Table of contents for 10 September 2018 in Open Magazine

LESSONS FROM KERALA What has happened in Kerala is another sign that nature must always be respected by mankind (‘After T he Deluge’, September 3rd, 2018). While governments often don’t take environmentalists seriously and are yet to fully believe that global warming and climate change is indeed happening, the evidence is sadly all around them. Every year India loses so much money on flood or drought relief. Freak occurences such as what happened in Chennai and now in Kerala also result in breakouts of various diseases, again putting pressure on the state economy. Lastly, natural calamities bring down the morale and quality of life of the people in the area and that, in the long-term, will affect the economy again. Thus, it is in everyone’s best interests that state and…

THEY SAY THAT the Humboldt penguin is a ‘vulnerable’ species. That’s one spot lower in danger level than ‘endangered’. Their population is declining, it is said, and the population of Mumbai’s Humboldts has declined too from the eight acquired from a South Korean aquarium to seven now. There were hopes that the one which died would be replaced by the chick born two weeks ago. But that wasn’t to be. Sadly the baby chick, no bigger than a human palm, didn’t survive to see the rather grand enclosure it would have lived in. The British built Mumbai’s zoo in 1861 on a 53-acre plot. They called it Victoria Gardens after you-know-who, because the zoo formed only a small part of the large plot. Locals call it Rani Baag. Officials, who…

US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump has increasingly been making or announcing—it is not clear which, perhaps he himself doesn’t know—policy decisions over Twitter. And so a few days ago he decided to turn his lens to Google and tweeted, ‘…search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/ reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% ofresults on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!’ The…

I SHOULD HAVE BEEN in Kerala this week with Mr D, in search of elephants in Periyar and Wayanad and to revisit Cochin. I thought of Coorg as an alternative destination till I realised that it too had been hit terribly hard by the monsoon rains. Our postponement is totally insignificant in the face of the unimaginable suffering of those whose lives have been devastated. We, and most of our generation are unusually lucky that we have been spared direct experience of human conflict or natural disaster. We imagine death and physical injury, read about them, and see them on-screen but barely consider those who suffer the long-term psychological consequences, such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), with its flashbacks and nightmares, often for the rest of their lives. There is…

THERE’S SOMETHING PRIMAL about Neeraj Chopra when he stands at the top of his mark with a spear in hand. Maybe it is his alarmingly large arms (all three muscle groups: shoulders, biceps, triceps) protruding out of the sides of a slender vest. Or perhaps it is the way he sways his hair—a shock mop last seen on the members of the band Kiss—out of his eyes, always before flaring his already wide nostrils and exposing his teeth. And then there’s the javelin itself, which, in his cocked wrist, seems less like a javelin and more like an assault weapon. In vastly different circumstances, it isn’t difficult to imagine a bunch of hard-pressed men running at the other end of Chopra’s field, some zigging, the others zagging. At the Asian…

‘HIMALYAN CITIZENS carry a unique identity. It does not matter which part of the world you belong to when you inherit the hills...’ The introductory chapter by Sujeev Shakya sets the tone for this anthology of writing that covers the Himalyan arc from Nepal to Bhutan, into northeastern India and Myanmar. This is what the editor calls ‘East of the South-east’. This collection of 30 pieces of fiction, poems, translations and non-fiction reflects the diversity of the region. Yet it engages with commonalities of the kind emphasised by Shakya, who draws on his Kalimpong childhood to advocate a Himalayan identity. From the poverty and physical isolation of communities to momo parties that end with music, Shakya sketches out continuities that transcend national borders. This theme of commonalities runs across several…

The heavy rainfall in Kerala and the devastating floods have resulted in hundreds of human lives being lost and altered (‘After The Deluge’, September 3rd, 2018). Who would have thought that water could dislocate the daily life of millions? In the last few decades, different Indian states have seen such a loss of human lives and property, outbreak of epidemics and damage to the economy due to natural disasters. But we seem to have learnt no lesson from it. The abuse of nature is one cause for these occurrences, and as per reports, such rains and floods are linked to global warming and climate change, thanks to human carelessness. Human beings cannot fight nature but can prevent and reduce the way and pace at which the climate is changing. The…

Fewer Indian TV personalities have had as peculiar a story as Kapil Sharma. A nobody, he started with the comedy show circuit before becoming arguably the most popular face on TV. But that’s when the trouble began. Although he has claimed he was suffering from poor health, it is said he had a drinking problem, got into tiffs with colleagues and reported late or never showed up for work, very often making film celebrities—who were to appear as guests on his show—wait for several hours. He took a break and relaunched his show on another channel. But the same issues began to dog him there too and his show was eventually cancelled. According to reports, he is now going to make another comeback—on Sony TV around Diwali with the same…

IF MYANMAR CAN’T be persuaded to allow the Rohingyas to return in peace and live in security, they might be allowed to build a new life for themselves in Iceland. They are a people who need land. Iceland, which looks on the map like a snowdrift wafting across the Arctic Circle, has more land than people. The thought came to me while driving for hours through empty valleys and crossing barren hills, snow-capped peaks in the distance and gushing jets of steam that they call guy-zers in the foreground. There was no sign of human life anywhere. Yes, a few fat sheep rested somnolently among the tussocks. Occasionally, dappled brown and white cows chewed the cud. Squat (and, apparently, useless) horses grazed lazily here and there. We were told never…

INDIA’S SACRED geography is a palimpsest of narratives in which the travelling pantheon and epics of the pan-Indian margi Sanskrit tradition meet, do battle with, and eventually intertwine with local deities, folk heroes, saints and tales told in the robust desi languages. This process brings about a confluence among Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim and Christian transmission lines, as well as embracing the practices of groups that an arrogant orthodoxy would consign to the margins of the caste system or regard as tribal communities. Likewise, India’s sacred calendar encodes various histories of conflict, coalition and synthesis among different social groups and cultural systems. The clash between the cult of the fiery goddess and the cult of the monsoonal earth-god (later rendered by the victors as a buffalo demon) is recalled in…

HE WAS AN extraordinary young man. He left home at the age of eight and was dead by the age of 32. In the intervening period he produced commentaries on the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Bhagavad Gita, beautiful poetry to the gods, and treatises on Advaita. He travelled all over India, meeting scholars, propagating his revolutionary ideas, and establishing monasteries or muths in the four corners of the country, proving this was the land of Sanatana Dharma, long before the British named it India. He was known as the Shanmata Sthapana Acharya, for he united six quarrelling cults—Shaiva, Vaishnava, Ganapatya, Shaurya, Kaumara and Shakta—under the head of Sanatana Dharma. He established five muths in Dwarka, Badrinath, Puri, Sringeri and Kanchipuram which have preserved his teachings and philosophy. Adi Shankara was born…

Project Dacoit Udta Punjab director Abhishek Chaubey recently wrapped production on his dacoit drama Son Chiriya, which stars Sushant Singh Rajput and was shot extensively in Chambal. Insiders have revealed that the filmmaker was ‘heartbroken’ when Yash Raj Films announced its own dacoit film Shamshera some months ago. Chaubey’s disappointment didn’t stem from the fact that another studio was making a film set in a similar world, but from the fact that YRF had managed to rope in Ranbir Kapoor to take the lead in their film. Turns out Chaubey had approached Ranbir for Son Chiriya originally, but the actor reportedly begged off the project saying he just couldn’t relate to a dacoit story. Sources close to Ranbir reveal that the actor signed Shamshera at a time when he was…

JOURNALISTS IN THE line of duty come to know people of eminence. I was fortunate to know Atalji from my college days and subsequently built on that relationship after becoming a writer. But this is not about me. This is about the tallest leader of the post-Independence era. Without intending to add to the lavish tributes, I recall here two extraordinary gems of silver-tongued flourishes which he alone was capable of. The first concerns a public meeting at the Ramlila Maidan on 30th January, 1977, the very first after the release of a number of Opposition leaders from prison during the Emergency. An all-enveloping pall of fear still hung over the Capital. Some in the Opposition feared that poor attendance would hurt the anti-Emergency cause. But Vajpayee had trust in…

A LITTLE OVER FOUR years ago, a pizzeria in Mumbai uploaded a video showing a drone dropping off a pizza. This was when Amazon had announced its plans of using drones to make future deliveries. And the idea of little flying machines zipping through our skies doing everything from taking pictures to delivering diapers had just begun to take off in the public imagination. The video of the pizza delivery—a distance of 1.5 kilometre done in about 10 minutes—became an internet sensation. And soon enough cops were looking into it, since, although India did not have a specific rule governing drones then, flying anything over an altitude of 400 feet was still forbidden. The whole thing, it turned out, had been staged. A police officer told me then that when…

ACCORDING TO CENSUS 2011, 68.84 per cent of India’s population lives in rural India. When we were students, we used to be taught characteristics of an underdeveloped economy. The expression ‘underdeveloped economy’ hadn’t yet gone out of fashion. There was something negative associated with living in rural India. In a developed economy, that negative association with ‘rural’ doesn’t exist. In the US, 19.3 per cent of the population lives in rural areas; in England, 20.7 per cent. No one thinks those populations are deprived in any sense. Unfortunately, historically in India, rural has meant being deprived in terms of physical and social infrastructure. That mindset still perpetuates. Rural is deprived. Rural is agricultural. In a fast-changing economy and society, as India is now, neither of these two propositions is correct.…

WE ARE REPEATEDLY TOLD THESE days that we are living in a new and frightening era of ‘post-truth’, and that lies and fictions are all around us. Examples are not hard to come by. Thus in late February 2014 Russian special units bearing no army insignia invaded Ukraine and occupied key installations in Crimea. The Russian government and President Putin in person repeatedly denied that these were Russian troops, and described them as spontaneous ‘self-defence groups’ that may have acquired Russian-looking equipment from local shops. As they voiced this rather preposterous claim, Putin and his aides knew perfectly well that they were lying. Russian nationalists can excuse this lie by arguing that it served a higher truth. Russia was engaged in a just war, and if it is OK to…

MATTERS CAME TO a head in June, 1975. A beleaguered Indira Gandhi imposed an ‘Emergency’ in India after two years of political unrest in the country. In these years, strikes, judicial verdicts against the government, adverse economic conditions and unrelenting opposition to the Prime Minister had become a regular feature of the political landscape. Since then, analysts have been busy explicating the reasons for the breakdown of democracy in India. The explanations range from Marxian ‘crisis’ theories to the intensely personal aspects of the Prime Minister’s rule. Events, personalities and actions have been parsed threadbare to understand the Emergency. What remains vivid in the decades since is the chain of events—how different actors behaved as events unfolded. Behind every step—in calls for strikes, the organising of mass protests and the…