Sommaire pour May 30, 2016 de Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This is with reference to the article, ‘Judgment Day’ (23 May 2016). The judiciary, which was a flag bearer of propriety, seems to be getting tangled in its own arguments. Its National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test order, which requires students to take a common entrance test for medical courses across the country, could harm its reputation. While it has rapped states for not doing enough on the drought front, [its pronouncements] persist with an anti-environmental mindset. Two instances are the permission to widen roads in the Pench Tiger Reserve and the staying of a Rs 117-crore fine on a real estate group in Bengaluru imposed by the National Green Tribunal. If the NGT’s decisions are summarily reversed, it defeats the purpose of its deliberations. It also seems…

‘MIDDLEBROW’ IS A putdown, a term deployed by cultural snobs, but it can be used usefully rather than pejoratively to look at the often ignored middle ground of Hindi cinema which lies somewhere between the highbrow art cinema and the lowbrow masala film. Middlebrow means cultural forms that feature some or all of the following traits: commercial, emotional, earnest, aimed at self-improvement and learning. It often manifests aspiration and auto-didacticism, and pops up in those tedious lists of things to do (often adding, unnecessarily, ‘before you die’), or ‘top tens’. Cultural and literary festivals are also mostly middlebrow, in that they cater for an eagerness to interact with authors in person and listen to their readings, rather than to critically read books. The middlebrow is also marked by a desire…

SCARY OLD SEX Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury 240 Pages | Rs 499 THERE’S NO PICTURE on the cover of Scary Old Sex. Instead, the title appears against a stark white background, silver grey letters with a single touch of pink, reminiscent of silver hair and naked secret skin. Look closer and you’ll see that the final two alphabets of the word ‘sex’ are enjoying a gentle tickle. The subtlety of this image does not, however, reflect the contents of the book. Arlene Heyman is ‘a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst practicing in New York City’ whose stories include scenes that are as intimate as they are unsentimental, replete with smells, sights and sounds. The title suggests that we will ‘see’ what end-of-life sex might look like and that the view is scary and frightening. But…

THE ANT IN THE EAR OF THE ELEPHANT Minni Vaid Rajpal & Sons 288 Pages | Rs 325 ‘THE TAMIL WORD for radiation is kathirveechu,’ writes Minnie Vaid in her new book, The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant. For the people of Idinthakarai, a small fishing village in Tamil Nadu close to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP), the threat of exposure to kathirveechu inspires dread. They live in a post-Fukushima world and they know it well. Something they cannot touch, taste or smell could still drive them from their homes, poison the soil they farm and the fish they catch. Most terrifyingly it could harm their children, and their children’s children. This conviction that no nuclear plant can ever be completely safe has put the people of…

OVER THE PAST few weeks, photographer Steve Mc Curry has received a good deal of flak. Best known for his iconic portrait of the Afghan girl published on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, he is a member of the acclaimed Magnum cooperative. His work has a crossover appeal, belonging as much to ‘photojournalism’ as to art galleries and books, though ‘visual storytelling’ is how he likes to describe his practice. This selfdescription allows him the leeway to be more adventurous with his medium, with the result that his photographs often tend to be dramatic and exaggerated. In March, writer-photographer Teju Cole panned McCurry’s work in The New York Times magazine for being ‘astonishingly boring’. Comparing McCurry’s images of India with that of photographer Raghubir Singh’s, Cole noted the…

Is She the One for Him? Over the last few weeks, rumours that Salman Khan may be soon tying the knot with his Romanian girlfriend Iulia Vântur have become louder and gained momentum. This past weekend, the Bajrangi Bhaijaan star made a public appearance with his lady at Preity Zinta’s wedding reception in Mumbai, and tongues began wagging again. Some have said that the superstar’s mother has urged him to settle down. Salman met Iulia, a model and television presenter in Romania, while scouting locations and filming in Eastern Europe some years ago. Iulia, who was previously married to a Romanian actor, has been often spotted hanging out with Salman and his family at his Panvel farmhouse, and often on his film sets. Salman, however, has skilfully dodged media questions…

THE COW IS not your mother. It is an animal. It is a useful animal. That still does not make it your mother. You must be kind to animals. The cow is one among them. You must be kind to the cow. That makes sense. ‘The cow is my mother and therefore I must be kind to it’ is the kind of thought that if held by one man would ordinarily make people look at him with suspicion and pity. But because millions of people hold the view, it is normal. But it is not. Delusions are not always dangerous, but to sustain it, the numbers need to remain up. Quantity determines whether something is a religion, a cult or psychosis. Underlying this is aggression because it is impossible for…

A POLITICAL QUAKE HAS hit the Congress, burying under its rubble two crucial governments of the party in Assam and Kerala. It was felt in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, too, where the party’s revival plans remained good only on paper. This is the worst news for Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, who has long been projected by his party as a challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the national level. With the Congress now running governments in states that together have less than 10 per cent of the nation’s population, doubts will multiply over the ability of the Nehru-Gandhi scion’s ability to fashion a credible message that connects with a changed and changing electorate. With hubris and defiance as the trademarks of the Congress leadership, there are fears within…

KARAN MAHAJAN AND his characters hail from Delhi. But while their origins might be in the Capital, they share a similar sense of un-belonging and being ‘at the mercy of forces greater than themselves’. Mahajan’s recent book The Association of Small Bombs (Fourth Estate, 276 pages, Rs 499) is a Delhi novel, the action is set here. But it is also a Delhi novel wherein the mental makeup of the characters swathes the city in Stygian hues of despair and grief. The surfaces of the city refract the emotions of the characters, making for a bleak, bleak picture. The Association of Small Bombs is 32-year-old Mahajan’s second novel. His first, Family Planning (2008), won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. While…

GIRLS & SEX: NAVIGATING THE COMPLICATED NEW LANDSCAPE Peggy Orenstein HarperCollins 320 Pages | $26.99 INTERCOURSE IS AN achievement. Sexting causes more trauma than real-life sex. And every girl’s dream is to be ‘just slutty enough’, when she’s considered neither prude nor whore. These are some of the new-age sexual scenarios that journalist and girl culture expert Peggy Orenstein highlights in her new book. Through interviews with girls between the ages of 15 and 20, Orenstein tries to understand why girls, despite significant advancements in opportunity, still lack the freedom to make their own sexual choices, resist stigma and explore their bodies. The intimate details and revealing one-liners (given by the girls Orenstein met) make her study of hookup culture, revenge porn, body shaming and campus rape a first in…

FOOD ESTABLISHES the connection between mind and body, between the spiritual and the physical. We search for the elements and dishes—fruits and nuts and vegetables and lentils and meats and seafood— that will provide nutrients and create the perfect body and soul within each one of us. Is a perfect body necessary for achieving a perfect soul? What is the relationship between food and creating a perfect individual? Historically, this question has plagued religions, evoking unruly debates, and creating schisms, factions and sects. It is also a question that we are constantly trying to answer in a world of visual media, diets and spirituality. Let us begin with answers to the above questions in the worlds inhabited by religions. The early Vedic tradition links the concept of perfection integrally with…

THE ROUGH AND tumble of Indian politics hit another low when Bharatiya Janata Party MP Subramanian Swamy dispatched a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to sack Raghuram Rajan. A respected academic from the University of Chicago, Rajan is highly regarded in global central banking circles for his careful management of India’s monetary and external economic policies as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Even if one ignores the more outrageous of Swamy’s allegations against Rajan—such as the one that says he’s ‘mentally not fully Indian’—what the MP has written against Rajan is plainly wrong. Take, for example, Swamy’s claim that ‘When the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) started to decline due to induced recession in the small and medium industry, he shifted the target from WPI to…

TO WALK AROUND the streets of London or travel on its overcrowded underground metro system is to meet the whole world compressed into one gloriously diverse and colourful city. There is nowhere on earth quite like London and no country on earth that hasn’t contributed to its multi-ethnic, multi-cultural kaleidoscope of humanity. You’re as likely to hear any one of several hundred languages and dialects as you are to hear English. Go down any main road and the majority of the restaurants will be serving food from India, China, Italy, France or any number of other countries. The people you pass in the street reflect such a wide range of races that you scarcely notice after a while. The only thing that is unambiguously British is, of course, the weather.…

ALCOHOL: A HISTORY Rod Phillips Speaking Tiger 384 Pages | Rs 540 A HISTORY BOOK is a prism through which accounts of the past stream through and transform magically into light. Rod Phillips in his comprehensive work, Alcohol: A History, delves deep into the world of one of the most sought-after fluids on this planet after water— alcohol—tracing its history back to the first signs of it in pottery of the Neolithic period which archaeologists excavated in China and elsewhere. This tipple was made more than 7,000 years before the birth of Christ. Alas, the quest stops there almost abruptly, for going further back in time is impossible since leather or wooden storage facilities of the pre-Palaeolithic era which could have stored the liquid have not survived to tell the…

THE GREATEST BENGALI ST ORIES EVER TOLD Selected and translated by Arunava Sinha Aleph 305 Pages | Rs 499 ON THE JACKET of The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told, you’ll find a quaint illustration of Kolkata’s yellow Ambassador taxi. Not just does the choice seem predictable, its use is also at odds with the 21 short stories which make up this delightful collection. Frayed over time, these cabs are emblematic of a state that prizes nostalgia over discovery. West Bengal’s writers are an antithesis to such apathy. It’s clear from their fiction that they have always been preoccupied with that which is novel. Put together, Bengal’s literature seems to have always been contemporary and avant-garde. Bengalis can be both, argumentative and cynical. So, Arunava Sinha, who has selected and translated…

DEEPAN SIVARAMAN, the director of ‘The Legends of Khasak’, is associate professor at Ambedkar University, New Delhi, and founding artistic director of Oxygen Theatre Company, Thrissur. Winner of the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award (META ) and Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Award, his other notable works include ‘Spinal Cord’, ‘Lord of the Flies’ and ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’. In an interview with Deepa bhasthi, he talks about the significance of fire, and why he doesn’t believe in the binary of an actor and non-actor. Excerpts: The use of fire is very extensive in the play. Does it have a ritualistic meaning for you? There is an undertone of death in the play. The dug-out stage is conceived as an excavation ground, where by taking out the soil, life, culture…