Table of contents for 27 February 2017 in Open Magazine

LETTER OF THE WEEK After the Supreme Court’s decision to hold Sasikala guilty of corruption, one thing is clear: fortune changes faster than you think (‘In the Name of the Mother’, February 20th, 2017). First she was made party chief and then she was able to gather support from the majority of AIADMK MLAs and was literally on the verge of becoming Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister. Now after this verdict, there are a few things which will be keenly watched by everyone in the country. First and foremost is the threat of violence and protests by her supporters, especially since in all probability O Panneerselvam will be asked to form the government. Whether all the MLAs who were supporting Sasikala and were there in the resort with her will support…

INFOSYS CEO Vishal Sikka, much like the infotech sector of which his company is the figurehead, has not been having a good time lately. A fat severance pay to a CFO, his travel in chartered flights and even his food bills have been put to scrutiny, triggered by a public dressing down by a company founder, NR Narayana Murthy. Business expenses that would be underwhelming in any other entity of Infosys’ size have turned into an ethical issue because of what is believed to be a circumvention of the values left behind by the founders. It is somewhat contradictory because the last couple of founders didn’t exactly make the company flourish when given its reins, the reason why Sikka, an outsider, was hired as CEO. If you get someone because…

NOBODY WANTS TO be NR Narayana Murthy right now. Not that there is any dearth of empathy with the infotech magnate whose eminence takes up space by the gigabyte on the internet. Must a man who had his leftism knocked out of him by the brute excesses of communism—he was bundled off a train once into prison for 72 hours by Bulgarian guards just for asking a co-traveller what life is like under red rule—now suffer the brute excesses of capitalism 42 years on? Must the co-founder of a great enterprise, one that has striven to redeem business of all its alleged ills, endure intimations of his own irrelevance to his life’s legacy? Must his voice be swiped off handset screens, his values admired more than adhered to, his presence…

Grumbler No 1 Remember Govinda? Yes, him of the yellow pants and infectious dance moves? Well, the 50-something actor grabbed headlines recently when he dissed old friends and colleagues while speaking to the media during promotions for his latest film. Chi Chi, as he was once fondly referred to, lashed out at frequent collaborator David Dhawan, accusing him of turning his back on the actor when his chips were down. He suggested that Dhawan—with whom he’d made 17 films— pointedly avoided him when he desperately needed work, and even ‘stole’ a movie idea that he had come up with. He was equally dismissive about his once-close friend and Partner co-star Salman Khan, who he admits was helpful to a point but won’t work with him anymore. “[When we worked together],…

THE TRUMP administration’s radical modification of the H1-B visa has, quite predictably, triggered a minor storm in India. In Parliament, many politicians have expressed their indignation and even charged the Government of being mealymouthed in its protests. The media, which somehow has come to view infotech as an elevated state of existence, has also jumped into the battle and twinned the issue to the larger liberal crusade against Trump. To have a contrarian view of the whole controversy is daunting, especially since it runs the risk of being charged with unconcern for Indian interests. However, I believe that the new restrictions may not necessarily be inimical to our national interests. For the sake of argument, let us keep aside the larger issue of national sovereignty—the right of nations to choose…

THE LAUNCH OF 104 satellites in one go by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is a technical accomplishment of a high order. It also marks the arrival of ISRO as a serious competitor in the $3-4 billion global space launch market. What ISRO undertook on February 15th required mastering a complex set of technologies. For one, you need a powerful rocket to bear a payload of around 1,400 kg that allows the placement of so many satellites in the desired orbit. After decades of trial and error, ISRO finally has such a vehicle: the Polar Space Launch Vehicle or PSLV. For another, sequencing the release of satellites—with 90 belonging to a single client—the American firm Planet Labs—requires control and manoeuvrability. For this, ISRO developed adapters known as quadrapacks, each…

The Grammys have time and again proven that they are out of sync with the times. This year was no different. But their oversight was highlighted by none other than Adele, winner of five Grammy Awards this year. But the award that she felt she could not “possibly accept” was Album of the Year, even if she were humbled and grateful for it. This was after all the year of Beyoncé’s “monumental” and “soul bearing” album Lemonade. Choking back tears, she said, “Beyoncé we fuckin adore you. You are our light.” Adele’s speech proved what an artist fraternity can actually look like, where musicians not only support each other but also acknowledge that their contemporaries might be more talented than them and more relevant to the times. WORD’S WORTH “The…

DINING WITH THE Nawabs is not the kind of book that you can perch on your chest and read in bed. It is a silver-edged tome that mandates it be ceremoniously laid out on a table and be opened like the unwrapping of a gift. Clad in an aquamarine jacket with a jaali worked inner flap, it announces its royal credentials from the start; not for it the riffraff of parchment, only velvet and glint will do. The pages are glossy and the photos perfectly choreographed. This isn’t merely a book about the royals, it is a majestic production in itself. The layman’s interest in royalty can seem a tad distasteful. After all, what distinguishes them from the rest of us, other than an accident of birth and the extent…

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO is set over the course of a night, barely a few hours actually. It’s the story of a nation divided against itself, not ready to come to terms with the war and division around. It is the night of February 22th, 1862, two days after the son of arguably the most remarkable president of the US has died. Abraham Lincoln may be remembered today for leading a divided nation with moral courage and conviction, but his life was hardly uni-dimensional. A less-known episode from Lincoln’s life is the subject of George Saunders’ novel. Saunders, not the best known of contemporary American writers globally, has been regarded in the US for the better part of the past three decades as the author whose definitive work was just…

THE NEWS FROM the afterworld is alarming, unless you are a Trumpian cheerleader or some other variation of the nativist. In this world, the struggle for ‘Greatness’ and ‘Firstness’ eclipses the last vestiges of dignity and decency in politics. This world, as received wisdom goes, is born after the death of truth and fact; it’s born in the ruins of reason. It is the bastard child of emotion and fantasy. Liberals and other such noble souls, repelled by the nausea, are already fleeing this world and taking refuge in the echo chamber of angst-ridden refuseniks. This kind of initial upheaval is unprecedented in modern American presidency. To a large extent, the circus in Washington has contributed to it. And liberal media alarmism has given it an end-of-civilisation urgency. A more…

“THERE IS NO east or west. It is a globe.” I don’t know if this is an original quote. But there is a moment in Morgan Neville’s documentary The Music of Strangers, which tells the story of the band Silk Road Ensemble, when a musician uses this expression to articulate the idea behind the band and its music. The Silk Road Ensemble—made up of artists from such diverse traditions and genres and parts of the world that it was once referred to as the Manhattan Project of music where nobody knew what was going to come out of it—was founded by the legendary Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Since 2001, it has brought out several exceptional albums. Each of its albums has been about what happens when strangers meet. Where does…

IF WE TAKE a bird’s eye view of our higher education system, we quickly discover that it is a very complicated one. We have over 33,000 institutions, which train close to 20 million people. The system can be broadly divided into professional and non-professional colleges, publicly funded, partially funded, and fully private. In the non-professional, that is the Arts, Sciences, Social Studies, Commerce, and so on, we find a pyramidal structure. At the top are the 42 Central universities, and below them a hodgepodge of 275 state, 90 private, and 130 universities. When it comes to professional courses, we have seven All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), 20 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), an equal number of Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs),…

TWO MONTHS AFTER former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa’s death, the reality of exhausted possibilities in Tamil Nadu is sinking in. The state has seen one self-destructing narrative after another since the death of MG Ramachandran, the sole infallible hero, in 1987. It has vacillated between the two Dravidian parties, castigating the precursor and carrying on a rebound affair with the incumbent in each subsequent election. In 2016, Jayalalithaa became the first to break this curse in three decades by winning twice in a row, but were she to look at Tamil Nadu today, she would despair of her own victory. In the overlong battle for her political estate, power has refracted between an officious meddler with an army of stooges and a perorative redeemer of the seduced masses. And they…

MAN IS A RATIONAL animal. At least that is what we all learnt in school. It sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. How wrong that was. We did unlearn, over time, from Descartes to Nietzsche and from Marx to John Rawls. But the duo that demolished several myths of human nature, exposing our delusional grandeur and sense of infallibility to put the spotlight on our fallacies were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two unalike behavioural economists who met as young men in the backwater of Israeli academia in the 1960s. Their studies placed mistakes of intuition and action of individuals as well as groups under the lens, and were destined to have a profound impact on a range of fields, from lawmaking to data science, from…