Care for some pups?

Iyengar bakeries predate Bangalore's darshinis and pizza outlets, but how the orthodox Brahmins learnt to make English stuff with yeast and eggs is an enduring mystery

Iyengar bakeries must be Karnataka's gift to the world. The Iyengars of Tamil Nadu don't run bakeries. The Iyengar bakeries in Chennai – a friend tells me that city has at least two dozen now – are called Bangalore Iyengar bakeries.

How this orthodox Tamil-speaking Brahmin sect got into the business of making English-style buns, puffs and biscuits is one the biggest puzzles in Karnataka's cultural history. A couple of bakery owners tell me they don't eat the cakes they make because they are vegetarian, and can't have eggs.

Among the Iyengars, only the Vadagalai sect is associated with the bakery business. All bakery owners hail from Hassan district, which has also produced a prime minister in H D Deve Gowda.

The Tamil spoken by Hassan Iyengars is Kannada-flavoured, and sounds suspect to the ears of their clansmen in Tamil Nadu. But if you were to hold a baking and confectionery contest between the two, the Kannadiga Iyengars would win hands down.

Every corner in southern Bangalore has an Iyengar bakery, although some newer enterprises, like Butter Sponge, have dropped the caste prefix. Most have names like L J (Lakshmi Janardana) and SLV (Sri Laksmi Venkateshwara).

For working couples and their children, the Iyengar bakeries were a godsend. Then the darshinis happened, Malayali Muslim bakeries arrived with their egg puffs, pizza outlets mushroomed, and Bangalore became, in the language of the metro supplements, hip and happening. The Iyengar bakeries haven't really vanished, but their '70s glory is gone.

Anil Kumble was reportedly fond of dilkhush and dilpasand, two sweets that most bakeries added to their menu in the late 1970s, when he was a student of National High School in Basavangudi. In an ad, the Test captain appears against a Mediterranean backdrop with a wine glass in his hand and some fancy dish on his plate. Mistaken branding! He would have been a more convincing brand ambassador for the Iyengar bakeries, with a veg puff and a glass of badam milk in his hand.

My bakery favourites are the special bread (called 'special' because it has sugar, as against 'ordinary' which is bland), the spicy khara bun, the unbearably sweet benne biscuit (butter cookie), and the sunflower yellow-coloured badam burfi (a V B Bakery speciality). I also used to like the apple cake, which I now understand is made from breadcrumbs and the previous days leftovers.

Iyengar bakeries offer good variety, but each item is a carb feast. The icing on their cakes, for instance, is too sugary. Their syrupy flavours are particularly attractive to the taste buds of school and college students, but many graduate to grilled sandwiches and gobi manchurian, which the Iyengar bakeries don't make.

The best time to eat bakery stuff is three in the afternoon, when the stuff comes hot out of the Iyengar ovens. The bakers would do most of their work manually, but machines have taken over now even for something as simple as slicing the loaves.

Growing up on bakery stuff is probably a nutritional disaster. I have frequented an Iyengar bakery since I was in school, giving them steady business for their breads, buns (sweet and stuffed) and what they call pups (puffs). The bakers, who won't eat what they make, remain young and fit, but I've greyed!

Journalism's proud moment

Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for economics. That's good news for Princeton University, where he teaches, but it's even better news for journalism because he's famous the world over as a columnist.

It is not every day that newspaper columnists are feted for their intellectual accomplishments. Krugman writes two columns a week for The New York Times, and is syndicated in many newspapers in India. That makes him the most prolific economics columnist in the world.

How many academics take the trouble to write columns? How many can quickly analyse developments as they unfold, and do it in a style that will not put off the non-specialist reader? University professors are too busy with their teaching and research to want to connect with a larger audience. Some are daunted by newspaper deadlines, some are lazy, and quite a few just can't write plain English.

Krugman has managed his dual role with great distinction: he writes for newspapers and simultaneously lectures on international affairs at the university. There's plenty academics and journalists can learn from him, and they can do it in the confidence that they might some day be considered for what many consider the highest honour in the world.

But to cut to reality... It would be foolish to compare Krugman to the average reporter who won't even revise his copy. The average journalist has earned the reputation of being a simpleton who cannot understand anything more complex than crime and municipal news. The idea that journalism and erudition can go together looks outlandish not just to outsiders, but even to some journalists! But that's not entirely the journalist's fault.

When Justice Manisana headed a board to fix wages for journalists, many newspaper managements, anxious not to pay bigger salaries, told him reporters and sub-editors ought to be compared with bank clerks, not college lecturers. People who ought to have known better expected little more than stenographer services from journalists. That was in the 1990s. Today, most journalists work on contract, and get higher salaries than those recommended by government wage boards.

Job seekers and interns at newspaper offices are unfamiliar with basic reporting and editing despite their spending years studying journalism. India has more colleges and institutes offering journalism than ever before, but something is seriously amiss: they just aren't imparting the right skills. To state the obvious, reporting and editing are the primary skills for any kind of journalism, all else is secondary. The exams ask students to define 'investigative journalism', 'caption', and 'headline'. Answering such questions is not the same as being able to deliver an investigative report, or write a caption and headline!

Reporting requires street-smartness and the ability to collate information from diverse sources. Editing requires an understanding of language and context. Print journalism calls for an advanced skill that is mostly overlooked: making copy simple, stylish and pleasurable to read. Ultimately, journalism is the art of making the complex comprehensible to everyone.

I recently leafed through the syllabus of a master's course in communication, and was surprised to find a module on how to cover international affairs. Ideally, if these courses were working, we would have had many Paul Krugmans in our midst!

Happy couple's time pass

All's Well, staged at the Ranga Shankara yesterday, is a neatly executed sitcom. It is based on the works of T Sunandamma, the Kannada humorist who died in 2006.

Pramod Shiggaon has directed the play for Kriyative Theatre Trust, a group founded by Laxmi Chandrashekhar, who has opted out of teaching English and now acts on stage and in Kannada TV serials.

All's Well is an English reworking of a Kannada play scripted by Sundar.
Kapinipati and Bhagirati are an elderly couple preparing for Deepavali. Two of their children live abroad, and the other two live in Mumbai and Delhi. The couple look forward to celebrating the festival with two of their just-married children and their spouses.

The play draws on the stereotypical rivalry between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law to create situations characteristic of TV comedies such as I Love Lucy and Tu Tu Main Main. It also throws in a parallel father-in-law and son-in-law rivalry, and cruises along predictably to a happy ending.

All's Well is totally middle class in its setting, philosophy and expression. The humour is recognisable to those familiar with the Old Mysore (southern Karnataka) of a generation or two ago, and echoes the writing of A N Murthy Rao, Rashi and Beechi (but not so much Masti, who, even when he told a story in a light-hearted tone, plumbed greater psychological depths).

The gentle, lifelong mocking of the spouse's family is a convention that is no longer in vogue. (Urban working couples are gripped by angst and locked in more urgent quarrels!). The play's fuss about the ritual bath would perhaps look strange to the Mumbaikar who would rather drink and gamble to celebrate Diwali; it is also unlikely the Kannadiga who works at a BPO will relate to the relaxed banter. But don't hold that against the play.

The couple plan their revenge on their children's spouses … This is portrayed as innocent good humour, and in any case, they are liberals who wouldn't really want to interfere in their children's lives. Kapinipati and Bhagirati represent the elderly Brahmin couples living by themselves in Bangalore and Mysore, with their children away in the US. They bear no ill will, and talk of their offspring with pride, but their loneliness cannot be denied.

Kapinipati and Bhagirati end up dreaming (not metaphorically but literally: they doze off and dream) of situations where they outsmart their supposed enemies, but when they wake up, they realise that they are friends and family after all.
Laxmi Chandrashekhar as Bhagirati and Sundar as Kapinipati and Ananthu brought energy to the production, and their English dialogue sounded appropriately Kannada-flavoured.

The production had its moments, as when their Mumbai son and daughter-in-law break into a Mumbai movie-style gig before setting off for work, highlighting the incongruity of the Hindi "national" culture in an orthodox south Indian home. That scene was followed by the Kannadiga mother doing a devi stuti and attracting the paying guest, a musician, to do a pop-style fusion with her!

All's Well is the kind of play the more serious Kannada theatre buff might scorn. But it is neatly executed, and has the potential to charm Kannada TV audiences and tickle the fancy of this city's comedy-loving English theatre-goers.

The play is unpretentious if unambitious… what some would call time pass.

(This review appeared in print on October 6, 2008)

Trading places

The world is watching in shock and bewilderment as capitalism collapses in a flop. Every day, television cameras bring images of investors gaping at electronic boards showing their fortunes plummeting.

The mood is gloomy, but if you were up to it, you might appreciate how the 'financial tsunami' is changing everything for people who believed they had all the answers. And it's happening overnight. There can't be a better time for connoisseurs of irony.

Friends (such as investment bankers) are looking like villains, and enemies (such as the public sector) are suddenly looking like good people.

Heroes of India's IT economy, N R Narayana Murthy included, are now arguing for more controls. A year ago, they would have laughed at the idea of the government running businesses. Who would have believed they would ever wake up to the dangers of letting private corporations manage the world?

At least two families, both with Bangalore connections, have killed themselves as the markets wiped out their fortunes. A man in Chicago, an IIT graduate, pulled out a gun and shot his wife, three sons, mother-in-law and himself. In Mumbai, another family got into a suicide pact to find a way out of the money calamity. Such is the extent of distress, and it is gripping the globe.

People who put all their money in the markets and enjoyed the good life are today worse off than the poor. They are killing themselves like farmers in debt. The class that mocked farm loan waivers is today out with a begging bowl, pleading for a government bailout.

So how did we reach here? A basic truth everyone forgot was that the stock market is all about gambling and speculation. Various factors contribute to giving it more respectability than it deserves. The government talking proudly about a booming stock market, for instance, sends out the signal that it can't just be a game of dice.

A Ficci survey in December last year predicted the Sensex would touch 25,000 in two years. And its respondents were CFOs, investment bankers, mutual fund managers, and asset management companies. You won't hear a squeak out of them today.

The small investor balks in disbelief when banks cite testimonials for safety from some "reputed independent agency". Many of yesterday's "reputed" financial institutions are worth nothing today.

ICICI Bank, India's most aggressive financial institution, is sending SMSes to tell its depositors their money is safe. Their vice-president is writing mail to its customers, asking them not to panic. In the normal course, you couldn't get past their call centre executive. But here they are, the big bosses, talking to you with their hands folded!

At least two camps are watching the capitalist misery with some satisfaction. The communists, who always believed America's free market model was flawed. And the Islamists, who believe their tormentor is justly being tormented.