Table of contents for 05 June 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK It is sad to note how little human life is valued in India (‘The Blind Men of the Home Ministry’, May 29th, 2017) . As always, there are several grand plans and solutions on paper but when it comes to executing them, everything goes for a toss. However, in the case of the CRPF, the Government cannot afford blunders because there are so many lives at stake. One often wonders why more urban, upper middle-class youngsters aren’t keen on joining the armed forces and the answer lies in the kind of care and status given to the men serving our nation. It is shocking that stupid mistakes and mismanagement can even exist within the CRPF, especially given the kind of skill, encouragement, back-up and training…

THE AWARD OF Army Chief’s commendation card to Major Nitin Leetul Gogoi, an officer stationed in the insurgency-hit district of Budgam in the Kashmir valley, is a well-deserved honour. This will go a long way in boosting the morale of army officers who are very often subjected to political pressure by so-called human rights groups and activists. The controversy in which the Major found himself began during the by-poll to the Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency in April. Gogoi, an officer with the 53 Rashtriya Rifles, a specialised unit of the army for tackling insurgency, received a distress call from a group of officials at a polling station who were surrounded by hundreds of stone-pelters. There was no way these officers could have reached to safety without the army coming to…

The battles on Twitter are only getting more shrill and more vile. This week, matters really came to a head with Paresh Rawal (actorturned- MP) condemning author Arundhati Roy in the most despicable way in 140 characters. But Rawal was not the only hatemonger out there. Singer Abhijeet Bhattacharya found himself on the wrong side of Twitter’s terms of use after he slandered a female Twitter user. Fellow singer Sonu Nigam took up cudgels on his behalf and in a series of 24 tweets announced that he was quitting Twitter. Given the fact that Germany is backing proposals to levy fines of millions of dollars on social media platforms for failing to remove illegal hate speech promptly, Twitter’s actions seem practical. Social media platforms cannot be the lynch mobs of…

On the day after Donald Trump sacked James Comey, his FBI director, I interviewed Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist who has for decades been a source of wisdom (and occasionally of controversy) on the state of the world. The author, most notably, of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of that institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. I had last met Frank— as he’s known to his friends and colleagues—in 2007, and he appeared not to have aged at all. Unchanged also was his impressive—and essentially Japanese—courtesy. He is a quiet American, and there are few better people to talk to if one wishes to comprehend…

THEY SAY THAT adversity is the mother of all invention. This is perhaps truest for artists whose work triumphs despite great physical challenges. It is speculated that had it not been for Claude Monet’s astigmatism, he may never have painted Impression, Sunrise— the painting that was, at first, criticised by naysayers but then went on to become the talisman of the Impressionists. Another artist who immediately comes to mind is Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who turned her debilitating accident into her muse and painted most of her self-portraits from her four-poster bed. In India, similarly, many artists have used their physical disabilities to interpret the world in new and different ways. PRIYA RAVISH MEHRA Cloth and paper pulp have never looked so beautiful together. An installation featuring diaphanous strands of…

INSOMNIAC CITY: NEW YORK, OLIVER AND ME Bill Hayes Bloomsbury 291 Pages | Rs 599 WHAT MAKES A love story? ‘Love’—well, many people have that. But a ‘story’—only a handful. And what is a better plot twist than death to convert life into literature? Insomniac City is one such love story, immersed in affection and respect, and then cut short. It chronicles the six-year relationship between the author Bill Hayes and renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, which ended with Sacks’ death from cancer in August 2015. Sacks who died at 82, is aptly described as the ‘poet laureate of medicine’. Which captures both his profession as a consulting neurologist and his finesse in rendering medical speak into prose. When Hayes and Sacks meet in 2009, Hayes was a 48-year-old…

WE PRIDE ourselves on having an evolved and a sophisticated palate, but scratch the surface, and we will find that the foods we consider our favourites are in fact those we have preferred from our infancy and childhood. I love a glass of ice cold milk. But I cannot drink hot milk with sugar. Turns out that when I was a toddler, my mother decided there was no need to put sugar in my milk. Why? Because she did not like milk that way, and also thought that too much sugar was not good for me. Is it not a scary thought that our adult food preferences are so deeply connected to our toddler-stage foods, and to how our parents decided to serve us a dish or a drink. What…

THERE ARE FEW countries as preoccupied with its own past— and not necessarily as a conservation exercise—as Germany. This is understandable. After two World Wars that led to defeat, devastation, the deaths of millions of its people, international opprobrium, the loss of territory and a painful partition, the German people are anxious to never repeat the 20th century. This has involved a series of intellectual acrobatics—some born out of a commitment to a European utopia and others totally contrived. I spent a day at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and then at the Topography of Terror exhibition at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters to understand Germany’s public portrayal of its history. What was reassuring is that no attempt has been made to air brush the past, particularly…

WHAT DID GIANI Zail Singh, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Taylor, the Sultan of Brunei and Egyptian business magnate Mohamed Al-Fayed have in common? They were all guided at some point in their lives by a bearded godman, variously described as a likeable rogue and an ill-mannered power broker, whose reputation was nowhere as pristine as his flowing white robe. Trickster, conniver, fixer and counsellor to dozens of politicians, businessmen and criminals, Nemi Chand aka Chandraswami died in obscurity following a long illness two decades after playing Chanakya to former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao (1991-96). A Youth Congress leader-turnedtantrik who impressed hardened rationalists with his astrological stunts, Chandraswami effortlessly cosied up to people in power. He was an eager intermediary in questionable affairs, transmitting bribes, conducting esoteric rituals to ward off…

‘A MAN IS KNOWN by the company he keeps’ is a proverb from Aesop’s Fables, whose origins lie in the Panchatantra. Friendship is key to the Nitishastra, with the first two books of the Panchatantra called the Mitrabheda (the separation of friends) and Mitralabha (the acquisition of friends). Friendship is hard to define but easy to experience and to recognise. Bhishma identified different kinds of friends— friends like family, friends with family connections, business friends, paid friends. The most important friends are those who love you for your character and qualities, but you can lose them if you do wrong. In the Mahabharata, Krishna is a friend to Arjuna and the other Pandavas, just as Karna and Duryodhana are friends, while the cousins fight a war with each other in…

Playing Dress-up at Cannes Another edition of the Cannes Film Festival has ended and the only thing we seem to be talking about are our leading ladies and their fashion sense (or the lack of it) on the famed red carpet. To be fair, all three of our heavyweights— Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Deepika Padukone and Sonam Kapoor—got the thumbs up for most of their glamorous ensembles as L’oreal ambassadors this year. And much newsprint and digital space was committed to photos of them soaking in the sun on the terrace of the Martinez, or simply hanging out with the other spokeswomen of the brand, namely Eva Longoria, Andie McDowell and others. What nobody seems to be talking about is how carefully coordinated the three actress’ appearances were; so meticulously managed…

IN DUBAI, WHILE promoting his next release, Salman Khan, asked about Malayalam movies, said that he was keen on watching Pulimurugan. Released last year, it is the biggest blockbuster in that language, the first to cross Rs 100 crore, about a man in a tribal village who has a grudge against tigers. He hunts and kills man-eaters on demand and then gets embroiled in the criminal underworld of the city where he puts the same skills to use. The absurdity of the story is heightened using the tools of filmmaking, like special effects. The movie stars Mohanlal, who in keeping with the general trend of south Indian superstars, is acting his age with more salt than pepper in his hair and becoming ever more popular, despite considerably diminished emoting. The…

CANNOT IMAGINE any other Indian state in a more pathetic situation than the people of Tamil Nadu. A long hoary narrative of Tamil chauvinism and Brahmin bashing in the background of skyscraping cutouts from where starry icons smiled and blessed their ‘masses’ has all come crashing to the ground with the death of Jayalalithaa. The giant cardboard edifice of Dravidian mythology has also gone to dust, leaving the masses with nobody to look up to. But from this dusty atmosphere, a digital cutout called Rajinikanth is being reprised and made to appear as Tamil Nadu’s next messiah. I Honestly, no one, including Rajinikanth, has a clue whether he will enter active politics and if he does, what kind of role he will play in 21st century Tamil history. For the…

HREE YEARS IS a long-time for a Government in New Delhi. Usually, by this time two markers of political health are clearly visible. On the one hand, the number of errors of governance that creep into the day-to-day functioning increase to the point that there’s an air of immobility in India’s seat of power. On the other hand, expectations that bring a government to power usually evaporate by then. Both make a toxic mix that usually consumes the party in power in the next General Election. T By these measures, the Narendra Modi Government is an outlier on the country’s political landscape. The usual signs—corruption scandals, confusion in policymaking and, by the start of the fourth year, political panic—seem to be a distant prospect. Modi’s problems lie elsewhere: managing expectations…

LET’S JUST COME out and say it aloud, email has killed communication. The ping of a new mail in one’s inbox is greeted not with the cheer of ‘Oh, someone has thought of me’, but rather with the groan of ‘Oh, I have one more task to complete’. The sheer volume of messages has quashed the joy of receiving. Emails today are seldom, if ever, the voice of a loved one or the ruminations of a friend. They are quite simply only about one thing—work and business. So it is not surprising that in this avalanche of instant communication, the humble letter has become a beacon of hope. Unlike online commu- All of us cherish certain letters, those which have travelled with us from city to city and decade to…

TEMPORARY PEOPLE Deepak Unnikrishnan Restless Books 253 Pages | Rs 799 DEEPAK UNNIKRISHNAN’S Temporary People, a lacerating exposition of the existence of ‘temporary people’ in the Arabian Gulf, tells the unheard stories of sacrifice smeared with sweat, tears and semen, in a brilliant combination of Salman Rushdie’s linguistic invention and George Saunders’ satirical vein. Through his award-winning debut novel, Unnikrishnan, who teaches at New York University in Abu Dhabi, has wowed literary circles by both pitchforking a group of people whose lives have never been chronicled before, and by leaving the comfort zone of the conventional novel. Temporary People does not throw an all-encompassing light on the subaltern lives and cultures of the expatriates in the Gulf—the guest-workers who end up living in the country for generations—but a random spot…