Table of contents for 26 February 2018 in Open Magazine

DRAVID’S DREAM TEAM Kudos to India’s Under-19 cricket team for winning the World Cup in New Zealand (‘Wall of Fame’, February 19th, 2018). Their victory is all the more memorable from the perspective that this team won all their matches from the league stage to the final. It is heartening that India was not represented by players from Delhi and Mumbai alone, and lads from Samastipur, Barmer, Bhavnagar, Sonipat and Amravati played in the tournament, highlighting Indian diversity. The team’s coach and mentor, Rahul Dravid, played a huge part in nurturing these talented players and grooming them to showcase their skills. He was really the man behind it all, as he personally picked players himself. With any success comes responsibility, and now these players must remain grounded and work to…

TWO OF MUMBAI’S biggest public events happen within one month of each other. There’s the Mumbai Marathon in January and then the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in February. Just concluded, the nine-day festival was, by all accounts, a great success. When any event succeeds, the challenge for the organisers is how to make it better the next year. One way is to make it bigger. In its 20th year, Kala Ghoda was certainly massive: 560 events, 102 installations, 22 curators. The list is long. No wonder its organiser, the Kala Ghoda Association (with Maneck Davar, the publisher, as its chairman), calls it India’s largest multi-cultural festival. Outsiders to the city will no longer be mystified why this arts precinct, with its many galleries and restaurants, is called Kala Ghoda: there…

WHEN JACOB ZUMA called it a day on February 14th, South Africans breathed a collective sigh of relief. The embattled president had been followed by charges of corruption in high places—referred to as ‘state capture’— for a number of years. During this time, South Africa turned from a potential African winner to a country plagued with economic problems and soaring crime. On the morning of February 14th, an elite police investigation unit called Hawks raided the sprawling mansion of the Gupta family in Johannesburg’s upmarket Saxonwold suburb. The same day, Zuma was to face a no-confidence motion in parliament. Just weeks earlier, the African National Congress (ANC), Zuma’s party, had elevated Cyril Ramaphosa, a party veteran, to its leadership. That was a cue for Zuma to go. Ramaphosa had publicly…

Fame can be a dangerous and tricky thing in India. The moment Malayalam actor Priya Prakash Varrier shot into the limelight online with her arching eyebrows and smile, the Indian inevitability of communal fringe organisations latching onto it for their own fame began to kick in. The film clip is a teaser of a song, Manikya Malaraya Poovi, in Varrier’s debut movie, Oru Adaar Love; after it stormed the the internet, a number of Muslim organisations are filing police cases claiming that their sentiments have been hurt because the lyrics allude to Prophet Muhammad’s relationship with his wife Khadija. The intent, they argue, is to outrage their religious feelings. In some ways, it’s a Padmaavat redux, which gave Hindu caste organisations like the Karni Sena a burst of fame after…

In his quest to garb himself in a more distinguished lineage than his party can ordinarily lay claim to, Modi called on farmers across India to donate iron from their ploughs to construct a giant 550-foot statue of the Iron Man HISTORY, UNDER BJP rule, has developed a surprising tendency to dominate our national discourse. Not only has Indian history increasingly become ‘ground zero’ in the battle of narratives between Hindutvavadis and pluralists, it is being wielded as the BJP’s weapon of choice against the Congress. Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s excoriating speech in the Lok Sabha on February 7th, in which he blamed the Congress Party and Jawaharlal Nehru for the Partition of India and the continuing Kashmir dispute, is the latest example of the ruling party’s invocation of historical…

The bubble of cryptocurrency was bound to burst sooner or later because all good things must come to an end (‘Bitcoin Meltdown’, February 19th, 2018). Investing in cryptocurrency is like playing in a casino. Those who were smart and followed market trends closely would have cashed out when Bitcoin was at its peak. Those who were greedy would have wanted to wait a bit longer, in case the price went even higher, and they would have lost a large sum once this cryptocurrency crashed from its peak. Like with anything that involves a bit of a gamble, it is wise to make your fortune and get out when the going is good—it may or may not get any better. Also, with so many security issues related to cryptocurrency being raised…

BACK IN 2010, at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong, the work of a little-known—until then—Indian jeweller took the world by storm. It was a diamond necklace with a pear-shaped flawless Golconda diamond of 12.29 carats at the centre. Supporting the Golconda diamond were 34 equally rare pink diamonds from Australia’s Argyle mine. The necklace, called the Golconda Lotus Necklace, went for Rs 16.29 crore. The auction announced its creator Nirav Modi to the world. Since then, emerging almost out of nowhere, Modi has blazed a trail internationally, leaving in his comet tail a string of designer stores on some of most popular high streets in the world, from Madison Avenue in New York to Macau and Hong Kong. His pieces have gone on to find even more recognition. One…

GOVERNMENTS AND THEIR policies are labelled according to whether they are pro- market or anti-market. ‘Market’ here is a conceptual idea used by economists. In a market economy, unlike a non-market economy, decisions are taken by individuals, producers and consumers, rather than governments. But a market isn’t necessarily a physical place where buyers and sellers gather for transactions. It is more of a notion. However, every market functions in a given institutional setting. There are principles and templates for a market economy, but the context for Country X would differ from that for Country Y. That’s the reason economists increasingly pay attention to institutions. Classical economists were conscious of their importance. For a while, mainstream economics forgot about this, until it was rediscovered as the new ‘institutional economics’. There are…

THE PATEL VERSUS Nehru debate is as old as Free India’s history. Or perhaps older. Therefore, it is only natural that every time someone wants to spite the main opposition Congress—an emaciated party which, for all practical reasons, is remote-controlled by the Nehru dynasty—the ‘if Patel were Prime Minister’ argument gets lapped up for political posturing more than anything else. What gets buried in this melee is the tragedy that the RSS-BJP doesn’t have an icon other than Nehru’s own comrade-in-arms—his deputy in the Union Cabinet, a true-blood Congressman, a leader and unifier who had publicly aired his sharp disapproval of the RSS’s ways—to invoke in order to trash the legacy of the first Prime Minister of India. Far more than irony, the fight to appropriate Patel’s legacy puts the…

HIMANTA BISWA SARMA Assam minister and key northeast strategist The senior Assam minister and a key strategist for BJP’s northeast conquest was appointed in-charge of Tripura last December by party president Amit Shah. At 10 pm, he is still at the party office in Agartala talking to some of the party’s candidates, all of whom have shifted allegiance from the Congress. Sarma, 48, is himself a former Congress leader, a party he was part of for 23 years. The review meeting goes on till midnight. “It’s a 24x7 job,” says Sarma. His strategy for the party begins with plans to wipe out the Congress from a region it has held sway over. The first test was in Assam, where, in 2015, the three-time Congress MLA switched over to the BJP,…

ANJU DODIYA cited apprehension as the premise for politely declining my attempt at a studio visit last October. ‘I am working towards my show in Delhi in February,’ she wrote in an email. ‘I tend to shut myself up when deadlines approach and anxiety soars!’ She did express hope, though, that we could get together some other time. I took her up on her word mid-December, and was lucky to find her more amenable to my possibly invasive presence. She had work to show me. We decided to meet the day after Christmas. I went by with homemade sweets and felt oddly thrilled by the close proximity of her Ghatkopar East-based studio to my home in Kurla. I loved the idea that in this very middle-class Gujarati locale lived two…

How to Make It Big in Hindi Cinema It appears that Salman Khan has taken on the responsibility to launch Isabelle Kaif’s cinema career. This younger sister of Salman’s on-off girlfriend and co-star Katrina Kaif has reportedly moved bag and baggage to Mumbai and is looking for work in the movies. A few years ago, Salman cast her as the female lead in Dr Cabbie, an Indo-Canadian film he co-produced with his NRI friends. But the movie sank without a trace, making it hard for her to seek work in America. With Salman’s clout here in Bollywood, a steady stream of film projects should be no problem if the young lady has got what it takes. Insiders are saying she’s been pencilled in for a film opposite Sooraj Pancholi that…

AND YOU THOUGHT only the Right rewrites history? Well, people of a certain age would remember how then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had gone on All India Radio at a time when the Chinese were still wrecking havoc on the Sino-Indian border in the winter of 1962, having already overrun several Indian posts. After the fall of Bomdila, when it appeared that the invader might walk in unchallenged into what was then a united Assam —since then divided into several states—a defeated and broken Nehru addressed the nation on the evening of November 20th, 1962. And instead of boosting the morale of millions trapped directly in the Chinese line of fire, he shattered whatever little residual courage they might have had by uttering in a choking voice, “…my heart goes…

IN INDIAN POLITICS no one is ever written off. Often, there is nothing that a party out of power has to do but to have patience. Just a year ago, the Congress had been considered extinct by many, but after recent Rajasthan bypoll results, it finds itself back in the reckoning. It is hard to think of anything that it did which led to this. Voters begin with high expectations and soon get bored or disappointed with all governments in power. It goes under the label of ‘antiincumbency’. But to reap the rewards of this phenomenon, the opposition party must have a critical mass of popular support. It is this space that the Aam Aadmi Party tried to capture and, as it completes three years running Delhi’s government, the ambition…

ONLINE ABUSE OF authority must have sounded like a joke once upon a time. A couple of decades ago, the notion of authority itself was alien to this free space that existed in a realm nobody could touch. The internet was not just open to all, it was allergic to control. In 1996, John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, even issued a heady ‘Declaration of Independence’ that went viral: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’ In internet time, that…

THE MOST INTRACTABLE problem with the latest controversy over the relative virtues and shortcomings of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is that it centres on counter-factual history. What-if is a wonderful parlour game and even has a place in politics, especially when invoking nostalgia or lament. I grew up in a Bengali society that was dominated by a collective despair over the brave Netaji who didn’t return home after 1945. There was always a flickering hope that he was still around, somewhere, andthat one day, whenthenationneededhimthe most, hewouldreturn, re-enter public life and lead India towards achieving its national destiny. That hope was never realised and, consequently, to this day, there is unending debate over what would have happened had Subhas Chandra Bose returned to India after the conclusion…

SITTING OUTSIDE HIS fertiliser shop at Dhanpur—the Assembly constituency that Tripura’s Marxist Chief Minister Manik Sarkar has won for four consecutive terms—Manuranjan Debnath looks at vehicles packed with people heading towards Sonamura, 25 km away, to attend Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally. “This time there will be a tough fight. The last time this happened was in 1988 while fighting the Congress,” he says. The BJP had shifted Modi’s rally from Santirbazar to Sonamura, the sub-division under which Dhanpur falls, causing some resentment among in Santirbazar. When Modi got wind of it, he asked BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma if a rally could be accommodated there along with one in Agartala a week later. After Modi reached Delhi, Sarma got a call from BJP President Amit Shah about Modi addressing…