Table of contents for 24 April 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The Congress has been facing charges of corruption for so long now that nothing comes as a surprise anymore (‘The Rotten Apple’, April 17th, 2017). However, one cannot dismiss the multiple allegations against Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh. It is interesting to note how much wealth he has amassed over the last few years and the highly unbelievable explanations he gives for them. Orchards and fruit businesses cannot generate the kind of cash that he has, and it is clearly a cover-up. Also, there have been several discoveries of cash that he has not been able to explain at all. The saddest part of corrupt politics is that at the end of it, crooks get to walk away with their loot even though they…

ONE OF THE fallouts whenever a BJP government comes to power is the cow becoming the centre of the universe. Even in the era of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, magical properties began to be found in the urine of cows. Numerous products using it, including soft drinks and floor cleaners, were marketed. The phenomenon reasserted itself with the return of the BJP and is now peaking. In the last couple of months, it has been confidently asserted in Parliament that cow urine can increase the yield of sugarcane, that it increases the haemoglobin count of cancer patients in chemotherapy. A study claimed that the urine of a particular cow species from Andhra Pradesh can fight diabetes. They tested it on rats with success. Even if one finds all this somewhat hard…

IF YOU DID not know much about Kashmir and were shown a video clip that has surfaced recently—of a few paramilitary soldiers being teased and kicked and hit by a few unruly youth, while some record this on their mobile phones— you’d think that India has withdrawn its forces from Kashmir and Indian soldiers do not want to engage with men whose shouts of ‘Go India Go Back’ they’ve acceded to. India is not going anywhere because Kashmir is India. But it is really a disgrace what we are asking our soldiers to endure for the sake of an electoral process that has in any case failed because the state has failed to protect its interests. Showing restraint in the face of provocation is one thing, but not being able…

ASKED WHAT HE would do to end Syria’s wretched civil war, Donald Trump until very recently said: “Nothing.” Railing against US involvement in senseless foreign wars was part of his ‘America First’ schtick. Unless there was oil to steal or jihadists to kill—the only possible circumstances in which Trump, on the campaign trail, envisaged taking America to war—he wasn’t interested. Then why, on April 6th, did Mr Trump launch a salvo of 59 cruise missiles against the Shayrat airbase, in reprisal for President Bashar al-Assad’s latest atrocity, a nerve gas attack in northern Syria that killed over 80 civilians? And what did that mean for American foreign policy? Is the American global policeman, who was, if not semi-retired, then a bit more cautious under Barack Obama, now back on the…

“To think that the writing is only in the book or what is written down is misleading” AMIT CHAUDHURI HOW IS A novelist to write about the 2008 terrorist attacks in Bombay? Does he go all fire and brimstone, make it the pivot of the story, and assert that the city can never be the same again? Or does he stitch it into the fabric of his tale, like a tailor adding a button to a shirt, the button being essential to the shirt but not its sole point? That is what critic, essayist and novelist Amit Chaudhuri accomplishes in his latest work, Friend of My Youth (Hamish Hamilton; 120 pages; Rs 499). Let’s see how he does it. The narrator orders tea at the Sea Lounge of the Taj.…

THE ISI OF PAKISTAN: FAITH, UNITY, DISCIPLINE Hein G Kiessling HarperCollins 309 Pages | Rs 599 INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES often acquire reputations that are out of proportion to their real capabilities and reach. Not so the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan. This agency has the dubious, if well deserved, distinction of having worked assiduously both to destabilise its neighbours, especially India and Afghanistan, and to intervene in the internal politics of Pakistan. It is difficult to think of another military intelligence agency that has nurtured so many terrorist outfits. What explains its unusual trajectory? There are few authoritative accounts of the ISI. Much of what we know about it comes from some former ISI officers and a few dogged journalists. As with all intelligence history, it is difficult to know what…

THE EXPRESSION ‘food freedom’ has, in recent days, acquired currency in India. The context is obvious: restrictions on the slaughter of buffaloes and cows, and restrictions on the sale and consumption of beef. This is an issue that has agitated a section of the intelligentsia— not all of whom, it is fair to say, are habitually accustomed to beef eating. The notional right to eat beef has become an issue in about the same way that flaunting a keffiyeh (the blackand- white or red- and-white check scarf) in the West symbolises support for the Palestinian cause. Earlier, in the 1920s and 1930s, a small section of bohemian leftists—particularly those associated with the Fabians in Britain— distinguished themselves from the proverbial ‘lesser breeds’ through an alternative lifestyle that included vegetarianism. Today,…

BY-ELECTIONS are usually tame affairs in Indian politics. The party in power in a given state usually walks away with wins. This is, in part, a matter of a longstanding tradition: voters seldom give upset mid-term victories to opposition parties. From that perspective, the results of ten by-elections in eight states offer an interesting picture. Of the eight results declared by April 13th, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won five, the Congress two and Trinamool Congress one. The results in Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the BJP is in power, followed the traditional pattern. The same pattern was visible in Karnataka, a Congress-ruled state. But there were notable departures as well. In Himachal Pradesh, the BJP trounced the candidate of the ruling Congress party. There, the grand old…

EARLY ON A Friday evening, one of the many restaurants in the alleyways of Shahpur Jat is empty and oppressive, as the air-conditioner barely shuffles the air. But slowly the centre table of 12 starts to fill up. Two young women in crop tops, dark red lips and stilettos take their place. They are followed by a guy in a tie and Mohawk hair. Others join, all seemingly in their twenties. Along with their handbags, they also carry an SLR camera packed in its case, which they will soon unsheathe and sling around their necks. A single sheet menu is passed around. The regular restaurant menu makes no appearance. Introductions begin. “Hi, I am dude_underfood.” “Hi, I am appetisingcity.” (sic) Immediately phones are taken out and buttons swiped. “I am…

THE SAGA OF MUZIRIS Sethu Translated by Prema Jayakumar Niyogi Books 432 Pages | Rs 495 THE WRITER AT his most ambitious is God—he does not just create life but also the laws that govern life. An apple dropped can float up by just a scribble of his pen, and if he is clever he knows that. The only check to this absolute power is getting the reader to be complicit in the new universe. If he can manage that, then the creation is complete. In The Saga of Muziris (Marupiravi in Malayalam, translated by Prema Jayakumar), A Sethumadhavan, better known as Sethu, crunches time in an unusual superstructure of a novel within a novel, juxtaposing the present against the immediate past, the immediate past against the ancient past, and…

FIRST THE DECLARATIONS, because ‘Who Are We?’ is the question that concentrates the national mind nowadays. Or so it seems at a time when definitions and attitudes have become the talk of the nervous town. So here they are. I don’t have to eat beef to prove my secular credentials, and neither do I need to endorse cow slaughter to show my tolerance. Then I feel like a stranger in a place where the slaughter of the beef-eater is an isolated incident of ‘civilisational rage’. Where cow vigilantism is a necessary cultural expression is not my kind of place either. This town is not mine when I’m tutored on the secular responsibilities of an Indian, and when I’m force-fed on the Idea of India, as if condescension and self-righteousness are…

WE ARE TOLD too often, and too gratuitously, that a particular book is an ‘essential read’. Reviewers tend to throw in that phrase just to boost their self-importance. A doctor can tell you, ‘It is essential to eat vegetables’, so here we are telling you: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is an essential read. Necessary not because it will benefit your well-being, but because this one stands head and shoulders above most of the countless books spat out every year. The novel which has already dominated the charts (including of The New York Times, Time Magazine and Amazon), won the National Book Award for Fiction 2016 in the US. Earlier this week, Whitehead, a 47-year-old New Yorker, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Underground Railroad, his seventh novel.…

AYAAN HIRSI ALI has just published an important—and importantly provocative—new book. I propose to discuss its message, but would first like to take you on a swift tour of her life. In 1992, at 23 years of age, Hirsi Ali arrived in The Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia, fleeing an arranged marriage and every other form of psychic (and bodily) oppression that a conservative Muslim society is in the habit of heaping on its young women. In 2004, when she was 35, she was threatened with violent death by an Islamist extremist who murdered— in broad Amsterdam daylight—Theo Van Gogh, a radical anti-Islamist film-maker with whom Hirsi Ali had collaborated. The threat to her life was set out in a note that was stuck to Van Gogh’s chest with…

COURTING THE PEOPLE: PUBLIC INTEREST LITIGATION IN POST-EMERGENCY INDIA Anuj Bhuwania Cambridge 157 Pages | Rs 495 ON A COLD January morning in New Delhi in 1979, a lawyer, Pushpa Kapila Hingorani, was reading the Indian Express newspaper, when a bulletin sprang out at her. KF Rustamji, a member of the National Police Commission, had published a detailed article documenting the plight of thousands of under-trials in the prisons of Bihar. According to the report, some of them had been in jail awaiting trial for periods much longer than the actual punishment awardable for their alleged crimes. ‘I felt…‘How can such a situation exist in our country? We must do something about it!’’ Hingorani later wrote. Two days later, on the suggestion of her husband (who was also a lawyer),…

Look Who Wants to Play Hardball The editor of a popular film glossy has apparently been complaining to anyone who’s willing to listen that Shahid Kapoor played hardball with his team recently. The actor shot a cover for the magazine just days before the release of his last film, Rangoon, but the issue wasn’t due out on news stands until a few weeks after. When the team sent the actor a scan of the story, days before the issue was despatched to press, the editor says Shahid balked. Reportedly he didn’t appreciate being referred to as a ‘star’ in the headline, and demanded it be changed to ‘ superstar ’. If they were unwilling to make that change, he wanted the story pulled. The team made the change, the actor…