Table of contents for August 8, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The cover story, ‘What’s Going Wrong with Prashant Kishor?’ (1 August 2016), offered an insightful view on the life of one of India’s most notable political strategists. As common citizens, we only have the privilege of seeing the ‘public’ face of a politician and often aren’t aware of all the planning and lobbying that goes on backstage. In that respect, what Kishor has achieved is tremendous as most voters will know who Modi is, but very few apart from those who read newspapers and magazines closely will be able to identify Kishor. And almost no one has any idea just how much strategy work goes into a political campaign. While it may be a loss for the BJP with Kishor switching sides to the Congress,…

WHEN SYED HAIDAR RAZA died on 23 July, at the age of 94, it seemed as if the world was suddenly awash in the colours of early sunrises over the tropics and summer sunsets of Europe. Coral and topaz, ruby and sapphire doused our computer screens and pages of newspapers. The colours were alive as they partnered with the next shade, each one giving way to the next, yet retaining their individual identity. If they seemed to be moving towards a point, they also appeared to move away from it. Geometry is essentially a creation of instruments and determined by rules of radii and angles. But with Raza they became the fancies of the hand, the concerns of the mind. In the midst of these lines and swirls of colour,…

IN THE DAVID and Goliath story from the Old Testament, David has become a symbol of the underdog. Israelites fought with Philistines. Goliath was the champion of the latter. His challenge went unanswered for 40 days, before David took him on, one-to-one, and killed him. If you read the Iliad (Book III), you will find a similar idea in the proposed duel between Paris and Menelaus. Let there be a champion from either side. Let them fight and let that decide the outcome of the war. We can then avoid collateral damage, not just of civilian deaths. If two heroes fight and decide the outcome, the lives of other combatants are saved. It is always difficult to estimate the number of deaths caused by a war. (There can be disease…

HOW DO YOU write a history of food in a country as diverse, as vast and as fragmented as India? Even the concept of ‘Indian’ food is quite bewildering and seems unidentifiable once one begins to delve deeper. So, to take on the challenge of writing about a history of food in India, as Colleen Taylor Sen does in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (Speaking Tiger; Rs 699), is a brave act indeed. While the title—‘a’ history, not ‘the’ history—suggests modesty in the endeavour, the questions posed by her do not lack ambition. After commenting on the diversity and multiple layers introduced by history and geography to the palimpsest of Indian cuisine, ‘in which no layer ever hides or erases what has gone before,’ Sen poses…

IF EVER THERE were a mutation in the genes of penguins and they eventually became conscious beings and, as conscious beings, decided to write a history of their species, one of the chapters would be an epic journey made by eight of them to the city of Mumbai in the country of India. The Humboldt Penguins should actually have arrived from the South American coast, but being participants in a movement called globalisation that humans unfurled, these eight were residents of South Korea when they took the flight to Mumbai. The journey, as penguin scribes would tap on their laptops with their flippers, was not epic for the distance it covered or the numerous adventures along the way because there were none—they were all in refrigerated boxes for some hours—but…

THERE IS A lot in a name. A lot more if the name is Jayalalithaa. It carries so much history—personal, cultural, and political—that it runs the risk of banalisation in an age where informality is mistaken for intimacy. So when the speaker of the Tamil Nadu Assembly said that the Chief Minister should not be addressed by her name, he was only reminding the House that she was not one of them, that she had already migrated from the real to the mythical, which should be seen as a natural passage in the life of someone who had earned her place in others’ frenzy. This legislative fatwa is very Tamil in its cultural connotations. Political appreciation at the mass level in Tamil Nadu swings between exaggeration and vulgarisation. The sociologist…

I AM USUALLY A NOUN, I can be a verb. I can cascade down in ribbons, be twirled to stand at attention, sculpted into twirls across visages, plaited and rubber-banded, dyed and gelled. I like to feel the wind blow through me on long and empty roads. The touch of whisky sends a shiver down my spine. I am tickled easily and quiver at a touch. I have a penchant for grabbing food and not letting go. When I’m not cultivated with care, I grow as wild as wild can be. I find myself out of place in boardrooms and hotel kitchens; boxing rings and battlefronts are not for me. I’ve donned the cheeks and draped the necks of the greatest men in history from Moses to Jesus Christ, Charles…

INDIA RISING: FRESH HOPE, NEW FEARS Ravi Velloor Strait Times Press 384 Pages | Rs 480 GOH CHOK TONG as Prime Minister of Singapore in the mid-1990s was the author of a ‘mild India fever’ that gripped the island-country and led to the first substantial economic engagement between the two countries, even though Lee Kuan Yew was initially sceptical about Goh’s initiative. Ravi Velloor’s book India Rising: Fresh Hope, New Fears is part of the rush of books which have appeared over the past two years. Velloor, who headed the South Asian bureau of Singapore’s Strait Times (2005- 2012), has many advantages over other writers, which show up in his book. He knows many of the important players intimately, has travelled extensively all over the country and has worked for…

Hail the Queen Guess who’s Kangana Ranaut’s biggest champion? None other than Sanjay Leela Bhansali. The Bajirao Mastani director is reportedly super impressed with the actress for her bold stand on morality issues. It’s ironic, given that Kangana’s gone head to head with Hrithik Roshan in a very public spat, and Hrithik, of course, was Bhansali’s leading man and close collaborator from Guzaarish. Plus, Bhansali’s current muse is Deepika Padukone who—let’s just say—isn’t one of Kangana’s most enthusiastic fans. Still, the filmmaker doesn’t hide his admiration for the Queen star and her mature handling of the recent controversy. Some years ago, Bhansali similarly defended Mallika Sherawat publicly (and even appeared on Karan Johar’s talk show with her) when the industry sniggered at her ‘brazen’ approach to control her sexuality and…

BY NOW INDIANS have got used to the strange and incoherent rants of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. His personalised attacks on political rivals, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are well known. But even by his usual standards, he took a bizarre leap on 27 July. He said that Modi could get him killed for vendetta. In a video uploaded on the internet, he asked his partymen and members of Delhi Assembly to “discuss it with your families”: “They can go to any extent and may kill us. They can kill me as well. They are capable of doing anything.” It is true that in the past few days and months, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has been under ‘pressure’ of sorts from law enforcement agencies. Its MLAs in Delhi…

A ‘conspiracy’ is the favourite cry of any famous personality caught red handed. Politicians inevitably see enemy action in every misfortune, but sportspersons too are adopting this tactic. Whenever a sportsperson is accused of doping, she or he almost always concocts a conspiracy story. Lance Armstrong did it for years until his confession. Narsingh Yadav, who was supposed to represent India at the Rio Olympics, stands accused of doping after a failed test and now claims malevolent intent directed at him, with someone contaminating his food. His parents point a finger at the wrestler Sushil Kumar Singh, whom Narsingh upstaged to get into the Indian team, as the one behind the alleged plot. According to Yadav, a junior wrestler in the SAI complex had once tried to spike his food,…

BURHAN WANI IS being described, in Indian and international media alike, as a ‘Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander’. The appellation of ‘commander’ rings with gravitas and carries connotations of seriousness and seniority. The armed group to which he apparently owed allegiance, and which is usually referred to in Jammu & Kashmir as ‘HM’ or ‘Hizb’, has an impressive-sounding name as well: ‘warriors of the faith’. However, all indications suggest that Wani may never have participated in, let alone led, any operation against Indian ‘occupation forces’ during his six years as a ‘freedom fighter’. Insurgency is not a theoretical field of study; after the basic training in handling weapons and explosives, one can only become proficient in the craft by doing it. With negligible—if any—experience of actual combat, it is not surprising that the…

NOTHING IS MORE dreaded by liberal America than the potential presidency of Donald J Trump. He means to blow up the foundations of the existing global order along with the current set of US foreign and military policies. Notionally ‘Republican’ in his ideological moorings, Trump has declared he will tear up all free trade agreements, end refugee, immigrant and even visitor flows into America from nations “compromised” by “radical Islam”, including France and Germany, and, in order to generate well-paying jobs at home, stop US companies from outsourcing work offshore. Most significantly, his government will require, he says, treaty allies and strategic partners to pay their “fair share” for the military protection provided to them. Trump will terminate alliances, including NATO , since he perceives these as vehicles for allies…

THERE’S AN OLD journalistic conceit, thought to have originated at the New York Times, which holds that ‘once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is a trend’. In the space of a few weeks I’ve watched two startling movies, each featuring a Tamil avenger in foreign lands. Although there isn’t a third such film, and hence no apparent trend, I’m quite happy to wallow in the wonders of a mere coincidence. In each movie, the main character is an angry and irrepressible Tamil man, bent on righting wrongs in the most violent way possible. Neither is set in India, except for fleeting scenes in Tamil Nadu. The first, Dheepan, is by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard, best known previously for A Prophet. Although he made Dheepan in 2015, it…

THINGS THAT CAN AND CANNOT BE SAID Arundhati Roy and John Cusack Juggernaut 132 Pages | Rs 250 AFTER READING THINGS That Can and Cannot Be Said, the thing that can be said about Arundhati Roy—who co-authored this with American actor-activist John Cusack—is that she reminds you of Ijon Tichy, the hero in Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 mind-bender, The Futurological Congress, that is set in a seemingly Utopian future. Ijon discovers the government has been dosing everyone with powerful psychedelics called ‘mascons’ and literally goes underground to take a counteractive drug. It strips away layer after layer of the world to reveal a grim, cold, dystopian reality. TV news, Instagram, always-a-semifinal-aroundthe-corner cricket matches, instant pizza, pseudo-bawdy Bollywood fare— if these are our ‘mascons’, then Arundhati Roy is the…