Table of contents for 30 January 2017 in Open Magazine

LETTER OF THE WEEK Prime Minister Narendra Modi truly has the power to convince people, both in India and across the world (‘Is Modi’s technocracy India’s future?’, January 23rd, 2017). Though Modi has been accused of ‘personalising diplomacy’, in my opinion it will prove to be good for India’s foreign policy. The present Government and future ones will surely benefit from the newfound confidence and credibility that India has gained because of its technocratic shift. It will take the country to greater heights. Any government that promises to be democratic should also be able to deliver on its promises, otherwise it is of no good to the people. The fact that the people of India voted a leader like Narendra Modi to power shows that they are ready to break…

Love of animals takes strange and surprising forms. It is deep affection for the cow that makes Rajasthan’s education minister reveal that it is the only being in the world that can both inhale and exhale oxygen, unwittingly making its lungs the most inefficient of all God’s creatures. Then there is the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA ), which has long done the male of the human species the favour of cladding beautiful semi-nude actresses in animal skins and thus encouraged the love of animals through lust of women. Or at least that is the intention. It would be generous to believe that when an 18-year-old sees Shilpa Shetty in leopard skin or Celina Jaitley with chains woven around her body, he is thinking of a better planet…

DONALD TRUMP AND BARACK OBAMA are the most violently contrasting pair of consecutive presidents in post-war American history, the distinction having been held previously by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, with Obama and George W Bush, arguably, a very close second. Obama is a figure of inherent contrast, but there has been no Venn diagram of an American president and his successor quite like the one that represents him and Trump. If one were to omit the fact that they have both been elected president of the United States—and omit, also, such obvious commonalities as maleness and an absolute reliance on oxygen for survival—we’d have two clear circles sitting side by side, with no intersection at all. And both men would exult in this stark absence of overlap. “I’m not…

WRITING IN Nautilus, the popular science magazine, last summer, the freelance writer Shruti Ravindran bemoaned the widespread resource illiteracy in India among lay persons and decision makers alike about India’s astonishing geodiversity. Now, while ‘biodiversity’ refers to extant creatures great and small, ‘geodiversity’ is about the rich variety of fossils of the past that lie buried under rocks and stones. India’s coal mines and highways are chipping away at or paving over a rich fossil record that might yield deep insights into how life evolved over the aeons. In particular, Ravindran wrote of the key events that led the ancestors of whales from the land to the sea, a journey key staging points of which lay along the west coast of what is now India. Well, there is now a…

LUCIANO GIUBBILEI, a garden designer who had won his second gold medal at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show, suddenly found that he no longer felt challenged. In The Art of Making Gardens, he writes: ‘I was proud of the designs… but I felt that these gardens lacked authenticity… In the gardens I dreamed of making, nothing I could envisage seemed quite right, and I didn’t know which path to take.’ That’s when he met Sir Paul Smith who asked him: what did he want people to remember from his garden designs? In other words, what was the mark-making thing or things— those that we experience in a visceral way—in the designs? For mark-making to occur, ‘the experience does not necessarily require a single moment of high drama. If the atmosphere…

A revolution has often been described as a change of regime, rather than a mere change of government. Judging from the hysterical responses of people who didn’t vote for him or are afraid of having to deal with a presidential style that is, to say the least, unique, I am often inclined to think that in Donald Trump we have witnessed the second American Revolution. On reflection, that may well be an overstatement. When President Trump moves into the White House after a rumbustious inauguration that he has proclaimed will be a “people’s” celebration, rather than a cosy elite party filled with wealthy donors, it will be a landmark event. Hitherto, the occupant of the White House—in living memory at least— has been a conventional politician. Trump has never held…

Bankers, a cliché goes, lead dull and unimaginative lives. It is safe to extrapolate the claim to central bankers of our age. But if anything, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the otherwise reserved Urjit Patel, appears to be defying this norm. In the past two odd months, he has been subjected to a barrage of vehement and often unfair criticism. The Governor faced more of it on January 18th when he was summoned to depose before a parliamentary panel on demonetisation. Patel was asked a series of questions—from the level of notes re-injected into the economy since November 8th to the extent of scrapped notes deposited with the central bank. Answers to many of these questions are not yet available, as the RBI is still gathering data…

TM Krishna has made a name for himself as a musician who doesn’t shy away from causes that he believes in. Of late, Krishna has made waves again with the video Chennai Poromboke Paadal, a song about the city’s Ennore Creek. ‘Poromboke’, as we are told in the video means: 1) ‘places reserved for shared communal uses (water bodies, gazing lands)’; or 2) ‘a pejorative intended to demean and devalue a people or place.’ The nine-minute video based on an essay by social activist Nityanand Jayaram asks how the meaning of the word has changed over time and how the flood has come and gone, but no lessons have been learnt, and cities continue to throttle water bodies. WORD’S WORTH “When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail…

THINGS TO LEAVE Behind is the final book in Namita Gokhale’s Himalayan trilogy that includes The Book of Shadows (1999) and A Himalayan Love Story (2002). A work of historical fiction, the novel traces the journey of a Kumaoni Brahmin family from 1840 to 1912. It begins at the time when the Kumaon hills passed out of the hands of the Nepali monarch into ‘the embrace of the British Raj’. Gokhale draws out a deep yet subtle narrative, tied intrinsically into the seasons of history, the grip and later the loosening hold of the Raj in India. The legend of the Nainee lake (Nainital) as the place where the eyes of Goddess Sati fell upon the earth presides over the story. Incidents from history, often narrated with tongue-in-cheek humour, fill…

Strictly Professional Arjun Kapoor’s patience appears to have run out, especially with troublemakers who’re determined to portray him as an unprofessional party boy. The actor lashed out at a so-called ‘respectable’ film magazine recently for running a story that he’s had a falling out with his Half Girlfriend director Mohit Suri. To be fair, the magazine wasn’t the first to report the alleged tiff between the two, but Arjun made it a point to explain that he expected better from what he believed was a responsible publication. Lately, stories have surfaced that Arjun wasn’t being professional during the shooting of the film, and that he handed a bill of Rs 150,000 to the film’s producers for his drinking and partying on an outdoor schedule. The actor rubbished the rumours, insisting…

In the beginning was the poetry, and the dreams of a people soared with its cadence. It was a time when one man’s biography, an infusion of distant worlds and cultures, became an entire nation’s destiny. Every word he spoke broke the frozen cynicism of political tribalism; he turned the oldest clichés of the trade into catchphrases of redemption. Suddenly, ‘change’ was the most original idea delivered by a freshman senator who dared to reimagine America, not as a colour-coded land of political and racial divisions, but as a unifying ideal. The context of war and imperial morality added to the urgency of his text of moderation. The wages of partisan politics had corrupted the soul of America, and it was for him to restore the frayed dreams of the…

It is not enough if you are a good man,” he said, “You must also appear to be so… You put forward an image of yourself if you want to get anywhere.” No one followed his words as assiduously as he himself did, though unaware, it seems, of the risks of getting ‘trapped’ in his own image. MG Ramachandran (1917-1987), a Malayalee born in Sri Lanka, matinee idol and the heart-throb of millions of adoring fans who became Tamil Nadu’s most popular mass leader, reworked the narrative of a state that had witnessed a resurgence of Tamil pride. Tamils elected him as Chief Minister of the state for two terms and more, and he was in power from 1977 until his demise in 1987. They voted him to power even…

TODAY IN INDIA Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is less a man and more a symbol. His bald pate and oval glasses reside in our wallets, grace our envelopes, and man our junctions. We see him everywhere, we sing his favourite bhajan, and we celebrate his birth (since it is a national holiday), but somehow in the midst of all this, the man himself has receded in our consciousness. Tales of Young Gandhi (HarperCollins; 216 pages; Rs 499) by Janhavi Prasada (with illustrations by Uttam Sinha) aims to rectify this omission. This graphic non-fiction reminds readers that MK Gandhi is simply human, and a fallible human at that. What distinguishes him from the rest of us is his ability to introspect and his discipline to follow through. The author and mastermind of…