Table of contents for 26 March 2018 in Open Magazine

A STATUE IS JUST A STATUE It is highly unfortunate that some BJP workers have pulled down a statue of Lenin in Tripura (‘The Politics of Falling Statues’, March 19th, 2018). This kind of vandalism and violence in Tripura is the last thing that the BJP needs at the moment. Emboldened by the party’s Northeast victory, if some people start indulging in such unruly behaviour, then they are doing more harm than good to the BJP. This is a golden opportunity for it to provide good governance in Tripura and change the economic fortunes of its people, especially the youth. That is only going to happen when new job opportunities and financial progress are delivered to the region. If that is achieved in full measure, the BJP would have fulfilled…

INCREASINGLY, NETAS and journalists alike are giving the Central Hall of Parliament a miss, though the usual suspects who cannot do without putting in a daily appearance can still be seen hanging around. Even as MPs do their obligatory disruptive act in the two Houses as soon as proceedings begin, they leave the Parliament precincts post-haste, skipping the Nation’s Hall of Gossips. Clearly, something more urgent preoccupies them. Spending time in the Central Hall has its uses, though. You get to exchange notes with fellow politicians, picking up useful nuggets of information and disinformation from the regulars, essentially castaways of various parties who park themselves early on benches that have come to be associated with them. These self-styled eyes and ears of their respective parties seek to earn brownie points…

FRANCE IS A long-standing partner of India. From crucial defence purchases to nuclear technology, Paris has often helped New Delhi overcome barriers imposed by technology denial regimes. The recent visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to India points to a significant upping of the relationship. There were two pointers to that end. The usual defence partnership was, of course, much in evidence. But even more importantly, Macron said France could be a destination for Indian talent. In recent years, Indian students and skilled professionals have found their usual destinations—the US and Britain—closing their doors. In the US, technology professionals have found themselves on the receiving end of legislation inspired by domestic politics. The halcyon days of techies moving seamlessly from Bangalore to Silicon Valley are effectively over. In Britain, student…

Although The Shining as a film has come to be recognised as a horror masterpiece in cinema, Stephen King, the author of the book on which it’s based, was said to upset at what he saw it on screen. He once described the film as ‘a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside’. It is not an unusual sentiment when it comes to writers and cinematic adaptations of their work. Most writers secretly harbour the dream of their work being adapted into films and plays, but they often end up hating what they see. They rant and move on. Very rarely is it taken up further. The estate of To Kill a Mockingbird is now suing the producers of a much-anticipated Broadway adaptation, one written by Aaron Sorkin, for deviating…

MR AND MRS AT, both in their eighties, moved from Pune to Mumbai to live near their only son. Two years later, Mrs AT needed hospitalisation thrice in two months, first for medical problems and then for a hip fracture surgery. During this period, they made it clear that they did not want excessive medical treatment towards the end of their lives. Mrs AT made a partial recovery and could hobble around with a walker. But three months later, her husband suddenly developed pneumonia and needed admission. Within a day, in spite of treatment, his BP crashed, kidneys stopped functioning and breathing deteriorated—medically termed multi-organ dysfunction syndrome. He was 89 and the doctors were certain that pulling him out would be a difficult task. If he did recover to the…

1 2.8 million years ago  The genus Homo appears in east Africa. Along with Australopithecines, they are considered the earliest humans after splitting from chimpanzees and bonobos. Homo habilis, thought to be the direct ancestor of Homo erectus, appears around this time 2 1.8 million years ago Homo erectus emerges. It bears a striking resemblance to modern humans but with a brain about three-fourths the size 3 600,000 years ago  Footprints of Homo heidelbergensis dated to this time are seen. Considered the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, this species is morphologically similar to Homo erectus but with a larger brain case, about 93 per cent the size of that of Homo sapiens 4 500,000 years ago  Neanderthal and Denisovan lineages diverge from a common ancestor 5 300,000 years…

EARLY THIS MONTH, the United Kingdom saw a small literary controversy after The Sun, a leading tabloid, ran a story which said that university students were now sympathising with Frankenstein’s monster. The headline, ‘FLAKENSTEINS: Snowflake students claim Frankenstein’s monster was ‘misunderstood’— and is in fact a VICTIM’ had a line under it which said a university professor ‘even claimed that the murdering monster could have been protected by human rights laws today’. To which, numerous scholars pointed out that while this may have been startling new information to The Sun, the ambiguity of its evil was precisely the point of the book when it was first written and published in 1818. It is what makes Frankenstein so deserving of the label ‘timeless classic’. This year marking its 200th anniversary has…

WHAT IS DALIT food, I asked Chandra Bhan Prasad, who has started Dalitfoods.in. Have you eaten bread made of dry peas, he asked. I shook my head. In summer, peas are dried and crushed into flour and then thick rotis are made. Every Dalit household ate this in Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh when Chandra Bhan was growing up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. At that time, peas featured in every meal. Lunch and dinner consisted of dried pea rotis and a chutney of red chilli, salt and water or a flax seed chutney or one made of the leaves of the green garlic plant, or a dal of dry peas. If the family was slightly better off, they would add onion to the dish. In the evening, women…

Narendra Modi has already stood the test of time in Gujarat as its Chief Minister, and he is now ready to do the same as Prime Minister of this country and the unmatched leader of the BJP (‘Optimum Power’, March 19th, 2018). After the Congress had ruled India for about half a century, with no remarkable achievements to its credit, the BJP came to power as a suitable replacement. Interestingly, the BJP has now paved the way for the same one-party dominance that the Congress enjoyed in its early years. In politics, change is inevitable. Yesterday, it was the Congress, today it is the BJP, and tomorrow it could be the BJP again, provided the party continues to win the hearts of people through sincere reforms and inclusive politics. With…

THE FARMERS CAME, they saw, they conquered. While the first two parts of that sentence are undoubtedly correct, only an optimist will vouch for the last—and most important—part. We are, of course, talking of the ‘Farmers’ March’, the likes of which we have never seen. An estimated 50,000 farmers and Tribals came to Mumbai from Nashik, 180 km away. They could have taken the easy way out, and asked the principal organisers, the CPM-led All India Kisan Sabha, to hire trucks instead of trudging all the way. But, then, so could Mahatma Gandhi have gone by car to Dandi. Would the effect have been the same? Obviously not, and so it was with the farmers’ march. The sight of so very many of them, all walking for a whole week,…

IN 1993, STEPHEN Hawking made a cameo appearance in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a hologram of himself. Playing poker with an android and with holograms of Einstein and Newton, Hawking joked that he “beat them all, but unfortunately there was a red alert, so I never collected my winnings”. No matter what the book jackets and the reviews tell you, Stephen William Hawking was not the greatest physicist since Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton. But he was the most popular, anointed with honorary doctorates, awards and a Playboy interview. As every bio ever written on Hawking exults, he was born exactly three centuries after Galileo died. But more importantly, he ushered in another kind of scientific revolution: he made cosmology accessible. Mathematician, writer, media darling…

THIS IS A sequel to my last column, on police reforms. A word of caution. If an issue is raised in a column, that doesn’t mean every possible aspect of the issue will be thrashed out in it. An entire volume can be written on police reform, for instance. My intention is only to flag an issue in the broader context of reforms. In the last column, I mentioned the two pre-Independence (1860, 1902) Police Commissions. Just before Independence, United Provinces appointed a Police Reorganisation Committee on January 23rd, 1947. If you read the report, you get a sense of vu. Or do I mean déjà vécu? Corruption, misuse of authority, non-registration of First Information Reports (FIRs), unsatisfactory investigation, fabrication of evidence—each of these finds a mention. There was greater…

Outside AKG Bhavan, the CPM’s headquarters in Delhi’s Gole Market area, barricades are in place with armed policemen on duty. India’s biggest Communist party in mainstream politics has been at the receiving end of violent protests in the past few years by rival political parties, especially Hindu nationalists, some of whom had barged in, fulminated at General Secretary Sitaram Yechury and reportedly even tried to assault him. On the veranda, a bust of Lenin faces that of Marxist leader AK Gopalan, after whom the office is named. In a second-floor room, senior Politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai greets me warmly. The building’s elevator is currently under repair and although he suffered a serious knee injury from a fall, the 80-year-old Pillai is not deterred by the stairs. Physically fit and…

DAYS BEFORE 35,000 farmers marched to Mumbai to the music of revolution, the disaffected politicians and activists of Chennai had emerged blinking into its sweltering streets in several separate efforts to string along popular passions. To an outsider, Chennai might have looked embattled. On one day, there were at least four groups protesting in and around Valluvar Kottam, a memorial to the Tamil poet and a popular venue for pamphleteering. The Left and the Dalit parties occupied a public square where they practised their most guttural and censorious lines. The DMK sent a busload of boisterous men and women who, instead of revising their old scripts about governmental inadequacy, smiled at policemen and courted arrest. The previous day, a group of Periyarists, ideological pitchforks at the ready, had resorted to…

MANY OF SHASHI Tharoor’s books reflect his deep understanding of Hinduism, starting from his first The Great Indian Novel. His latest Why I am a Hindu is a beautiful and simple explanation of a complex religion. Shashi was not only born a Hindu, but is a practising and believing Hindu, so he is eminently suited to write about his faith. Hinduism is difficult to define, ranging from the metaphysical Vedas to the atheistic Charvakas, from the ritualistic Mimamsa to the deeply devotional poetry of the Alwars and Nayanmars. There is no dogma in Hinduism and each individual has to find his own path to liberation. The author calls his chapter ‘My Hinduism’, which would be an appropriate definition for every Hindu. He discusses a wide range of subjects, from definitions…

A Case of Misguided Contempt It’s just incredible. Sonakshi Sinha has gone to great lengths to put out the news that she hasn’t signed Housefull 4. The actress wants everyone to know she isn’t doing the movie, contrary to rumours that suggest otherwise. Her team has been saying she does not ‘endorse’ that kind of comedy, which one can only assume refers to the leave-your-brains-at-home brand of humour that the Housefull franchise is known for. If this was any other actress, you might say, ‘Well done for taking a stand’. But this is Sonakshi, whose CV reads like a laundry list of the most sexist movies made in Bollywood in the last ten years. She allowed Akshay Kumar to pinch her waist and refer to her as his “maal” in…

MARX WILL BE 200 years old in May, and his spectre is left with no place to haunt. Pyongyang? That’s pure comic strip with a dash of uranium-enriched horror. Cuba? Where revolution remains abandoned like a half-chewed cigar, and the máximo lider is gone. China is a different story, where McMarxism and a Leninist apparatus are useful pretexts; it’s social capitalism marinated in Confucian nationalism, and now all in the service of the eternal leader. So where, Marx? It’s more than 25 years since the ideology was rejected by the street. Then it was revolution in reverse, the Manifesto reimagined. It was then that ‘the masses’ had been humanised, given faces and names. The spectral history of communism came to an end with the exorcism of 1989, the year that…

THIS WEEK THE President of the United States fired his Secretary of State, the second most powerful man in the world from the standpoint of other countries, on Twitter. Priya Varrier, a student from Kerala, has reportedly landed a role in a movie with Ranveer Singh after fame came calling through her rising eyebrows that spanned a few seconds in a Malayalam movie trailer. Two events separated by continents, arenas and magnitude, but bound by the strange and creeping influence of digital forces on life as we once knew it. Consider what it would take for an aspiring actress from regional movies to land a role in a major Bollywood project in the past. She would have to carve a niche in her own film industry, get noticed by way…

COME MAY 19TH and the Commonwealth might be bouncing along the road to a truly multiracial destiny. The 2.4 billion people of its 53 member countries, almost a third of the world’s population, are drawn from virtually every race under the sun. But the leadership is vested in the mottled pink and grey descendants of a minor German princeling settled in England. May 19th might set the ball rolling for the leadership one day to reflect the dazzling demographic diversity of the 94 per cent of Commonwealth citizens in Asia and Africa. That’s the date for Britain’s Prince Harry to marry Meghan Markle, who says, “My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American. I’m half Black and half White.” Meghan can only have a role through her husband…

SOMETHING HEARTWARMING has happened in legal opinion in India changing on how we can manage death and dying. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has declared Advance Directive (AD) and refusal of life support (so-called ‘passive euthanasia’) lawful. It symbolises the constitutional importance of autonomy and privacy in healthcare. Central to humane medical treatment is respect for the patient as an individual, not merely as a diagnostic label. We fix a disease, but we must care for the person. Nowhere is it so important to care as when a physician is called upon to manage a dying patient. In the initial years of intensive care, there was wonderment at being able to salvage lives previously held to be beyond help. We could bring back the heartbeat after it had…

AS THE STORY goes, back in 1863, Robert Bruce Foote bent himself on a parade ground at Pallavaram Cantonment near Madras and, from the debris dug out from a small gravel pit, picked up an odd-shaped stone. Foote was a 29-year-old assistant geologist stationed in the Madras office of the Geological Survey of India. His job was to map the Madras Presidency and locate mines within the area. This rough stone turned out to be a two-million-year-old hand axe made of quartzite. The young geologist had discovered the first palaeolithic site in British India. A few months later, again near Chennai, at an area called Attirampakkam, Foote and a colleague, William King, chanced upon more stone tools. These included flake tools, cleavers and hand axes that prehistoric men could have…

NAZIA ERUM’S Mothering a Muslim is familiar and strange at the same time—familiar because of the increasing number of stories we hear now on religious discrimination, and strange because to an extent, there are also several Muslims who have been insulated from it. So far. Mothering a Muslim opens up important questions that everyone must consider today and be encouraged to discuss. From young boys being the butt of ‘terrorist’ jokes to girls being treated disdainfully if they wear the hijab or just because of their Muslim surnames, the book looks at all aspects carefully, but always from the worried and concerned perspective of a mother. The jokes used to be about biryani earlier, but children are asked if their parents are experts at making bombs now. Considering the political…