Table of contents for February 29, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in RUCHI This refers to the article, ‘Who Needs Men?’ (22 February 2016), which speaks about how women are now able to live a life independent of men. While this is true in some respects, and society, especially rich society, has become more accepting of single women, there are still so many ways in which women are suppressed and bullied. It is sadly only the well-off and privileged who can afford to carve out a living for themselves, fulfil their desires and stand up to family pressure. Men have always been and are still threatened by feminists and women who have a voice. We might not need men but are unfortunately forced to accept them in today’s scenario. While it is perfectly fine for men to seek out personal gratification,…

FOR staying an order transferring him to another court There’s a basic tenet in law that requires judges to not hear cases that involve a family member. The reasons are obvious—your judgment may be clouded. But Madras High Court judge Justice CS Karnan did something even more unusual by staying the proposal of his own transfer to the Calcutta High Court by the Chief Justice of India. He issued a suo motu judicial order that stayed his transfer, forcing the Supreme Court to put a freeze on his functions as a judge. According to media reports, the judge has alleged that he was being targeted for being a Dalit, and that he would direct the Chennai Commissioner of Police to register cases against the apex court judges under the SC/ST…

SEDITION IS SERIOUS business. The fear of sedition is paranoia, which itself is a sign of fragile national confidence. Sedition is rebellion that threatens to destabilise the state and dethrone the ruler. The fear of sedition is born out of an exaggerated sense of the nation that abhors the very idea of the disruptor. Sedition is the freedom to repudiate the power that sets the limit of your freedom. The fear of sedition is diminishing faith in your own national worth. In JNU, there was no surge of sedition. There was the fear of sedition, which, predictably, snowballed into another image crisis for those who wanted to save India from the so-called enemies of the nation. In JNU, there was something else, the comic strip revolution. It also says something…

BEING A LEICESTER City fan has rarely been great. The Foxes, my local team as a boy, probably my family’s team since the club was founded in 1890, have never won the football league or the FA Cup and rarely threatened to stay in the top tier of English football for long. Leicester is the archetypal yo-yo club, too big for the lower divisions, too small to keep pace with the big boys of London and Manchester for long. Its fate is therefore to oscillate endlessly between glory, often defined as a nail-biting survival act, and the defeats that send it crashing back down for another spell of lower-league tedium and obscurity. The club has been relegated seven times in my lifetime. Its combined total of 22 promotions or relegations…

‘It’s the human condition which is your common denominator, whether it is mortality or death or just getting on with life’ LILLETE DUBEY, actor and director “BREATHE. LET it come from your gut. Open your voices… and your minds. Let your body flow. It’s not about the lines. It’s only about this moment. Live it. Go, do a great show.” That’s Lillete Dubey, inspiring 11 actors, minutes before they hit the stage for the 20th show of Boiled Beans on Toast written by Girish Karnad. The third bell goes off, a rendition of Maha Ganapathim by KJ Yesudas welcomes the audience as the actors give the final touches to their make-up, in the wings. Dubey has now let them go. “This is theatre, it’s an actor’s medium. Once the stage…

BELOW THE BELT “It’s common sense. Do you see animals mating with the same sex? Animals are better because they can distinguish male from female. If men mate with men and women mate with women, they are worse than animals” — Manny Pacquiao to TV5, 15 February 2016 ‘I’m sorry for hurting people by comparing homosexuals to animals. Please forgive me for those I’ve hurt. I still stand on my belief that I’m against same sex marriage because of what the Bible says, but I’m not condemning LGBTs’ — Pacquiao in a Facebook post, 16 February 2016…

IT IS IN the mood of the times that the news item was buried deep inside The Times of India on the last of its ‘Nation’ pages on Tuesday. The headline said, ‘Eliot, Keats dropped for desi writers in Raj textbooks’. The report said that in the revised textbook of Class VIII, poems ‘by the likes of John Keats, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, TS Eliot and Edward Lear’ had been replaced, presumably with local talent. Of the latter, two names— Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda—you shouldn’t have a quibble with. In literature, Tagore is worthy enough to stand alongside Eliot or Keats. But beyond that, this change is good enough to be part of the dumbing down project that this country is so much in love with. As the article…

TRENDS OF DOING-IT-YOURSELF, propelled by easy-touse point-n-shoot devices, have created a junkyard of images in the last half decade, one that has no physical burden. These snaps are clicked, leaked, shared, viewed and happily forgotten to accommodate the craving for the next selfie moment. The purpose could be official, erotic, the proud declaration of one’s current location or companionship. The postures could be poised, seductive, wired, jubilant or dangerous. But the explanation behind this symptomatic drift is not as varied. An unprecedented constant craving for visibility of the self, a desire to publicise and comment on the private, is the driving force behind this promiscuity of tethered access and habitual sharing. The force must be sufficiently empowering and excessively expressive enough to capture the imagination of the universal, overcoming all…

CHANDIGARH IS IN INDIA Edited by Shanay Jhaveri THE SHOESTRING PUBLISHER | 288 PAGES | Rs 3,000 WHEN TWENTY villages in a divided Punjab were cleared for a new state capital, Chandi—the name of one—was chosen, and Chandigarh was born. A new nation needed to build anew, and a break from the past was required. Utopia re-imagined as India Modern. Chandi village’s tryst with destiny endowed its name on Nehru’s modern experiment and fifty years later became a book’s title: Chandigarh Is in India, edited by Shanay Jhaveri. Jhaveri examines how Chandigarh’s architecture and urban planning has engaged visual artists. In the lead essay, ‘Stalking Chandigarh’, he lays the historical background to Chandigarh but does not dwell too much on the Punjab, situating Chandigarh with other modernist movements in India.…

“FOOD DOES not interest me,” said several of my colleagues and friends when I told them that I was writing a monthly essay on food. Highly intelligent folks who think in interesting ways about politics, art, philosophy, economics, and life in general. Yet, their view on food is—one eats to live, and beyond that any conversation about food is utterly tedious. I disagree and point out that what you eat, who you eat with, and how you eat express religious, ethnic, gender and class identities, and reflect one’s personal views on justice and ethics. Rubbish, they say in chorus. This attitude is quite deep-rooted among philosophers and thinkers for whom food and philosophy are as far apart as the body is from the mind, as the physical is from the…

THREE YEARS AFTER his hanging, the spectre of Mohammad Afzal Guru has returned to haunt Indian politics, fuelling a series of reactions and counter-reactions, dividing the people of this country into seditionists, hyper nationalists and a mix of the two in between. Students have been arrested as ‘traitors’ to the nation, social networking sites are saturated with abuse and hate mail, lawyers have reportedly attacked journalists, politicians from every party are wading with glee in these troubled waters (the Congress, which okayed Guru’s execution when in power, has now decided to stand in the corner of those who spoke for him) and it is as if a deep schism has been opened in the Indian polity. It was after several students from Jawaharlal Nehru University allegedly chanted slogans in support…

JUST DAYS AGO, Russia and Venezuela, along with Saudi Arabia, threw ample hints that an oil output production freeze was in the offing. If implemented, this could lead to oil output being frozen at January 2016 levels. Scary? Well this may not come to pass. Iran, a key member of OPEC, has expressed unwillingness to go ahead with this plan. Long under global sanctions, Tehran now wants to revive its creaking economy. The country’s president, Hassan Rouhani, recently visited Europe, where he signed a slew of commercial deals. The lifting of sanctions against Iran is proving to have tangible benefits for the world. If an oil production freeze is put in place, India will be one of the countries to be hit adversely. Along with China, India is one of…

THIS IS A shloka from the Bhagavad Gita. Actually, it is one and a half shlokas, shloka number 26 and half of shloka number 27 from the first Chapter. By the way, almost everyone refers to the text as Bhagavad Gita and so have I. That’s grammatically wrong. Following rules of sandhi, one should either say ‘Bhagavat Gita’ or ‘Bhagavadgita’. Before the battle, Arjuna asks Krishna to station the chariot between the two armies, so that he can see who he has to fight with. That’s when this shloka occurs and one has a list of father, grandfather, preceptor, maternal uncle, brother, son, grandson, friend, father-in-law and well-wisher. That more or less covers every masculine relative one can think of. A few shlokas later (shloka 34 to be precise), there…

David Coleman Headley’s sensational disclosure via a video link from the US that Ishrat Jehan, the young woman who was killed in Gujarat along with three others in a 2004 police encounter, was an operative of Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has evoked much shock, relief as well as denial. The political opposition, various human rights groups and NGOs have cried foul, arguing that Headley, a former Chicago drug dealer who later became an LeT accomplice—he of heterochromatic eyes, with a brownish left one and a bluish-green right eye, and who had conducted a reconnaissance exercise on prospective targets, including the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, for the brazen 26/11 attack in 2008 that killed 166 people—had named Jehan as part of a quid pro quo deal to help…

THE MAIN ENTRANCE to Patanjali Yogpeeth on the Delhi-Haridwar highway leads to Sadbhavna Bhawan, a huge courtyard with a raised platform that stands on four pillars. On the platform, behind a small metal gate, is a grey sofa that is unoccupied. This is the seat of the much-loved yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who is now on a whirlwind tour of the Northeast. In his absence, the ashram is quiet, serene. We are greeted with Oms and pranams as we make our way to Acharya Balkrishna’s office. Ramdev’s companion since the 1990s, Balkrishna is also managing director of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd—he holds 92 per cent of the company’s shares; an NRI couple from Scotland hold the rest. He is busy, juggling business meetings and supervising paperwork. Around him, the atmosphere of…

FAR FROM the madding crowd of the India Art Fair and other assorted cultural happenings around the city, my favourite artistic refuge in the past few weeks has been Satish Gujral’s magisterial retrospective at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in central Delhi. Beautifully curated by Pramod Kumar KG, Satish Gujral: A Brush with Life has been organised by the Gujral Foundation to celebrate the artist’s 90th year. A handsome volume accompanies the show, but it is the transformative power of the series of interlinked rooms of the Twin Gallery at the IGNCA that casts a spell on the viewer. The eye is alternately soothed and quickened as it adapts to the range and unpredictability of Gujral’s styles over the decades. There is just about enough textual…

ONE EVENING IN the autumn of 1937, a princess of Travancore entered the library at Satelmond Palace in Trivandrum where her parents were ensconced sorting wedding proposals for her. “There’s no need to look anymore,” she declared casually. She’d just returned from a procession, escorted around Trivandrum Fort in an ornate palanquin, heralded by pipers, drummers, and the liveried guards. All of them looked sufficiently solemn and Lalitamba Bayi was meant to play her part and act appropriately poised. But this mutinous princess popped her head out and waved at her pious, somewhat startled subjects. And there— in the crowd on a certain inner street, she saw him. Without a hint of reservation she at once decided she would marry this man, and no amount of frenzied parleying with her…

THE MARVEL MAN SINCE 2004 Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool in the eponymous film, is no stranger to Marvel characters. He played Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity (2004) and Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) I F YOU DIDN’T know it was Dickens, would you find Fitoor acceptable as an unrequited love story? A poor boy in Kashmir worships a snooty, aristocratic girl in the Valley. She has a mother who is obsessed, to the level of perversity, with the idea that a broken heart is part of falling in love. Begum Hazrat (Tabu) tells young Noor (Aditya Roy Kapur), every time she meets him, that he must endure the tragic effects of love, just as she herself has all these sad years. But the boy doesn’t listen…

Deadpool DIRECTOR Tim Miller CAST Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, TJ Miller If one were to categorise this movie within a genre, ‘uber cool’ might be apt. It is not satire, because Deadpool is actually a Marvel Comics character and even makes an appearance in an X-Men movie. It is his attitude that is unusual. He mocks the very genre he appears in: the ‘Superhero’ movie. The film starts off with Deadpool, in costume and all, hailing a taxi for his superhero activities. He chats with the Indian taxi driver, who behaves as though he is used to people like Superman and Spiderman flagging him down in New York City. With Bollywood music playing on the radio, he tells Deadpool about a woman he finds ‘agreeable’, a girl called Geeta. However,…

Offspring in the Wings Film industry insiders are currently talking about Saif Ali Khan’s daughter Sara, who is grooming herself for an acting career. The 22-year-old Columbia graduate returned to India and decided she was a chip off the old block, after all. The young lady has reportedly lost 40 kg over the last year, putting herself through gruelling workouts and punishing diets. Four years ago, when she appeared on the cover of Hello! magazine with mum Amrita Singh, both draped in Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla fabrics, the industry took it as a sign that Sara was testing the waters. More recently she is believed to have walked the ramp at a private fashion show held at the home of one of India’s most prominent industrialists. Eyewitnesses say she looked radiant…