Midnight in Paris

For once, it was not Woody Allen who wrote my template for a city even though his urban scapes have imbued every other city I lived in with his curious charm. So what if my cities were thousands of miles away from the black and white Manhattan montage unfolding to George Gershwin's music? Despite loving my favourite neurotic American director's quirky tribute to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in his Midnight in Paris, my inspiration for the city was a pastiche of books I had read, films I had watched and stories I had heard. From some of the most romantic moments in cinema captured in the lights of the Eiffel Tower's glitter and the chiaroscuro shades of the gas lamps lining the streets of this magical city of lights to the artists, writers and poets living in their consumptive freezing garrets in vertiginous old buildings producing some of their greatest masterpieces in the midst of squalor and poverty. From the bohemian cabarets of Boulevard de Clichy to the colourful parties and balls of Montmartre, Paris has occupied a pivotal point in my introduction to the world of art and culture.

Ever since I could remember, as an idealistic teen, an ambitious 20-year-old, a bit more worldly 30-year-old, every trip I ever planned whether as an imaginary itinerary or as a near-possibility — featured Paris. Time and again I would return to my worn-out globe, give it a spin and make it force stop on that same old dot circled with a red felt pen— Paris.

After all these years obfuscated by mundane matters and the daily business of life, when I finally did make this trip in the late summer of 2013, I was a bundle of nerves. Just like meeting a virtual love interest for the first time in the real world, I fretted whether my imagination had just built up this massive fantasy city unable to match anything that actually existed. And sure enough, it was a more frayed, edgy, dusty and older version of the imagined city pieced together from celluloid and poetic representations — and yet, it was more perfect than anything I had ever dreamed up. While I could write reams about Paris... it is Woody Allen again who has the perfect context for the city for Paris at midnight is when it is the most beautiful. It is the bewitching hour when the city draws you into herself and holds you in her thrall forever.

Like many others who have come before me, I too discovered and fell in love with the city by night Walking the banks of the Seine, with a view of the flying buttresses and the jaw-dropping magnificence that is the Notre Dame Cathedral, crossing the iconic green facade of the marvellously quaint and characterful Shakespeare & Co bookshop, walking cobbled streets of the artsy and fashionable 3rd and 4th Arrondissement, stopping at the first cafe that was yet to down its shutters and downing glasses of its cheapest house red to the sounds of a city not yet asleep and not yet awake.

Paris turned me into a wide-eyed girl, looking for the familiar indices of my growing up years as I read copiously and found the world in the pages of the books. I imagined yesteryear movie stars doing a little hop down these ancient avenues, bathed in the same neon lights reflecting off the restaurant signs that coloured my face...

It was the city that Remy, a tiny rat in the film Ratatouille, stared at from a rooftop window and felt the desire to overreach himself and his humble origins. It made you forget you were watching an animated film... all that filled your heart at that moment in time was the vast city and its myriad twinkling lights.

Paris by night allowed me to belong even if for those fleeting moments. My temporary home was truly mine and I was a Parisian till morning dawned and the harsh light of day stripped me of that illusion and left me a behatted tourist with a map, queuing up in lines to visit the nth museum and art gallery.

(First published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 23 April, 2015)

The curious lovechild of horror, fantasy and chicklit

Author, graphic novelist and journalist Shweta Taneja's latest offering Cult of Chaos (Harper Collins India) is a curious book. It is a new kind of cross-breed, much like the oddball and imaginative creatures in the fantasy universe that she creates, right from the freewheeling and powerful female tantrik — Anantya Tantrist — to the host of rakshasas, minor demons, supernatural bladesmiths, serpentine potion makers and mysterious half-breed cops and forensic experts. Melding humour with horror, fantasy with chick-lit, the occult with technology and ancient myths and legends with a modern and urban vibe rooted in Delhi's posh farmhouses and crowded back alleys, the author has created a genre bender which is a fast paced and racy page-turner. Taneja's first full-fledged novel was The Ghost Hunters of Kurseong — a comic-ghostly caper for tweens and a training ground of sorts for this book, which is the first of her occult mystery series featuring Anantya Tantrist.

The chapters boomerang between the horrific and violent sacrifices and murders to some outright humorous oddball apparitions of the night, from apparently normal dates in a posh central Delhi restaurants to glamorous Page 3 parties showcasing filmstars and supernatural freaks.There are elements of a baroque excess about some of the set pieces in the book as a supernatural canvas unfolds across a very real Delhi life populated with all manner of supernatural creatures or 'sups', tantrics of various clans, rakshasas, daevas and many other half-breeds and undefined creatures from the various planes that are visible through Anantya's magical 'septifocals' and allow her to view what is unseen by regular human eyes.

There are some truly inspired creatures like the gnarled ancient tantrik Guru B with his great labyrinthine library of marvels and a taste for peacock meat. Then there is Kaani the blademaker who belongs to a tribe that has mastery of death and is a creation of pure genius. There are the absurd denizens of the Bedardi Bar who look like they would be perfectly at home in a Guillermo Del Toro visual spectacle. Shweta Taneja's brand of horror features generous doses of humour, plenty of high-octane action sequences, spell-casting duels (imagine Harry Potter & company going native), gizmos drama, romance and even a teensy bit of fashion thrown in. Above all, Cult of Chaos launches the newest crime fighter on the block who has shades of Nancy Drew, Lizbeth Salander, Miss Marple, Modesty Blaise and Trixie Beldon. At the same time she is her own peculiar person. Anantya is a curious character who piques one's imagination as much as the book itself. Armed with mantras for every occasion, this beedi-smoking, outcast rebel child of a detective has an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth and a knack to summon up the oddest supernatural sidekicks and minor demons to do her bidding. She straddles the worlds of darkness, light and all the supernatural things that lie in between with the preoccupations of a young 20-something free-spirited and independent young woman complete with raging hormones, an eye for vintage clothing and accessories and a taste for the heady soma. She can kick ass like no other and find a way out of the toughest spots with her ability to cast spells to match the occasion, summon spirits from the darkest circles of hell and give two hoots for order, propriety or hierarchies that other members of her order seem bound to.

The mystery itself follows the usual tropes, twists and red herrings and it is not the final resolution that leaves you feeling satisfied, rather it is in the telling of it. That and a spunky and irrepressible heroine and Taneja's mini mythopoeia with its assortment of 'sups', its parallel universes that lie beneath the cracks and around the bends of very real city like Delhi that makes Cult of Chaos a darned good yarn.

(This piece appeared in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 21 April, 2015)

Suniti Namjoshi: the fantastic fabulist

I met Suniti Namjoshi on a stormy evening last month at the Bowring Institute in Bangalore over cups of strong filter coffee. In town for the launch of her first ever picture book, Little i, published by Tulika Books, the London-based author was full of stories, especially about how she started writing for children—quite by accident and in part inspired by her niece Aditi, who is the inspiration behind her Aditi series.

“I was tired of taking her books about pink and blonde kids, so I typed up a story about an Indian girl and set it in surroundings that would be more familiar to her,” says Namjoshi, “This became Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey, my first ever book for children which was actually published many years later.”

The funny part is that when nine-year-old Aditi read the story, she solemnly declared, But, this is not about my childhood, It’s about yours! “And she was bang on,” Namjoshi agrees. “In the story, I had written in places and characters who were derived from my own growing-up years.”
The second Aditi book also happened by chance after Namjoshi went for an event to the Blue Gate Fields Junior School in London, UK. “It was the strangest thing. There I was in front of a sea of brown faces in a school in London and all the children were thrilled to see me because I looked like them and I had also written a book about a character who was just like them,” she recalls. “They wanted Aditi to come to them and so I wrote Aditi and the Thames Dragon.” It was often such odd twists that caused the series to grow, and the places that Namjoshi visited, along with the things she liked—computers and the cyberspace, for example—wound their way into the books.

Little i is the latest instalment from Namjoshi’s imaginarium—a clever, whimsical and “stroppy little character” who is actually a runaway computer programme from an earlier book, Beautiful And the Cyberspace Runaway. Little i is a symbolic representation of the mathematical imaginary number, a little hat-tip to the self and a small but extremely important alphabet who keeps wanting to assert herself as the writer spins a witty and playful pictorial fable around her. On being asked for the nth time about her affinity with the fable, Namjoshi elaborates once again: “What the writing starts off with is an image, and a set of lines. These images start talking to each other and following their own inherent logic. Then begins the hard part of cleaning it up till it finally begins to sound right and the end result, whether it be a fable, a poem or something else, is something that takes shape through the process of writing. For example, when I think of a character like Little i who is a runaway computer programme, I try and think of what she would want to do now that she is outside the computer and in the real world. I figure that she would probably like to make friends and play. That is exactly what she goes about doing, stealing their vowels, and having some fun.”
She is as nimble with her language in a picture book like Little i as in the beautiful love poem, "All the Words", from the Flesh And Paper collection.
All the words have leaped into the air like the cards/ in Alice, like birds flying, forming, reforming, swerving and rising, and each word/ says it is love.

Images that leave an impact, whether from Shakespeare or a comic book, all contribute to Namjoshi’s fables. “I didn’t choose the form or the animal characters, they just came together from the debris of images, stories and poems floating about in the bottom of my mind and from what forms the rag and bone shop of the heart,” she says.

Her fables, she says, mean something entirely different for different people. And it is children who often have the power to observe things that adults miss (remember the child who points out that the emperor is stark naked in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes?).
"The Monkey And the Crocodile", one of her representative fables in The Feminist Fables, is a story that could be read on many levels by different kinds of readers. In it the monkey which lives on a jambu tree protected by her crocodile friends has a perfectly safe and charmed existence. However, bored by the sameness of her life, she wants to see the world, or at least the source of the river. Although she is warned by her friends about the beasts in the big bad world, she persists and sets off on her travels. When the monkey returns, several years later, she is bruised, battered, missing an eye and rather worse for the wear. On being asked about her condition she mentions the beasts and it is a telling statement which reveals that they looked just like her friends. While at the most basic level, and especially to a young reader, this could be a fable about the dangers that a girl might face in the outside world after leaving her friends behind, there are far deeper layers of gender inequality, abuse and iniquity that would be revealed to a more mature frame of reference.

Namjoshi herself has experienced several contexts in her life. She was born in a small town in Maharashtra, educated in an American school in Mussourie, and worked as a young officer in the Indian Administrative Service. Shocked at the imbalance of power in her country, she realized the necessity of subverting this equation. But, as she put it, she “wasn’t good enough” to bring in that change as a government official. So she turned to writing and her journey thereafter spanned three continents and 46 years away from her original homeland.

Home is now a nebulous concept for the writer, as she grew up in India, was given Canadian citizenship, and meanwhile lives and teaches in Exeter, UK. As she writes in Goja: An Autobiographical Myth: “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is”.

Namjoshi explains that this feeling of rejection is often due to the inability to fit in. And she describes it through her inimitable and wry humour. “Once, a fellow graduate student asked me whether I had smoked grass and I said that I hadn’t and, in an attempted jibe at coolness, had instead told him how I had tried to smoke rolled-up cabbage leaves in the past,” she says. “Needless to say, our versions of grass were entirely different.” At her poetic best, she describes the difference between the two cultures as the difference in the ephemeral shades of light in the afternoon.

Namjoshi writes herself into many of her stories, such as "The Conversations Of Cow" to "Saint Suniti And the Dragon". “There are different ideas behind each casting of myself,” she says, “If Sant Tukaram and other Bhakti poets can do it so why can’t I? I use this technique to question the existing norms at my own expense without attacking anyone else or gender stereotyping.”

It is this sense of humour that pervades her interactions as well. From joking with the photographer about the fact that there is finally a new picture to replace the existing one on the Internet (which, she says, makes her look like as though she owns precisely one red top) to cracking jokes about her age, Namjoshi is as full of lightness as her stories.

It is perhaps fitting that our meeting draws to a close with a striped tabby elegantly picking its way across a red shingled roof of the Bowring Institute in the fading light. It stops us in mid-sentence. To my mind, this unexpected image could well be the beginning of a new story for this extraordinary fabulist of our times.

This story appeared in the HT Mint Lounge on 27 September, 2014

The Unsettling Beauty of a Dark City

Delhi by night is dangerous, threatening, seething with discontent. There is something almost otherworldly about its tree-shrouded neighbourhoods and deserted multi-lane roads cast in the chiaruscuro shades of the sodium vapour lamps glinting through unruly amaltas trees. This is the real city that provides the context for Avatar Singh's literary city where crime, history, power, violence, beauty and death reign supreme. Published by Fourth Estate, this genre-straddling work is aptly named Necropolis and reveals a side of the city where the dead are never quite gone. The book which is at once an ode to a city as well as a vindication of its shortcomings is a city novel like no other. And who better to write this than Avatar Singh, the Dilliwallah who knows its numerous nooks and crannies and their varied secrets and offerings. As editor of Time Out's very first Delhi edition, he encouraged people to go out and explore the city and find its many stories in its many mohallas.

One of the reasons Avatar Singh succeeds in his crazy literary experiment of a book is the deftness with which he juxtaposes types, characters and styles. He pits poetry against hard-boiled crime fiction, a literary ethos with genre exercises and history with news from the sensationalist urban rags. Necropolis is both an episodic novel as well as a collection of short stories linked through their common protagonists, antagonists and fictional landscape.

It is perhaps fitting that its cover features the forbidding yet enticing image of a dark purple rose — an image that is morbidly fascinating as a symbol of a strange and almost decaying beauty. It is also apt that a murder is announced in the first three lines of the book followed up by a detailed description of the dead body especially its most unusual feature — "Around his throat was a necklace of fingers". This finger collector or Angulimaal is one of the recurring characters in the novel — a mysterious young man whose face is always shrouded by a kaffiyeh — and whose actions remain cryptic as he plays nemesis as well as informer to DCP Dayal with equal ease.

DCP Sajan Dayal is our unmistakable hero, a Dilliwallah to the boot with a hint of an old-world tehzeeb, a love for Ghalib and in his own words "a chowkidar with a taste for history". He is an anomaly of sorts — an original denizen in a city of migrants, a well-bred and upright police officer — both characteristics of a rare and vanishing breed. He is well aided by Kapoor, an older and legendary police officer with a longstanding if violent reputation of dealing with criminals, and Smita Dhingra, a fresh IPS recruit who struggles with her experiences as a woman law enforcer in a city which "isn't famous for treating its daughters well." This trio form the crime fighting protectors of the city, its last defence against an endless anarchy.

Their milieu is made up of other shadowy creatures of the night ­— the lycans, the vampires, the drug dealers, the kidnappers, the rapists and the murderers as well as the other equally dangerous creatures who roam the corridors of power by day and act as puppetmasters controlling the fates of its 25 million odd inhabitants. Into this mix is thrown the novel's most pivotal character, an anthropomorphic representation of Delhi through her various pasts and presents, her muse and her burden — the irresistible Razia. She is all charm and romance and poetry. She personifies night and time and in all her endless ages, she is both a victim of the city as well as its vigilante defender. It is her passionate relationship with DCP Dayal, her omnipresence across the pages and crimes that make her fascinating. In one of her first encounters with the DCP, there is an inspired exchange of words between the duo:

“These girls call me Razia. I don’t know why.”
“It fits. Delhi’s own Sultana. Regal, powerful.”
“Dead, too, these past eight hundred years.”
“A blink of the eye in this city’s history, surely.”

Singh fuses fantasy with gritty realism. His exploration of the city noir is deliberate as he traverses the length and the breadth of this heaving metropolis capturing the stench of the Yamuna, the decrepit evil lurking in the carefully tucked away urban slums, the fragrant beds of hollyhocks and rows of silk cottons in Lutyens Delhi, the mirrored ostentation of South Delhi's nouveau mansions, the anonymity of its migrant workforce, the staggering power of its elite and the shadow of the crime that lurks at every corner of the various Delhis encased in each other like Matryoshka dolls.

He scratches at the raw surface of a shared history to reveal the crimes wrought by time and finds no healing balm even as his crusaders race to stop the marauders who threaten to destroy all. He takes the reader through the different textures of the city through its changing seasons and neighbourhoods. His novel is the chronicle of an unforgettable and unusual love affair with Delhi, a city where the possibility of romance exists near the darkest pools of hell.

A loopy and lesser edited version was published in the New Indian Express Bangalore on 24 March, 2015

The compelling lure of Goa

ln the past few weeks, every time I have spoken to a friend or an acquaintance about to burn out from the corporate grind, looking to celebrate a birthday, or rekindle their romance, or simply get away from it all, the one thought that has floated into my mind has been “Why don’t you go to Goa?” And in an odd multiple mirroring of this thought, they have piped up on cue — “So we are going to Goa...” From the gaggle of girls off for their bestie’s bachelorette to the impulsive weekend partygoers who continue the weekend binge by tottering to the Majestic bus depot in the wee hours and taking the first bus out to Panaji without a care for Monday morning, it isn’t hard to identify a Goa junkie. And, I would like to think that I am as much of a Goa enthusiast who would like to return to the state over and over for some of that much needed susegad.

What is it exactly about this sunshine state that draws you in? The obvious charms of the sun and the sea don’t quite seem to define it as that is a feature of the entire Konkan coastline and a drive along it would perhaps yield virgin beaches, whiter sands and clearer azure waters than anything you’d see in the often crowded Goa itself. To ascribe the newly slashed airfares with the arrival of low cost carriers also doesn’t quite explain an influx that dates all the way back to the first wave of the flower people in the 1960s. This is a call that is far more primal than the call of the beaches, the parties, the free-flowing spirits, the hippie vibe, the fresh seafood, the spicy Goan delicacies, the yoga and the greenery.

It is all of these things, but most of all it seems to be about a mythic and historical bond between the people and the idea of susegad—a sense of contentment and peace with one’s surroundings, a tolerant approach towards all things and a unique enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life. It is perhaps fitting that each year, the Goan Carnival procession begins with the blessings of the symbolic leader of the proceedings, King Momo. He is the eternal figurehead and an annually appointed actor who dons the crimson robes, accepts the crown and sceptre and then deems all of Goa fit to eat, drink and make merry. His carnival motto is an extension of the idea of susegad.   

It is this irreplaceable living kernel that is encased in the many carapaces that form that ancient marine creature that is Goa. There is a Goa for everyone — from the fiercely protected and private Goa of the locals — the proud descendants of the Portuguese settlers — to the Goa that is the adopted home of all those free spirits who adopted this tropical land as their home and continue to imbue it with their bohemian laissez faire — to the bit of Goa that belongs to everybody from the tourist to the coconut seller, from the hotelier to the student, from the immigrant waitstaff at your holiday resort to the visiting writer on a residency program.

It is a state which boasts a tolerance and acceptance of all — the state in fact has colonies specific to nationalities from around the world. Despite the potential to turn into a global village, Goa remains fiercely individualistic, straddling its history and modernity with ease -- revering its 16th century Catholic saints as much as it celebrates the arrival of mobile phone penetration and Internet and Wi-fi in the remotest of villages and riverine islands. Its people are as comfortable doing a folk dance to Konkani fisherfolk’s tunes as they are grooving to the latest electronic mixes from the top DJs in the world. Goa is a  state where you can find a fine French stew just as you can find a neighbourhood shack where you can be assured of a hearty rice plate and fish curry even when your bank balance dips to the double digits. You can discover that one jolly aunty who can rustle up a mean sorpotel with homemade pav and a family-run bar where you can always find a friendly ear, some delicious food and free-flowing tipple.

Viewed without a rose-tinted lens, Goa has her share of political, social and environmental problems — and yet she is resilient and ever-welcoming, with a will to turn it all around some day. No matter what the issue of the day is, Goa remains the homing beacon guiding you back to her sunshine-filled heart time and time again.

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 19 March 2015

A Young Woman in Search of a Husband

A self-confessed funny girl, Itisha Peerbhoy’s debut novel, Half Love Half Arranged is definitely funny, laced with familiar characters and an easy urban vibe that is immediately recognisable. It is the tale of 30-year-old Rhea Kanwar — a single Punjabi IT professional who lives with her parents — and is as plagued by her unchanging single status as she is by the impending threat of her ‘boobs racing towards her toes’. About ten kilos over the ideal weight for the prospective bride, Rhea is on a husband hunting mission spurred on by her mother who is our very own homegrown Mrs Bennet, obsessing about the perfect match while running her household and the lives of her three daughters with an iron fist.

If one uprooted Bridget Jones from a very cerebral London sort of a life to a Punjabi household and replaced the dishy suitors with prospective husbands 1 to 3, one would arrive at an approximation of Rhea Kanwar. Except here, the obsession seems to be with finding a husband rather than Mr Right and so much so that towards the end, the book spirals into a crazy race towards the mandap with pretty much anyone who will agree to be there. While this is the disappointing and regressive plot point in an otherwise light and sparkling work of "chicklit", Itisha’s story still retains its fizz and underlying humour. A quick, frothy and light read, Half Love Half Arranged could have done with some brevity as the twists tend to wear thin by the last 50 odd pages of the book and a part of you wants to shake Rhea’s ample frame and ask her to wake up to the 21st century with its suffragettes and the bra burners rather than regress into an imitation of a 19th century Victorian heroine, despondent without a man in her life.

For someone who is independent, strong-willed and otherwise pretty smart and spunky, Rhea ends up in a pile of Pimms-fuelled simpering silliness ever too often. Rhea’s adventures with Pammi Auntiji’s esoteric marriage bureau, her all-girl Vodka fuelled bitching sessions, her camaraderie with her sisters and some spicy dollops of love, sex and dhoka, make this an engaging and light-hearted read without devolving into the stuff of diabetes inducing pulp that seems to have become the mainstay of commercial romantic fiction in India.

The first generation torchbearers of chicklit included the path-blazing wit of Anuja Chauhan, the quirkiness of Advaita Kala and the effervescence of Swati Kaushal. Thereafter, there seems to have been an imaginative void and Itisha Peerbhoy brings some hope to this tired genre, infusing it with a new spark and creating winsome characters for today. While these are women who are unabashed about the choices the make and make no bones about the merit of a good roll in the hay and boast a wicked sense of humour to boot. Peerbhoy’s singular flaw is perhaps her hurry to acquiesce to the fact that a single woman in possession of a brain and a will must be in want of a husband.


This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 3rd March 2015

In memory of the man who spread edible happiness

For the uninitiated, Michele Ferrero was a real-life Willy Wonka and innovator of marvellous confections and owner of the chocolate manufacturer Ferrero SpA. He was the man behind the magical Nutella Hazelnut spread, the mouth-freshening Tic-Tacs, the dense and rich Ferrero Rocher chocolates and every child’s all-time favourite, the Kinder Joy eggs. He died this week and his passing feels like an immensely personal loss, for he touched my life and my culinary universe in more ways than one.

At almost all given points in time, I am likely to have the trademark little plastic tin of Tic-Tacs in my bag. I like to call these mouth freshening pills, ‘mintlets’ with just the right amount of sweetness and zing. Among the staples in my larder, there is always that much-loved glass bottle of Nutella that has offered succour when days were cold and dank, an element of joy when meals were bland and cheat moments during diet breakfasts comprising bottomless bowls of Dickensian gruel. Whenever I have been at a loss for presents, the Ferrero Rocher pralines have been my go-to last-minute saviours, immediately adding a suitable sense of gravity to any occasion.

Mr Ferrero pretty much thought of it all, offering smart plastic cases that were pretty enough in their own right and available in different sizes for the varying relationships between the gifter and the giftee.

If there is one thing that Mr Ferrero made that I missed trying, that would be the Kinderjoy egg. Always a stickler for collecting Easter eggs, this little egg-shaped chocolate surprise entered the supermarket and my life in a post-lib India long after I had left my childhood long behind. Although the idea of having my own Kinder egg appealed to me, the idea of being in queue with wee babies, cajoling their parents to buy them yet another one, was a tad embarrassing. However, this week in tribute to this man, I shall sacrifice my adult composure and return to the innocent joy of discovering a toy inside a chocolate egg. 

And Nutella... Well... I could sing paeons to this creamy chocolate-hazelnut spread that has spawned hundreds of pretenders but never a worthy equal.

The journey from a Napoleonic war-time substitute created from the hazelnuts of Piedmont to a gianduja (an Italian chocolate and hazelnut sweet) inspired by World War II cocoa shortages to the modern-day phenomenon which was launched in its current Nutella avatar as late as 1964 and has since spread across the world, is remarkable.

The product has spawned reams of numbers and statistics including the near unbelievable one which states that a bottle of Nutella is sold somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds! A World Nutella Day is celebrated every February 5. Nutella recipe festivals, competitions and even a postage stamp commemorating this jar of joy.

It is Mr Ferrero’s masterful blend of chocolate, hazelnut and palm oil that has emerged as a winner, turning his father’s small pastry shop into a veritable chocolate empire and one of the most successful businesses in the world,

It also skyrocketed its owner into the list of the world’s richest men. Despite the success, the company has remained family-owned, Mr Ferrero remained reclusive and closely guarded his secret recipe through his life.

One could almost expect an army of Oompa Loompas to be manning the sprawling factories in Alba.

While Michele Ferrero might be no more, he leaves behind a marvellous legacy and continues to spread the happiness across the world.

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 21 February, 2015