Table of contents for 16 January 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK It is ironic that in our globalised, highly connected existence, marriage brokers still exist (‘The Last Marriage Broker’, January 9th, 2017). It is probably true that the extent of lies on websites and dating portals has now made it hard for users to trust people they meet online. There have also been several cyber crimes and rapes reported that perhaps add to the overall fear of marrying someone you have come across over the internet. Marriage brokers, on the other hand, have also changed their tactics of late and have started highlighting the authenticity of their clients and the relative guarantee of safety that offline meetings offer. These brokers also have real life experience in sensing which matches will work and which ones will not.…

AFTERTHOUGHT Reckoning with unpleasant facts of life is a task usually left to later months of the year. But there are some such matters that cannot—and should not—escape notice. For a country like India, terrorism is a prime candidate for early discussion. The global terrorism index (GTI)—perhaps the most comprehensive tracking of terror events across the world— ranks India fairly high on its list of countries afflicted by this scourge. The 2016 edition of GTI ranks India among the top ten. Specifically, it is eighth out of a total of 130 countries, placing the country just below Somalia. But rankings can often be deceptive and only offer a snapshot as it were of a phenomenon that has much longer cause-and-effect sequences. The GTI tracks another number: that of persons killed…

IDEAS With MS Dhoni having relinquished his captaincy from ODIs and T20Is, Virat Kohli is now India’s leader in all three formats of the game. Kohli had taken over the Test team after Dhoni retired from the format in 2014, and under his watch India has thrived—winning five Test series in a row and going unbeaten in the last 18 Tests. But before you expect Kohli to deliver with the same ease in the shorter formats, understand this. In Test cricket, captain Kohli has been the only power-centre in the dressing room. In the blue jersey, he will still have to lead India’s most successful captain ever, conqueror of each of the three ICC majors and a man who last wasn’t captain of the ODI team back in September 2007,…

IN A WORLD WHERE SUCCESS IS MEASURED ON UNEQUAL GROUNDS, THESE DANCERS, LIKE SEVERAL OTHER YOUNG PROFESSIONALS WHO HAVE DARED TO MAKE FULL CAREERS IN PERFORMING ARTS, ARE JUDGED HARSHLY Indian classical dance has long been stereotyped as an ‘all women’ zone. Though the gods of Hindu iconography often dance—Shiva is worshipped as ‘Nataraja’ and Krishna is hailed as ‘Natawara’—over the past few centuries, across architecture, sculpture and poetry, it has been women who are the subject of anything related to dance. One of the many reasons for this stereotype is the temple cultures and traditions that patronised female practitioners of the art form. The community of dancers— who later came to be known as ‘Devadasis’— never had any men performing. The male professionals they hired were musicians, percussionists, dance…

Besides affixing responsibility and securing justice for victims, the legal proceedings that follow a non-natural disaster are also expected to contribute to public memory. We expect to learn from them. What could we have done to reduce the extent of loss? How can we modify behaviour so that we are better prepared for the next such incident? Cinema viewing in the national capital has largely moved into safer multiplexes, but risks of fire and panic that lurk in the interlocking alleys of Hauz Khas Village are a grim reminder of how civil and criminal proceedings that followed the Uphaar cinema fire tragedy of 1997 have fallen short. Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy’s Trial By Fire is a detailed and personal account of this failure. With meticulous yet readable descriptions of both…

I was searching for monkeys outside Tinsukhia. I could as well be searching for oil, as half a dozen corporations seem to be doing in Upper Assam.But then, finding monkeys has been a personal passion, and the town, by all accounts, is a primate paradise. Within a ten-kilometre radius of the town you can stumble across seven species of primates far easier than you can find oil. Or so it is rumoured. I have seen them all, the orange and black capped langurs, the bearded Assamese macaques, the common rhesus macaques, the absurdly short-tailed pig-tailed macaques, the bald, red-faced stump-tailed macaques, the singing hoolock gibbons and the goggle-eyed slow loris but never before in one spot.That was the attraction of visiting the three Assamese sanctuaries that have been created primarily…

IN THE SUMMER of 1972, four of us from La Martiniere decided that Delhi offered better prospects than Calcutta, then engulfed by mindless Left-wing extremist violence. Three of us entered St Stephen’s College and the fourth took admission in Hindu College. We negotiated our own admission procedures, found our way in a strange city and, overall, had a jolly good time making the transition from school to college. Although we were from the ‘provinces’, there was no way in which we found ourselves inadequate. Delhi did not intimidate us. Yes, it appeared marginally more prosperous than Calcutta, but even this was negated by the sheer boredom of a babudominated social life. In facing up to the Capital of India, we didn’t feel like country bumpkins. Indeed, we often sniggered at…

PORTRAIT The impact of rotavirus—the leading cause of diarrhoeal disease among children and infants globally—is particularly terrible in India. Every year, an estimated 78,000 children under five years die here. And several million are hospitalised. Vaccines have been around since the mid-1990s, but their high cost, between Rs 2,000 to 2,500 for a course, has put it out of the reach of most Indians. And strangely, even when children here are vaccinated, it is found to be far less effective than this measure has proven in the West. Not only is the burden of the bug tremendous here, for a long time it has also been little understood. Among the six individuals awarded this year’s Infosys Prize is one of India’s top rotavirus researchers, Dr Gagandeep Kang, a physician scientist…

THE GEOPOLITICS THAT candidate Trump shouted from the rooftops can serve President Trump very well: confront rising China rather than declining Russia. It is fortunate that China is still a clumsy player—because of foolish mistakes it lost Myanmar with its unique Indian Ocean access—while Putin combines great strategic ability with economic failure. Of course, both China and Russia are expansionist, but now that it has swallowed Crimea, Russia shows no appetite for any more of the Ukraine, or for the Baltic states which not even Stalin annexed to Russia. China, by contrast, is militarising the 3.6 million sq km of the South China Sea, threatening Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and even Vietnam, as well as Japan’s and the world’s most critical sea lanes. Because there are only tiny islands…

Way back in the early 1990s, my one-time boss Saleem Muqaddam presented me with a copy of Tom Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem. Saleem knew that I was interested in the Middle East and he thought that this book had an interesting take. Which of course it did. I learnt a new expression, ‘Hama rules’, which described the kind of warfare that could and did take place in that unhappy part of the world. Watching the bombings in Sanaa and Aleppo on TV today, one can’t help but think about how prophetic—and sadly, tragically prophetic Friedman was. Years later, I met Friedman in Bangalore when he interviewed me and went on to quote me in his The World is Flat, giving me a Warhol moment of fame among friends and…

A decade after the 2006 Mumbai train blasts, much of the memory of that horrific day has receded from public imagination. It has become 7/11, just one of several terror attacks on the city. That monsoon evening, in the span of six minutes, seven bombs went off in seven local trains. It was rush hour and the passengers were packed together—as the saying goes—like sardines. Over 200 people were left dead, some 700 injured. It had been about a month since I’d moved to Mumbai. For some reason, I hung around with friends instead of taking the train home after classes. One classmate that I regularly travelled with was slightly injured in a compartment adjacent to the one that got bombed. I remember taking the train the next morning on…

A Tree House for Master Khan While the majority of stars head overseas to ring in the new year, turns out that Shah Rukh Khan simply zipped across the bay on a speedboat to spend the weekend at his holiday home in Alibaug. It’s the same place he had a bunch of his friends (including Karan Johar and Ranbir Kapoor) over during Diwali; the same place that’s been designed and outfitted by his talented missus. For the New Year’s Eve weekend, SRK reportedly wanted to install a tree house—an authentic all-wood cabin for Abram and his friends to call their own—in his sprawling garden. Of course, when you’re one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Ikea isn’t going to cut it for you. And frankly, what’s the point…

ANGLE Anyone who thinks that 2016 was the year of radical political and social shifts only has to wait till January 20th, when Donald Trump gets sworn in, to come to terms with what 2017 has to offer. History does not change course in moments. It is a slow wave that builds momentum, waiting patiently for a trigger to turn it into an all-consuming tsunami. By then there is nothing to do but endure. On January 1st, 1914, the Daily Telegraph wrote an editorial that ruminated on the new year for the United Kingdom, the leader of the world then, and said, ‘So today, though it would be folly to disguise the anxieties with which the year opens, we shall not take it amiss if Cheerfulness keeps breaking in. Happily,…

“When you stop watching porn, you start to view things differently. The first two weeks that I went off those two things (porn and fapping) I found a new clarity” nikhil Finance executive Meet a 26-year-old man who chooses to call himself Nikhil. He works in Bengaluru, in finance, after completing his undergraduate degree in Chennai and his Master’s in the UK. In college he found himself ensnared in a cycle of pornography and fapping (an onomatopoeic term for masturbation, first used in manga comics, and a common slang today). Eight months ago, while sitting at a bar in Bengaluru, a friend, who had also returned from the UK, told him about the NoFap website for the first time. Despondent that he was hooked to porn and was fapping four…

Arshia Sattar’s translations are a delight and I am using the word in the plural because she has translated more than the Valmiki Ramayana. She has written extensively on the Ramayana as well. With two qualifications, hers is probably the best current translation (in English) of the Valmiki Ramayana. First, her translation is an abridged one and no such translation can hope to capture every nuance. There is inevitable subjectivity in what one chooses and what one leaves out. There aren’t too many unabridged translations in English, though—Ralph Griffith, Manmatha Nath Dutt, Robert Goldman and the online Valmikiramayan. net. Second, the poetry of the Valmiki Ramayana is sublime. (Vedavyasa doesn’t devote any attention to describing nature. Through that lens, Valmiki is like Kalidasa.) To appreciate Valmiki’s poetry, one has to…

Almost every day in my practice, I see a patient who has abandoned allopathic medication in favour of an alternative system of medicine for managing diabetes. Even patients with well-controlled diabetes tend to experiment occasionally. Only when there is marked deterioration in diabetes control do people revert to the original prescription. At the heart of these attempts is the deep-rooted suspicion about the ‘hidden’ long-term side effects of allopathic medication coupled with the perceived lack of any side effects withAyurvedic or other alternative forms of treatment. I am often faced with the question: Do these drugs actually work? A question that is impossible for me to answer satisfactorily. Although trained in allopathy, I would be happy to use any medicine that helps my patients. As we know, Ayurveda brings with…