Table of contents for 09 October 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The exodus of the Rohingya has been touted as one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world (‘The Abandoned’, October 2nd, 2017). Ground reports straight from Bangladesh’s several refugee camps, which have been set up keeping in mind the sudden and drastic influx of refugees, have been nothing short of chilling. In the midst of all of this, the most prominent revelation has been that of Buddhist radicalism and the might of the military in Myanmar. What, indeed, is to become of the Rohingya? It’s commendable of Bangladesh to open up its borders for them. Other nations must join in. Rohingya have made India their home over the last few years too. The call for deportation is totally unacceptable. At a time when the…

SURESH GOPI, A fairly popular actor in Kerala who turned to politics recently as a Rajya Sabha member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, came in for much ridicule last Saturday when he spoke of wanting to be reborn as a Brahmin because he considered them gods. Movie stars either turn out to be astute politicians like MG Ramachandran and NT Rama Rao, or they find themselves participating in a game they are clueless about as they clumsily wade its humiliating waters, like Govinda and Rajesh Khanna. Gopi, for the time being, seems to be in the second category. A politician needs to know when not to speak what he is feeling. And when he is speaking what he is not feeling, he must know that even that can get him…

THE CURIOUS CASE OF AN EXPLOSIVE DIARY Diaries, like organisers, are much sought after, usually at the end of the year. There is this curious but explosive case of a diary from yesteryears as the most potent political weapon in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poll-bound home state of Gujarat, even as a big political battle brews at the hustings this yearend. Diary 2011, as it is known among the authorities, is likely to be the key to wresting the psychological advantage in Gujarat and thus build up a massive electoral momentum. The information it contains on I-T evasions and bribery at the highest levels in the state are considered explosive. Diary 2011 could well be a Dussehra gift to the party leadership. It is on the basis of an FIR…

It is okay to be anti- authority, but that should not be only because there is a particular man at the helm of affairs. The idea is to write about the wrong policies of any government, not to hold meetings on how to bring it down A JOURNALIST FRIEND I have known for long once told me that after the fall of the Soviet Union, he was so depressed that he did not venture out of his university hostel room for a week. My friend, who supports every sub-nationalism movement in India, has never got an election prediction right, though he takes great pains to travel around, especially in the hinterland. Just before the results of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls were to be announced, we met at another friend’s…

BN GOSWAMY IS India’s best known art historian, and our answer to Indiana Jones—or actually, Indiana Jones’ father, as played by Sean Connery in the movies. With his cravat and spectacles, he resembles a European Connery. He punctuates his conversation equally with Persian couplets and Vedic shlokas. He’s one of the last great liberal art professors in the country. Like Jones, he has lived a dual life as a mild-mannered academician and a researcher finding and exploring old Pahari, Rajput, Mughal and Sikh paintings. He has also made a career of challenging assumptions. He chose to leave the IAS after two-and-a-half years to pursue a PhD in History. In 1958, when economic and political histories were the subjects of choice, he chose to focus on Art History. While Indian art…

Fresh Bonds When Alia Bhatt signed Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi, it was because she loved the script and the character she was approached to play. The 24-year-old actress was aware that her director was the daughter of the legendary poet and filmmaker Gulzar, but that might have been all she knew about the Talvar helmer. As part of her preparation for the role—and specifically to wrap her head around the manner in which she was meant to speak Urdu in the film—Meghna reportedly handed over a bunch of old Hindi film DVDs to her leading lady. Ever the professional, Alia reportedly immersed herself in research, dutifully watching all the films she’d been asked to closely study. A few weeks later, while discussing the references and takeaways from each of the movies…

AS A PARENT, it is always difficult to adjust to the fact that your child has grown up and is ready to face the world. The situation confronted me last week when my son left home for London to pursue a higher degree. Of course, the distance is largely notional. I can text him anytime, we can have phone conversations on WhatsApp and he even talks of coming home for the New Year. I can even transfer some money to him quite effortlessly—and legally. It is such a change from when I left home for London exactly 42 years ago, carting one suitcase and with only £50 in my pocket. Money was so tight that I took a bus from Heathrow to Victoria and then the tube to Paddington. On…

THE TWO-DAY VISIT of US defense secretary James Mattis to India this week can be described in a single line: an incremental build-up of relations. This has often provided cannon fodder to critics who say that for all the hoopla around bilateral ties, matters are essentially stagnant. This is more a case of looking at the glass as half-full than anything else. Barely six months ago the relationship was considered fraught. Donald Trump had just become president at the head of campaign that hinted at India ‘unfairly’ gaining at the expense of the US in trade deals. The first meeting between Narendra Modi and Trump had a bated breath quality about it. Since then, much has changed. For one, the US has realised that helping India in modernising its armed…

Cricket has just got a new disciplining tool for its players and they didn’t really have to look very hard for it. The red card, long a fixture in football games, will now be used to send off cricket players who get physically aggressive. This could include threatening to assault an umpire, any player or other acts of violence. It might be somewhat of an overkill, given that football is a close contact sport where emotions frequently spill over while cricketers are generally less prone to launching physical attacks on the field. If the rules had included oral violence, like sledging, in offences that warranted the red card, then it might have been more practical but we will probably have to wait for the introduction of a yellow card for…

THE IMAGES ARE uncanny. A flyover is transformed into a swathe of people. Those in khaki lead from the front. If not for their uniforms, from the photographs they could be mistaken for participants rather than law keepers. Flags agitate in the distance. Puppets bob above the crowd. And thousands hold up signs that read, ‘I am Gauri, We Are All Gauri’. Their black headbands read, ‘I am also Gauri’. It is a solemn coming together of people, yet it is imbued with a certain velocity and energy that tells us, ‘We march, we move ahead, we are in this together.’ In December 2016, when the author Pankaj Mishra wrote that we are in the throes of an ‘age of anger’, he meant that authoritarian leaders were ‘manipulating the cynicism…

IF HOMES ARE a reflection of a person, then Anu Malhotra has an eye for detail. The 56-year-old sits on a sofa in her Lajpat Nagar home, dressed in an orange shirt and colourful pants, as her brown hair cascades gently onto her shoulders. She is surrounded by artefacts and artwork, from Chinaware and Turkish porcelain items, to works by Sunil Das, MF Husain and FN Souza, to tribal sculptures and statues from the Northeast. “There’s a certain wisdom in travel, don’t you think?” she tells me animatedly. The daughter of an Indian Air Force officer says, “I’ve changed 10 schools as a kid. Travelling is ingrained so much within me that every few years, I feel like, ‘When am I going to move now!’ I feel those who have…

A STORMY TOMORROW is what the weathermen predict, a cautionary upheaval. They say it, defying professional propriety, with a certain amount of schadenfreude. Climate change, we have been warned again, is a man-made disaster. And in India, the experts tell us, it’s always the same man, the only one. First, it was demonetisation, which was forced upon us as a great cleansing programme. The detergent didn’t work. Even the RBI said so. Then came the GST, causing so much hardship to businessmen small and big. It’s always bad economics that kills good politics, the wise men tell us. So it’s payback time, and look for the lifejacket. The weathermen’s glee spreads in an otherwise gloomy atmosphere. They love the bad days. Is it then a double calamity for the man they…

ANGELA MERKEL HAS been a familiar hand in a Europe and, in fact, a world that is increasingly getting turbulent—with the Euro crisis, the rise in Western far right politics, the mess in the Middle East and the emergence of Donald Trump. Merkel’s Germany has been an anchor of stability. She has been hailed as the leader of the European Union and the ‘new leader of the free world’, someone who has persuaded her country to be more largehearted, opening its doors to refugees, standing up to Vladimir Putin and Trump and even offering to negotiate between North Korea and the US. But all is not right at home. She has won the elections and is set to remain Germany’s Chancellor. But she has managed to do this with a…

NEVER BELIEVE ANYONE who says they don’t like dancing. It’s so much part of what it means to be human, an instinct like poetry or music. While some people must have been put off dancing for some reason or another, it’s never too late to rediscover it. I was entranced by the ethereal beauty of ballet as child. My father pointed out I didn’t have the figure for ballet, as I was what might politely be called ‘sturdy’ rather than sylph-like, so I was sent for Scottish Highland dancing where my enthusiasm and figure matched the more vigorous sword dances and flings. I wish he were alive so I could tease him about his being politically correct in making me a heritage student true to my—or rather his—ethnicity. The medals…

AFTER WATCHING Victoria and Abdul in a London cinema, I came home to find another film on the same subject, Queen Victoria’s Last Love: Abdul Karim, showing on television. Despite the title, this was more a documentary with explanatory commentaries than a romance. Central to both is the unspoken predicament of more than 1.7 billion Muslims who comprise 23 per cent of the world’s population. Their distinctive lifestyle—dress, food and personal laws—sets them apart from other people just as Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim’s flamboyant appearance presented an exotic contrast to the royal household. The young Agra jail clerk (far better looking in reel than in real life) who rose meteorically to become Queen Victoria’s Munshi could be a metaphor for his co-religionists everywhere. I am not talking of either film.…

FOR a person who has spent the last 10 years goading the Government and the automobile industry to look at electricity more seriously as an energy source for Indian vehicles, Sohinder Gill, director, corporate affairs, of the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles (SMEV), and CEO of Hero Electric, which manufactures electric two-wheelers, has a cautious tone today. “I think there should be no more [Government] statements now [about the policy on electric vehicles],” Gill says. “The industry has gotten all jittery. Instead, there should be some action, some solid action, until the next statement.” Gill’s apprehensions are understandable. India, currently the world’s fifth largest automobile market, is preparing itself for what is possibly one of the biggest automobile overhaul plans in history. The Government wants to curtail the sale…

MAYA KRISHNA RAO totters onto the stage in kitten heels, perches elegantly on a stool, picks up her cup of tea, and, as the audience waits with palpable excitement, says her first lines from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story Quality Street. “We were drinking tea…” And then the face mic clams up. A soloist’s worst nightmare. “Can’t hear! Can’t hear,” the audience at Delhi’s Habitat Centre complains. Without missing a beat, Rao carries on with the Nigerian pidgin, but shifts the rant to the sound folks. A small crisis averted, she resumes the play, an ambitious Nigerian mother’s rant about a daughter who wants a minimalistic wedding. Next day, at the Jamia Nagar Ramleela ground, the 63-year-old is doing her viral act, Not in My Name, on hate crimes. It…

PARTITION: THE STORY OF INDIAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE CREATION OF PAKISTAN IN 1947 Barney White-Spunner Simon and Schuster 420 Pages | Rs 640 REMNANTS OF A SEPARATION: A HISTORY OF THE PARTITION THROUGH MATERIAL MEMORY Aanchal Malhotra HarperCollins 386 Pages | Rs 799 “IT’S NOT THAT he has forgotten… it’s just that he can no longer remember,” Bharati Sanyal says about her husband’s recollection of life in what is now Bangladesh. The Sanyals are one of the many interviewees in Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation who struggle between varying degrees of remembering and emotional amnesia to recount their experiences of Partition. Bharati’s insistence that forgetting is not the same as no longer remembering might be true of how we all construct Partition histories, whether we lived the event or…

HOW THE BJP WINS: INSIDE INDIA’S GREATEST ELECTION MACHINE Prashant Jha Juggernaut 235 Pages | Rs 399 FOR ANYONE WHO has followed Prashant Jha’s ground reports, especially in the months immediately after demonetisation last November and ahead of the Uttar Pradesh elections of 2017, several anecdotes in his new book, How the BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine, will be familiar. When so many journalists were reporting extensively on the shock of demonetisation to people across the country—from farmers who couldn’t buy seed or fertiliser, to housewives whose cash savings were suddenly worthless, small traders who were forced to work on credit, to endless queues at ATMs and banks unable to cope with short supply of new currency— Jha was cautioning his readers against assuming that demonetisation had rung…

NO PATH IN DARJEELING IS STRAIGHT Parimal Bhattacharya Speaking Tree 194 Pages | Rs 450 BORDER TOWNS TEND to be the most interesting places. Here the seams of the modern nation-state are either fastened tight or are gradually coming undone thread by thread. These are areas where the pull and push of boundaries exert tension and create ambiguity. Here the lay of the land, the people and their cultures are closer to their neighbouring countries than the ‘mainland’; here the ideas of political identity—like an image from an ancient camera—tend to be shaky and hazy. Among India’s several frontier towns, there are fewer places as fabled, as complicated, as the Darjeeling hills. A place that is both real and imagined. British officers in the 1800s started the process of creating…