Table of contents for 07 May 2018 in Open Magazine

END RAPE ONCE AND FOR ALL The recent new stories about rapes have been shocking and shameful (‘About The Girl’, April 30th, 2018). A rape is a rape, irrespective of the age or background of the victim. It should be condemned. I do not know when the conscience of the nation will be shaken enough to end such crimes for good. All those who have been politicising these violent crimes have shamed their own mothers and sisters. It is an open secret that there is huge inequality in our society when it comes to caste and gender, and whatever we may claim in our defence, we have let down our women. The time has come for our government to take some drastic steps to end all discrimination and violence and…

MUMBAI IS SWELTERING. This may seem like an exaggeration to people who live in north India, where temperatures routinely climb into the 40s, but it’s not. The rising mercury, however, is not surprising because February, which is the last of the city’s winter months, experienced record highs: at 38.80 Celsius, it was the second hottest February day in ten years. The breeze wafting in from the Arabian Sea is supposed to be our saving grace, and being caressed by air, especially if it’s not hot, is a blessing. But the sea is not entirely benign. It brings about increased humidity, and humidity brings about an increase in the Heat Index. This is a measure of how hot we feel when relative humidity is factored with air temperature: If, for example,…

A CORNUCOPIA OF SPANDEX superheroes has arrived on our cinema screens (and invariably in our social media and real life feeds) to a humongous opening that has left nobody surprised. The latest Avenger movie, Avengers: Infinity War could possibly become one of the most successful films of all time. For whatever good or bad it is worth, what Disney has managed with its Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is no mean feat. At a time when TV has all but replaced cinema as the topic of water-cooler conversations and the image on our T-shirts, it has churned out a new cultural product for changing tastes—a hybrid TV-cinema show. It has adapted the serialised-comic-book-format and made this men (and women)-in-tights genre of commercial entertainment today’s most dominant. Infinity War is the MCU’s…

AT THE MOMENT, I am harping on the broad theme of law and order. How can one get away from justice delivery, tangentially touched upon when I mentioned police reforms (see ‘Police Story’ and ‘Police Story 2’, Open, March 12th, and March 26th, 2018)? Let me begin with two anecdotes. I have written and spoken about them elsewhere, but not every reader may be familiar with these two cases. First, there is the famous Lal Bihari, from Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh. He was a farmer cum teacher in a government school and possessed an ancestral plot of land in Khalilabad. His maternal uncle coveted this piece of land and bribed the tehsildar to declare Lal Bihari dead. When Lal Bihari applied for a bank loan in 1975, offering the…

“To me, nationalist pride and Hindutva, the foundations on which the BJP is built, are more important than my own identity as an icon of the Nayaka community”B SRIRAMULU BJP candidate from Molakalmuru and Badami OVER AN HOUR-LONG drive in a black Fortuner from his residence in Ballari to the Jindal Vijaynagar Airport in Toranagallu, the BJP’s star campaigner, B Sriramulu, repeatedly refers to himself in the third person, at times objectively as a tool in the hands of the party to wrest a chunk of the Dalit vote from Siddaramaiah, the architect of the Congress’ Ahinda strategy, and sometimes with an undertow of megalomania. “Sriramulu can win from any constituency. He can consolidate the votes of the weaker sections of society,” says the 46-year-old, who has toured 190 constituencies…

There’s Something about Sara Sara Ali Khan hasn’t been on screen yet, but she’s made some fans already. Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh’s daughter, who reportedly ditched a seat at Columbia University to pursue a childhood fascination with acting, made quite the impression on guests (mostly film industry folk) at a wedding reception hosted by Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla last weekend. The designer duo extended invitations for their niece’s big night to all their friends, and the evening turned out to be one of song, dance and some surprising performances. Karan Johar, who clearly knows the steps to many a Bollywood dance number, sportingly broke into Radha on the Dance Floor from his own film, and Shweta Bachchan did a slinky version of Pallu Latke, with mother Jaya…

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Government gain popularity and power across the country, rival parties are naturally both frightened and threatened (‘Full of Sound and Fury’, April 30th, 2018). Regional leaders fear that people in their states will also vote for the BJP, given the party’s commitment to development and economic growth. But these parties have their priorities all wrong; simply forming alliances will not improve their poll performance, especially if such alliances are with leaders who are viewed as either corrupt or inept. The people of the country want a new face, a fresh person who is fit to represent them on the global stage. None of the leaders who want to take on Modi fits the bill. They are all only taking potshots at him, but…

TELEVISION NEWS AND social networking have a common trick to manufacture traction—deliberately conflate the pointing out of a phenomenon with its endorsement. It is especially evident in sensitive issues where anything that seems to be a neutral or different opinion becomes a mark of character on the person who voices it. It is thus not surprising that Bollywood choreographer Saroj Khan was vilified as a defender of the casting couch. In the interview clip that led to this, she can be seen saying that the casting couch is not rape (true), it is a means to a career (true), it happens everywhere (true), and why target only Bollywood for it (true)? Distasteful as the practice is, so long as the give and take is of free will, it doesn’t make…

THE FIELD OF architecture is all about money. There are no architects for the poor. At the conceptual stage, most of them assume that money is no constraint because they abhor the idea that their creativity is subject to the availability of finances. In a country like India where aesthetics is typically the last of all considerations, except for some government buildings and corporate offices, almost every construction is ugly and crassly utilitarian (most houses of the middle-class, for example, leave alone the poor). When money is plentiful, Indian architects place Doric and Corinthian columns in apartment towers. Projects of distinction are rare. Can one imagine a free hand given by a wealthy Indian to an architect to design and erect something like New York’s Rockefeller Center? Elsewhere in the…

SINCE JANUARY THIS year, Delhi has been rife with speculation that the Chief Justice of India (CJI), Dipak Misra, was likely to face a motion for his removal in Parliament. After much dilly-dallying, a divided opposition and an equally divided Congress party filed the petition before the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Vice President VenkaiahNaidu, onApril 20th. Four days later,Naidu dismissed the petition saying that he was of the ‘firm opinion that the Notice of Motion does not deserve to be admitted’. In the days since, a furious controversy has broken out with a campaign-like attack on the CJI and high-pitched criticism of the Vice President without any consideration of the fact that the two are Constitutional functionaries. The foul atmosphere is reminiscent of the 1970s, when attacks on independent…

IT WAS A rainy day when R Madhavan first landed in Mumbai. He was 24, stuck in a train that had stalled on the tracks just minutes into the city. The water was rising, and exit options were few. Which is when a group of good samaritans got the passengers off the train and provided them with food and a place to stay the night as they waited for the deluge to subside. “I was coming in from Kolhapur and was carrying a big suitcase. They ushered us into the local community hall and gave us hot khichdi and papad. I was new to the city and had heard all kinds of things about how one gets robbed and mobbed in Bombay, but this was unprecedented. There was a sheer…

IN 2006 INDIA began a programme that created work as a right, perhaps the most ambitious of its kind anywhere in the world. For a country that is considered a very unequal place in the world, the work guarantee plan was hailed as a milestone in its evolution. Since then, trillions of rupees have been spent on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). This year alone, it has a budget of Rs 55,000 crore. For scholars like Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University, this is exactly the kind of remedy the world needs, including rich Western democracies where concerns about inequality and its effects are at an all-time high. Moyn is a historian of human rights who has written extensively on the…

WAS THE PROLIFERATION of nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s an operation conceived and largely planned solo by AQ Khan? Or was it a systemic government and military led effort? These questions and all the variants between these two polarities are what this book substantively engages with. In the process of answering them, the author provides as good a general analysis as you can get of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, its nuclear weapons programme and the prevailing security mindsets and world view of its military, bureaucratic, scientific and political elites. The author, Hassan Abbas, is a scholar based in the US but had a career in the Pakistan police in which capacity he was part of an investigation into AQ Khan’s proliferation activities and related allegations of…

TN SESHAN, the feisty Chief Election Commissioner of the early 90s, had once boasted that he eats politicians for breakfast. Well, whatever he ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner or in-between was his business, but he did restore the primacy of the EC in the conduct of polls. And, boy, how he did it, putting the fear of God in our politicians. However, one can reveal with some authority what our politicians eat round the year to sustain themselves in their tricky profession. They eat their words, and do so without batting an eyelid. Numerous though the examples are of these slippery customers going back on their solemn words, let me cite the latest that ought to make them squirm in embarrassment but won’t because of the long practice they’ve…

OF ALL THE coercive laws enacted in Independent India, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has had the longest run. The earliest application of it, through an ordinance signed by President Rajendra Prasad in May 1958, was in Assam and Manipur. Even at that early stage, the Naga Hills district—later to become Nagaland—was a ‘disturbed area’. Just days shy of six decades, the law is being withdrawn, slowly and carefully. It has been withdrawn fully from Meghalaya and its coverage has been reduced to patches of three districts in Arunachal Pradesh. It is likely that at some point, Assam and Manipur will also withdraw it. The history of insurgency in the Northeast is complex, but one of the responses of the Union Government—the ultimate provider of security in any…

The issue of when to retire is a delicate one in professional sport. When a 36-year-old performs poorly, for instance, he may think he is in a temporary rut of form, but others are likely to believe his age is catching up. In India, several larger-than-life sport-stars are known to prolong their careers, using their connections and fan base, believing they still have it in them. How does one resolve such an issue? Something interesting happened recently, when Gautam Gambhir, a player with an illustrious IPL record—two titles as captain, 55 half centuries—retired from the Delhi Daredevils team mid-way through the tournament. He may or may not have been pressured into it, but so far he’s had a terrible IPL. A player may be able to hang on to one’s…

SPEAKING TO DELEGATES in Hyderabad on the fourth day of the six-day 22nd Party Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), its triennial summit, General Secretary Sitaram Yechury poked fun at what he called the ‘bourgeois media’ for their distorted portrayal of communists. He specifically named the Malayala Manorama, a Kerala daily, for carrying allegedly biased news on comrades. This newspaper had carried a photograph taken at the inaugural session of the Party Congress in which senior Politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai—who is from the rival Prakash Karat camp and was a contender to the top post in the previous Party Congress in Visakhapatanam—appears to be checking out Yechury’s green-coloured delegate badge. Its caption had employed a Malayalam usage associated with the colour (‘Pachcha pidikkumo?’) which can be loosely…

IN PARAMESWARAN IYER’S mission, each day counts. It is spelt out prominently in black ink on a white board on a wall in his office. There are seven figures: the days he has been working on the Swachh Bharat assignment, days left till the end of his job contract,villages declared Open Defecation Free (ODF), districts declared ODF, number of Swachhagrahis (grassroot motivators of behavioural change), percentage of rural India that has access to toilets; and the number of villages rated on the Swachhata Index, in that order. Further down the wall are framed cartoons on sanitation by Sudhir Dar, and facing it, around a dozen paintings on Swachh Bharat done by primary school children across the country. “Please do not make it a story about me,” he says at the…

KARUPPU IS NOT just a piece of theatre, it’s an experience. A dance of light and darkness plays out on stage, with stories emerging out of the crevices between the two energies. It’s almost as if you are hurtling towards luminosity from a certain tenebrosity, and back, with amazing speed—there are scenes with pitch darkness and absolute silence; this blackness is suddenly pierced by the red glow of a lamp, and the silence invaded by the breathing of characters, the trickling of water and low murmurs. In that one hour, one lives through such vivid imagery, which shouts out to you, even though not one word has been spoken on stage. This non-verbal play, which was recently staged in Delhi as part of the 13th Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards…

I HAVE ALWAYS wondered about the source of my disbelief about an afterlife, about a heaven and hell, and my conviction that one should live one’s life happily without causing pain to oneself or others. Hence my insistence that I will not deprive myself of anything—no biking up a steep hill when I can stroll, no jogging, no fasting, eat everything, deny myself nothing. Turns out, these convictions have an ancient lineage. Brihaspati (c. about 7th century BCE) is regarded as the founder of a philosophy that extolled the living of a pleasurable life, one that did not bring pain as a consequence to oneself or others. He said: Eat, drink and make merry, for tomorrow we die! Go into debt if necessary to live a happy life. While most…