Inhaltsverzeichnis für June 27, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to the cover story, ‘Cyber Bullies’ (20 June 2016). While it is quite disturbing to learn about the number of teens who are bullying their classmates online in India, it is not entirely a surprise. Cyber crime is hardly, if at all, monitored in this country, making it an easy place for people to target others. In some ways, it has become a platform for venting feelings of extreme hatred. And while public figures and adults may still have the resources to cope with anonymous abuse, children may not have the emotional or psychological strength to deal with the same. The effect that cyber abuse has on youngsters is probably the worst. Phenomena such as body and sex shaming have become a reality…

DURING THE HORRIFIC attack on a gay nightclub in the US, the shooter Omar Mateen called up a police helpline and reportedly revealed his allegiance to the leader of the terrorist organisation ISIS. A few days later came a rumour of the death of that leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but no one is in a hurry to believe it. Over time, there have been several unverified reports of his death or injury, and in one case, even paralysis from a supposed spinal injury. This time, the rumours say he was injured in a US airstrike on 14 June. And Amaq , a news agency which is believed to be linked with the Islamic State, has reported, as per some news reports, that Al-Baghdadi has succumbed to his injuries. The US…

AN ENTIRE generation of dreamers who sat up late nights studying hard to become rocket scientists and then found themselves laughing at their own naiveté may now have reason to drop their grey-haired cynicism and advise today’s kids to get as dreamy as they like about outer space. It could yet be a career open to pursuit. Market forces, at last, are at play in this arena, thanks to America’s spirit of enterprise and—dare one add—India’s scientific temper. Rocket launch services seem ready for blast-off as a business with a plurality of players in real rivalry, and it is no longer insane to imagine Indian companies going all out to recruit tomorrow’s whizkids of escape velocity. Our space agency ISRO, whose commercial wing Antrix Corp Ltd has positioned itself as…

OUR CONSTITUTION IS in vogue these days as never before. Scarcely does a ministerial speech fail to make a ritual genuflection to its all-pervasive majesty. Prime Minister Modi even used the occasion of his recent address to the two houses of Congress in Washington to inform the world that the Constitution was his only holy book. (Though it is the Bhagavad Gita, and not the Constitution, that he prefers to hand out on his visits to foreign leaders, the sentiment deserves applause.) Last November 26, Parliament held an unprecedented special session to celebrate (though largely through unvarying expressions of consensual admiration) the day 66 years earlier, on 26 November 1949, when the Constituent Assembly finished its work and agreed on a Constitution that was to be formally adopted two months…

ZINDAGINAMA Krishna Sobti Harper Perrenial 480 Pages | Rs 550 LIKE MOST GIRLS who reached puberty in those times, Krishna Sobti, the grande dame of Hindi fiction, too was told by her mother to replace her frocks with salwars. She refused to wear the salwar, a symbol of conformity, and chose the garaara, a flowing long skirt. A ceremonial dress in Punjab of her childhood, the garaara was not her symbol of rebellion but a statement of originality. It was her first commitment to something which later reflected in all her work and life. Frock to salwar was a rite of passage for girls in the village, but Sobti made it a point of departure with her garaara. Sobti in her garaara may look like a dignified begum, but she…

TASTING MENUS have become de rigueur these days in restaurants, and not just in the fine dining ones. A tasting menu, which has its origins in the banquets and feasts of ancient Greeks, Indians, Persians and Romans, and continues in the degustation of the French and the omakase of the Japanese, consists of, as the Oxford Dictionary says, ‘sample portions of many different dishes served in several courses for a set price’. But the dictionary’s description does not do justice to the complexity of the endeavour. A tasting menu is to food as a symphony is to music, and a garden dreamscape is to gardening, and a novel is to an author. It is in the composition and the performance of a tasting menu, in the drama in multiple acts…

THE ASPIRING politician who does not have either charisma or intelligence or connected kin finds himself in the peculiar position of having to climb a difficult mountain relying entirely on the worst and most comic traits of his character. It is his good fortune that often that is enough. That is how India woke up to the bizarre ritual of a painted Donald Trump having his mouth smeared with a birthday cake by a party known as the Hindu Sena. What remained of the portrait was more a defacement than a celebration, but in any case, Trump, all those thousands of kilometres away, wouldn’t really mind. Chances are he might even be pleased. Because that is just the kind of man he has shown himself to be and those like…

I REMEMBER VIVIDLY how my grandfather once came home in almost a state of shock after visiting a friend of my mother’s: “She had no flowers in the house, not even a small posy from the garden.” I don’t recall if my mother and she remained friends. Fifty years later, I use my grandfather’s reaction as an excuse to buy flowers at least weekly in my attempt to maintain some semblance of good housekeeping. The culture of buying and giving of flowers is deeply sexist. Men give women flowers, and gay men are thought to like flowers, making it all very non-masculine. Only as I write this do I realise I have never given flowers to a straight man. I buy cut flowers often as there just aren’t enough flowers…

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party nominee for the presidency of the United States, recently described her Republican opponent Donald Trump as “temperamentally unsuited” to hold the highest office of America. The comment struck many Congress members in India as an apt description for their own party Vice-President Rahul Gandhi. And when US President Barack Obama set off ripples of laughter with his response to a TV anchor’s query on whether he thought Trump was the right presidential candidate for the Republicans, “I don’t know about them, but we think so,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on a US visit, might well have felt the same way vis-à-vis Rahul. Just a few weeks earlier, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a political rival of Modi, had called Rahul the real ‘USP’ of…

LISTEN TO THE FLAMES: TEXTS AND READINGS FROM THE MARGINS Edited by Tapan Basu, Indranil Acharya, A Mangai Oxford University Press 184 Pages | Rs 250 A SUCCESSFUL anthology evokes both a singularity of style and a diversity of content. Listen to the Flames, a collection of Dalit literary writing, is an attempt to create a Dalit aesthetic. As a project, it has a threefold intention. Firstly, it announces the arrival of what Tapan Basu calls a pan-Indian Dalit consciousness. Dalit writing is no longer Maharashtrian writing or Telugu writing. It creates a universe for a wider imagination. Secondly, the project, through the very encounter of reading Dalit stories, makes the reader reflect on his own prejudices, the comfortable little stereotypes which enforce a Brahminic perception of caste. Thirdly, it…

FINALLY THERE is light at the end of the tunnel for the Goods and Services Tax (GST). There is now a realistic chance that the ambitious tax reform Bill will be passed by Parliament in the Monsoon Session this year. The GST law is much more than a mere tax reform and envisages a single national market in India, a dream that eluded even the framers of the Constitution. While the foundational document has provisions that promise freedom in inter-state commerce, in practice each state has pretty much behaved like an independent country when it comes to local taxes and their rates. More than locational advantages and availability of raw materials, it was the tax treatment of industries and companies that led to divergences in the economic destiny of different…

Can anyone object if a missive, even a nasty one, begins with ‘Dear’? Every public correspondence course going back a few centuries would recommend it. It could actually be rude otherwise. Why then would HRD Minister Smriti Irani have a problem when Bihar’s education minister sends her a short tweet beginning ‘Dear @smritirani ji…’? She replied accusing him of discourtesy, aking how he could address women as ‘Dear’. This makes little sense. Perhaps his tweet questioned her lack of focus on education policy and she was merely trying to embarrass him. There is, after all, a difference between ‘Dear Smriti Irani’ and ‘Smriti Irani dear’. WORD’S WORTH “If we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very…

WHEN THE EMPIRE dressed up in vibrant colours for the Queen’s 90th birthday last weekend in London, it was a generational saga of royal pomp on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Competitive palace balladeers chose their finest words to wonder whether the thirteen-month-old Charlotte, from the arms of her mother the Duchess of Cambridge, had already mastered the art of waving at the subjects thronging the Mall. The monarch, in summery green, enjoying the aerial spectacle above and the orderly adoration below, did not look like an imperial relic indulged by the islanders in their extended sunset. It was as if this sprightly old lady was the last English institution unsullied by time, the only one that unites the past and the present in a perpetual ceremony of simulated glory.…

OUT OF THE BOX By Rohit Chawla “FANS ARE YOUR BIGGEST ENEMY. THEY WANT YOU TO KEEP DOING THE SAME THING TILL ONE DAY THEY ARE BORED OF IT AND THEN THEY ACCUSE YOU OF DOING THE SAME THING” Anurag Kashyap EVER SINCE HIS debut film Paanch (2003) ran into trouble with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), director Anurag Kashyap has been no stranger to controversy. Over a career that has explored edgy, often dark themes, Kashyap has emerged as a powerhouse of alternative cinema. From the trippy Dev. D (2009) to the sprawling Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), he was at the forefront of the genre often referred to as ‘Hindi indies’. And in an industry where directors are often relatively unknown, he emerged as a star in…

BABIES & BYLINES Pallavi Aiyar HarperCollins 232 Pages | Rs 350 ‘I WAS THE ONLY person driven to the point of contemplating murder or suicide, by his yowling…’ This candid line from Pallavi Aiyar’s book about her daily struggle of trying to put her colicky baby down for the night, lifts this memoir above the heap of mediocre honey-coated writing found under ‘baby literature’ in bookshops. Bringing up a child is not an easy task, but one that falls squarely on the mother’s shoulders irrespective of her nationality, geographical location or economic status, and Aiyar is unflinching in describing how frustrating and momentarily rewarding motherhood can be. From the frenzied anticipation that follows the appearance of purple lines on a stick to the misery that washes ashore post-partum, freshly minted…

The Long Shelf Life of Brainless Humour So it’s settled then—there won’t be a Ram Lakhan remake after all. That film, which was to be directed by Rohit Shetty for Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, has been pretty much shelved, Rohit revealed earlier this week. He said Karan and he are currently discussing another project instead. It’s hardly surprising, given the dismal reaction to Rohit’s last outing Dilwale, and the fact that the general consensus in Bollywood is that filmmakers ought to be looking ahead and not turning back for inspiration. That doesn’t mean the director has given up on remakes and sequels completely, though. He’s still very much committed to making Golmaal 4, since that franchise has always yielded big box-office even when the films have been weak (yes, Golmaal…