Table of contents for 18 December 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK What happened during the demolition of the Babri Masjid is truly frightening and should serve as a warning to the rest of the country as an example of how fanatism can get the better of a civilised society (‘The Hindu Inflexion’ by Swapan Dasgupta, December 11th, 2017). Whatever the rationale behind the demolition, violence and hatred will never be the answer. Ayodhya is a political cause, but unfortunately it is the common man and the media who pay the price for such propaganda. When one looks at the sequence of events before, during and after the demolition, as well as some of the provocative political speeches given on that fateful day 25 years ago, it is all too clear that things not only escalated out…

AS MARKETS expected, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) did not reduce its policy rate—the repo rate—on December 6th. The central bank kept its rate unchanged at 6 per cent. Importantly, the policy statement said its monetary policy stance will remain neutral. In plain words: lending rates will not be reduced on the back of growth concerns In recent weeks, there has been much concern about the bank’s impending decision based on the gap between India’s potential growth rate and the actual rate at which its economy has grown in the past few quarters. This gap is now negative, with observed growth below its potential. In such conditions, a rate reduction is an obvious policy response. The implementation of the Goods and Services Tax and demonetisation had imparted policy shocks…

THE IDEA OF Hindu nationalism conflates ideas of religion and culture with those of nation and state. Nationalism is by definition indivisible, whereas religion and culture take on multiple manifestations. Culture of course contributes to national identity; yet culture alone cannot mould the nationalism of a country, leave alone that of a plural land like India. In India, during colonial rule, the reassertion of Indian culture was a nationalist project, which witnessed the revival of dance forms like Bharatanatyam and traditional classical music, as well as modern literature in Indian languages and what evolved into the gaudy cinema of Bollywood. But an India confident in its own cultural diversity could celebrate multiple expressions of its culture. Hindutva sees culture differently; as the RSS’s MS Golwalkar wrote, culture ‘is but a…

Shashi’s masculinity was a refreshing change from the macho posturing and misogynistic heroes who flaunted their rippling muscles THE OUTPOURING OF love and grief over the passing of Shashi Kapoor is extraordinary; but then he was an extraordinary man. Born into film royalty, the Kapoor dynasty, he was someone who could move between Hindi cinema and Western art cinema as well as theatre. He was a true crossover star whose effortless onscreen charm perhaps led people to love him rather than admire him. I have to get one thing out of the way at the beginning. Shashi was beautiful. His eyes, with their exaggerated lashes, his curly hair and tall slim figure might have made him almost intimidatingly handsome, but then he’d smile a goofy grin with his crooked teeth,…

“Gone are the days when an actor needed heroism to prove his might. It would be foolish and limiting for me to only look for stories that revolve around my character”Irrfan Khan ALMOST 40 YEARS ago, at the age of seven, Irrfan Khan’s father packed him off to his maternal grandmother’s house in Tonk, Rajasthan. He was being punished for his ‘patang baazi’—for flying kites too often. His nani, the only woman who was a hakim in that village, readily came to his rescue. “Her hands often smelt like the herbs that she’d use to treat patients. I’d spend months with her learning how she healed people,” Irrfan says, recounting the influence of strong women in his life. They would always rescue him, he says. “My father was hardly available.…

The Claws Are Still Out Kangana Ranaut may be down, but she’s far from out. The actress, who’s kept a low profile since the abysmal failure of Simran, has been reportedly focusing her energies on her next, Manikarnika, the Rani of Jhansi film that she’s currently completing. Recently, news leaked that Kangana had refused to sign a petition that many of Bollywood’s leading ladies had put their names to, condemning the threats that Deepika Padukone had received in the wake of the Padmavati controversy. The initiative was led by Shabana Azmi, and several actresses including Jaya Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Anushka Sharma, and Vidya Balan have reportedly signed it. Rubbishing the narrative that she had refused to sign the petition because she doesn’t get along with Deepika, Kangana made a…

THE STORY WAS worth telling and retelling then for a different reason, and the narrative style was lucid and linear too. Even The Economist was enthusiastic in invoking the spirit of Guangdong to endorse the development model of Gujarat. There were admirers who suspended their political beliefs and wished that India would match the state’s pace and its passion for good administration. By then, Gujarat had overcome the ignominy of its bad headlines. Maybe the point that David Rieff makes in his little book of philosophical revisionism, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, is relevant in Gujarat as well. Reconciliation is not necessarily a return trip to the Great Grievance; there is virtue in letting the past pass. The Gujarat of Narendra Modi at the time of…

CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS, Air India does indeed have suitors. The Tata Group is assumed to be one, for the simple reason it was the national carrier’s original owner. JRD Tata not only piloted its first flight, he stayed on as its commander-in-chief for 24 years after it was nationalised in 1953. That the Group should bid for it now that it’s up for sale is seen as some sort of poetic justice. That other airlines should do likewise is considered a matter of strategic impulse: the urge to merge and enlarge themselves. As far as official Expressions of Interest go, however, Air India’s only prospective acquirer so far is IndiGo, which is reportedly keen to buy its international operations, a gig prized for its globe-girdling network of flight paths and…

SING, UNBURIED, SING Jesmyn Ward Bloomsbury Circus 285 Pages | Rs 419 IN THE NATIONAL Book Awardwinning Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward juxtaposes the America of today, where any Black boy can die from police brutality at any time, with the Jim Crow era, which still lingers in the memory of the aged. Among this generation are Mama and Pop, as Philomène, a magnificent traditional healer dying of cancer, and her husband, a gentle man actually named River, are known to their grandson Jojo. The novel unfolds in three voices, opening with Jojo trying, painfully, to assist his grandfather in slaughtering a goat. It is his 13th birthday, and his mother will soon neglectfully buy him a baby shower cake, another reminder of how fortunate he is to live with…

ECONOMISTS HAVE GREAT faith in incentives as a mechanism that can fix every social problem that humanity faces. This might have been put under a formal framework in recent times, but what is ever new in human affairs? In another age, incentives went under the label of carrot and stick. And just like in olden times, they do not work all the time and might not be correct to apply in every situation. The Indian Express reported on December 6th in a front-page story that the Government would award Rs 2.5 lakh to just-married couples if one of them was Dalit. This scheme existed earlier for those who had an annual income below Rs 5 lakh. The ceiling has been removed now. There is a limit of 500 couples who…

INHOUSE RUMBLE AGAINST DYNASTY The Shehzad (Poonawala) versus Shehzada (a routine BJP pejorative for Rahul Gandhi) controversy is not about to die down anytime soon. Bets are on in some quarters on whether Poonawala was instigated by the Old Guard in the Congress party to queer the pitch for the 47-year-old Gandhi. Poonawala, a very vocal voice defending the Congress, its leaders, its vision, on both social media and on prime-time TV debates, shot into the limelight recently when he made public—somewhat surprisingly to many— his discovery that delegates to AICC elections were being “fixed” for Gandhi to win the post of party president. That would’ve been dreary news to most people, but no one expected the Maharashtra Congress secretary to air his discovery quite so loudly or make such…

“I have seen my grandmother die, I have seen my father die, I have seen my grandmother go to jail and I have actually been through a tremendous amount of pain as a child... now there is absolutely nothing I am scared of” 27 January 2014, in a Times Now interview “Congress is a funny party. It is the largest political organisation in the world, but… we create new rules every two minutes and then dump them. Nobody knows the rules in the party” 21 January 2013, AICC session, Jaipur “Poverty is just a state of mind. It does not mean scarcity of food, money or material things. If one possesses self-confidence, we can overcome poverty” 5 August 2013, Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad “If India is a…

“I’VE BEEN COLLECTING tribal art myself for around 10 years now, especially Jangarh Singh Shyam,” says Mandira Lamba, the co-owner of Blueprint 12 gallery, in Delhi’s Lado Sarai. Since Blueprint 12 has brought excellent South Asian contemporary artists like Bangladesh’s Mahbubur Rahman and Pala Pothupitiye from Sri Lanka to the India Art Fair in recent years, this is a bit of a surprise. But the tribal and folk artworks that they are exhibiting in a joint exhibition with Exhibit 320—another gallery in Lado Sarai run by Oxfordreturned Rasika Kajaria—hopes to shift the way we view and categorise Indian non-urban art. These, they believe, can compete and hold their own with contemporary art in the market. The exhibition showcases some of the most fascinating turn-of-the-century and contemporary artworks from across India…

THE BENGALIS: A PORTRAIT OF A COMMUNITY Sudeep Chakravarti Aleph 457 Pages | Rs 799 “THE TROUBLE ABOUT saying anything on India,” writer Suketu Mehta said a few years ago, “is that anything you say is true and false at the same time.” Maximum City, his 2005 biography of Mumbai, opened the floodgates for Indian literature in English on the country’s megapolises, but a bit of the writerly focus also spilled over to smaller cities like Patna and Ahmadabad. From there, it might seem like natural progression to move the spotlight to India’s communities, but, if we take what Mehta says to be true of the country, his words are even more germane to its people It would take a stout heart, supreme confidence and immense ambition for a writer…