Table of contents for 27 November 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Winning Gujarat Assembly elections had been a cakewalk for the BJP all these years. But this time, with the entry of new players Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakur and Jignesh Mevani, besides the Congress trying hard to cash in on their appeal and regain its presence in the state, another landslide might prove an uphill task for the BJP there (‘Amit Shah in the Vanguard’, November 20th, 2017). But the BJP has no dearth of tactics of its own. Amit Shah is a seasoned politician with significant organisational capacity. After having covered thousands of villages in the state and cultivated an extensive base, supported by sustained efforts to contact voters at their doorstep, Amit Shah has scripted a careful and tactful strategy that has almost made…

YOU COULD, AND must, ignore much of what Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says because it is meaningless spiritual jargon, clichés camouflaged as extraordinary insights about existence. For example, this week he tweeted: ‘Senses act as a bridge. They tell you about the world & tell the world about you. One side is the object & the other side is the Self.’ If your senses are sharp, you will know that this is not something worth wasting your time or intelligence over. However, even someone so well versed in the art of esoteric obfuscation needs to be sympathised with if his words are mangled by political correctness taken to irrational extremes. In an interaction at Jawaharlal Nehru University, while answering a question by a gay student on how to deal with…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) technologies are expected to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, upending every facet of human society from the economy to warfare, along the way. Leadership in AI technologies, therefore, will give any country a qualitative edge over its rivals, both economically and militarily, a thought echoed recently by Vladimir Putin, who said that the nation that leads in AI will become the ruler of the world. Countries across the world have begun recognising this, but no country has seemed more aware of it than China. The last few years have seen a veritable boom in Chinese AI advances. Chinese companies like Baidu and Tencent now routinely match the likes of Google in AI research output. China now publishes the second highest number of AI-related…

THE PEOPLE OF Tamil Nadu never had it so good. There is never a dull moment for the man on the street. The epic battle between the indefatigable film scriptwriter Karunanidhi and the former actor and relentless fighter Jayalalithaa—leaders of the two Dravidian parties, DMK and AIADMK respectively—that engaged popular interest for more than two decades has come to an end. However, analysts who expected state politics to lose its colour and verve after the death of Jayalalithaa, the imperious queen who had an astonishing hold on Tamil masses and her party, are in for a surprise. High theatre is back. The symbiotic relationship between cinema and politics is still alive. Recent Income Tax raids in 200 places on 40 relatives of Jayalalithaa’s close aid and ‘sister though not born…

HIT REFRESH: THE QUEST TO REDISCOVER MICROSOFT’S SOUL AND IMAGINE A BETTER FUTURE FOR EVERYONE Satya Nadella Harper Business 273 Pages | Rs 599 IN THE BEGINNING, there was Apple. From 1977 to 1981, Apple owned the personal computing space, and when IBM introduced its personal computer in 1981, Apple greeted it with, ‘Welcome IBM. Seriously.’ Soon, though, the IBM PC relegated Apple to a niche. Microsoft supplied the operating system and utilities to all PCs, IBM or not, and grew to dominate the software world. By 2001, Apple was one-fifth the size of Microsoft. Apple reinvented itself by creating consumer products—the iPod, iPad and iPhone. Today, it is 2.5 times as large as Microsoft, and four times as profitable. Meanwhile, Google launched its search engine, and a proper noun…

THE UNZIPPED MAN in power is an image that reinforces the gender stereotype of our times. Good journalism and bolder women have come together to shame and then banish him from the limelight. The guy who still lingers in memory after the evening is not the gentleman who flirted with elegance, or the one whose gallantry was straight out of a Jane Austen novel, but the Lothario in pinstripes who prowled and pawed in the shadows. When apologies came, it was all blamed on bad biology. A curable crime. Look, I’m undergoing treatment, trying to tame the beast. And, as more and more victims return to that distant day of terror, it looks like the beast has names other than Harvey Weinstein. It has been photographing beautiful women in the…

THE FINDINGS OF the latest Pew Research survey of India—carried out in February to March this year—should surprise no one. The survey affirms that Narendra Modi remains the most popular political leader, by a long margin, in India. The numbers tell their own story. Three years after he became Prime Minister, 88 per cent of those surveyed said they had a favourable view of Modi, up by seven percentage points over 2016. That was the year when his rating took a small dip over 2015, by six percentage points. Overall, his rating has remained in the high eighties over this period. Significantly, the number is up 10 percentage points from 2013, on the eve of the 2014 General Election. What can be said safely from this is that after three…

It usually becomes clear to sportsmen that retirement is imminent but they rarely heed the call, waiting instead for age to diminish form until it becomes impossible to postpone. MS Dhoni, former captain of the Indian team, is suffering from the same syndrome. In recent times, on the back of poor performances, voices that Dhoni must go have been getting louder. This week, the Indian coach Ravi Shastri had to come to his defence. Retirement is especially painful for sportsmen because it happens when they are in their thirties and there is an entire life ahead with nothing to do. What someone like Dhoni needs to consider is how he will be remembered against a couple of years of playing life in which humiliations will pile up. A flawless legacy…

AS THE CLOCK APPROACHED 6 pm and people the world over stood in snaking queues, hands trembling in anticipation for what was hailed as ‘the future of the smartphone’, iPhone buyers in Delhi stood in line on red carpets with velvet ropes, large men in black blazers patrolling the sides to maintain order. Some customers, it turned out, had driven down from nearby cities like Dehradun, fearful that their local stores would not be able to honour the promise of delivering the phone on the first day. Others, equally enthusiastic but less fond of physical exertion, stood in front of the ghostly lights of their computers, fingers on the keyboard. And in Mumbai, one man, Mahesh Paliwal, climbed atop a horse, with a baaraat of drummers in tow, to go…

DELHI-BASED filmmaker and artist Amar Kanwar was not present at the Asia premiere of his latest film Such a Morning, at the recently concluded sixth Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF). He had to leave for New York at the last minute. But he would have been glad to see the response the film received at DIFF. After the film began, there was the kind of silence that speaks louder than most applause. A film festival is, after all, a kind of liminal space between an art gallery and the full-blown theatre experience: it has the quietude and no-nonsense air of the former while still maintaining the community experience of the latter. A regular at the prestigious art exhibition Documenta, the movie was screened there earlier this year to rave reviews.…

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR: THE CURIOUS HISTORY OF INDIA’S RELATIONS WITH PAKISTAN TCA Raghavan HarperCollins 348 Pages | Rs 699 TCA Raghavan claims that ‘in tracing out this history, I do not draw any grand lessons and if there are any takeaways I leave it to the readers to decipher and extract if they so wish’ THERE HAS BEEN a plethora of books on Indo-Pak relations and hence it is difficult to bring anything new into this familiar field. But TCA Raghavan, formerly of the Indian Foreign Service, has managed to do just that in The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan, a fascinating read. What is it that makes his book different? At one level, it is the methodology. He has depended a great…

I MEET PENELOPE CRUZ at the posh Claridge’s in London. Her latest film Murder on the Orient Express has just hit screens. She shares her favourite stories from the sets. Your role in the latest film is that of a religious introvert. What philosophy do you live by? Well, I try not to hurt others and not to hurt myself and I don’t have a specific religion. From a young age I have studied many different religions. I am curious and respectful of all religions, but I don’t see the need to pick one. Tell us about your character in Murder on the Orient Express. She’s one who, if she had any sensuality, would want to hide that. She doesn’t want any attention. She has had a very traumatic experience…

SURPRISED BY THE unseemly goings-on in the Supreme Court of India? Please don’t. Remember Their Lordships, too, are cut from the same cloth just as most of us are—and remain vulnerable to the same frailties just like ordinary folks. What does (or should) differentiate judges are the proprieties and traditions of the great institution they are called upon to serve. But as recent events have shown, the judiciary’s top sanctum sanctorum did not exactly come out smelling of roses when it revealed for all the world to see the ugly divisions between ‘honourable’ judges. Quite a few legal eagles believe that at the heart of the spat was no lofty principle or concern for probity but the personal ambitions of the dramatis personae. It turns out that Justice Jasti Chalameswar,…

RAHUL, AKHILESH AND WILD ASSES Logically speaking, wild asses shouldn’t have dragged SP leader and former UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, especially not after Yadav’s infamous “Gujarat ke gadhey” jibe at the BJP’s power duo of Modi and party president Amit Shah, both Gujaratis and key campaigners in the UP Assembly polls. Ostensibly, the reference was to a Gujarat Tourism ad showcasing the state’s elegant native species, the wild ass, in its natural habitat. As things turned out, the BJP swept the state, routing Yadav’s party, and the young leader’s wisecrack will haunt him as he campaigns for the SP in the five constituencies it is contesting in Gujarat, due for polls in December. Among videos going viral is the clip…

“KAAVIYUM KARUPPIL ADANGUM.” Saffron, too, is subsumed in black—the colour of the subaltern Tamil man. There is a reason the media these days hangs on to every word of Kamal Haasan’s, spouter of mystical epigrams in the thaw after Jayalalithaa’s Ice Age. In a world full of the words of other people, Annadurai, Kamaraj and MGR among them, Haasan speaks his own mind, taking a dig at “bumbling politicians” and enthusing leaders to be CEOs. At a time when the political scenery in Tamil Nadu has been reduced to two withering leaves and an eclipsed sun, he is an artist promising to restore its lost beauty. As he sets out, armed with irony, intellect and purpose, to steady a faltering democracy, a question looms large: will his politics meet the…

RECENTLY, A 25-year-old woman filed a plea in the Kerala High Court claiming that she was forcefully converted to Islam and that an attempt was made to make her join the ISIS in Syria. She further claimed that she was a ‘victim of forceful conversion, fraudulent marriage, and attempt to sexual slavery’. This is only the latest in a string of interreligious marriages to rock Kerala, where ‘love jihad’ is one of the most hotly discussed issues today. The term ‘love jihad’ has been painted as a politically motivated issue and as an attempt to malign a particular community. At the same time, the suffix ‘jihad’, which, as per religious text, means ‘striving to uphold the cause of God’, has been misinterpreted by certain sections of that community as a…

“Why should a girl put her career on the line because some guy hit on her? It’s a power game. Guys are being hit on by powerful women too” KALKI KOECHLIN KALKI KOECHLIN’S FILM Ribbon is one of the most relevant recent Hindi films. The struggle of a young married couple living in a chaotic and sometimes brutal city forces us to take a good look at ourselves. Is today’s hyper-ambitious youth capable of holding a family together? Are we moving too fast to live the little moments in our lives? Is it only the woman’s job to sacrifice her professional goals to keep her home from falling apart? The film tries to find answers to many such questions, and aptly mirrors the confusionridden relationships of the urban space. Ribbon…

MARGOT: SISTER NIVEDITA OF VIVEKANANDA Reba Som Viking 291 Pages | Rs 599 IN TIME FOR the 150th anniversary of her birth arrives this excellent and frustrating biography of Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita of Vivekananda. Nivedita (or ‘dedicated’) was one of the ‘Hindu revivalist’ thinker and Vedanta proselytiser’s closest disciples. In a recent speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the Swami’s focus on ‘youth’. Vivekananda’s chief social aim was to bring into being a vigorous, ‘manly’ Indian youth with a genuinely Indian sense of nationhood and oneness. The context was British colonial rule and the deliberate and insidious discrediting of ‘Hinduism’ as degenerate (or effeminate, or childish) and impervious to rational modernity, and of India as possessing any kind of nationhood at all. It is the Irish-born…

Will He Make It on Time? Even as the political row over Padmavati rages on, the film’s director Sanjay Leela Bhansali is reportedly racing against the clock to ensure that he meets its December 1st release date. Insiders say that although Viacom18, co-producer of the film, unveiled a 3D trailer recently, the 3D conversion process is a long and cumbersome one and is unlikely to be done in time. They’re estimating that 3D prints of Padmavati could be released a week or two after its general theatrical release. Good luck getting screens then. Let’s not forget Star Wars: The Last Jedi releases on December 15th, and Tiger Zinda Hai the week after. Nevertheless, the team of Padmavati is focused on completing the film without any hitches now. Even as VFX…