Table of contents for 06 March 2017 in Open Magazine

LETTER OF THE WEEK If you are profiting from the market, then why not also let the market decide the future of your company (‘The Difficulty of Letting Go’, February 27th, 2017)? The case of Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy’s tussle with its management is one of someone wanting to have his cake and eat it too. If you have retired from the firm, you cannot expect to interfere with its decisions. What Murthy has done by washing the company’s dirty laundry in public, making insinuations against the current CEO Vishal Sikka, is proof that he still considers the company to be largely his own. It was also very interesting to read that no other CEO in the history of Infosys has held office for as long as Murthy. And…

KERALA IS RIGHT now dealing with a sensational and strange criminal case. It is not as serious as some of the crimes it has seen in recent times. Like when in 2011 a one-handed man raped and threw a girl off a train killing her. Or in 2016, another girl, a law student, was found dead in a mutilated condition. In the present case, an A-list film actress who was returning from work was waylaid by a group of men and her photos taken in a state of undress. Whether there was sexual assault is unclear, though in the beginning it was taken for granted. Some newspapers in their online editions even reported that there was rape, and, perhaps because of that, the crime took another dimension. A number of…

FOR A FEBRUARY afternoon it is quite hot in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh. On a vast ground along the Grand Trunk road, about 160 km from Lucknow, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief, Mayawati, is about to address a rally. Her helicopter is supposed to land at noon, but people have begun to arrive from 9 am onwards. They are coming in buses, tractor trolleys, motorcycles, cycles, and on foot. By noon, the ground is full, and the local BSP functionaries have to ask volunteers to prevent more people from entering. Songs based on popular Bollywood songs, eulogising Behenji, as her supporters affectionately call Mayawati, are being played over giant Ahuja speakers. On the stage, BSP candidates from various Assembly constituencies in the Fatehpur region run from one corner of the…

BRUISED AND RESENTFUL, after a monthlong pounding at the hands of the national media, Donald Trump went back to the campaign trail to lick his wounds on February 18th. The venue was a small airport on Florida’s Atlantic coast, at a place called Melbourne, a short helicopter flight from Trump’s private member’s club, Mara- Lago. The crowd was the sort of lily-white and raucously adoring assembly Trump had gathered, to the disbelief of Republican grandees and journalists, throughout the long campaign. “This will be change for the ages, change like never before!” he roared. But what sort of change did Trump mean? He has yet to turn almost any of his campaign slogans—such as ‘Bomb the hell out of ISIS!’ and ‘Make America safe again!’—into serious policy. And the criticism…

IN THE BOOK’S inner jacket, the novel has been described as ‘Little Women meets The Virgin Suicides’. In its characters and story set-up, This Wide Night does resemble Little Women, the 1900 classic by Louisa May Alcott. The novel’s denouement takes from The Virgin Suicides, the 1993 bestseller by American author Jeffrey Eugenides. The story is based in Pakistan of the 1970s. The four Malik sisters who are the protagonists echo the March sisters of Little Women in their talents, preoccupations and natures. The narrative voice is mainly that of the Maliks’ neighbour, Jamal or Jimmy, who calls to mind Laurie, the orphan grandson of the March family’s neighbour. Book One of the novel makes for a familiar yet uncomfortable read because it often recalls the older novel and inevitable…

WE ARE LIKE that only, aren’t we? Not long ago, a former Governor, keen to retain a well-appointed sarkari bungalow in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, devised a clever stratagem: he would make out a case on security grounds. So, he penned a couple of clumsily-worded letters to himself, threatening gruesome murder for his alleged role in sanctioning tough measures against a state-centric terrorist outfit during the time he officially occupied its Raj Bhavan. He was, however, in for a rude shock when the Housing Ministry forwarded the letters to the police for tracing their likely antecedents. Soon it was established that the writer was none other than the addressee himself. His Excellency now had no option. He hurriedly moved into his own private house in the capital. Yet, the…

FOR A COUNTRY that is quite familiar with terrorism, China’s attitude towards it is remarkably insouciant. During his recent visit to Beijing, India’s Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar was informed by Chinese officials that “solid” proof was required to declare Maulana Masood Azhar a terrorist at the United Nations. Azhar is the leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist outfit that operates out of Bahawalpur in Pakistan. He is infamous for being released by India in exchange for the safety of passengers on an Indian Airlines plane that was hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1999. Demand for proof, solid or otherwise, is unexceptionable. Even terrorists have rights. But there’s more at play here. Under a UN Security Council resolution passed in 1999, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations can be proscribed…

It is easy to forget that language has a life of its own. We often look at dictionaries as tomes that belong to the past. But Merriam-Webster’s social media account has taken it upon itself to pick up words that are being bandied about in the public sphere. Of late, the dictionary has helped make sense of the political scenario in the US. On Election Day, its Twitter background flashed the word ‘gotterdammerung’, meaning a ‘collapse (of a society or regime, marked by catastrophe, violence and disorder’. When White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said that press secretary Sean Spicer gave out ‘alternative facts’ about Trump’s inauguration crowd size, Merriam- Webster tweeted the definition of ‘fact’: ‘a piece of information presented as having objective reality.’ And once chaos ensued over the…

IN THE MONTH of February, terrorists in Pakistan have killed over a hundred Muslims, leaving many crippled for life, in just five days. This cracks the myth that Pakistan has conquered its terror problem and that incidents of violence have gone down by more than half. On February 16th, Afghanistanbased Islamic State (IS) suicide-bombed the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan Sharif in Sindh, killing 88 and injuring 342, and then sent out a message in Arabic that it had destroyed ‘a Shia place of worship’. Most devotees of Lal Shahbaz didn’t know the shrine was of the Shia sect of Islam. Then IS added another irony to an already ironic fact: it said that the ‘martyr’, the bomber who attacked Sehwan, was named Usman Ansari, a name that…

“I got a little bored; my personal life took preference and maybe I did not focus so much on being an interesting actor as I did on the commercials. And I think I have paid a price for that” SAIF ALI KHAN actor In A CAREER SPANNING over two decades, Saif Ali Khan has gone from being the boy no one took seriously to a poster boy for the urban Indian man, to a man finding his comfort zone as an actorproducer. His sharp wit, worldly intellect and sobering realness reflect the many worlds he has traversed personally and professionally. The 46-year-old father of a newborn, Taimur, takes time out to discuss his legacy and why acting like a twit to promote a movie is the worst part of his…

THREE YOUNG STUDENTS loiter at the gate, debating who should foot the Rs 15 entry fee. The matronly ticket seller (with a distinct south Indian accent) tells us, “Only garden entry. No climbing.” Sleeping dogs startle awake at the tread of strangers. A Bollywood song rises in the background. Labourers look up from mouthfuls of lunch to follow our footsteps. As we make our way over construction material, cement and brick, a tomb rises into view. We are in the precincts of Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan’s tomb in Nizamuddin East on Mathura Road near Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. After centuries of neglect—it is believed that in 1753-54, marble and sandstone from this tomb was used in the construction of Safdarjung’s Tomb located a few kilometres away—Abdur Rahim’s tomb is getting the…

Wanted: A Lady for Aamir If you’ve been wondering why Aamir Khan is sporting so much facial hair lately and why it doesn’t look like he’s had a haircut, it’s because he’s set to begin shooting his next film, Thugs of Hindostan, and it’s all part of the look. Very little is known about the film except that it will be directed by Dhoom 3’s Vijay Krishna Acharya. And that Amitabh Bachchan has a key role in the movie. And that it’s a period actioner. That’s literally all we know. Which should hardly be surprising, given that the film is being produced by Aditya Chopra, a stickler for secrecy. Lately, industry insiders have been gossiping that the makers of Thugs are having trouble landing an actress for the film. Deepika…

SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY wrong in the 21st century. It began by shattering the idyll of liberal democracy in a world where the Iron Curtain had migrated to the minds of nationalist comrades in Asia and Latin America— and, mostly, it was more comic strip than Stalinist horror. It was the morning after the Age of Lie, and we were still recovering from the bloody aftermath of the post-communist identity crisis in the Baltics and elsewhere, hoping that the argument over freedom would not demand more graveyards. We were wrong. Someone else was reading the Book, another aggrieved revolutionary who found his Finland station in Afghanistan’s Mount Jihad. Everything changed after 9/11, even the idea of the Islamic revolution itself. As the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini waned as a global force,…

WHAT IS COMMON between a drunk at the local theka, a homesick student in Brussels and the gift hamper of a businessman? The answer is quite simply Haldiram’s. Chances are that the tippler will clutch a packet of ‘tasty nuts’ in his hand as he swigs 8 PM from the other, the student will have a bag of moong dal mixture hidden away as succour on that European evening of sleet and snow, and the businessman would have filled his goody bag with tins of rasgullas and panchratan mixtures. Haldiram’s is special because it is so common. It is one of the few food products that straddle different classes and denominations. It is economical, but never considered cheap. How many interminable train and bus journeys have been salvaged by Haldiram’s…

THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY of the death of William Shakespeare has come and gone and was dutifully registered in our media with a slew of articles about his continued relevance (‘Shakespeare@400’, Open, April 20th 2016). I must confess I wrote one myself in one of our more popular Yearbooks, under the title ‘Why Shakespeare Matters’. But all of us—myself included—did not actually pick up any of his great plays and try to relate it to India. That’s what I’d like to do. I first read the play Julius Caesar as a required text in my English Literature class in the tenth standard at school, studied it intensively, and came to know it intimately. Even though Julius Caesar is little read outside Indian classrooms and rarely performed, many of the themes of…

ON FEBRUARY 17TH, an actor in Kerala was abducted, molested and brutally harassed for three hours in a moving car. The sexual harassment and rape of women, irrespective of age, has become so rampant that it barely shocks anymore. But this time the victim is a celebrity, a popular young actor in South Indian cinema who has won several awards and acted in more than 75 films. The assault on her shows that social status provides no protection from sexual violence. Even a famous person who lives a car-to-carpet life, it would seem, is at risk. She was assaulted in a chauffeurdriven car, travelling from Thrissur to Kochi by National Highway 544 on February 17th, an ordeal that began at about 7 pm—defying the typical narrative that such assaults take…

BACK IN 2012, when GS Seethapathy was pursuing a Master’s degree in Biotechnology in Trichy, he wrote a piece about nutraceuticals and the role they could play in dealing with cancer. Nutraceuticals, from the words ‘nutrition’ and ‘pharmaceuticals’, are laboratory-made medical products derived from food sources that are believed to possess health benefits. The piece—a review article of a subject of his choice—was mandatory in Seethapathy’s curriculum. Satisfied with the way it had turned out, he thought he should try getting it published in a science journal. “It was a time that I did not know anything about research and publication,” he says,“[just a bit] theoretically.” So he did what many researchers now increasingly do in India. He went online and found a journal. The one that the search engine…

“VEG OR NONveg,” asks the stewardess on Air India, and you know you have arrived in India. It is only here that this phrase is used. You also know that ‘veg’ does not include fish or eggs, as it does on European airlines that use the term ‘Hindu vegetarian’ to refer to the Indian ‘veg’ category. However, most Indians are not vegetarians; in fact, only 31 per cent are indeed vegetarians, according to The Hindu-CNN-IBN Food Habits of a Nation Survey in 2006. The figure is 21 per cent for families (with all vegetarian members). Another 9 per cent of the population is ‘eggetarian’, or vegetarians who eat eggs. Women are more likely to be vegetarian than men and so are those above the age of 55. But there is…