Table of contents for 27 March 2017 in Open Magazine

COUNTING DAY TV is a spectacle I have become drearily accustomed to. There was a certain novelty about it the first time I was a part of the programme during the 1998 General Election. Those days there were few channels and I was the number cruncher for the programme (outsourced to India Today) on Doordarshan. The counting process then was an elaborate exercise lasting for some three days. Information was slow to trickle in, especially from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and we often had little idea of which stage of the counting the leads reflected. Occasionally, even the postal ballot tally was totted up as a lead. It was all very improvised and rather good fun, especially post-midnight when the conversations became rather silly. These days life has become quite…

PUNDITS HAVE BEGUN in right earnest to hang a phrase on the BJP’s stunning victory in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, gains in Manipur, and sharp tactics to retain power in Goa: an ‘Indira Gandhi moment’. While the BJP may resent comparisons with the late Congress leader, an astute politician who campaigned tirelessly and held sway even over state-level elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought for his party the glory of what the Congress had in her prime: absolute power. In doing what he did, especially in UP, Modi has endeared himself to four categories of people: the aggrieved, the aspirational, the awed and the austere. The poll push, steered by the likes of party President Amit Shah, lieutenants Sunil Bansal, Bhupendra Yadav and others, focused on these four As…

THE RULING BHARATIYA Janata Party’s success in the recent state elections, crowned by the stunning results in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, has stamped Narendra Modi as a political man without parallel perhaps in the history of the Republic. No Prime Minister so far has sported such keen political antennae that pick up the slightest tremors of popular anger and angst, gauge the people’s frustrations and despair, and shape the voters’ collective consciousness and cater to it with appropriate government action and policies. He can apparently do no wrong. Everything he attempts, however dubious, turns into a political windfall (to wit, demonetisation). That unerring sense of what will play at the grassroots level is instinctive, not something learnt over time. If this were not the case, Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav…

HOUSEBOAT CRUISE Many consider River Chapora’s backwaters cleaner and more beautiful than those in Kerala. Enjoy the best of both with a lunch/sunset or overnight stay on board a luxurious Kerala House Boat Laid Back Waters. BIRD WATCHING WITH RAHUL ALVARES With an abundance of lush vegetation, almost 420 species of birds can be seen during the cooler months in Goa. Rahul Alvares, who’s better known for his snake-wrangling skills, has spent many a winter visiting various corners of Goa to curate three wonderful bird watching itineraries. TREKKING TO DUDHSAGAR WATERFALL One of India’s most splendid cascades, Dudhsagar offers excellent opportunities for rock climbing and swimming, or just spending a day with your very own gourmet picnic and chilled beer. DIVING IN THE WARM ARABIAN SEA For those searching for…

THE RECENTLY HELD Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Goa and Punjab have vindicated Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party’s stand on many hard decisions taken over the past three years. The sweeping victory of the party in UP and Uttarakhand stunned all. No less significant has been the BJP’s performance in Manipur, where the party had hardly any presence earlier; the party’s occupying political space in this tiny but sensitive border state of the Northeast could be crucial for concerns of national security. It is also interesting that though the BJP won seven seats less than Congress here, its vote share of 36.3 per cent was higher than the Congress figure of 35.1 per cent. In Goa, a small state with great significance, the BJP…

In UTTAR PRADESH, MOST election pundits put a Pascal’s wager of sorts on the presence of silent voters who they said would stealthily vote for Mayawati. Their belief proved to be partially correct. The silent voter does exist in the state. But to the chagrin of many, this voter did not vote for Mayawati; s/he voted for Narendra Modi. The pundits are already busy working on pie charts to come out with plausible answers for Modi’s extraordinary victory. But nothing matters now. Modi’s plane has left for 2019, and in the smoke trail, most of his political opponents, Mayawati included, look like sore losers. The truth is that most of us failed to see the writing on the wall. We were unable to predict the mood of voters. Perhaps the…

WHILE WRITING ABOUT psephology, its failure, its success and challenges in the context of the recent round of assembly elections, I can’t escape sharing my experiences of conducting pre-election polls, being at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. It is all the more important because at this moment, we are on the firing line, having ended up with an inaccurate projections for Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, though our estimates were not so bad for Punjab and Goa, where the numbers were somewhat accurate. But yes, we failed to gauge the sense of the voters mood in UP and Uttarakhand completely, and we must accept this as our failure and introspect to find out what may have gone wrong with our polls. They captured the trend or mood of…

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, March 12th, a blizzard was heading straight for the East Coast of the US. The forecasters predicted 20 inches of snow, which would have made it a historic storm. While air travel was hobbled, Mohsin Hamid was bravely fighting the wind and sleet late at night to make it back to New York City by car. Speaking on the phone (he wasn’t driving), he says, “You can imagine that as a Pakistani man nothing frightens me quite as much as the idea of being cold.” When I call him from Chennai, I am minutes away from the Bay of Bengal, the presence of sun and sand are so fierce that snow and cold seem ideas and imaginings rather than realities. For a moment we both marvel at…

A Rare Kind of Confidence Vidya Balan hasn’t had a hit since Kahaani in 2012, but unlike other actors who’d likely be sweating over the uncertainty of their careers, Vidya says she’s learnt to ‘disinvest’ from the outcome of her movies. Don’t get her wrong. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about how her films fare at the box-office. It’s just that she won’t make herself sick worrying about her next hit. She wasn’t always this ‘evolved’ though. When Ghanchakkar (2013) bombed after a spate of hits, she took it badly. By the time Shaadi Ke Side Effects and Bobby Jasoos tanked, it had begun to sink in that she shouldn’t think of herself as infallible. But it was the failure of Hamari Adhuri Kahaani that was the turning point,…

THERE IS AN expression in the colourful vocabulary of Bengali slang: laejur. It is derived from ‘laej’, the word for ‘tail’. The laejur is a creature that, lacking a face, body and voice that can enable it to exist independently, attaches itself as a tail to someone else in order to survive. In other words, a parasite. Indian politics has a laejur in the form of the tragic remnant of the party once helmed by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, among numerous other luminaries. On no less than three occasions during just the past one year, this ragged, lost outfit has affixed itself as the proverbial laejur to other parties in assembly elections in large, populous states in three different parts of the…

SOON AFTER THE electoral verdict in favour of the Congress party in Punjab, a video clip surfaced showing Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders of the state in an exuberant mood. The party’s convenor, Sanjay Singh—originally an inhabitant of Uttar Pradesh—is seen predicting a massive win for Bhagwant Mann, AAP’s public face in Punjab. The clip shows Singh and other AAP activists singing songs joyfully and talking on a cellphone, imagining a tally of 100 seats in a 117-member house. This clip is perhaps the best marker of what happened in the state Assembly elections. An insurgent party—intoxicated with political success in a mini-state—imagined it could simply walk into Punjab; an incumbent party—overshadowed by charges of corruption and drunk on arrogance—is vanquished at the hustings. The field, in the end, was…

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to find anyone who is fond of India and isn’t aware of the Mahabharata. No other story from India has been similarly eulogised, rewritten, interpreted, translated, sung, narrated, danced to, choreographed and philosophised over for centuries now. It continues to be India’s greatest war ever fought. But what is it about the rustic voice of a bashful balladeer woman that transforms these oft-repeated stories into an ethereal experience? Armed with a simple tambura, when Teejan Bai, 60, sings these songs in her Pandavani style, the epic becomes an unforgettable encounter. Sukhwati and Chunuk Lal Pardhi belonged to the traditional community of bird-catchers. Abject poverty drove them to make mats and brooms in Ganiyari village, about 15 km away from Bhilai, in Chhattisgarh. Teejan was the eldest of…

FOR THE LONGEST time, detective stories were considered a Western product, while Indian authors, especially in the English language, were fixated with doing the ‘Great Indian Novel’. The crime selection in our Indian bookshops mostly consisted of either British ‘cozies’ or American ‘noir’ even just a decade ago. Incidentally, the 1990s saw some fine pioneering but largely overlooked local English language suspense fiction—by Ashok Banker, Shashi Warrier and, in particular, Amitav Ghosh in The Calcutta Chromosome. Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2005) was the game-changer, which combined crime with that grail of literature, a great Indian novel. Its publication coincided with the unexpected emergence and rising popularity of books beyond Anglo-American crime, such as translations of social-realist Scandinavian noir (especially Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy which sold a record 80 million copies…