Indice dei contenuti per May 9, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to ‘Mother’s Day’ (2 May 2016). Jayalalithaa is one politician whose popularity, especially among women, is evident at each rally she addresses. For many, her appeal lies in the fact that she is both a ‘traditional’ woman (decked as she always is in a sari) and a powerful leader. That is a balance that thousands of women would want to achieve in their own lives and it makes Jayalalithaa a relatable as well as an aspirational role model. Unfortunately, she hasn’t always lived up to their expectations, especially during the Chennai floods last year when her handling of the situation was criticised by many observers. She might have made lots of well-intentioned statements and set aside funds for helping those affected, but for…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, an odd thing occurred. George Martin, the so-called ‘Fifth Beatle’, passed away. But the tributes pouring in online were directed towards another individual. Turns out, many people assumed his namesake, the fantasy writer George RR Martin, had died. The writer, who readers have long worried will not be able to complete his epic saga, A Song Of Ice and Fire (on TV as Game Of Thrones), had to come online later that day to reassure fans that reports of his death were ‘greatly exaggerated’. The other George Martin isn’t a small name. He may not have been as popular as The Beatles, but he was the producer of that iconic British band. The mistaken identity incident, however, is an indication of the kind of sway George RR…

ESCAPING THROUGH PORN might be de rigueur in Mysore but in Sikar, a district in the barren Shekhawati belt of Rajasthan, it was learning of a completely different nature that received peer approval. Here, as I discovered a week later, learning and not escaping through social media is how teenagers attempted to break free from the shackles of traditional society. I was at the only gated all-girls private university in the region which offered courses from kindergarten right up to the masters level. It was a favourite with business-class marwari parents who could now give their girls an education but at the same time ensure that they ‘didn’t get out of hand’. A girl could spend her whole life on the 500-acre lush green campus and never know what life…

DADDY’S BOY Shandana Minhas Fourth Estate 219 Pages | Rs 499 THIS BOOK COULD really have been two books. The first section starts with the opening sentence, ‘It was that rarest of Karachi deaths. Expected,’ which sets the stage for a description of the most dangerous city in Pakistan, where kidnappings, abductions and gangland style executions are a daily affair, and where to die in bed is unusual. So it’s not surprising that Asfandyar Ikram has never visited the city before despite being 30 years old and a corporate executive working in Lahore; people with no reason to visit Karachi would be likely to give it an extremely wide berth. However, fate decrees that young Ikram find himself in this hazardous metropolis for a reason that is mysterious to him:…

IN MUMBAI, EVERY time a man goes to a movie, he has to pay homage to Bharat Mata by standing up for the national anthem. Recently, before the release of the movie Jai Gangaajal, you saw Priyanka Chopra in the uniform of a police officer singing Jana Gana Mana. It was an obvious attempt to promote the movie in which she plays a cop. The national anthem can arouse strong emotions. People get abused when they don’t stand up for it in Mumbai’s cinema halls. And yet, that the film industry should use it—Jai Gangaajal was not the first movie to do—to market its movies seems perfectly alright to ultra-nationalists. You can notice the phenomenon in Salman Khan just being appointed the goodwill ambassador for the Indian Olympic contingent. It…

WHEN THE AESTHETE comrade of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, utters words such as “a historic moment”, we had better take note. He said that without a touch of irony (something even aesthete comrades are not allowed to use in their social-realist narratives). The occasion that prompted such hyperbole from one of Bengal’s once-beloved Communists could not have been seen by people who still live within a whirl of history without comic disbelief, if not irony. There he was, stepping out of hibernation, sharing a stage with a political tourist who continues to discover India with simulated anger. Rahul Gandhi has returned to Bengal, and this time to join the fallen Communists in the struggle against Mamata Banerjee, who has taken over the sub-rural ‘soviets’ and shows no sign of vacating…

QUEEN VICTORIA doesn’t look you in the eye. Hers is a stern gaze, fixed at the topright of her portrait. It has been so for the past 178 years. The oil-painting of the former monarch often makes visitors to Jewel House at the Tower of London halt in their tracks. They are struck by her sartorial taste: satin gown, flowing red and golden robes with a sceptre in her hand, and the imperial state crown on her head. Below the painting is an inscription, referring to the queen being presented the ‘Koh-i-nûr’ diamond in 1850. “They say they want it back.” So absorbed was I in admiring the painting, I hadn’t noticed a British woman sneak up in front of me. It was my first visit to the Tower: a…

WHITE MAGIC: A STORY OF HEARTBREAK, HARD DRUGS AND HOPE Arjun Nath HarperCollins India 296 Pages | Rs 399 IN MID-2010, Arjun Nath, a heroin addict in his early thirties, joined a rehabilitation centre called Land, located outside Mumbai. During a therapy session with the centre’s founder Dr Yusuf Merchant, Nath was asked to write down a quantifiable goal. ‘To publish my first novel within five years,’ he wrote in near jest. When ‘Doc’ asked him to visualise the details, something happened: ‘I, who don’t believe I can buy groceries without cocking it up somehow, know in that moment of total clarity that I will write and publish a book. Doc’s simple and absolute belief in himself is contagious […] I am high, floating on another man’s faith.’ White Magic…

ONCE UPON A TIME Ashok Srinivasan Fourth Estate 176 Pages | Rs 499 ALL CONTEMPORARY novelists grapple with two contradictory impulses before putting pen to paper. One instructs them, quite simply, to tell a story straight; while this other, more problematic impulse, threatens to throw them off the beaten path of literary realism, towards experimentation and fantasy. This conflict is played out on almost every page in the final chapters of Ashok Srinivasan’s new novel Once Upon a Time, where the real and the imaginary are so closely packed together that it gets difficult for the reader to tell them apart. Once Upon a Time, as the title clearly illustrates, is intended as a parable of sorts. But it’s a parable with an inverted moral arc, so that by the…

How to Make a Star-Spangled Show What do you do when you have some of the most promising, popular young stars on your roster? You put together a killer show with the whole lot of them and set off for a string of live performances, that’s what you do! Reshma Shetty, founder of Matrix, one of the top talent management agencies in Bollywood (she’s also the architect of Salman Khan’s Being Human initiative), has reportedly collaborated with a promoter of live events in the US to put together a series of musical concerts featuring her enviable client list—Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Sidharth Malhotra, Aditya Roy Kapoor, Parineeti Chopra (loaned from YRF talent), and also Karan Johar who will emcee. Unlike the big ‘tours’ that routinely feature A-listers like Shah Rukh…

THERE IS SOMETHING cynical about scandals involving defence equipment purchases in India: they go nowhere. After much heat, and little light, the matter dies down and virtually no one—politician or bureaucrat—ever gets convicted. A similar fate possibly awaits the latest one, involving helicopter purchases—ironically for the use of top-level politicians—from the Italian firm AgustaWestland. Such scandals are not new to India. The first one was almost coeval with Independence. In 1948, VK Krishna Menon, then High Commissioner to the UK, signed an ‘irregular’ deal with a British firm to deliver 200 jeeps. Only 155 landed. The Government of the day refused to order an inquiry. Much later, in 1987, the Bofors scandal broke out. Again, it got nowhere. It is another matter that Bofors’ 155-mm howitzer saved India’s skin in…

To the controversy over Bhagat Singh being called a ‘revolutionary terrorist’ in a Delhi University textbook, an interesting question is how he looked at himself. In his later writings, Singh avers he was not a terrorist though accepts that he was one in the beginning. The question of who a ‘terrorist’ is, is a prickly one. Governments in power designate those who use violent means against them as terrorists. Should ‘terrorists’ succeed and become the establishment, they do likewise. Ironically, the aggressive actions of governments are rarely termed terrorism. WORD’S WORTH ‘I am not a terrorist and I never was, except perhaps in the beginning of my revolutionary career. And I am convinced that we cannot gain anything through those methods’ BHAGAT SINGH in 1931…

IN 2013, Brookings Institution, a prestigious American think tank, opened its New Delhi chapter, promising to disseminate ‘recommendations for Indian policymakers’. Three years later, its Washington twin, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, set up shop in the country, hoping to develop ‘fresh policy ideas and direct[ly] [engage] and collaborat[e] with decision makers in [Indian] government, business, and civil society’. It is reasonable to surmise that the policy advice proffered by these two organisations will, at a minimum, be in tune with the US interests and geopolitics. In fact, at an event on 6 April, Sunil Mittal, owner of Bharti Airtel, a big donor and chairman of the board of trustees of Carnegie India, removed any doubts on this score. “We have put out our flag here,” he declared, without a…

IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there’s always one person who has tried his hand at all kinds of businesses and failed. But the math of failure upturns when you enter the world of weight loss. Almost every person who has tried to lose weight has failed to keep it off. And it’s not because of lack of trying. It could actually be a case of trying too much. Statistics put the number of people who have lost weight and kept it off at less than 20 per cent, which means that at least 80 per cent of us are constantly struggling to lose weight. India, by the way, is the third-most obese country in the world. We also rank amongst the highest in the global hunger index, just behind Afghanistan and Pakistan.…

THOSE OF US who read crime fiction are considered to be ghoulish or at least slightly offkilter by those who do not. A Nielsen market research survey conducted in the United States revealed that over 65 per cent of readers of the mystery/crime genre are over the age of 45, and more than two thirds are women. But consider these two books, which went on to become publishing sensations. A serial killer leaves red diamond pentagrams under the eyelids of his victims in Oslo in Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast. A young girl who is brutalised by her state-appointed guardian in Sweden takes revenge by tattooing ‘I’m a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist’ on the aggressor’s abdomen in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson’s Millennium series…