The story behind Vivan Shah's name

At the Kasauli Litfest where your diarist was playing lounge lizard over the weekend, there were several memorable encounters, some of which are fit to print and bear recounting on these pages. Reclusive artist Vivan Sundaram lives here in a lovely, rambling light-filled house inherited from his half-Hungarian and half-Sikh mother and where we were invited for tea.
As soon as we entered, we stepped on a rug, only to jump back on being told that it was designed by his famous aunt, Amrita Sher-Gil. Keeping us company at the salon as we listened in to the kind of rarefied conversation largely unheard in glitzy Mumbai, were the writer Githa Hariharan, theatre impresario Neelam Man Singh and journalist Sunil Sethi.
But no delectable conversation is ever complete without a smidgen of gossip. One of the things that came up was an arch comment on Naseeruddin Shah's recent and much-acclaimed memoir, pronounced `be-ras' by a member of our party: “He spent too much energy trying to be self deprecating and did not capture the essence of those tumultuous and landmark NSD years." Vivan Sundaram chose to maintain a diplomatic silence through this, perhaps because Naseer has named his younger son Vivan Asad after his two heroes, Sundaram and the poet Ghalib.