Table of contents for 02 October 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The present Government’s efforts to recognise sub-categories in the state government jobs meant for OBCs in as many as 11 states is a step that speaks for itself (‘Modi’s Mandal’, September 25th, 2017). History has taught us that it is in the Hindi heartland where the OBCs have been backing regional outfits. It has been interesting to follow the political trends since the new government has come, especially with their efforts to mobilise the OBCs, who have rightfully been called the ‘reactionary’ caste. The overhaul of the caste politics will present to us deep insights into a system that has been deeply entrenched in Indian society. We are yet to see if this will bring about any changes. Mayank Singh A CASE AGAINST NEPOTISM First,…

THE UNJUSTNESS OF existence begins with the genes handed down to us. Among the many children of the same father and mother, some will be Dawood Ibrahims and others Ibrahim Kaskars. Look at the photo of Kaskar after his arrest this week—overweight, jowly, an over-loose yellow roundneck T-shirt with a giant P on it, style that denotes a man of ordinary taste. Whereas, the images we have of his brother are in jackets and goggles, and with the hardedged gangster stare. There is no fear in Kaskar’s countenance despite the arrest, just a listlessness; as if this is also one of the weary chores that middle-aged men of the middle-class suffer, like getting on suburban trains at 10 in the morning. His brother is said to have Rs 35,000 crore…

MODERN DEMOCRACY HAS its roots in the French Revolution and there are numerous reasons given for why the French people decided to take matters in their own hands. In The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return (Profile Books; 240 pages; Rs 599), Mihir A Desai, a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School, zooms in on an unlikely cause: badly designed insurance policies To finance its wars, the French monarchy had started taking lump sums from its citizens in return for which an annuity would be paid out for the rest of their lives. However, to get as much as possible, they started giving the same annuities to people of all ages; a five-year-old and an eighty-year-old receiving equal. The five-year-old however…

COMEUPPANCE: MY EXPERIENCES IN AN INDIAN PRISON James Tooley Speaking Tiger 258 Pages | Rs 299 WHAT ARE THE chances of an English heterosexual White man, engaged in a white-collar job, running into trouble with the Indian criminal justice system and worse, getting wrongly thrown behind bars? Unusual as it might be, none of these obvious markers of privileges could come to the immediate rescue of 54-year-old James Tooley, a British professor, who had a rough encounter with the system for over four months on a visit to India in the summer of 2014. Tooley, a professor of education policy at the University of Newcastle, also known to be a champion of low-cost private schools across South Asia and Africa, was harassed, jailed, and made to suffer indignities, before he…

TO AN UNOBSERVANT onlooker, the act of weaving may seem mechanical: the rhythmic swooshing, clacking and swishing of the wooden loom, the cadence of the shuttle against the gossamer threads, the whirring of the spindle, and the perfunctory movement of a silent weaver (sometimes with a quiet helper at his side) with a stylus in a dusty workshop. To a textile connoisseur, however, this mundane sight metamorphoses into hymns, ancient chants and folk tales, echoes of wars, invasions and migrations, and tells of a community’s art, religion and music. The theatre of life itself is woven into a fabric. Kabir, one of the greatest mystic weaver-poets, compared weaving to the sacred act of creation. He wrote, ‘I have run mere cotton threads for the warp and weft. But how did…

GRANTED, WE WOULD normally avoid a mention of GST in this column, but given that almost everyone is discussing this new and potentially all-in-one tax, we must note what they are all cribbing about. Nearly three months after it was first implemented, most people feel harassed and angry at the endless glitches in its operation. Taxpayers from various socioeconomic strata find it difficult to open the designated site to make payments. Count yours truly as one of them. The topic that animates evening parties at most well-appointed living rooms these days is the seemingly unending woes of GST. You cannot avoid hearing a litany of complaints about how poorly it is being implemented. The near unanimous belief is that they rushed to implement the tax without fool-proofing all systems. Early…

THERE IS MUCH to be concerned about India’s economy. In the second quarter of this financial year, economic growth has sputtered to 5.7 per cent, below the psychologically important level of 6 per cent. Inflation, which many claimed had been ‘slayed’—the historic deflation in food prices was held as clinching evidence—is bubbling up again. A cautious central bank refused to give in to the drumbeat of cutting rates. The way matters appear at this stage, a further decrease in growth rate in the quarters ahead won’t surprise anyone. What should be done? The immediate policy priority should be to prevent the combination of rising inflation and slowing growth. That is a corner from which it is difficult to extricate the economy. This was seen earlier, in 2011, when the then…

There is a difference between lying in public and private. Those who cannot understand it are the ones who get into trouble. Like TV anchor Arnab Goswami who, at a function some years ago, embellished his reporting credentials by claiming to have had dramatic experiences during the 2002 Gujarat riots. His former boss, Rajdeep Sardesai, has now tweeted that those experiences were actually his own. Sardesai posted the link of the YouTube video titled 'Arnab Goswami talking on Gujarat Riot (sic)', and wrote, 'Wow! My friend Arnab claims his car attacked next to CM Res in Guj riots! Truth:he wasn't covering Ahmedabad riots!!' For a man who lives by the power and perpetuity of the visual image, it was somewhat foolish to not appreciate the risk-reward ratio of lies. What…

THE SPRAWLING precinct of Kabristan Maszig at Panchkuian in Agra is anything but quiet this morning. Men in white kurta pyjama walk in droves, some sitting by the graves, chanting. Others chatter as they walk past. As we make our way in, a caretaker hobbles towards us, “Not today, sir,” he tells Rajiv Saxena, the 63-year-old local journalist who is leading this small pack of visitors. “We’re here to see the grave for just a few minutes,” says Saxena, “These people are from Delhi.” The caretaker’s eyes widen with acknowledgment. “For that, definitely, go ahead,” he says. A bemused Saxena says, “I’m here a lot, mostly for this one reason. They let me go inside whenever I bring people for this purpose.” We walk into the kabristan, once a Mughal…

I DO WHAT I DO Raghuram G Rajan HarperCollins 344 Pages | Rs 699 RAJAN IS A FINE COMBINATION OF AN ACADEMIC WHO UNDERSTANDS BANKING BOTH AS A THEORIST AND AS A PRACTISING CENTRAL BANKER RAGHURAM RAJAN IS among the best and the brightest of India. At 40, he was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Last year, when he left Indian shores, he had served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for three years. That he did not go on to serve a ‘full term’ of five years led to controversy. The reverberations of his departure continue today. If the measure of a person’s attainment is his rank in a country’s governance structure, then Rajan has been very successful. That, however, is an…

I SAMPLED A 19 course tasting menu at a well known fusion restaurant in New Delhi. Of the 19 courses, only four were delicious. The rest of the courses were off-balance. Had the menu consisted of these four dishes, I would have written a rave-review of the same restaurant. Alas, the lure of the multicourse tasting menu was too overpowering for the chef. The natural (rocks) and unnatural elements (syringes) used to serve the dishes were aesthetically pleasing or whimsical to the eye, but not to the taste buds. The dishes we enjoyed included a tamarind fish preparation, and prawns in a delicate coconut broth—but these hewed close to the recipe practiced in the Malabar region for centuries. The biggest disaster was the fusion element of the dish. One of…

THREE FRIENDS decide to rob the very bank that has blown up their pension funds, leaving them clueless as to how they will pay their bills or look after their loved ones. This is the premise of Michael Caine’s latest film, Going in Style, in which he shares screen time with Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin. We meet at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. At the age of 84, Michael exudes an extraordinary amount of charm and politeness. In keeping with the premise of the film, have you ever stolen anything? I was living in London with my mother when the Blitz started and we were sent to the country. We were all Cockney boys and we had never seen apples growing on trees. We found out where…

SEPTEMBER BRINGS IN the parting kick of a departing monsoon, with the heavens resounding with rumbling claps of thunder and ear-splitting bolts of lightning. Neither of these creates music for the ears, but luckily, September also brings to the National Centre for Performing Arts music of the real kind: the Symphony Orchestra of India gets together for a season of music, presenting six concerts of exceptional quality. This year has been no different. The star of the season, we thought, would be Stephen Hough, the acclaimed pianist. He has performed sold-out recitals across the world, including Chicago, Paris, London and at New York’s Carnegie Hall as well as the Lincoln Center. His recordings have won several international awards, including Record of the Year from the prestigious Gramophone magazine. Hough’s attitude…

THERE IS SOMETHING poor about badminton on TV. It does not have the testosterone-fuelled theatrical flourish of say football, or the made-for-TV scale of cricket, or the kind of historical romance bequeathed to tennis. Its tournaments are not well known. It doesn’t have celebrated courts and venues like the other games possess. It is, at the end of the day, a game, too simple perhaps, consisting of racquets and a humble shuttlecock. Save for the occasional appearances of champions like Prakash Padukone, P Gopichand, and later Saina Nehwal, the game has grown away from people’s consciousness and the television landscape in India. Not surprising then that until recently, the most well-known thing about badminton wasn’t any of these players, or even the game itself but the actor Jeetendra, an apparition…

RAHUL GANDHI, THUS far, has not been known as a spellbinding orator or a captivating thinker. At best he has been sincere. But now he has said something genuinely interesting. The Crown Prince of the Congress has decided to come clean about the problem of dynastic politics in India. When asked in California whether the Congress party was not associated with ‘more dynastic politics’, he replied; “Actually, most parties in India have that problem … don’t get after me, that’s how the entire country is running … that’s what happens in India”. So is that an admission or an accusation? It’s certainly an extraordinarily broad thing for a political player of such importance to say. And he didn’t hold back. Without further questioning, he listed the dynasties he had in…

THE DILIP KUMAR and Vyjayanthimala starrer Naya Daur (1957) was one of the earliest films in Independent India to delve into the perils of industrialisation. The theme was simple if intensely emotional: an unequal fight for the survival of horse-carts against newly introduced buses as a means of transport. Like a good Indian film, the horse-cart wins, even if only for a speck in time. Ideologically, horse-carts have had an upper hand in India ever since, if not earlier, and even 60 years later, something similar is being waged. This time, however, the fight is between a Japanese bullet train and the derelict wagons on rails that most Indians ride. Much has been made of how elitism of this kind has the potential to destroy the Indian Railways, serving and…

IN THE BOOK What do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013), author Daniel Bergner details the work of Canadian sexologist Meredith Chivers. Chivers was on a mission to ‘obliterate the civilised world’ when it came to the subject of women and sex. She would need to surpass indoctrinated ideas of sin and convention, propriety and decency, to get into the heads of women, to peek into the brain of a proto-human. She wanted to learn what excited women at a physiological and visceral level. In her lab, using a plethysmograph, she tried to get past the ‘obfuscations of the mind, the interference of the brain’s repressive upper regions, and to find out, at a primitive level, what turns women on’. Her research revealed the scope of…

“I never understood lack of freedom and what it does to your psyche. It’s only when I spoke to women who have grown up like that, I understood how it felt. The feeling of being constantly belittled” RATNA PATHAK SHAH AT FIRST IT’s a bit odd to think of Ratna Pathak Shah as Naseeruddin Shah’s daughter in the latest Motley play, The Father. You wonder why she chose that role. But to watch the play is to witness 40 years of her theatre experience unfold before you. She plays the devout daughter of a man who has Alzheimer’s disease and is losing grip on his life. It is a subtle yet heartbreaking role reversal where we see the daughter now taking care of a father, who has nearly been reduced…

ALTHOUGH humans possess five types of taste, the adjectives we use most commonly as terms of endearment are related to sweetness. ‘Honey’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘candy’ all conjure pleasant sensations (contrast this with the ones we associate with ‘sour’ or ‘bitter’). Sweet taste, therefore, is essential to our happiness. Sugar, an Indian discovery from the pre-Alexander era (the word is derived from ‘sharkara’, meaning ‘gravel’ in Sanskrit), provides us with this sweetness. Sugar (sucrose) has 4 calories per gm, which means one spoon provides between 15-20 calories. Sugar is rapidly absorbed, leading to a spike in blood glucose levels, a subsequent surge in insulin, followed by a rapid lowering of the sugar level which ultimately leaves you feeling hungry again. This cycle continues— and we gain weight. In case you have diabetes,…

Art of the Rehash Varun Dhawan, who’s spending most of his time these days promoting his new movie Judwaa 2, a ‘reboot’ of the Salman Khan-starrer Judwaa from 1997, ran into Tabu recently and didn’t miss the opportunity to once again plug his film. Varun reminded his fans that Tabu was a huge part of the original Judwaa, although she wasn’t technically in the movie. She had, some might remember, dubbed for Rambha, one of the two leading ladies of that film. What few might know is that Tabu, a top star at the time, dubbed for the film as a favour to her then boyfriend Sajid Nadiadwala, who produced both the original Judwaa and this remake. Tabu was also one of director David Dhawan’s favourite heroines, having worked with…