Table of contents for 30 July 2018 in Open Magazine

THE MENACE OF FAKE NEWS A solution must be found to combat fake news and rumours spread through social media before others lose their lives in this bizarre wave of fear (‘The Age of Suspicion’, July 23rd, 2018). The Government must implement strict regulation and take legal action against the transmitters of such messages, while mainstream media should take action to counter fraud news. Social media is being misused and its role has gone beyond helping people stay in touch with new and old friends and/or family. Mahesh Kapasi It’s hard to verify the honesty of every message on social media, and this makes it one of the easiest ways to spread rumours today. That is why steps must be taken to ensure lives are not lost over rumours and…

ANOTHER PARLIAMENTARY election is beginning to loom large over Lutyens’ Delhi. Normally well behaved allies, after enjoying the fruits of power for four years, have started searching for greener pastures outside the BJP tent. The disgruntled now feel emboldened to speak up openly, while the freelancers, who had gravitated towards the ruling party espying an opportunity for personal advancement, distance themselves from it, picking on stray incidents to strike an independent—even a defiantly anti-BJP—posture. Both politicians and members of the Fourth Estate, integral to any democratic system, are prone to change colour on election eve, ideological and personal loyalties be damned. As for the capital’s fixers, well, after virtually going underground at the advent of Modi in 2014, they can be seen once again at five-star, members-only watering holes. And…

WHILE HEARING A case on mob lynching and cow vigilantism, the Supreme Court on July 17th said that ‘mobocracy’ cannot be tolerated in the country and suggested that Parliament enact a law specifically to counter and punish acts of lynching. In the Court’s words, ‘We think it appropriate to recommend to the legislature, that is, the Parliament, to create a separate offence for lynching and provide adequate punishment for the same. We have said so as a special law in this field would instill a sense of fear for law amongst the people who involve themselves in such kinds of activities…’ There can be no dispute that lynching—as any other criminal offence involving physical violence—needs to be dealt with harshly. The debate is whether a new law is an appropriate…

This is an age where all our heroes are either visionary entrepreneurs or tech wizards. We celebrate attitudes now, people who may be flawed but have a single-minded focus and a win-at-all-cost zest. Yes-men won’t do anymore. And the first thing on the chopping block is invariably decency. This was visible recently when Elon Musk, the celebrated CEO of Tesla, called Vernon Unsworth (a diver who was part of the effort to rescue schoolboys stuck in a Thai cave) a paedophile on Twitter. Unsworth had said Musk’s offer of building a small submarine to rescue the boys wouldn’t work and that it was a “PR stunt”. Musk has now apologised, but this comes after Unsworth said he was considering suing Musk. Anyone monitoring Musk’s Twitter feed will know he has…

Guernica, for me, has always been an impossible jigsaw. Impenetrable as it sometimes seems, Picasso also makes me look at it differently each time. The bull, the skulls and the light bulb all carry secrets that I yet don’t know the import of. I like how Guernica makes my eye shift. In Nanette, an hour-long stand-up routine, Hannah Gadsby asks a question that left many stumped: “Any of [Picasso’s] perspectives a woman’s?” The Australian comedian hates Pablo Picasso, and she has good reason to. While in his forties, a much-married Picasso had an affair with a 17-year-old girl named Marie-Thérèse Walter, and sex with a minor, as Gadsby rightly points out, can deserve no pardon. She shreds Picasso’s defence: “It was perfect. I was in my prime, she was in…

WHEN A SCIENTIST writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers—said Robert Jastrow, an American astronomer and the author of a 1978 book, God and The Astronomers. Alan Lightman, a theoretical physicist known in literary circles as the author of the famous book Einstein’s Dreams, has now brought out a collection of essays that are essentially ruminations on what lies beyond the infinite and infinitesimal. A Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, Lightman has always held a scientific view of the world from his teens and always sworn by the materiality and un-determinism (for example quantum mechanical perceptions) of the physical world revealed through science. However, lately, as the essays show, he has become concerned with an urge for the subjective…

Mukesh Ambani and Reliance are synonymous with all that is powerful and glamorous in the Indian business sector (‘The Idea of Mukesh Ambani’ by James Crabtree, July 23rd, 2018). Be it his wife Nita Ambani, his house Antilia, his children or Jio, Ambani has never been far from the limelight. Also, since the Reliance chief is largely a private person, almost all the ‘news’ about him is guesswork and based on rumours. There are very few interviews with him as a private individual. One that stands out is an interview conducted by Simi Garewal with Mukesh and Nita Ambani. It is through this interaction that people found out how the two met, the lessons that Mukesh learnt from his father Dhirubhai Ambani and what his values are as a businessman…

THE PRIME MINISTER of India boasts of his government’s achievements whenever and wherever he speaks. Following His Master’s Voice, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra does likewise. Here’s his latest statement, delivered to the Assembly with a flourish of trumpets:2014-15: 14,4552015-16: 5, 3162016-17: 4,4782017-18: 4,044 The declining figures the Chief Minister is bragging about are the number of potholes on Mumbai roads. Since their number is dynamic, as new ones form every day and old ones are filled (presumably every day too), there must be an army of municipal employees whose whole-time job is to count potholes. The city might be better off if they filled them instead, but as in all things municipal, there’s a logic in their madness, if only we could understand it. There’s a brilliant photograph doing…

‘In a crowd… a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct’ — Gustave Le Bon, 19th century French sociologist CONSIDER FOR A moment a Mumbai local train at rush hour. It’s a suffocating and uncomfortable atmosphere, and commuters are always surly towards one another. Sometimes even fights break out. This is not a crowd. It is just a bunch of individual people who have nothing in common except for the fact that they happen to be momentarily travelling, packed in a single compartment, on the same route. But give them a connection, a sort of shared identity, and they will suddenly transform into a crowd with its own…

I STARTED THIS SERIES with reforms as its focus. But there may be an impression that I have digressed. Where is the talk about economic reforms? Why aren’t we discussing markets and the state, the latter interpreted as the government(s)? Reforms mean reduced state intervention. A retreat from reforms means enhanced state intervention. So runs the argument. What is a market? It is a conceptual notion used by economists for a space where goods and services are exchanged, bought and sold by buyers and sellers. It can be a commodity market, a labour market, a financial market, or some other market. However, the market is a notional entity, not a physical place like your neighbourhood fish market. It is embedded in an institutional setting, the bedrock of which is the…

Marriage between any two people is a complicated business. Marriage with a celebrity can be even harder, as there is now a third party involved, the public. And marriage with a celebrity that combusts is, of course, the stuff of tabloids. Now we have not a headline, but an entire book that chronicles every twist and turn of Reham Khan’s life in Reham Khan (SK Publications; 548 pages; £17.99). Released in the UK on July 9th, its Amazon page in India no longer exists. The description of the memoir on Amazon UK is intriguing, as Imran Khan, chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, is not mentioned once. While he is, of course, the throbbing centre of the memoir, as Imran and Reham had a 10-month marriage in 2015. The…

EARLIER THIS MONTH, an ‘affidavit’ of rather scandalous proportions was leaked to a section of the media in Kerala. It contained salacious and incriminating details by a woman, a member of the close-knit Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, confessing sexual relations with four priests of the congregation. Let aside the fact that the document—which the husband has handed over to the Church—offers ticklish details of her carnal life, a racy read that can probably be fodder for a desi version of Fifty Shades of Grey, she also had more disturbing allegations to level: of one priest having used her confessions as a blackmail device to demand sexual gratification in exchange for his silence, while the other three used their knowledge of this to demand sex as well. The docket has thrown…

THE BRILLIANT SUN of the Mughal imperial rulers shone brightly over India for more than two centuries. While the story of Mughal emperors and princes has been told often enough, we sometimes forget the equally fascinating and surprisingly influential women who were also a part of that family. It is therefore refreshing to come across an account that relates the stories of a series of ladies connected to the Mughal family, as daughters, wives and ‘milk-mothers’. The breadth of the treatment, from the time of Babur’s youth to the death of Aurangzeb’s daughters, more than two centuries, is also impressive. Ira Mukhoty tells us that veneration of powerful women was among the earliest traditions of the Mughals, who traced their lineage from both ‘Timur the lame’ and the Mongol Chengiz…

LIVING IN MODERN Indian cities is like living in a gas cauldron. Thirteen of the world’s 25 most polluted cities are located in India. Delhi, for example, is twice as polluted as Beijing, and ten times more than London. Air pollution can cause an increase in numerous diseases, the most obvious being lung disorders like asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia. Over the years, it has become evident that several other serious, potentially life threatening conditions—heart disease, stroke, cancer and kidney disease—are also linked to air pollution. New research tells us we may have to add more to this list. Diabetes has also been found to be linked to air pollution. Diabetes in Indian cities has increased almost tenfold in the last four decades. One of its striking features in India is…

AS CANDIDATE AND president, Barack Obama gave some of the finest motivational speeches of the 21st century. He is a writer of equal flourish as well. Much before Bill Clinton found his inner Agatha Christie, there was Obama, then just a freshman senator, as the author of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, a memoir written with the narrative skill of a novelist. Once in the White House, even as the romance of the one who campaigned like a prophet and poet began to fade, he could revive the old magic whenever given a podium and a teleprompter. It was vintage Obama in Johannesburg on July 17th, when he delivered the lecture to mark Nelson Mandela’s 100th birth anniversary, and, to the delight of the liberal…

ON JULY 16TH, at a hearing in which a 20-year-old woman sought to abort her 25-week-old foetus, the Supreme Court denied permission and the judges also made comments, according to the news website The Print, ‘suggesting that aborting a foetus amounted to murder’. The report said: ‘A bench comprising Justices Kurian Joseph and Sanjay Kisan Kaul told the woman’s advocate, Sneha Mukherjee, that the unborn child should have been represented in court instead of the mother. “You should make the mother hear her child’s heartbeat,” Justice Joseph said… He also said that the woman would “regret killing the baby” if she “reconciles with the husband”.’ Only extraordinary circumstances make the abortion of a foetus beyond 20 weeks legal, and this case clearly doesn’t qualify. The woman was estranged from her…

IT IS A TRUISM that innovation is a buzzword and everyone wants it. But why? There is a single measure for innovation: what is the value it creates for society at large, and perhaps incidentally, for individuals and firms? Let us apply this metric to things of the past few decades that are accepted as highly innovative: the computer, certain drugs and medical procedures, the jet engine, the ocean-going container, the smartphone, search engines, social media, e-commerce, space exploration, air-conditioning and the internet. Of course, that is not a comprehensive list of innovations, merely a random one. Do these things create value? Apparently, they do. Look at the current market valuation of companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, Microsoft, Tencent, etcetera. Now look at their offerings. Clearly, people like…

PAUL POGBA WANTS you to watch him. That’s all he wants, really. For you to watch him pretend in mock-wonder which camera is beaming his gorgeous cheekbones on the large screen at the Luzhniki Stadium. For you to watch his statuesque and drenched face break into a grin when his hands lift the World Cup. Then, for you to wonder how the flying confetti of golden wrappers is stuck to the faces of all his teammates but not his; his gorgeous cheekbones, ostensibly, having shielded its self-contained gorgeousness against any sort of impurity, even if the impurity is gold. Paul Pogba doesn’t just want you to watch him. He wants you to never take your eyes off him. It’s a French thing, maybe. That’show he once watched Zinedine Zidane. That’s…

“I THINK THE READING of great, or even good, poetry has a humanising effect,” says Gieve Patel. “A good poem”, he believes, arrives at an “area of freedom” away from lies. One of the earliest poems to have this impact on Patel was DH Lawrence’s Snake, which focused on a boy who regrets throwing a log at a snake. He says, “It conveyed to me a feeling for the sacredness of all life.” It’s an emotion that he carried into his most famous poem, On Killing a Tree, which lays bare the extraordinary effort required to kill a tree beyond possible resurrection. The poem, which has appeared along with Lawrence’s Snake in school syllabi around the country for decades, is responsible for Patel being one of the most widely known…

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN fascinated by the Panda’s thumb. Being a biologist, I suppose it is de rigueur to do so. Even if the world gurgles at its perfect round eyes set in velvet black raindrops or coochy-coos at its oh-so-hug-gable teddy-bear proportions, the Giant Panda has another, more serious scientific distinction. Along with the finches of Galapagos and the Helleborine orchids of the marshlands of Europe, the Chinese bamboo bear is one of the pillars that support the theory of Darwinism. Not that Darwin spoke about pandas at all. He outlined the theory of natural selection citing bees and bats and barnacles, orchids and spiders and molluscs, once even the giraffe, but never once the panda. The story of the panda came much later as devotee after devotee rose…

Revised Guide to Karan’s Good Books When Kangana Ranaut called Karan Johar “the flag-bearer of nepotism” on that infamous episode of Koffee with Karan a year-and-a-half ago, she was referring to the filmmaker’s inability to look beyond second-generation industry kids while casting the many films that his company produces. From introducing Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt in Student of the Year, to signing Janhvi Kapoor and Ishaan Khatter for Dhadak, casting Chunky Pandey’s daughter Ananya in Student of the Year 2, and announcing first dibs on Aryan Khan whenever Shah Rukh’s sprog is ready for his close-up, it’s fair to say Kangana’s accusation wasn’t entirely misplaced. But over at Dharma Productions, it appears there may be another route emerging to get into Karan’s coveted projects. Vicky Kaushal took a supporting…