Table of contents for 12/12/2016 in Open Magazine

LETTER OF THE WEEK Social media has taken over the way everyone functions and communicates, so why should politicians not jump on the bandwagon? As mentioned in the story, ‘How Social Media Is Shaping the New Political Order’ (December 5th, 2016), Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal largely owe their public image and vote bank popularity to what they put out on social media. Just like there is no such thing as ‘bad publicity’ in the press, there is no bad publicity on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram either. The frightening part, however, is that the public largely remains immune and unaware of the ways in which internet ‘news’ can manipulated for propaganda. One cannot even be sure whether posts are written by one person or an entire team of…

THIS MONSOON, the entire road network of Mumbai collapsed. Footpaths, tar, gravel, concrete, emanations of black holes hidden under muddy brown slush—all melded together to create a Jackson Pollock painting where once there were highways. This didn’t happen last year. This didn’t happen the year before last. This was because of the drought. This year it rained as it should. An economic capital is a city that needs to rely on the monsoon failing to keep its traffic moving. As it turns out, maybe not even that. Oxford Economics, a global advisory firm, says that Mumbai has just been edged out as India’s economic capital. In its list of 50 best metropolitan economic entities—Mumbai is 31st and Delhi 30th. Delhi will extend its lead by 2030, moving to 11th spot…

THIS IS WHAT we know: it’s not a good time to be in power. Politicians playing by the rulebook are being assailed by furies from the farthest provinces of resentment. Slogans no longer inspire the base because the grassroots have declared war on clichés: so think before you use the word ‘change’. We have also been told that truth died a sudden death in the ruins of politics-as-usual: so beware the evangelist wasting his eloquence on tomorrow. Yesterday is suddenly beguiling, and it looks like the future belongs to time-travellers promising to take us back to a place beyond memory and mythology. It is as if the so-called ‘power of the powerless’ has made the old ideological divisions redundant. The extreme is the new centre. It is not a good…

DEMONETISATION IS treating a symptom. The disease is systemic and grave, and relates to the institutionalised corruption in the vast, inefficient, wasteful and mostly ineffective administrative apparatus of the Indian state. Consider what happened in Chennai after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise announcement on high-denomination paper currency. According to a person in the know, large stacks of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes held by the corrupt, bribe-taking bureaucracy, lower judiciary and the political class, instantly turned into waste paper. Unruffled, the triumvirate responded by simply sending bulging sacks of demonetised currency notes in their possession to contractors, influential litigants, and those seeking favours, with instructions to do the needful of converting the black money into white—however this is managed— and returning the laundered funds in like amounts. Assuming, reasonably,…

SHARANYA MANIVANNAN’S protagonist is a Janus-faced creature of love and loss. She is by turns sensual, whimsical, cruel, innocent, tender, and willful. She is the sviya, or one who is her own wife. Her unconventional form rarely suits the ready moulds of patriarchy, and the struggle to fit in is bloody and tortured. The High Priestess Never Marries is Manivannan’s debut work of fiction where she extracts women from real and mythical universes and makes them the central pivot of her stories. Each story has a female narrator who has complete control of her words, her body, and her desire. They are women who make difficult choices, choose the tougher alternative—and live with the consequence of their actions. They rise from the sea like mermaids with an ancient knowledge of…

Dutt’s the Way Ranbir Kapoor is gearing up to play Sanjay Dutt in Munna Bhai series director Rajkumar Hirani’s biopic of the controversial star, and those who’ve seen images from the look test conducted for the film have been raving. The big question—how do you make Ranbir look like Dutt?—appears to have been tackled superbly by Hirani and his team of artistes who’ve skillfully employed prosthetics, make-up, and hairstyling to transform the star into the mucholder Dutt. Iconic looks of Dutt have been facsimiled by Ranbir in a series of still images which he’s saved on his mobile phone and which he’s excitedly been showing friends. There is also confirmation now that Sonam Kapoor will play a small role in the film. It is unclear yet which of the many…

OMEGA SEAMASTER PLANET OCEAN The Seamaster Planet Ocean Collection has remained a strong symbol of OMEGA’s ocean heritage since 2005. But the new Planet Ocean 600M goes further, epitomising the finest in watchmaking craft with Master Chronometer certification and its innovative new design. The cases of the 39.5mm and 43.5mm models, as well as the 45.5mm chronographs, are made from 18K Sedna™ gold. Most impressively, the dials and bezels have been created from ceramic, a sleek effect that is enhanced by Liquidmetal® or Ceragold™ numbers and scaling. For the first time, rubber has been blended with ceramic to create a vibrant new diving bezel. This can be seen in several models, where orange rubber covers the first 15 minutes. The straps are also made from rubber with an anti-bacterial treatment.…

WHEN THE DUST settles, the ATMs start functioning again and the social media posts about the desperate plight of the neighbourhood liberal’s maid and maali ceases, it may be worth collating a list of the most ingenious ways that those who were caught on the wrong foot went about their laundry. The most familiar one was, of course, the payment in advance of cash to employees. The drivers in our locality spoke about how the masons, carpenters and plumbers engaged by the builder who lives in the locality were paid two years’ salaries in advance. The other common trick that worked with the connivance of bank managers or petrol pump owners was to quietly exchange the new money paid by many customers with old notes at a discount ranging from…

DONALD TRUMP IS in many ways a unique winner of the top political job in the US. He is the first president-elect who does not have any military experience or some prior government job that equips him to handle one of the most complex roles in the world. On top of this, his continuing engagement with a sprawling real estate empire has raised questions about conflicts of interest. The latter has been held as a unique problem in recent US political history. It is hardly that. All this may be coming to an end. On Twitter—Trump’s favourite mode of communication—on November 30th, he said, ‘Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations.’ Critics were quick to point out that the expression ‘business operations’ is…

The Supreme Court has ordered that the National Anthem be played in cinema halls across the country and citizens must stand up for it in respect. The Hindu reports one of the judges who passed the order as saying, “...people should feel that they live in a nation and show respect to the national anthem and the national flag.” That is well taken, but there is still the question of why it should be necessary or mandatory to exhibit what one feels. Also, what makes cinema halls so important that this rite must be performed there? Why not play the National Anthem in all public places before every activity? For example, at railway platforms from public announcement systems before a train sets off. Let an Indian show adequate respect by…

VISUALISE THIS. A splendid sun spilling out of a smokey sky, spilling on to a cricket ground. Broad concrete stands seating men, women and children in different stages of rapture and perspiration, their foreheads wrapped in crescentmoon shaped paper caps. Ugly hoardings in radioactive colours—of chewing tobacco, cement mix, cough syrup and engine oil. Dusty outfield. Brown infield. Biscuit crumb pitch. White uniforms of fielders smeared with clay. Face towels hanging by tailbones. The conspiring lot packed around their prey, a Caucasian batsman, like cunning dholes. This, of course, is a scene from a Test match in India. And because the series against England is currently underway, perhaps Rajkot. Or Visakhapatnam. Maybe Mohali. And because of the fielding side, India, is described to be in a position of control, you…

ASHWATTHAMA IS ONE of the most fraught anti-villains of the Mahabharata. Cursed with painful and suppurating immortality, the myth is that he still wanders the earth paying for the sin of slaughtering the Pandava princelings as they slept. (Hindi afternoon news channels, incidentally, love stories on bizarre Ashwatthama ‘sightings’ as much as miracle snakes.) In Sauptik, Amruta Patil’s brilliantly rendered second graphic retelling of the Mahabharata, Ashwatthama is the sutradhaar. Her first, Adi Parva: The Churning of the Ocean, retold the epic through the eyes of Ganga. The word ‘sauptika’ is derived from ‘sleeping’, thus evoking the night massacre in Kurukshetra. That is the only place that this tormented, naked outlier searching for death finds peace in Patil’s imagining—a shamshan bhoomi where the mortality play runs 24x7. Its two dons,…

THAT WAS ANOTHER time in journalism. Pages were not as well curated as they are now. Headlines were not as desperately clever as they sometimes are today. It was staid. It was monotonous. It was at times tediously reflective, and a lot more explanatory. It was a time when the omniscient bureau chief, with a voice graver than the chief of the nation, ruled the most coveted corner plot of the front page. The news pages were, as they say, the state indeed: drab. Once in a while, it would take the moral outrage and investigative skills of an editor to quicken the pulse of the state—or topple it. That said, the Editor with a capital E was beyond the grasp of the state. He was, for all practical as…

THREE YEARS AGO, when Nawaz Sharif had to choose the next Pakistan army chief, it is said he selected the most apolitical one among the candidates, someone who posed the least threat to his power. General Raheel Sharif stayed away from interfering with the civilian government, even becoming the first army general in two decades to step down on time without seeking an extension, but he didn’t exactly fit Nawaz Sharif’s assessment. The two differed over the trial of General Pervez Musharraf, and the decision to lift a travel ban on the former dictator was seen as a sign of the government conceding to the army’s will. The army general also made a rare public statement expressing reservations over the civilian administration’s governance last year. Over time, the general has…

THE DUKE OF Bedford didn’t have India in mind when he wrote that ‘the social significance of Marks (& Spencer) was greater than that of Marx; or to put it another way: Simon (Lord Marks who developed the store into a British icon) was a more important—and more successful— revolutionary than Karl.’ But his words resonate in an India where a $1-billion house and a Rs 500-crore wedding testify to the primacy of consumerism over conscience so that Fidel Castro’s vow to temper ‘vulgar materialism’ with a ‘humanist alternative’ sounds quaintly Nehruvian. Castro (1926-2016) was a nationalist who believed that the American Green Card is not life’s ultimate achievement for any self-respecting nation or individual. He was a Communist who survived Communism. He made history after the end of history.…

THESE ARE CASHLESS days in India. Soon after the Union Government withdrew high-denomination notes in early November, the debate on India moving towards a cashless economy—or more plausibly, a lesscash economy—has gathered steam. In the days immediately after the decision, many urban residents switched to digital payments online due to sheer necessity, as notes of Rs 100 and less suddenly became scarce. ‘Scarcity’, however, is the wrong word to describe what happened. The Rs100 note has over the last 15 years been edged out by Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, so when the latter were withdrawn, it resulted in a shock of sorts. Are these just the pangs of a transition to a cashless economy? Or is this a far-fetched goal in a country where cash transactions still account…

THIS IS GOING to be a cold, harsh, smoggy (if you live in Delhi) and largely cashless winter. Except for Donald Trump supporters, the rest of the world has relatively little to cheer about this season, so it’s befitting that the jackets, at least, should light up your eyes. Winter 2016 runways promised enough drama to last through the chill. From metallic, spacey blazers in New York, to jackets being worn inside out in Milan, to hems left unfinished in Delhi, there was never a dull moment. And the stories! Take for instance the psychedelic prints and the supersaturated jackets at Moschino’s agitprop fall 2016 collection that was designed in collaboration with London-based artists Gilbert & George. Jeremy Scott, creative director of Moschino, hit upon the vivid concept over tea…

‘In my mind, her struggles were over. She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by colour, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities… In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit.’ What is adolescence if not an attempt to find a tribe to belong to? What is loneliness if not realising that no one has kept a chair for you? While we’d like to imagine that children make friends on a whim, we know the truth is far more complicated. Even for pre-teens…

‘WHAT IS POETRY?’—the first session of the first day begins with a sucker punch. It is an unanswerable question and the German poet Jan Wagner, of whom this has been asked, knows it. He demurs, talks about how lifetimes are spent writing essays on it and then attempts an answer: “Expression of the greatest possible freedom in the smallest possible space.” Neat and amorphous, but not really a definition. What if the poet uses more than the smallest space? The next day in another session, as a young writer, Shubhangi Swarup, who edits India’s only Virtual Reality magazine, talks about poetry in the digital age, she asks: “Are words necessary for poetry?” Combine both points of view—the greatest possible freedom in the smallest possible space without words—and what have you?…

Given the global economic environment and the uncertain climate in the US, is there an asset mix you would recommend that UHNIs lean toward— despite their varied individual aims? India is today among the fastestgrowing large economies. It has a host of factors going for it — a large middleclass with growing disposable incomes, favourable demographics, a stable government, low commodity prices, a government balance sheet on the mend, etc. These factors can propel growth for the decades to come. No doubt the global economic environment and the uncertainties in the US will have an effect on India too, but they will be momentary and when the calm returns, India will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of global growth. UHNIs should have a positive stance to equity investment to…

“My recent wedding collection showcases Indian craftsmanship combined with modern silhouettes. The Manish Malhotra couple is fresh and modern, but they also take pride in their heritage.” MANISH MALHOTRA Fashion Designer This wedding season, throw out the image of the bride weighed down in a heavy red lehenga and the groom stuffed into an overly embellished sherwani. This wedding season is about keeping things classy, with a modern twist to traditional wedding wear, and showcasing your personal style. Take a look at the fashion runways and that is exactly the kind of collections you will find from India’s top designers. “My recent wedding collection at India Couture Week showcases Indian craftsmanship combined with modern silhouettes for a stylish, young bridal entourage,” says designer to the stars, Manish Malhotra, who recently…

If you were to get married and you were granted a wish to choose any destination for your wedding, what would your choice be and why? I’d choose Seychelles or Greece, as destination weddings are enjoyable and an intimate experience for all involved. You’ve won beauty pageants. If you were made to judge the best wedding event decor, what would the top 5 points on your scorelist be? A stylish vintage wedding theme would be really interesting with some pastel shades. But most importantly it should reflect the personalities of the two people in love and the culture of the two families coming together. My top 5 points will definitely include: 1. Best execution 2. Perfect blend of shades 3. Interesting theme 4. Fresh flowers 5. Exotic cuisines What’s your…

When Paul Simon’s popular track ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ came out over 30 years ago, he was metaphorically talking about a wealthy woman in New York City and her various suitors. In today’s day and age, that song has a much more literal meaning. It wouldn’t be surprising to find a customer desirous of having shoes with diamond-studded soles, and if they have the money to splash, there are countless luxury brands to create them for her. Welcome to the world of bespoke products that cater to every client’s every tiny creative demand. In 2013, Italian designer Alberto Moretti created the world’s first 24 carat gold shoes for an elite set of customers around the world, and this trend of creating one-of-a-kind, limited edition pieces has travelled…

Not many Indians can boast of making it to the top 10 list in the world on any count. Lakshmi N Mittal, however, has made it to more than a few. And this includes the list of the most extravagantly expensive weddings— the tab for the wedding, footed by him, of his daughter Vanisha Mittal with investment banker Amit Bhatia in 2004 is estimated at over $60 million. Multiply that a few times and it will give you the value in dollars today. But what can you spend such a large sum of money on? Well, think invitations sent to over 1,000 guests in silver boxes with flight tickets and booking reservations at a 5-star hotel in Paris. Imagine a 6-day event at a 16th-century chateau, Palace of Versailles, and…