Table of contents for 13 March 2017 in Open Magazine

LETTER OF THE WEEK The political career of Mayawati has had many controversies, including the Taj Corridor and disproportionate-asset cases, and her commissioning of several statues of Dalit icons (‘A Matter of Maya’, March 6th, 2017). She may be a ‘Dalit queen’ to the millions who love her and continue to lend their support, but she stands accused by critics of lavishing money on luxury homes and diamond necklaces while ignoring the poor. She has remained unapologetic about her personal extravagance, although officials in her party say she has since reduced the level of public pomp. These polls, she has been something of a spitfire, a form not seen since her 2014 rout. During the 2013 riots, the BSP had found it difficult to handle relations between Dalits and Muslims…

UNTIL SOME YEARS ago, economic growth statistics were a boring matter. A sleepy government department would release them on pre-set dates, there would be some commentary on the op-ed pages of newspapers, and all would be forgotten until the next numbers were released. It was dull and predictable. Not anymore. Instead of ebbing, controversy rages two days after the release of estimates for India’s economic performance in 2016-17. Statisticians and economists are done with their quibbling over the quarterly and annual estimates of growth, but opposition politicians refuse to play ball. Much of it has to do with the growth numbers for the year’s third quarter (October to December). Demonetisation took place in the middle of this period and was supposed to have hit commerce hard, particularly the informal sector.…

AVI BANGAR, INDIA’S high commissioner in Nicosia, is a deeply disturbed man. There are 5,260 Indians in Cyprus, he says, and 50 per cent of them are domestic maids. Not only that. It seems unbelievable that 90 per cent of the maids should be from Punjab, the land of five rivers flowing with milk and honey. Cyprus is an idyllic Mediterranean island peopled by gentle Greeks who wouldn’t dream of brutalising servants like the Saudi Arabian employer who was accused of chopping off a maid’s right arm when she complained of harassment and torture. But the very fact of Punjab sending its damsels across the seas to sweep, swab and cook for alien households distresses him. “What has happened to Punjab’s buoyant economy?” he demands. “Where is Punjabi prosperity?” There…

NUMBERS GAME THE RUN-UP TO the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh was marked by a dramatic family feud in the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party (SP), which provided one of the best spectacles on Indian television in recent times. The soap opera within the Yadav clan for claiming the party could’ve given Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors a run for its money. Observers have been watching keenly. The electoral exercise in the state is a political extravaganza due its vast proportions in terms of geographical space, the electorate and representation in Indian Parliament. The state mandate has a direct bearing on the national politics of India. This was evident in the General Election of 2014, as it voted heavily for the BJP and catapulted the saffron party back to power…

IT WOULD BE dishonest to pretend that I wasn’t both excited and curious on being given a giltedged card stating that ‘The Master of the Household has received Her Majesty’s command to invite’ me to Buckingham Palace to attend the Queen’s reception. The ostensible reason was to flag off the India-UK Year of Culture, an exercise that has the potential of being either great fun or painfully dreary. The reception was an occasion to observe the monarchy’s understated pageantry at its most evolved best. From the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh meeting all the guests individually and other members of the royal family, including the stylish Duchess of Cambridge, milling around effortlessly to the no-frills drinks, there was nothing stiff or pompous about the event. The purpose of protocol…

Moonlight stars an all-Black cast. There is almost no incidental White person, such a rare phenomenon for mainstream Hollywood that this in itself seems like a political choice “IN ORDER FOR you to understand what happened last night [at the Oscars], you have to understand the phenomenon known as ‘peak blackness’,” explained the comedian Roy Wood Jr on The Daily Show. “Peak blackness is a rare metaphysical anomaly that can only occur when an amalgam of Black excellence comes together at the same societal intersection,” he said. What? “It’s when a lot of dope black shit happens at the same time.” Of course Moonlight was going to win. He explained that the win was a culmination of several recent events from the Black History Month and Beyonce’s pregnancy, to the…

I ALWAYS CONTEND I am entitled to a PIO card, as at least 20 kg of me is of Indian origin––due to my love for the Subcontinent’s food. As I near the end of a wonderful two-month visit to India, I think I may have to revise that figure to a ‘Person of Ever Increasing Indian Origin’. When I studied Sanskrit, I learnt about the traditional beliefs and practices that shape Indian relationships with what they consume. Taboos about which animals were and weren’t eaten, about the raw and the cooked, the pure and polluted, commensality (who can eat with whom) and so on. The many different attributes of food, fasts and eating restrictions were fascinating, and seemed endlessly complicated. In India today, new food cultures overlay traditional ones. Restaurants,…

Q1 I just love buying gold. Isn’t gold the best investment? There are a lot of beliefs, myths and traditions in India around investing your savings in gold. As a nation it is our obsession to invest in gold. Did you know that Indi is the world’s largest consumer of gold since anyone can remember? This is mostly because of our age-old belief that gold is safe. Besides, of course, when it comes to weddings it is necessary purchase. And we Indians love to celebrate marriages! Q1a So you agree? That investing in gold is the best thing? I am not saying gold is not good, but please think about a few important facts: 1. Gold is very difficult to keep safe, although it captures value safely. 2. Gold is…

Q2 People say that investments can help you to fight inflation, how? Only economists use the fashionable term ‘inflation’! The rest of us understand it more simply as mehengai (or fall in purchasing power in Hindi), which is nothing but the rate at which your rupee loses value year after year. We all know that every year we pay more for the same things that we buy for home or for personal use, whether food, clothes, soaps or any other item of consumption. So, how do you try to keep the purchasing power of our rupee intact? Equity Investments is the best answer. Q2a Q. How can you say that for sure? Let me illustrate this: In 1979, the price of sugar in Mumbai was approximately Rs.1.25 per kg, price…

I FOLLOW A GROUP of Class IX students into the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi. Outside, a bunch of tiny tots who’ve finished their tour of the museum celebrate being out of school by making hand puppets à la Husain. Inside, the teachers try to ensure that no one accidentally destroys a priceless piece of art as the bemused students stand to attention around the wooden architectural model of the Hall of Nations in Pragati Maidan. Instead of colourful canvases, there are posters with lots of text on the walls. The sharp, young lady guiding them through their hour at the museum asks the students if they recognise any of the people in the posters. No one answers. “Have you seen any of the buildings?” she asks next.…

READERS OF NON-FICTION often get their share of disbelief in biographies, many of them so much larger-than-life, they surpass fiction. In a revealing new biography, Mr and Mrs Jinnah, veteran journalist Sheela Reddy unravels the story of a brilliant couple who defied convention to reach the heights of political and social attainment, only to find their marriage floundering on the rocky path to Independence. Here you have a man who dreamt up a new nation, a beauteous Parsi princess with an unconventional dark side and a shadowy political marriage that ended in a flawed victory for one and devastating tragedy for the other. The book has all the ingredients of an Indian Downton Abbey, offering an envious insight into the legendary wealth and foppish lifestyles of Bombay’s privileged mill owners…

ONLY FOUR MONTHS have passed since a puritanically white-clad handshake gave Colombians new hope. There is no surprise that President Santos wore white, for that is a politician’s garb, but when the bearded rebel leader Timochenko gave up his fatigues and even his leisure time favourite, the baseball cap, and donned white in Cartagena, I started looking at Colombia with new eyes. The curlews pecked out our eyes,’ wrote Marquez in The Night of the Curlews. It was time to see if the nation state that had for 50 years been the last vanguard of the four great narcotics of our time—coffee and cocaine, Marx and Marquez—was ready to open its eyes to a new world. And thus, I go searching for peace and curlews to its very heart, Antioquia.…

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION gives Javed Akhtar, commenting on Virender Sehwag’s comment on Gurmehar Kaur, the liberty to tweet, ‘If a hardly literate player or a wrestler trolls a pacifist daughter of a martyr its understandable but whats wrong with some educated folks’. He thus stereotypes and profiles uneducated people as less decent, but, even if it is an ignorant and unsavoury thing to say, it is okay. To mock people who are not literate is a freedom given to him even if he thinks that Sehwag abused it. Most people, if given a choice to be born in India or in Norway, or even the US under Donald Trump, wouldn’t take long to choose. And yet, if Sehwag and his merry company of Twitter patriots choose to be proud of…

ON THE MORNING OF February 27th, the gruff police officer who stopped our SUV some 10 km from Mau where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to address a huge rally, his 16th in the ongoing seven-phased elections to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, told me curtly that there was a threat on the BJP heavyweight’s life and that I needed to open my handbag for it to be searched. He and about 10 others, some of them armed with machine guns and video cameras, had already ransacked the vehicle. I obliged, adding that we had been through a similar exercise some 20 minutes earlier. “We are doing our job, sir,” he muttered after he found I was carrying only a notebook and a few newspapers in my bag. The place I was…

CATCH VIRAT KOHLI in a press conference, any press conference, and you will see him glow. Maybe it has something to do with the lights in the room. Maybe it is due to his earnest answers— the man with a fierce reputation for his near negligible fuse now has a remarkably high tolerance for bullshit questions. Maybe he is aware of the fact that his metamorphosis from brat-whocan- bat to legend-who-levitates is complete. It could well be that his incredible stack of runs over the past year has made us all believers; phantasmal even, who knows. But in press conferences, it is quite easy to imagine Kohli sitting behind that table cross-legged, perched above four feet of thin air Kohli is glowing in this press conference as well, a presser…

I REMEMBER IT QUITE distinctly, even after what would most certainly be more than 20 years—the afternoon when Mani Kaul’s film, Uski Roti, was broadcast on Doordarshan. I was in my late teens and therefore naturally inclined towards the more conventional kind of cinema—where narrative was curated to create lifelikeness, where plot was a utilitarian toy meant to give pleasure. My reaction to Uski Roti, a film about a young woman making rotis for her truck-driver husband who passes through her small town occasionally, was, as is obvious from a review I wrote at the time, ‘boring’. I did not understand why something so common—making rotis for a husband—had to be the subject of a film. A few years later, in college, a professor offered me an interpretation. “I was…

Agents of Change Switching agents is a big decision in Hollywood and tends to make big news. It usually implies that an actor is not satisfied with either the quality of work the agent has been lining up, or with the size of the pay-cheque that the agent has been able to negotiate for him or her. Closer home in Bollywood, the concept of agencies and agents is a relatively new one. Given that the film industry here is a much smaller place—everyone knows everyone— and the emphasis has always been on the ‘personal’, the handful of operating agencies tend to focus on procuring brand endorsements and ad campaigns over feature films for stars. When Sonam Kapoor’s agents Shanti Sivaram and Atul Kasbekar (of Bling) turned producers with Neerja, they…