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| (From left) Jayal and Singh with chief guest
Dr Aamir Ali |
Flies during the
day and midges during the night," wrote Gurdial Singh in his diary
about Lata village, the last human habitation en route to the 23,360 ft
summit of Trishul. A month earlier in June, Singh, a teacher at Doon School,
had hustled former Doscos Surendr Lall, a boxwallah "who never climbed
a mountain", air force pilot Nalni Jayal and Roy Greenwood, an instructor
at the Indian Mountaineering Association, into embarking on mountaineering's
last phase of innocence before ascent became synonymous with a Rs 65,000
guided tour of Everest.
"The Spirit of the Hills: The First Indian
Expedition to Trishul, 1951" at Delhi's Habitat Centre is a photographic
reminiscence of this "season of joy". Here you see Tenzing Norgay,
sirdar of the French Nanda Devi Expedition, snapped at the Rishi Ganga
gorge two years before he accompanied Edmund Hillary to the top of the
world. Elsewhere, "a shady stretch through a deodar glen" and
"Lata Kharak, a flower covered pasture at a height of 12,200 ft".
Even the non colours can't prevent you from smelling the wild roses.
-Sonia Faleiro
 PICK
OF THE WEEK: It's Operation Ragpicking in
Delhi's Connaught Place. They're clad in blue, wearing gloves, drawing
wheelbarrows with separate cans for organic, recyclable and inorganic
wastes. The project, called "Samagam", aims at accepting ragpickers,
"these spurned people, who handle nearly 15 per cent of the city's
waste, as another service class", explains Bharti Chaturvedi of ngo
Chintan, one of the organisers along with by New Delhi Municipal Corporation,
the New Delhi Traders Association and the waste collectors themselves.
It's working. Santu Choudhury, 26, a ragpicker, says that he feels "more
respectable without the sack". It seems 250 of his colleagues can
now have their pick.
-Teresa Rehman
Citizen Of The Loo
 Orgasms
are an obsession with actor Rajit Kapur. That is when he's not thinking
of bowel movements. Rage Productions' The Wisest Fool on Earth, employing
a provocative mix of sexual and scatalogical humour, has Kapur (as Jaidev)
playing a gay, unemployed (and at that point inebriated) man struggling
in Mumbai. Written by R. Raj Rao and directed by Deep Dudani and Kapur,
the play, set fashionably in a loo, opened at Mumbai's Prithvi last week.
But the idea of a 45-minute monologue scared Kapur when he first read
the piece six years ago. Fortunately a positive response to a play reading
and two performances in Pune sharpened his confidence.
It's not all onstage solitude for Kapur, also
busy with other more interactive theatricals like Ila Arun's Jamilabai
Kalali and I'm Not Bajirao. He's also finished Zindagi Khoobsoorat Hai,
a Hindi film with Tabu and Divya Dutta. Theatre, however, comes first:
"I always feel a greater sense of involvement and challenge with
theatre." Something to think about when you're in the loo?
-Himanshi
Dhawan
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