Table of contents for 17 July 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign trips have all been well planned and executed, and his recent visit to the US to meet President Donald Trump was no less impressive (‘Strongmen at Work’ by Tunku Varadarajan, July 10th, 2017). It takes quite some confidence and determination to befriend one of the world’s most powerful yet temperamental men. The joint statement by both countries was a reflection of the ongoing friendly relations. But aside from polite statements, Modi did manage to gain US support on the fight against terror from Trump, and that is no mean feat. The entire country had great expectations from this meeting and it would be fair to say that Modi and his team have not disappointed us. However, it remains to be…

IN THE 70s and 80s, one of the great imaginations of human doom was the Nuclear Winter, the earth laid barren and desolate by radiation and fire from which smoke would be a blanket of dark around the atmosphere, freezing the ground into nothingness. Even now writers hark back to it as a theme that has its uses, but with the end of the Cold War, that vision of waste went into a folder in the attic. This week is as good as any to dust and take it out. North Korea claims to have tested its first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It can easily reach Delhi, which is about 4,500 kilometres. India has no quarrel with North Korea, so we are far away from that line of sight for now.…

AT A RECEPTION IN a South Delhi farmhouse hosted two months ago by a former high-profile bureaucrat long associated with Bihar, a senior Union minister was holding court when he announced that Lalu Prasad, president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), had been confabulating lately with some leaders of the BJP, imploring them for help and offering to “finish off” his partner in power back in his home state, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United). Prasad and Kumar had forged a formidable mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) to neutralise Narendra Modi’s magic ahead of Bihar’s Assembly polls held in late 2015. In return now for snapping ties, Lalu Prasad wanted graft cases against his family to be dropped. The RJD leader’s offer, as the minister explained, was straightforward: if…

“COMEDY IS ONE of the strongest forms of dissent,” she once said. It was, therefore, dissent itself when Aditi Mittal bagged a special show, Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say, on Netflix. We must acknowledge that edging the gender angle into happy stories such as this is tedious at times. I am certain Mittal would rather be a comedian instead of a ‘female comedian’. But we still live in times where gender matters. And that is why Mittal’s Netflix show is important, especially when the channel’s rival Amazon Prime has signed up 14 male comics. In a culture where women are made fun of, rather than internalising that they can be side-splittingly funny, Mittal is part of a talented crop of comedians who are thriving in the English comedy circuit.…

THE STORY OF one Joanne Kathleen Rowling has become almost as mythic to her legions of Muggle followers as that of the child wizard whose scar made him a legend in magical England even before he could walk. And with good reason, of course. Twenty years ago, Harry Potter’s first adventure introduced the world to hats that rhymed, wonky mirrors, turbaned professors, Quidditch, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans and that most magical of places, Hogwarts. We stepped through Platform 9 and 3/4s right alongside Harry, and we were just as awed with the world she built as the boy who lived in the cupboard under the stairs. Harry proved to be a great surrogate for Wizarding Britain, immediately lovable and endlessly brave. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone did well…

A STATE OF FREEDOM Neel Mukherjee Hamish Hamilton 275 Pages | Rs 599 AT SOIREES IN our metro cities, it is considered hip to bandy lines like, ‘Whatever you rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’ While speechifying and debates can often euthanise such statements, a novel can bring it to life. Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom does precisely that. If the book is about suffering, it is also about resilience; if it is about poverty, it is also about those who strove out of it; if it is about desolation, it is also about unlikely partnerships; if it is about migration, it is also about home. London-based Mukherjee has already made a name for himself with his two previous novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won…

WHAT CONSTITUTES dressing appropriately? I don’t think this question has any clear, straightforward answer, particularly in an age where informality and casualness have become the defining hallmarks of style. It was much easier in an earlier age when propriety was rigidly defined and personal comfort discounted. People wore exactly what was expected and there was no scope—or at least very little—for deviation. Last week, in a landmark ruling, the Speaker of Britain’s House of Commons permitted a backbench Member of Parliament wearing a jacket and an open-collar shirt to participate in the proceedings. Hitherto, by convention and an earlier speaker’s ruling, gentlemen MPs had to wear a tie to participate in the debates. The Speaker, John Bercow, now ruled: “The general expectation is that members should dress in business-like attire.…

AS EXPECTED, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel has been spectacular. Apart from the optics—the glowing warmth with which he was received by the country— there has been plenty of substantive progress as well. If the contours of the bilateral relationship have been clear for a while—shared democratic values, a concern about Islamist terrorism and a desire for cooperation in economic development—what was missing was the political will to firm it up. Modi’s visit provided that in ample measure. Much has been made of the bypassing of protocol by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in accompanying Modi to various locations. It is not just empty formality, but reflects the importance attached to the Indian leader, the first in a quarter century of diplomatic relations who chose to deepen them.…

It is good to negotiate hard, but only if it can be accompanied by a rational assessment of one’s own worth. Snapdeal has received an offer of over $700 million (but under $800 million) from Flipkart that its board has rejected. It was, after all, less than the $1 billion that Snapdeal had initially expected. However, $700 million is still a lot better than nothing for a company that is currently struggling to stay competitive. In 2008, Yahoo had rejected Microsoft’s bid of $40 million saying it was too little. Yahoo ultimately sold its core internet business to Verizon recently for only one-eighth of what Microsoft had offered. If greed for bumper profits is not secondary to recovering the principal investment, then what is left is often an empty hand.…

“I did not write the film to make a point. I was always fascinated by what goes on in the mind of a regular woman in India” ALANKRITA SHRIVASTAVA filmmaker A SMALL YET significant journey of an independent Indian film began in December 2016. The film called Lipstick Under My Burkha talks about four women living in Bhopal and their individual voyages of discovering, or rediscovering, their sexuality. The movie was complete, but its fight to reach the world had just commenced, thanks to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) which refused to pass the film, deeming it as ‘offensive’. According to the CBFC, the film was too ‘lady oriented’ because it spoke about women’s fantasies, underlining their discomfort with the subject of female sexuality. Thankfully, their decree raised…

THE DILEMMAS OF LENIN: TERRORISM, WAR, EMPIRE, LOVE, REVOLUTION TARIQ ALI Verso 384 Pages | Rs 1,750 SOVIET-ERA PUBLICATIONS have for long offered us a highly truncated picture of Vladimir Lenin. Besides those endless hagiographies, I remember reading one book that was slightly different for the age before the fall of the Berlin Wall: a copy of Lenin’s Comrades-in-Arms: Episodes from the Lives of Lenin’s Foreign Comrades-in-Arms and Contemporaries. In hindsight, that too offered only Lenin 101 and a bit more. It didn’t tell us about his long associations with ultra leftist radicals of the late 19th century who initially shaped his ideas; it didn’t talk about his disappointment with several European Marxists in the time of World War I. Such books were designed not to talk about his worries…

A Suitable Role at Long Last In Jagga Jasoos, Katrina Kaif was directed by Anurag Basu for the first time, but few are likely to be aware that the actress came close to working with Basu twice before. Turns out she was the original choice to play the female lead in Saaya, Basu’s supernatural thriller from 2003 starring John Abraham, but the muscular actor was reportedly responsible for having her replaced with Tara Sharma. Katrina has joked about it, even admitting that she was reluctant to work with Abraham years later in Kabir Khan’s New York because she was still bristling from the rejection. Katrina was also offered Ileana D’Cruz’s role in Barfi and she flirted with the offer briefly, before turning it down on learning that Ranbir Kapoor and…

IN THE LAND of Israel, it’s always been a struggle between the cruellest paradoxes of history and the sacred legitimacy of memory. As the sun sets on Mount Zion, take a walk through the cobblestoned paths of old Jerusalem, where the divided communities of Jews, Christians, Armenians and Arabs live in a controlled bustle, and you can’t miss the tension as ancient as gods and gospels. It’s here, in the glow of the candles lit by the faithful from across the world in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, you see the last remains of the crucifixion. And it’s here, at the Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall, you in your mandatory skullcap whisper your prayers to the rock, insert the folded papers of your wishes and grievances into the…

JEWELRY IS OFTEN imagined as part of the body. Think of all those metaphors that liken a woman’s body parts to jewels: pearly teeth, ruby lips, eyes shining like diamonds, golden hair. Philip Roth, in Sabbath’s Theater, rhapsodizes on the clitoris and concludes: “Why do they need jewelry, when they have that? What’s a ruby next to that?” On statues of goddesses (I know the South Indian bronzes best, but it is true much more broadly), the bracelets and anklets seem part of their skin, more a part of them than any garment could be; this is especially true of statues of nude goddesses, even of naked women, who often wear nothing but jewelry. One of the earliest images of this sort that I know comes from the ruins of…