Table of contents for 04 December 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Despite its high prices, Apple continues to seduce the people of India ‘(Apple Bites India’, November 27th, 2017). This is not only because of an ever-increasing appetite for new technology and innovation in the country, but also because no other company delivers the same aspirational value as Apple. However, the appeal of the brand is largely limited to metro cities. An iPhone is a risky investment for most Indians because it is so expensive, and the fear of damage or loss makes many people wary of acquiring one. It is far easier to replace other less expensive brands without feeling the pinch. Yet, it’s interesting to see the excitement surrounding the launch of the new iPhone. Consequently, some of the older models have become cheaper…

ON NOVEMBER 22ND, the Government issued an ordinance to amend the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), a 2016 law that aims to speed up the process of resolving bad loans, something that has jammed the banking system for a while now. This is held to be a major cause for faltering investment growth in the country. The new ordinance tightens the law further by banning wilful defaulters—an individual or a company that does not pay bank loans back even when it can— from bidding or taking over an insolvent company. On the surface, this looks like nitpicking. For, the SEBI—the capital markets regulator—has already barred such individuals and firms from acquiring listed assets. But in reality, there was always a chance that a wilful defaulter could bid for his own…

On November 21st, Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma equated getting cancer with God’s punishment for sins. “Sometimes we come across young men getting inflicted with cancer or young men meeting with accidents. If you observe the background, you will come to know that it’s divine justice. Nothing else. We have to suffer that divine justice,” Sarma said at a function in Guwahati. ‘Divine justice’ is an offshoot of the idea of karma, which is a hangover from a pre-scientific age and has little basis besides blind belief. Since karma inevitably runs up against bad things happening to good people, it ties itself up into knots and then finds loopholes to get out. Like Sarma, who embellished his theory by adding that the ailment could even be the result of…

“AMERICA IS DECLINING. I GREW UP IN SOVIET RUSSIA AND THERE ARE CERTAIN PARALLELS ALREADY. THE FLAGS ARE GETTING LARGER, XENOPHOBIA IS GOING UP” GARY SHTEYNGART author Behind a white screen in the author’s lounge, Gary Shteyngart sits alone amid several plates of half-finished lunches. He is wearing a shirt with dark checks, and when he stands to offer a hand, you can see the shirt-tails hanging out. He looks less professorial in appearance (which he is, at Columbia University, New York) and more a bookish nerd (which he probably is). He seems despondent. And he peers, from behind large glasses and under furry eyebrows, with a joyless expression. “It takes two years to write a book,” he says early in the conversation, raising his hands in mock dejection. “And…

All in a Week’s Work Shah Rukh Khan has had a busy week. The superstar showed up to attend the opening of the Kolkata Film Festival on the invitation of Mamata Banerjee, and sportingly allowed her to drop him off at the airport in a Santro, much to the amusement of the paparazzi who badgered him with indelicate questions about when he last travelled in such a ‘small car’. On Saturday night, SRK boogeyed away at Farah Khan’s bash, and on Sunday he accompanied his 4-year-old son to a mela-themed birthday party of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai’s daughter Aaradhya. Shah Rukh was spotted on a Ferris wheel with a very excited AbRam, and then getting the little fella some cotton candy, while an amused Amitabh Bachchan looked on. Domestic…

THE AMOUNT OF time some Indians spend rubbishing puerile articles just because they appear in some mainstream foreign publications is astonishing. The venom-filled outbursts may be warranted, but they also constitute a colossal waste of time. There was much huffing and puffing last week over an incredibly silly feature in the New York Times arguing that India’s Hindutva drift could also be discerned in the growing penchant for desi clothes, not least among women. The article was a classic example of undergraduate bravado that, ideally, belonged to a campus magazine and should not have graced a publication that claims to set standards in journalism. Apart from being plain wrong and based on the naïve assumption that there is one standard of sartorial cosmopolitanism, the article pointed to the lax editorial…

THE TEMPERATURE HAS been taken. And the UK—if it wasn’t clear so far—has been found ill. For the first time in the history of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the country will not have a judge sitting at the court. In its place will be Justice Dalveer Bhandari, the Jodhpur-born Padma Bhushan-conferred former Indian Supreme Court judge whose term as the ICJ judge was otherwise coming to an end in February next year. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which includes the UK, have had a vice-like grip on power throughout the history of the organisation. Their power isn’t just limited to within the Council. They ensure that their nominees are elected to all key UN offices. There is a convention, for instance, that each of…

THE YEAR WAS 2015 and I was just wrapping my head around a massive career shift from being a journalist to an actor. I’d gotten my first break in a film named Traffic opposite Manoj Bajpayee. It was clearly the opportunity of a lifetime. My director, my crew and even the film itself came from my own home state Kerala, and I couldn’t have felt more at ease on the sets of my debut venture. “You should definitely try for work in Malayalam cinema. You would really fit in,” my director Rajesh Pillai often told me during breaks on set. Unfortunately, I took his word for it. A few months after the film wrapped up, I got a casual text from a popular film director in Trivandrum. ‘I am shooting…

WHEN I HEARD about Vijay Nambisan’s passing in August this year, I was in the midst of trying to compose an essay called ‘The loneliness of the Indian writer.’ I had the title and I had my theme—that we indulge in all the minutiae of the craft, we bang on about the nobility of our subject matter, we discuss the milieus that inhibit or enable us, but we rarely express kinship. The poets in English have, it is true, made something of a tradition out of honouring their peers, but writers of fiction in the language are rarely in each other’s sightlines. Why this great unease with each other? But Vijay died, and thinking of the benediction of a 15-year friendship, I did not write that essay—the idea seemed to…

ABOUT EIGHT MONTHS ago, when I was in Kerala, I came across a case in which a senior citizen from a poor family fell seriously ill and was rushed to a hospital where they put him in the ICU. Within two days, his son, who just had a part-time job, realised that they could not afford the fees. They shifted him to a government hospital, which put him up in the general ward despite many of his organs showing degeneration. His death was expected, but he gained consciousness and was soon home. He is in a little discomfort but still alive. I remembered him on reading about the death of Adya, a seven-year-old whose father accuses Fortis Hospital of giving him a Rs 16 lakh bill which included charges for…

FATHER SCHEPERS QUOTED to us Blaise Pascal’s comment about the whole face of the world being different if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter. The canny old Belgian Jesuit taught history at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta. When we were studying British history he emphasised that England would still have been a Catholic country if Henry VIII hadn’t insisted on marrying his “concubine”, as he called Anne Boleyn. Concubine was a deliciously tantalising word that conjured up exciting adolescent fantasies. The turmoil it created left little scope to consider that the austerely celibate priest was arguing that history is made in bed in the Western world. In India it’s politics that is made in bed more often than our prudish posturing allows us to acknowledge. Some believe Jagjivan Ram might have…

$4.58 trillion Estimated cost of treating non-communicable diseases and mental illness in India between 2012 and 2030, according to a report published by the World Economic Forum and Harvard School of Public Health 2 Number of children below 5 years who die every minute in the country 1 Government doctor for every 10,189 people; one bed for every 2,046 patients; and one government-run hospital for every 90,343 people 154 India’s position in healthcare access, out of 195 countries. The country lags Bangladesh and Liberia, according to The Lancet 41.1 Infant mortality rate out of 1,000 childbirths in the country; the figure is 24.5 in Indonesia and 32.8 in South Africa SOURCES: WHO, WORLD BANK WHEN JYOTISH KUMAR Chandravanshi’s infant son Aryan complained of nausea on September 5th, the 31-year-old, who…

LIFE AMONG THE SCORPIONS: MEMOIR OF A WOMAN IN POLITICS Jaya Jaitly Rupa 308 Pages | Rs 595 BOOKS HAVE NUMEROUS purposes, but what should a political autobiography hope to achieve? It will, of course, tell the life of the protagonist, but it should also tell a larger story, of the times itself. Politicians after all are privy not only to the daily machinations, but also the large sweep of history. Jaya Jaitly’s memoir is an interesting account of a personality but it seldom rises to the level of ideas. Which is a pity, given the politician and former Samata Party president’s intellect and erudition. Jaitly has certainly had an eventful, even tumultuous, life. She was born in Shimla in 1942, a month too early, because her mother, clad in…