Table of contents for 22 May 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK ‘Open Minds 2017’ (May 5th 2017) perfectly encapsulates the who’s who of contemporary India. From the literary prowess of thinkers and writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Ramachandra Guha, Patrick French and Shashi Tharoor, to succinct analyses of the political discourse of India by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, to Alia Bhatt’s reign over Bollywood, and economic architects Arvind Subramanian and Nandan Nilekani, the issue brings to light these individuals (and more) and their seamless efforts to raise the bar in their respective fields. Time and again, many of us have questioned the people who are in power. It is important to ask that question in order to understand and challenge the current discourse, to become a part of the dialogue that concerns us all. Some names on…

ON WEDNESDAY, Kapil Mishra, former minister of the Aam Aadmi Party and the man who accused his party chief Arvind Kejriwal of corruption, went on a fast unto death for a somewhat strange reason—he wanted the travel expenses of some of his former colleagues, ministers in the Delhi Government, to be made public. An ANI report quoted him with this missive to Kejriwal, ‘I know if I will die, it won’t affect you.’ Perhaps not, but Mishra is not going to die either. The fast is a weapon umbilically tied to the AAP and one yet to claim any politician who used it in recent times. That is a little unfortunate. The world needs at least one such martyr for this gimmick to be taken seriously but the present instance…

ON APRIL 27TH, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Shimla to flag off three new flights under the Regional Air Connectivity Scheme. The scheme, named UDAAN— Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik, will connect places hitherto unserviced by commercial aircraft. There is also a cap on the ticket price—Rs 2,500 for up to 500 km. At first glance, this looks like any other government scheme, but a deeper thought underpins it. “I want to see people who wear Hawai chappal in a hawai jahaz,” Modi said in his speech in Shimla. The scheme is a way of reaching out to this section of people for whom air travel is still a luxury. Come May 26th, the Modi Government will celebrate its third anniversary. Preparations are in full swing and different ministries…

ON SUNDAY MAY 7th, France elected 39-yearold Emmanuel Macron as its youngest ever President since Napoleon, after an election campaign which saw both traditional parties eliminated from the race in a hotly contested first round. His victory is a personal triumph for a young man whom no one inside or outside of France had heard about until three years ago. It is also a victory, the world over, for those who feel dispirited by the twin blows of Brexit and Trump. In Europe, where Putin’s Russia is looming large in the East and Erdo?an’s Turkey is rising in the South while the US turns away, Macron’s pro-European stance offers reassurance that the values and identity that have shaped the continent since 1945 will stand up to attempts to erode them…

IN THE WINTER of 1988, in New York, a young woman broadcaster was scheduled to interview Shabana Azmi. Even though she was nine months pregnant, she finished her interview. Within a few minutes her water broke and labour pains began. Without panicking, she took a taxi to the hospital where, after a few hours, she delivered a son. ‘This is one interview I will never forget,’ said a note from Azmi, which arrived with a bouquet of red roses, wishing the mother and child good health. This is one of the many incidents that reflect the life of dancer, choreographer and festival curator Anita Ratnam. To the world of Indian classical dance, Ratnam is a known face. Born into a well-known business family, she, like many girls in the early…

THIS HORRIFYING NEW book, with its juicy title (The Front Page Murders; Hachette; Rs350; Pages 322), reads like a murder mystery and is guaranteed to provide morbid readers with as much titillation as any thriller. But what obviously separates it from a run-of-the-mill page-turner is the fact that it’s based on an actual case and that the protagonist we follow isn’t a sleuth, but crime correspondent Puja Changoiwala. Yet I suspect that despite this, readers will pick it up for entertainment. Changoiwala has an acute eye for detail. She walks into a police station and meets a paunchy duty officer who, in mid-conversation, takes off for the loo and is astonished at the lady reporter’s perseverance in bothering to stay and wait. Then there is the description of the proceedings…

Exploring New Pastures Last week I told you how Shraddha Kapoor had lost the female lead in Dhoom 3 director Vijay Krishna Acharya’s Thugs of Hindostan after she asked producer Aditya Chopra to up his Rs 1 crore offer. As it turns out, Dangal star Fatima Sana Shaikh has now landed the role. Contrary to rumours, insiders say the actress is not paired romantically opposite the film’s leading man Aamir Khan. Just as well, considering she last played his daughter in the boxing blockbuster. My sources tell me the film is a loose remake of Sholay, no less. Aamir reportedly plays the thug of the film’s title, a rascal recruited to avenge the death of Fatima’s family, while Amitabh Bachchan may be playing a role inspired by the Thakur character…

FOR A BOY growing up in the Calcutta of the 1960s, the nameplates on the gates of houses fascinated me. I used to wonder why a disproportionate number of medical doctors had got their impressive degrees from either Edinburgh and Glasgow and why a snob value was attached to those who added Oxon or Cantab to their MA degrees. Those were the days when a foreign education invariably involved studying in a British university. My family was a bit odd in that my grandfather— who had a visceral antipathy to anything British—actually made the long journey to the United States and was among the first Indian graduates of Stanford. Equally unusual was his feisty sister Prabhavati who earned her doctorate from Heidelberg in Germany during the turbulent days of the…

IN THE PASSING away of Justice Leila Seth on May 5th, India has not only lost a great judicial mind but also a pioneering liberal judge. Seth was part of a group of pioneering lawyers who began their careers soon after India gained Independence. That was a heady time to practice law as a nascent country was creating new institutions suited to its genius after almost two centuries of colonial rule. In this, Seth had an ample measure of participation as she went about practicing in different Indian cities such as Patna, Kolkata and Delhi. After two decades of legal practice, she broke what was a glass ceiling: she became the first woman to be appointed a judge of the Delhi High Court. Thirteen years later, she broke another, higher,…

Imitation, it seems, is not the sincerest form of flattery. British artist Damien Hirst’s Golden Heads (Female) has drawn ire from Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor, who accused him of copying Head of Ife, a 1938 Nigerian artwork. This is not the first allegation for Hirst. In 1999, he was accused by celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, while in 2000, the artist was sued by Norman Emms. By 2010, there were about 15 cases of plagiarism against him. The event has raked up the debate over appropriation and plagiarism in the art world. There are those who capitalised on the strategy, a la Andy Warhol. There is Hirst and his ‘inspirations’. And then there are reckless encounters such as award-winning photographer Souvid Datta's recently revealed doctored works. At a time when…

NO OTHER STEREOTYPE in cricket is more carefully sculpted in its ruggedness than the image of the Australian Test captain. Mirthless, godless, forbidding men. Men with dirt under their nails and skeletons in their closets. Men the rest of the team tip-toe around. Them with their unkempt beards and upright collars, unbuttoned shirts exposing vast swathes of tan and hair. Think Allan Border, who revealed he too could smile some 20 years after his career had ended. Think Steve Waugh, the father of mental disintegration, grim as the Reaper, squinting like Clint Eastwood in those spaghetti westerns. Think Ricky Ponting, who, like the Mafia, could change the authority’s mind with a stern look and a silent nod. Think Michael Clarke, a boy nicknamed Pup who promptly grew into a mongrel,…

THE BRITISH-INDIAN writer Hari Kunzru, whose latest novel, White Tears, is just out, currently lives in New York. In 2003, Kunzru turned down the John Llewellyn Rhys prize because of its association with the British conservative paper Mail on Sunday whose editorial line, Kunzru said, fostered an “atmosphere of prejudice”. In a phone interview Kunzru speaks about, among other things, living in Trump’s America and a writer’s duty in today’s world. White Tears is seen as ‘a broad frontal attack against racism,’ as a review describes it. Others have called it a narrative against capitalism, against cultural appropriation. Were you conscious of these themes while you were writing it? All these things swirl around. I should underline that it is a novel and I don’t write fiction for merely polemic.…

LETTERS TO A YOUNG MUSLIM Omar Saif Ghobash Picador 245 Pages | Rs 499 MUCH HAS BEEN written about the radicalisation of Muslim youth, from former radicalturned- writers and social scientists to policy makers and security experts, explaining how to and how not to deal with the growing radicalism amongst Muslim youth across the world, especially in the Arab countries. In his debut book, Omar Saif Ghobash, Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Russia since 2009, adds his own bit. And, unlike most of the authors who have done so by addressing the world, he, of Arab-Russian descent, does it instead through over two dozen personal yet politically nuanced letters, which address the very constituency that is affected by the problem. This is because the book is not…

WHY DO I think of Emmanuel Macron when I think of the descent of Arvind Kejriwal? With the election of Macron, whose movement En Marche! shares his initials, the fall of Europe has been averted, globalism has been given a new lease of life, and the Brussels bureaucracy won’t be unemployed anytime soon—or so we have been told by the good people alarmed by the rise of populists from both sides of the ideological divide. Macron, a former banker known for his multimillion deals and networking skills, is an accidental politician, and in a country that has historically indulged leaders with a brooding philosophical bent, he, at 39, is an open-minded member of the global elite who has no time for Gallic exceptionalism, except maybe in romance. In the final…

ROBERT SEWELL’S APPELLATION, A Forgotten Empire, is probably the best description for the greatness that was Vijayanagara. I first visited this ancient capital at Hampi when I was in my late teens. It was a mess, with broken stones strewn all over the place. I visited it again when I was in my late thirties, with my husband and two young sons who were fascinated to see archaeological digs. My most recent visit was in March this year with an American writer friend, when I observed the wonder that was Vijayanagara, following the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) recreation of the medieval empire. Hampi lies on the southern bank of the Tungabhadra River, formed by the rivers Tunga and Bhadra, and is the chief tributary of the Krishna River. The…

THREE AMORPHOUS sculptures in searing maroon, like lumps of sinuous, open flesh, stand stark against crisp white walls. To the onlooker who considers their ominous forms, large protruding nodules can be made out that leave sinking, dark hollows at their roots. Anish Kapoor’s exhibition of new works at Lisson Gallery in London is a slaughterhouse of reds. Through violently expressed shades of the colour of blood, it explores the diametrically opposed yet complimentary notions of organic and geometric. These sculptures—which, as exhibition organiser Emily Skeppner tells me, the artist identifies as paintings—are made of silicon. Kapoor sculpted the material, which only remains malleable for an hour once it has been mixed, over a mesh of wood and wire, then covered them in a veil of fine gauze that disguises the…

OPTION B: FACING ADVERSITY, BUILDING RESILIENCE AND FINDING JOY Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant WH Allen 226 Pages | Rs 599 EVERYBODY HAS AN Option B, whether trivial (I wanted to wear my maroon shirt but it was creased, so I had to wear my blue one) or significant (If I get good marks I’ll apply to the top IIM. If not, then any business school will do). But when Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, the acclaimed book on how women can empower themselves in the workplace and achieve leadership positions in a male-advantaged society), lost her husband Dave at the tragically youthful age of 43, finding Option B was something she had to learn how to do. Option A was obvious: that somehow, Dave…

There is no sincerer love than the love of food. —George Bernard Shaw FOOD IS THE most basic need without which all life would be extinct. All of us have experienced hunger and the relief that comes with the intake of food. Food is, however, much more than a survival tool. It is one of the principal pleasures of the senses—for some of us, the love of food is the very purpose of existence. Giving up food, therefore, is one of the greatest sacrifices a human can make. In the religious/spiritual context, food provides nourishment to the body, fasting nourishment to the soul. Most religions recommend intermittent abstinence from food as a form of purification or penance. In the Mahabharata, Bhishma responds to Yudhisthir’s query: ‘There is no penance that…