Table of contents for July 4, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The cover story, ‘A Crisis Called Rahul’ (27 June 2016), brought out the real reason why the Congress is in shambles today. Once the party was widely loved and appreciated. It was called the ‘grand old party’ for a reason. And now it has almost been reduced to the status of a regional party. This is all because of one man who has not been able to step up and provide the party with the leadership and direction it needs. This also puts a question mark over the politics of inheritance. While being the son or grandson of a well-known leader might give a sense of grandeur to a person, it does not necessarily mean that the candidate is capable of or right for the…

LAST WEEK, two ageing rockstars, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Robert Plant came together. Not to reunite for a concert, but at a sombre Los Angeles courtroom. The members of what Rolling Stone magazine once described as the ‘heaviest’ band of all time sat quietly along with their lawyers as a jury in a courtroom filled with reporters, fans and onlookers listened to their famed composition Stairway to Heaven. It was the start of what will most certainly become one of the most talked about courtroom trials in music history. The band is alleged to have nicked the famous guitar riff at the song’s opening from another song of the time, Taurus, by a US band called Spirit. The copyright infringement action has been brought by the estate of the…

THE PROPHETIC prescription of Marshall McLuhan’s global village has run its course. The world today is anything but a village, says Timothy Garton Ash in his heavily annotated manifesto for free speech. A global city—connected by technology and shrunken by the free flow of ideas—is a more appropriate description, but Garton Ash, who would like to see himself as a historian of the present, calls this world ‘cosmopolis’, which is the ‘transformed context for any discussion of free speech in our time’. Freedom in cosmopolis is trapped inside a paradox. The most obvious feature of this world is that there has been a kind of democratisation of freedom. And it has shown how human instincts are amplified by technological insights. The medium is not the message. It is the shared…

EVERY NOW AND then, India witnesses a replay of an old debate: the independence of its democratic institutions from the Government. The questions always remain the same: is the Government harming the country’s long-term interests by exercising control of the various institutions which complement it in the difficult task of governing a nascent democracy? The latest hand-wringing over this evergreen debate came last week, over, of all things, the Reserve Bank of India’s relationship with the Government. Such was the intensity of the controversy that even film actors joined the debate. Thus, no sooner had Subramanian Swamy, an irrepressible and some would say irresponsible BJP MP, demanded of the Government that it not extend the three-year term of the current RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, than a veritable liberal storm broke…

THE RISE AND FALL OF NATIONS: TEN RULES OF CHANGE IN THE POST-CRISIS WORLD Ruchir Sharma Allen Lane 480 Pages | Rs 799 IN THE FIRST decade of the 21st century, a curious illusion gripped economists, investors and statesmen. A large number of these otherwise careful people began to believe that the elixir of economic growth had been found. Growth, it was assumed, would continue for the foreseeable future. What made this possible was the learning of the right lessons—openness to trade, greatly reduced government interference in markets, and globalisation, among other policies had unlocked a secret that had eluded the world since at least the Neolithic age. The illusion was short-lived. ‘Then came 2008. The years BC (Before Crisis) gave way to the years AC (After Crisis). After the…

UNDER INDIAN LAW, as far as anyone can be certain, putting one’s foot in the mouth is not a crime. Salman Khan has plenty to occupy himself with when it comes to legal proceedings. A stray remark about feeling like a raped woman after a frenetic shooting schedule shouldn’t be one of them. In an audio clip of that segment of the interview, he seems to have realised the inappropriateness of the comparison almost immediately, and murmurs something like “I don’t think…” before continuing with his train of thought. But it is not everyday that you get two buzzwords—Salman and rape—in the same context, which explains the overdrive on social media. But that is okay, because the nature of such networks is to relentlessly react and be seen doing it.…

ON 5 AUGUST 1968, Chairman Mao sent a basket of mangoes to the workers of the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The mangoes had been gifted to the Chairman by the visiting foreign minister of Pakistan. The Pakistanis would never have imagined that their mangoes would make history. The next day, newspapers reported the elation of the workers in the propaganda outfit. Many readers of the People’s Daily realised that the mangoes were a warning to the student ‘Red Guards’ to fall in with the disciplinary measures of the propaganda team. Just in case the message eluded its audience, the newspapers carried an article expounding the theoretical rationale titled ‘The Working Class Must Exercise Leadership in Everything’. The Red Guards were leashed firmly in their…

ON 20 JUNE, the Union Government took another step in liberalising the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) rules that prevail in the country. While the overall pace appears to be incremental, some of the changes effected have been in sectors as diverse as food products, defence, pharmaceuticals, civil aviation and single-brand retail, cumulatively making India one of the more open countries when it comes to welcoming investment from overseas. There is much to be positive about the moves that were announced on Monday. With the latest round of FDI liberalisation, there is now just a small negative list left; otherwise, most areas are open for investment under the automatic route or by Government approval. This list includes investment in atomic energy, railway operations, gambling and betting, lottery businesses, chit funds, cigarettes…

THE LATEST film of Nagesh Kukunoor, Dhanak, leaves you with a smile on your face and hope in your heart—both underrated elements in movie-making these days. While most plots stem from lies, deceit and killings, here’s one that comes with a silver lining. Which is why you don’t mind a far-fetched tale about a brother and a sister who go in search of Shah Rukh Khan to find a cure for the brother’s blindness. “I wanted to convince myself more than anyone else that the world is actually not such a bad place. I also wanted to go back to the India in my head where people trusted each other,” says Kukunoor, sitting at his Andheri office, facing a wall covered with life-size posters of his previous work. His plain…

THE END OF KARMA: HOPE AND FURY AMONG INDIA’S YOUTH Somini Sengupta HarperCollins 244 Pages | Rs 596 MUCH WRITING on India is akin to the five blind men feeling up an elephant. Most writers, with notable exceptions, are unable to grapple with the Indian kaleidoscope and its million ever-changing mutinies; so they write rah-rah-rah about India’s economic potential or its emerging superpowerdom without bothering to tell us a good yarn or two. To borrow Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor, non-fiction writing is like a hedgehog, digging deep in a narrow area to reach a fundamental truth, while fiction is like a fox, jumping all over the place and connecting the dots to give a picture of the universe. That our writers have failed at both has allowed political demagogues to step…

An Experiment With No Outcome Anurag Kashyap can be a complete jerk. And I’m not talking about his outburst on Facebook last year, immediately after the failure of Bombay Velvet which he attributed to the fact that most people just didn’t ‘get’ the movie. No, it’s his performance in the opening scene of Lootera director Vikramaditya Motwane’s now-aborted project AK vs SK, also the only scene Anurag filmed with Shahid Kapoor (their initials make up the film’s title) before the latter walked out of the movie. Those who’ve seen the bits before they were stored away on a hard drive at Phantom Films, insist that Anurag totally nailed his role as “an exaggerated, pompous version of himself”, while Shahid was just as impressive as “a sincere, earnest version” of a…

ON WEDNESDAY, 22 June, an Indian PSLV rocket launched 20 satellites simultaneously, a feat that put India in the league of select countries which can carry out such complex missions. Seen from a historical perspective, it is a fine moment for Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). From the first sounding rocket launched in 1963 to the 20 satellites on Wednesday covers a period of more than half a century. During this time, ISRO has seen some failures and a number of notable successes as well. That launching satellites into polar orbits was once a challenge for it is now long forgotten, and the success of its moon mission with Chandrayaan has shown what it is capable of. Over these decades, India was subjected to successive technology denial regimes led by…

After having contributed to Raghuram Rajan’s exit, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy is now demanding the resignation of Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian. On top of relentlessly harping that both are American in spirit and not Indian enough at heart, he tries to offer ‘economic reasons’ for why they don’t deserve to hold their positions. Unless such disinformation is countered by the relevant authority, it tends to gain momentum. The Centre did not defend the RBI Governor strongly enough, but the CEA has found support in the Finance Ministry. WORD’S WORTH ‘Who said to US Cong on 13/3/13 the US should act against India to defend US Pharmaceuticals interests? Arvind Subramanian MoF!! Sack him!!!’ SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY on Twitter, 22 June…

“ALL OF US have been having sleepless nights,” says a visibly sleepdeprived Girish Kumar — founder of Aiplex Software, a Bengalurubased anti-piracy agency—gesturing at his 100-odd employees. They have all been kept awake for the past 48 hours by a file that, irrespective of what they do, keeps reappearing on the internet. On 15 June, at around 12 in the afternoon, Kumar noticed what turned out to be a 40-minute-long clip of the film Udta Punjab on a torrent website. The makers of the film had hired Aiplex to monitor and deal with any pirated copy of their film. A few days earlier, on 13 June, once the Bombay High Court had cleared the film and it appeared that the film would be released on 17 June as planned, Balaji…

THE FILMS OF ADOOR GOPALAKRISHNAN: A CINEMA OF EMANCIPATION Suranjan Ganguly Anthem Press India 166 Pages | Rs 499 SADLY, WHILE WE have had a host of publications on Bollywood and its stars, there have been very few books on even master directors or celebrated actors of South Indian cinema, certainly not in the English language. If one is right, there is no comprehensive book on legends like G Aravindan, John Abraham or Girish Kasaravalli—to name just three. It was only in 2010 that my book, a full-fledged biography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, his life and cinema, was published. This was the first detailed written work on him in any language. In a scenario such as this, Suranjan Ganguly’s tome—on Adoor the director and 11 of his movies—is to be welcomed,…

HE IS CALLED Sudan and he lies, head bowed under the burden of being the last male of his kind in the world. He lies sprawled in the dust, his forelegs seemingly unable to bear the weight of his gargantuan grey body. His face is creased and dusty, pale white mud flakes encrusting a tired visage. His eyes are closed, the eyelids bearing surprisingly long black eyelashes that flutter once and then lie still once more. Only the occasional breath indicates that Sudan is still not ready to be declared dead. His horn is wide at the base but what would have once been a long, sinuously tapering sexual adornment is now trimmed back by human hands into a sorry stump. Like a felled redwood—nay, a slain Cyclops— Sudan contemplates…