Inhaltsverzeichnis für September 26, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to the cover story ‘Smriti Irani Weaves a New Legacy’ (19 September 2016). It is true that India has a rich textile heritage and many handloom styles to share with the world. This is the only country making handloom products on a commercial scale. Works of tussar silk, Pochampalli silk, patola print, ikat, Dhakai, Kutch embroidery, Chanderi silk and Maheshwari silk can be made worldfamous because of their intricate detailing and sheer hard work required to make them. It is a shame that such beautiful and priceless weaving art forms might be lost forever if the next generation isn’t given the appropriate incentives to continue the trade. While it is heartening to see Smriti Irani take on her new role with vigour and…

A BIRTH CENTENARY could be occasion to revisit a person’s legacy or it could be an excuse to cast them further in alabaster. In the case of Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi (or simply MS, as her fans called her), we are lucky that questions and scholarship have proved that she is far more multidimensional than first imagined. We all know that MS was a Carnatic vocalist of unparallel skill and devotion. The daughter of a devdasi in Madurai, she gave her first public performance at age 11. While still a teenager, she performed at The Music Academy in Madras, considered the most prestigious venue for Carnatic musicians. Over the following decades, she sang across the world, including at Carnegie Hall, New York, on UN day in 1966. She was the first…

ON MODI-LESS MARGARITA Island in Venezuela, where the 17th NA M summit is underway, it was a piece of political realismo mágico one evening recently when Nicolás Maduro, accompanied by a few of his bodyguards, went out for a walk. In no time in the shantytown of Villa Rosa, the Venezuelan president, who was on the island for a socialist propaganda mission, was booed by a group of impoverished locals, banging on pots and hurling the choicest swearwords at the president. Maduro could do nothing but run away from what could have been the scariest creatures of his worst nightmares. Before the burly autocrat’s security men could round up some of the offending pot-bangers, the image of Latin America’s most unpopular politician vanishing into the depths of a surreal night…

WEIGHT LOSS ARKA Using distilled cow urine and made according to the Charak Samhita, this Holy Cow product offers to help lose weight. The dosage is 4 tablespoons along with 2 tablespoons of honey mixed in a cup of warm water on an empty stomach NIRMAL GANGA A neem and tulsi soap, it also contains distilled cow urine and pure coconut oil. Gou Ganga markets it as beneficial in controlling acne and pimples SUKANTI FACE PACK Prepared with cow dung powder, Multani mitti, turmeric, and red mud powder, Maa Gou’s face pack promises to nourish and improve skin texture SURABHI DHOOP This cow dung, herbs and sandalwood incense by Maa Gou is said to release oxygen, and keep mosquitoes away GAUNYLE Said to be extremely effective and eco-friendly, this Holy…

THE NIGHT OF 9 September was one of the longest for jailed RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin, and the impatience was visible on his face. The man who had spent more than a decade behind bars was to be released the next morning. The medical ward in the third block of Bhagalpur Central Jail, Bihar, where Shahabuddin had been lodged for the last three months, was lit up all night. Saheb, as locals in his ‘hometown’ Siwan call him, could hear his supporters raise slogans outside the jail. A restless Saheb could not sleep a wink. Finally, at 7 am, he appeared at the gate. By his side was a policeman, carrying two bags of books that Shahabuddin had kept with him during his incarceration. Saheb’s convoy had more than 500…

WHY AREN’T WE DEAD YET? Idan Ben-Barak Collins 204 Pages | Rs 299 DEATH ON EARTH Jules Howard Bloomsbury 288 Pages | Rs 499 WHILE ONE BOOK, (Why Aren’t We Dead Yet?) deals with the ongoing wars and battles our bodies fight every living moment to stay that way—alive—the second deals with the ultimate final outcome for all of us: death. Both rather macabre and morbid subjects, you would think, except that Idan Ben-Barak and Jules Howard have such an infectious and insatiable curiosity, peppered with humour and humanity, that what might have been cold, dry and grim science writing is turned into unputdownable material as one astonishment after another is revealed. Ben-Barak, who holds an MSc in Microbiology, gives us a ‘Survivor’s Guide to the Immune System’; a defence…

“IF DARWIN HAD come to Hawai’i before he went to Galapagos,” said Gary, our guide for the day, “he would have solved the question of evolution ever so sooner.” And he might have well done so if he had looked, as I did, rather intently, at the Hawaiian honeycreepers. There it was, the mythical palila, half hidden in the foliage of a māmane tree, stripping a seed pod, golden head now visible, now not. There could have been no other way to see it. If it were out fully in the open, it would have been rather ridiculous behaviour for a critically endangered bird that typifies endangerment. If it were not stripping away at its almost sole food source, the poisonous māmane, it would not have demonstrated its extraordinary way…

Splits Villa The tabloids are saying Katrina Kaif has finally moved out of the apartment she’d been sharing with Ranbir Kapoor before they broke up, and has moved back into the flat she’d been living in before they decided to bunk together. Splitting up is messy. And doubly so if the couple in question are high-profile movie stars. When Ranbir and Katrina ended their relationship some months ago, they had to be aware that the process of moving on was going to be awkward and more public than they’d have liked. Ranbir famously moved out first, and immediately it was made to look like he’d walked out on Kat, leaving her all alone in the apartment they were meant to share. Insiders, however, reveal that the couple had discussed and…

LAST WEEK, Uber began to test having commuters call for driverless cars in Pittsburgh, US. A few weeks ago, Singapore tested a driverless car and expects to soon ferry people using automated pods. By the end of the year, Volvo will have demonstrations of driverless cars in New Zealand and Australia.Often with technological revolutions, people don’t realise when they are in the middle of momentous change. The internet, for example, had to be around for many years before its potential became evident to nonspecialists. When it was first invented, no one, except for a few scientists, really understood what was in store. The car is in a different and more relatable category but the imminent seismic shift is yet to hit home. Every major automobile company in the world, from…

ARE KASHMIRIS—MEANING, in this essay, the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims who live largely in the Kashmir Valley—paragons of secularism or zealots driven by religious identity? Are they Sufis, or are they actually Wahhabis? In Indian perception and discourse, the first image dominated for four decades, until 1990, when the ‘paradise’ (jannat) turned into a cesspit of violence and the second image—the polar opposite of the first—came to the fore. What, then, really defines these people? Are they one or the other? Or perhaps they suffer from bipolar disorder? The Indian lament that Kashmiris have let down secular, democratic India, that they have betrayed the ideal of liberality they once collectively personified, is not new. A senior Indian anthropologist, also a ‘native informant’ as a Kashmiri Pandit, wrote in 1993: ‘The way to…

ANCIENT INDIAN TEXTS are replete with references to cows. There are too many to enumerate, but I will focus on the Mahabharata, its references being reflective of those in other texts as well. They explain the reverence shown to cows. The Mahabharata has sections, known as parvas. There is one particular section known as Anushasana Parva, part of the teachings given to Yudhishthira by Bhishma while he lay on a bed of arrows. Within parvas, there are subsections, also known as parvas. This sub-section is known as Dana Dharma Parva—on the dharma of giving gifts or donations. I am going to cite exact quotations as translated from the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata brought out by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. Indra went and asked Brahma why cows were…

“MY FOCUS IS TO TELL ANY STORY AS ENTERTAININGLY AS POSSIBLE AND THEN I HAND IT OVER TO THE DIRECTOR IN ME, WHO IS A CROWD PLEASER” Neeraj Pandey in two weeks, National Award-winning filmmaker Neeraj Pandey will face the biggest test in his (roughly) decade-long Hindi film career. His fourth feature film as writer-director, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, made over two-anda-half years on a reported budget of Rs 80 crore, will soon release worldwide in four languages. A biopic on the life of arguably India’s greatest cricket captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Sushant Singh Rajputstarrer MS Dhoni will be Pandey’s first film since A Wednesday! to feature a lead actor other than Akshay Kumar (who starred in both Special 26 and Baby) in a genre other than a…

A FEAST OF VULTURES: THE HIDDEN BUSINESS OF DEMOCRACY IN INDIA Josy Joseph Harper Collins 231 Pages | Rs 599 IN JOSY JOSEPH’S new book, India is an unrelentingly bleak landscape of perfidy. Stories of state-sponsored cronyism, unchecked graft, stubborn oligarchs, sleazy middlemen, crime and an ineffectual state litter A Feast of Vultures, a sprawling exploration of the dark and venal heart of modern India. Joseph writes that the book grew out of his ‘anguish at the staggering size and scale of that underbelly, the dilapidated state of Indian institutions and the deep immorality at the heart of our democracy’. So, ‘in this country it is okay to do practically everything: use fake promoters, use bribes, commission murders, intimidate media, manipulate courts and grab power.’ That’s not all. ‘The courts…

DURING A MEMORIAL service held on 9 September for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, US presidential contestant Hillary Clinton left the venue early after feeling ‘overheated’. No reporter was allowed to follow her, giving rise to speculation that she was hiding some medical condition. More than any Western democracy, the possibility of a president, or a would-be president, concealing some health issue quickly snowballs into a political controversy in the US . Clinton is not the first US politician to be dogged by it. In the early 60s, John F Kennedy was suspected to be suffering from Addison’s disease during America’s nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, a situation that could have spun out of control in case the president had a bout of debility rendering…

As deplorable as corruption is, many of India’s most privileged have a farcical attitude towards it. They will rail against it, join protests and fasts, like they did some years ago during Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption stir. But they will pay scant notice to who’s at the other end of the corruption cycle: themselves. A few days ago, TV comedian Kapil Sharma tweeted to the Prime Minister, objecting to how despite paying a large sum as income tax, he was being asked for a bribe of Rs 5 lakh by a municipal official for constructing an office. But it now turns out, as the allegations go, that the comedian had been issued a stopwork notice for illegally expanding his office. His flat in a nearby high-rise has also been found to…

“We have got it wrong all this time.” The voice on the other end of the line in Bengaluru is crisp and energetic. Inflected with a slight Kannada accent, it has the distinct quality of someone filled with the certainty of his new business model, perhaps a startup man full of entrepreneurial zeal who believes he has stumbled upon something novel and disruptive. “The milk is not the main revenue you can source from the cow,” he says. “It is urine and dung.” What? “Yes, that’s right,” he says in all sincerity. “It is cow urine and dung.” You would expect a hermit holed up in some Himalayan cave to come up with that. May be even one of the numerous insincere voices you hear in newspapers pulling down butcher…

SUCCESS TO SUKET Dhir came the same way that bankruptcy came to Ernest Hemmingway’s character in The Sun Also Rises: ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ Dhir had never competed for anything in his life, stubbornly laid-back through his formative years, until in his midthirties, when out of relative anonymity in the fashion universe, he shot like a meteor to global renown and a blitzkrieg of media attention in the wake of the 2016 Woolmark Prize, considered the ‘Oscar of fashion’. Psychologists would call Dhir a ‘late bloomer’, a term that catches him by surprise and makes him nod in some wonderment. “Perhaps I am,” says the menswear designer who came into the limelight for a second time this year when he suggested changes to the new uniform of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak…

REKHA: THE UNTOLD STORY Yasser Usman Juggernaut 230 Pages | Rs 150 A JOURNALISTIC PIECE on someone’s life—a profile—is tricky to nail, for it deconstructs something that’s difficult to understand: a person. No matter how meticulously researched and assiduously reported, a profile can never be a definitive account of someone’s life. Because unbeknown to themselves, people, at times, aren’t even honest to their own selves, fashioning narratives of self-deception, where they’re free of guilt, fault and blame. This reticence is so internalised that even a best-case scenario—a candid interviewee talking to an interested interviewer—is, at some level, a compromise. A profile, however, still remains a fascinating and important journalistic form, for it, to varying degrees, helps plug the gap between the past and present, motive and action, person and persona.…

INDIA’S PERFORMANCE at the Rio Olympics has evoked reactions ranging from ridicule to adulation. Driven by a desire to ‘feel good’, we expect our athletes to win medals at the global level, with very little understanding of what it actually takes. However, to put it in perspective, of the 206 participant countries in Rio, 128 did not win any medal. Kudos to our athletes who did well against significant odds and put India on the medal chart. It is true that for a country of 1.3 billion, all we have to show are two medals, neither of them gold. Of this vast population, however, how many have the potential to be sportspersons, let alone Olympic-level athletes? Even the staunchest India supporter will agree that India is not a sporting nation.…

ARE YOU A princess, an ascetic or a yo-yo when it comes to how you rank food vis a vis health and figure? If you want the best service in the best restaurants, if you send back dishes if they are not tasty, as royalty of yore did, if you are given a choice between being healthy and slim versus gorging on a delicious meal, and you choose the latter, you have a royal approach to food. This applies not just to yourself, but also to how you expect your loved ones to be treated by the world. Others have a purely ascetic approach to food. Think of high-protein or only-carbohydrate diets, or worse still, starvation ones. These are serial dieters who move from one diet to another. For this…