Open Magazineの October 3, 2016 の目次

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK It is great to see the many ways in which entrepreneurs are marketing cow products (cover story ‘Milking the Holy Cow’, 26 September 2016). If only this also translates to protection for the animal. It is sad that despite being ‘worshipped’, most of these gentle animals are terribly ill-treated, underfed and left to fend for themselves on dangerous highways the moment they stop producing milk. Is it right to use animals for commercial gains and then mistreat them? At the end of the day, even as cow owners and businessmen rake in profits, these animals are only being exploited. What is the use of saying time and again how precious the cow is to the Hindu religious system and then running over the same animal…

IT IS TOUGH not to like Bridget Jones. Here is a woman who loves fiercely, drinks rampantly, speaks freely and laughs loudest at herself. But it was this abandon of spirit that also scared away the men, or so she feared, as here she was a 30-something woman, without a significant other and few professional prospects. The 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding sold over two million copies in a decade, spawned a film of the same name in 2001 and a sequel in 2004 (both starring Renée Zellweger). More importantly, it was also the harbinger of a movement. Today if chick lit is as legit as a dude in a tux, we have Bridget to thank for that. She gave legitimacy and currency to the opinionated interior…

DURING MY ANNUAL ‘Staff Development Review’, I was advised that I should take the Mental Health First Aid Course as part of my university’s commitment to reduce mental health discrimination, raise awareness and offer comfort. Many students confront issues of mental health, and I wonder whether this is due to an increase in psychological problems—often attributed to stress among the young, lack of family support and so on—or if it results from the increasing medicalisation of matters that were hitherto largely swept under the carpet. These caused vast distress to families and friends as well as the individual sufferer. I’m not a doctor (not that sort of doctor, anyway) and I’m no expert in these matters, so while I may identify the existence of a problem, I cannot treat the…

SEATED INSIDE her rickety but clean hut in Dalitdominated Rautapur village of Uttar Pradesh’s mango-rich Sitapur district, Sunita Ravi, a homemaker in her late thirties, says she has been worrying less for the past three days. “We now have a gas connection,” she states, beaming. Before a fellow from the local office of Indian Oil Corporation came home with an LPG cylinder, a stove and a small green-coloured hose, installed the cooking system on a pedestal and lit it, her life had been completely different. She had woken up every day anxious about collecting firewood for cooking. Occasionally, her husband got her dried cow-dung cakes as fuel, but she still had to leave home early morning looking for dry twigs, branches and other pieces of wood. She couldn’t afford to…

EIGHT YEARS AGO, an accidental turn in the YouTube maze led me to Speakeasy NYC, a channel showcasing spoken-word poets from across the country. One blurry video here featured a pixellated, bespectacled young woman perform an enchanting, raw piece addressed to her future daughter. The poem was B, by Sarah Kay. I decided to reproduce the piece entirely for a college festival: hand gestures, voice intonations, and all, memorised down to the last syllable. It was a disaster: I forgot the words halfway through, stumbled to the finish and hurried out, my spoken-word hobby consigned to the trash bin. At the National Youth Poetry Slam (NYPS), held in the massive Lotus Convention Centre in Bengaluru on 17-18 September, the stakes are much higher: colleges and schools compete in rounds—or ‘bouts’—to…

NUTSHELL Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape 199 Pages | Rs 699 WRITERS’ LIVES presumably follow an arc in which they move from raw and intense wonderment to a refined and polished contemplation. Literary giants glow so brightly at a point that even when they lose their lustre with time, they still outshine the ordinary. Ian McEwan is one such colossus. His early work is deliciously wicked. Though I discovered him in 1997’s Enduring Love, my favourite remains A Child in Time (1987): pitch-perfect, haunting. But after Atonement (2001) I was tossing his books aside; by Sweet Tooth (2012) I gave up. As with Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, his best writing was barely visible in the rearview mirror. His latest, Nutshell, a slim yet packed read, is a variation on Shakespeare’s…

An Epic for the Wrong Reasons So I have it on very good authority that Padmavati won’t start filming anytime soon. There’s a set more or less ready and waiting at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali is sitting on dates of all three of his principal artistes, but budget issues have thrown the project in a tailspin. All plans to complete the film in time for Cannes in May next year have naturally been scrapped, and insiders are saying that the summer of 2018 may be the earliest that Bhansali can schedule the film’s release if it goes on the floors shortly. But it’s very likely that the cameras won’t roll until early next year. Ranveer Singh is reportedly taking off for over a month to a ‘secret…

THE LAST TWEET from the ‘official Twitter account’ of Hardik Patel, the man who has been helming the Patel reservation agitation in Gujarat, was on 31 July and it said: ‘Is @manoharparrikar job to protect India from external aggressors or threaten fellow countrymen like actor @aamir_khan?’ This was soon after Parrikar had in a public address said that people like Aamir—who’d spoken of a climate of intolerance in India last year—should be taught a lesson. The mystery of why Patel stopped tweeting thereafter we will not know, but that he is not the kind of person to hold a candle for free speech shouldn’t have been difficult to deduce even then. And now, in the sort of irony which surprises no one in what passes for politics in India, Patel…

THE URI ATTACK in the early hours of Sunday that has claimed the lives of 18 Indian jawans confirms yet again that nearly seven decades after Independence and Partition, Pakistan remains India’s biggest foreign policy challenge. Pakistan was hacked off the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947 as a homeland for India’s Muslims, but (at least until very recently, if one can extrapolate from the two countries’ population growth trends) more Muslims have remained in India than live in Pakistan. Pakistan’s relations with India have ever since been bedevilled by a festering dispute over the divided territory of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. Decades of open conflict and simmering hostility, punctuated by spasms of bonhomie that always seem to sputter out into recrimination, and now marked…

Swiss watchmaker Longines blends history and imagination in the design of this watch, influenced by army aesthetics. Giving a fresh cast to the lines of a dial used regularly in the brand’s early 20th century timepieces, the Longines Heritage Military displays elegant restraint that is resolutely modern. The 12 large Arabic numerals adorning the matt black dial make it easy to tell the time at a glance. Longines is expanding its Heritage collection with this impressively distinctive watch. The charismatic man who wears the Longines Heritage Military draws many admiring glances to his wrist, secure in the knowledge that its great aesthetics do not come at the cost of reliability. Both qualities are cornerstones of the winged hourglass brand, which draws on a rich legacy with this design, derived from…

EXACTLY A YEAR ago, on a grey morning just like this one, I found myself at the corner of our street, seething with outrage. I had stormed out of the house after reading a news report. I needed fresh air, birdsong, tender first light as it broke past a dirty wadding of cloud. I needed these to reassure myself there was life beyond what I’d just read. Paradoxically, my feet had led me here. The corner of our street is the municipal dump: three bursting bins of garbage flanking a mountain of overspill. At 6.30 am, the fish market next to it was still two hours away from business, but the prime customers were already queued up. In the rain-tree’s canopy, egrets balanced delicately, each an alabaster amphora in a…

WHAT LIES BETWEEN US Nayomi Munaweera Pan Macmillan 320 Pages | Rs 499 WHAT LIES BETWEEN US is a patchwork of memories. These are dark, distant and ragged impressions of childhood viewed through a twisted adult prism: It is a vision of the ‘before’ where the ‘after’ seeps in to fill the empty spaces like moss in between old cracks. Nayomi Munaweera’s latest book is a deep exploration of the psyche and its deep-rooted fissures that lie seething under an outwardly calm surface. It is powerful in its telling of an unravelling life. It is also the detailed anatomy of a crime—right from the inception to its terrible denouement. Munaweera’s unnamed narrator is a young woman, both a victim and perpetrator of something unspeakable, and her story is as much…

COME NEXT YEAR and there won’t be a separate Railway Budget. After 92 years, there will be no distinct annual statement of accounts for one of the biggest employers in India. It was a step that should have been taken a long time ago. The original rationale for a separate Railway Budget had some traction at a time when rail expenditures were very large and in the same league as those of the Union Budget. During the colonial period, the Indian Railways would issue bonds in London to raise funds. The complexity of its finances merited separate treatment. This situation changed dramatically after Independence. The Indian economy became inward looking and lost most of its global financial links over time. The Railway Budget began to be financed by government money,…

Love may or may not be dead, but Brangelina is being put to rest: Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt. The two of them, famous individually but together an even stronger cultural force, symbolised the idea of a modern family. They lived together for years, testing themselves, before deciding to marry. They adopted several kids. But the wedding has come unstuck, showing that marriages, no matter how perfect they seem, succumb to the same old pressures—incompatibility, infidelity, insensitivity. The split of a celebrity couple shouldn’t be cause for any greater sorrow to unrelated parties, except that it brings home how much effort it takes to make a relationship last. WORD’S WORTH “Divorce is always hard. Especially on the kids. Of course I am the result of my…

SHE WALKS, SHE LEADS: WOMEN WHO INSPIRE INDIA Gunjan Jain Penguin Viking 556 Pages | Rs 799 WOMEN OF WORTH Although • Sudha Murthy was the seed investor who paid for all family expenses for three years while Infosys was getting off the ground, Narayan Murthy refused to have her join the board saying the two couldn’t work together. The episode rankled Sudha for years. • Parmeshwar Godrej raised a million dollars through her Heroes project for HIV Aids distributing money to several NGOs including Elizabeth Glaser Foundation. • Rajshree Birla has done enormous work to contain polio in India working with the government to create a rural cold chain and immunising 18 million children over the years. She heads a team of 200 CSR professionals and 1,500 field workers…