24 TIMES SPECIAL MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2016 Experts...

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Pamela Malhotra walks through the forest, pointing out a spot where she and her husband saw a herd of 10 elephants a few days ago. She also shows off a giant

tree nearby. “That tree is about 700 years old and draws different types of birds,” she says, running her hand along the massive trunk. Pamela and her husband Anil K Malhotra have spent the last 25 years buying denuded and abandoned agricultural land in Karnataka’s Koda-gu district and reforesting it, to return the land to a bio-diverse rainforest for elephants, tigers, leopards, deer, snakes, birds and hundreds of other creatures.

The couple owns 300 acres of land in Brahmagiri, a mountain range in the Western Ghats, which houses the Malhotras’ Save Animals Initiative (SAI) Sanctuary. It’s probably the only private wildlife sanctuary in the coun-try with more than 300 kinds of birds as well as many rare and threatened animal species.

But this was not the scene in 1991 when Anil, 75, and Pamela, 64, who run the SAI Sanctuary Trust, came to this

part of the country. “When I came here with a friend who suggested I buy this land, it was a wasteland of 55 acres. The owner wanted to sell because he couldn’t grow coffee or anything else here,” says Anil, an alumnus of Doon School, who worked in the real estate and restaurant business in the US be-fore moving to India. “For me and Pamela, this was what we were looking for all our life.”

They had almost given up the search for land after hitting the land ceiling hurdle in north India. The couple, who met and married in New Jersey, US, in the 1960s, had a love for nature from their childhood. When they went on their honeymoon to Hawaii, they fell in love with its beauty and decided to settle there. “That is

where we learnt the value of forests and realized that despite threats of global warming no serious efforts were being made to save forests for the future,” says Anil.

When the Malhotras came to India for the funeral of Anil’s father in 1986, the pollution in Haridwar horrified them. “There was so much deforesta-tion, the timber lobby was in charge, and the river was polluted. And no one seemed to care. That was when we de-cided to do something to reclaim the forests in India,” says Anil, sitting below a dense canopy in front of their

house facing the Brahmagiri hills.When they realized they would

not find land in north India, the search turned southwards. Mal-

hotra’s friend had told him that if he was looking for re-turns, this land in Brahmagiri wouldn’t pro-vide any. “We w e r e n o t

looking for money. Ear-

ly on, we realized that shortage of

fresh water will be a concern for India and the rest of the world. Acquisition, protection and reclamation of for-ested lands and wildlife habitat, where vital water sources have their origin, is the only way to save our-selves,” explains Anil.

They sold property they owned in Hawaii, bought the first 55 acres at the foothills of the Brahmagiri range and began afforestation work. Soon, they realized there was no use nurturing a forest on one side of the stream when landholders on the other side were using pesticides for cultivation. “We started buying lands across the stream whenever they came up for sale. Many of the farmers considered their holdings ‘wasteland’ as very lit-tle grew on it and were happy to get money,” says Malhotra.

But there were legal complications as many land documents were not in order and many farmers had debts to be settled. “Once we bought the land, we allowed the forest to regenerate. We planted native species where neces-sary and allowed nature to take care of the rest,” says Anil. Today, SAI Sanc-

tuary covers approximately 300 acres, and draws naturalists and scientists doing research on the different animal species as well as hundreds of indig-enous trees and plants, which have medicinal value as well.

Hunting and poaching was a chal-lenge and often locals did not under-stand what “this couple from the US” was doing, so it was slow going and required a lot of talking to create awareness. “A priest of a temple lo-cated on a nearby hillock was killed by a tiger and villagers were afraid. We helped them rebuild the temple at a safer location, but our condition was that they’d give up hunting and poach-ing,” says Pamela. “When they asked us why, we asked them why they wor-shipped Hanuman and Ganesha but killed animals. It worked,” she says.

They worked with the forest de-partment to set up camera traps and keep poachers away. “There are times I have fought poachers with logs,” says Pamela.

The couple gets help from other trustees to keep the sanctuary going. They also try convincing large compa-nies to buy land and let it flourish as part of their corporate social respon-sibility plans. “Corporates should ex-tend their CSR activities towards this sector,” says Pamela. “Without water, what business will you do?”

WE BOUGHT ASANCTUARYA couple has transformed 300 acres of denuded farmland in

Karnataka into what is probably India’s first private wildlife sanctuary

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For her 2003 Cannes appearance, the second of her career, Aish-warya Rai wore a neon green Neeta Lulla sari with front

‘pallu’ and tied her hair in a high bun. A top image consultant likened her to “a dowager’s sofa set” in a newspaper article at the time.

Flash forward to Feb-ruary 29, 2016. It is the most glamorous red carpet event of the year, the Oscars, and India’s Priyanka Chopra is making head turns in an under-stated yet beautiful beige and ivory Zuhair Murad gown. There’s not a hair out of place and her make-up is understated and flawless. That day, Chopra became the second most searched celebrity on Google.

Indian leading ladies have clearly come a long way on the interna-tional red carpet. Heavy silk saris, gold chokers, ornate bindis and bangles — a hangover of the In-

dira Gandhi era with its many Festivals of India – have been replaced with contemporary brands and accessories that favour global over local.

The welcome outcome is fewer fashion faux pas, and a lot of restraint. “Even Aishwarya has

learnt to temper it down,” says fashion commentator Sujata Sippy, who feels that striking a balance between drama and elegance is the

key to red carpet success.Rai was one of the first Indian faces (in 2002) to

grace a high-pro-file event — t h e C a n n e s

film festival. She gets invited to it

every year in her capac-ity as the official ambas-

sador for an international cosmetic brand. After the ini-

tial setbacks, Rai has been attracting rave reviews for her choice of outfits by designers like Roberto Cavalli, Elie Saab and Gucci.

Even Sonam Kapoor, one of the best dressed Bollywood actors today, has had her red carpet problems. In 2015, twitte-rati compared her Elie Saab yellow con-fection to Sesame Street’s Big Bird. Oth-

ers called it a mop. However, she re-deemed herself in subsequent appear-ances with a gold and black Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla outfit and a gossamer ivory gown by The Row. “Be it JPG or Anamika Khanna, Sonam knows how to make a statement and yet be elegant,” says Sippy.

In recent years, Bollywood actors Kat-rina Kaif, Richa Chadha and Mallika Sherawat have also appeared at red car-pet events without causing any major style embarrassment.

The fuss over red carpet fashion may seem excessive. How difficult can it be for the stars to dress up when they have a bat-tery of stylists, make-up artists and design-ers to rely on? Not so easy, says Harmeet Bajaj, fashion designer and choreogra-pher. “When these girls go overseas they are confused about how to appear in pub-lic. ‘Should I be a brand ambassador for my country?’ ‘Or, should I go for a more global look?’ It’s a difficult choice to make,” says Bajaj, who feels that a great body is just as important on the red carpet. “It is the body within the clothes that gives

you confidence and gets you noticed.”Chopra’s decision to pick Murad, a

Lebanese designer, may not be totally random, says Bajaj. “Murad is known for his embroidery and so are we,” says Bajaj who is developing a ready-to-wear line for Ekaya, a bespoke store curating handcrafted creations.

While many commentators have pointed out how Chopra and other desi red carpet regulars now look as smashing as the Western celebs, Yatan Ahluwalia feels that “a star should never blend in”. “I think if you are an Indian celebrity, you should have something Indian about your look…be it a piece of jewellery or a bindi. And contrary to what many believe, it is possible to carry an Indian look without being blingy,” says Ahlu-walia, an image consultant and stylist.

But as Neena Haridas, former edi-tor of Marie Claire, pointed out in a recent article, PC’s decision to wear a gown instead of a sari was a smart move. “She was sending a loud and clear message to Hollywood: She is no exotic creature in a sari or embel-lished lehenga-choli or salwar kameez making an appearance for the brands she endorses.”

Bollywood goes from embarrassing to elegantAs Priyanka Chopra’s immaculate Oscar look shows, Indian celebs

have finally found the fashion formula for the hallowed walk

DESI GIRL GONE GLOBAL: Chopra wowed with her choice of an elegant Zuhair Murad gown at the Oscars

In her second Cannesouting, Aishwarya was likened to “a dowager’s sofa set”. The elegant Sonam Kapoor got her share of unkind tweets when her Elie Saabyellow dress was compared to a mop

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At book fairs, Lakhmir Singh isn’t mobbed by fans like Chetan Bha-gat and Amish Tripathi are. He has never been interviewed by the media and never held court at

a literary festival. But writers of popular fic-tion would perhaps trade their non-writing arm for the kind of book sales Singh garners. If you are, or were, one of those high school students who subsisted on study guides, it was probably Lakhmir Singh who saved you from the sinkholes of science. His books on chemistry, physics and biology have been recommended as supplementary study mate-rial for over three decades across India, notching book sales of around three lakh copies a year. Even fiction’s favoured few would be hard-pressed to meet that figure.

According to the Nielsen India Book Market Report 2015, academic publishing – constituting around 8,000 publishers – cor-ners 93% of the Rs 260 billion publishing market in India; trade (to which litfest del-egates typically belong) takes the rest. The report goes on to say the K-12 publishing

segment has been growing at CAGR 19.6% and higher education at 20.7%. Compare this to trade which is growing at 8.5%.

Behind these vertiginous figures are au-thors next door — doctors, teachers, account-ants, lawyers who are courted by publishers for their domain knowledge. Their books sell in lakhs, and are priced be-tween Rs 300 and Rs 1,000. With 10-15% royalties accru-ing to them, they often earn in crores, but you wouldn’t recognize an academic best-seller if he chucked his book at you. “I keep a low profile,” admits Dr KD Tripathi, “No Twitter, no Facebook, noth-ing.” His Essentials of Medi-cal Pharmacology is stand-ard reading for second-year students of MBBS, who call it their Bible. The book, now in its seventh edition, sells around 1,00,000 copies a year (Rs 995 a copy) to students, doctors, chemists, and others associated with the subject, says his publisher Jaypee Brothers. “I was a professor at Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College when Jitendar Vij, MD of Jaypee, ap-proached me to write a guide to pharmacol-ogy that was contextual to India,” recounts 74-year-old Tripathi.

Lakhmir Singh says he was inspired to write chemistry reference books in 1980. “I realized that Class 9 and 10 students who couldn’t afford private tutors would probably fare poorly in exams as textbooks weren’t self-explanatory,” Singh, 68, recalls. A chem-istry lecturer at Delhi University’s Dyal Singh College at the time, he emulated the fluid narrative style of foreign academic writ-ers whose books he encountered at book fairs in Delhi. Singh wrote a few chapters for Class

9 chemistry and took the manuscript to six academic publishers in Delhi, five of whom recommended he partner with a known writer, because known names sell books, more so in the academic market.

Publisher S Chand, however, gambled on Singh and ordered an initial print run of 2,200. But back then it was hard for a new writer to break through the close ranks of incumbents who, through merit or kickbacks, had insinuated themselves into the school supplementary reading list. In a smart mar-keting move, Singh bought 500 copies of his own title, and with wife Manjit Kaur who had helped write the book, carted them on his scooter to Delhi’s schools to convince faculty and students of its merits. Today, Singh, who completed his primary educa-tion in a Patiala village, has a science series to his name.

“It’s hard getting good writers today; young academics would rather get into the tutorial business,” admits Himanshu Gup-ta, Joint MD at S Chand, whose grandfather established the company in 1937. His au-thors typically take a year or two to com-plete a text. Editions are updated every two

or three years, but when a curriculum is about to be majorly revised, it’s back to the drawing board for authors.

In the embryonic years of Independent India’s education system, writers and pub-lishers sought to simplify the language of textbooks, contextualize instruction, and

offer students alternatives to foreign authors. It’s what got Avtar Singh started in his five-decade career writ-ing law manuals. His semi-nal textbook Company Law, in its 16th edition, cele-brates its golden jubilee this year. It was priced at Rs 12.50, then, and Rs 550 now. “I was a lecturer of law at Lucknow University since 1957, and my students often complained that their text-books — authored mostly by foreigners — were ex-pensive. They wished my notes were available to them as texts. That inspired me,” says the 84-year-old Singh, who went on to write 35 primers on all forms of

law. His books are widely read by students of law, accountancy, taxation and business. Fifteen of his titles have been translated into Hindi by his publisher, the Lucknow-based Eastern Book Company.

Singh spent two years, 14 hours a day, writing his first book by hand. “I don’t have recognition, but good writing is a reward in itself,” he states.

Interestingly, both distributors and law students, when asked to name a leading In-dian writer of law, name Singh. In fact, stu-dents often drop by his place in Ghaziabad on an academic pilgrimage. Tellingly, when asked how he started writing textbooks, Singh replies: “With a pen!”

LOCAL LESSON: Avtar Singh turned to textbook writing because his law students wanted an affordable alternative to expensive foreign books. This year, the 84-year-old’s book Company Law, which is in its 16th edition, will celebrate its golden jubilee

These bestselling writers would never get invited to a litfest

Academic writers are seldom feted yet their books sell in lakhs. Sunday Times meets some unknown stars of Indian publishing

Umesh Kumar

Often, locals did not understand what ‘this couple from the US’ was doing. “We had to persuade villagers to give up hunting and poaching,” says Pamela

Photos: Getty Images

WILD LIFE: Anil Malhotra and his wife Pamela (above) sold property in Hawaii to buy here

It is the blackest of blacks, a shade that resembles the void. Vantablack was developed by UK-based firm, NanoSystems, to help disguise satellites. But its creative rights have been given exclusively to sculptor Anish Kapoor. Sunday Times speaks to Indian artists on the idea of ‘owning’ colours.

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MITHU SEN

“T ime is Vantablack. Me too Vantablack,” jokes Sen. She supports the copyrighting

of the black that absorbs 99.96% of light, the darkest of the dark as it has been described. Sen believes that artists have the right to claim the colour that defines their vision.

“I want the colour of pure blood. Around 10-12 years ago, I had painted with my own blood, and it looked beautiful, but when it dried, it became a rusted shade of red,” says the Delhi-based artist. “I want that bloodiest of blood red to remain and when I find it, copyright it. I may call it Mantared.”

ALEX DAVIES

T he artist, who has been working on mirror sur-

faces, says he would want to patent the exact opposite of Vantablack — a non-existent colour that doesn’t absorb anything but reflects every-thing outwards. “It is the lightest colour and it is lucid. It’s like that reflection on wa-ter. It would stand for per-sonal expression,” he says. Like Klein’s blue belongs to the artist. “We can work with it. But it is a colour that rep-resents him,” says Davies.

SUBODH GUPTA

“B lack and white are not colours. They belong to the spectrum,

not to an artist. Not even a shade,” says Subodh Gupta. “It is like the story Shahjahan Ke Aansoon — the emperor is asked to pick the one grain that he could eat in prison. He said it would have to be chana. Col-ours are universal — manmade or otherwise. They belong to the world.”

The International Klein Blue

(IKB) was developed by Yves Klein in collaboration with Edouard Adam, a Parisian art paint supplier, but the artist never patented it. It lives in his name but is accessible. That’s how colours should be, Gupta believes, free for all.

“Art is not made of colour alone,” Gupta says. “I like grey and crimson and yellow and blue and black and I dilute them in my work. I can’t work without colours. But I don’t own them.”

Anish gets a colour copyright. How fair is that?

Photos: K Sunil Prasad

Academic books still dominate publishing, with 93% of the

260 bn market

They are growing at 20%, which is twice the rate of trade (fiction and non-fiction)

It’s bestsellers are ten times as big – 100,000compared to 10,000 in trade publishingSource: Nielsen India Book Market Report 2015; publishers

FACT IS BETTER THAN FICTION

THE TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURUMONDAY, MARCH 7, 201624 TIMES SPECIAL

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Bengaluru: Women seem to be the main victims of heinous crimes by juveniles in the country. For, 9,672 crimes committed by juve-niles between 2012 and 2014 were targeted at women, data from the Ministry of Home Affairs shows. They constituted 10% of all hei-nous crimes by juveniles.

According to MHA docu-ments, there were 5,048 cases of rape and 3,628 cases of assault on women with intent to outrage modesty. T h e re we re a l s o 2 9 0 dowry deaths cases against juveniles.

BN Gangadhar, director of Nimhans, said: “Some amount of accurate assess-ment of how a mind behaves can be done based on our experience and database. But an adolescent mind that is deliberately committing certain act is difficult to pre-dict and generalise as it is very dynamic.”

Sociologist Sudha Sitar-am and psychologist Sulata Shenoy had pointed at dif-ferent factors to TOI earlier. While Sudha had said there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we so-cialize — a flawed system that encourages people to hurt women — Sulata had stressed the need for sex education.

While the government has been trying to find solu-tions to the problem, the crime figures are only ris-ing. In 2012, the number of crimes against women was 2,142, which rose to 3,680 in 2013 and touched 3,850 in 2014. The complete data for 2015 will be released this year.

Beginning 2014, the gov-ernment began to separate-ly document attempts to rape and there were nearly 100 such cases that year. There was a huge increase in the number of assaults with intention to outrage a woman’s modesty from 618 in 2012 to 1,424 in 2013 and 1591 in 2014.

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Bengaluru: Delinquents above the age of 16 commit-ted the most number of juve-nile crimes between 2005 and 2014, data from the Union ministry of home affairs reveals. In 2014, they were responsible for 73.7% of ju-venile crimes, up from 66.6% in 2013.

According to MHA docu-ments in TOI’s possession, the percentage of juvenile delin-quents above the age of 16 has been consistently rising from 2005, when it was 55%.

Until 2000, only those be-low the age of 16 years were considered juvenile — that year, the rule was amended to increase the age limit to 18. In 2014, a parliamentary com-mittee on empowerment of women had recommended

that the government reduce the age of male juveniles to 16 from 18, citing an upward trend in crimes by those above 16 years.

The committee’s report said: “Although the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection

of Children) Act, 2000 pro-vides for adjudication and rehabilitation of Juvenile delinquents, the crimes against women committed by juveniles have shown an up-ward trend... Analysing the profile of juveniles appre-

hended, the committee found that most of the crimes have been committed by male ju-veniles in the age group of 16-18 years."

The government reverted to the earlier age limit (16) in December 2015.

9,600 crimes against women by juveniles in 3 years: MHA

Experts Point At The Way Society Treats Girls, Stress The Need For Sex Education

74% of delinquents above 16 years

2014 73.7%

2013 66.6%

2012 66.6%

2011 64.5%

2010 63.3%

2009 63.5%

2008 60.4%

2007 60.3%

2006 55%

2005 54.9%Source: Ministry of Home Affairs

% OF JUVENILE DELINQUENTS ABOVE 16 YRS OF AGE

2012 2013 2014 TOTAL

Rape 1175 1884 1989 5048Attempt 00 00 93 93to Rape*

Assault With

618 1424 1591 3633Intent toOutrageModesty

Insult to 183 312 113 608Modesty

Dowry 166 60 64 290Death

TOTAL 2142 3680 3850 9672Source: Ministry of Home Affairs | * Stat collection began only from 2014

Women main victims of heinous crime by juveniles

In 2014, a parliamentary committee recommended that the government reduce the age of male juveniles to 16 from 18, citing an upward trend in crimes by those above 16 years

Academic writers are seldom feted, yet their books sell in lakhs. The Times of India meets some unknown stars of Indian publishing

24 TIMES SPECIAL MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2016 Experts...

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