Table of contents for 11/28/2016 in Open Magazine

eneditor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Donald Trump’s unexpected win has taken the world—America included—by surprise (‘The American Dream 2016’, November 21st, 2016). The world’s largest democracy may now experience a non-democratic way of governance, and it is going to be an interesting phase. Last week, many people across the US protested Trump’s victory, calling their right to protest ‘democracy’. Well, democracy is how Trump got elected in the first place. Now, if you have a grouse, it should be against the people who voted for him, and not him per se. All these protests should have taken place when Trump’s candidacy was announced, or when he was in the running. It may have made a deeper impact, or any impact at all for that matter. I love how democracies across…

EVERY YEAR Oxford Dictionaries—the last word on all expressions English—issues a list of new words to be included in its famous corpus. It is not unusual to see words from other languages included in the list—‘paratha’ and ‘pyjama’ are examples of such entries. This year, however, a strange new term has made its entry: post-truth. Simply put, ‘post-truth’ refers to a condition when ‘objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Sounds familiar? After a string of polarising political events in the recent past—Brexit, the bitterly contested US presidential election, among others—public reactions have been extreme. The world, it seems, is divided into two halves where people feel their political position is right and that of those holding other beliefs, wrong, even…

There is a time to display the power of one’s wealth and there is time to not. When almost all of India is standing in queue for Rs 100 notes is not when a rumoured Rs 500 crore should be spent on a wedding. It is unsurprising that the wedding of the daughter of mining baron Janardhan Reddy is being called an obscene display of wealth. Grand weddings have traditionally been occasions to exhibit and bolster connections and social status. But, the corollaries of poor timing are a public relations disaster and making oneself a target of the Income Tax Department. WORD’S WORTH “I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me,…

SANDHYA MRIDUL IS full of stories. She’s got a story about how she made the move from a marketing job at KLM to acting in television shows; a story about entering Bollywood with Saathiya that features Yash Chopra; a story about a party and a haircut that led to her breakout role in independent cinema withWaisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II; and of course, a story about a train journey to Jaipur and a call from Nikkhil Advani that bagged her a role in one of Star Plus’—and Indian television’s—most ambitious shows, POW: Bandi Yuddh Ke, which hit airwaves recently. In this TV magnum opus, an official adaptation of the Israeli series, Hatufim, that American TV series Homeland was adapted from, Mridul plays Nazneen Khan, the wife of Squadron Leader…

FOR MANY LONGTIME Bangaloreans, the reality of today comes up short against the reverie of yesterday. A many-headed beast feeling its way forward without quite knowing how, the city, in a former life, had been an isle of bliss. In Askew, TJS George, a senior journalist and a Bangalorean, turns flaneur of that cosy past. He nostalgises the ‘Bangalore way of life’ before progress turned its ‘grace to gluttony’. ‘The problem was that IT transformed Bangalore in ways earlier bouts of industrialization and immigration had not. The old agreeable Bangalore was now replaced by an aggressive Bangalore where no one had time for his neighbours,’ he writes. But what makes this slim volume a keeper is his reportage: from the crowded platforms of Bangalore’s railway stations during the unfortunate exodus…

UNLIKE THE BREXIT vote in the summer, where a visit to the UK shortly before polling convinced me that the pundits were getting it wrong, I too did not believe that Donald Trump was going to spring a surprise on November 8th. Not having visited the United States since 2004, I went by media reports and poll forecasts that were nearunanimous that Hillary Clinton’s win was a foregone conclusion. Despite this miscalculation, I delighted in watching CNN all through the counting and was quite tickled at the growing incoherence of the otherwise glib anchors as it became apparent that the liberal media’s gush-gush coverage of the Clinton campaign was horribly off the mark. The growing inclination of journalists to live in an echo chamber and equate their own personal preferences…

THERE IS A BEAUTIFUL anecdote about Leonard Cohen from his performance in the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Between August 26th and 31st, this tiny island off the southern coast of England came to host one of the greatest musical events of those times. It featured all the heavy rollers of that era—Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, and several others. The organisers had expected some 150,000 people. But instead, over the course of five days, more than four times as many turned up. As the audience swelled, the venue began to tremble under their riotous mood. Pumped with the adrenaline of that era and fuelled by the electronic rage of rock and roll’s greatest musicians, the audience began to break and burn things. One man…

THE FILM 2001: A Space Odyssey used to be a rage once. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke wrote the screenplay, and after the film was released, the latter wrote a book with the same title. (There was a short story by Arthur C Clarke that had inspired the film, but that's not what I want to bring up.) In both the film and the book, there is a character named Moon-watcher. He was a leader of the man-apes. Moon-watcher features prominently in the film too, but there is a quote that you will only find in the book: 'Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon. And though he could not remember it, when he was…

ON A CRISP winter afternoon back in December 2014, Sumit Anand found himself on his motorbike with the visage of his girlfriend in his rearview mirror and a smile on his face. The 29-year-old Delhibased software developer, after much deliberation and planning, had finally managed to find some time off and combined two long-held promises into a single plan—that of a long bike ride promised to himself and the other of an outstation holiday with his girlfriend. The idea was to reach the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand by evening, check into one of the several hotels on the park’s periphery at night, and be up early next morning for a tour of the famed national park. The bike zipped through the city in the mild afternoon sun, leaving…

HERE IS HOW you write a brilliant Japanese crime fiction novel. First, revive the sense of wonder, of the fantastic, in the crime by introducing a very attractive mystery. Create an element of surprise—a single mother murders her abusive ex-husband and a neighbour knocks on the door and offers to create a perfect alibi (Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X), or co-workers in a factory that assembles lunch boxes design a macabre way of getting rid of the body by chopping and packaging and distributing it in different parts of Tokyo (Natsuo Kirino’s Out). Then include the puzzle element of who did it (or if you already know that at the beginning, then show how that person evades the police). It is important to use science and rationality in…

FOOD IS CENTRAL to the ancient Vedic texts. The creation hymn of the Rigveda (10.90.4) divides all things into those that eat and those that do not eat (or are the eaten). ‘Food and eaters of food, that’s all there is’ (Satapatha Brahmana 11.1.6.19). It is part of every rite of passage—thread ceremony, weddings, sixtieth birthdays, funerals, death anniversaries, and so on. Food links the ascetic, the sadhu, with common folk through the ritual of begging for alms and the subsequent giving and receiving of food. What one is permitted to eat and with whom, how much one should eat, from whom one can accept food, how food is to be prepared, and when one can eat are all central everyday questions governing the hierarchy of the caste system, appearing…

MY RAILWAY SEASON pass is bought from an app called UTS with a very tiresome mode of paying that involves transferring money online to something that they call an R-Wallet and then deducting the money from that. It could be simpler, but, even so, there is no cash involved. When I order food, I use Swiggy or Zomato. No money changes hands. If I have to travel by road, I have Uber. I buy groceries through Big Basket or Nature’s Basket. Recently, I bought a Jala Neti pot to irrigate my nasal passages on an online store that sells yoga products. In the last two years, I have seen the inside of a bank just once when I was asked to do a KYC (know your customer) check. Sweden, they…

PUNDITS HAVE FOUND many reasons to explain why Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton: the bi-coastal liberal bubble, Democratic cosiness with Wall Street, the end of industrial America, Hillary Clinton’s personal unpopularity. I’m sure all of the explanations have a grain of truth to them, but when the stupefied newscasters on CNN grudgingly conceded on the morning of November 9th that Donald Trump had won the US presidency, I thought about Walter White. The anti-hero of the TV saga Breaking Bad, Walter H White is a high school Chemistry teacher whose life at the beginning of the show is an endless series of humiliations. Although a gifted teacher, this middle-aged White man gets no respect from his students, his principal (a Hispanic woman), or the Romanian owner of the car wash…

LIKE MILLIONS OF others around the world, I had little or no sleep on the night of the US presidential election. It was a global event of momentous significance. As the results came in and the prospect of Donald Trump emerging as the victor gradually increased, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that the world—not just the United States of America— was entering a new era that would challenge many of the certainties that have underpinned the complex global structures, both political and economic, that have endured since World War II. I wrote recently in Open that ‘the world will be anxiously awaiting the result of an election that looks desperately close when by all conventional measures it should be anything but’ (‘Fall of the Professional Politician’, October 10th,…

CAMBRIDGE MAY WELL be ranked the UK’s top university this year and have an unbroken academic history of over eight centuries. Its mere list of illustrious alumni would fill thick tomes, but for an Indian lad moving there in the mid-1960s on his own, it was straight out of a picture book. ‘Stone walls and enclosed courts. Gates like those of castles in the movies.’ Those are the first impressions of Farrukh Dhondy, who attended Cambridge to study Natural Sciences on a Tata endowment. He went on to add English to his degree and be a chronicler to a Britain waking up in a post-colonial world, albeit through an Indian lens. Before that remarkable journey came this stint at college, now chronicled as Cambridge Company, almost half a century later.…

It’s More Than Complicated In Bollywood, it appears that exes can be friends, but no matter what relationship you share with your ex, you can’t be friends with another of his exes. Complicated much? At the first edition of the surprisingly well-attended Lux Golden Rose Awards held recently, eye-witnesses swear they saw Shahid Kapoor and a very pregnant Kareena Kapoor Khan exchange pleasantries when they bumped into each other (some swear they hugged; I’m not buying it till photographic evidence emerges) and share parenting tips. Refreshingly, there appears to be no awkwardness between the one-time lovers. Meanwhile, at the same awards show Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif reportedly steered clear of each other, and succeeded in dodging the awkward confrontation that might have taken place on account of poor planning…