Indice dei contenuti per February 8, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK BAL GOVIND This refers to the column ‘The Death of Rohith Vemula and the Republican Ideal of a Just Society’ (1 February 2016). It is sad that this whole issue of Rohith Vemula’s suicide has been turned into a Dalit versus non-Dalit issue and politicians are leaving no stone unturned to get the most mileage out of it. The real story is entirely different. It is about a student who died in unfortunate circumstances. It is these that should be condemned and focused on. If Minister of Labour and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya did indeed advise the HRD Minister to write to the Vice-Chancellor of Hyderabad Central University to suspend Rohith, then it needs to be probed as he has clearly acted with political interests in…

FOR continuing to shield its CEO, RK Pachauri, who is accused of sexual harassment Nearly a year after a 29-oldwoman researcher filed a complaint against TERI top-hat RK Pachauri for sexual harassment and criminal intimidation, fresh reports suggest that the organisation continued to ‘coax’ the woman towards an out-of-court settlement by pressuring a male colleague to influence her. According to a complaint filed by the male colleague on 12 January, as many as four senior managers asked him to approach the woman and cajole her and was once told in a very ‘patronising’ tone that he should ‘reach out to his lady friend and get her to settle it out of court as this will be good for her as there is nothing left to achieve’. The male colleague has…

GODMEN, EVEN those who have evolved into two Sris before their names, are not immune to peer pressure. It was exactly a year ago that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, under whose watch millions of people exhale forcefully every morning while swimming happily in that ocean of platitudes that he comes up with at the rate of one a minute, was told that he had received the Padma Vibhushan. And what did he do? Much before the term ‘award wapsi’ even came into being, Sri Sri declined it, though with all the politeness he could muster, as his statement at the time shows. He had tweeted, ‘Rajnath Singhji called to inform me about Padma Awards. I thank Govt. for considering me. Instead of me, I’d like them to honour someone else’.…

WHEN AAKAR SINGH returned home to Bandra, Mumbai, from a week-long work trip to the US, he was surprised to find his 38-year-old wife wearing makeup for the first time in ten years. “It’s all organic,” Bani Singh proudly informed her lawyer husband. “I should’ve taken it as a warning. Since then everything in the house has been replaced by an organic alternative,” jokes Aakar, who now sleeps on organic bedsheets, eats organic GMO-free breakfast cereal, drinks organic wine, showers with handmade organic soap and organic jute towels, writes with biodegradable environment-friendly pens and makes love using vegan and organic flavoured condoms. For Bani, the change in lifestyle occurred after she read about bone char being used to process sugar, and brewers using fish bladders to filter out yeast in…

THE NEW year brought in a mild winter and a mesmerising array of art. At the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in London, I witnessed two major exhibitions featuring Spanish and Italian masters, Francisco Goya and Alberto Giacometti respectively. Both shows focused on portraiture, especially on the drama of the human face, though formally, and stylistically, the artists could not have been more different. Goya (1746-1828), who was appointed a painter at the Spanish court in 1786, spent his life depicting various members of the royal family and the aristocracy. Mischievous but always mindful of not offending his patrons, he is often thought of as the last of the Old Masters and a fitting precursor to the moderns. Walking among his incredibly lifelike portraits, one is struck by the…

Joy DIRECTOR David O Russell CAST Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper The humour and quirkiness of David O Russell’s recent works (Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle) are missing here. This film is about Joy Mangano, an inventor of household appliances who became a millionaire in the 1990s selling her patented products on teleshopping networks. The movie is presented, entirely without irony, as an ode to American capitalism. After much struggle and plenty of failure in her personal and professional life, Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) finally meets the man who will be the key to her success, QVC executive Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper). The first thing he does is give her a tour of the telemarketing operation he works for. The scene looks and sounds exactly like a sales…

ARTICLE 356 of the Constitution has a justified air of infamy. The Article has been used dozens of times to dismiss lawfully elected state governments. Often, this has been done for no other reason except flimsy political differences between the Union and state governments. So when the Narendra Modi Government used this Constitutional provision to dismiss the government of Arunachal Pradesh, it aroused memories of abuse once again. In this case, as in all such cases of recent vintage, the matter has landed in the Supreme Court of India. But beyond the merits of the present case, this is a good time to carefully examine the content of this Article. There is a wide space between the narrow judicial interpretations of ‘breakdown’ as being failed floor tests in an assembly…

THE ODDS ON India achieving its disinvestment target for 2015-16 are lengthening by the day. And while this D-word still draws smiles of irony from Dalal Street watchers in London and New York—the term ‘privatisation’ being taboo in New Delhi for what it implies— the trouble this time round has nearly nothing to do with sarkari hands being wrung over the principle per se of selling off slices of what the state owns. If anything, the NDA Government has been quite keen to offload large chunks of ownership; neither ideology nor alliance dharma are in the way. But with Indian stock indices so shaky, corporate results cheerless and talk of a global recession in the air, it is equity investors who seem to be in hem-andhaw mode. As part of…

PERSON OF THE WEEK SUNNY LEONE THE STORY OF Sunny Leone, a former pornstar born to a deeply traditional migrant Sikh family in Canada who has since gone on to become a successful mainstream Bollywood actress, must be a fascinating one. Unsurprisingly, given that she is trying to craft a mainstream career, she has rarely spoken about her life, perhaps to exercise control over the way the story is told. Recently, a senior news anchor from one of India’s top news channels tried to clumsily wiggle one part of that story. He grilled and badgered her, hemmed and hawed, and cloyingly nudged her to acknowledge the ‘sinful’ aspect of her past career choices. Perhaps he was expecting her to burst into tears and confess all on TV. But Leone neither…

COULD AMERICANS REALLY be about to do this? Will nothing stop them? Are they going to choose as their candidates for the world’s most important job two of the most ill-suited, and in the case of Donald Trump, one of the most despised, claimants to that role imaginable? They really could. The primary process, a series of statelevel elections to decide who will represent the Republicans and Democrats in the presidential election due on 8 November, is about to begin in earnest—in Iowa on 1 February, when the midwestern state’s most committed voters will gather in small groups, or caucuses, to nominate a candidate. The Republican front-runner, in Iowa and across the wider GOP electorate, is Trump. A celebrity builder, he has no previous political experience. Yet he has formidable…

“The food stock I had last year is completely exhausted now. With no crop this year, I am forced to buy food grain from the market” AMAAN CHAMAR, farmer THERE IS A barren land where Amaan Chamar, 65 years old, had a field. Last year was not good, but he still managed to get some wheat growing. Now, when it is time for the rabi crop, he has not sown anything because it is pointless. Farmers richer than him have got some seeds sown on their own tracts of land, but no one is sure whether anything will grow. There is no water. Local ponds, which supplied water, have gone dry and bore wells are too expensive for farmers like him. Chamar is from Rajpura village, 60 km east of…

IT IS EASY TO tell that the country’s most awaited literary weekend has arrived. All you need to do is spend time at Haldiram’s beyond Manesar situated on the Delhi-Jaipur highway. While hungry travellers tear into their puris, the words ‘hegemony’, ‘dialectics’ and ‘narrative’, ‘Anokhi’, ‘Amrapali’ and ‘Rambagh’ will waft towards you along with the steam of aaloo curry. The CD cars will pull up outside. The hand sanitiser will be passed around. Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another Jaipur Literature Festival (or JLF), 21 to 25 January, is upon us. The evolution of the JLF lanyard in many ways mirrors the growth of the festival itself. Seven years ago, names were scrawled on paper by hand. In 2012, a bar code was added to the name tag and the sashes…

CONTEMPORARY INDIAN art has gained visibility as India’s economic strength has increased. Indian art and artists have become known the world over. However, Indian art was being represented and promoted by museums and curators abroad. There was an urgency for purposeful platforms in India that responded to the needs and conditions of contemporary art. The Triennale-India that used to take place in Delhi, founded by visionaries like Mulk Raj Anand, unfortunately lost its energy many editions before it finally folded. Many people have tried to revive the Triennale, but somehow it hasn’t worked. There was an attempt towards a biennale in Delhi around 2005, which didn’t take off because there was no support forthcoming from the state. So when the then Minister for Culture of Kerala, MA Baby, asked Riyas…

THE THEATRE MAN Kumud Mishra, who plays joint secretary Sanjiv Kohli in Airlift, is an NSD graduate and a popular stage performer. On the big screen, he first came to notice with his role in the 2011 film Rockstar THE HEROES of the evacuation of over a hundred thousand Indians stranded in Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion of the country in 1990 may well have been IK Gujral, then Minister for External Affairs, and MP Mascarenhas, then regional director of Air-India in the Gulf. But these distinguished gentlemen do not quite match Bollywood’s profile of action heroes. Akshay Kumar needed a part in that story, and one in which a little fiction would do no harm. So he plays an Indian businessman in Kuwait called Ranjit Katyal, very loosely based on…

The Inevitable Blame Game So it appears that the gloves are off. With Dilwale having failed to beat Bajirao Mastani in the (domestic) box-office sweepstakes—not to mention its abysmal defeat in the ‘perception game’, thanks to crushing reviews and dismal word-of-mouth—it was only a matter of time before the blame game began. Bollywood insiders are saying that starproducer Shah Rukh Khan is blaming the film’s poor performance on his director Rohit Shetty… for banging out a film that just wasn’t up to the mark. The Chennai Express director, meanwhile, who has a reputation for delivering blockbusters consistently, seems to have his own grouse with SRK. Sources close to Rohit say the director had ‘begged’ the star to avoid clashing with Bajirao, but Shah Rukh was unwilling to shy away from…