Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in MAHI This refers to the story ‘Where She Is Not Scared’ (18 January 2016). It is true that men, regardless of which part of the country they are from, will never truly understand female empowerment. In the minds of men, as long as a woman is safe, taken care of, not beaten up or left starving, she should be happy and have no complaints whatsoever. They never realise that women too have their share of dreams, desires, passions and wishes that go beyond being trophy wives. So while girls might be ‘safe’ in Nagaland, they aren’t truly free. Of course, compared to metro cities they are much better off and enjoy a lifestyle that big city girls in India could never dream of. I do feel however, that this…

GLOBAL CRUDE OIL prices tumbled below $30 per barrel on 12 January for the first time in 12 years. After its record spike in 2008, when the benchmark price touched $147 per barrel, dire predictions of ‘post-peak oil’ led to scary predictions of a world starved of the commodity. What a change it has been since then. Global energy giants have begun reducing their workforce and many analysts say that oil prices won’t recover for some years. These predictions, just as those that forecast an oil apocalypse, should be taken with a pinch of salt. The news, meanwhile, is good for India. And for a change, the Government has displayed wisdom by using the opportunity presented by cheap oil to raise excise duties on oil products. When global prices swing…

‘SAUDI AARAMKARO’ IS how desi expats in the Gulf refer to it. Saudi Aramco, that is. With over 260 billion barrels of oil—the actual figure is a state secret—to itself under the sand, all in vast reservoirs that take the geological equivalent of a pin-prick to access, the company has had little to do but open and close spigots as and when it wants to keep the gooey stuff gushing out and cash gushing in. Billions and billions of dollars of it, enough to keep an entire country going; Saudi Arabia is financed by its revenues. Something within, though, seems to be astir. Muhammad bin Salman, son of the current ruler who has the kingdom’s oil sector under his charge, announced on 4 January that Aramco plans to hold an…

DONALD TRUMP IS looming before us like a disconcerting giant, a perverse, noisy Gulliver in a Republican Lilliput. With his adopted party’s presidential primary just a little more than two weeks away, Trump leads his nearest rival, Ted Cruz, by a clear—some would say hair-raising—14 percentage points in the polls. As of this writing, the Real Clear Politics average of multiple nationwide American polls has Trump’s support at 34 per cent, an astonishingly far cry from the two-and-a-bit per cent he could call his own in June last year, when he declared his presidential candidacy to widespread derision. The true impact of Trump’s success comes not just from his own numbers, but from those of the opponent who was vaunted to win the nomination when the contest began last year:…

ALPHABET SOUP FOR LOVERS Anita Nair HARPERCOLLINS INDIA | 204 PAGES | Rs 350 WHAT’S IT ABOUT food writing that tantalises our soul? When Pablo Neruda writes in A Lemon, ‘Cutting the lemon/ the knife/ leaves a little cathedral:/ alcoves unguessed by the eye/ that open acidulous glass/ to the light; topazes/ riding the droplets,/ altars,/aromatic facades’, it opens cellar doors in your head that you never thought existed. It plates that moment when your food memory collides with someone else’s fecund imagination. Anita Nair creates a series of odes to food in her new book that almost fits in your palm—if you have nice big hands—like a warm mug of soup. The book, incidentally, is called Alphabet Soup for Lovers. Komathi is learning the English alphabet. Her 57-yearold brain…

FOR DECADES, the idea of happiness has been linked with health and longevity. According to this theory, if you stay optimistic and lead a cheerful life, this attitude will get you good health, while misery and stress will shorten your life. Studies have linked happier people with longer lives and claimed happiness can even help protect against health conditions like heart disease. But according to a new study, published in Lancet, which investigated the link between mood and mortality, happiness has no real effect on death rates. The study was part of the Million Women Study programme in the UK, which also investigated the causes of breast and ovarian cancers in women. One million women between the ages of 50 and 69 were studied, where participants filled out a questionnaire…

THERE ARE SOME photos that you just cannot capture on your cellphone, especially if you want to play with lighting and details. Cameras from Fuji Film, Nikon and Sony come in small sizes and pack a lot of power, and the iPhone can take some great pictures, but the DxO One offers an outstanding way to combine a phone with a high-quality camera. Designed to be connected to the lightning connector of your iPhone, the DxO One lets your device act as both the screen and controls for the camera. Once connected to your phone, there is an app that needs to be installed in order to use the DxO One. This app also gives you a chance to try out different shooting modes and styles such as ‘program’, ‘aperture’…

CAST AMITABH BACHCHAN, FARHAN AKHTAR, MANAV KAUL DIRECTOR BEJOY NAMBIAR THERE IS ALWAYS a catch when casting Amitabh Bachchan in a film, and the makers of Wazir are snared in that no-win situation. Bachchan brings in an audience with his reputation and image, but the character he plays never stays the character in the script. His larger-than-life aura inevitably overshadows the role, which then expands and bursts at the seams, spilling out in all directions, taking up inordinate space and time and eventually edging out other important roles. This is exactly what happens in Wazir. Since it is a thriller about terrorism, every single character must play a specified role, particularly the protagonist, Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) officer Daanish Ali (Farhan Akhtar). Unfortunately, the Akhtar character gets short-circuited right at the…

The Frenemies Say Cheese Famously reclusive and deliberately inaccessible, Sanjay Leela Bhansali appears to be making a concentrated effort to change his ways. The Bajirao Mastani director-producer showed up at friend-turned-foe-turned-friend-again Farah Khan’s birthday brunch last weekend where he sportingly posed for selfies with the rest of Farah’s filmi friends. He also attended a Filmfare Awards ‘Pre Nomination’ party where he bumped into on-off pal Karan Johar just as he was making his way to the event. Photographers had a field day snapping both filmmakers who put on their best smiles as the flashbulbs popped. Bhansali was accompanied by his two-time leading man Ranveer Singh, who, according to the industry grapevine, will work with the director again in his next. Currently waiting for his hair to grow out, Ranveer will…

SHEIKH MOHAMMAD ABDULLAH, the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, died in September 1982. He was three months short of seventy-seven. He had been ailing, especially since a heart attack in 1977. Sheikh Abdullah’s funeral procession was gigantic. It may have been the single largest ever seen in the Subcontinent. The mass outpouring of grief was a measure of the stature he commanded among his people even in the twilight of his life. He had, after all, been the dominant figure of Jammu & Kashmir’s politics for a full half-century. A decade later, Abdullah’s grave—near Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine, on numerous occasions his base and pulpit over that turbulent half-century—was under guard by Indian paramilitary forces to prevent its desecration by armed militants and angry mobs. The apparent reversal in the Sheikh’s standing among…

ONE LATE AFTERNOON, on the last day of 2015 to be specific, a bright auto-rickshaw shot through Kalyan’s haphazard lanes and the Mumbai suburb’s narrow highway to reach a playground where a local cricket coaching camp was being held. Inside the three-wheeler, the conversation, like always, had veered towards cricket. Two schoolboys, 15-yearold Pranav Dhanawade and his friend, were discussing a local match they had watched when their senior companions joined in. Mobin Shaikh, a Central Bank of India employee who doubles up as a local cricket coach and was travelling with them that day to conduct the camp, had something to ask of Pranav: “Doosro ke baare mein sirf baat karega? Ya khud kuchh karega? (Will you keep talking about others? Or will you do something yourself?)” It was…

GUNS & THIGHS: THE STORY OF MY LIFE Ram Gopal Varma RUPA | 211 PAGES | Rs 500 DOES THE public disregard Dr Manmohan Singh’s incredible contribution as Finance Minister in 1991 because he messed up in his final years as Prime Minister in 2014? Yes, it does. Because public memory is frighteningly short and shallow. History, thankfully, is kinder. Would filmgoers, in a similar vein, not credit Ram Gopal Varma for making Satya in 1998 only because of the crap he created a decade thence—Shiva, Satya 2, Phoonk 2, Rakta Charitra 2, Bhoot Returns, Contract, Darling, Department, Agyaat… ? Unlikely. Because Satya’s significance, not just as a great film but a game-changer for Bollywood, is widely acknowledged. Varma’s role in Bombay’s film history is fairly safe. But he doesn’t…

THE CITY WAS UNRESTRAINED, impatient. The invasive blares of car horns pierced the smog, punctuating the potential quiet of the twilight hour, reminding us of the unmindful urgency of its dwellers who each had places to go, things to do, quite unlike the more desolate setting of the poem by the 12th-century saint, Gorakhnath, ‘Shunya gadh shahar, shahar ghar basti’ (In the empty fort, a city, in the city, a settlement). As we sit on the red-brick steps adjoining the new wing of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the erstwhile Jaipur House, located close enough to the historic Purana Qila, artist Sudarshan Shetty recites each doha, occasionally pausing to emphasise intricate subtleties. “If the city is empty, the fort is empty then where is the question of…

We recognise one another by the unique details of our facial features. However, this is not so for those who suffer from face blindness or congenital prosopagnosia, a condition where people are unable to recognise others by their facial features. People with face blindness compensate for this by focusing on, for example, their voice, hairstyle, or the way they walk. A study has now discovered that this condition can be traced to an early stage in this perceptual process. ‘Even the earliest face-selective responses, recorded approximately 170 milliseconds after seeing a face, are altered in people with congenital prosopagnosia,’ noted Dr Andreas Lüschow, a researcher on the study.…

A common problem with headphones is their lack of bass. This is what the ATH-WS1100iS is trying to fix. The gadget comes with huge 53 mm deep motion audio drivers and circular vents that help optimise air damping for enhanced bass reproduction. The ear pads are padded with a hard internal part and a soft outer layer, aiding sound isolation. The headphones perform amazing well and can produce a sound pressure of 100 db/Watt, revolutionising the experience of listening to music.…

IN MEMORIAM DAVID BOWIE (1947-2016) WHEN DAVID BOWIE’S final album Blackstar released last week, as well-received as it was, many were left wondering what it was all about. The cover featured not a picture of its famed artist, but a stylised black star. Some of the songs’ videos featured a blindfolded Bowie, wringing his hands, with buttons for eyes. The title song featured a dead spaceman. The lyrics were as cryptic and mysterious as ever. I Can’t Give Everything Away featured words like: Saying no, but meaning yes, this is all I ever meant. The track Lazarus had lines like: Look at me, I’m in heaven. I’ve got scars that can’t be seen, I’ve got drama can’t be stolen; everybody knows me now. What were the damn songs going on…

SANJAY DUTT IS going to be out of jail ten months ahead of time, a generosity that the state provides to rich movie stars who buy AK-56s and hand grenades from the underworld. Salman Khan’s case investigations were botched, admitted the Mumbai Police to themselves 13 years after the hit-and-run and a month after the Bombay High Court arrived at the same conclusion and let him free. In the midst of such depressing news compacted within a few days, what we must never forget is the power of positive thinking and the existence of a good side to everything. The ordinary Indian must first accept the fact that he did not have the foresight to be born to a movie star couple, the one singular achievement of Dutt. That might…

IS PRANAV DHANAWADE, the 15-year-old who scored a world record 1,009 in 323 deliveries in an inter-school match in Mumbai, a prodigy? He perhaps is, but only time will tell for sure, for a prodigy is by definition a person, especially a child or young person, of extraordinary talent or ability, and Dhanawade will have to compete on equal terms with adult cricketers to prove that he is indeed one. His was no mean feat: a thousand runs in any class of cricket is a mind-boggling achievement, even if Dhanawade made his record score against a weak opposition of younger kids on a small ground. He scored his runs at a strike rate of over three runs per ball, while leaving the previous highest individual score in any class of…

ANCESTRAL AFFAIRS Keki N Daruwalla FOURTH ESTATE | 242 PAGES | Rs 499 ‘Ancestors are a ghost wall; between their genes and their shadow, there could be a world in itself… Ancestors are a cave where boys shouldn’t enter. Set against our forefathers we’ll always be kids’—Keki N Daruwalla in Ancestral Affairs IN THE LATE 1990S, distinguished poet Keki N Daruwalla, now retired from his unlikely day job as the Additional Director, Research & Analysis Wing, was invited to deliver a keynote at a conference in Rajkot, where he encountered a curious literary category for the first time: Parsi fiction. Buoyed by the great writing and global successes of Rohinton Mistry and Bapsi Sidhwa, Parsi fiction, it seemed, had become the subject of many theses and plenary sessions. Cut to…

THE FRENCH eat snails and frogs’ legs, Germans devour sauerkraut and sausages, Americans guzzle beer and burgers, and Italians thrive on pasta and pizza. These, one might say, are commonly held notions about what nationals of a country eat. But how accurate are they, particularly for a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-regional country like India? If you ask someone in London about India’s national dishes, the response would be chicken tikka or biryani. But a Gujarati would disagree vociferously and propose Gujarati dal, a Tamilian, sambar , and so on. While the dal and sambar both use lentils, the other ingredients are different and produce markedly different tasting dishes. It got me thinking about what makes a dish uniquely French or Malaysian or Brazilian. How does a ‘national’ cuisine emerge, particularly in…

Why is it that when you are busy on your cellphone, playing a game or replying to a text, you fail to hear someone speaking to you? According to a new study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, this is because we become momentarily deaf to normal-level sounds around us when our mind is focused on a visual task. For the study, brain scans were carried out on 13 participants engaged in a visual task where they had to quickly decipher ambiguouslooking letters. Scientists found that during this period, the brain’s response to sound was significantly reduced and volunteers could not hear clearly audible sounds. The researchers claim our sense of hearing and vision relies on the same neural resources, which are limited and may only be available to one…

The Moto G is back in a new avatar. The Turbo edition features an Octa Core processor running at 1.5GHz on a Snapdragon chipset, letting you enjoy powerful gaming and apps. However, the phone is sadly supported with just 2GB of RAM. This new version outshines rivals, though, on its battery life, which can go for a whopping six hours with just a 15-minute charge. The phone also has much better IP67 protection to shield it from water and dust. It is currently available in two different colours: white, with a slate back, and plain black. Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in…

DIRECTOR Sean Anders CAST Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini This is a ‘brom com’ about a daddy and a stepdaddy. Did you know that a sterile man can become virile just by living under the same roof of a man who brims over with testosterone? This is told to us by a fertility doctor in the movie, Dr Emilio Francisco (Bobby Cannavale), a publicity driven charlatan if there ever was one. It is amazing how this film has completely bypassed the mommy (Linda Cardellini). All she does is try and keep her current husband (Will Ferrell) at arm’s length from the biological father (Mark Wahlberg) of her two kids. She fails miserably in the effort, because the two men actually like each other, polar opposites that they are. The…