Table of contents for 07 August 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Ram Nath Kovind’s appointment as President of India brings fresh hope for the millions in the country who are born into poverty and/or low-caste families (‘The Kovind Effect’, July 31st, 2017). Every time a Dalit or a poverty-stricken person makes it big, people are again reminded that no dream is too big or too small to be realised. On a political note, however, it remains to be seen if the new President will be able to do the nation proud and fulfil his promises a to Indian citizens. Presidents such as Pranab Mukherjee and APJ Abdul Kalam have set a certain benchmark for what people expect from future office holders. A president must be more than just a figurehead, but also contribute to the cultural,…

VICTORIAS MAY FINALLY ride into the sunset. For outsiders, that sentence will make no sense, but Mumbaikars will know what it means: that the familiar clip-clop of horses near the Gateway of India and at Nariman Point will no longer be heard. If you look at old photographs of the city, you will see many of them. In fact, horse-drawn carriages were the sole means of transport for the well-off. Victorias weren’t like the ubiquitous tonga seen in many parts of India which had just two wheels; Victorias were four-wheelers, more spacious, rather grand in fact, the perfect way to make an entry into the Taj Mahal Hotel. You will even find a description of them in the Oxford Dictionary (‘Historical. A light four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage with a collapsible hood,…

SOME 40-ODD years into India’s independence, just as winds of change began to sweep across the country in 1991, a science programme, Turning Point, appeared on Doordarshan. It was hosted by the actor-playwright Girish Karnad and explained scientific concepts to viewers. And whose real job, as revealed at the end of the show, was to help this deeply God-fearing nation ‘develop a scientific temper’. One of the most engaging aspects of the show was the section that came at the end. A scientist, Professor Yash Pal, would pick up a postcard and read out a question sent by a viewer. And then he would demystify some scientific phenomenon in a simple, lucid and engaging style. What Pal was doing was not just making science comprehensible, he was introducing science to…

I HAVE A confession to make; and unlike many confessions, this one is not made sheepishly. Before the recently concluded Women’s World Cup took place, I hadn’t ever watched an entire women’s cricket match. I watched my first (men’s) Test match in 1969, aged seven, and since then, all my cricket has been unwaveringly male. In this, I am not unlike many thousands of other cricket-watchers, and chauvinism has nothing to do with it. My habits are not an expression of preference for the male game so much as a result of the exclusion of women’s cricket from public view. Women’s international cricket has been around in India since the early 1970s, but it has never been reported or televised properly. Things weren’t much better in England and Australia, the…

LIKE MOST OF his puritanical predecessors in the Stalinist confines of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan is a reluctant conversationalist. His interactions with the media are always guarded. He belongs to a generation of Marxists taught to be tight-lipped about the goings-on of the party apparatus, unlike the CPM’s younger General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, a former student leader who rose to the top echelons of the party. Interestingly, Yechury is said to have told a few reporters in the Central Hall of Parliament recently that the decision on whether he should return to the Rajya Sabha for a third term with Congress backing “would be clinched by voting”. In direct contrast to Kerala’s Chief Minister, Yechury’s penchant for humouring reporters with spicy details of…

Indologist and philosopher THOSE IN INDIA who engage with the country’s past are mostly at two ends of a spectrum. At one end are those who glorify the India of yore as a ‘sone ki chidiya’, a prosperous land of wise people considered superior to the West before foreign marauders came knocking. On the other end are those who see its past as degenerate, and, influenced by Indology, want the modern nation state to sever its umbilical cord from old traditions. One of the ways they try to put this in motion is by asking for ancient Indian texts—like the two great epics—to be read exclusively in terms of the ‘Brahminic ideologies’ that allegedly inspired them. They thus deny these texts philosophical relevance and a message that transcends their time.…

A COMMUNITY THAT WAS once maligned in mainstream US culture, South Asians appear to have gained a new prominence in recent years. With the rise of stars like Riz Ahmed, Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari, it has never been a better time to be of South Asian origin in the US entertainment industry. The same cannot be said for the mainstream art world. That is why a new exhibition of works by American artists from the South Asian diaspora, currently showing in New York, matters. ‘Lucid Dreams and Distant Vision: South Asian Art in the Diaspora’, held at the Asia Society in New York (in conjunction with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Centre), is not the first time the Asia Society has shown works by South Asian diaspora artists, but…

POCKET PIKETTY: AN EXPLAINER ON THE BIGGEST ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE CENTURY Jesper Roine Speaking Tiger 160 Pages | Rs 399 OF ALL THE questions stirred up by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (2014), the most relevant might well be this: Is inequality too important to be left to economists? It arises again, now that Swedish researcher Jesper Roine has ventured out to rescue readers knocked cold by that data-laden groan-evoker of a volume with Pocket Piketty, his handy little guide to explain—ahem—‘the biggest economics book of the century’. Hype aside, it does a fine job of the original book’s primary purpose. It pricks your conscience alright. And that too with the ease of a pickpocket who’d have you kick yourself for your negligence. What Piketty has startled…

Telling It Like It Is It’s good to know that there are some people you can always count on to be disruptors of the status quo. Salman Khan, or the ‘rock star among movie-stars’ as his fans have taken to calling him, revealed once again why he should never be taken for granted. At the opening press conference for the IIFA weekend held in New York, the actor minced no words when the mike was passed to him. It had been a long afternoon of the emcee announcing dozens of sponsors who’d bankrolled the big show, while stars like Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Shahid Kapoor and Salman were expected to smile and applaud each time a brand was named and thanked for its association. Most stars, evidently jet-lagged and looking…

WHEN THE MORALITY play of socialists reaches its finale, the stage gets littered with fallen comrades and broken pledges. A bit of Shakespeare with a dash of farce. Today, the ageing, exhausted children of Lohia may have been co-opted by the Establishment, but they still retain their capacity to shatter the idyll, and quicken the pulse. Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar are two monumental towers of a hoary legacy. And on the night of July 26th in Patna, one of them listened to his conscience, the other to his brood, and the fallen and the liberated in Pataliputra once again provided a dramatic twist to Indraprastha. When Nitish returned to his natural ally to form an NDA government in Patna, it was an act of cleansing, a moment of liberation.…

NITIN GADKARI HAS made transport his pet domain ever since he was a minister in Maharashtra’s Shiv Sena-BJP government in the mid-1990s. He was responsible for a slew of flyovers that considerably helped Mumbai meet its impossible commuting demands. As Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways now, his department is among the better performing ones, and even if it has not met its own hyper-ambitious targets, still miles ahead of what the UPA did in highway development. Gadkari has a common-sense approach to transport. Some of his public statements include saying the Road Transport Department should be scrapped and that a large proportion of driving licences are bogus. He is smart enough to know that any technology which has attained critical mass is impossible to dam. Under him, the…

TWO YEARS AGO, I had gone to meet Father Davis Chiramel in the town of Thrissur in Kerala. In 2009, he had given his kidney to a Hindu electrician in the village where he had his parish. It had been done in the most casual of manner. Some villagers who were on a fund collection drive to purchase a kidney for the man had come to him, and the priest, recognising that it was illegal to buy an organ, had simply offered his own. News of the deed made him a spiritual celebrity of sorts in Kerala and led to his floating an organisation, Kidney Federation of India, and starting a movement for organ donation. His office was on the first floor of a shopping complex and I had to…

‘FUCK ISIS’. It must have taken considerable anger to scribble these words on the dome of the Al Nuri Mosque, from where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced his caliphate in 2014. But somebody did. Beheading would have been the self-proclaimed caliph’s way to deal with the offender, but since the victory of Iraqi forces in Mosul earlier this month, things have changed. On July 9th, Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service, among other forces, prevailed over the Islamic State in the city and now stand guard outside the ruins of that historical monument. Ironically, the 12th century place of worship was brought down by men who claimed to be warriors of God. Brigadier Abdul Amin al-Kazraji of the Iraqi army’s Golden Division says that ISIS used car bombs to demolish the mosque. This part…

LONG BEFORE CRINGEPOP became an officially enshrined genre of music, Vennu Mallesh, an aspiring scriptwriter from Hyderabad, crashed the gates of YouTube with a painfully funny and arguably delusional music video. It went: ‘It’s my life whatever I wanna do/ It’s my life wherever I wanna go/ It’s my life whomever I wanna love oo oo… I always search good in bad/ And I search bad in good/ I am a very good bad boy’. The music was a tonal soup with bad drum fills, the words were straight out of a fevered dream and the delivery was bland as water, yet Mallesh seemed totally into it, eyes shut and head swaying passionately to the jangle of the guitar as though recording the hit of the decade. The song, his…

NICOLE KIDMAN radiates warmth without the slightest hint of a movie star when she walks into a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Her work has taken her from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut, to Baz Luhrmann’s decadent musical, Moulin Rouge, to the war drama Cold Mountain, to, most recently, Lion, in which she plays an adoptive mother. The latest entrant to the Oscar Award-winning actor’s illustrious filmography is awardwinning director Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, set in the US Civil War period, where Kidman plays the headmistress of an all-girls’ school. You have made some courageous choices in choosing the roles you play. What motivates you? It just comes from the love of filmmakers and auteurs. I love auteurs and directors who have a strong vision.…

THE MORNING A New Delhi daily reported that the RBI had stopped having Rs 2,000 notes printed, and instead the security presses were furiously rolling out new Rs 200 currency notes to be introduced shortly, a number of opposition MPs looked bothered by the news. A few hours later, when Parliament met, the Samajwadi Party’s Naresh Aggarwal—who a couple of days earlier had had some nasty words to use against revered Hindu gods and goddesses that were expunged from the record—got up in the Rajya Sabha on an impromptu point of order. He wanted to know whether the news report was true, and, if so, why was the printing of the Rs 2,000 notes ended. In response, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley explained that a sufficient quantity of the big-denomination notes…

THESE ARE CONTENTIOUS times in India. After almost three decades of weak governments, during which regional parties and state governments filled the power vacuum, there is a strong Central Government in New Delhi. This is bound to cause a disequilibrium of sorts between politics, which often treads along regional grooves, and sound governance, something that requires a strong central authority. The need of the times is a careful calibration of political ideas, ideologies and even plain words to prevent any damage to the foundational ideas of the republic. On July 25th, the Madras High Court passed a judgment saying that ‘Vande Mataram’, a hymn that has inspired millions of Indians, should be compulsorily sung in schools, offices and industries in Tamil Nadu. The court said the hymn should be sung…

Disruptive innovation is part of business jargon now, used and abused by any consultant who wants to sound clever. However, the most potent disruption is not even an innovation. It is the giving of something absolutely free, something which your competitors used to charge for. And that is the innovation that Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani unveiled at his company’s AGM by announcing free smartphones along with cheap data plans. Will it change the telecom industry? Yes. But will Reliance profit from it? Not for now. That is some way off, and the company must hope that in the interim no one else comes out with a truly innovative disruption. WORD’S WORTH “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significiant market share. No chance. It’s a $500…

INFERIOR: HOW SCIENCE GOT WOMEN WRONG AND THE NEW RESEARCH THAT’S REWRITING THE STORY Angela Saini Fourth Estate 280 Pages | £12.99 SOME YEARS AGO, I wrote an unremarkable blogpost about the lizards I study in which I said that we would understand these lizards better if we paid attention to both males and females instead of thinking only about male lizards’ biology, as many scientists are curiously wont to do. After all, ignoring half of anything prevents us from painting a complete picture of it, and you would think that scientists are in search of complete pictures. But two comments on that post epitomised much of science’s calcified view towards feminism: one commenter used the post to poke fun at his feminist wife, and the other explained, scientifically of…