Sommaire pour September 12, 2016 de Open Magazine

LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to your cover story, ‘Radicalisation of the Kashmiri Mind’ (5 September 2016). The northern-most state has long been in the news for turmoil and strife. However, we often forget to look at the smaller picture, so obsessed are we with Pakistan and geo-political debates. The lives of ordinary people, especially young children, are what we should focus on. What does a generation growing up to the sound of bombs and gunfire grow up to be like? How are we ever going to help them forget their tragic childhood? Will they ever get to experience the innocent joy and fun that every child deserves? These are questions that almost nobody cares to answer, or even think about. But they are important, especially if we want…

WHAT MAKES FOR a saint? In the conception of the Catholic Church, which will anoint Mother Teresa as one on Sunday, 4 September, it is intimately tied to the ability to perform miracles. The Vatican did its best to hurry the process along, making it one of the swiftest in the Church’s history. Usually, there is a five-year period after a person’s death for due diligence, but in Mother Teresa’s case, it was thought that there really was no need for that since her credentials had been well established during her life itself. There was her charity work, of alleviating the suffering of the destitute and dying in a Kolkata that was the most abjectly miserable city in an India roiled by deprivation. But two miracles were still needed. The…

IN the popular science of ‘Endology’, the decline—and the eventual fall—of the West is a perennial fascination. Strange, isn’t it, that it took only a quarter of a century after the demise of history—or the triumph of liberal democracy on the ruins of the Iron Curtain—for the winner to show signs of intercellular disintegration. It is inevitable, argue the apostles of declinism, that the West, after its unchallenged dominance of the marketplace and mindspace, is ceding ground to the new usurpers of the international order from the East. And in the evolutionary history of power, apogee is followed by atrophy, so it is the West’s turn to retreat to irrelevance. The new crop of navel-gazing nativists, with their focus more on the glorious home rather than on the spheres…

THE INDIAN MILITARY is an open book. It has no hardware secrets worth the name because every major weapons platform and armament in its inventory— from combat aircraft, tanks, artillery to warships and submarines—is procured from abroad and is thus compromised at the point of induction itself. There are only five arms suppliers of note—Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, the last four constituting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NAT O), whose members share highly sensitive information on the military technology supplied to Third World states among themselves, and, if it serves their individual national interests, with states that are in adversarial relationships with their customer(s). In the information age, moreover, there are enough purveyors of specialised information, such as the Jane’s series of British publications,…

NINE YEARS AGO, in July 2007, I woke up with my hands tied to a hospital bed. I had no idea where I was. The tubelight flickered and the tiles in the room were a dirty green. For a month, I had survived on hardly any sleep. My thoughts had raced at a frightening speed. Connected by patterns that had been imperceptible before, the world seemed like my creation. I was Shiva. I was the Second Coming. I had littered the streets of Delhi with pages from Virginia Woolf’s diary. Protesting control. The state, in particular, seemed despotic. Incarcerated, strapped, my question to the orderly was a very obvious one: “Have I been arrested?” A psychiatrist, portly and bespectacled, soon walked in to reveal to me my diagnosis. “You’re bipolar,”…

INSPECTOR BOREI GOWDA is not an easy man to love. He cheats on his wife, he is brusque, hates small talk and anything ‘cute’. Despite these shortcomings, Gowda is a policeman who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty to find the truth. In this second book featuring Gowda—a perfectlyflawed inspector reminiscent of crimefiction legends like Inspector Rebus created by Ian Rankin and detective Cormoran Strike by J K Rowling—gifted author Anita Nair gives us more than just a sweeping vision of a middle-aged cop chasing criminals. This crime fiction novel’s central theme is child trafficking and sexual abuse. It lays out in great detail the horrors that a young girl or a boy who may last remember being offered a candy by a benevolent old woman, wake up to, find…

A BOOK OF LIGHT, edited by Jerry Pinto, cannot be reviewed. This collection of essays that tells of those with mental vulnerabilities can only be clutched at night and appreciated for its courage and fortitude. After all, how can one appraise or analyse a description of a daughter’s suicide, a brother’s corpse, a lover’s mania or a mother’s ravings? These are beyond the pale of literature because they cut to the bone and into the core of human experience. All that a reader can and must do is sit down, shut up and listen. The first sentence of Pinto’s introduction reads: ‘My mother was bipolar’. These four words show there are no euphemisms to hide behind, no formalities to cower under. They set the book’s tone. Issues of mental…

I ASKED A friend who is a film buff if she could think of a film in India where food is the hero. “What do you mean?” she asked “Well, think of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, or Babette’s Feast, or La Grande Bouffe, or the Mexican one, Like Water for Chocolate. Or Meryl Streep who portrayed Julia Child in Julia and Julia. A film where the focus is on preparing a feast and through this, memories and emotions are evoked. Do we have something like that in India?” “Bawarchi, Cheeni Kum, Lunch Box, Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, English Vinglish, Queen, Stanley ka Dabba, Ramji Londonwaley, and Daawat-e-Ishq,” she replied, a day later. Very slim pickings indeed. Where is the poetic revenge of the wife in Peter Greenaway’s The…

IT WOULD BE interesting to find out Usain Bolt’s reaction to becoming part of what has turned out to be the most urgent debate of our time: India’s relationship with the bovine species. Here are the tweets of MP Udit Raj spaced a day apart: ‘Usain Bolt of Jamaica was poor and trainer advised him to eat beef both the times and he scored 9 gold medals in Olympic’, followed, in the interest of surviving within the BJP, by ‘I cited circumstances of Jamaica that despite poor infrastructure & poverty Bolt won 9 gold so our players should find ways like that to win’. You will notice that the second tweet makes no sense, but then you will notice that the first didn’t either, so if two nonsenses can cancel…

FINDING BEAUTY IN the traditional may be a flawed premise since it idealises the past. Which is why the ten artists in Revisiting Beauty have put a ‘contemporary’ twist on our tradition of miniature paintings and its notions of beauty. The exhibition, curated by gallerist Tunty Chauhan, is part of a series of exhibitions planned on the theme of beauty over the coming year. The curator poses the question: ‘Is beauty a ‘bad’ word in the age of cutting-edge, angst ridden art?’ The artists have responded with artwork that reconfirms the belief that art has a certain intrinsic relationship with beauty, even if it is a critique of the conventional notion. The exhibition features veterans like Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, V Ramesh and Nilima Sheikh whose works have attained a spiritual…

The Never-Ending Saga The latest in what seems like the unending behind-thescenes saga of Padmavati is that two studios have decided to join hands to fund the film. In order to divide the risk on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ambitious Rs 150 crore-plus epic, Eros Entertainment has reportedly reached out to Viacom18, and both studios are currently in talks to pool in and bankroll the project. The film’s landing cost, after provisions for marketing, promotions and other expenses like budget overruns and delays, could bring the project in at about Rs 180 crore, making it one of the most expensive Hindi films to be made. Meanwhile, although no official statement has been released by Bhansali, it appears Ranveer Singh is locked to play the male lead after a long round of…

WITH THE SIGNING of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), India and the US have further strengthened a military relationship that was already on a secure footing. There is plenty of speculation that with this agreement, India is now a de facto US ally and has ‘compromised’ its foreign policy independence. Since independence, India has followed a strange trajectory in its relations with the world. Due to a series of historical accidents, India chose to align itself with the Soviet Union even as it professed non-alignment. But if the Government chose to look in one direction, Indians looked the other way: through the Cold War years, a steady stream of Indians moved to the US and established a prosperous community there. This divergence of sorts is now finally being…

FOR THE PAST FEW years, I have been fortunate enough to spend my summers in France, one of thousands of British people who escape south for the warm weather and the pleasures of a country that sets a very high store by the quality of life. Here, in the south of France, everything stops for a leisurely lunch. Indeed, from breakfast to late in the evening, the day is punctuated by mealtimes that are all but sacrosanct. Freshly prepared food and fine wines are savoured and enjoyed whenever possible in the company of good friends and with stimulating conversation. It is all part of what makes France what it is, and the French are inordinately proud of their country and its traditions. For most people here, whatever their age, background…

“When I could not catch hold of a runaway cow I had taken for grazing, I would be under extreme tension” AJAY KUMAR PATRA 13 former cowherd SINU SAHA HAS no clue how old she is. But she can spell her name. She’s in Class 4, so maybe she’s nine. When she got here two years ago, she’d never known what school was. Or even the care of parents. She was working at a sweet shop somewhere, as her elder brother asked her to, washing dishes in terror of letting a glass slip out of her tiny hands. “Burra lagta thha (I used to feel bad),” she says of her earlier life, going sullen on being asked what a smashed glass meant. The brother worked at the same outlet, but…

“EVERY WOMAN SHOULD BE WELL EQUIPPED WITH THE NECESSARY DEFENCE MECHANISMS TO STAND UP FOR HER RIGHTS, EVEN AGAINST SOCIETY IF NEEDED” Sonakshi Sinha WHEN SONAKSHI SINHA was shooting for Tevar, more than a year ago, she tweeted, ‘My dad always called me Fearless Nadia. Now I know why. Ready to jump off a five-storey building.’ That was perhaps a teaser for her fans of what was to follow. With her just released film Akira, Sonakshi has set a new benchmark for action in Bollywood. The early promo of the film was enough proof that the actress had punched, kicked, fallen and risen above all others in this AR Murugadoss-directed film. Sonakshi says, “Murugadoss sir is associated with action films, but he has always done it with the male actors.…

THE WOMAN IS crying, no sobbing, no hiccupping, just crying; her shoulders do not move, her expression does not change, her eyes run freely. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ says the husband to television correspondent Ravinder Bawa. ‘Don’t pay attention to her. She feels she is going to get attached to the child. We [names another man, presumably the agent] have told her it is not like that.’ The husband takes the camera home, to those parts where his wife’s advance payment has already been put to use, a part of a re-done kitchen, the cementing of a deity-plinth. ‘It is all for her good only. Even when the rest of the money comes it will only go for the boy’s education.’ Camera back to where the woman is, sitting on the floor,…

IT WAS JULY and the sea ice had thawed just enough for the rubber dinghy to cut through its glacial sheen. To the port side, a pair of puffins bobbed up and down, their comical beaks reminiscent of a gluttonous child who has just finished a burger, lips stained with mustard and ketchup. To the starboard, kittiwakes screamed in consternation, rising on frigid currents that could have afforded them no buoyancy whatsoever. In the Zodiac, ten of us crouched in our dry gear, eyes transfixed on a spot thirty yards away ashore. In front of us was a patch of ice, crunched up and bloodied, torn asunder by a polar battle that had happened moments earlier. The victor lay over his spoils. A young polar bear, exhausted after having hauled…