Inhoudsopgave van September 2016 - Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The cover story, ‘Amit Shah Has Cast(e) The Vote’ (29 August 2016), shows the BJP’s political manoeuvres and planning in the run-up to critical state elections. The party has always been extremely smart and perceptive when it comes to exploiting the weak spots of rival parties. Modi still makes the occasional ‘Maa-bete ki sarkar’ jibe at rallies. For countless citizens who are yet to see decent roads, electric connections, schools, medical care, water facilities and employment opportunities reach their doorstep, such jokes leave an impression. As the party gears up for polls in Uttar Pradesh early next year, Amit Shah and the rest of the party are going to leave no stone unturned. Caste, in particular, is going to be the BJP’s trump card, especially…

‘RED EARTH, RED ants,the shleshmataka and poison must not be consumed by Brahmins. Brahmins must also not eat fish that are without scales, frogs and four-footed aquatic animals, with the exception of turtles.' Shleshmataka is a medicinal plant, its botanical name is Cordia Myxa. The fruit is edible and used in Ayurveda preparations. It is full of vitamins. Shleshmataka is also believed to help in growth of hair. There are more than 12,000 types of ants and most of them are edible, or so I think. The bit I have just quoted is from the Mahabharata. If you remember the Mahabharata, Bhishma has been brought down and is lying on a bed of arrows, waiting for the right time to die. At that time, he instructs Yudhishthira, in sections…

THE ONE OBJECT Bharti Kher has been carrying on her person for at least 13 years does not belong to her, even though she possesses it, not in a Zen-like way, but as an embodiment, or a silent witness that discreetly records every sensuous incident she has since experienced. That singular blue pendant in the shape of a votive eye has hung by a chain around her neck each time I’ve met her; first, years ago, as an artist acquaintance, someone I’d see at art openings in Delhi, someone whose work moved me but who I admired distantly, and gradually, as a cherished friend, someone with whom I’d spend more than half an evening at a party, immersed in deep, unencumbered conversation, speaking about bodies and motherhood, sex and creativity.…

‘ON MONDAY, THE Tamil writer Perumal Murugan posted this, as translated by The Hindu, on his Facebook account: ‘Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He also has no faith in rebirth. An ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.’ But to not write is not something that will happen even if he intends it. He will write. It is something he has no control over, no matter how much humiliation he has had to face.’ It was in January of 2015 that your columnist wrote the above passage and he is happy to note that Murugan has indeed not been keeping his pen idle and this week released a book of poems, titled Songs…

TO BE CONDEMNED by headlines can’t be anything new for Narendra Modi. He has overcome the worst of them, and that may partly explain his distrust of the media. A lesser political life would have come to an abrupt end under the weight of front pages, but his was one that drew its strength from the worst of morning news, and the severest of editorial punishments. It was as if being alone against the wall only hardened his will to defy, to win. It has always been a lone fight, every instance of adversity an inspiration for the next astonishing moment. He reached Delhi after one of the longest campaigns in political history, and it was one man’s rejoinder to the cosy assumptions of the entitlement raj. In victory, there…

ON THE MORNING of August 22, as Hyderabad toasted its newest hero, 21-year-old Pusarla Venkata Sindhu, who had pulled off a heist at the biggest event in international sport before losing to firebrand Spaniard Carolina Marin in the badminton women’s singles finals, journalists and TV news crews were sweating it out in the sun. The day seemed just as long as the final game against a stronger, wilier Marin, prone to Sharapovian bouts of screaming. We had arrived early at the Haj Terminal of the Hyderabad International Airport and waited alongside a posse of policemen, political representatives, athletes and a blue, open-deck BEST bus from Mumbai. At the exit, the ‘Haj Mubarak’ banner was dwarfed by bigger boards welcoming home the freshly-crowned Olympic silver medallist and the coach with the…

SELECTION DAY Aravind Adiga Fourth Estate 280 Pages | Rs 599 IT CAN’T BE easy being Aravind Adiga. After your first novel has won the Man Booker Prize, once it has become omnipresent at traffic signals of the city and in pirated piles on pavements, where do you go from there? Do you try variations and permutations of what brought you success back in 2008, or do you select something altogether different? With Selection Day, Adiga chooses the blueprint that has reaped him rich rewards previously. If The White Tiger is the story of a man from Laxmangarh who used to wipe tables at a teashop and smash coal, and now works as a driver in Delhi, Selection Day tells of a chutney seller from Karnataka who has moved to…

A LONG WATCH: WAR, CAPTIVITY AND RETURN IN SRI LANKA (As told to Sunila Galappatti) Ajith Boyagoda HarperCollins India 229 Pages | Rs 350 FOR SOMEONE WHO belongs to the Sri Lankan navy and is thus officially in opposition to the Eelam uprising, Commander Boyagoda is remarkably sensitive to the Tamilians he meets while on duty. He allows the Red Cross to conduct meetings with the local population, and whenever he returns from leave to visit his family in Colombo, he carries back medicines since there is hardly a headache pill available in Karainagar, on the island next to the Jaffna peninsula that he is in charge of. After a rather uneventful two decades of war, Boyagoda considers an early retirement in 1994. He is at the time helming a…

INDIA’S TRAVAILS AT the Rio Olympics are wellknown. A country of 1.3 billion could only manage two medals at the world stage while smaller, poorer countries performed much better. It is facile to look for a single explanation for India’s performance, but if there is one sore point, it is the way sports are organised—or rather controlled—in the country. It is not hard to understand why. Indian sports administrators, probably the most ill-informed and badly behaved of bureaucrats, treat players as people working for them and not the other way round. By now there is plenty of controversy over how the marathoner OP Jaisha was treated. The athlete claimed she did not get water to drink after her run. Indian administrators claim she is lying. But for every Jaisha whose…

Is there a limit to free speech? A case of sedition has been filed against Kannada actress Ramya for saying that she received good hospitality in Pakistan as part of a delegation to a SAARC meet of young parliamentarians there. If merely saying so makes her an enemy of the state, then limits would have to be placed on just about anything that’s said. Because if even basic courtesies of human interaction are equated with treason, then, in effect, there is no free speech. If Indians have to pause before saying anything—just to ponder whether it would be anti-national to say it—then we will soon be a country of long silences. WORD’S WORTH “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep…

‘SI AINT FREGIT, noli id reficere’. That, according to Wikipedia, is Latin for the wise American advice, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ But what if it is broke? That’s perhaps why the Indian Constitution has been amended a hundred times in 69 years with more amendments in the offing. It is a clear outlier because, in contrast, the US Constitution has been amended only 33 times in 227 years. The Australian Constitution has been amended eight times in 116 years. (There it takes a referendum to get it done). The Irish Constitution, from which ours borrowed quite a lot, has been amended 33 times in about 75 years. The French have made about 30 amendments in 56 years, but most of these are about their colonies and elections,…

ON 4 SEPTEMBER, WHEN Raghuram Rajan demits office as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), he will be succeeded by his quiet deputy. The person, who has seldom been seen in public delivering lectures or presiding over events, is usually to be heard only during the customary analyst and press conference after the central bank’s monetary policy announcements. Even then, he waits for the mike to be handed over. Meet Urjit Patel, the quiet Deputy Governor in charge of monetary policy at the central bank. With wide experience in the private sector, academia and international financial institutions, Patel is first and foremost a macroeconomist. His mettle is about to be tested in what is one of the more stressful jobs in India. Earlier this year, on 18 June,…

THE VOYEUR’S MOTEL Gay Talese Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press 240 Pages | Rs 1141 AS A HIGH-SCHOOL student, about one-and-a-half decades ago, I had a close friend who liked to peep through the vertical iron bars of his living room window. From the window, he saw a bedroom in the opposite building, which housed three girls: one was about his age; the rest were a few years elder to him. That bedroom had a long mirror, where those girls saw themselves, and my friend saw them seeing themselves, waiting and hoping for them to take off their clothes. Often, they did. But it wasn’t easy, usually he’d spend inordinate time near the window, looking at the empty room, enduring boredom, clinging to anticipation, trying to ward off feelings…

Brutal Endings Angel-faced Vicky Donor discovery Yami Gautam—when she isn’t busy clarifying the status of her relationship with Pulkit Samrat, or responding to his wife’s accusations that she broke up their marriage—is fast consolidating her position as the go-to girl for filmmakers seeking to cast the role of the brutally tortured girlfriend or wife whose death or beating the film’s hero will go on to avenge. In Badlapur, she played Varun Dhawan’s beloved missus who meets her end at the hands of Nawazuddin Siddiqui during a bank robbery that goes awry. Varun spent the rest of the film engaged in a cat-and-mouse chase with Nawaz, plotting a fitting payback. In the eminently forgettable Prabhu Deva-directed turkey Action Jackson, she was Ajay Devgn’s better half, attacked most unsympathetically in an underground…