable ways of cooking food. Photo: @dennistheprescott, from Anahita’s Instagram

At 22, she was the chef-manager at the popular Parsi restaurant, and now, at 28, she is a chef-partner. Anahita

When she interned in a kitchen, she realised she wasn’t going to get any work experience if the chef didn’t trust her. She says she started small, and worked her way around the kitchen to higher tasks.

“I see a lot of girls in the kitchen saying, ‘I won’t do this, I won’t lift that’. Those are opportunities – take them up. Do some heavy-lifting, work it out,” she says. “In the kitchen, we are all equals.”

It took a bit of rescheduling to get her to talk to HerStory. She was either travelling to Bhubaneshwar or some other Tier-II city collecting recipes (we know this from her appetising Instagram feed), or was in and out of meetings with her peers discussing menus. We don’t want to complain, but merely illustrate a chef’s job is more than just plating a dish.

Chef Anahita Dhondy with Chef Gary Mehigan from MasterChef, Australia in Bengaluru. They were at World On A Plate, a gourmet festival in India. Photo: Instagram @anahitadhondy

“The principal of my culinary school told me that you will miss a large part of your family functions and holidays in a year,” says Anahita. “He added – you will work long, exhausting hours in hot kitchens.” With this picture, Anahita studied at the Institute of Hotel Management, Aurangabad, and then, Le Cordon Bleu in London.

When taking over her kitchen as a chef-manager, delegating at first was seen as barking orders, and her team wouldn’t take her instructions seriously. She tried a new approach – she worked with them, instead of making them work for her. “I could see the difference. They started respecting me for my work and my inputs. Plus, I learnt a thing or two from them.”

“The people I work with, in the kitchen haven’t seen too many women chefs, and aren’t used to taking orders from them,” says Anahita. “When I started doing the work – peeling onions and boiling eggs with them, they understood that I know my skill and mean business. They were surprised I cooked all the dishes myself and, then, started opening up.”

“The bigger the dream, the more important the team” Anahita quotes Robin Sharma on her Instagram photo while she talks about her team at SodaBottleOpenerWala. Photo: @sbowindia

Anahita also sees a palpable change in their attitude towards women. “Now that they have worked with a woman chef, my teammates have a certain sense of pride when it comes to their girls. You can see if when someone in the team has a baby girl – the conversation has changed. They seem excited, hopeful. I can see the difference in their thinking,” she adds.

On what India needs to do to get more women as chefs in the industry, Anahita feels girls need to be ready for difficult and exhaustive routines. “You can’t say that you want to work in AC kitchens. You have to be dedicated, you have to have grit and the willpower, and educate yourself. Experiment with recipes from different states and cuisines in India. Go back to grandma’s recipes. Learn from the different people and be passionate. Then, the industry will see a drastic shift in the demographic,” she says.

Ashdeen Lilaowala dives into his fabulous family archives and has come up some “Vintage Tales”

Childhood memories never fade away. In fact, the talented tend to preserve these precious recollections by either penning a short story or creating an artistic impression. It also means a lot to those who live, work and dream fashion. This is what Ashdeen Lilaowala, a textile designer based in Delhi, has done in his newest collection, “Vintage Tales”. “In the late 19th and early 20th century, a fad swept across the Parsi community. Well-heeled Parsi women would pose for portraits and photographs in a variety of idyllic settings wearing their newly acquired, precious Gara saris,” says Ashdeen, whose new collection is available at his new store in Defence Colony

Article by Madhur Tankha | The Hindu

He fell in love with the traditional Gara saris as a child growing up in the close-knit Parsi community. And each year he reinterprets this in his own special way on multiple outfits. “For our latest collection, Vintage Tales, we dived into the fabulous archives of these portraits and photographs that can still be seen in Parsi-run institutions, fire temples, libraries, schools, and hospitals, and re-created Gara embroideries that have scarcely been attempted in over a century. The result is a rare collection of traditional Garas in blacks, violets and reds, on rich silks.”

Excerpts:

On interpreting Parsi Gara

Since the inception of our label in 2012, we have been working with Parsi Gara. I was very clear that our saris would be a modern interpretation of embroidery heritage rather than slavish copies of vintage pieces. Over the years, we have done several collections with varied themes. In 2015, Our “Scent of the Orient” collection was inspired by the classic Chinese pottery. From the classic blue-and-white pottery to exotic shades of crimson and burgandy from the snuff bottles, each season, the idea is to explore the multi-faceted, rich heritage and culture of the Parsis.

This collection has many new elaborate jaals and saris, which we haven’t done in our previous collections. We have pushed ourselves to do very fine detailing and work. We have also done saris in which we have created a khakha or peking knot effect using an aari needle.

On how it is different from other embroideries

Parsi Gara embroidery has a distinct style and varies from other embroideries in the way the colours combine, the motif placement and the artistic rendering of birds and flowers. Garas are usually in dark, rich colours like black, purple, red and blue with embroidery in soft shades of cream, dove, blue and lavender. This distinct combination with the very detailed motifs of chrysanthemums, peonies, roses and lilies set Parsi Gara apart from other embroideries.

On his experience with Parsi garas right from seeing them in family heirlooms…

The Parsi community has always been fascinated by Gara saris and these are treasured family heirlooms. They are cherished and worn with great pride at weddings and navjote ceremonies. Growing up, I was charmed by these exquisite creations and would notice them carefully. I was always riveted by our family’s Gara sari. As a textile design student at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, I did my first paper on Gara saris tracing its history, the motifs and the colours. This sowed the seeds for future research and documentation with the UNESCO Parzor Project.

On the highlights of the collection

The collection focuses on dense embroideries featuring a variety of butterflies and mythical birds with fantastic plumage, as well as flowering trees, plants and vines. We have also revived rare geometric lattice patterned Garas, as well as the Kanda-Papeta (onion and potato) Gara, a favourite, featuring a dense border of butterflies and flowers and a field of embroidered polka dots.

WORLD renowned Pakistani artist, social crusader and philanthropist Jimmy Engineer continues to promote and project soft, positive, moderate and forward looking image of Pakistan and its peace-loving loving people before the comity of nations through displaying his art and delivering talks.

Article in Pakistan Observer

Jimmy Engineer during his yet another goodwill tour of foreign countries has now displayed his selected creative artwork at The Mall, Erin Mills Town Centre in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. On the opening day of week long exhibition of his paintings, Jimmy Engineer talked about his life, illustrating his thoughts and motivation behind his paintings and also answered questions from the audience including large number of members of Pakistani community as well as local artists and art lovers present.

The inaugural ceremony of the paintings exhibition, according to a message received here, was also addressed by Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Mindshare Workspace Mississauga Mr Robert Martellaci, President of Ontario Zorastrian Mr Neville Patrawala, President of Canadian Pakistan Business Council Mr Samir Dossal, Pakistan Consul General in Canada Mr Imran Siddiqui, Consul General of Turkey in Canada Erdeniz Sen, Members of Canadian Parliament Kaleed Rasheed and Iqra Khalid, Councilor Pat Saito, artist and radio producer and Ambassador for World Peace Ms AroojArooj, General Manager of Erin Mills Town Centre Mr Will Campbell besides organizer of the event Nelly Engineer.

By and large, they said that the visiting world renowned artist, a social crusader and a philanthropist from Pakistan Jimmy Engineer has dedicated his life for social causes, his paintings have been highly appreciated not only in Pakistan but also all over the world wherever he has presented his art work, through his art work he spreads the message of peace and harmony and promotes soft and positive image of Pakistan and its people, each of his paintings duly highlight the different aspects of the life of the people, their struggles and achievements, to which he is deeply attached and committed.

Earlier, Jimmy Engineer had also delivered a talk about his art, life and achievements at a function organized by the Pakistan Society within the compound of Pakistan High Commission in London on July 25, 2018. Over all these years, Jimmy Engineer has created more than 3000 paintings, 1000 calligraphies and 1500 drawings that are in museums and private collections in more than 60 countries throughout v the world. Many, however, have remained undocumented, as he has been giving countless of these away to charities in order to raise money for good causes.

As a social crusader, he has to his credit introducing the concept of fun, food and awareness programmes for mentally retarded, physically handicapped, deaf and dumb children by entertaining these children in posh hotels and restaurants in Karachi, Lahore and also in Sri Lanka and has held more than one hundred solo walks raising awareness of a myriad issues, mainly those relating to serious disadvantaged children, to widows and orphans as well as to the hardships and the endemic health problems they continue to endure.

Siddharth Roy Kapur’s next brings back Sooni Taraporevala as director with a true-life story.

A decade after making her directorial debut with the National Award-winning family drama Little Zizou, internationally acclaimed screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala is returning to direction with Ballet Boys. It recounts the inspiring true-life journey of two Mumbai boys, Amiruddin Shah and Manish Chauhan, who with the help of their Israeli-American mentor Yehuda Maor and the support of their families, fought the odds to get into London’s Royal Ballet School and the Oregon Ballet Theatre. Produced by Siddharth Roy Kapur, the musical drama rolls in January.

Sooni had earlier directed a documentary on the same subject, Yeh Ballet, for Anand Gandhi’s culture lab. Quiz her on it and she says, “My son was working at Anand’s lab and they were asking people to direct some VR (Virtual Reality) films for them. I jumped at the opportunity. They gave me a list of subjects, this one fascinated me because I learnt ballet for many years too and believe this amazing story has to be told.”

At 71, Astad Deboo still walks with the leaping grace of a warrior

Is it sweet revenge to be acclaimed as a living legend of dance right here in the most conservative of dance bastions?” I ask Astad Deboo. He is in Chennai to receive the Yagnaraman Living Legend Award for 2018 at the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha July Festival.

In conversation with Geeta Doctor | The Hindu

Deboo is not pretending to be a living legend. It’s still morning. He is wearing pink and grey candy-striped shorts and a T-shirt and sitting cross-legged on a sofa. His hair is steel grey. It is corn-row plaited into corrugated bands that hug his scalp. I am instantly reminded of the Caterpillar smoking a hookah in Alice in Wonderland.

I have known him from his bad boy days when he electrified the Mumbai dance world of the late 70s with a performance at Prithvi Theatre. It was so raw it ripped the sensibilities of what had been perceived as dance.

The stage was dappled with blood. His blood. That he allowed to drip from the incisions he made with a blade. A lit flame singed the hair on his powerful forearms. As a grand finale he contorted his body so that he became all tongue. The tongue became the dance. He licked his way across the stage wiping the dirt off the floor.

Ups and downs

“No. No. Revenge is never sweet,” he says reflectively. “My journey has been full of ups and downs. Even today after 50 years, or 40 years, it’s difficult to get a sponsor for contemporary dance. It’s not easy to produce oneself. You are always dancing on the edge.”

Of late, it’s Astad Deboo the legend who has been in the limelight. Last year for instance he was invited for a sparkling ceremony of artists, dancers, musicians and sportsmen at Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. He wore a black Jodhpur outfit with a magnificent shawl from the northeast of India draped over his left shoulder like a cape.

“What did you say to the Queen?” I ask.

“Well, I said: Good evening your Majesty,” he replies. “She greets you and then you move on.”

Later, he explains, as they were nudged discretely into smaller groups, the Queen came along and asked him; “You are a dancer?” And she added, “I hear you are a pioneer?” and when he nodded, she stretched out a gloved hand and said: “I too can dance a little you know!” And to Astad’s delight, she twirled her left hand into a little mudra.

London was one of the watering holes that nurtured the young Deboo’s passion for contemporary dance. He had been trained in the Kathak style early in life. He started when he was just six. His parents were living at Jamshedpur. Though born into a traditional Parsi family (he still wears a sudreh and kusti — plain cotton undershirt and consecrated waist string), Jamshedpur was a melting place of modern India. As he is fond of saying, the Jesuits at the school gave him a strong sense of Christian values, the Bengali Hindus included them in all their cultural activities, while the Kathak style instilled in him the essence of Islamic culture.

It was only much later, when he returned from his travels across the dance world, both learning and teaching different dance techniques, that he went to Kerala to induct himself into Kathakali and the martial arts.

It was the Age of Rebellion. Punk had entered the soul with the promise of liberation. In the arts, in music, in dance, in fashion, in sex, amplified by the revolution in communication that allowed for the dissemination of these radical ideas. The rebel was the anti-hero. Or as one of the popular mentors of the time, Carlos Castaneda, explained, the rebel was a warrior. “We choose only once. We choose either to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth.”

A disturbing language

Deboo chose to be a warrior. He does not actually say this. It informs the choices that he makes. After his time in the U.K. where he learnt the dance technique of Martha Graham, consorted with the Pink Floyd group, trained under Alice Becker Chase of Pilobolus and Pina Bausch, not to leave out the time he choreographed the famous ballerina Maya Plisetskaya in Paris under the eyes of Pierre Cardin, Deboo chose to spend a year in South America, where he learnt the Capoeira martial dance form. As he says, “I knew I had all these worlds within my dance language that I wanted to explore.”

Often, as the case has been with Deboo, the language of dance would be harsh and even disturbing. In his depiction of a drug addict in ‘Broken Pane’ in the 1990s, even his normally sedate Western audiences were shocked as he jabbed a syringe into the veins of his arm not just once, but three times in the course of the evening, banged his head repeatedly on the ground and writhed with the agony of the condemned. It was like a collaboration between Hieronymus Bosch and a Kathakali artist.

Giant puppets

“Even the French critics felt it was over the top, waving that syringe around sticking out of my arm. It should merely be symbolic, they cried,” Deboo shakes his head at the memory.

Equally disturbing were his experiments with ‘Death’ with the famous Parsi puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee’s giant puppets.

As against these often stark and even quasi-violent pieces, Deboo — who has also won formal accolades such as the Padma Shri and a Sangeet Natak Akademi award for creative dance — displays his most delicately nuanced side when he works with children.

His work with the street children of the Salaam Baalak Trust led to the piece ‘Breaking Boundaries’ that was shown at Kalakshetra.

And a long-term engagement with the hearing-impaired children of Kolkata’s The Action Players and The Clarke School for the Deaf in Chennai created some of the most life-affirming moments in dance. He led the audience and the performers in raising their arms in a ‘hand and finger wave’ signal at the end instead of clapping.

In every case Deboo has tried to create a narrative for himself. In the context of how so much of our ‘experimental’ work, whether in dance or the arts, is derivative at best, or imitative at worst, Deboo’s instinct to let the body lead him into revealing its secrets has been what makes him a ‘warrior’.

In recent times his work with Manipuri martial art dancers and drummers has led to a cultural cross-fertilisation of the most vivid kind.

As he described it, the Manipuri dancers have a very strong tradition of wielding their instruments of war and swirling with the momentum of getting ready to kill and be killed. While he was in the process of deconstructing these movements for a performance-based display, he observed how their traditional teachers would come and watch. “It was only when I suggested that they crouch as though crawling through the jungle, that they protested. Warriors never crouch. They leap!”

The dancer who turned 71 on July 13 still walks with the leaping grace of a warrior.

NanoViricides is pleased to announce that the Company’s Board has appointed Dr. Irach Taraporewala as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

Dr. Irach B. Taraporewala is a seasoned pharmaceutical executive with over 25 years of experience in drug development and regulatory strategy. He is a hands-on CEO with strong scientific background combined with significant management, leadership, business development, and financing experience.

“Irach has precisely the skill set that we were looking for. He is an experienced Pharmaceutical Industry Executive, accomplished in the development of novel drugs. Importantly, he has experience in working with the FDA in designing clinical trials, and he has taken a novel drug candidate through successful Phase II human clinical trials,” said Dr. Mukund Kulkarni, Chairman of the Compensation Committee, and a Director of the Company.

“We welcome Irach and believe that his joining the Company is a milestone achievement in fortifying our Management Team by bringing in strong Pharmaceutical Industry and Regulatory expertise,” said Dr. Anil R. Diwan, President and Chairman of the Company, adding, “Irach has strong expertise in CMC and QA/QC areas that will be extremely valuable for us to progress into an IND with our lead drug candidate in the HerpeCide program. He also has fund-raising experience in an early stage pharmaceutical company.”

“We believe that our substantive search and due diligence processes have led to the selection of the ideal candidate,” agreed Mr. Stan Glick, Chairman of the Search Committee and a Director of the Company.

Dr. Taraporewala was previously the founding CEO and President of Ohr Pharmaceutical, Inc. (“Ohr”), from April 2010 until December 2015.  During his 5 years of leadership at Ohr, he played a critical role in taking the company from preclinical stage through successful Phase II clinical trials. Dr. Taraporewala ensured that the Company was well capitalized, oversaw the up-listing of the Company’s common stock to the NASDAQ exchange, and completed several successful rounds of financing.

Prior to Ohr, Dr. Taraporewala was Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Clinical Research at Mystic Pharmaceuticals Inc., Austin, TX, from April 2008 to March 2010. At Mystic, he led the regulatory strategy for the Company’s ophthalmic and intranasal drug products, as well as drug delivery systems. Earlier, Dr. Taraporewala served at a well-known pharmaceutical consulting and clinical research organization, PAREXEL International Corp., as Senior Consultant in the Drug Development Consulting Division. In this position, he provided technical expertise and regulatory advice to small and large biotechnology and pharmaceutical company clients worldwide.

Dr. Taraporewala holds a Ph.D. degree in Medicinal Chemistry from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (1984).  He holds a Master of Science degree in Organic Chemistry, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Microbiology, both from the University of Bombay, India.

He will join NanoViricides, Inc. as of September 1st, 2018, although he has already begun to work with the Company in a limited capacity. 

About Dr. Irach B. Taraporewala

Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Irach B. Taraporewala is a seasoned pharmaceutical executive with over 25 years experience in drug development and regulatory strategy. He is a hands-on CEO with strong scientific background combined with significant management, leadership, business development, and financing experience.

Dr. Taraporewala is the founder and Managing Member of Sitara Pharmaceutical Consulting, LLC, providing consulting services to biotechnology companies on business strategy, regulatory strategic planning for small molecule and biological pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology drugs and drug-device combination products.

Dr. Taraporewala was previously the founding CEO and President of Ohr Pharmaceutical, Inc. (“Ohr”), from April 2010 until December 2015. During his 5 years of leadership at Ohr, he played a critical role in taking the company from preclinical stage through successful Phase II clinical trials.  His achievements included technology assessment and opportunity identification, followed by due diligence for potential acquisitions. He led the acquisition of the lead compound Squalamine by Ohr, He was personally involved in successfully formulating the drug as an eye drop, completing FDA IND-enabling preclinical studies, and advancing the drug product through multiple Phase 2 clinical trials in retinal diseases. Results of human clinical trials in macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and retinal vein occlusions showed positive visual acuity benefits in patients.

Additionally, while at Ohr, he managed external contracts and manufacturing relationships, with particular attention to regulatory CMC and QA/QC aspects. Further, he managed the successful acquisition by Ohr of an ophthalmic research company, SKS Ocular, LLC. In addition, he established a joint venture spin-off between Ohr and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, called DepYmed, for further clinical development of certain oncology assets. Throughout his tenure as CEO of Ohr, Dr. Taraporewala ensured that the Company was well capitalized, oversaw the up-listing of the Company’s common stock to the NASDAQ exchange, and completed several successful rounds of financing.

Prior to Ohr, Dr. Taraporewala was Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and Clinical Research at Mystic Pharmaceuticals Inc., Austin, TX, from April 2008 to March 2010. At Mystic, he led the regulatory strategy for the Company’s ophthalmic and intranasal drug products, as well as drug delivery systems. He played a key role in advancing the Company’s technology from lab bench research into clinical trials stage.  Earlier, Dr. Taraporewala served at a well-known pharmaceutical consulting and clinical research organization, PAREXEL International Corp., as Senior Consultant in the Drug Development Consulting Division. In this position, he provided technical expertise and regulatory advice to small and large biotechnology and pharmaceutical company clients worldwide.

Dr. Taraporewala also has a track record of being awarded multiple Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the areas of development of antiviral drugs, DNA-based cancer diagnostics, and from the United States Department of Defense (DoD) for antimalarial drug development, all as the Principal Investigator.

Dr. Taraporewala holds a Ph.D. degree in Medicinal Chemistry from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (1984).  He holds a Master of Science degree in Organic Chemistry, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Microbiology, both from the University of Bombay, India.

The 87-year-old veteran artist had been ailing for a while

The Mumbai-based artist, Mehlli Gobhai has died at the age of 87 in a city hospital this morning. The artist was said to be ailing for a while and had been hospitalised for a month.

Poet, curator and cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote’s tweet — an endearing image of artists Jehangir Sabavala and Mr. Gobhai along with him – recalled a friendship of three decades and “many years of conversation, travel and meetings”.

Article by Gauri Vij | The Hindu

Mr. Hoskote said to The Hindu, “He was one of the last great original characters [in the art world]. Absolutely eccentric and with a marvellous experience that crossed three continents in the most interesting decades in the 20th century. He landed in New York city in the most interesting decades and was really a witness to all the incredible moments in art history. He was easily our finest abstractionist. He really crafted his own amazing abstractionism idiom and that was literally special. Had he played his cards better in terms internationally he would have been in a different league. He’s in the same league of [Mark] Rothko and [Barnett] Newman.”

Auction house, Saffron Art’s website describes Mr Gobhai as, “a classical abstractionist with traditional artistic leanings”. Born in 1931, Mr. Gobhai graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. He later studied at the Royal College of Art, London and then Pratt Graphic Centre and the Art Students League, New York. He lived and worked in New York for over 20 years, returning to the city of his birth in the late 1980s.

Mr. Hoskote said that, “Nancy [Adajania] and I are currently working with memories of his work for a retrospective of his work, slated to go on display in March 2019. This will be a tribute to the great purity of [Mehlli’s] abstraction. He was such a kaleidoscopic character.”

Below is an article on Mehli from 2002.

Diagrams of energy

An art such as Mehlli Gobhai’s is a sacramental practice, a gesture that connects the secular world to the sacred; the work, therefore, occupies a space midway between easel and altar, writes RANJIT HOSKOTE.

Link with the past… The paintings of Mehlli Gobhai now on show in Mumbai.

MEHLLI GOBHAI’S recent paintings stand like dark, shrouded angels in his studio; they glow slowly to life as the light touches them, an effect that has been replicated through meticulously calibrated lighting at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, where these works are currently on show. At first sight, these seven paintings appear to mark an unbroken continuity with Gobhai’s preoccupations over the past decade. They record the dialogue of spare line and burnished field: the gradual luminosity emerges from beneath the sombre colours layered in strata of roughened and smoothed textures; the painting aspires to the condition of leather or parchment sanctified by years of ritual.

Gobhai, who was born in Mumbai in 1931, took a degree from St. Xavier’s College there; he went on to train as an artist at the Royal College of Art, London, and the Pratt Graphic Centre and the Art Students League, New York. He lived and worked in New York for two decades before choosing to return to Mumbai in the late 1980s. It is significant to an understanding of his work that he came of age, as an artist, in the United States rather than in Europe, which was the favoured destination for the young Indian artists of his generation. Many of his confreres arrived in Paris or London, only to find that the flight had left without them (actually, they didn’t find this out until much later, but New York had already supplanted these centres as the capital of the international art world). But Gobhai, like the intrepid Mohan Samant and Natvar Bhavsar, caught up with the flight on the other side of the Atlantic.

The early 1960s in New York were a time and place of lively contradictions. The refined high modernism of such Abstract Expressionists as Rothko, Newman and Clyfford Still was at its zenith. But the reaction against it was already under way, in the form of “postmodernist” idioms emphasising conceptual strategy, popular imagery, playfulness, identity politics, naked autobiography and self-dramatising performance. As a post-colonial subject in the pre-eminent global metropolis of the period, Gobhai found himself faced with a variety of artistic choices; but pure painting was the idiom that the best Indian artists aspired to then, and the young artist took up his position on the painterly side of the divide.

* * *

Even today, four decades later, Gobhai makes no apology for painting in series, attending to an image until he has drawn out its resonances to the fullest. Far from denoting the exhaustion of a theme by repetition, such a serialism connotes that system of correspondences and mutations, which unifies an artist’s work in time, carrying it forward through acts of intensification, affirmation and renewal. It is through serial encounter with his material that the artist re-visits a theme that has exercised him, not only exploring it within the span of a current suite of paintings, but also returning to paintings executed in the past, to retrieve and re-direct their impulses.

Gobhai’s works address a specific formal problem: the split between surface and structure that is a defining characteristic of much modern painting. After the pictorial revolutions of Cubism and abstractionism, it was no longer possible to pretend that surface and structure could unproblematically be melded in the production of a representational picture space. It seemed that the painter would have to choose between rival mandates: the sensuous immediacy of surface or the austere linearity of structure. But the problem would not admit of so dualistic a solution; the greater and more stimulating challenge is to reconcile the two principles after the critique of the representational.

Gobhai proposes a resolution by establishing a dynamic relationship between surface and structure. The surface is associated, in his oeuvre, with a tactile eroticism: here, he dwells on the attractions of organic form and metallurgic physicality, charging his paintings with the feel of stone and fruit-rind, earth and leather, river-veined rock and metal sheet. Structure marks the other pole of Gobhai’s personality: here, he refines the bodily human presence to the briefest but starkest notation, that of the axis, which is also the pivot around which the universe turns; the relationship of the body to the cosmos is indicated through an elegant economy of means. Surface and structure are tuned finely to each other: Gobhai’s is an art of deep coloristic and textural saturation held in counterpoint by geometric precision.

The colours and textures may bear subliminal associations, but the sharp linearity and the deliberate saturation remind us that Gobhai registers the primacy of the human imprint of order over the contingencies of nature and chance. These paintings function as energy diagrams, holding a set of forces together through linear symmetries, chromatic assonances, subtle allusions to the genres vestigially latent within Gobhai’s abstractionist idiom, such as the figure and the landscape.

Significantly, the artist often draws metaphors from geomancy and cosmology to approach his work; it is clear that he continues to regard the painting as a kshetra, a field of action, a ritual theatre of forces that becomes a model of the universe. An art such as Gobhai’s is a sacramental practice, a gesture that connects the secular world to the sacred; the art-work, correspondingly, occupies a space midway between easel and altar.

* * *

Let us turn, now, to the process by which Gobhai achieves these paintings. These magisterial works, powered by archetypal allusions — the clay tablets of the law; steles for fallen heroes; edicts graven in stone; scriptures written on parchment or leather — are painted on a base of handmade kalamkhush paper. The deckle edge of the kalamkhush is left intact: untrimmed, irregular. Work begins when the stiff, thick paper is stapled down to a hard board that serves Gobhai as an easel; he then builds up the painting in layers of graphite and zinc powder, pastel and acrylic, washing in the paint with a brush and rubbing the pigment and powders into the paper with his fingers and a rag.

Gobhai insists on the unnameability of the colours produced through this intensely satisfying activity of “staining and polishing”, and the varying gradations of rust, olive, verdigris, grey and black in his paintings change hue with changes of light and viewing angle, to reveal hidden tones (he is notably ambivalent towards colour, relishing it but damping it down before it can exercise its full enchantment). As the painting emerges from the alternate scumbling and glazing of the surface, Gobhai marks in his definitive lines, drawing and sometimes incising them with a burnishing tool.

While Gobhai enjoys an intimate, full-bodied relationship with his material, he does not believe that the process is more important than its product; complex and intricate as it is, the process is finally subsumed and attains its fulfillment within the resolved image. Which is not to say that the process does not secrete any evidence of itself in the product: its impress and character are evident in an unmistakeable sense of embodiment, in the incision of line and the staple scars, the varying degrees of patina and the ragged edge left close to the preliminary stage of colouring and less worked over than the main surface. As a result, these art-works gain a palpability and even a manifest corporeality, becoming emphatic presences.

In the studio, before being set in frames, they possess a free-hanging, sculptural quality. And while Gobhai’s concern with the worked-over surface keeps him wedded to the two-dimensional space of the painting, his preoccupation with structure ought to urge him in the direction of the four-dimensional realm of the sculpture-installation, and the re- positioning of his classicism in a new context. In this sense, I would speculate that these new works are transitional or indexical forms.

Pointing beyond the space of painting as they do, I would suggest that they signify the threshold of a new project, a throwing forward of energy into engagement with untested situations. Mehlli Gobhai has not yet permitted himself to articulate these possibilities, but his recent works indicate that he has begun, if I may adapt Jiro Yoshihara’s vivid and memorable phrase from the Gutai Manifesto (1956), “to hear the tremendous scream of the material”.

Long before Rafael the hotheaded, red eye mask wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle entertained children onscreen, there was Rafael the esteemed painter who’d won over a cultured crowd of art connoisseurs. By his mid-20s, Raphael Sanzio was already a star. At the top of his game, this master of the Italian Renaissance had been invited by the pope to live in Rome, where he would spend the rest of his days. Starting in 1509 he began decorating the first of four rooms in the Papal Palace. Collectively, these Raphael Rooms, along with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel exemplify the High Renaissance fresco technique.

Article By Jessica Stewart, mymodernmet.com

In particular, Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens has come to symbolize the marriage of art, philosophy, and science that was a hallmark of the Italian Renaissance. Painted between 1509 and 1511, it is located in the first of the four rooms designed by Raphael, the Stanza della Segnatura.

But just what does this famous painting mean? Let’s look at what the iconic The School of Athens meant for Raphael as an artist and how it’s become such a symbol of the Renaissance. At the time, a commission by the pope was the apex of any artist’s career. For Raphael, it was validation of an already burgeoning career.

Raphael was in Florence when he received word that Pope Julius II, the same man who asked Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Ceiling, asked him to decorate apartments on the second floor of the Vatican Palace. He was hoping to outshine the Early Renaissance paintings his predecessor, Pope Alexander VI, had done in the Borgia Apartments, which sat directly below. It could be seen as a bold choice, as a young Raphael had never executed fresco works as complex as the commission would require. At that point, he’d mainly been known for his small portraits and religious paintings on wood, in addition to a few altarpieces. Some believe that his friend Bramante, who was the architect of St. Peter’s, recommended him for the job. They’d both grown up in Urbino and knew each other well.

Raphael rose to the challenge, creating an extensive catalog of preparatory sketches for all his frescoes. These would later be blown up in the full-scale cartoons to help transfer the design to the wet plaster. Working at the same time as Michelangelo, it’s thought that this helped push and inspire Raphael by stimulating his competitive nature.

Stanza della Segnatura

Sala della Segnatura. (Photo: 0ro1 [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], from Wikimedia Commons)

The School of Athens is one of four wall frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, The room was set to be Julius’ library, and therefore Raphael’s overall concept balances the contents of what would have been in the pope’s study.

In the 15th century, a tradition of decorating private libraries with portraits of great thinkers was common. Raphael took the idea to a whole new level with massive compositions that reflected philosophy, theology, literature, and jurisprudence. Read as a whole, they immediately transmitted the intellect of the pope and would have sparked discussion between cultured minds that were lucky enough to enter into this private space.

The School of Athens was the third painting Raphael completed after Disputa (representing theology) and Parnassus (representing literature). It’s positioned facing Disputa and symbolizes philosophy, setting up a contrast between religious and lay beliefs.

Take a virtual tour of the Stanza della Segnatura via the Vatican Museums website.

The School of Athens

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

Set in an immense architectural illusion painted by Raphael, The School of Athens is a masterpiece that visually represents an intellectual concept. In one painting, Raphael used groupings of figures to lay out a complex lesson on the history of philosophy and the different beliefs that were developed by the great Greek philosophers.

Raphael certainly would have been privy to private showings of the Sistine Chapel in progress that were arranged by Bramante. Though Raphael’s work, in many ways, could be seen as more complex due to the number of figures placed in one scene, he certainly was influenced by the great artist’s work. This is particularly evident by the long figure thinking in the foreground, as we’ll soon see.

In fact, modern influence seeps in more frequently than one would think, particularly when it comes to the faces used for certain figures in The School of Athens. Let’s take a look, group by group, to pick apart the concept and see who appears in the famous fresco.

Who are the figures in The School of Athens?

Plato and Aristotle

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The two main figures in the work are placed directly under the archway and in the fresco’s vanishing point, a compositional trick to draw the viewer’s eye to the most important part of the painting. Here, we see two men who effectively represent the different schools of philosophy—Plato and Aristotle.

An elderly Plato stands at the left, pointing his finger to the sky. Beside him is his student Aristotle. In a display of superb foreshortening, Aristotle reaches his right arm directly out toward the viewer. Each man holds a copy of their books in their left hand—Timaeus for Plato and Nicomachean Ethics for Aristotle.

Plato’s gesture toward the sky is thought to indicate his Theory of Forms. This philosophy argues that the “real” world is not the physical one, but instead a spiritual realm of ideas filled with abstract concepts and ideas. The physical realm, for Plato, is merely the material, imperfect things we see and interact with on a daily basis. Interestingly, some people believe that Raphael used Leonardo da Vinci’s face for Plato, based on similarities from his self-portrait.

Conversely, Aristotle’s hand is a visual representation of his belief that knowledge comes from experience. Empiricism, as it is known, theorizes that humans must have concrete evidence to support their ideas and is very much grounded in the physical world.

Scholars argue that this divide in philosophies, placed at the center of The School of Athens, is the core theme of the painting.

So who is everyone else? It’s not always crystal clear, as Raphael doesn’t arm all his characters with attributes that give away their identity. Fortunately, there are quite a few that scholars can agree on.

Socrates

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To the left of Plato, Socrates is recognizable thanks to his distinct features. It’s said that Raphael was able to use an ancient portrait bust of the philosopher as his guide. He’s also identified by his hand gesture, as pointed out by Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Artists. “Even the Manner of Reasoning of Socrates is Express’d: he holds the Fore-finger of his left hand between that, and the Thumb of his Right, and seems as if he was saying You grant me This and This.”

Among the crowd surrounding Socrates are his students, including the general Alcibiades and Aeschines of Sphettus.

Pythagoras

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

In the foreground, Pythagoras sits with a book and an inkwell, also surrounded by students. Though Pythagoras is well known for his mathematical and scientific discoveries, he also firmly believed in metempsychosis. This philosophy states that every soul is immortal, and upon death, moves to a new physical body. In this light, it makes sense that he would be placed on Plato’s side of the fresco.

Euclid

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

Mirroring Pythagoras’ position on the other side, Euclid is bent over demonstrating something with a compass. His young students eagerly try to grasp the lessons he’s teaching them. The Greek mathematician is known as the father of geometry, and his love of concrete theorems with exact answers demonstrates why he represents Aristotle’s side of The School of Athens. Experts believe that Euclid is a portrait of Raphael’s friend Bramante.

Ptolemy

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

The great mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy is right next to Euclid, with his back to the viewer. Wearing a yellow robe, he holds a terrestrial globe in his hand. It’s thought that the bearded man standing in front of him holding a celestial globe is the astronomer Zoroaster. Interestingly, the young man standing next to Zoroaster, peaking out at the viewer, is none other than Raphael himself. Incorporating this type of self-portrait is not unheard of at the time, though it was a bold move for the artist to incorporate his likeness into a work of such intellectual complexity.

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

Diogenes

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

It’s universally agreed that the older gentleman sprawled on the steps is Diogenes. Founder of the Cynic philosophy, he was a controversial figure in his day, living a simple life and criticizing cultural conventions.

Heraclitus

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

One of the most striking figures in the composition is a brooding man seated in the foreground, hand on his head in a classic “thinker” position. This figure doesn’t show up in Raphael’s preliminary drawings and plaster analysis shows that it was added later. Art historians Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny write in their book Raphael that it “is probably Raphael’s first attempt to appropriate some of the heavyweight power of Michelangelo’s Sistine Prophets and sibyls.”

Long thought to be a portrait of Michelangelo himself, the brooding nature would have matched the artist’s character. In the realm of philosophers, he is Heraclitus, a self-taught pioneer of wisdom. He was a melancholy character and did not enjoy the company of others, making him one of the few isolated characters in the fresco.

Statues

“The School of Athens” preparatory cartoon

Rounding out Raphael’s program, two large statues sit in niches at the back of the school. On Plato’s right, we see Apollo, while on Aristotle’s left is Minerva. Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and justice, is an apt representative of the moral philosophy side of the fresco. Interestingly, her positioning also places her close to Raphael’s fresco about jurisprudence, which unfolds directly to her left.

Apollo, recognizable by his lyre, represents the natural philosophy side. As the god of light, music, truth, and healing, his position puts him adjacent to Raphael’s Parnassus fresco representing literature and poetry.

Since its creation, The School of Athens was a success, bringing Raphael subsequent commissions by the pope and making him one of the most sought-after artists in Rome. Though Raphael’s life was short—he died in 1520 at age 37—his impact has endured over the centuries. He’s still considered one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, with his work influencing artists even today

He came to his canvas with no feelings of certainty about what he wanted, with no pretense that it was a willing ally in the act of creation.

We were sitting in a Charles Correa-designed house, looking out at five acres of “cultivated wilderness” and talking about death and painting.

“Perhaps that’s why we create,” Mehlli said. “Because death is certain. And because we can’t believe it will happen to us, we react as children might. We try and throw something at the bogeyman, to scare him away. That something is art.”

Article by Jerry Pinto | Scroll

Mehli Gobhai, Mumbai, 2015. | Sooni Taraporevala & PHOTOINK

Mehlli Gobhai, who died on Thursday morning at 87, was one of my closest friends. He was the man who taught me to eat cheese that smelled different and lamented my lack of a drinking habit. He taught me to look at modern art, he taught me how to respect the sacred geometry of a Chola bronze. He taught me the correct way to tie my shoelaces and he taught me to shake out my shoes before I put them on in the country lest a scorpion had sought the acrid shelter of my footwear for the night.

He was one of the greatest of abstract expressionist painters we had, no, one of the greatest painters we had and he took his work seriously. So seriously in fact that he often waited for a painting to begin happening for months. And then there would be the first approach, the black thread taken from his mother’s sewing box. This would be pinned carefully to the canvas and then he would sit back and light a Gaulois and consider what had happened to space and time and him and us by this simple intervention. When it seemed as if this might be able to bear the burden of what he wanted to magic into being, he would begin the work of painting.

But it wasn’t work; it was a campaign. Mehlli Gobhai approached his canvas with no feelings of certainty about what he wanted, with no pretense that it was a willing ally in the act of creation. He would often speak of what he was doing in terms that were spiked with violence. “I must brutalise that section,” he would say. “I must rough that up a bit.”

The early years

Mehlli Gobhai was born into an India that was still under British rule and went to Bombay’s Saint Xavier’s High School and Saint Xavier’s College. He even started a degree in law before he moved on to join J Walter Thomson to work in the creative department. There, he drew some magnificent roughs for the Air India campaigns being managed by the legendary Bobby Kooka. Kooka looked at the roughs and declared they didn’t need any refining.

He moved for a while to England where he lived and studied in London before moving to New York, a city that suited him perfectly. It was rich, it was vibrant with energy. But there was also his home by the Arabian Sea, Bombay, with its dramaturgy of monsoon cloud and rain greys; and the foothills of the Himalayas where creeks ran muddy brown and a water snake lurked in the pond where he drew his water. There he earned his money by working on a series of children’s books that Speaking tiger will bring out soon translated in a variety of languages: Punjabi, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu.

Finally, he returned home and it was when he was having his first show at Gallery 7 in 1985 that I met him. He kept encouraging me to buy the papier mache creations that Pushpamala N had produced. We next met in 1994 when Ranjit Hoskote curated “Hinged by Light” for Pundole Art Gallery. I was a mathematics tutor then and worked in the area around his home on Carmichael Road. I would often drop in for coffee and cheese and endless conversations about everything from whether naïve art could really be naïve to the mathematics of Carnatic music. In the background, a painting would be burning quietly, its colours rich and strange and interior…can a colour be interior? On a canvas? You have to look at a Mehlli Gobhai work to see how that can happen.

He began to come to the Poetry Circle, enjoying working with words and having them critiqued. I think now of how Tagore said that art was a release because there were no expectations. But Mehlli took his writing seriously. Whether it was an ode to Bombay or a catalogue essay for his good friend the artist Sheetal Gattani, he worked out what he wanted to say and then sat down to work on it.

Untitled, 2007. Mixed media on canvas. Courtesy: Gallery Chemould

A big thing

A few years ago, a stroke knocked him over. When I went to see him, I asked: “How does the other guy look?”

“Don’t make a big thing out of it,” he snarled. Making a big thing out of anything, even if it was a big thing like a stroke, was a cardinal sin in the Gobhai theology. But a few days later when he began to slur some words, we went to see a doctor. We were sent to a neurologist. Peripheral neuropathy, one of them said. It was a cruel thing this disease. It took his hands from him and then his feet. It took his work from him. He was the man who had once wondered if his skill at life drawing was making his line glib and so he had shifted to his left hand and found that drawing came just as easily. Now he could not work with precision. And if he could not do exactly what he wanted to do, if he could not control everything, everything, he was not going to do anything.

He stopped working.

And then he began to withdraw. Just a little. The long phone calls became shorter and then telegrammatic. His wide circle of friends, from postmasters upcountry to aspiring artists, from kindergarten school teachers to egg ladies, shrank and shrank until it was a man in front of a television set with the images playing on and on, the hysteria of news, the accretion of meaningless detail. I tried to slow things down. Sheetal Gattani tried. His brother Cavas, a midwife of ideas in the United States and now felled by a similar stroke, tried. His nephew Dinshaw tried. But without the ability to lob another work of art in the face of time, Mehlli was having none of it.

Going away

Ten days ago, he began to experience respiratory distress. He was admitted to hospital. He had been there before and come back in a day or two. This time he would not return.

Ranjit Hoskote, noted art critic and cultural theorist, said: “Had Mehlli’s career trajectory been managed differently, or had he belonged to a later generation that benefited from globalisation, he would undoubtedly have been acknowledged as a key figure in the history of global abstraction. His art was not derivative of Western exemplars. Rather, it stood its ground beside Rothko, Newman and the other masters of Abstract Expressionism. In the specific context of Indian abstraction, also, Mehlli was unique. He made no concessions to the phantoms of landscape, or to inherited symbolism, or to the evocation of retinal reality, to which some of his confreres in Indian abstraction remained wedded. He was proud to describe his art as a ‘non-objective’ art. And in the late phase of his work, he experimented boldly with blurring the line between painting and sculpture, to produce results that were neither and yet more expansive than both. I used to speak of these as ‘image-objects’. They remain among his most compelling work. While many (and careless) observers believed that his work remained more or less similar across the decades, the reverse is true.”

Hoskote explained: “Any consideration of his oeuvre demonstrates the clear shifts from one phase to the next, the emphasis on the incised line yielding to a devotion to the saturation of colour as palimpsest, this yielding in turn to a sculptural interest in edge and mass. Too many in the art world saw him as a genial eccentric. Too few saw the driven, inspired nature of his artistic explorations.”

On September 9, 1925, Jehangir Tata wrote a letter to his father Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata from the barracks in the south of France. The 21-year-old had come up with a way to help the family business. He wanted Pathé News, a famous newsreel maker of the time, to produce short films about current events in India to be shown in the country’s cinemas.

Article by By Deborah D | scroll.in

The young Tata scion believed that footage of Mohandas Gandhi’s visit to their steel factory in Jamshedpur in 1925 would be “excellent and free propaganda and advertising”. “Too many people in India believe that steel works are just the same as a cotton mill, a foundry or a power station,” he wrote. “That is why they are all so amazed when they see that people who have seen this marvellous plant and the fine town we have built don’t wonder afterwards or shout where the 21 crores have gone to!”

Gandhi had made the trip to Jamshedpur to resolve labour disputes and ask that the Jamshedpur Labour Association be recognised by the company. Jehangir Tata had been informed that Gandhi’s preconceptions were shaken after he visited the factory and believed sharing the footage with the public would quell any similar distrust among them. In 1969, the year of Gandhi’s birth centenary, his Jamshedpur visit finally made it to promotional material. A Tata Steel advertisement from that time said, “…we proudly recall that, when [Gandhi] visited Jamshedpur in 1925 and 1934, he was happy to see the cordial relations there and felt their further extension would help to achieve a ‘Miniature Swaraj’”.

Jehangir Tata, who would later be popularly known as JRD Tata, apologised to his father in case he was “talking rubbish”. “It is the best way to talk sense one day, isn’t it?” he wrote. The letter was but a small glimpse into events that would transpire in the future.

JRD Tata took charge as chairman of the Tata group in 1938. During his 53-year tenure at the helm, it published numerous advertisements asserting its contribution to the country. Long before its companies were asking consumers to “Jaago Re” or add a pinch of “Desh ka Namak” to their food, they were communicating – in a variety of ways – its alignment with India’s mission to be a self-sufficient and expanding economy with a high standard of living. Over 200 vintage ads of the conglomerate, from the early 20th century up to 1990, along with the letter that JRD Tata wrote to his father, are on display at the Tata Central Archives in Pune. And if there is one theme that runs right through them, it is nation-building.

“The exhibition [Tata Vintage Advertising and Publicity] showcases not only the genesis and history of the Tata group, but also highlights in parallel the integral role that the group has played in India’s industrialisation and progress,” says the press release.

The foundation of the Tata group was laid by Jamsetji Tata in the 1870s with a textile mill. The young Parsi had made a tidy profit of 4 million rupees sending supplies to the British troops in the Abyssinian war, and had held nationalist sympathies. After his death, Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India between 1898 and 1905, said that “no Indian of the present generation had done more for the commerce and industry of India”.

The Tatas continued to be regarded by many as patriots after Independence. But the Indian leadership at the time also held strong socialist ideals, and both advertising and large private enterprises were viewed with suspicion.

Early in 1968, JRD Tata, in a letter to World Bank adviser George Woods, wrote: “I am afraid that in spite of all the lessons of the past twenty years, there’s no real change in Delhi’s attitude toward ‘big business’, nor have our politicians and bureaucrats realised that what seems big business to them would be little more than peanuts elsewhere”.

Companies in the private sector faced strict government controls and often felt that they were at the mercy of politicians’ caprices. Author and researcher Claude Markovits observes in his essay The Tata Paradox that the group lost the unique position it held before Independence, when it enjoyed the protection and support of the colonial state and benefited from patriotic enthusiasm simultaneously. “When British rule came to an end, other big Indian firms had a more intimate connection to the Indian state as a result of the support they had given the Congress during the independence struggle,” wrote Markovits. “This was particularly true of the Birlas and some of the Ahmedabad textile magnates.”

Against this backdrop, it’s clear from the advertisements that the company wanted to be seen as a force for good – one that wasn’t focused on accumulating wealth and power for its owners and shareholders, but devoted to improving the country.

Veteran adman Roger Pereira, whose early assignments involved working on Tata advertisements at J Walter Thompson in the 1960s, mentions a time when advertising helped the company navigate political hurdles.

In 1977, George Fernandes, the industry minister at the time, wanted to nationalise Tata Steel. In response, the company ran a campaign that detailed its philanthropic work and added, almost in passing – “we also make steel”.

“They said ‘we’ve built these hospitals, we’ve done this and this…and we also make steel. This is how we spend our money’,” said Pereira. “[The Tatas] weren’t profiteering for the sake of profiteering, they were investing in the country. That was a brilliant campaign, the most brilliant advertising campaign of all time in India. That’s what made Fernandes really look like a fool.”

This brand positioning is also seen in a Tata Iron and Steel Company advertisement from October 1955 that was created by J Walter Thompson. It portrays a man in a loincloth holding a long sheet, and says that India has come from importing the bulk of her textile requirements 30 years ago to having the second-largest textile industry in the world. Written in a larger font size below this, it reads, “Private Enterprise Serves the Nation.”

An advertisement announcing the opening of the Trombay Power Thermal Station in 1956 said it was “yet another Tata contribution to a higher standard of living through an expanding economy” and an “example of the work of enlightened Free Enterprise”.

Earlier in 1949, Tata made the connection between steel and agriculture in an advertisement that talked of the mechanisation of agriculture. It had a photograph of Nehru watching a tractor in operation. That same year, the company ran an ad that said, “Steel links India’s Frontiers”, and described how 7,000 tonnes of steel were used in the newly-laid railway line connecting Assam to the rest of the Indian Union.

Indian companies at the time strove to distinguish themselves from multinationals by emphasising their swadeshi credentials, and Tata was no exception with its Hamam soap – “Tata’s Hamam is a bigger soap – it’s truly swadeshi, too” read one advertisement. Another reminded consumers that Jamsetji Tata had set up the Swadeshi Mills Co. Ltd in 1886, twenty years before the swadeshi movement gained prominence.

“Winning the government’s approval was important during the Licence Raj days – this meant appearing to serve the people,” said Arvind Rajagopal, professor of Media Studies at New York University. “Large companies also began to reflect aspects of national developmentalist ideology. Advertising agencies all publicly avowed support for the planned economy, for example, and the biggest ones were all foreign.”

“Nation-focused ads were released not only by Tata but by all companies,” said Arun Chaudhuri, head of the marketing research company BRAND and the author of Indian Advertising: Laughter and Tears. “Obviously all these ads helped to support the government line that India was on a rapid path of progress. The reality was that the majority of the people lived pitiable lives hardly managing a square meal a day.”

According to Chaudhuri, another reason why advertisements tended to focus on the country and its progress before liberalisation may have simply been a lack of creative output from agencies. Since demand for goods was greater than supply in most industries, companies didn’t need bigger markets and didn’t care all that much about the content in ads. They were bought to keep newspapers – an important tool for public relations – happy.

Also in short supply were Tata Mercedes Benz trucks, which were “speeding prosperity to the countryside”, according to an advertisement from August 1960. The truck was compared with the Gwalior Fort that played a role during the Indian Mutiny (“Stalwarts Both”) and the India Gate (“Gateways to Prosperity”).

The messaging was clear: Tata wasn’t just driving India to a brighter future; it was also taking her back to her illustrious past. An ad for Tata Exports Limited, talks about “reviving the age-old glory of Indian exports”. Other Tata Iron and Steel Company ads advertisements refer to “implements of steel used by master craftsmen of ancient India”, “exquisite swords of Indian steel” used in the past and admired by outsiders and Indian ships being “once again on the high seas”.

If this rhetoric sounds familiar today, it is because it is used by politicians to invoke a sense of nationalist pride. But for the Tatas, that was not the only motivation. Even today, according to a recent survey, Tata Motors, a company that was founded 73 years ago, is viewed by Indians as the second-most patriotic brand in the country.

Tata Vintage Advertising and Publicity is on display at the Tata Central Archives in Pune until December.

All photos courtesy the Tata Central Archives.

Rayan Dadiburjor the XYZ President-Elect writes in about the recent XYZ Leadership Camp.

Rayan writes…

We arrived at Karjat’s Rivergate Resort with our bags packed for an overnight trip but went back with memories that will last us a lifetime.

This was my second XYZ Leadership Camp but I came with no expectation or prospect of what we might learn as the first camp taught me that Hoshaang uncle and his team never fail to surprise us with all the activities that were meticulously planned. As the bus pulled into Camp, we were all really taken aback by the beauty of the area and the amazing AC tents that we stayed in.

The XYZ Leadership Camp is only for the Presidents, President Elects (next year’s presidents) and President Nominees (they will be presidents two years later). Some volunteers are also a part of the camp and this year, the XI (Xerxes’ Invincibles, ie. Ex-XYZs and youth between 15 to 25 years) also participated.

The competitions of the camp kicked off with the ice breaker games which we played between the 4 teams: Presidents, President elects, President nominees and the XI. We played 10 different 1 minute games which brought us all together.

These were followed by activities that the office bearers were asked to prepare from home.

The elects exhibited tees that they had designed for their groups. The presidents gave us a gist of the monthly fundays they had conducted through the year. The nominees showed us innovative ways they would conduct a funday activity with their group in the coming month. Some of the tasks were so innovative that we had to play them at camp itself. My favourite one was Hushrav’s crown word search… Well who would not enjoy solving a puzzle on someone else’s head?

The camp moved on to the lawn where we played games designed by Delnaz aunty and Zyros uncle. Stamping and calling out numbers, using non verbal communication to bring blind folded people into an area and a different take on stone, paper, scissors. They were team building and task oriented games. Though the intent was to help us become better leaders we had loads of fun in the bargain. Even the rain showers decided to cool the event…

We then took to 2 hrs of adventure activities. While Farshid and Danesh sped to the kayaking area Aryan, Bezaan and me jumped into the pool. Hufriya and Bhuvana were however stuck to the adventure zone doing the zip line and the commando course.

After all this one would think we would sleep instantly however this was when Hoshaang uncle split us up and gave us a new task to perform at 11pm. While brainstorming, all barriers were broken and we chatted and bonded almost through the night

The next day was short but productive as we were given a task of creating a joint event between pre assigned groups. This brought each of us out of our comfort zone and allowed us to relate to the mammoth task that lay ahead of us of planning events and leading our team. The XYZ XI also outlined a major social service event planned for January 2019.

So all in all it was a wonderful experience with great organisers, good food, new friends, fun filled activities and most importantly bringing out the leader in me. So i feel that Leaders are definitely made, they are not born.

Rayaan Dadiburjor

XYZ President Elect,

Cyrus’ Superstars

www.xyzfoundation.net

Cyrus Todiwala is the founder and owner of Café Spice Namaste, a Sustain Patron, long-time London Food Link supporter and JE reader. Here he shares his thoughts on how Urban Food Fortnight helps the good food business community.

Picture: Cyrus Todiwala © Café Spice Namaste

Published: 11/09/2018

I set up my first restaurant 25 years ago and Café Spice Namasté twenty three years ago. Since this time I have focused on quality produce and have relationships with all my suppliers whether that be local or Britain wide. Most importantly we have a stringent policy on vetting all our suppliers and whether or not they comply with our own ethos and ethics.

Being the patron of the British Lop Pig Society and Chef Ambassador for The Rare Breeds Survival Trust, as well as The Shellfish Association of Great Britain, and several other commitments, means that we ourselves first and foremost believe in what we are representing and committing to the environment and all things British as closely as we can.

Why good food is good for business

I believe that good food and ethical supply chains have to be at the heart of any sustainable business and increasingly our customers are asking for this; they want to know that they are eating food that has helped and supported communities, farmers and people working in the food system, that on the way animals are well treated and happy that it is not contributing to excessive food and other waste.

London Food Link

I have been a supporter for London Food Link and the Jellied Eel magazine for many years, and am proud to be a patron for the work of Sustain, the charity that runs them both. I know how passionately the team feels about supporting small, local producers, and have worked with LFL to get dishes featuring local produce on my menu. I have also helped them fundraising for the Capital Growth community food growing network as this is an issue close to my heart. 

Urban Food Fortnight inspires

Over the last seven years, I have seen how Urban Food Fortnight does a fantastic job of raising the profile of the wonderful things that are going on in London’s small food businesses. This includes celebrating the brilliant people behind them, as well as inspiring new events and collaborations.

Producers like Sutton Community Farm, who we had the pleasure to work with and are growing tonnes of pesticide free vegetables within the M25 for local restaurants and their local box scheme. Other great folk are the urban beekeepers, and those using surplus produce in their jams and chutneys. I hear there is even someone fishing crayfish from the local waters, and that Forty Hall Farm is producing organic meat in north London! The fortnight reveals all of these hidden gems, and LFL works year round to continue doing so.

Many of us working in good food have lots of passion but lack the time to really shout about what we are doing. Urban Food Fortnight helps us to focus our energy on engaging new audiences to support all of our businesses.  It also brings us closer together with each other, to collaborate and support each other’s businesses and I think that’s a great thing.