Table of contents for 18 September 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Salman Rushdie’s world, caught in history and fraught with imagination, is one that always manages to capture the chaos of today’s reality (‘Novelist of the Now’, September 11th, 2017). In Midnight’s Children, he brought us magical realism set in the time of Partition. In his latest, The Golden House, he looks at the new world order, perfectly captured in his words and analogies. The characters of Joker and the bat-woman, for instance, brings the new American reality into perspective, where the Joker becomes the president and a new America emerges from its dark nooks and corners. Importantly, the immigrant in him emerges too. Mumbai has been close to him, and the city once again becomes a resident in his world. It will be interesting to…

THE SHIV SENA may have officially changed Bombay’s name to Mumbai over 15 years ago, but the two still co-exist as they did before. They may live together in the same physical space, but they are two distinct entities, one shutting out the other, generally unsuccessfully. You see this most clearly during the city’s—and Maharashtra’s—biggest festival of the year, Ganeshotsav. Mumbai celebrates it noisily, raucously; Bombay tries to shut out the noise with double-glazed windows and air-conditioning. But however hard we citizens of Bombay may try, we can’t blank out Mumbaikars completely (if at all): there we are in our cars, windows up, music and AC on full blast, but outside are Mumbaikars dancing in the streets, their multiple percussions thumping so loud that even the cannons in Tchaikovsky’s 1812…

SHE IS FIERCE and outspoken. She does not accommodate outsized egos and gives the appearance of a bull in the delicate china shop of Bollywood, willing to call out people for who they are, be it Karan Johar, Hrithik Roshan or Saif Ali Khan. This was visible again last week in TV interviews where she took on several celebrities. In India, stardom is all about worship. It is about people bathing a poster of Rajinikanth’s latest release in milk, of queuing up outside Galaxy Apartments or Mannat for hours to catch a fleeting glimpse of Salman or Shah Rukh Khan celebrating their birthdays. Ranaut’s appeal—and it is immense—is different. It does not rest on the deification of a superstar, but on relatability. A person just like you and me, from…

THE SUPREME COURT’S Triple Talaq judgment has generally been welcomed by women’s groups and political parties, and even been treated with circumspection by those, like the Jamiat Ulama-e Hind, who have declared their opposition to it. For it is also understood as being a largely symbolic and certainly not revolutionary decision that simply brings India in line with Pakistan, Bangladesh and other Muslim countries as far as Muslim personal law is concerned. Unlike the Shah Bano case of the 1980s, when Muslims protested against the courts granting divorced women alimony by setting aside their personal law, there has been no great mobilisation for or against this issue by anyone. But everyone also recognises that the judgment’s importance is about precedent. For Muslim seminaries and many ordinary believers, it represents the…

WHEN BJP PRESIDENT Amit Shah went into a huddle on a mid-August afternoon for over two hours at 11, Ashoka Road with 30 other party leaders, including Union ministers, it was clear that he meant business. Shah had identified 120 Lok Sabha seats outside BJP stronghold zones that had to be worked on, and he assigned five each to 25 of the leaders present. Three days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah spent four hours at a meeting with 13 chief ministers of BJPruled states and six deputy chief ministers at the party headquarters, and the Prime Minister asked the chief ministers to ensure that all Central welfare schemes were implemented by 2022, the 75th anniversary of India’s independence. They all had to go into mission mode to achieve…

HOW INDIA SEES THE WORLD: KAUTILYA TO THE 21ST CENTURY Shyam Saran Juggernaut 320 Pages | Rs 599 IN MID-JUNE, when a crisis erupted over an attempt by China to construct a road in a remote plateau in Bhutan, India faced one its most severe foreign policy tests of recent times. Not only was the confrontation with a militarily superior antagonist, the eyeball-to-eyeball face-off took place in the territory of a third country. It was not uncommon to hear that India had made a grave miscalculation and that an armed conflict was just a matter of time. If this were not enough, there was plenty of noise from the Chinese side about ‘dire consequences’ and other such rhetoric. Yet, when the crisis was defused 78 days later, many held it…

PETER PARKER returns home to stay with his aunt after enjoying his experience with the Avengers. All he wants to do is blend into his neighbourhood and lead a normal life, but when evil Vulture arrives upon the scene, he is forced into action. Spider-Man: Homecoming is the 16th instalment of the Marvel comic and it stays pretty much close to the vest. Tom Holland plays Peter Parker and the film is entertaining and fresh and is having a superb box-office run. We meet with Tom at the London Hotel in West Hollywood, where he is busy promoting the film. He’s young and fresh and personable. There’s Superman, there’s Batman and Iron Man. So what makes Spider Man so unique? The main difference for me is that I’m younger than…

OPINION HURTS. It unsettles belief systems built on comforting certainties. It questions ideas aspiring to be the only truth, or the only necessary truth. It challenges, ridicules, belittles, humiliates, denies posturing the legitimacy it seeks in the marketplace of freely constructed absolutes. Still… An opinion is not an argument. It may even reflect a closed mind. It may not enlighten as much as it enrages. Its strength is directlyproportional to the confidence with which it seeks authenticity. It dresses up falsities as conviction. Its righteousness is only matched by its exclusiveness. Its moral flexibility is a reflection of convenient lies. Does it really matter? The divisiveness of opinion gives democracies the delight of being inconclusive. Its potential for polarisation adds an argumentative tension to their choices. It shatters the cosiness…

IN THE LATEST annual report of Berkshire Hathway, the greatest investor of our times Warren Buffett writes about his criteria for buying businesses: ‘We will not engage in unfriendly takeovers. We can promise complete confidentiality and a very fast answer—customarily within five minutes—as to whether we’re interested. We prefer to buy for cash, but will consider issuing stock when we receive as much in intrinsic business value as we give. We don’t participate in auctions.’ The italics are his, which tells you he is kind of serious about the idea. On the other hand, Buffett does participate in auctions. A private lunch with him, the proceeds of which were to go to a charity, was auctioned off this June and netted $2.68 million. The moral of the story is that…

In 2013, ONE OF the country’s largest television networks, Star India, got into an unheard-of deal with Salman Khan, paying him a jaw-dropping sum of Rs 500 crore to broadcast his films for the next five years, till the end of 2017. Star TV’s Executive Vice-President Hemal Jhaveri called it a “first of its kind contract signed by any actor in Indian showbiz” and “a mammoth and a complex deal which has been chalked out considering Salman’s box office success over the past few years”. Back then, TV channels were outdoing one another to land the biggest films with the biggest stars, offering huge sums, getting into bidding wars and signing multiple-film deals. And film producers were looking at television for a large chunk of their earnings. Today, Salman Khan’s…

IN THE 1950S, the administration of US President Dwight D Eisenhower would periodically threaten to vapourise China with atomic weapons. Barring the Soviet Union, no other country had them then. Far from being intimidated, as the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had hoped, Chairman Mao Zedong called in the American journalist Edgar Snow and famously declared that he considered the Bomb a ‘Paper Tiger’ and, further, that 300 million—half the population of the country at the time—would survive a nuclear holocaust. It was the second intimation to Washington that Communist China was no pushover, the first being the People’s Liberation Army’s entry into the Korean War in October 1950 as promised by Beijing if General Douglas MacArthur’s forces crossed the Yalu River. It was not that the US…

THE EPIC CITY: THE WORLD ON THE STREETS OF CALCUTTA Kushanava Choudhury Bloomsbury 208 Pages | Rs 499 WHEN MY FRIEND’S father, a journalist of three decades, drives me around Calcutta, we visit the train crossing next to the Hoogly river, the Chinese breakfast market at dawn, the ferry to Howrah, and the idol-maker’s workshops in North Calcutta. This is the city of an old Calcutta family that has lived in the same house on Park Street for generations. The Epic City is a different version of the same reverence for a beloved, ageing place where trams still run and poets still gather to share their work in a room tucked away in a bylane. Setting aside the picturesque, Choudhury introduces us to the intriguing, baffling aspects of Calcutta. He…

The Supportive Other So, it’s out: Fukrey stars Ali Fazal and Richa Chadha are a couple. The actors made their relationship public at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week where Ali attended the world premiere of his new film Victoria & Abdul, while Richa stood by his side, happily playing the role of proud girlfriend. They have reportedly been seeing each other for roughly a year now, and contrary to rumours that they began dating when they started shooting the Fukrey sequel some months ago, insiders say they’d remained close since after completing the first film and got together when both were single last year. Richa reportedly explored Venice with a common friend who was also travelling with them, while Ali spent the bulk of his visit doing press…

THE RESHUFFLE OF the Modi Cabinet has left many in the ruling party extremely angry. Their failing to make the grade in what’s said to be the last recast of the Central team before the next General Election was one thing. What’s particularly galling was the induction of Hardeep Singh Puri and KJ Alphons, both of whom joined the BJP on the eve of the 2014 polls after retiring from government service. Senior leaders with multiple Lok Sabha terms under their belt are upset that their claims were ignored in favour of ‘outsiders’ in search of post-retirement glory. It’s a case of ghar ki murgi dal baraabar, they believe, of the homebred being taken for granted, rather than lack of talent within the party. Ministerial spots for RK Singh, former…

AT KIM JONG-UN’S age, any normal person would either be busy fending for himself in the world or trying hard to build a career. But Kim, who is yet to touch 40, is busy playing a dangerous game with nuclear weapons and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Were it not for the acute danger this involves for the Korean peninsula, this crazed person would not be taken seriously anywhere. There is, however, something macabre about a merry Kim as he gleefully looks at weapons and missiles made by scientists. Just days ago, pictures showed him laughing as his minions went about explaining the weapon at hand: a hydrogen bomb. The absurdity continued in the evening when North Korean TV broadcast the ‘happy news’—announced by the now-familiar ‘pink lady’ whose fake enthusiasm…

Aung San Suu Kyi, once a great symbol of resistance against despotism, has within a year of coming to power in Myanmar become, in the minds of her former admirers, what her oppressors had been. Her fall in their esteem is a result of the crackdown on the country’s minority Rohingyas, resulting in their mass exodus. She is complicit in their persecution, they say, and defends it even now that the scale of the crisis is apparent. The values she espoused as a victim have been forgotten in the name of national security and action against terrorism. It might bolster her political position in Myanmar, but history has different pedestals for icons who choose self-interest over the values they fought for. WORD’S WORTH ‘Persecution is not an original feature in…

THE FIRST TIME I cried watching a film, I knew nothing of dignity. Yours truly had bawled, acquiring nuisance value enough to be evacuated from the hall in parental arms. It was a movie called Maa and a baby elephant was stuck on a railway track as a train came hurtling down. There would be a hero to the rescue, of course, but that’s irrelevant; a runny reflex had revealed itself and any intervention— heroic, motherly or otherwise—to smother it has proven a doomed exercise ever since. If it’s an authentic Hindi movie, an all-blurry cry is assured. That it’s a jolly good thing struck me only in the early 1990s. It began as a dry observation after being sent off on a market research assignment to study theatre audiences…

A DECADE IS A long time in the life of a culture, and much changed during the 1980s. But arguably far more changed, and changed unthinkably, between 1989 and 1993. The American writer Benjamin Kunkel, founder-editor of the journal n+1, said in an interview published in 2014: “… I’m now old enough to remember when the Cold War just seemed like a permanent geological feature of the world. And then it just vanished. Then people would talk about how Japan was going to be a wealthier economy than the United States in 10 years. It would have seemed totally insane that there was going to be a black president and that gay people were going to get married…” Kunkel is telling us how difficult it was, and always is, to…