Table of contents for 06 November 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK It is a matter of great concern that Kerala is becoming a breeding ground for Jihadi elements (‘Marching for Jihad’, October 30th, 2017). It needs to be noted that the state government ruled by the Left front is turning a blind eye towards the radicalisation of Muslim youth. Kerala has been admired by many as a secular society. But in pursuit of the Muslim vote bank, both the Congress and the Left have been silent on various issues such as Love Jihad, hawala funding of radical organisations and its alleged links to ISIS. Central government should intervene to prevent Kerala from becoming another Kashmir. Out of a hundred young people who crossed the sea to join the ISIS, a majority of them hailed from Kerala,…

NEXT TUESDAY, October 31st, there will be an unusual auction happening in Mumbai. Works of 41 artists will be sold and the proceeds will go towards the organisation of the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale to be held next year. When it held such an auction in 2015 for its last edition, they collected over Rs 2 crore. In the present auction, the artists have been equally generous. A stainless steel sculpture by Subodh Gupta, for instance, has an estimated price price of Rs 15-20 lakh, an Atul Dodiya painting Rs 3-5 lakh. It is money that is much needed because the Biennale is India’s biggest art event and, being a non-profit endeavor, runs entirely on donations that is always hard to come by. Artists donating their works is…

THE ‘TEN DAYS that Shook the World’—to repeat the title of John Reed’s gripping account of the October Revolution—also changed India. Jawaharlal Nehru’s admiration for the Soviet Union as “A New Civilisation” (without the question mark that Sidney and Beatrice Webb used to start with) shaped official India’s economic thinking even before PC Mahalanobis was inducted to replicate Soviet state planning. Nehru and his successors have concentrated as much power in the prime minister’s office and person as the Kremlin ever enjoyed. None of this was apparent in early 1917 when starving Russians rose in righteous wrath against Romanov absolutism. Many stories are told of the oppressive conditions against which they revolted. In one a grand duchess emerging from a ball in the small hours of the morning to find…

RECENTLY, MY routine blood test results showed extremely high levels of cholesterol, of the LDL variety. Add to that, a blood group (A+) that is sensitive to allergies, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, I felt like Jerome K Jerome in Three Men in a Boat, flipping through a medical dictionary and experiencing all the symptoms of every disease from A–Z, including the housemaid’s knee (which was the only one Jerome did not have). Unlike the appendix, it seems that cholesterol is quite important as it helps form the structure of every cell in the body. Low-density lipoprotein is supposed to be bad cholesterol because it tends to build-up plaque in the artery walls and slows the flow of blood, triggering heart disease and attacks. HDL, usually called the ‘good cholesterol’, carries…

AN UNEXPECTED AND very rushed three-day trip to New York before Diwali gave me an opportunity to get a fleeting glance at the work of the United Nations. The sheer scale of its activities and its vast international embrace is undoubtedly awesome and it is easy to get completely bowled over. When I made a five-minute intervention at a committee meeting on ICT— Information and Communications Technology—I was understandably a bit hesitant. My inclination was to contest some of the assertions made by a couple of earlier delegates, ostensibly representing the least developed world—but it was painfully apparent that this was not diplomatic. In the UN, delegates are skilled at mouthing platitudes and bluntness is reserved for a few contentious political debates in the General Assembly. This is not to…

THE NORTH MALABAR region of Kerala has increasingly come under the radar for all the wrong reasons. Besides being the hot bed of violent political clashes between the ruling Marxists and the cadres of the RSS and the BJP, it has also earned a bad name for itself over the rising influence of radicalised Islamist outfits such as the Popular Front of India (PFI) and Jamaat-e-Islami. This week saw the arrests in Kannur district of five men with suspected links to the Islamic State, indicating that things are perhaps getting out of hand as regards measures to safeguard national integrity and to stem disillusioned Muslim youth from going astray. At least three of the arrested were suspected to have visited Syria and reportedly received training from the terror outfit. “Three…

In hearings this week, the Supreme Court asked the Government to draft out regulations on standing up for the national anthem at movie theatres. The root of this issue was in fact the court, which had some time back made it mandatory for movie-goers to stand up when the anthem is played before every film screening. The SC seems to be trying to extricate itself from this decision by lobbing the ball onto the Government. But better late than never. The order doesn’t make sense unless there is some special reason for only those who go to the cinema to be given the honour of this ritual. In any case, patriotism needs to be felt more than exhibited. And to ask that it be felt at the state’s beck and…

A DVERSITY BUILDS character. For an eighteen-year-old playing only his fourth first-class match for Delhi, 19 December 2006 should have been like any other day on the batting pitch. Brimming with the exuberance of youthful talent, Virat Kohli was returning home from the Feroz Shah Kotla ground, enthused about cricket and life. Karnataka had piled up a massive 446 runs and Delhi was struggling at 103 for 5 at the end of the second day’s play but Virat was still batting on a well-made 40. He had struggled for form in his first few games but now appeared poised for a big score, which slightly stemmed the tide of the impending follow-on. As he climbed the stairs to his first-floor home in the West Delhi colony of Vikaspuri, Virat had…

FOR ANYONE WHO’S fallen in love during the 90s and early 2000s, there’s a good chance that writerdirector Richard Curtis’ films influenced your ideas of romance. The man behind the iconic Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’ Diary and Love Actually(and also, TV classics like Blackadder and Mr. Bean), put up his filmmaking boots with his 2013 film, About Time to pursue his other passion: helping to make the world a better place. Curtis reached his pinnacle in the early noughties with his feel-good, look-good cinema. He was often accused of being a ‘Little Englander: Setting on celluloid a nation in which the upper middle-classes, after a series of comic misunderstandings, finally manage to blurt “I love you” on a snowy Christmas Eve…’ (The Guardian). But the…

I HAVE RECENTLY been looking up Atta. Not Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian mastermind of the Twin Towers attack who imported terror to America and by extension to the rest of the world. Not Atta, the etymological origin of the English number eight fashioned after the proto-German ahtou or the Hindi aath. My recent fascination is instead with Atta, a breed of ants. I stumbled across Atta in the humid forests of Panama; a non-flashy 15 mm long, reddish-brown insect with a classical hourglass waist and an elbowed antenna. The last two anatomical features separate ants from all other insects, especially their closest cousins, bees and wasps. But Atta is no mere ant. It is probably the creature with the most fascinatingly complex social life after humans. But before I delve…

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago this month in a cold night, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, wearing an ill-fitting wig to disguise his identity, walked the longest distance in his life, but the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd was less dramatic than what was written in the mythologies of the New Man. The transfer of power from the post-Tsarist provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky to the Bolsheviks was, in the words of the liberator himself, “as easy as picking up a feather”. Lenin went on to build history’s biggest Empire of Lie. Empire-building was a process that validated the supremacy of one man, keeper of the only truth, over the masses, which need to be directed towards happiness. Lenin began it: the Unquestionable Power of the One. Where gods and…

IT SOMETIMES TAKES a Doordarshan news anchor to show China how, despite its astonishing military and economic rise, Indians have so little interest in it. How else does one explain the calling of its leader ‘Eleven’ Jinping three years ago when he was on a state visit? Is it because Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is the correct one, and what else could Xi have been but Roman numerals to an Indian. The anchor got sacked but such an ignorance of a man who is the second most powerful in the world speaks of our enduring fixation with the USA while blind to the giant next door, except as a supplier of cheap mobile phones. But China and Xi are going to be looming over India for a…

I WILL NEVER FORGET my heartbreak when the first school prize was announced when I was ten. It was the neatness prize for which the main criterion was good handwriting. At university, in the days before word processing, I had to read my essays aloud because of the backward- sloping scrawl. Even I couldn’t read it, much to everyone’s amusement. There is something childish about the idea of prizes, such as the dog Muttley in the cartoon Wacky Races whose desire to win a medal and his being stripped of his medals by his sidekick, Dick Dastardly, was as loved as much as his wheezy laugh. Yet there are also many prizes for adults. It makes sense in the context of something like a village show, and in the north-east…

RAJDEEP SARDESAI HAS written a book that makes me very cross. Indian cricket has been badly served by its writers and cricketers. There have been few good books by Indians who have played or studied the game, and Rajdeep—an Oxford blue with a fine education—could so easily have written a book for the ages. After all, his idea is a terrific one. Instead, he has given us nearly 300 pages of trite rehashing and sentimental wind. Such a pity, and such a waste. Rajdeep contends that 70 years after independence from the imperial people who gave us the game, ‘we could well argue that cricket is one of the few largely meritocratic activities in the country’. I scratched my head in search of contradiction when I read this, but I…

DURAND’S CURSE: A LINE AC ROSS THE PATHAN HEARTRajiv Dogra Rupa 256 Pages | Rs 595 ‘THE HISTORY OF Afghanistan, almost throughout the nineteenth century, reads stranger than fiction. It was a story full of greed, intrigue and violence. It need not have been this way. And it may not have been so but for the misjudgments of small men.’ This is the story narrated in Rajiv Dogra’s Durand’s Curse. It is a perceptive, analytical story about the history of Afghanistan and the Durand Agreement, which Afghanistan signed with Britain in 1893. The seven-paragraph document demarcated areas of influence in the northeast of Afghanistan, placing the frontier areas (in present day Pakistan), under the British ‘sphere of influence’. The line not only divided the Pashtun homeland in two, but also…

Fans Come First for Ranveer Other actors can learn a thing or two about keeping their mood in check from Ranveer Singh. Earlier this week, the Padmavati star appeared to be in a funk of sorts while exiting Bandra’s Otters Club after a workout. His trademark smile was nowhere in sight, but the actor dutifully took selfies with a dozen or so fans who’d gathered outside the gate hoping to catch a glimpse of him. His only request—that they don’t tread on his fancy Yeezys in their excitement, and that they stand on his left since that’s his ‘flattering’ profile. It was evident Ranveer was not in the mood to chat and engage. Still he sportingly flashed the peace sign (and not his pearlies) while taking pictures, and then greeted…