Table of contents for 10 July 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The radicalisation of young minds has been happening for many years, but what has changed with the Islamic State is the rampant use of social media (‘God’s Recruits’, July 3rd, 2017). The sheer number of young people who have been converted to that group’s ideology of hate and violence is disheartening and shocking. Unfortunately, those in power fail to recognise the real motivation behind these conversions. Young people have little faith left in society, thanks to poor educational opportunities and a falling number of job vacancies. Left with little chance of improving their economic and social prospects, some of them get brainwashed by ISIS recruiters who promise them money and glory. This is not altogether surprising. It is also evident that Muslims in India feel…

SALMAN KHAN HAS had his first flop after a long time and there is no mystery to it. People will swallow anything from a superstar, but not excruciating boredom. If Tubelight had been made as an Indie movie on a budget of Rs 2 crore with Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the lead actor without Kabir Khan as its director, it might have had a slim hope of winning an award or two at a film festival. But that is about it. The court of an audience paying money needs more than the idea that this is a movie with a message. Having made the mistake of watching it on the third day in a theatre that was three-fourths empty, your columnist can tell you that Tubelight does have something to leave…

T HE PLACE WAS crammed. I had queued for over an hour, and reckoned myself lucky to get in. Eventually, the star took the microphone, and as he warmed to his theme, the audience became increasingly noisy. Line after line from the platform was greeted with cheers, as the speaker rained blows on the government, skilfully exposing its rottenness and its injustices. It was as if a downtrodden people were finally rising up against their oppressors. But I felt no sense of triumph. Nor could the audience be looking forward to imminent liberation. For the year was 2017, the venue was a lecture theatre in the British Library, and the iniquitous regime was the British Raj. Not a lot at stake then, and not exactly topical. Amusingly ironic too, sitting…

FRESH FINDS RAORCHESTES CHALAZODES Also known as the Bubble Nest Frog, it was presumed to be extinct, until rediscovered in 2010 MICROHYLA SHOLIGARI It was first observed in 1997. But it was never sighted again until a team of researchers rediscovered it recently MICROHYLA LATERITE The Laterite Narrow-mouthed Frog is so tiny that can sit on a thumb. It was first sighted in a wasteland in Manipal PURPLE FROG Considered among the most elusive amphibians, it is believed to have been in existence even before the Himalayas BACK IN 2013, Ramit Singal, along with a companion, got into the habit of exploring their neighbourhood in Manipal late into the night. Carrying a flashlight and with their ears turned up for varied sounds of the night, the two would scour backyards…

EVERYONE KNOWS RUSKIN Bond. And that is the crux. Even if we have never met him, he seems familiar. Most of us first encountered him as junior school students. To read Bond’s stories was akin to ambling through his home, watching the sun set over the Himalayas, listening to the whistling thrush in the trees and ghosts clattering teacups in the drawing room. His stories were so intricately woven into his life’s experiences that to read him was to know him. He is often called India’s ‘beloved’ writer because of his influence on young readers, who regard his home in the hills as a shrine, and his post box a confessional. They send him lengthy manuscripts, first drafts of novels and poems that rhyme. He also receives melancholic letters from…

THE RENAISSANCE man of modern American filmmaking, David Lynch, defies cinematic conventions and believes that if films reflect life, they should be complex and unexplainable. Take, for instance, Eraserhead, Dune or Twin Peaks, films that sends one in a tizzy with his visceral view of reality—extreme violence, bizarre comedy and haunting beauty. And then came Blue Velvet, which won a Cannes film festival award. He was invited back to Cannes this year for a special tribute to his films. Twenty- five years ago, he brought Twin Peaks to the small screen. The saga picks up where it left off in a new limited series, which retains his surrealist aesthetic. Apart from filmmaking, you are a painter as well as a sculptor. Do you see these two forms colliding? They say…

NO, IT WASN’T racism that saw the ejection of the Meghalaya nanny, Tailin Lyngdoh, enjoying a quiet meal with her employers and a few others in the dining hall of the upper-crust Delhi Golf Club. At least on this count, Kiren Rijiju, the junior minister for Home Affairs in the Modi Sarkar, is wrong. Poor Lyngdoh found herself shown the door merely because club members reckoned that she did not appear to be ‘one of us’. The incident was a reflection of a mindset that puts a premium on one’s economic status. Her wearing the jainsem, the traditional Khasi dress, was incidental. For, a culture of exclusivity—nay, segregation—still pervades the rarefied confines of the nation’s much sought-after watering holes with the most ferociously guarded entrances. New membership is hard to…

IN THE DAYS after Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned from his successful visit to the US, a new crisis began to emerge in Sikkim. There, near the tri-junction of India, Bhutan and China, the Indian Army finds itself in a tense stand-off with the Chinese army. Much more has happened. Indian pilgrims who travel to Mansarovar every year—under an agreement with China—were turned back from the Nathu La border post. Ordinarily, these events could be interpreted as idiosyncratic Chinese behaviour that is on display off and on in remote parts of India. From Kongka La in Jammu & Kashmir to Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, China has a habit of creating ‘incidents’ in border areas. Its claim that its actions are on its own territory is no longer believed by the…

We are brought unto the earth with only a limited quantum of energy and focus. This also applies to nation states. Wise governments stay away from distractions; running a country is hard enough. Why then start a business and then continue with it in spite of desperate losses? Simply because it can. It is a testament to the Indian state’s capacity for everything but good governance, that it has for decades been subsidising Air India in the name of national pride and to keep its employees in good cheer. In return, it got a balance sheet drenched in red ink. The Government is now finally poised to offload its shares in the public carrier. Better late than never. Strategic buyers might possibly yet be found. WORD’S WORTH “Governments tend not…

SUSPECTED POEMS Gulzar Translated by Pavan K Varma Viking 144 Pages | Rs 299 IN A SONG that clings to girlhoods like mine, a girl in Gulzar’s film Ijaazat (1987)—played with attractive vulnerability by Anuradha Patel—sings ‘Mera woh saman lauta do ...’ The girl’s name was—had to be—Maya. It was a mark of love in the age of socialism— that romantic love, if it came at all, would be fleeting, and that its life could be recorded only in a love letter. It was a world so delicately private that the viewer almost felt guilty to be eavesdropping on the conversation between the lovers. The things catalogued in the love letter that Maya wanted back from her lover were so non-materialist that they could be the stuff of a joke…

THE HAY FESTIVAL preceded the UK’s general election by a few days, so chronologically speaking, this column should have appeared before the last one which was about Theresa May’s shock results and the British media’s partisan handling of it. But what is more important? A literary festival, however much admired and venerable, or a nation going to the ballot? I would like to believe it’s the former, but I am not sure I can win that debate. Let’s phrase it another way: which of the two events is of a more immediate nature? No argument there—elections before a litfest. As it happens, the Hay Festival gave enough signs of what was to come at the elections, if only people had read between the lines. To recap, in the British general…

‘BETWEEN THE IDEA. And the reality. Between the motion. And the act. Between an old father’s love. And a young son’s desire for power’, to misquote TS Eliot, ‘Falls the shadow.’ And there don’t come shadows lengthier than the fractious world of Saudi royalty. King Salman may have always wanted to bequeath Saudi Arabia to his favourite son Mohammed bin Salman (popularly referred to as MBS), but it couldn’t have been easy appointing him heir. There were other royals in this medieval soap opera, dozens and dozens of ambitious half-brothers and other relatives who saw themselves in line under a tradition that has ignored the idea of primogeniture. The most powerful amongst them, an elder nephew, was awaiting his coronation when he found himself divested of his right to accession.…

WE’VE PASSED MIDSUMMER, the wonderful time in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere when the sun barely sets. It really is the middle of summer, now that May and June—when the leaves are lime green and soft and the flowers are at their best—are over and we are in the second, heavier part of summer when greens darken and warmth bathes us. Like clockwork, the media begins publishing stories of heatwaves, Indian summers, ‘summer in the city’, which sunscreen to use and the fact that everyone can wear shorts, even to office. I suspect they recycle the same story every year. Over the last couple of weeks, the heat was unbearable. Just as northern India lacks central heating for the cold snap, so do we lack air-conditioning and fans…

“If you’re trying to build a personality on stage, if you want people to relate to it, to like it—or dislike it, whatever it is— you have to be something. You have to have an identity” TARANA MARWAH TARANA MARWAH remembers having a decisive conversation with her father when they’d gone out for a long walk many years ago. They were talking about music. “He was like, ‘If this is something you want to do, you have to start taking it seriously now’,” she recalls. “I was seven.” Her father, who plays the harmonium and tabla, had introduced her to classic rock and old Bollywood music early on, instilling a musical curiosity in her. Growing up in Canada, Marwah began learning the keyboard, and is a classically trained player. She…

REPORTING PAKISTAN Meena Menon Viking 384 Pages | Rs 599 MEENA MENON DID not spend more than nine months in Pakistan, so she does not claim to write as an expert on all things Pakistani. Yet this book has a special value because it is simultaneously an account by one of the last Indian reporters living—albeit for a brief while—in a Pakistani environment, as well as a depressing description of the downward spiral in Delhi’s official relations with Islamabad. The engaging and evocative manner in which it has been written makes the book worth reading. The period she was in Pakistan was tumultuous. It saw the election of Nawaz Sharif as its Prime Minister, followed by its army’s efforts to cut him to size; 2014 saw a vicious terrorist offensive…

Work Comes First Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif are leaving their personal differences aside and putting up a united front to promote Jagga Jasoos. The actors, who ended their relationship last year amidst intense media scrutiny, have sportingly been facing the press and taking all sorts of intrusive questions during the promotional tour of their much-delayed film. Last week, tabloids ran a report that Katrina had declared she wouldn’t be working with Ranbir again after this film, but Ranbir has clarified that Katrina was misquoted; that she was only joking that he had become unprofessional and difficult to work with (so they weren’t going to be making movies together anymore); and he insists that journalists had deliberately misconstrued her words. “We’ll be working together for a long time,” he says.…