Table of contents for April 18, 2016 in Open Magazine

APANTHEON IS a sealed testament of divinity, and every nation needs one. It is where the mortals in power, whose frailties require a continuous supply of models from the past, come to pray. It is where history is a closed house, a temple that abhors questions. It is also the site where national memories are replaced by the mythologies of heroic men, one-dimensional men, reassembled to suit the smallest of our minds. It is where desperate politicians and their ‘intellectual’ henchmen gatecrash and turn history into a dispute over ownership. A national pantheon is convenient veneration in countries with low self-esteem. We have a pretty crowded one, and not a single day passes without new struggles for entry. If we are lazy enough to leave the fortunes of our heroes—and…

MOSSACK FONSEC A IS now a byword for the evasion of taxes and parking of wealth abroad by the world’s rich and powerful. From top politicians in Western countries to shady businessmen in the South, the Panama Papers offer a who’s who of those who shifted money away from their countries of residence. What made this possible? The year 2015 marked the bicentenary of a now forgotten episode: The Congress of Vienna that ended one of the bloodiest wars in European history. It also put a stamp on Switzerland’s neutrality, letting it turn into a country where money could be parked from elsewhere. In 1776, Adam Smith had demolished the ideas behind mercantilism, but it was not until 1815 that taking wealth away from one country to another ceased to…

For a politician, the decision to impose Prohibition is one of greed versus power. Sales of alcoholic drinks bring in enormous tax revenues to a state. In contrast, Prohibition brings in votes, especially of women. The decision is almost inevitably reversed after a few years. Prohibition has worked well in Saudi Arabia, but Bihar, where it came into force on 5 April, can hardly flog or sentence to death those who deal in illegal liquor. In free and poor societies, Prohibition leads to a flourishing black market and an increase in corruption. WORD’S WORTH “I give the public what it wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. I could never meet the demand (for illegal alcohol)” AL CAPONE, gangster, in 1927…

REMINISCING AND NOSTALGIA appear to be activities of the mind that consciously delve into the past, removing us momentarily from the reality that surrounds us. But the past is never really behind us; it is alive and an active participant in our present, moving and shaping human thought and action. This is true of every sphere of life, be it the high-tech binary-digital universe or the landscape of tones and tunes that music creates. More often than not, we come to the conclusion that something precious that ‘was’ has been lost, purity and honesty have been bartered for something that is not of the same quality, calibre and value. This is a complex perception dyed in numerous shades of emotion that colour our lenses. Let us explore this past-present asymmetry…

THE DROWNED DETECTIVE Neil Jordan Bloomsbury 265 Pages | Rs 499 THE INVISIBLE MAN FROM SALEM Christoffer Carlsson Speaking Tiger 297 Pages | Rs 499 WHAT DO A BRITISH expatriate running a detective agency in an unnamed East European city and a weary cop in Sweden have in common? Both take the reader on a journey through the protagonist’s subconscious and memories. But the resemblance ends there. The Drowned Detective is a very strange mystery. Its prose is lyrical, haunting and staccato. Its sensibility is by turns ancient and highly modern. Its themes are about exile—the protagonist is an Englishman in a decaying Eastern European city; love—facing a crisis in his marriage because of his wife’s infidelity; jealousy—you know why ‘I channel jealousy… the jealousy that is useful is the…

THE LINK between diabetes and sugar is deeply embedded in our minds. Diabetes is referred to as ‘sugar’ in common parlance. To most people, a diet for diabetes means a ‘diet without sugar’. It is true that the link between diabetes and sugar is strong. But is diabetes only about sugar? Many of us don’t realise that fat intake also plays a major role in influencing diabetes. There are three broad ways by which fat intake could impact diabetes. One, fats are high calorie food (one gram of fat provides nine calories, as compared to a gram of sugar, which provides only four). Diets high in fat provide extra calories, which leads to weight gain and greater risk of diabetes and heart disease. Two, if one already has diabetes, extra…

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to Prabha Chandran’s ‘An Empire Redeemed’ (28 March 2016). Truschke is a child of Sheldon Pollock’s, and it comes as no surprise that this ‘scholarship’ is motivated by the need to fight current political developments in India rather than the need to study history dispassionately. That said, the idea that Mughal interest in Sanskrit somehow proves that they were an enlightened secular lot is a gross lie at best. The fact is that all conquering civilisations have an interest in studying their conquests and digesting whatever they can it. Ultimately, all predatory civilisations understand the need to study the ‘other’ so that they can be better conquered, defeated, and eventually digested. Pollock and his minions are Marxists with an agenda of destroying any…

TESLA’S MODEL 3, the grand unveiling of which has generated hysteria a la Apple in America, offers us the first real clue to whether its CEO Elon Musk will finally live up to his reputation as the ‘Steve Jobs of the Space Age’. For a while, this 44-year-old man of ideas seemed in danger of being a visionary with a vision so far beyond ‘the rest of us’ that getting excited about his next big thing was no more than a theoretical exercise. Wasn’t this the guy who wanted to save humans from extinction by enabling an escape to outer space in case capping carbon emissions failed? As a dreamer, Musk has held popular imagination since at least 2002, when he used the fortune he made on PayPal to set…

EBRAHIM ALKAZI: DIRECTING ART: THE MAKING OF A MODERN INDIAN ART WORLD Edited by Parul Dave-Mukherji Mapin Publishing 300 Pages | Rs 5,550 IN A DOCUMENTARY series that Ebrahim Alkazi directed in 1955 called Indian Art and Modernism, the veteran theatre personality and art connoisseur outlined ‘three main issues that confront… Indian artists today’. Articulated in the form of three questions, these involve matters that have preoccupied artists and art historians for decades, and remain pertinent to this day. His words are worth quoting in full: “The first question is, what pictorial language is appropriate to interpret our contemporary times? Secondly, what pictorial language of the Indian artists today have to do with our own artistic heritage? And thirdly, in the West since the end of the 19th Century, there…

I Am a Hero Unto Myself If insiders are to be believed, Anushka Sharma has bagged the lead opposite Shah Rukh Khan in Imtiaz Ali’s next film, a—what else?—love story that the Highway director will shoot in Punjab and London. Very little is known of the project so far, except that SRK will film this along with or possibly after Anand L Rai’s next (in which he reportedly plays a dwarf) later in the year. Industry watchers are especially surprised by the director’s decision to cast Anushka, given his abiding fondness for Deepika Padukone. But few are aware that Imtiaz had offered Tamasha to Anushka before Deepika ended up doing it. Sources close to Anushka reveal that the actress politely turned down Tamasha, despite badly wanting to work with Imtiaz,…

WHAT DOES THE media advisor of Aishwarya Rai share with the Pakistan Joint Investigation Team that came to investigate the Pathankot Air Force base attack? Complete faith in simple denial in the face of evidence to the contrary. When The Indian Express asked the media advisor about Rai’s name in the Panama Papers which showed that the actress had created offshore entities, her reply was, “What is this consortium (ICIJ) and what does it do? Is this an authorised entity and how do we know that the information they get is authentic? All information that you have is totally untrue and false.” Similarly the Pakistani JIT came, sauntered around Pathankot and then, as per a report in Pakistan Today quoting a source, came to the conclusion that not only were…

ANNIVERSARIES are usually moments of stock taking, assessing achievements and failures. In the case of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, such an exercise would be both presumptuous and foolish. With many great leaders, we assess how they measure up to standards and ideals of a civilisation. In Ambedkar’s case, the reverse is true. He is the yardstick to which a whole civilisation must measure up. We don’t judge him by our ideals; he should be the ideal by which we judge ourselves. In engaging with Ambedkar, the question is not of assessing him; it is of assessing ourselves, and trying to understand why we continue to avoid confronting his bracing call to justice, his advocacy of reason, the depth of his institutional imagination. He is the mirror in which we dare not…