Table of contents for July 18, 2016 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to ‘An English Romance’ by Swapan Dasgupta (11 July 2016).After 43 years of being part of the European Union, Britain has decided to exit. Though the terms of its withdrawal will be a long-drawn process of negotiation with the EU, till that time Britain has to abide by its membership rules. Still, this separation, expected to take almost two years, is going to be messy. All those who voted for ‘Leave’ will be happy as they thought that Britain was not gaining anything other than an inflow of immigrants from the EU. But they should not forget the long-term consequences of their vote. The country now has to negotiate trade treaties and agreements with both the US and EU. No doubt, the latter…

This is 1.5 of the Ashtavakra Gita, a text I have mentioned earlier. This is a text where the sage Ashtavakra teaches King Janaka. "You are not a vipra or any of the other varnas. You do not belong to an ashrama. You are not something that can be seen by the eyes." If Janaka is not any of these, what is Janaka? That's the objective of this entire series, not to be answered immediately today. Let's take the ashrama bit first—the fourfold classification into hrahmacharya, grahasthya, vanaprastha and sannyasa. In very loose terms, hrahmacharya is described as celibate student-hood, grahasthya is described as the householder stage, vanaprastha is described as the stage of retiring to the forest, and sannyasa is described as the ultimate stage of becoming an ascetic,…

LAST SUMMER, the editor of Open, S Prasannarajan, wrote—in my view a trifle mischeviously— in this magazine that ‘talking about Islam is problematic today, given the alacrity with which the epithet Islamophobe is being thrown at anyone who dares to question, or initiate a conversation on a religion in whose name the worst crimes against humanity continue to be committed in our time’. As a Muslim, I have certain problems with that particular, ‘problematic’ context. I wish to engage the author of those thoughts, as well as those thoughts themselves by saying that talking about Islam is problematic today, given the alacrity with which the epithet ‘Islamist’ or ‘jihadist’ is thrown at anyone who dares answer, or initiate a conversation on charges levelled against a religion that is under attack…

ONCE UPON A TIME IN INDIA: THE MARVELLOU S ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN CORCORAN Alfred Assollant Translated by Sam Miller Juggernaut 231 Pages | Rs 299 “GET RID OF the English! I approve of that, Lord Holkar, and I’ll even give you a helping hand,” says Captain Corcoran, a swashbuckling Frenchman, who promises an Indian king that he will dispel ‘the red coat barbarians’, namely the British. The year is 1857 and there is an uprising on the boil in India, the perfect setting for the English-hating Frenchman who speaks ‘Hindustani’ to go on a rhinoceros hunt on elephant back, meet a courageous lotus-eyed Indian princess and fall in love. If you raised your eyebrow at the stereotypes about Anglo-French rivalry or the ‘exotic orientalism’ used to describe India, then fear…

The Party Pooper No one thinks of the IIFA Awards as anything more than a free holiday for the film industry where they get to bring a partner, a parent, or a friend to a fancy foreign location each year and basically have a good time. In exchange, the organisers expect their guests to dutifully turn up for the half dozen or so events organised over the course of the weekend and smile for the many cameras trained on them. According to Bollywood insiders, former jailbird and all-round nice guy (yeah, the irony of that!) Sanjay Dutt insisted on travelling with an entourage of nine when he was invited to attend the event in Madrid two weeks ago. Because nobody says ‘no’ to Sanjay Dutt, the organisers complied. But, reportedly,…

CHARLIE MUNGER—who along with Warren Buffett turned a failing textile company called Berkshire Hathaway into one of the United States’ largest corporations—once gave a speech at Harvard University where he talked about how humans mislead and get misled. One of the elements in it was the power of incentives leading to bad outcomes. He cited the example of Xerox, which had a great new machine that was actually selling less than its old outdated one. The company found a simple answer—its salesmen were getting better commissions on the old one. In the speech Munger also pointed to the bias caused by incentives, noting, “It’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behaviour. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate……

IT IS NOT a political farce after Brexit. It is perhaps a Shakespearean passage interrupted by the lurid realism of tabloid London, but, nevertheless, a political junkie’s eternal delight, a voyeur’s most rewarding peephole. The days and nights after 23 June saw the epochal set against the trivial, the cathartic against the bathetic, the moral against the brutal, the principle against the personal, and in the grim alleys of realpolitik, ghosts lurked, knives waited, blood was shed, and the assassin’s cheque bounced. Before the EU became smaller, the United Kingdom unravelled, and the day after liberation, the losers in Westminster united on a stage littered with the fallen winners. What was it, asked the disillusioned, a pub dispute between posh boys? Or a class war that migrated from the streets…

PAST, PRESENT AND future fused together last week as Britain stepped back from the giddy immediacy of political turmoil to take stock of a military tragedy that was fought out a hundred years ago. It was a poignant moment India shared with Queen Elizabeth and her consort who bowed their heads in Westminster Abbey, while their son and grandsons did the same on a windswept, rain-lashed pasture in the French village of Thiepval. The triplearched brick memorial there, 45 metres tall, seemed remarkably familiar until I realised why: the handiwork of Sir Edwin Lutyens, it could have graced New Delhi railway station. This wasn’t the real connection. I had forgotten India’s participation in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 until Dame Shirley Williams, the veteran British politician and…

SHRILL: NOTES FROM A LOUD WOMAN Lindy West Hachette 260 Pages | Rs 499 THE SHAMING STARTED the day she was born. A doctor in Seattle, Washington, held up baby Lindy West and declared the circumference of her head to be ‘off the charts’. The incident became a joke in her family. West laughed it off at first but she says she always knew that she was ‘Abnormally big. Medical-anomaly big. Unchartably big.’ And she tried to become a small person in other ways— turning into a terror-stricken mouse at school, talking (through nudges and whispers) to no one other than her mother. In Shrill—part memoir, part feminist roar—West recounts the first time (at the age of eight) when she was asked to join the ‘above 100 kg’ group at…

THE MURDER OF 20 people in a cafe followed by bomb blasts outside the Sholakia Eidgah in Dhaka are just a few in a series of terror attacks that have rocked the Muslim world in the last ten odd days. The curved line on the map that links Istanbul, via Medina, all the way to Dhaka is the new ‘arc of instability’. But this is a disingenuous label in a way, for the arc has merely expanded: earlier, its borders were the banks of the Euphrates in the West and the Indus in the East. The phenomenon is not new, only its expansion is. Bangladesh is not just another victim but an important marker in understanding the psychology of permissiveness that allows such terror to expand. Dhaka has an unimpeachably…

IN 2009, Justice K Kannan of the Punjab and Haryana High Court became perhaps the country’s first judge to voluntarily make his assets public. He did this after an open letter addressing all judges of the Supreme Court and high courts from the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reform (CJAR) argued that by doing so, they would be setting a worthy benchmark for transparency on their financial status and property. Those standards, it seems, proved to be too high for many in the legal profession, leave alone other public servants, to follow. Whispers of undue influence brought to bear on the justice system had already begun to cast a shadow on the profession by the turn of the decade, throwing up questions about the impartiality of the Judiciary in some…

AT THE GLOBAL Education Fair held in Delhi last week by The Chopras, an education consultancy, there was a new question being put to admission counsellors: “Which Asian university will give me the longest work visa when I graduate?” The 300-odd students in attendance who wanted to pursue Marketing, Finance, Medicine or Engineering, all wanted to enroll at a university that would give them the best return in investment. “I am not scared of a little competition. But I don’t want to get stuck in the cut-off rut in India. I want to study abroad and then work abroad,” says Sahil Dixit, 17, one of the attendees. He has already rejected two offers from UK universities, not because the course would cost him more, but because no work visa would…

TRAM 83 Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Translated by Roland Glasser) Speaking Tiger 210 Pages | Rs 350 REQUIEM, ALIAS King Nzinga Nkuwu, alias Hitler, alias Negritudé, alias The Man Who Changes Water Into Vodka, is waiting at the half-built 19th century train station for his old friend Lucien. The station is ‘the only place on earth where you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes’. It is a place teeming with professors selling their lecture notes, intellectuals reeking of salted fish, Cuban musicians performing salsa... Requiem feels he has better things to do than wait for a train that is running late, as they always do. He could instead go to the popular nightspot Tram 83, which has the appearance of a ‘true…

“When people ask me if I feel intimidated working with strong actors like Amitabh Bachchan, I say never” Nawazuddin Siddiqui IT WAS AN unusually rainy afternoon in Mumbai. The year was 1998 and the month August. Shops shut down early, office goers rushed towards home, and trains moved carefully over flooded tracks. A group of five struggling actors and a writer sought shelter from the rains at Andheri railway station, all of them new to the merciless downpour that invades Mumbai. In the group—that shared two cutting chais—was comedian Rajpal Yadav (the only known face amongst them) and Anurag Kashyap, who was reeling from the after-effects of the super hit Satya. “He did not know me back then. In fact, he did not even pay much attention to me. But…

THE NATYA SHASTRA, India’s foremost treatise on aesthetics, describes the emergence of censorship immediately after the birth of drama. It comes at a time when the world is so disordered that the gods approach Brahma for a solution. The Vedas are all well and good, they tell him, but sacred scripture isn’t available to everyone. In response, Brahma produces the Natya Veda, a democratic form of knowledge to which even Shudras are permitted access. He tasks Bharata with simplifying this fifth Veda and putting it to use, but the director’s choice of inaugural play is injudicious. He stages the Amritmanthana, in the course of which the devas deceive and defeat their cousins the asuras, for an audience composed of both victors and vanquished. Watching themselves being clobbered, the daityas and…