Past Forward

Dream, love and hope. Live life fearlessly and with passion. There is no other way. This is what I learn from 2008. A forward in my inbox triggers memories.
In 2004, I took my then boyfriend to New York for our first holiday together. It was his first visit to the city, and I had planned an itinerary that included a violin concert at the Lincoln Center, the view from the Empire State Building, walks through Times Square and Central Park, a ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty and dinner in the West Village. But when our bus finally rolled into the Port Authority bus terminal, he turned to me and asked, “Can we go to Harlem first? I really want to see the Apollo Theatre.” Being Japanese, and musically inclined, his imagination of New York and what it stood for was quite different from my Bollywood/Hollywood-tinted perspective. So that’s what we did, and luckily, I was exposed to a very different slice of the city’s diverse multicultural pie.

Some months later, we visited Atlanta together, and had the opportunity to comprehend Martin Luther King’s historic civil rights struggle and achievements within the context of his birthplace. We paid homage to the Gandhiji statue and sat in the pews of the Ebenezer Baptist Church during the Sunday morning service; the same church at which King and his father served as pastors during their lifetime. As the preacher spoke and the choir children sang, I looked around at the largely black audience and wondered if a black man or woman might ever become president of this country that I was increasingly growing to love and admire. This was not a new thought. Several of my friends in both India and the US had in different prior conversations, cited the fact that the US had so far not been able to elect a black person or a woman to its highest office as an indication of its inherent societal prejudice. The thought crossed my mind once again, when on a visit to a friend at the University of Chicago, I passed by some ghettos and noticed poverty of the kind that I thought only existed in India. At that time, Obama for President was just a whisper in the media, and The Audacity of Hope was a successful convention speech, not a best-seller book. As his amazing campaign gathered momentum over the months that followed, a knot began to form somewhere at the bottom of my stomach, and like millions of people all over the world, the ‘can he?’ transformed into a ‘can we?’

The email forward that I receive contains a picture taken by the Reverend Chloe Breyer, on the night that Obama has been declared the next President of the United States. In the picture (see above), young Americans are spontaneously singing the American national anthem on the corner of Frederick Douglas Boulevard and 125th Street, under the Apollo Theatre at about 1 am. Reverend Chloe Breyer is the director of the NYC Interfaith Center, and the daughter of US Supreme Court Justice Breyer. I reach out to her to ask if I may reproduce the picture in Verve, and her reply is as moving as the moment she has captured. “Since 2003, I have served as an associate minister at a church in West Harlem and as you might imagine, it was incredible to hear this new enthusiasm and sense of ‘ownership’ of the national anthem that for so long, African-American men and women have had difficulty singing with integrity in this part of the country.”

Ownership. Enthusiasm. Key words. The Obama campaign ran on the promise of change, but the undercurrents were that of enthusiasm, and ownership, hope and belonging. Much has been said of Obama’s victory speech on November 4, but I want to revisit what could arguably be considered the start of his amazing presidential race, when at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he asked: “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope...the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”

The young black people singing the national anthem outside the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, were ecstatic that after centuries, in that one historical moment, the audacity of their hopes had become a reality. The picture also encompasses their friends from other races, who are singing as enthusiastically. This enthusiasm led to ownership, to a renewal of ideals. “Yes, we can,” he said, for the past two years, and we repeated it after him, again and again until it became a mantra that shook beliefs and changed mindsets, including our own. Obama’s “we”, an all encompassing collective “we” consisted of white people, black people, gay people, straight people, youngsters and veterans, people who voted in America, and people who drew inspiration from him all over the world as a symbol for their own audacious hopes. Within that brief moment, in that giant surge of electrifying goodwill that crackled through the millions of TV sets in the world and on the streets of America on the night of November 4, as the unfettered voices of the youth in Reverend Chloe’s picture soared into the sky, my broken heart expanded, and made way for a feeling that was larger, magical and inexplicably more beautiful than anything I had felt before.

The Obama victory was still very far away when we sat down to plan this year-end issue. We had decided that we would end 2008 by celebrating hope and saluting fearlessness, the attitude that strides out into the world to transform hope to reality. For this, we would invoke the spirit of Bollywood’s first superstar Fearless Nadia, and infuse this spirit throughout the magazine. The timing couldn’t be more apt; 2008 marks Nadia’s birth centenary and the 75th anniversary of Wadia Movietone, the legendary studio that produced the Nadia films. Then, as we shifted gears into production, Fearless Nadia encountered Obamania, and this Verve issue taps into the chutzpah of both these iconic figures.

Madhu Jain writes about Nadia as a feminist icon, and how her on-screen characters evoked the spirit of indigenous historical action heroines, like Jhansi ki Rani, or Razia Sultan, while Sohiny Das discusses the Hunterwali’s nonchalant swashbuckling style, which also gets interpreted with a Verve twist, within our spectacular year-end fashion section. The spirit of Nadia-Obama runs through several of the other stories in this issue. Shereen Bhan, our cover girl, not only embodies the spirit, but also tracks it every day in the television programmes that she produces and anchors. As she tells Verve in an interview, the entrepreneurs that she meets for her show Young Turks “are not apologetic about who they are and don’t carry the baggage of the past. This is transformational change”.

The 10 next-gen female singers that Sona Bahadur tracks for her report At Full Throttle are fuelling a renaissance in India’s music scene by being fearlessly non-compromising when it comes to singing in their own voices and own styles, including hip hop, rock, blues and electronica. The fashion scene too, is undergoing its own confident evolution, and to know more about India’s path-breakers from the Spring-Summer 2009 collections, read Fashion Forward. There are so many more stories in this issue along these lines (Sooni Taraporewala and Little Zizou, Hermes’ India plans, or Anita Nair’s column, for example), but discover these for yourselves. Savour them at your own pace, and reflect on them as this momentous year draws to an end. I hope that they lift your spirit in much the same way that they, as well as the iconic figures that they have been inspired by, have lifted ours.

Fashion Week Extra!

Backstage With Queenie

More than any designer, model, or celebrity showstopper (it feels ridiculous using that word after watching Fashion), if there was one person who captured the spirit of the Mumbai fashion week for me, it was Queenie. Superbly turned out every day in head-to-toe designer gear, gravity-defying high heels and with full make-up, blow-dry and jewellery from 10 am to 11 pm, she was pretty much everywhere, playing the multiple roles of front-row diva, scribe and TV anchor. We decided to sit together for what we felt would be the most fun shows - gen-next and the emerging designers. After whispering our reactions into each other’s ears (very good, overall), I followed her backstage as she shared the young designers’ triumphs with them and coaxed them to speak in front of her television camera. I find it quite ridiculous that some people dismiss the quality of Queenie’s work just because she happens to have an active social life. I have always found her to be dedicated and passionate about her writing and I noticed at the Fashion Week what an absolute natural she was in front of the camera. It will be very interesting to see where this media trajectory takes her next. A talk show, perhaps?

Men On Top

You won’t read about men’s fashion in the rest of the magazine, so I thought I’d bring it up here. The men’s day at the Lakme Fashion Week was brilliant. Hemant Laconet’s sexy, confident vision had bright colours, frosted helmet clad models and bare-bodied androgyny. Narendra Kumar, ever in tune with the mood of the moment, had bloodied still models stretched corpse-like on the ramp, while their bandaged counterparts walked past silently to the soundtrack of Nazi propaganda. Finally, Arjun Khanna lightened the mood with his ice cream fantasy of sherwanis and jackets in pastel colours. From playfulness to protest, from reality to fantasy, from the past to the future, this short men’s day managed to pack it all in.

Crowdsurfing

Sometimes, it is more fun at Fashion Weeks to check out what’s being worn off the ramp. Here’s a selection of some of my favourite looks from attendees that I photographed at the Mumbai and Delhi Fashion Weeks. Note that none of these are togged in head-to-toe designerwear. What drew me to them was that they were bold, unique and their clothes complemented their personalities wonderfully. Isn’t that what fearless style is all about?

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