Table of contents for 20 November 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Critics of demonetisation have failed to take into account the fact that such an economic overhaul takes time to implement and should not be viewed in isolation of other economic reforms in the country (‘Demonetisation: One Year After’, November 13th, 2017). The opposition is divorced from ground reality, one that saw Indian citizens, who queued up outside banks and ATM machines, displaying extreme patience and faith in the Government’s policy. It’s premature to dismiss its impact on black money. A debate over the results of demonetisation is still underway. The Reserve Bank of India has stated that almost 99 per cent of the currency has been returned to the Bank. Yet, it has also seen the detection of benami properties, reportedly close to 300. Suspicious…

LIKE A FROG in a pan of steadily heating water, millions of Americans are becoming accustomed to a degree of institutional damage that would until recently have seemed appalling to them. Mounting evidence that Donald Trump was installed in the White House with the help of Russian spies suggests their democracy system has been badly compromised. Meanwhile, almost every day, Trump’s administration launches a fresh assault on the judiciary, Congress and the free press, further reducing public trust in the very institutions in which America’s strength resides (contrary to what many Americans have come to believe, tragically). Consider just the past fortnight. It has witnessed a highly respected former FBI director, Robert Mueller, indicting two former advisors to Trump—including his sometime campaign manager, Paul Manafort— with crimes including serving as…

Get the goal amounts right: Instead of going with a random figure of Rs 20 lakh for your daughter’s education in 15 years from now, get a precise figure and not a random figure. Think of what your child may want to study and the cost of such a course. For instance, if the cost of doing Engineering is Rs 10 lakh at the moment, account for inflation while figuring out the cost of education in 15 years. Assuming specific inflation in education at 10%, the cost will be Rs 41.7 lakh. If you were planning for Rs 20 lakh, you would be in trouble. Start early: Don’t wait for your child to reach high school before you start planning. Be proactive and start investing early once you draw up…

AROUND 25 YEARS ago, when ‘out-ofthe- box’ was not yet a cool expression in classical dance, Malavika Sarukkai recalls staging Shad Ritu (Six Seasons) at the Triveni amphitheatre in central Delhi. It was well within the Bharatanatyam matrix, but it was still an experiment outside the margam, the ‘path’ prescribed by convention. She remembers being very excited about the experiment, curious about how it would be received by dance lovers. The recital ended… to resounding silence. “There was this look of shock all around. Everyone looking at each other in dismay wondering how to react,” she recalls. In the decades that followed, Bharatanatyam has come a long way and so have audiences. Thematic experiments are the order of the day and you have to be radical to stick with convention.…

WHAT BEGAN AS a casting couch revelation about a famous Hollywood producer has turned into an epidemic. From the glitzy world of entertainment where these things were imagined to be widespread, the charges of sexual misconduct— the clinical expression for groping, harassment and even forced sex—have now engulfed the world of academia and created a huge political crisis in the United Kingdom. I was in London when the excreta hit the fan and the wags were calling it Sexit, the progeny of Brexit. That may sound funny but the South Asianists in the West could hardly stop talking about the lists of alleged ‘offenders’ that have started coming out in Facebook posts. Some names provoked absolute outrage and were deemed nothing but slander, but some of those mentioned had been…

WHEN IT COMES to a choice between what your eyes see and what the world is telling you it should see, trust yourself. This comes across forcefully in the video clip of an altercation last month between IndiGo Airlines’ ground staff and a passenger. It went viral recently and the media picked it up. Consider the Times Now headline with the accompanying clip: ‘Terror on tarmac: IndiGo staff restrain and throttle passenger at Delhi airport after an argument—WATCH’. But when you watch it, what do you see? 1) It begins with the airline staffer remonstrating with the passenger for using words of abuse. 2) The passenger hurries off to the waiting bus, ignoring him. 3) The staffer asks that he be stopped. 4) Something happens at the door of the…

HOW DOES A desperately poor family cope with one of its members having a terminal illness and no hope of recovery but which would destroy whatever little financial security they have? In Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district, they apply to the courts for mercy killing. Two months ago, for instance, the parents of a six-yearold with a rare neurological condition did so, and, as is inevitable, the application was turned down. The parents were labourers in a cloth weaving unit. The Hindu article which reported on this case also said, ‘During the last six years, half a dozen families approached the courts in Madanapalle and Tamballapalle of the division, appealing for mercy killing to their members, mostly those with terminal illness.’ There is usually no intention of going ahead with the…

✓ Create new household budget with new expenses that a child brings ✓ Discuss with your spouse in the changing spending habits with the arrival of the child ✓ Take adequate health insurance cover and include your child in it ✓ Set aside expenses that are regular for the child like clothes and education, and plan for future needs such as education separately ✓ Create a separate expense budget for children, as it will evolve as they grow ✓ Set aside money for coaching in higher classes if need be ✓ Encourage your children to handle money on their own for them to be geared for things later in life ✓ In case you are short of money for education, consider education loan…

THE ARRIVAL OF Jeet Thayil’s new novel The Book of Chocolate Saints (Aleph; 501 pages; Rs 799) was heralded not by the usual melee of reviews and interviews. Instead, Jeet Thayil chose to interview Jeet Thayil in a national daily newspaper. Here was journalist spewing out serpentine questions so packed with jargon and art-speak that they were rendered meaningless. Here was an author, prone to long silences and abrupt disappearances, so uninterested in the exercise at hand that his answers were limited to ‘Not really’, ‘I’m not sure’ and ‘No’. The self-indulgence of the interview could be overlooked for its super snark and acuity. The farce rightly held up a mirror to so much of culture writing today—artists who only want to make work, but then must sell it; and…

With the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) suspecting a Class XI student as the murderer of seven-year-old Pradhyumn in Ryan International School, Gurugram, it exonerates the bus conductor, Ashok Kumar, who the local police had first made the accused. The bigger question is not what led to his arrest but what would have been his fate if the case was not high profile enough to force the CBI to step in. He would have probably been convicted and spent the rest of his life in jail. Indian policemen, whenever they are forced to show results, have been known to falsely arrest those who have no resources or ability to protest or seek redressal. Destroying an innocent’s life in order to appease a superior is as criminal as the crime that…

“SWP can help you with income during certain phases in life other than retirement too and are more tax efficient than traditional investment options.”D P Singh, CMO and ED, SBI Mutual Fund When it comes to money; chances are that the best of plans may sometimes fail. While there are few financial instruments that exist to tide over such situations, you could use your existing investments to help you tide over emergencies from time-to-time. Take for instance a situation when your college going child needs money to prepare for competitive exams towards higher studies? You may not have accounted for this when you were saving for college education. So, what do you do in such a scenario? The sum may not be that much that you need to borrow, but…

BY THE TIME the last cannon and matchlock were removed from the battlefield at Khanwa in March 1527, ancient India and its ideas had been long gone. At Khanwa, key kingly qualities described as essential by political theorist Kamandaka, too, had disappeared. It can be safely said that if Rana Sanga, the last credible Hindu challenger to the Turko-Mongol onslaught, had prowess (pratapa), his lack of energy (utsaha) and, more importantly, constant vigilance unhinged his plans. Kamandaka’s treatise Nitisara mentions these qualities as essential to being a successful king. Modern scholars, it goes without saying, differ from this assessment. Nationalists during colonial times looked at such battles as examples of India’s lack of technological advances in weaponry and knowledge of military strategy and tactics. They were held responsible for the…

The Art of Keeping Friends Happy Alia Bhatt seems to be everyone’s favourite partner-in-crime. The 24-year-old star shares a personal trainer with Katrina Kaif, and they can often be spotted working out together. In an Instagram post that went viral subsequently, the two girls mugged for the camera in the absence of their trainer, with Katrina pretending to put Alia through the grind in the gym. As it turns out, Alia also gets along swimmingly with Deepika Padukone whom she hung out with at the Padmavati actress’ impromptu house party last weekend, also attended by Karan Johar, Sidharth Malhotra, Ranveer Singh and others. But it had to have been awkward for Alia dividing time between Katrina and Deepika at Shah Rukh Khan’s birthday in Alibaug last week, where Kat and…