Table of contents for 14 August 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Religion has become one of the most volatile subjects today (‘Among the Good Believers’, August 7th, 2017). India itself has been witness to some of the most horrific communal riots in recent history. Even now, religious tensions are rife, revealing deep wounds in the psyche of a nation that is still reeling from one of its biggest conflicts ever: Partition. However, it is also true that communal behaviour has got something to do with [majority or minority] status, rather than just the specifics of religion. It’s only fair to say that the entire blame cannot rest on religious belief. The example of Ladakh, where Muslims and Buddhists, among other communities, live in harmony and address other aspects of life such as conservation, is a good…

TWENTY-NINE AMERICAN states have allowed marijuana for medicinal purposes over the last two decades, but the federal administration under President Donald Trump is addressing it, with little evidence, as a narcotic correlated to violent crimes. Legal consumption of marijuana is far from settled as a policy even in the developed world. Unexpectedly, this week saw a Union minister of India, Maneka Gandhi, recommending that marijuana should be legalised in India and that is just extraordinary because of where it is coming from. Indian politicians almost never take a stand on issues that are perceived to be tricky, even if they are self-evident to teenagers. A US survey by Gallup last month found that a little under 50 per cent of Americans had tried marijuana at least once. In 1969, the…

NINE YEARS AGO, when KS Sunil Kumar quit a stable job at Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, a hallowed public sector institution in Bengaluru, to join the engineering sciences wing of Satyam Computer Services, he thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime. His father, a handloom weaver from a village 110 km from Bengaluru, was jittery about the move, but Kumar made an informed choice. The new job would bring more money, a chance to travel the world and work on-site at the offices of aeronautics majors, and the excitement of being part of an industry that had grown by leaps and bounds since 1991. The frailty of the IT dream did not hit home even when the scandal-ridden company got acquired by Tech Mahindra. An aircraft structural design engineer, Kumar…

WHEN A SALMAN Khan film like Tubelight tanks in India, you know that something is changing. When a film about female desire like Lipstick Under My Burkha breaks records (earning more than double its projected figure), you know that change is afoot. This is not to say that the era of massentertainment blockbusters is done. There will always be takers for the Rs 100-crore money spinner. But, slowly and surely, the window for films that are closer to our reality seems to be widening, and with good reason. In the 1970s, it was called the ‘parallel cinema movement’; in the 1980s it became ‘art house’; in the 1990s it emerged as the ‘new wave’; and in the last decade, we simply called it ‘films with meaning’. Simple, bold and relatable…

THE POLITICAL COUP in Bihar caught everyone—apart from Nitish Kumar, Amit Shah and maybe one or two more individuals in Patna and Delhi—by total surprise. It was executed with speed and masterly precision, so much so that the whole drama was over in nearly 36 hours. Lalu Prasad, the Congress leadership and the rest of the anti-BJP opposition barely had time to react, let alone organise an effective fightback. India is not exactly unfamiliar with situations where political equations change dramatically and abruptly, without warning. Many of us remember the bombshell that Babu Jagjivan Ram and Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna dropped in 1977 when they walked out of Indira Gandhi’s Congress and injected new life into a dispirited opposition that had barely recovered from the Emergency. Some of us may even…

THE WIDELY EXPECTED reduction in the Reserve Bank of India’s policy rate finally took place on August 1st when the bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided on a 25-basis- point—quarter of a percentage point—lowering of its repo rate from 6.25 to 6 per cent. There had been speculation for a while that India’s central bank would reduce its policy rate. But as with any other central bank, the RBI has a reputation for caution in conducting monetary policy. The case for treading carefully while easing credit availability has a sound basis in India’s macroeconomic history. Two factors lie behind this conservative approach. One, in India it is tough to forecast inflation meaningfully. This is best exemplified by the volatility in the RBI’s own figures on inflationary expectations. Two, once inflation…

Censorship is a state of mind. It is also an exercise of power. In the hands of those who have disdain for imagination and creativity, it is a combination of both combined with pettiness. The Central Board of Film Certification is no exception. It asked for 48 cuts in Babumoshai Bandookbaaz, leading to Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who stars in it, to comment that if implemented it will turn the movie into a short film. And the cuts were demanded after it was awarded an Adults certification. What would happen to a 60-year-old who hears a cuss word? Nothing. But it doesn’t matter. Power is its own end in the hands of a censor. WORD’S WORTH “There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful,…

SANDEEP SHUKLA IS the Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair Professor at IIT Kanpur. Along with his colleague Professor Manindra Agrawal, he set up the interdisciplinary Centre for Cybersecurity and Cyber Defence of Critical Infrastructure at the institute, which is shortly expected to launch India’s first industrial-scale cyber security test bed for power and manufacturing equipment. The State University of New York alumnus works closely with the Government. He serves on two panels created by the standing committee on cyber security at the RBI and also advises the Railways on its signalling systems. Recently, Shukla and Agrawal presented a study on cyber crime to the Parliamentary Committee on Finance, warning of an escalation in digital offences following demonetisation and espousing an urgency to fight the menace. Shukla spoke to Executive Editor…

EARLY IN HIS new book My Hanuman Chalisa (Rupa; Rs 295; 170 pages)—a verse-by-verse discussion of one of Hinduism’s most popular devotional hymns—mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik offers an insight about the ‘north’ and the ‘south’ in the Ramayana. These are not literal references to north and south India, he says, but metaphors for states of mind: the north is an empathetic, caring world while the south stands for insecurity and covetousness. And in between them ‘is the land of the monkeys, our animal core, that can move either way, towards Rama or towards Ravana’. Speaking to Pattanaik on the phone, I tell him that on reading this sort of analysis—and there is plenty else like it in his books— he comes across like a literary or film critic who offers subtextual…

IT WAS PROBABLY some ancient Greek who coined the questionable adage that history is always written by the victors. I suppose if one reads Winston Churchill on World War II, or Romila Thapar, the post-Independence secularist, on the conquest of Vijayanagar, this Greek may have something going for him. The Brits did beat the Nazis, and Gandhi and Nehru led the fight for Independence, and the Raj retreated, leaving the victors with a divided nation and the saving instinct for secularism. But then I turn to the other ultimate losers who didn’t write their own stories but are celebrated as the heroes and heroines of them. Julius Caesar wasn’t a winner, but his place in history is assured and dwarfs any annals of Brutus, Cassius, Cinna or the others who…

A COUNTRY, A SOCIETY, a community—and their values—are showcased and made great by their art and culture. As guardians of this heritage, museums play a significant civic role in preserving history, building awareness, and shaping cultural identity. Globally, the notion of the museum and its defined social role has changed much in the centuries since its conception. Apart from their traditional roles of acquiring, preserving and sharing rich collections, museums now play an increasing role in supporting the development of communities. This is a shift that demonstrably begins in the late 20th century with a changing understanding of a museum’s role and reach: as greater emphasis is placed on audience-driven and experiential deliverables, and the success of a museum is measured not simply by its collection and content but by…

Bhai Does It Again Salman Khan’s love-hate affair with the media continues, and this past weekend, the superstar demonstrated just how much he enjoys frustrating journalists. Two groups of mediapersons— photographers and television reporters—had assembled at two different points alongside the red carpet that led into an awards ceremony, hoping to catch stars for pictures and sound-bites, respectively, as they made their way to the event. The actors dutifully posed for pictures first, then a few feet away stopped to talk to the group of bite-hungry reporters. When it was Salman’s turn, however, he happily stopped for photographs but smiled cheekily as he began to walk past the reporters. Spotting the look of desperation and disappointment on their faces, he taunted them, asking: “Bite chahiye?” (You want a bite?) When…

WHAT’S MORE FAKE, the news or the politician? In a world where the commander-in-chief launches his deadliest weapons from his cell phone in the earliest hours of the day, and a new Cold War, simulated from newsrooms and presidential towers, puts Washington and Moscow in a comic-strip standoff, truth is a dispute, power is a delusion, and the media is Me. In another age, the philosopher politician extolled the virtues of ‘living in truth’. In our age, when the presidency of the United States is pure reality television, it’s war on truth, the theatre shifting from the mainstream newsroom to the unrestricted realm of social media. ‘My use of social media is not presidential,’ Donald Trump had tweeted, ‘it’s modern day presidential.’ Literally, and gloriously for its user, it’s the…

FOR MORE THAN a year in the run-up to the 2014 General Election, Arvind Panagariya had played a pivotal role in hardselling the Narendra Modi brand of ‘economics’ and reviving a debate over the Gujaratversus- Kerala models. Along with his mentor, the trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Panagariya also locked horns with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen for what they called his ‘anti-growth assertions’. As early as 2012, the duo had already co-authored a book lauding the Gujarat model of development, which they argued was about growth and private entrepreneurship. In India’s Tryst with Destiny: Debunking Myths that Undermine Progress and Addressing New Challenges, the authors also insisted that it was a growthoriented policy—the Gujarat model—that had delivered results even in Kerala, a state that had earlier been spotlighted by Sen and…

HAVING STARTED IN 2010 with the objective of identifying residents using biometric markers, the Aadhaar experiment has grown in size and scale over the years. Not only has it has ignited our collective imagination, it has been contested at the Supreme Court as an intrusion of our privacy. Its technology design, which permits private entities to read its database for the authentication of customers, and its supporting legal framework, which places the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in a unique position as the custodian and regulator of the Aadhaar database, have come under the judicial scanner. On first glance, Aadhaar appears to renew the classic debate between the ‘constructive’, largely represented by engineers and technocrats, and the ‘critical’, as civil society actors, NGOs and publicinterest motivated lawyers often get…

THE BROKEN LADDER Anirudh Krishna Penguin Random House 416 Pages | Rs 499 WERE ALL OF India’s poor born into poverty? Why are they forced to go to schools of inferior quality that leave them ill-prepared for the modern economy? Why do women find it harder to get higher education and better jobs? Why do so many people spend their whole lives working, and end up with no provision for retirement? Why do our less-privileged face discrimination at the time of hiring? Why is the quality of education in private schools so much higher than in public schools attended by the poorer majority? Why do high-quality civil servants deliver low-quality governance? Why does India’s democracy continue to deliver uneven outcomes? Anirudh Krishna—a bureaucratturned- professor of political science and public policy…

FIVE YEARS AGO, while spring cleaning her parents’ home after her father’s death, Bakula Nayak discovered a file that contained 500-odd letters that her parents had written to each other. “I’d always thought of my parents as the most non-romantic couple, ever,” Nayak says, “They were always arguing, disagreeing; you know, typical middle-class parents who were putting their lives and priorities in the backseat, doing their best to provide us children the happiest childhood possible. I’d never seen them even hug each other in front of us. But the letters were full of love and passion; they revealed to me a side of my parents I’d never ever known.” That revelation, in a sense, became the starting point of Bengaluru-based visual artist Bakula Nayak’s journey into art. The letters, full…