Table of contents for March 7, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in SRISHANT Your cover story ‘The Ishrat File’ (29 February 2016) could not have been published at a more opportune time. More now than ever before, our country is being torn apart by religious and communal forces. Such turmoil almost always results in an utter waste of time, resources and life. In the case of Ishrat Jehan, for long political parties were up in arms about the encounter. Now that David Headley has testified she was an LeT operative, they all come off looking foolish. As with all petty political propaganda, there are more serious things to worry about and fight for. This week, while we all fought over reservations and the definition of ‘sedition’, very few took time out to send a prayer for the families of the ten…

FOR assuming guilt until innocence is proven ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a rule of law followed in almost every civlised nation. However, soon-to-retire Delhi Police Chief BS Bassi would like us to believe otherwise. In the ongoing movement for free speech that Jawaharlal Nehru University has become part of, with some students being accused of sedition, Bassi reportedly said, “They should join the probe. If they say they are innocent, they should present evidence of innocence.” While a few students the police was hunting for were absconding from campus for a few days, they did not run away from the law. However, the police said that the students must “surrender”. Not only is this absurd, coming from someone whose job is to protect citizens, it is highly disturbing as…

THIS IS NOT a lament, and not certainly one at a time when what we hear and what we read are mostly outbursts of disillusion, despair, and revulsion. And who will dare to add to the current discourse on the Forbidden Republic of India that swings between the funereal and the farcical? What we miss in the noise are the good old pleasures of conversation, which is what sustains a democracy as a more meaningful alternative to systems where communication is a one-way affair, Power talking down to its subjects. The noise we generate here—the most polyphonic Babel on earth perhaps—is cited by awestruck students of freedom as democracy’s elemental volatility, its dizzying diversity. The noise we hear today, the anger that burns morning papers and airwaves, is about an…

THE BATTLE FOR SANSKRIT: IS SANSKRIT POLITICAL OR SACRED, OPPRESSIVE OR LIBERATING, DEAD OR ALIVE? Rajiv Malhotra HarperCollins india | 488 pages | Rs 699 THIS ISN’T Rajiv Malhotra’s first book, nor will it be the last. All his books generate discussion and debate. This is no different. It is titled The Battle for Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the foundation for much of our history, culture, legacy, knowledge and language and there is indeed a battle that needs to be waged for its preservation. Other than an Introduction and five appendices, there are 11 chapters in this book. Two of those (Chapter IX on declaring Sanskrit dead and the conclusion) are on this battle. The other nine chapters are on a parallel, though related, battle, that of the capture of Indology…

POWER PLAY “You can’t form a government in the air. The point is how to create an encouraging atmosphere... And for it you need the support of the Government. If we get it, fine. If not, then we’ll move on” — PDP President Mehbooba Mufti to party members, reported in Hindustan Times, 5 February 2016 “I have faith in Allah and on the decision of Mufti Sayeed sahib... He believed that a leader like Modiji with his huge mandate and courage can take a decision which can bring India and Pakistan close” — Mufti to party members, reported in The Economic Times, 24 February 2016…

SIN IS A transgression against the intent of God, but in modern rational times it should be an irrelevant word, among sensible human beings at least. Smoking cigarettes might be bad for your lungs but it is difficult to see it as a sin because it is hard to see God having an opinion on it, one way or the other. The Health Ministry recently wrote to the Finance Ministry asking for the imposition of a Sin Tax in this Budget on the consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. When—and if—the proposed Goods and Services Tax comes into force in India, then it too will in all probability be levied on these two items. As something that makes people pay the state a penalty for socially undesirable actions, the Sin Tax…

ACROSS THE WORLD, political campaigning has become big business. Thousands of people are employed, vast budgets are spent on advertising, promotion and logistics, and the ‘product’ is as carefully packaged as any merchandise. Most campaigns require big, wealthy investors to help pay for all this. Sometimes, as in the current presidential race in America, there are attempts to do things differently, but they are exceptions to the rule. Donald Trump on the Republican side pays out of his own pocket, while the Democrat Bernie Sanders relies on millions of small donors. But even they cannot avoid becoming a ‘brand’ and having their USPs paraded in front of consumers who must ultimately decide which to select. Many of those consumers, who the campaigns hope to convert into actual voters on polling…

A BOOK IS A many splendid thing. It could be a distraction on a train journey; bought on the platform, read and completed on the upper berth and abandoned by the window. It could be a dear companion stored in one’s bedside table drawer and reread ever so often. Or it could be a piece of art in itself, one which makes its presence known in a room and demands that its pages be turned (never flipped) with reverence for generations to come. The books of Taschen fall into this last category. The leading publisher of art books in the world, Taschen has reconfigured how publishing works. Started in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen, it is known by aesthetes for its exquisitely produced books on everything from art and architecture to…

WALKING THE HIMALAYAS Levison Wood HACHETTE INDIA | 291 PAGES | RS 699 IMAGES OF travel seduce me like no others; fill me with a sense of paradises lost, of places in which I might have immersed myself. Of all those that have beckoned, the Hunza Valley is the most seductive, but it lies just outside my reach, across the Line of Control in Kashmir. How tenuous are these lines on maps. ‘Intangible, yet maddeningly granitic—borders. They unlock strange panoramas in our collective psyche; the borders of identity, of inwardouterness,’ wrote Paul Salopek. The Hunza Valley famously inspired Lost Horizon, James Hilton’s novel about a Shangri La. Here, Levison Wood walked through ‘fields of spinach and cabbage and orchards of apricots, cherries and walnuts.’ In the current dispensation of lines…

DIRECTOR Tom McCarthy CAST Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams Even if a journalist dies and goes to heaven, he or she is unlikely to ever get to work at a desk with as much space and time as the ‘Spotlight’ unit of the The Boston Globe is given. They have months to work non-stop on a single investigation, as they did with the child sex abuse scandal of the Roman Catholic Church in Boston in 2001-02. This movie is a fictional documentation of that extraordinary work, perhaps the most important by an American publication since The Washington Post investigated the Watergate scandal. The repercussions following this case on the Church in Boston may not have had as direct a political impact as did Watergate, but the international reverberations of…

UMBERTO ECO (1932-2016) ‘Beyond custodians of historical memory, multimedia tools can be devices to strengthen our ability to remember’: reads a tweet dated 21 November 2015. Written in Italian, that was the last day Umberto Eco sent a message out to the world. He would pass away of cancer on 19 February at age 84 in his home in Milan. He might have begun his career as a scholar of medieval studies and semiotics but the present and the future always absorbed him. If his present tweet moves away from the typical discourse that technology makes us amnesiac, back in 1994 he used his skill as a semiotician to read into computers and place them in a religious context. He said, “I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh…

NUMBER CRUNCHING SEASON is upon us. And while analysts whip up a storm of figures drawn from the Budget to crunch—and torture, in some cases, to confess one view of the economy or another—it is also a good time to sit back, take a deep breath over the state of your own finances, and nag yourself about how much money you are actually putting away for the future. Tele-marketers selling pension schemes are already doing it, and rather shamelessly at that: their preferred pitch involves a modest sum you must invest every month, placed in contrast with a vast sum promised a few decades hence. What they fail to mention is what that cash would be worth after all those years. One can’t blame them, though, for they simply do…

I meet PNC Menon at his centre of gravity, a modern home for deprived seniors and widowed mothers in Kerala that represents everything he believes in. A charitable facility, Sobha Hermitage is located in a serene 23-acre campus in Palakkad district’s Vadakkencherry village to which he traces his roots, although he was raised in Thrissur, 30 km away. The sparsely furnished rooms of the grey-and-white building appear more inviting than most three-star lodgings in India. They speak of the property magnate’s obsession for detail, and his insistence on immaculate maintenance. The founder and chairman emeritus of Sobha Ltd looks the part of a fastidious aesthete, freshly-scrubbed and dressed in a half-sleeved shirt and beige trousers, his polished Prada shoes, diamond-flecked watch and Ferragamo belt buckle betraying a taste for luxury.…

ENGLISH CONTINUES to be the preferred lingua franca for many litterateurs in India and a bevy of English literature festivals are proliferating across the country’s cultural landscape. However, Gateway Litfest, which debuted in 2015 to much success, has emerged as a mass literary movement to revive the rich and varied literary tradition of the country and provide a much-needed platform for language writers and literature aficionados. It provides a definite perspective to the present literary scene in the country, till now thought to have been dominated by Indo-Anglian writings. What started as a coffee table discussion among a group of journalists (Mohan Kakanadan, Sabarinath M, Joseph Alexander and KJ Bennychan) became the country’s first regional literature festival last year. It has since helped promote writings in our mother tongues that…

GILBERT: THE LAST YEARS OF WG GRACE Charlie Connelly BLOOMSBURY | RS 499 | 190 PAGES BENAUD IN WISDEN Edited by Rob Smyth BLOOMSBURY | RS 599 | 198 PAGES WILLIAM GILBERT GRACE was a modern cricketer in two senses of the term. He invented batsmanship as we know it today. To quote his great contemporary Ranji, “Grace founded the modern theory of batting by making forward and back play of equal importance… he turned a one-stringed instrument into a many chorded lyre…” His cricket was about great synthesis and stunning invention. His record is phenomenal. On wickets where (even at Lord’s), batsmen had to often pick stones out of the track, he once made 344, 177 and 318 not out in successive innings. In all first-class cricket in a…

A MAN OF MANY TALENTS Tom McCarthy, director of Spotlight, has been seen in films like Meet the Parents and Good Night, and Good Luck and TV shows such as The Wire. He also co-wrote the critically acclaimed animation film Up TWENTY PEOPLE were killed by the hijackers on Pan Am Flight 73 as it was grounded at Karachi Airport on 5 September 1986, and 12 of them were Indians. We know that the Head Purser on that aircraft, Neerja Bhanot, displayed extraordinary dedication and bravery, way beyond the call of duty, and saved many lives. But by the end of the film, as Neerja’s mother (Shabana Azmi) delivers a lengthy, sentimental eulogy to the memory of her daughter, and the extended end credits roll down, you have to ask…

House Husband in Heels The things movie stars will do to promote their films! Arjun Kapoor walked the red carpet at an awards ceremony last week wearing a pair of red women’s shoes. The actor who’ll next appear as a house-husband to Kareena Kapoor’s ambitious career woman in R Balki’s Ki & Ka, sportingly posed for shutterbugs flaunting his heels, and even pirouetted in them to show how comfortably he could carry them off. His buddy Ranveer Singh serenaded him for the cameras when he hit the red carpet just moments later. And to think these guys played oiled-up lafangas oozing machismo when they last appeared together on screen in Gunday. The Superhero’s Lady Love Casting the female lead opposite Ranbir Kapoor in Ayan Mukerji’s superhero film took some deliberation,…