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Capitalising on the Claus

Every year, dozens of Santas graduate from what is probably Mumbai’s oldest and only Santa training school. After learning the Santa talk, the Santa walk and the Santa ho-ho-ho, the red and white bundles of joy are transported to malls, shops, homes and Christmas parties all over India. Their professor, Martin D’Souza has been training “happy people’’ to play the jolly old man for 20 years now.

Classes for the only finishing school that aims at making flab and wrinkles attractive and lucrative begin in the first week of December. Admission criteria are physical attributes like high cheekbones, broad shoulders and a twinkle in the eye.

A member of the Clowns of India International (COAI) and International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM) D’Souza hires “fresh graduates or undergraduates’’ for his event management company Mad Hatters Entertainment. They are taught the nuances of clowning like juggling, magic, mime, stilt walking and comedy but only a select few get to play Santa. Both men and women can enroll.

Earlier, students were trained to be Mr Claus, Mrs Claus and the young and pretty Santarinas. But Mrs Claus had no takers. “Party goers prefer Santarinas with their halter-necks and short skirts’’, says D’Souza who has imported Claus costumes from America and Singapore for the 60 Santa-strong troupe.

Past experience has made the school shy away from Delhi parties because “hunt and hit Santa is a sport’’ for the saucy crowd there.

But 72-year-old Byculla-resident Cyril D’Souza who has been playing the role since 1983 says the crowd can be as raucous in Mumbai too. “I don’t mind the rough handling. Regular yoga helps me stay flexible,’’ he says.

He recalls the time when he was lifted by a crane to perform at the Chembur Gymkhana do which made him feel like a superhero performing a stunt. At a party at Mahalakshmi racecourse he had to arrive as Santa on horseback which proved quite cumbersome with the Santa costume.

This professional Santa vouches that he would make a good candidate for the Limca Book of Records since he shakes hands with over 2,000 guests for every party he visits.

A Santa from Bandra, Darryl Loyola informs that shaking hands and crowd management is a scientific operation. Disciplinary tactics have to be in place without being to obvious as a large crowd could cause a stampede and chaos. He has acquired an on-the-job expertise and can cope with rowdy crowds, hankering street kids and filmstar crazy fans as he often pairs up with celebrities.

Last week, he shared the stage with Salman Khan at Wellington Club where a Christmas party for orphans had been organised. A dance teacher at St Stanislaus School and makeup artist by profession, Loyola uses his professional skills to role-play Santa. He choreographs his own Santa stints and does his own old-man makeup.

A regular at Hill Road’s St Peter’s Church, this year, his bag of goodies not only contains sweets for children but medicine boxes for the needy sick who come for Christmas mass at the church.

Tags: Christmas, church, mumbai, santa claus

An online invitation to grow offline

On Saturday morning, 120 Mumbaikars, most of them internet junkies, gave the city a green Christmas gift. They had been invited online by techies Satish Vijaykumar and Ranjeet Walunj to adopt an Ashoka or Neem sapling. The saplings were given free of cost with a condition: They should have an online profile with updates, photos and videos for the next two years.

Participants were encouraged to use the #sapling tag on networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us and Technorati. An award awaits the participant whose sapling grows the tallest at the fastest rate. The group plans to plant 10,000 saplings to the city by 2010.

The citizens’ initiative has been called The Sapling Project (www.thesaplingproject.com) and was started because the organizers felt that most tree plantation drives were carried out at the National Park or Aarey Milk colony, while colonies and buildings that actually need more trees were being ignored. ”Living is a different thing, we’re just about managing to stay alive,’’ says Vijaykumar, a Borivali-resident, avid tweeter and blogger at bombaylives.com.

Weeks before the drive, online invitations to visit Shivaji Park and adopt a sapling were sent out using Twitter, Facebook and blogs. His friend Walunj wants to tie up with the BMC. “A lot of places in the city can be designated sapling zones where trees are needed. So people who do not find place can come here and plant them’’.

Online networking with tweeters in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi has enthused locals to carry out similar plantation drives as part of the project. The next drive in Mumbai will take place in January and the organizers will visit areas like Dadar, Bandra, Andheri and Borivali with saplings in a van for distribution.

In the past, several sapling-planting initiatives have been launched in the city. In a move to restore the degraded periphery areas of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, GAIA Conservation Foundation is working with the Bombay Natural History Society to get citizens to plant saplings.

Over 10,000 saplings of indigenous trees like Red Silk Cotton, teak, Shivaji’s Sword, Khair, Shivan, Ziziphus and Flame of Forest have been planted by hundreds of people at the Goregaon site. NGO I Love Mumbai has been carrying out planting distribution drives in the city too.

But environmentalist Rishi Aggarwal says drives like these need support from experts who understand the ecology of each tree. ”You can’t plant a tree that will grow to have a 30-foot canopy on a narrow road. Plantation has to be an informed exercise,’’ says Aggarwal who wants the tree authority to have a separate website giving details of where saplings can be planted in the city using GPS coordinate. ”Location is the key criteria and the BMC seems to have failed in facilitating the good intentions of citizens in this area’’.

Unemployed and underground

Saddled with debt and the tag of being unemployed, a group of 20 trained commercial pilots met last week at Kalina. They prefer staying anonymous and say there are around 3,000 others like them. They’re people who spent Rs 30- 40 lakh to train and obtain a commercial pilot license, and are now just about barely managing to pay EMI. Some are 21-year-olds, who joined flying schools, after not scoring well enough to make it to medical or engineering school. For them it was the best alternative, but little did they know that three years down the line, the slowdown-hit sector would have no vacancies.

For 22-year-old Divyesh Trivedi the captain prefix before his name is only of ornamental value. Today, after completing 200 hours of flying, the Dadar-resident works with a BPO. “How else do I pay an EMI of Rs 45,000?’’ he asks. Trivedi says it was the air traffic boom, three years ago that attracted a large number of young students to the sector. But that gap was filled by over 900 expat pilots and those who had retired after the government increased the flying age from 60 to 65. “It hurts when airlines continue to employ foreigners when there are so many qualified Indians waiting for a job,’’ he says.

Recruited on a contractual basis, expat pilots are paid 30-70 % more than their Indian counterparts with a bonus of free accommodation. “Their contracts are being renewed and other expats are still being hired. Why the unfair treatment?’’ he asks. “We want a rollback in the retirement age back to 60,’’ say pilots like Trivedi who have come together and formed the Unemployed Pilots Welfare Association of India this year. “For all government jobs the retirement age is 60, then why is it still 65 for pilots? Isn’t it a security risk since the rarefied atmosphere, fatigue and jetlag can make it tougher for retired pilots to fly?’’ they ask emphasizing the need for all pilots to have quick reflexes. Members network using the Internet and hold meetings like the one at Kalina to make sure they make the right noises, at the right decibels. But when they warn out-of-school freshers against attractive aviation school adverts, they are snapped at with, “You are pulling us down,’’ in return.

So severe is the job drought that even small time airlines are taking advantage of the large number of unemployed who are eager to fly. When Air India advertised for 30 trainee pilot posts, it received more than 1,350 responses and no one was selected because of reported irregularities. Spirit Air in Ranchi, a private air-taxi provider invited applications but charged a fee of Rs 6,000 from every applicant. Other private operators charge heavy deposits for every application, making huge profits in the process and do not even tell the applicant the results. “Recruiters are taking advantage of the jobless and milking us as much as they can,’’ says Dhruv Sen who was asked to show 3,000 hours of flying experience by one recruiter. “It takes almost a year to finish 1000 hours, with each hour costing Rs 7000. It is next to impossible for a newbie who generally completes 200-280 flying hours to have that kind of experience.’’

Tags: mumbai, pilots, UPWA