Inhoudsopgave van May 16, 2016 - Open Magazine

ONE OF MY favourite lines from Dostoyevsky is: ‘Beauty shall save the world.’ It is darker clouds that loom over the great Russian’s pages, and his sentences writhe in the mind’s gloomiest recesses. This one is warm, hopeful, and points to the pleasures and possibilities of an alternative. Imagination alone makes the other republic, a counterpoint to this wretched place. It is the beauty of literature that makes this world bearable—and comprehensible. Standing by the ruins of hope, Dostoevsky, a writer who struggled to live by the daily wages of words, invested his faith in the alchemising powers of the mind. There was no other option for him in such a cheerless place. We have not come a long way, certainly not if we consider the politics of resentment that…

MARKET GURU The Globalist After the 2008 recession, the world of finance does not command as much respect anymore but Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets and head global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, is an exception. In an age of the niche, he is one of the increasingly lesser-seen grand theorists who takes an eagle’s eye view of the landscape and gleans out prophecies from them. On China, he has for a long time been talking of how the country has plateaued and as it slows down, corollary damage will be felt in other countries as well. In his first book published in 2012, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, he highlighted the folly of clubbing emerging markets together. And with his second book, The…

FOREIGN POLICY EXPERT World Connection The international recognition that C Raja Mohan attracts has a lot to do with the future of the US being linked to that of India. A foreign policy strategist of great repute, Mohan was on 3 May named the inaugural Marshall Bouton Asia Fellow of the prestigious The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Over time, he has emerged as one of the country’s top strategic experts who could inspire a shift from the status quo. In addition to being director, Carnegie India, Mohan is associated with several universities and is a widely-read columnist. He was also once a member of India’s National Security Advisory Board. He has performed the multiple roles of a journalist, academic and analyst with diligence. His influence over Indian foreign policy…

HISTORIAN Time Traveller The polyglot who speaks 10 languages is Reader in Modern South Asian History and Director, St Antony’s College, Asian Studies Centre, at Oxford. Faisal Devji’s scholarship helps us understand Islam better and grasp the intricacies of Jihadist thought with greater clarity. Born in Dar es Salaam, raised in Canada and elsewhere, he is a scholar who has untangled various complex aspects of Islam. His books, such as Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, and lectures offer valuable insights into poorly understood and opaque issues. An authority on geopolitical trends in the Indian Subcontinent, his book on Gandhi, The Impossible Indian, offers rare, new perspectives. The star historian’s works…

ENVIRONMENTALIST Ever Green Be it her nuanced stand on the Odd Even scheme of Delhi, arguing for it as a necessary emergency measure but not a permanent solution, or her position during the Paris Climate Change Conference that India shouldn’t let the big polluters of the developed world browbeat us into submission, Sunita Narain, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment, has been at the forefront of every major environmental issue and weilds powerful influence on public policy. In 2013, while she was cycling on a Sunday morning in Delhi, Narain was hit by a car and suffered severe injuries, but it didn’t dampen her spirit. Currently, she is an active voice on how India needs to tackle the drought it faces, arguing that it is a man-made…

POLITICAL STRATEGIST Poll Vaulter He is the new ‘war room’ manager on the block. Sethi was recently hired by the BJP as its political strategist to take on Prashant Kishor, who is expected to manage the UP Assembly elections for the Congress. A public policy graduate from Harvard University, Sethi has already drafted a vision document for Assam, which went to polls recently. He started off by collecting data and crunching numbers to grasp voting patterns in the state. Kanpurborn Sethi, who had earlier worked with the World Bank, has endeared himself to senior leaders of the BJP and the RSS who are impressed by his humble demeanour. “After graduation, I have been working with BJP in the poll management space, assisting the party with data analytics, communication and micro-level…

DALIT ACTIVIST Voice of the Voiceless She has narrated the story of her life on several occasions. Urmila Pawar remembers that Mahar Dalits like her were forced to live in perpetual insecurity and at the centre of a village—so that they could be summoned by upper castes at any time. If something ever went wrong, they were vulnerable to attacks from all sides. Thanks to her determination, she went on to receive an MA from the University of Mumbai, author acclaimed books and act in radical Marathi theatre. She says she is a breakaway from the usual mould of Dalits who grew up with her because she decided to break free of the place she was born in, a difficult task. She has been blunt in her writings. To say…

CULTURAL IMPRESARIO The Showstopper If you are attending a major cultural show in the country, chances are that you will catch a shock of white hair rushing past you. That head of hair belongs to Sanjoy Roy, the founder and MD of Teamwork Arts. Over the last few decades, this event management firm has brought innumerable shows to cities in India and abroad. The Jazz Festival, Festival of India in Thailand, Ishara International Puppet Theatre Festival, to name a few, and of course, the biggest of them all—the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). The prime mover of all this is Roy. His years of experience in theatre, television, film and events have ensured that he remains unflappable. People who have worked with him speak of his humility and the regard he…

ARTIST AND CURATOR Stretching the Canvas Migrants from Mangalore to Mumbai who made it big in the city include the likes of George Fernandes, who cut his teeth in politics in the metropolis. Sudarshan Shetty is an artist whose father was from Mangalore, and he is now artistic director and curator of the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s first art biennale (Shetty studied painting at Mumbai’s JJ School of Art in the 1980s). Like many of his contemporaries who had to fight the uncertainties of life as an artist before they were catapulted into the national and later global limelight, Shetty didn’t choose his vocation because he thought he would be in the right place at the right time. But after two decades of battling the odds, he…

MALAYALAM FILMMAKER The Original The award-winning Sanal Kumar Sasidharan is the kind of person parables are written about. He graduated in Zoology and Law, but then in 2001 decided to turn to his abiding passion—filmmaking. He started by making short films such as Athisayalokam (Wonder World), with funds chipped in by a group of local film enthusiasts in Kerala. But it is his maiden feature film Oraalppokkam (Six Feet High), which released late last year, that is creating a buzz and winning awards. Starring poet Meena Kandasamy and Prakash Bare, it was made by a team of rookies and does not woo the audience with technical gimmickry. Crowd-funded by supporters, the simple story of a man and a woman shows the true scope of independent cinema in India. Sasidharan is…

WRITER Rebel with a Pause KR Meera’s Aarachar in Malayalam (Hangwoman in English) won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award in 2015. Her recent novella And Slowly Forgetting That Tree is a searing account of multiple rapes and a critique of patriarchy. TT Sreekumar writes in the introduction, ‘… Meera not only reveals the gendered ideologies imprisoning her characters, but also constructs a feminist model of dominant literature, one in which patriarchal, nationalistic discourses and their systems of repression are displaced by feminist discourses and testimonies.’ Meera’s work is never easy to read as it discomfits the reader but in this space of unease, Meera, a former award-winning journalist, reveals the complicated web of man-woman relationships in today’s time.…

WRITER Bombay Central Indian literature has a clear demarcation. There are the Indian writers in English and there are the regional writers of the vernacular. Jerry Pinto is one of the rare few who straddles both worlds. Pinto’s 2012 novel Em And The Big Hoom was praised by Salman Rushdie as ‘one of the very best books to come out of India in a long, long time’. Pinto has also written some of the finest English translations in contemporary times of Marathi books. This year he was the recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize. It is fulsome recognition for a life in literature.…

IT WAS PAST 11 pm. For a change, I wasn’t among the last few to leave. The who’s who of the South Asian and international art world were all in attendance at the opening reception for the third edition of the Dhaka Art Summit held earlier this year, hosted by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani. The roof party at Le Meridien was in full swing, but I was exhausted. I headed towards the elevator, and as I waited, chatted with artists Jitish and Reena Kallat, among others. Just then, superstar curator Hans Ulrich Obrist made his way towards us. He, too, I suppose, wanted to catch the bus back to the hotel before it was too late. He seemed affable, and of course he was well acquainted with all members of…

Strictly Business in Morocco Katrina Kaif will not be heading to Cannes this year. The L’Oréal brand ambassador will be in Morocco instead, filming Jagga Jasoos with Ranbir Kapoor. There was speculation in the industry whether the exes would end up completing the film in Morocco as planned, given all the bitterness around their recent split. It appears now that they’ve decided to set aside their personal differences and wrap the film without any further hiccups. Jagga Jasoos, now in the making for well over two years, missed its release dates at least twice, and according to industry insiders the producers will soon announce officially that they’re not going to be able to make their July release date either. Sources within the studio say they’re now looking at a September…

For a country of India’s diversity, vibrance and population, picking a few dozen names for such an honour roll is an exercise that demands a fine sense of judgment. While we strive to be objective, there could always be subjective interpretations of it, given that Indians remain as argumentative as ever. Yet, the names on this list of chosen people are anything but random, we dare say. There is a pattern to them, and plenty of rigour and much discussion preceded the final selection of those who make a significant difference to the lives of others in this country through their endeavours in a vast variety of spheres— government, policy-making, academia, social work, business and so on. They make us proud because these are men and women whose dedication to…

POLITICAL SCIENTIST Discovering India His biodata states he is an ‘Avantha Professor and Director at King’s India Institute’ at King’s College London, but the fact is that Sunil Khilnani has helped set the discourse of the day. His first book The Idea of India, written back in 1999, was a slim volume with a grand belief. As Amartya Sen wrote, it highlighted ‘the robustness and staying power of the secular idea of India’. Over the last 15 years, and especially recently, this ‘secular idea of India’ has been questioned—both literally and metaphorically—and has found prominent place in the arena of debate. This year, Khilnani has once again established his credentials as a leading public intellectual with his book Incarnations: India in 50 Lives. In this big book of little essays…

ECONOMIST The Debunker He is a hard-nosed economist known for his incisive commentaries on India and economic trends. An associate professor of Economics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, he has acquired a reputation for calling the bluff of policymakers bent upon effecting incremental measures with much fanfare, notably in labour reforms and monetary policy. Lately, he has commended Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his reforms push. Dehejia, who along with his wife Rupa Subramanya, wrote Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India, wields tremendous influence in Indian policymaking.…

POLITICAL STRATEGIST Heartland Whizz His is a voice taken very seriously by the Union Government. Though he keeps a low profile, he has the power to influence and push policy decisions. While he is wellknown as an organisation man, Gopal’s grip over the new establishment is not very well known even within the ruling dispensation. An RSS pracharak, he had been the brain behind many innovative rural health initiatives by various BJP state governments in the past. A PhD in Botany, ‘Gopalji’ had played a key role in the 2014 General Election from his Varanasi office. His knowledge of the electoral dynamics of Uttar Pradesh helped the BJP frame its poll strategy in the state. He was born in Hasayan, a small town in UP. Gopal has authored several books,…

Culture is often relegated to the ‘back of the book’. It isn’t politics, it isn’t the economy, so it must be unimportant. But to examine the minds in the following pages is to realise that these aren’t people who are only writing books or making cinema or painting on canvases. Rather, they are moulding the way you and I understand ourselves and how we interpret the world. As humans, we have an innate desire—to be heard and acknowledged. This sounds simple but happens infrequently. And it is here that artists come into play. They help us realise what we are thinking before we do; from the seed of an idea, a glimmer of a thought, they can spin an entire narrative, be it a tale, a film or a book.…

SCHOLAR AND PROGRAMMER Classic Cool He wears his privilege with a deep sense of responsibility. An Ivy League polymath, NR Narayana Murthy’s son— and for a short while, his executive assistant at Infosys—is a passionate patron of scholarship. His dream of producing quality translations of India’s greatest classical works ran into rough weather earlier this year with the so-called custodians of our cultural heritage opposed to American Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock’s helming of the Murty Classical Library of India. Murty, however, stood like a rock by his editor, arguing against the politicisation of the ambitious project spanning two millennia of India’s multilingual literary history. That is the young Murty for you, upholding the values he believes in. “Education is incomplete without knowledge of the humanities which inform us about the human…

SCRIPTWRITER Scene Stealer The first movie that Juhi Chaturvedi wrote, Vicky Donor, had an unusual plot of a man whose life changes through sperm donation. The movie had its flaws, but was a superhit. She then did dialogues for two more movies, Madras Café and Khoobsurat. But it was with Piku last year that Chaturvedi was acknowledged as one of the best writers in Bollywood. The story of the relationship between an old man obsessed with constipation and his daughter was again not usual Bollywood fare, but it went on to become an unexpected blockbuster. It is hard to find anyone who doesn’t like it. It got her a National Award and a Filmfare ‘black lady’. If the Hindi film industry is witnessing a wave of intelligent cinema for the…

AUTHOR Explosive Imagination What is Lajpat Nagar? ‘A market in Delhi’ is the most likely answer. But Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs (out later this month), outdoes and outshines all descriptions of Lajpat Nagar by describing it as a ‘Heisenbergian nightmare of motion and ambiguity’. Later in the same chapter, he writes of Mr and Mrs Khurana who have lost their two children in a bomb blast: ‘Mr and Mrs Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence.’ There is a certain smartness to this Delhi-raised writer’s work that has made him the toast in literary circles. He made news early on when he read the…

GOVERNOR, RBI The Big Bank Theorist He is not lionised the world over for nothing. When the rest of the emerging world is hurtling from one economic crisis to another and India stands relatively unhurt, the credit, in no small measure, goes to Raghuram Rajan who speaks his mind fearlessly. As RBI Governor, he steered us through a tough time when the burden on monetary policy was very high to reduce inflation levels. He has also lifted the country’s image in foreign markets. His reputation— he was made Chief Economic Advisor first and central banker later—preceded him. He is often talked about for his prescient paper at the 2005 Jackson Hole conference and his firstrate intellect. His report on financial sector reforms in India is a terrific blueprint for any…

PHILOSOPHER Wisdom of the East Trained as a mathematician at Cambridge university, Jonardon Ganeri fell under the spell of Indian philosophy later. Currently a professor of Philosophy at New York University, he is also the winner of the 2015 Infosys Prize in the Humanities category. Ganeri deserves acclaim for familiarising the world with various facets of Indian philosophy through his stunning works such as Artha, The Concealed Art of the Soul, The Self and The Lost Age of Reason. He is simply one of the best writers to analyse and interpret Indian thought. According to him, the hallmark of Indian philosophy—though it has been obscured by colonial manipulation of academic curricula—‘is a diversity of profound exploration into the multiple dimensions of human experience’. “Ways of thinking about what it is…

BUREAUCRAT Incredible Drive Amitabh Kant has earned a name as an out-of-the-box thinker and a superlative manager among babus. A 1980-batch IAS officer of the Kerala cadre, Uttar Pradesh-born Kant has always had a penchant for tough jobs. Now the CEO of NITI Aayog and the point person for Prime Minister Modi’s ambitious ‘Make in India’ campaign, he is credited with the highly successful ‘Incredible India’ and ‘God’s Own Country’ campaigns that transformed India from a largely budget-tourist destination to a high-end traveller’s dream, showcasing its diverse heritage and culture. An alumnus of Modern School, St Stephen’s College and JNU, he had played a pivotal role in shaping the concept of smart cities as chief executive of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation and in drafting new initiatives for the…

SPIRITUAL ENTREPRENEURS Soul Mates There might be numerous opinions on Baba Ramdev’s spiritualism and politics, but what no one will dismiss is his success as an entrepreneur. He and Acharya Balkrishna have created an entirely new business model of using a spiritual brand to market household products. From toothpaste to tea, they have a superstore of items selling like hot cakes under the name of Patanjali. Their recent launch of instant noodles is a testament to their astute business sense. There was a time when Patanjali products were pitched as ‘ayurvedic’ but the launch of noodles shows the nature of their ambition. The annual revenues of Patanjali are around Rs 5,000 crore and they want to double it this year, becoming major competition to the likes of Dabur and Hindustan…

ACTOR Peasant Surprise Long before the drought that many regions of India are reeling under broke into the national consciousness, film star Nana Patekar was quietly doing relief work. He began by providing support to families of farmers who had committed suicide, using his own funds. In one interview, he spoke about how he had money set aside for a new car when he found out the scale of farmer suicides and that sum was his first donation to the cause. He continued doing it without any fanfare until the media got wind of it. Later, along with Marathi actor Makarand Anaspure, he set up a foundation to expand the scale of the relief work, and within a week, they had collected over Rs 6 crore. More than the money,…

ACTOR World at Her Feet Priyanka Chopra is 33 years old and that is a young age in most fields of life. Bollywood, however, is famously unkind to actresses who have crossed the twenties and most of them either retire or move on to ‘character’ roles. But Chopra is different. When she first reinvented herself as a pop singer targeting the US audience, many voices ridiculed the idea. But it laid the foundation for Quantico, an American thriller series running on the ABC network, in which Chopra plays the central character. Its success became the basis for a role in Baywatch, a movie version of the cult yesteryear TV serial. Many A-list Bollywood actresses have aspired to conquer Hollywood but no one has come close to what Chopra has achieved.…

CARNATIC MUSICIAN Improv Maestro They say the best way to know Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s work is to attend his concert, pick a seat in the middle and enjoy the ride. To watch this vocalist once is to be converted for life. This Carnatic musician’s concerts sparkle not only with technical prowess but a liveliness and energy that exhilarates an audience. In ragam-thanam-pallavi, which is based entirely on improvisation, his creativity comes to the fore. His fans have described his performances akin to watching a ‘gripping thriller’, since his improvisations are sudden and unexpected. This has ensured that his shows run to packed houses. Even though he has a reputation as a ‘purist’ and a ‘connoisseurs’ musician’, young listeners flood his shows. At the Sangita Kalanidhi (considered the highest honour given to…

ACTOR Dream Girl Redefined She is the Indian male’s perfect fantasy and she has assiduously built that brand to cross over into areas previously considered off limits. Sunny Leone is now a successful mainstream actress and many of the movies that she acts in revolve around her character. And this is someone who does not speak Hindi well and has had little experience in acting. But her movies do well because she has a following that male stars would envy. Last month, Sunny also turned writer with the publishing house Juggernaut launching her collection of erotic short stories, Sweet Dreams. While no one sets much store by their literary merit, what Sunny is clear about is how it enhances her own brand appeal. Besides a series of endorsements, she also…

CHEF Taste Maker Can Indian cuisine ever hope to become modern enough to be listed among the world’s best that chefs have to offer? On the whole, that has not been a very promising ambition, except for a few rare exceptions, and Gaggan Anand is one of them. After completing his culinary schooling in India, Anand moved to Bangkok where he now has a restaurant, Gaggan, which ranked 10th best in Restaurant magazine’s San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2015 and first in Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants in the 2016 list. Anand likes to call his work ‘progressive Indian cuisine’, and does a molecular interpretation of Indian dishes, using his stint at that temple of molecular gastronomy, the famous El Bulli restaurant run by Ferran Adrià…

MODEL AND AUTHOR Mind and Body People expected her memoir to be scurrilous chick lit that milked her relationship with ex-husband Salman Rushdie. But anyone who reads Love, Loss and What We Ate realises that there is so much more to Padma Lakshmi than a couple of years spent with a famous man. She is a woman who has known tragedy—racism, abuse, ill-health—and overcome it. She has known success but hasn’t allowed it to define her. And she has used her position of power to raise awareness of endometriosis, a painful gynaecological disease that goes untreated in millions of women. While Lakshmi has always carved out her own space, first on the ramp and later on television cookery shows, her memoir tells us just how far this Madras-born girl has…

INDIA’S WAR: THE MAKING OF MODERN SOUTH ASIA 1939-1945 Srinath Raghavan Allen Lane 553 Pages | Rs 699 SRINATH RAGHAVAN’S India’s War fills a gap in the political-military history of India, and does so magnificently. While we have several excellent histories of World War II dealing with aspects of India’s involvement and its impact on the country, they have been fragmentary. Bayly and Harper’s Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (2005) was a brilliant social history and examination of the role of the Indian Army in the ‘great crescent’ from Bengal to Singapore. India’s War and Forgotten Armies have a full measure of British complacency and folly in common, but differ in important respects. This is a 360 degree view, including Africa, Europe and the Middle…

BEING DIAGNOSED with diabetes can be traumatic. The word conjures visions of lifelong restrictions on food, insulin injections and sermons on a healthy lifestyle from doctors, friends and family. My patients often ask me, “Can my diabetes be cured?” Recently, a report about a diabetes patient becoming insulin-free in a Miami research trial made headlines, raising the possibility of a cure for this condition. How real is this possibility? To understand strategies for ‘curing’ diabetes, we have to delve into its genesis. One of the pivotal defects in diabetes is deficiency of insulin, which is produced in the human body by beta cells. Beta cells are part of the islets of Langerhans, which in turn are part of the pancreas, the organ we associate with diabetes. In diabetes, beta cells…

CAST Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor, Sudheer Babu DIRECT OR Sabbir Khan WE ARE INFORMED at the beginning of this film that Kalaripayattu, a form of martial arts from Kerala, was the origin of Chinese Kung Fu. So apparently it all began here, in the backwaters of Kerala, and the early part of the film with the boat races and the discipline involved in learning Kalaripayattu, is beautifully shot. Ronnie (Tiger Shroff), a martial arts rebel, turns up in Kerala to learn this traditional art and comes under the influence of a mesmerising Guru, the local ‘Master Shifu’, who teaches him things like controlling his mind and doing a handstand, balanced on just a finger and a thumb. Unfortunately, this natural and artistic form of combat has a few ugly side…