Table of contents for 17 April 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Islam and terror have been the two most talkedabout subjects in the news in the last few years (‘The Cult of Death’ by Olivier Roy, April 10th, 2017). One can hardly remember a time when the religion wasn’t linked to violence, murder and mayhem. It is especially sad when the realisation hits just how widespread Islamist fanaticism has become and how many young people are joining the movement to harm other people in the name of religion. We are fed image after image of prisoners being executed or harmed in the most brutal manner or videos of terrorists gunning down innocent people and children on the streets of some of the most well-known cities in the world such as Paris and London. It is difficult…

DO OTHER CITIES have famous landmarks, so famous that they are recognised even by the notoriously ignorant tribe of taxi drivers, yet do not actually exist? Mumbai had three: Kemp’s Corner, called that because the area had a famous medical outlet of that name; Kala Ghoda, because of an equestrian statue of King Edward VII (then Prince of Wales) and Opera House, the area in which was located the country’s only venue for staging them. Over the years, Kemp’s the Chemist moved because of redevelopment, the black horse with its royal rider was sent to the zoo (!) to remove a vestige of imperialism, and Opera House became defunct, then derelict. But the names stuck, and served as markers to find your way around South Mumbai. Miraculously, in the last…

IS ART A transmission of emotion or of intellect? Should a classical musician be a medium for a guru’s highbrow abstraction of aesthetic perfection, or pursue perfection in each note like a haiku delving into a moment in nature, sidestepping all intellectual conceit? For Kishori Amonkar, the last of a generation of great Khayal vocalists, who died at the age of 84 on April 3rd, tonal purity came first. Her music, so often described as romantic and transcendent, appealed to the emotionally starved listener who did not care for the aloofness of Khayal music, but wasn’t ready to seek out lighter thumris. It was bridge music, striking a balance between the orthodox ornamental style of the Jaipur- Atrauli gharana to which she belonged, and her own meditative musical sensibilities. But…

AS WE CELEBRATE 70 years of independence, is it time to acknowledge that it was the first British Governor- General who launched our cultural renaissance way back in the 1780s? Of all Britain’s imperial proconsuls, Warren Hastings was the most curious. He learned about Indian culture and famously declared: “I love India a little more than my own country.” He was fluent in Bengali, had good working knowledge of Urdu and Persian, and pioneered the revival of Sanskrit, rescuing it from the narrow confines of a corrupt Brahmin priesthood. It was Hastings who rediscovered India’s classical Hindu and Buddhist past, after seven centuries of mostly benign neglect under Muslim rulers. He founded the Calcutta Asiatic Society in 1784, under the distinguished Orientalist Sir William Jones, and it became the centre…

THERE ARE SOME people who guide our lives, even though they enter them very briefly. For me, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay has played that role for a long time. Thanks to this important book by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vinay Lal, I’ve learned more of her writing, activism and life lessons. For readers who haven’t yet met her, her life will be a revelation. If Gandhi inspired and led a political revolution, she inspired and led a cultural revolution. Her influence in my life began in the late 1970s. I had returned to India, where I had lived for two years as a student and wanderer almost two decades before. Devaki Jain, my friend and colleague from that first visit, had arranged a trip to see some of the women’s groups that…

Shy Among Strangers Most people would leap at an acting offer from Karan Johar, but Badshah is not most people. Perhaps encouraged by the success his friend Diljit Dosanjh is currently enjoying as an actor, the 32-year-old rapper—currently all the sensation in Bollywood, with a string of chartbusters like Kaala Chashma, Chhul and Tamma Tamma under his belt—is open to taking promising acting jobs, yet he politely declined one from Bollywood’s top producer. You might remember that Badshah joined Karan and a bunch of young stars for the Dream Team live concerts across the US last year. It was during this time that Karan reportedly offered him a starring role in a film he is set to produce. Badshah, who counts the filmmaker as a mentor and a close friend,…

THEIR TRIBE IS multiplying, and their pathologies are a pointer to the darkest possibilities of populism. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte “would be happy to slaughter” drug addicts. He cares for national hygiene. In spite of horrifying portraits in international media of the latest exotic despot from Asia, his popularity is apparently intact. In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro is playing out the last script of Chavismo, the legacy of his predecessor Hugo Chavez. Seeking socialist immortality, he intends to be the sole controller of the country. Inspired by the ghosts of Castro and Chavez, and tapping into simulated anti-Americanism, it is socialist nationalism at play. He is the strongman as a poor pastiche of a Marquezian dictator. In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, lately bromanced by Donald Trump, is…

INDIAN ROADS HAVE had, like Indians themselves, a great tolerance for pain. They are born to sometimes die quickly, often to live long unhealthy malnutritioned lives, and for a very few, an actualised fruitful life of smooth asphalt. To the onerous fate of all of them has now been added an identity crisis. Whether a liquor shop should be present in its vicinity is none of the road’s concern, but is it not unfair that such an extraneous consideration should put its character itself to question? A number of states are mulling over making highways into not-highways merely by the stroke of a pen. This is in answer to a stroke of a Supreme Court pen that said no liquor vends can operate within 500 metres of a highway. The…

THE AIRCRAFT WERE at the peak of their climb when the bombs went off. Six were conventional; six were 500-kg fuel-air explosive warheads; two were tactical nuclear weapons. They exploded within 15 seconds of each other, sending out bursts of radiation. Contrary to common perceptions of the neutron bomb, the attack did not just kill soldiers and leave buildings intact. Everything within a 700-metre range was devastated beyond repair. Vehicles outside the range were left relatively unscathed, as were several tank crews who had managed to get into Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) suits and seal up their armoured trundlers. But after that, many died of dehydration and heat, abandoned by both sides as irradiated beyond saving. In this fictional account of a nuclear war in South Asia—written by journalist…

THERE IS—OR should be—this thing called the ‘morning album’. Something that makes you yearn for the speckled sunshine of early morning, with endless possibilities ahead of you, a good night’s rest behind. Something you’d put on as soon as you wake up, on an empty stomach, when you’re still stretching your arms for some circulation, rubbing out the sleep from your eyes. Lovesongs, by Bangalore/Dubai’s Aniruddh Menon, is one such collection of songs. It’s a delightful album—possibly one of the highlights of the year so far—evoking soft-filter panoramas of sunlit valleys. Of pastoral, transcendental landscapes that fade each time you blink. Of a broken kaleidoscope whose colours bleed into each other to form new colours, which in turn bleed into each other to form even newer colours. It’s wistful and…

A HISTORY OF INDIAN SPORT THROUGH 100 ARTEFACTS Boria Majumdar HarperCollins 228 Pages | Rs 1,299 WHAT VALUE DOES sport hold in your life? Is it a mere distraction from the humdrum of the everyday? Or do you revere it? Do you feel the energy of your heroes on fields, courts and tracks? And do they make you slap on your running gear and prepare with zeal for the next Sunday marathon in your city? Sports is being consumed in India like never before. Our society, as a whole, has witnessed a paradigm shift, in terms of what we view—whether on television or in attendance—and how we stay fit. Slowly, and surely, we are watching more, discussing more and even playing more. But are we celebrating Indian sport enough? How…

ASIDE FROM AN occasional flyer in the morning papers inserted by rival vote seekers, there is barely any evidence that the national capital is set to soon elect three new municipal corporations. Three? Because for some inexplicable reason, Sheila Dikshit in her last term as Chief Minister had insisted on carving up the hitherto unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi into three separate entities. This did create more jobs and other opportunities for our civic fathers, but whether the trifurcation made for more efficient delivery of services such as sanitation, street lighting, etcetera, remains highly doubtful. Indeed, given the woeful state of their finances, it is troubling that Arvind Kejriwal wants to abolish house tax, the single largest source of revenue for the municipalities. As it is, the AAP government was…

LESS THAN A MONTH after it was sworn in, the Yogi Adityanath government on April 4th waived off loans handed out to small and marginal farmers by banks. The bill: a whopping Rs 36,359 crore. This is a sum that Uttar Pradesh can ill-afford to dispense in such a manner, but worse, it has set a trend that will make it hard for any government to resist. Almost at the same time as the decision was announced in Lucknow, the Madras High Court ordered the Tamil Nadu government to pardon loans of all farmers in the state—irrespective of the size of their land holdings. Loan waivers for farmers are nothing new. In 2008, the UPA Government struck off farm loans worth Rs 60,000 crore, a sum that later rose to…

Given the anecdotal evidence, it is easy to say that technology makes us lazy. We know that we have outsourced our memory to electronic devices. We used to remember phone numbers and birthdays, but now our phones and calendars do that. A recent study published in Nature Communications by a group of neuro- and cognitive scientists at University College London shows how GPS navigation turns our minds lazy. Subjects trying to figure out how to get from a point A to an unknown point B by themselves had a sharp rise in brain activity. The hippocampus—a part associated with memory and spatial navigation—lit up. But those asked to find a route with the aid of GPS experienced none of this. So, if you want to give your brain a workout,…

In ancient times, apples were known as the fruit of the underworld, sustenance for those who would venture into deep, dark recesses from where there was no return. Virbhadra Singh, Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, the 82-year-old Congress stalwart who has been sworn in for the state’s top political post five times before and bears ‘Raja’ as a title for his royal lineage from the erstwhile princely state of Rampur Bushahr, apparently paid no heed to that bit of folklore as he allegedly cooked his account books in an apple stew of fraudulent figures that could now result in his fall. According to legend, Rampur Bushahr was founded by Lord Krishna’s son Pradhyumna, though the latter-day historian CF Kennedy traced its establishment to a Rajput warrior from the Deccan, Rana…

FAVRE-LEUBA IIn 2017, Favre-Leuba celebrates its 280th anniversary with a groundbreaking watch that is sureto turn heads in the world of horology, a watch that sets new standards and achieves something previously thought impossible by pushing the boundaries further than ever before. The Bivouac 9000 is the first mechanical wristwatch capable of measuring altitudes of up to an incredible 9,000 meters above sea level – an impressive demonstration of Favre-Leuba’s ingenuity and its steadfast refusal to rest on its laurels. The design team drew their inspiration for this groundbreaking creation, released to celebrate the brand’s 280th anniversary, from the company’s own history: in 1962, Favre-Leuba launched the world’s first mechanical wristwatch capable of measuring air pressure and altitudes of up to 3,000 meters above sea level. The outstanding reliability and…

IN HER POEM won’t you celebrate with me (1993), Lucille Clifton writes, ‘won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life? i had no model. / born in Babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did i see to be except myself?’ Although Clifton’s words describe her experience as a Black American woman growing up in the Civil Rights era, when I read them, I felt like she had written them for me. My parents moved to the United States from Chennai in the mid-1970s, their immigration enabled by my father’s medical degree. For them, there was never question of moving back to India: my mother still tells the story of picking up her Green Card from an immigration officer at Logan…

IN INDIA, THE disclosure of health data of top leaders is a rarity. A notable exception is our popular Minister for External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj, who regularly tweets about her health issues. In contrast, in the West, declaring health parameters of leaders is the norm. Donald Trump, while baring all about his health on The Dr Oz show last year, sent the media into a tizzy when he boasted about his normal blood testosterone level. The 70-year-old Trump, ever the showman, said he sees “a person that’s 35 years old” in the mirror. “I feel the same age as Tom Brady” said Trump, referring to his friend, a professional football player. “It’s crazy.” Why is it that the very mention of testosterone invariably generates excitement? Testosterone (the male hormone), produced…