IT IS not, at first sight, a marriage made in heaven. The conductor is a Parsee Indian, brought up in Bombay, trained in Vienna and living in Los Angeles.
The orchestra is a band of refugees who maintain a pocket of the ultimate in Western culture in the middle of in a war zone. And yet Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra have a relationship that is stronger than many a marriage. He first performed with the orchestra in 1961, when another conductor cancelled at short notice. He was appointed its music adviser in 1969, music director in 1977, and in 1981 Mehta accepted the title of music director for life.
It is a unique position in a business where contracts rarely run for more than five years.
In the world of classical music, successful conductors are the prima donnas of the orchestral world, able to name their price and their terms.
And Mehta is a leading light of this elite cohort: he is “honorary conductor” of a host of mighty orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera. He conducted the first Three Tenors concerts with Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo on the eve of the 1990 World Cup of soccer. He even has a character from the The Muppet Show, Zubin Beckmesser, named after him.
The boy from Bombay began his starry career on a high and went up from there. He cut his conducting teeth on the Liverpool Philharmonic, progressed to the Montreal Symphony and then the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the astonishingly young age of 24, and succeeded Leonard Bernstein 15 years later at the New York Philharmonic’s helm, where he was to stay until 1991. His talent and youthful charm was a refreshing change from the dour and god-like authority of conducting legends the likes of Furtwangler, Beecham and Karajan. He called orchestral musicians by their first names, he cracked jokes and made mistakes, and he reinvigorated orchestras and audiences with his turbo-charged performances.
Yet General Manekshaw himself recounted a cabinet meeting in Mrs Gandhi’s office in April 1971. To forestall secession, the Pakistani government had already cracked down in what was then East Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had crossed the border into India. Mrs Gandhi wanted the army to invade Pakistan. General Manekshaw resisted. The monsoon, he pointed out, would soon start in East Pakistan, turning rivers into oceans. His armoured division and two infantry divisions were deployed elsewhere. To shift them would need the entire railway network, so the grain harvest could not be transported and would rot, bringing famine. And of his armoured division’s 189 tanks, only 11 were fit to fight. 
It is the fascinating memoir of three young Parsi men of a group of six from the Bombay Weightlifting Club, who set a precedence in globe-trotting by going around the world in bicycles. Starting in October 1923, they journeyed for over four years, going from the Middle East to south Europe, across the British Isles to America, then covering Japan and China to come “rolling home” through Bengal, Madras and Ceylon. While the authors revel in the “gay amusements” of Paris, they have nothing but scorn for the filthy Italian peasants with dirty neckties, and are repulsed by the Japanese meal of live mice dipped in honey. However, they find the biggest surprise of the trip right in their own country, in Calcutta, when only a handful of people turn up to welcome the cyclists, who had become quite famous elsewhere in the world by then. To read the book is to travel not only all over the globe but also to another time preserved in the memory of the adventurers.
Bhicoo Manekshaw, elegant with her short, elegantly set silver hair, finger nails neatly manicured is 85 years and proud to be so. One of the best-known names in the world of gastronomical delights, she arrives before 11 every morning at her son-in-lawrestaurant Basil and Thyme at the Santushti complex. She oversees the menu for the day and makes the soups, sauces and desserts for the day.