“Baba Uncle”, as residents of this posh apartment complex near Dubai Creek call M F Husain, is getting ready for a lunch date with a mystery lady at his favourite haunt, the popular Noodle House in Emirates Towers.

A tough choice confronts the artist — should he take the Bentley, or the Bugatti? Husain opts for the stately Bentley, even though the sleek, low, uber-sexy Bugatti is the one that grabs eyeballs (it is one of only five in the Middle East and bears his initials on the headrest).

Dressed in traditional Emirati gear, the painter is wearing socks, but no shoes. Mustafa, his handsome third son, explains that this is in deference to local sensibilities with regard to bare feet. Even the mighty Maqbool (used to going shoeless for decades) has had to compromise and make a few concessions. Husain laughs his sardonic laugh. “After watching 3 Idiots, I am proud to call myself an idiot. I am a fool. It is good to be a fool.”

The previous night, Dubai’s ruler and his graceful wife singled out Husain at a gathering of over 500 celebrities from across the world who were there to attend Sheikh Mohammed’s spectacular World Cup Race (and a coming-out party of sorts). “How are you, sir?” the Sheikh asked the newly-minted Qatari citizen. Husain’s benign smile said it all — Dubai’s loss is now Qatar’s trophy. More:

She has been in Dubai all of two days but as Shobhaa Dé breezes into the restaurant, she greets the waiter like an old friend. He in turn beams from ear to ear, as well he might: in his native India, Dé is something of a celebrity. He asks if she will have her “usual table”. As she sashays across the bistro, making heads turn with her enviably trim figure, whisking off her huge designer shades, it is my turn to be charmed when she sprinkles some of her fairy dust my way.

“Look at your lovely long hair flowing down like the Ganges,” she coos, leaving me temporarily stunned.

This is not what I was expecting. Can this be the same woman who, as the founding editor of Stardust, the Bollywood news and gossip magazine that excoriated the superficiality of the industry and made the “star bores and star whores” quake in their boots?

The same Shobhaa Dé who said of Rekha, that sultry screen siren: “It wasn’t her weight but her voice that had got to me, grating, harsh, coarse – the voice of an illiterate washerwoman.”

Or of the late Sanjeev Kumar, the much-loved star of classics such as Khilona and Seeta Aur Geeta, that he was “rustic, ill-mannered and uncouth”. Could this be the Shobhaa Dé as infamous for her blog spats with the likes of Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan as she is for the novels she now churns out? More:

Salman Rushdie with one of his subjects (Photo: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar)

They include Booker Prize-winners Sir Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai; Vikram Seth, the celebrated author of A Suitable Boy; and internationally-acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple. Other contributors include novelist Amit Chaudhuri, leading Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, historian-writer Mukul Kesavan and popular novelist Shobhaa De.

[...] Sir Salman, for example, spends a day with eunuchs in the western city of Mumbai (Bombay) to write up a piece called The Half-Woman God.

“India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s. Yet… the third gender of India still need our understanding, and our help,” he says.

Kiran Desai travelled to the southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh to meet its sex workers. The state has one of the highest rates of infection in India.

“What I had seen, really seen, were lives lived with the intensity of art; rife with metaphor, raw, distilled,” Desai writes.

“The emotions of love and friendship, you’d assume would be missing or rotten, in these communities – existing even more so for their being sought amidst illegality, fragmentation and betrayal.

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HIV/AIDS and the ethics of responsibility in India

An extract from Amartya Sen‘s foreword to “Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India.” From The Telegraph:

The ethics of responsibility has been a big subject in analysing the social aspects of AIDS. The point has been made, with considerable influence, that since HIV infection is primarily contracted through voluntary acts, such as unsafe sex, it is the individual rather than the society that should take responsibility for avoiding the disease and accepting the consequences of irresponsible actions. This way of seeing the social ethics of AIDS would have vast implications for what an afflicted person can or cannot expect the state to do for the ill…..

The idea that somehow the afflicted person bears the responsibility for his or her own unfortunate condition, since the infection could have been avoided through changing personal behaviour, is indeed quite prevalent – not just in advanced countries like the United States of America, but also in India. There is certainly an element of narrow plausibility in this general outlook. Many of the actions that may lead to the infection are certainly within the person’s own control, and the role of personal responsibility is indeed an important connection to bear in mind in planning strategies for prevention, through greater availability and use of information and more social education and advocacy. And yet to see this as an ‘open and shut’ case of just personal responsibility also misses the nine-tenth of the iceberg that lies below the water, hidden from view.

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My column on the editorial page of the Hindustan Times looks at Mumbai and Delhi and how the differences between the two cities has narrowed in recent years

In the early 90s when I moved back to live in Delhi — ironically because I had married a Marathi manoos who lived as an ‘outsider’ in the capital — the Bombay (not yet Mumbai) versus Delhi debate was at its peak. Bombay was cool and cosmopolitan; a city of opportunity and dreams where everybody who worked hard enough, could make it big; a city that was so egalitarian that it didn’t give a rat’s tit to your last name; a city so safe for women that a ‘beautiful woman’, as the old saying went, ‘clad in the finest jewels may walk in the jungle safely at midnight’.

I had lived between both cities but finished school and college in New Delhi. Then, I left. Returning was like being reassigned to purgatory. Delhi was status-conscious and hierarchical with its own rigid social pecking order. Delhi was about nepotism and networking where those who made it big in the ‘import-export’ business did it because daddy-ji was pulling strings somewhere. Delhi was the city — or over-grown village, depending on your perspective — where no woman could be safe on the streets.

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She feels women have a chameleon-like quality that allows them to adapt to any situation. It is perhaps this very quality that makes author, designer, mother, wife (not necessarily in that order), Shobhaa Dé change her roles ever so frequently. Like Madonna, Dé too has that something which makes her challenge stereotypes and reinvent her persona to do something that she wants to. “I refuse to be a kindly granny fading into oblivion. I want women to know that it is possible to live life at 60. Sixty, my dear, is the new 40,” says Dé, tossing her mane. Or, as Meryl Streep famously remarked in “The Devil Wears Prada”, ‘Everybody wants to be us’.

Known for her rather provocative style of writing, Dé who has so far written only fiction, much of it based on the glamour of Bollywood, has switched gear and written a book based on India and its 60 years. It is no coincidence that the book is being published in her 60th year too. “India and my journey has been together. I was born in an independent India and I want our young generation to invest in this country. That is my mission,” remarks Dé.

Click here to read excerpts from the interview: