Table of contents for 01/09/2017 in Open Magazine

THE DEPLORABLES. That was what they were called. First as the stigmatised and then as revolutionaries, they had the last deplorable laugh in the American presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s description for what she saw as the ignoble legion that sustained the rage against her revealed not just the mindset of an entrenched elite. It brought out a fundamental truth about democracy and elections. Are they good for humanity? Is the voter’s choice a reflection of essential attributes such as reason, knowledge, and mental sophistication? Why should we suffer, in the name of democracy, the consequences of the choices made by all those idiots out there? The uninformed exercise of democratic rights has already made 2016 the year of the empowered deplorable, or that is what the liberal lament is nowadays.…

In India, winter is often viewed as a time for people to spend at home. A time when they can enjoy a sudden dip in the otherwise warm tropical weather. If people do travel, it is usually towards the West, towards the US and Europe, to partake in Christmas or New Year party revelries. But there is another choice, people can instead choose to fly in the other direction, beyond the vast Chinese land mass, east of the Yellow Sea, to reach within touching distance of Tokyo, South Korea. Winter might appear to be a brutal season in Korea. It is cold, windy and often very dry. But to the keen traveler, Korea can offer a plethora of options in winter. All you need is to grab your mittens, your…

WHEN TEJAS PAREKH came of marriageable age, he laid down two conditions for his parents who were no longer willing to put off their search for a daughter-in-law. The bride must be educated, at least a college graduate, he insisted, and she must be a working professional or inclined to pursue a career. What the young Gujarati computer engineer in Mumbai was ensuring was that the girl who would emerge from the wringer of his parents’ exacting scrutiny would be a traditional woman no doubt, but also, crucially, someone with a modern outlook. With this brief in place, relatives were pressed into action, friends sounded out, and soon the vast network of the Parekh clan was in hot pursuit of an eligible girl. Almost a year into this fruitless search,…

IT HAS BEEN called the ‘9/11 photograph you didn’t see’. Thomas Hoepker, the Magnum photographer who shot it, chose not to publish it in a book about that September morning as it was deemed too ‘callous’ in the immediate wake of the event. It appeared in a book only on the fifth anniversary of the attacks. The photo shows five people on a summer morning talking to each other. It has all the ingredients of a New York minute—sunlight and skies, water and wind, shadows and conversations, skyscrapers and bridge, bike and riders. But this isn’t just another morning; across the waters, swathes of smoke billow up from the burning towers. It is easy to glance at the photo and conclude that the people in it have turned their back…

THE LATE NIRAD C Chaudhuri personalised for me the ties that have always tortuously linked the peoples of East and West Bengal, Bangal and Ghoti as they are called. Those ties are mirrored in the complex relationship between India and Bangladesh highlighted by the grandest ever Vijay Divas, ‘victory day’, that Bangladeshis led by Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan recently celebrated in Calcutta, and speculation about a visit by their Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed. Mamata Banerjee’s coyness over the Teesta river may also owe something to Bangal-Ghoti tension. In his last book, Thy Hand Great Anarch, Chaudhuri described walking in Calcutta with the novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, whose Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) Satyajit Ray adapted into the immortal Apu Trilogy films, when communal rioting suddenly erupted. Bandyopadhyay assured him…

SOON AFTER THE announcement of the demonetisation policy on November 8th, with currency sucked out of the system and people unwilling to spend what small change they had, a slew of stories on barter started going viral on social media. One Bangalorean who had come to Mumbai and found himself without change bought a rickshaw ride by giving the driver rice purchased with his credit card. A tweet spoke about a man exchanging ladies’ fingers for wheat with his neighbour. An article in The Wall Street Journal with the headline ‘Barter Economy Is Reborn in Villages as India Cancels Cash’ quoted a shopkeeper in an Odisha village giving ‘one customer a kilogram of potatoes, cauliflower and tomatoes for half a liter of honey’, and being quite satisfied with it because…

BY ITS LOOK, Motinagar in Lucknow is a typical urban area of an Indian city: a haphazard arrangement of shops, houses, lanes and bylanes. In current times, it seems that like much of Old Lucknow, it has been left to its own devices even as civic progress marches on in trans-Gomti areas of the city. Residents of Motinagar know their habitation derives its name from that of Motilal Nehru, but few, if any, can recall the exact reason why. There is a bust of Nehru Sr in the locality, but in line with the anarchy that pervades the politics of the province, it takes time to figure out that the metallic figure is indeed his. His name has been scrawled out alongside those of unknown politicians who want to make…

Determine your monthly expenditure Calculate the amount you require every month to take care of your day to day expenses Prepare for your retirement plan early Planning for retirement should be done from the time you start earning. So, start investing since the beginning of your earning period to enjoy a healthy & wealthy retirement Ascertain your retirement duration Retirement duration is the difference between Life Expectancy and Retirement Age. For example, if you want to retire at the age of 60 and expect to live till 80, your retirement duration is 20 years. Decide retirement corpus Once you know your monthly expenditure and retirement duration, calculate the inflation adjusted corpus that you will need to fund the total expenditure during your retirement. Ascertain SIP amount To arrive at the…

CHRISTMAS IS THE biggest national festival in Britain. We don’t have a national day and our other public holidays have almost lost their religious associations, and even names: only us ancients speak of ‘Whit week’ (Pentecost). Easter is a long weekend but much less of an event than Christmas. I don’t think the message of death and redemption speaks to people as much as the miracle of birth and light in the darkness of a north European winter. The seasonal associations mean it should be dark and cold with celebrations designed to comfort in these bleak times. Some of this is not dissimilar from the Scandinavian ‘hygge’ (pronounced to rhyme with cougar, I’m told), a buzzword this year, making fashionable the sensible idea of staying indoors in the evening and…

Morning sir!...Do you remember me? Uh...Oh hello!...Kalpana of course! I wouldn’t’ve recognised you! How time flies! It’s been— Eight years...yes...Found anything interesting? Of course not. These end-of-season sales are really meant to display the junk that no sucker’s bought for years... And you? You must be working? Job-hunting? Or doctoral studies somewhere? In Paris. Yes. Oh. Did you know French in school? Look, sir, if you’ve the time, of course —could we just slip around the corner and have a coffee or something at this new place that’s come up where Empire Stores used to be? If you’re free, of course. Tea for me. My stomach can’t take coffee anymore. Across the table, they look at each other, glance away, do not speak. In fact, I changed schools. I’d heard…

IN THE LONG run, we’ll all be fed— and clad, and housed, and stimulated, and whatever-elsed—under the auspices of a great database that’ll know exactly what we all owe one another. Cash will be a curiosity, coins just spot-lit objects atop pedestals, or flippables best kept for an instant toss-up to settle a dispute, perhaps with the special sort used in Sholay (heads-I-win-tails-what-tails?) finding particular favour. Either way, it would be inevitable, the shift. Nothing forged in a furnace is truly eternal, after all, and with luck ‘Satyamev Jayate’ will be etched more durably in human mindspace than in hard metal, the outcome of a Hegelian dialectic of currency that traces the very arc of civilisation as we know it. Think about it. If life many millennia ago was cashless…

FOUR-YEAR-OLDS hate being woken up at 4.30 am and taken through morning ablutions by force, especially when they see most grown-ups in the joint family snoring away. But then a short walk that follows to a kalari session in the rain could lift your spirits. Petrichor is a feeling you experience long before you discover the word, and you can’t have enough of it. Soon, it is time to climb down the steps into a large pit that resembles a threshing floor, lit by a few oil lamps and a handful of unrecognisable photographs, framed and revered. I remember doing whatever others did: my older cousins would immediately strip, apply coconut oil all over their bodies and change into langotti, a diaper-like loin cloth—a laughable sight for sure— and start…

IT IS IN alien cities that I have felt my homelessness the most. In alien cities, the realisation that I have no home is set into motion by latent triggers of memory that I never knew even existed. It was still raining when I got down from the train in Nuremberg. I carried an umbrella, and by the time I came out of the railway station, the feeling of homelessness had returned. I had hoped to leave this feeling behind in Delhi where I had now lived close to two decades. But I still could not call it home; and I knew I never would. As I walked towards the Palace of Justice, I imagined a city bombed by the Allied forces; I imagined myself in a bus on a…

WORLD EVENTS IN the last few months have delivered us into an era defined as being one of ‘post truth’, a time when we seem to have transcended the need for truth as a basis for our thoughts and actions. Our politicians tell lies and we no longer care. News is patently false and that doesn’t bother us either. Facts are irrelevant, events and conversations that never happened are given weight in popular judgements and in the minds of a significant majority, events that did happen and words that were spoken are dismissed as having no significance. The term ‘post-truth’ became firmly established during the US presidential election in 2016, but now that it has settled into common parlance, it appears to apply to a number of events across nations…

A Note-Worthy Wait Ranbir Kapoor and Anurag Basu—who’ve co-produced Jagga Jasoos with former Disney India big boss Siddharth Roy Kapur—were always clear that the first trailer of their much-delayed passion project would go out with the studio’s holiday tentpole Dangal in December. But until a few weeks ago, insiders say it was looking unlikely that the trailer would be ready in time to be attached with the Aamir Khan-starrer. Turns out Jagga Jasoos and Dangal share a common composer in Pritam Chakraborty, and the prolific musician was reportedly running way behind schedule. He hadn’t even delivered the final background score for Dangal until the eleventh hour, and Aamir Khan was pushing him to drop everything else and focus on his film. On the other hand, he was being pressured by…