Sommaire pour April 11, 2016 de Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to ‘Have You Passed the Nationalism Test?’ and ‘Assembly Elections 2016: Backlash or Backslap?’ (4 April 2016). Development and nationalism go side by side. But what is nationalism is another question. Working to the best of one’s capabilities for the progress of the country is true nationalism. Playing politics over it is not. Politicians often indulge in this during assembly and other regional elections. Narrow concerns then tend to overtake issues of national interest. Along these poll campaign trails, we sometimes hear absurd and anti-national speeches by netas that are unconstitutional and detrimental to India’s interests. Such politicians must learn to rise above vote-bank politics. They must think of the nation before their state’s interests. Regionalism also hinders the economic growth of both…

DEFINITIONS HAVE a finality about them, particularly so when they are articulated by people who prefer certainties to fluidity, the rigidity of dogma to the elasticity of ideas. When power defines the citizen’s terms of engagement with the state, it sets the limits. It abhors the questioning mind. Definitions then are a call for submission and obligation, and they are set on the assumption that the state knows better than the citizen, that power bestows on its wielder the responsibility of showing the path, the only path. Definitions are then necessary means to control the mass conscience, and they take us back to an old pretence: it is the loftiness of a few that, in the end, redeems the unrefined majority. That was a totalitarian pretence: ‘Follow me, listen to…

WE WERE SUPPOSED to meet under the World Time Clock at Alexanderplatz at 4:30, but Zaher is now ten minutes late. He has just texted to let me know, but he didn’t need to —I knew he would be. He has a lot of nice qualities, but promptness isn’t one of them: when we took German together last year, he always showed up ten minutes late. It’s tempting to make a joke about his not having turned Prussian yet, but all that stuff about German precision is mostly a myth, at least here. Berlin is Rome-on-the-Spree. I’d asked to get together because I’m working on a piece about the integration of Syrian refugees into German life, and I wanted to find out how he’d gotten on. It’s an important question,…

FOR SOMEONE WHO translates the world through word, thus inscribing upon the self the complexity of sensual experience, confronting Himmat Shah’s artistic creations is unprecedentedly destabilising. One is not reduced to silence so much as rendered speechless. Where, in other previous encounters with art, words summon themselves to form thought, in Shah’s case, there occurs not blankness but a sudden recognition of a previously unacknowledged absence of vocabulary. All known verbal language is suddenly redundant. At the tip of the tongue is only the strangely familiar but until-now unfelt. It is no wonder then that ‘enigma’ is the one word that seems to recur most frequently in Shah’s linguistic vocabulary and that has subsequently been regurgitated in the art historical discourse surrounding his practice. “Human being is an enigma, and…

THE BOOK OF SHIVA Ravi Shankar Etteth Harper Element 255 Pages | Rs 299 It was noon when Asananda reached Rishikesh. He ambled through the sun-spotted shade of ancient trees, his shadow scraping the shadows of the old walls along the eastern riverbank. He carried a wooden staff to negotiate the narrow, steep hill roads. Over his shoulder was slung a cloth satchel that contained his meager possessions. Rishikesh’s two-kilometre length of temples, ashrams, ceremonial bathing ghats and shops that sold everything, from religious artefacts to vegetables, is situated on the banks of the Ganga. The area is called Swargashram. The monk stepped inside, onto a sandy yard, cooled by the shade of trees. There, on a verandah, sat Guru Gyanananda, eating rice and vegetable off a copper plate. A…

CAST Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams DIRECTOR Zack Snyder BATMAN CLEARLY APPEARS to be a more troubled character than Superman. For one thing, he has more dreams and wakes up in cold sweat, leaving you to connect his dreams with reality. Though the opening dream in this film is about Bruce Wayne as a child, being surrounded by a swarm of bats in a dark place, the others are generally about his dead parents. Which begs you to ask the question of when these indestructible superheroes became so much like fallible humans of an Ingmar Bergman or a Federico Fellini film . These DC comic book characters are conjoined in one film, because they are both, apparently, defenders of ultra capitalist states. In the previous Superman film, Man of…

SHOULD YOU PUT your faith in the Union Minister of State for Ayush, Shripad Naik, and decide that instead of chemotherapy, you will do yoga to get cured of cancer, then you will die. If it is slow cancer like that of the prostate, you might see sense before it is too late. If it is a fast acting one, your chances are zero. This is what Naik said on Sunday, as reported in The Indian Express, “It is a proven fact. We have visited the Bengaluru-based Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (S-VYA SA) institute, where many people told us they have been cured of cancer by regular practice of yoga. The institute has found a technique of yoga for the prevention and cure of cancer.” He added that his…

IT HAS BEEN the most violent, distasteful and at times maddeningly puerile drama in America’s recent political history. No wonder the Republican primary contest has dominated headlines, in America and everywhere. In just the past few days, a naked picture of Donald Trump’s wife was circulated by a group linked to the Republican front-runner’s main challenger, Ted Cruz, under the headline: ‘Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady’. Trump responded by vowing to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife, Heidi, whatever that might mean. He then sought to denigrate Mrs Cruz’s looks by retweeting an unflattering picture of her alongside another shot of Melania, a former model. Cruz called his rival a “snivelling coward”. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was meanwhile arrested for assaulting a female journalist. The lawyer hired…

NOTHING SCARES ARUN Sharma. The 25-yearold MBA graduate has participated in high-altitude bike racing, trekked to Everest Base Camp by himself, jumped off an aeroplane at 15,000 feet and if all goes well, he’ll soon be diving with sharks in Australia. Yet, when it was time for him to tell his girlfriend that he’d found someone else, he suddenly developed cold feet. Eventually he decided not to inform her at all. Since they’d met through a dating app, Sharma suddenly realised he could also end things equally conveniently. “We only met at coffee shops and chatted through Tinder. I simply stopped taking her calls and deactivated my account. She was really into me, I didn’t want to break her heart,” says Sharma. Since then he has virtually ended or ‘ghosted’…

WHO IS WILLIAM Dalrymple? Is he a historian and author, or farmer and goatherd? Does he thrive in the desolate moors of Scotland, the farmlands of Mehrauli, the caves of Ellora or the frenzy of Diggi Palace in Jaipur? Is he happiest with his books and family to protect him, or does he revel in distant lands and remote geographies? And now we have a new question: did you know he was a photographer before he was a writer? The Writer’s Eye (HarperCollins, 72 Pages, Rs 999) proves that the man in question can take photos, and really good ones at that. Unlike so much of his previous work, which untangled the whens, hows and whys of history, this collection of photos is much simpler. It interests itself only in…

BAD NEWS: LAST JOURNALISTS IN A DICTATORSHIP Anjan Sundaram Bloomsbury Circus 208 Pages | Rs 335 This superb book brilliantly captures the eerie calm, the constant gnawing anxiety of life under extreme political repression. The fear that eats at the mind until author Anjan Sundaram convinces himself the birds on his bedroom roof are crack commandos ready to drop through the ceiling and abduct him. The contagious mistrust slowly rises through the book; like the author, you too wonder whom to trust. It gradually becomes apparent that the surreal veneer of normality is a giant deception that convinces only the foreign diplomats and donors, who pride themselves on their influence with the dictatorship and on its efficiency. Who better to be the foot soldiers of freedom than Rwandan journalists who…

The Burden of Being a Celebrity Kid A gossip column is probably not the most fitting place to say this (irony, anyone?), but stalking celebrity kids on social media and turning the information obtained into stories is plain lazy journalism—not to mention an invasion of their privacy. Hardly surprising that Shah Rukh Khan is peeved at a section of the media who routinely rummage through Facebook and Instagram accounts of his kids Aryan and Suhana—and their friends!—to track their movements. The Dilwale star is believed to have lost his cool earlier this week when a picture of his daughter holidaying on a beach with her little brother AbRam found its way onto online gossip sites. It isn’t clear yet whether the photograph was taken by friends and hijacked from Facebook…

WHEN NEWS EMERGED of a plane being diverted from Alexandria in Egypt to Larnaca in Cyprus on Tuesday, it had all the makings of another dreary Middle Eastern terror incident. Barely six hours later, it was all over. In pathetic TV shots, one could see the lone hijacker, Seif Eldin Mustafa from Egypt, trying to escape from a cockpit window. He was, of course, arrested. Mustafa, later described as a mentally unstable person, had put forth demands such as the release of female prisoners in Egypt, among other vague conditions that kept hostage negotiators busy for a while. He later released most passengers who were on the plane. Another version has it that he diverted the plane to meet his ex-wife who lived in Cyprus. But that was not the…

India will soon adopt the number ‘112’ as its national emergency number. Akin to the concept of national emergency numbers abroad, for instance ‘911’ in the US and ‘999’ in the UK, Indians will be able to seek emergency assistance by dialling this number. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had suggested the adoption of 112 as the national emergency number last year. India currently has various emergency numbers like 100 (for the police), 101 (fire), 102 (ambulance) and 108 (disaster management). Apart from this, various states have helpline numbers for special categories of citizens. All these emergency numbers will gradually be phased out. WORD’S WORTH “We have to create so great an India that people will themselves say ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. We don’t need to force it on…

ONE OF THE SCENES from Mein Huun Yusuf Aur Yeh Hai Mera Bhai, a multi-award willing play at the 11th Mahindra Excellence for Theatre Awards (MET A), including for Best Director, has a dialogue which leaps out at you. The play is set in Palestine in 1948, when the country was gripped by political turmoil and uncertainty about its future. But in this scene, a madman in a village wants to talk about metaphors, not politics. The rational man speaking to him offers him an uncharacteristic insight: “People don’t want to discuss metaphors because they tell the truth. People want to discuss politics because it is all lies.” The idea that mystique reveals more truth than the literal that packages shiny lies disguised as the truth has universal resonance. But…

MOTHER, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY? LOOKING FOR LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS OF MANIPUR Anubha Bhonsle Speaking Tiger 256 Pages | Rs 499 There are books that update a telling, and there are others that offer fresher insight. Mother, Where’s My Country? by television journalist Anubha Bhonsle attempts both as it travels the roiled psycho-geographical territory of conflict and policy-callousness that is Manipur. As centrepiece she holds to narrative scrutiny a face from this Northeast Indian state best known to most South Asians after that of MC Mary Kom (alas, for many the face of actor Priyanka Chopra who reprised the gutsy boxer as Bollywood shtick). Irom Sharmila, the perplexing yet simple icon of fortitude is a tough act to follow. This lady has since late-2000 been fed by the government through…