A New Start

FT: The playwright who became president

Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. "But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn't reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race."

I wonder whether there isn't some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti- consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald's, why shouldn't they? He responds: "I don't want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different . . . I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn't metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

"That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket . . . What I'm talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilis-ation. We don't know where it's going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race."

His book has more to say about the US than Europe, and I ask Havel about his admiration for America. He says: "The US, and especially New York, is a sort of a bazaar of the entire world. Everything is there, mixed together. It's a view upon the entire world, isn't it? I find that atmosphere appealing. It's a truly free country."

I ask him whether his fascination with the US is compatible with his concerns about consumerism and globalisation, in which American companies are prominent. He insists there is no contradiction: "Global corporations are by definition global, so it is not just a US invention or a US job, even though obviously the US plays a bigger role in this than the Czech Republic, for instance," he says. "It is a phenomenon of our civilisation. I don't think it's good to associate it solely with America or even with America as a country that invented this."

===

The playwright who became president

By Stefan Wagstyl

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

Always a shy man, Václav Havel shuffles into view as if, even in his own office, he feels uncertain of his surroundings.

Years of fame as a dissident writer, anti-communist revolutionary and president of both Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic do not seem to have robbed the 71-year-old philosopher-king of his natural diffidence.

His welcome is warm but a little hesitant. His handshake is restrained. His voice, gravelled by decades of smoking that ended in lung cancer, is so gentle that it is hard to imagine him delivering the hundreds of speeches that he has made.

And yet the moment the conversation begins he comes alive. It is as if the mind inside this frail body has energy far bigger than the frame in which it is confined. He listens intently, pauses before speaking and shapes his answers with deliberate care - plus occasional flashes of the wit that brought him early acclaim as a playwright.

We sit down at a stylish cherry-red table in a space carved out of a period building in Prague's historic centre. It is a selfconsciously modern office with glass bookshelves and walls hung with contemporary art. Havel wears jeans and an open-necked blue shirt. Around him are scores of books in Czech, German and English.

Coffee is served - a mug for Havel and a delicate china cup for me - and a plate of chocolate biscuits that go untouched. I had asked to meet in a restaurant for lunch, but was told this would be difficult because Havel is so well known that we would be constantly interrupted.

I quiz Havel about his pictures. He says they are largely gifts he received as president and points to a colourful Buddhist tapestry. "There are small things here. But what is important is this carpet. It is a gift from the Dalai Lama, and only seven people all around the world have this kind of carpet," says Havel.

For many other public figures this would be a boast. But for Havel it is a statement of the obvious: his time as president transformed his life into what he calls "a fairytale" in which extraordinary events such as meetings with the Dalai Lama, not to mention Pope John Paul II, the Clintons and Robert Redford, became ordinary.

This year Havel published an English edition of his recollections of his presidency, entitled To the Castle and Back . It is not so much a memoir as a series of commentaries, interspersed with contemporan-eous office notes and entries from a diary he kept in 2005 while working on the book. President Havel worries about everything from the future of the planet to the half-cooked potatoes served to the visiting Emperor of Japan and the bat that has taken up residence in his summer house. "In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it? The light bulb has been unscrewed so as not to wake it up and upset it."

As he leaves the castle for the last time, he wonders about what happens to an ex-president in a country with little experience of ex-presidents. He writes: "I have to smile to myself when I realise that people don't know how to address me. Some say 'Mr President', others say 'Mr former President', some say 'Mr Havel' and it's only a matter of time before someone addresses me as 'Mr former Havel.'"

He also worries about the failure of ex-communist states to complete the revolutions of 1989 by reforming what he calls post-communism - the domination of former communists in positions of economic power. I ask him how the reform of post-communism is progressing. He says the fight is still on, with victories in popular revolts in Ukraine and Georgia and more sedate gains in central Europe. "As the young generation grows up, society needs to rid itself of the power of the people deformed by communism, people who had succeeded in quickly establishing themselves in the new regimes and in occupying various powerful positions."

Havel is, however, disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism. At our meeting he makes clear that there is little that can be done about this in free societies. "But I feel there is no reason why we shouldn't reflect upon this trend. It is a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race."

I wonder whether there isn't some intellectual snobbery hiding behind this anti- consumerism and put it to him that if people wished to use their freedom to go to McDonald's, why shouldn't they? He responds: "I don't want to prevent anyone from being able to do that. What I want to say is something different . . . I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn't metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code.

"That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket . . . What I'm talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilis-ation. We don't know where it's going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race."

Pointing to a mobile phone, he says: "Fifty years ago, I wouldn't have imagined this little device could be used to make calls all over the world, to make video recordings, and to send images. If someone had told me about this then, I would have thought the future world would be a wonderful one when people would have these things and would be able to communicate better. But that didn't happen. The world today is worse, and it is full of more traps and contradictions than it was 50 years ago."

I am shocked to hear him go this far. Surely, at least in ex-communist central Europe, the world is incomparably better than it was 50 years ago? Havel answers patiently: "Yes, of course it is a good thing that the Iron Curtain fell and that communism ended, but that still doesn't mean that the world is a better place. The big differences between the developed world and the developing world are deeper than ever. The unifying forces of globalisation incite various forms of chauvinism or nationalism. Terrorists almost have the capacity to fire nuclear missiles. The world is full of various dangers, including ecological ones in the form of climate change, and so on."

He continues: "I'd say that it is a good thing that the world is no longer divided in two, but new superpowers are emerging, and who knows what this will bring? China today is more powerful than Russia. Russia is witnessing the rise of a strange, special sort of dictatorship with strong imperialist demands, albeit dressed more elegantly than before."

I ask Havel why, in his book, he is so rude about his fellow Czechs. He writes of the "bitter provincialism" of the "little Czechs". Elsewhere he writes: "What they [Czechs] consider ideal is the capacity to enjoy various blessings - as far as possible with no struggle, no work and no cost."

Although Havel does not say so, a prime exponent of "little Czech" politics is the Eurosceptic Václav Klaus, his rival and successor as Czech president. Havel describes in his book how the Thatcherite Klaus made an uneasy political companion for Havel and other mainstream liberals who led 1989's "Velvet Revolution". When Havel became president and Klaus prime minister, Klaus's well-known arrogance caused repeated conflicts even over the most trivial incidents, such as Havel's decision to express officially his regrets at the death of Frank Zappa. Havel writes that Klaus would have been "happiest if I had submitted everything to him in advance for approval".

Despite these barbs, many Czechs are disappointed the book does not say more about the Havel-Klaus relationship. Havel says: "I am very much opposed to reducing the last 20 years of our history to personal tiffs between myself and Václav Klaus. And I don't like it when people get the impression that I did nothing but fight with him. I don't like that, and it doesn't reflect reality."

Havel denies that Leaving , the first play he has written since the end of communism, has anything to do with Klaus, even though many Czechs think it has. The work concerns a leader who has lost power but is reluctant to admit it and refuses to surrender his official residence to a successor named Vlastik Klein. Havel insists he conceived the idea in 1988, before the Velvet Revolution.

I ask Havel about his controversial second wife, the actress Dagmar Veskrnová. Many Czechs were upset when Havel married Ms Veskrnova, his long-standing girlfriend, in 1997 in what they saw as indecent haste within months of the death of his first wife, the widely admired Olga Havlová. I suggest that having become a moral authority far beyond his country's borders, he might have behaved with greater care. He shoots back: "Yes, but even a moral authority has the right to marry a second wife when his first wife dies, no? It was about something else . . . These campaigns [against Dagmar] had a strange element of jealousy, as though the public felt abandoned or betrayed when I remarried, as if society were an abandoned lover. It's an interesting phenomenon."

We turn to Europe. Havel, a passionate pro-European, is keen that the European Union's constitutional treaty should be kept alive despite its rejection in the recent Irish referendum. He is convinced the EU will muddle through, and, ignoring President Klaus's misgivings, says the Czech Republic should press on with ratification. Only then, he believes, should the EU consider a simpler treaty: "It would be best now to quietly select some three or four people who could create a beautiful, simple constitution that children could learn about at school."

His book has more to say about the US than Europe, and I ask Havel about his admiration for America. He says: "The US, and especially New York, is a sort of a bazaar of the entire world. Everything is there, mixed together. It's a view upon the entire world, isn't it? I find that atmosphere appealing. It's a truly free country."

I ask him whether his fascination with the US is compatible with his concerns about consumerism and globalisation, in which American companies are prominent. He insists there is no contradiction: "Global corporations are by definition global, so it is not just a US invention or a US job, even though obviously the US plays a bigger role in this than the Czech Republic, for instance," he says. "It is a phenomenon of our civilisation. I don't think it's good to associate it solely with America or even with America as a country that invented this."

A last question. Has he, I ask, since he is photographed on the cover of his book with a cigarette in hand, stuck to his promise to stop smoking? "I haven't smoked in 12 years," he says, "but about 40 times a day I feel like having a cigarette."

Stefan Wagstyl is the FT's eastern Europe editor. 'To the Castle and Back' (Portobello Books, £20). To buy it for the special FT Bookshop price of £16 plus P&P, call: 0870-429 5884.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Airmiles, Credit Cards

Hot airmiles

Published: July 1 2008 09:30 | Last updated: July 1 2008 19:44

Flying might have lost its glamour in the past few years but the business of marketing loyalty schemes has remained as alluring as the designer handbags on offer in duty-free. Now, however, the International Accounting Standards Board’s new rules on such programmes threaten to wipe hundreds of millions of dollars off airline balance sheets.

Qantas’s review of whether to spin off its frequent flyer division – which has 5m members – and sell up to 40 per cent to outside shareholders could be the first in a series of restructurings and sales to result from the IASB’s new rules, which came into force on Tuesday.

Traditionally, the liability of unused flyer miles was recorded on the airlines’ balance sheet at the (relatively low) marginal cost of a delighted regular customer putting their bum on an otherwise empty seat: a meal, some baggage-handling and a few extra gallons of kerosene.

But the IASB, seeking a more rigorous analysis of the opportunity cost of frequent flyer rewards, now wants the liability to be valued at “the amount for which the award credits could be sold separately”. At its most conservative, that means basing the value on the cost of a full price ticket.

The new regulations have their logic, no doubt. But their timing is awful, given that airlines are struggling for survival amid surging oil prices. When Qantas voluntarily adopted the new standards this year, it took a hit of A$508.4m to its retained earnings.

Spinning off its loyalty programme could raise between A$2bn and A$3.5bn. Keeping control would make strategic sense as the Qantas brand is at stake. And acting quickly might produce a better price than waiting for other airlines to crowd the market and depress demand.

Run well, these can be embarrassingly successful standalone businesses. One danger is that the semi-independent reward programme outshines the parent airline. Air Canada spun off its rewards programme, Aeroplan, in 2002. It is now worth four times more than the airline itself.

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Qantas looks at loyalty spin-off

By Elizabeth Fry in Sydney, Raphael Minder in Bangkok and,Justin Baer in New York

Published: July 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 2 2008 03:00

Qantas is considering the partial float of its frequent flyer business later this year, in a move that could raise between A$2bn (US$1.9bn) and A$3.5bn for Australia's biggest airline.

The Qantas announcement comes as some Asian flagship carriers are also studying whether to spin off their passenger loyalty programmes - including Korean Air and Japan Airlines - at a time when their main airline business is facing soaring fuel costs and stiffer competition from low-cost carriers, according to people close to the airlines.

While the carriers would not comment, such a move could allow them to generate additional funding, as well as highlight the value of a business that is less reliant on aviation as it generates sales by selling air miles to credit card companies, hotels and retailers.

Geoff Dixon, chief executive, said Qantas would decide by August whether to sell a 40 per cent stake in the business, with a partial float among the options. Qantas, one of the world's most profitable airlines, is overhauling its loyalty programme into one where points can be redeemed for any seat, at any time.

Qantas shares rose as much as 9 per cent yesterday, before closing up 6.6 per cent at A$3.24. UBS, Citi and Macquarie have been appointed as joint lead managers to manage the potential IPO. Morgan Stanley will continue to provide financial advice ahead of a possible offering.

US airlines that face a potential cash crunch later this year are starting to sell pools of frequent flyer miles to their credit card partners. The downturn has made many conventional capital-raising options more costly or dilutive, leaving carriers to explore alternatives that leverage assets that will retain value even as market conditions continue to deteriorate.

Airlines' ties to the credit card industry have come under greater scrutiny from investors this year as mounting losses cast doubt on carriers' ability to avoid seeking protection from creditors.

Continental Airlines, one of the six legacy US carriers, raised $413m on June 10 from affinity card partner JPMorgan Chase by selling miles and posting some of its routes and airport slots as a security interest. The figure comprised about 12 per cent of Continental's total cash at the end of the quarter.

In a bid to persuade investors that they will stave off bankruptcy, carriers such as American Airlines and United Airlines have noted that they have billions of dollars in miles and other unencumbered assets that could be exploited to raise cash in the coming months.

Additional reporting by Jonathan Soble in Tokyo

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

- - -

US airlines sell off frequent flyer miles

By Justin Baer in New York

Published: July 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 2 2008 03:00

US airlines that face a po-tential cash crunch later this year are starting to sell pools of frequent flyer miles to their credit card partners.

The brutal industry downturn has made many con-ventional capital-raising options more costly or dilutive, leaving carriers to explore alternatives that leverage assets, including frequent flyer miles, that will retain value even as market conditions continue to deteriorate.

Airlines' ties to the credit card industry - both the issuers that co-brand cards and the electronic payments companies that process ticket purchases - have come under greater scrutiny from investors this year as mounting losses cast doubt on carriers' ability to avoid seeking protection from creditors.

Credit card issuers use airline miles to reward account holders for making purchases.

Continental Airlines, one of the six legacy US carriers, raised $413m on June 10 from affinity card partner JPMorgan Chase by selling miles and posting some of its routes and airport slots as a security interest.

The figure comprised about 12 per cent of Continental's total cash at the end of the quarter.

Others may follow. In a bid to persuade investors that they will stave off bankruptcy, carriers such as American Airlines and United Airlines have noted that they have billions of dollars in miles and other unencumbered assets that could be exploited to raise cash in the coming months.

"The wheels are already in motion," JPMorgan analysts Jamie Baker and Mark Streeter wrote in a research note last week.

"Can a similar deal between American and Citibank [its affinity card partner] be that far off? Not in our opinion."

Because carriers often sell miles to card issuers at a discount to persuade them to acquire large blocks in advance, the transactions can be costly.

Nevertheless, airlines can make a persuasive case. Large issuers such as JPMorgan Chase, Citi and American Express value their marketing agreements.

Frequent flyers tend to earn and spend more money, and exhibit more loyalty toward their co-branded airline card than the typical account holder.

"Issuers are always trying to find a way for cards to not be commodities," said Richard Vague, a former credit card executive who ran stand-alone card issuers that are now part JPMorgan and Barclays.

"Airline programmes have always been one of the most successful in terms of having additional value."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

- - - -

Card companies hold a strong hand

By Justin Baer in New York

Published: July 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 2 2008 03:00

Last autumn, Frontier Airlines selected First Data over its peers as the low-cost carrier's credit card processor. But by April, Frontier held the electronic payments company responsible for its descent into bankruptcy.

Frontier's Chapter 11 filing underscores the crucial role the credit card industry plays in determining which airlines survive the downturn unscathed.

While credit card issuers can be a source of capital for airlines struggling with record fuel costs and slumping demand, card processors like First Data and US Bancorp can have the opposite effect on a carrier's financial flexibility by holding on to some or all of the proceeds from advanced ticket sales.

Processors have the right to "hold back" cash under certain circumstances because they take on the risk that airlines may go out of business before they meet all of their future obligations to passengers.

In short, if a consumer uses his credit card to buy a seat on an August flight to Los Angeles, and the airline fails in July, it is the processor who is left to reimburse the would-be passenger.

"It's really just like an extension of credit, in the sense that you're collecting the cash upon tendering the receipt but not delivering the service until some point in the future," said Ben Hirst, Northwest Airlines' general counsel. "That's typically a credit-based decision and so it varies by carrier, depending upon the relationship of the airline and the processor and the strength of the company."

In some cases, an airline's processor is part of the same financial services conglomerate that owns the company that co-brands credit cards with the same carrier.

Still, the threat of potential processors' hold-backs "may pose an even greater liquidity risk than fuel over the next several months as cash balances come under increasing pressure", JPMorgan analysts Jamie Baker and Mark Streeter wrote in a research note.

"Any material change in hold-back could exact a heavy toll on liquidity."

Concerned that Frontier's financial conditions had wilted materially, First Data put in place a timetable that would have quickly held back 100 per cent of the airline's advanced sales.

In filing for Chapter 11, Frontier was granted a stay on the holdback policy.

"Unfortunately, our principal credit card processor, very recently and unexpectedly informed us that, beginning on April 11, it intended to start withholding significant proceeds received from the sale of Frontier tickets," Sean Menke, the airline's chief executive, said in a statement.

"This change in established practices would have represented a material change in our cash forecasts and business plan."

Brian Mooney, president of First Data's Merchant Services unit, said his company was surprised, too.

"Even they would admit that the high price of oil had caught them in a tough bind," Mr Mooney said. "We had ongoing dialogue with them in the months leading up to the filing. They had not mentioned they were considering bankruptcy."

Under protection from creditors, Frontier reached a processing agreement with First Data that increases the extent of the hold-back more gradually. While troubled by the severity of First Data's actions with Frontier, many US airlines executives see the Denver-based airline's filing as an extreme case. Larger carriers will have more leverage and additional sources of liquidity, they argue.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

- - - -

 

Australian carrier soars on idea to float customer scheme

By Raphael Minder in Bangkok

Published: July 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 2 2008 03:00

Investors yesterday sent Qantas shares to rally to their biggest one-day gain in a year, after the Australian carrierannounced it could list its loyalty passenger programme.

But beyond investors' euphoria, which resulted in the Qantas share price rising 6.6 per cent to A$3.24, lies a long-debated idea that continues to divide the airline industry.

The benchmark was set in 2001, when Air Canada spun off its Aeroplan frequent-flyer scheme as a separate entity. Aeroplan now trades on a multiple of 18 times 2008 earnings and has a market capitalisation that is four times that of Air Canada.

However, the Canadian success story has not been sufficient to convince European airlines such as Air France to follow suit, while some Asian airlines, including Korean Air, are now showing interest but refuse to disclose their plans.

In fact, even Geoff Dixon, Qantas chief executive, did his best yesterday to damp shareholders' enthusiasm by insisting a partial flotation was only one of the options being considered.

"Under active consideration for the future of the programme is a partial initial public offering, potentially for completion in 2008," he said.

That caution underlines the dilemma faced by airlines that seek to boost the value of their assets without losing control over them. Proponents of the spin-off idea point to Aeroplan as an exemplar of how airlines can extract greater value from a programme by turning it into an independent profit centre, capable of ultimately forging new partnerships with other airlines.

Peter Harbison, executive chairman of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, a Sydney-based consultancy, says that, given Aeroplan's track record, it makes sense that "all airlines who have a well-established frequent-flyer programme are looking at the concept", which amounts to a recognition that the sum of the parts can be worth more than the whole.

"The bad apple is often the airline itself, which tends to contaminate the others," he adds. The worst scenario, however, is an immediate loss of a favourable and secretive contractual arrangement between an airline and its loyalty programme, which could also force the airline to raise its assessment of the liabilities generated by its redemption plan.

In the longer term, there is also the potential for reverse contamination as an independent programme branches out.

"Should the divested unit enter risky ventures and ultimately go bankrupt, the damage to the loyalty that Qantas has built up would be immense," noted Morgan Stanley in a report earlier this year, which forecast that Qantas would therefore settle for a partial sale.

Still, analysts believe that Qantas is among those airlines that have most to gain from floating its programme because, as a flagship carrier, it has built up a long-standing domestic clientele of more than 5m cardholders, a significant attraction for Australian banks and other local partners. That applies even more to Japan Airlines and Korean Air, two carriers that have also been studying a spin-off and which have, respectively, about 20m and 15m programme members.

On the other hand, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines, two of Asia's most profitable air carriers, have successful loyalty programmes but with a relatively small domestic base, which makes an IPO a less attractive option, according to observers.

That they are still determined to extract more value from their programme was, however, demonstrated recently by Cathay, which launched a new venture with American Express after ending a long-standing card deal with Citibank. Listing a loyalty programme also creates additional costs, estimated at A$10m (US$9.5m) a year in the case of Qantas by Morgan Stanley, because of the breakdown in the existing contract between the airline and its programme and the need to hire more staff to set up a fully fledged business operation.

But Qantas, like many other airlines in the region that have committed to an extensive fleet expansion, has already earmarked A$13bn of capital expenditure over five years.

That in itself could be the compelling reason for Qantas and others to seek to raise additional cash from an existing business.

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Fry

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: 'I feel less afraid of the world'

And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. "He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew," says Palin. "People just don't bother, they don't notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, 'I must remember that.' "

I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. "Does it switch itself off when it's bored?" he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.

"I always bring it down to the personal experience," he replies. "The other thing is to give a voice to people who don't normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go."

am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. "I'm immensely relieved," he says to my own relief. "In some people's eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian ."

I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: "I'm not pretending there aren't dangers but I think saying, 'These are the places we should not go,' restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, 'What do you know about the world now?' And, God, I don't know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn't travel."

===

'I feel less afraid of the world'

By Rahul Jacob

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

When Michael Palin met the Dalai Lama a few years ago, the Tibetan leader said he recognised Palin from his television travel programmes. The two quickly discovered that they had shared a passion for geography from an early age. "It's just an assumption but I felt a certain empathy when he was talking about how atlases were his favourite books when he was young and I said they had been mine too," recalls Palin.

Palin met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in northern India, where he has lived in exile for nearly 50 years since fleeing China in a dramatic 15-day journey by foot. A few weeks later, Palin found himself in the Dalai Lama's apartments in the Potala Palace in Lhasa while filming a series on the Himalayas. "Looking out over the city and the plains, I thought, 'This is what he was doing growing up in the 1950s and there was me in Sheffield looking at an atlas also.' "

Palin has barely sat down at Wiltons restaurant in St James's before he is telling stories. First there is one about how he was once photographed during lunch and how acutely embarrassing it was. The photographer's enormous lamps had shone a spotlight on him in the middle of the restaurant. It was, he says, "admirable" that everyone else carried on as if this were entirely normal.

There is one about his own failure to show a similar level of restraint when, at a friend's wedding, the registrar read out all the bridegroom's middle names, including one that none of his friends had known before. Everyone was laughing "including his betrothed", Palin recalls, and the only way out was to look as if "we were very moved".

And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. "He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew," says Palin. "People just don't bother, they don't notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, 'I must remember that.' "

I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. "Does it switch itself off when it's bored?" he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the filming of Around the World in 80 Days , the BBC programme that marked the launch of Palin's hugely successful second act as a travel journalist. Its success prompted epic television adventures such as Pole to Pole (1992), Sahara with Michael Palin (2002) and Himalaya with Michael Palin (2004).

Aside from the great landscape shots, the charm of watching Palin's shows lies in his ability to put people at ease even when he doesn't share a common language. Watching Michael Palin's New Europe , first aired last year, I chuckled through an episode in Latvia where Palin is made to wear a wreath about the size of a bush and participates in a pagan dance, all of which he goes along with gamely. In Turkey, a young woman tells him she dated a man who participated in the local passion for wrestling in leather pantaloons after olive oil has been poured all over the combatants and Palin sets off to investigate.

In the book that accompanied the series, Palin writes of being on a boat at dawn, making its way along Croatia's coastline. "What I am looking out on now is Dalmatia and I'm not the only one excited by it . . . Shakespeare set part of Twelfth Night here. Dalmatia, homeland of the Illyrians, was settled 5,000 years even before the Greeks and Romans arrived. This is not new Europe, this is very old Europe."

Our first courses arrive remarkably quickly - gazpacho for me and smoked eel for him. Aware from my own experience as the FT's travel editor of the challenges of travel writing in an era when so many of us are frequent flyers, I ask how he keeps his work interesting and relevant. "I always bring it down to the personal experience," he replies. "The other thing is to give a voice to people who don't normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go."

The inspiration for New Europe came from his feeling, when waking up on a long-haul flight back to London, that he was flying above places that were just two hours from Heathrow but which he knew little about. I suggest the series resonated partly because so much of the workforce in Britain is from eastern Europe, not least the staff in restaurants. Later I ask the waitress where she is from and this leads to an animated conversation between her and Palin about her native Moldova. His empathy builds bridges with people he meets - and in turn with audiences around the world.

Our main courses - poached halibut for him and grilled salmon for me - have been brought as speedily as the first course and this prompts Palin to remark on how unusually attentive the restaurant's service is by London's standards. Before he came here he had assumed the quintessentially British Wiltons ("since 1742"), complete with green velvet banquettes in separate booths, would be the sort of place that "members of the House of Lords visited with their researchers". On his previous visit, however, he remembers a group of businessmen from Dubai trooped over to his table and asked him to look them up when he was next there. Palin says he picked the restaurant for our meeting today because it is quiet and apologises because it is expensive.

By this point, I am relaxed enough to confess that, having grown up in Calcutta, I never watched Palin in Monty Python's Flying Circus , the TV series that made him and the other Pythons - including Eric Idle and John Cleese - comedy legends, nor in the subsequent Python films. I am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. "I'm immensely relieved," he says to my own relief. "In some people's eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian ."

Palin traces his gift for comedy back to boarding school, where he enjoyed impersonating teachers. As a 10-year-old in 1953, he developed a mini-cabaret based on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. "I would tell this running story about the coronation and it was about the Duke of Edinburgh being taken short."

I ask whether it was ever performed on stage in school and this leads Palin to reminisce about how his father, an engineer at a steel mill, was wary of his son's interest in acting. "He just saw this as a folly that would lead to a life of dependence on him. I didn't realise until he died quite how little [money] he had. He put about a third of his salary, about £500 a year, into educating me at Shrewsbury."

When he was growing up, Palin had assumed that his father had a particular dislike of theatre. In fact, "it was all to do with his hoping that I would eventually get a good job, probably better than he got."

Returning to travel, Palin recounts how an Ethiopian approached him in London a couple of years ago and thanked him for not showing his country as a victim. "Everybody has a sense of pride about where they live," he says. "I don't think the way to help is to say, 'Help is on its way from the World Bank.' I remember being in Tanzania once and the World Bank representative was in Dar es Salaam to discuss the next five years of Tanzania's economic cycle. They all seemed in terrible awe of him. I am not an interventionist. I really find that when we intervene, we just cock it up."

We discuss a shared concern - the often overly alarmist travel warnings issued by the UK Foreign Office and US State Department against visiting many parts of the developing world - and this produces another rich anecdote. When Palin was filming a few years ago in the admittedly dangerous tribal areas of northern Pakistan, a posse of 10 local policemen was sent to accompany him and the BBC crew. He wandered into a local market "to watch people make guns".

"A man came up and talked quite aggressively about the British and our policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan and I remember thinking, 'This could get nasty and I'm glad we have 10 security guys with us.' They were nowhere to be seen. It did not turn into a problem at all but I said later, 'Where were the guys?' It turned out that the police were so pleased to be with the BBC, they were having a group photo taken with the camera crew."

I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: "I'm not pretending there aren't dangers but I think saying, 'These are the places we should not go,' restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, 'What do you know about the world now?' And, God, I don't know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn't travel."

After decades of travelling, however, Palin, who turned 65 last month, has decided that he wants to stay home with his wife Helen, who once joked that she might have to divorce him because she had tired of answering questions from reporters about what a nice man he was. Being away for several weeks at a time has become a bore for Palin and he wants to enjoy watching his two-year-old grandson grow up.

Then, after allowing me to quiz him obsessively about my favourite actress, Maggie Smith, whom he has worked with, Palin thanks me and rushes off to another appointment. He was right about the bill - it is exorbitant - but, hearing the jollity prompted by Palin's goodbyes to the staff at the front of the restaurant, I think that you can't put a price on that ability to make people laugh.

'New Europe' by Michael Palin is out now in paperback (Orion Books, £7.99)

Rahul Jacob is the FT's travel, food and drink editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The dangers of banality

Excerpt
The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

==

The dangers of banality

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil". Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics that could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass murder of human beings. The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly "normal" - "more normal at any rate than I am", as one of them said with black humour, "after having examined him".

When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply "obeying orders".

Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight. If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us. We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today's politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with 100ft-high banners. We find it reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes that are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother ).

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt's formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality. One petty example is sports commentary. At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that, too, until it was sold down the river to Sky). Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud. But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.

Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever-more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis. Commenting on the tattooed quotation from Dostoevsky that the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd: "Oh, he's intelligent too - that wasn't what we used to read, was it Lloydy?" The idea, it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be "one of the lads".

Test Match Special , one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme that comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies. "There's really nothing to say," opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently - not a sentiment that could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnston.

The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station that treats classical music as if it was chocolate - and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness that should have been banned long ago by the EU. The early evening offering on Classic FM is called Smooth Classics , as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap. What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others. What is wrong with that? In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so "we need to be able to 'bite off' and 'chew' experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment . . . to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own."

The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

harry.eyres@ft.com

Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward

Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along. Gwendolyn Brooks

 

FT: Figure of speech

But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

==

Figure of speech

By Michael Fullilove

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

I once attended a talk given by President John F Kennedy's speechwriter, adviser and "intellectual blood bank", Ted Sorensen. He was asked who had written the most famous line in Kennedy's inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Was it JFK's work, or his speechwriter's? Sorensen's answer was magnificent: "Ask not!"

The speechwriter's code of silence requires that a discreet veil be drawn over the drafting process. Adherence to this code is rare these days, however. Speechwriters routinely brief friends and journalists about their authorship of some golden phrase or other. Occasionally they even scrap publicly for credit.

Sorensen is different. For more than four decades, he minimised his role in the drafting of the speeches delivered on the New Frontier. Only now, in this new memoir, with the other parties dead and the archives open, does Sorensen pull back the veil - a little.

Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History throws new light on Sorensen's central role in both the speechwriting and policy processes in the Kennedy White House ("I was too busy ever [?] to smell the flowers in the White House Rose Garden," he notes). But he always recognises JFK's primacy in both domains: "I never confused which of us was the elected leader and which was the assistant."

The president who appears in Sorensen's stories is rigorous, curious and aware of his own frailties - dissimilar in most respects, then, from the current incumbent. The world's opinion of America's leader was also strikingly different at that time. When a US emissary briefed French President Charles de Gaulle on the Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, de Gaulle brushed aside an offer to review the CIA's aerial photography. "No," he said, "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."

Sorensen admits JFK's flaws: his faint-heartedness in ducking a 1954 vote to censure Senator Joe McCarthy, his "blind spot on Cuba" and his "deaf ear on China". And he acknowledges the president's philandering: "He should have known that ultimately the inevitable disclosure of his misconduct could diminish the moral force and credibility of all the good he was doing," Sorensen writes. On the other hand, Sorensen refuses to provide succour to Kennedy's enemies, stating, "I know of no occasion where his private life interfered with the fulfillment of his public duties."

In other words, Sorensen keeps faith with Kennedy. Though a conscientious obj-ector in his youth, Sorensen is a good soldier. Here, too, there is a stark contemporary comparison in the former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan would not, I suspect, have even become an intern in Sorensen's day. But the real difference between the two men lies in the measure of their loyalty. Within two years of leaving the Bush administration, McClellan has a book in the stores dumping on the man who made him. Nearly half a century after JFK's assassination, on the other hand, Sorensen still feels what he calls "the obligations of loyalty, which for me outweigh all pressures to cast prudence, privacy, discretion, and the secrets of others aside".

Counselor is a wise and handsomely written memoir which reveals the uncommon attributes of its author. Somehow Sorensen has dodged the pomposity which attaches to so many important men in their advanced years. He recognises his failures and limitations; he cites the charges levelled by his critics, to whom he is generous; he enumerates regrets which he might easily have concealed. He has even forgotten his Secret Service code name, which others display as a badge of honour.

According to this book, John Kennedy was "a good and decent man". My first thought was that this is too sentimental a judgment. But he must have been, to have attracted so fine an associate as Ted Sorensen.

Michael Fullilove is director of the global issues program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Prometheus, Rockefeller, I Believe

"Prometheus, Teacher in Every Art, Brought the Fire That Hath Proved to Mortals a Means to Mighty Ends."

I Believe

"I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every
opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.

I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that
government is the servant of the people and not their master.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the
world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity
to make a living.

I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that
economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether
in government, business or personal affairs.

I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social
order.

I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be
as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position
-- is of supreme worth.

I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of
mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross
of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.

I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name,
and that the individual’s highest fulfillment, greatest happiness, and
widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will.

I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone
can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might."

http://www.rockefeller.edu/archive.ctr/jdrjrbio.html

==

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/taylor/2008/05/wy_zappos_pays_new_employees_t.html

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

I spend a lot of time visiting with companies and figuring out what ideas they represent and what lessons we can learn from them. I usually leave these visits underwhelmed. There are plenty of companies with a hot product, a hip style, or a fast-rising stock price that are, essentially, one-trick ponies—they deliver great short-term results, but they don’t stand for anything big or important for the long term.

.....

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

FT: Sari nights and henna parties

Sari nights and henna parties

By Amy Yee

Published: May 17 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 17 2008 03:00

On a recent spring afternoon the sound of hammers and saws drifted from my neighbour's house. This was not another example of the feverish construction that is changing the landscape of Delhi. Rather, it was part of a seasonal ritual that transforms homes all over India for the precious cool months of the year. The neighbours were preparing for a wedding.

Over the course of the day, carpenters built the frame for a tent and created a temporary foyer of white and red fabric. Trucks loaded with rolled carpets, bolts of cloth, bundles of flowers and assorted equipment pulled up and emptied their wares. In the evening guests were greeted by the bride's sisters dressed in colourful saris and throughout the night the sound of music and singing filled the air.

This is a common scene during India's wedding season, which lasts roughly from October to the end of May, before searing heat and monsoon rains set in. In recent months at houses on my street, and indeed all over India, tell-tale signs of weddings sprouted like spring flowers. An otherwise anonymous gate to one property on my street was strung with garlands of bright orange marigolds and dark green paan leaves. Another home was festooned with diaphanous fabric from its rooftops so it resembled a grand ship about to set sail.

Across cultures, marriage is one of life's most important rites of passage but in India it is a milestone for which middle-class families assiduously save for years, then go all out to host a marathon of parties and rituals leading up to the wedding.

As Indians become wealthier they are spending more to stage elaborate multi-day events leading up to the ceremony. India's $31bn wedding industry is growing at 25 per cent a year, according to a report in the Indian magazine The Week.

Today, a reception might be held at a hotel in order to accommodate hundreds of guests and the largest million-dollar weddings are held at venues such as country clubs that can accommodate thousands. But for many Indians, some part of the wedding festivities is still held at home.

"Home is where your memories are. You belong in that space," says Chiara Nath, who was married at her parents' home in New Delhi this spring. "The significance of every moment you spent at home before you leave becomes really poignant."

The mehndi , a party where the bride and female guests have their hands decorated with henna, is usually held at the home of the bride or her relatives. The sangeet , a party of singing and dancing that precedes the wedding, might also be held at home.

"One big reason to have the mehndi at home is to integrate the whole household into the wedding festivities. Relatives and friends gather to celebrate in a more intimate way," says Mohini Bhatia, whose sister Radhika got married in Delhi in March.

Yet even in family spaces the look and feel of Indian weddings is undergoing dramatic changes. For Hindu weddings, red and gold hues used to dominate the decor. The flower of choice was the marigold, an auspicious bloom typically used for religious offerings, strung into long garlands on the house.

But conventions are shifting. Rising incomes and greater awareness fostered by more travel have made many Indians more demanding and discerning. There are also more cross-regional marriages that might combine elements drawn from the different cultural traditions of the bride and groom.

In the past, weddings were organised by the bride's family. Now brides and bridegrooms can have more influence. Pastel shades and light fabrics might replace red and gold hues and heavy cloth. Themed celebrations might draw on different cultures and aesthetics. The ubiquitous marigold might be jettisoned for roses, orchids, lilies and gerbera daisies.

Amrish Pershad, a wedding planner who designed the sets for Mira Nair's 2002 film Monsoon Wedding , estimates wealthy upper middle-class Indians spend up to Rs600,000 (£7,300) on design and decor for a single event and as much as Rs2.5m-Rs3m (£30,500-£36,500) for all the expenses of one event, which might include food, drinks, music and service. The costs of the weddings of the wealthiest Indians could amount to the equivalent of millions of dollars, wedding planners say.

Preeti Singh, whose daughter married in Delhi this February, hired Pershad to help plan and co-ordinate six events, including the marriage ceremony. Five of them were held at her home in Delhi and her sister's farm - a sprawling estate complete with swimming pool on the outskirts of Delhi.

For a cocktail party at Singh's home metres of lime green and yellow fabric were draped from a second-floor balcony over the front yard to transform the house into a pastel cocoon. Pershad, originally a florist, covered the front gate with delicate roses and used hanging ivy and creepers to hide parts of the house from view. Instead of setting the residence ablaze with white lights, as per convention, he subtly interspersed strands of lights amid the ivy.

The farmhouse was the venue for the sangeet , which was themed around Buddha. Statues of the deity, paintings and candles were set up at the party, attended by 700 people who danced to Hindi pop music played by a disc jockey.

It was just one in a series of events in the week leading up to the wedding that transformed the farmhouse day after day, like a theatre set. The mehndi had an Indian "village" theme, where 350 guests ate, drank and mingled beneath large umbrellas made from old saris, "like in Mughal times", says Singh. "Vendors" gave guests bangles, hand-crafted shoes and hair ties as though a village mela (or "gathering" in Hindi) had been transported to Delhi. About 600 people attended the outdoor wedding reception, which had an "English" theme characterised by pink tablecloths, rose bouquets and a canopy draped in pink fabric.

Traditionally, the home of the bride's family would be open to visiting family members for about a week before the wedding but in return for access to an open house of eating, singing and celebration, relatives would take charge of organising food, decorations, flowers and other tasks. But times have changed. "Now no wedding goes without a wedding planner," says Singh. "In the old days you just had a caterer and the tent- wallah [wallah denotes a vocation in Hindi] would do the needful." Families used to cook for themselves. Now caterers are de rigueur and more exotic menus are in demand. "Now you have to have sushi, Chinese and continental food," adds Ms Singh. Pradeep Bedi, another Delhi-based wedding planner, says the marriage industry has gone through enormous changes in the past five years. "People are coming up with their own ideas. They are concerned about minute details now."

He attributes the shift in attitude to increased spending power of middle-class Indians, not to mention "Indian movies showing glamorous things".

Arab, Hollywood, Bollywood and a "crystal ball" are themes he has recently worked to produce. As expectations increase, so does the pressure to stage ever more opulent events. Although Singh says an impressive wedding means you've "said goodbye to [your daughter] in the best manner you could ever do", she also laments that they are becoming too commercialised.

But in another take on the tailoring of the modern Indian marriage celebration prompted by increasing affluence, Chiara Nath had a simple, elegant event at her parents' farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. Only 250 guests were at the sangeet and just 80 people attended the reception.

Nath said there was initially great resistance to the idea of such a small occasion from her parents. She was told she would offend a lot of people by restricting the guest list but Nath, a designer who lives in the coastal state of Goa, insisted on a pared-down event. "For me, none of that formality was necessary."

Her restrained aesthetics shocked Bedi, her wedding planner. She requested cream hues and gold accents for the reception tent, table cloths and chair covers. "Mr Bedi thought I was crazy," admitted Nath, explaining he thought the palette was too cold and drab, especially as white is the colour of funerals in India. "I said: 'It's OK. Less is more.' It was an exercise in patience," said Nath.

Ultimately, Bedi was converted to her vision. Weeks later he lauded the wedding as "subtle, simple and classy". And though the celebration was more restrained than most, the result was an intimate affair held at the bride's childhood home.

"I wanted it simple," said Nath. "I did what was most necessary to me."

Amy Yee is an FT correspondent in New Delhi

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008