Table of contents for 13 August 2018 in Open Magazine

FOR A GANDHI-FREE CONGRESS The Congress is constantly doing a service to the Modi Government by allowing Rahul Gandhi to speak and act on its behalf (‘Is Candidate Rahul the Biggest Asset for Modi in 2019’, August 6th, 2018). For some reason that is unknown to the public, the party has refused to take into consideration the series of electoral failures it has encountered in the last few years with Gandhi at its helm. Now it has become almost an assumption that the Congress will never dump the Gandhi family and that one cannot exist without the other. It would actually be shocking news if the party ever allows another leader to emerge. A Gandhi-free Congress is virtually unthinkable at present, however needed it might be for the party to…

SPARE A THOUGHT for our much-maligned politicians, abusing whom has become a national pastime. In all probability, they deserve it too. But why gloss over the unscrupulous conduct of people in other walks of life? They too are often equally amoral and unscrupulous, aren’t they? Indeed, we would be in a much better place if everyone outside politics were to follow the law. Truth be told, as they say, hum sab chor hain (we are all thieves). Take this case of a member of the capital’s elite Delhi Golf Club. It takes some 40 years and as many lakhs of rupees to become a member. The crème de la crème of the capital are members. Located in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, the Club grants you the privilege of brushing…

IT IS GOING to be half a century next year since Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, long-haired and wild-eyed, straddled their Harley-Davidsons across the American landscape searching for freedom. Easy Rider (1969) was a landmark moment in cinema, and you can see why. It was through that film—the bad boy leads, the ideas they espoused and the thunderous roars of the bike’s V-twin engines pounding down the American highway—that the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s found its best cinematic expression. Only one bike is believed to have survived that film—Fonda’s so-called ‘Captain America’ chopper, and it became inarguably history’s most iconic motorcycle. It was auctioned for $1.35 million four years ago, although some believe the bike is probably a replica and the original was destroyed in a fire.…

IN MY LAST column, I mentioned ‘merit’ and ‘nonmerit’ subsidies. Merit subsidies are defined as subsidies that benefit everyone. Elementary education and primary health are good examples. Non-merit ones are those meant for specific groups. Fertiliser subsidies are an example of this. That’s the way these terms are defined in subsidy computations, and such calculations show most subsidies in India are non-merit, not merit. Stated differently, merit subsides are deserved subsidies, while non-merit subsidies are not. If you like, non-merit subsidies are reserved subsidies, and unfortunately, most subsidies in India are reserved, not deserved. Who deserves to be subsidised? India, with a per capita income of less than $2,000, is a relatively poor country. But this cannot be used to argue that everyone in India should be subsidised. Subsidies must…

1982 ON A ROAD SOMEWHERE in Leeds, UK, driving with a friend, a song slowly filled up the fast-moving car. Silently, rapt, he listened to the song. For the rest of the journey, he played the song on what is today known as a loop. 2018 Thirty-six years later, Imran Khan still loves the Lata Mangeshkar song, Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh (‘An odd story is this’). Not many songs seem as apt as this one to encapsulate the story of Imran Khan’s life as the hauntingly beautiful lyric, ‘Kahaan shuru kahaan khatam (Where does it start, where does it finish).’ From an Oxford-educated, devastatingly handsome man, a legendary cricketer, to the prime minister-designate of Pakistan, Imran Khan has come a long way. Khan is probably the only sportsman in the…

IN 2015, MOHAMMED Omer Mohsin was conscripted, trained and sent to fight a bloody war by his army within a matter of weeks. Everything happened in a flash. Then a lanky 20-year-old interested in football, math and Islamic studies, his circumstances began to change rapidly. It was unsettling, the way his country transformed overnight. From his home north of Aden, the southern port city of Yemen, Mohsin had to pick up his guns and head for Ad Dhale, a town more than three hours away by road. There, he was meant to fight off a threat from rebel Houthi troops armed to the teeth in a civil war that continues to this day. Lying in his hospital bed in south Delhi, Mohsin recalls the good old days back home as…

THIS WORK OF non-fiction is a source of inspiration and a rich entry to the field of media history that has received little attention in India. Hicky’s Bengal Gazette is recommended reading for not only historians and journalists, but for anyone who is interested in ascertaining the importance of a free press to rein in unchecked power. In the 18th century, the outspoken voice of the Irishman journalist JA Hicky, based in Calcutta, put him on a collision course with the British East India Company. With an archetypal arc of a story—journalist takes on despotic authority figure—this book tells of how he waged a battle for press freedom, and what befell him afterwards (spoiler: the strategies used then, among them the law of criminal defamation, are still deployed to muzzle…

Rahul Gandhi, in his speech and behaviour in Parliament during the no-confidence motion against the Modi Government, has shown that he is an immature politician (‘Is Candidate Rahul the Biggest Asset for Modi in 2019’, August 6th, 2018). The one advantage ceded to the Prime Minister is that if he is doing something wrong, he will now be more alert and aware of the opposition to it. The long-standing Congress party needs to change with the times and forget dynastic rule. For the party to make a real comeback, it needs to find a capable leader outside the Nehru-Gandhi family to run the show. This has been said by many and printed many times before, but the party still fails to take notice and continues to back Rahul Gandhi as…

NEXT TO WHERE we live in the city’s south, Metro work (‘Mumbai is upgrading’) starts at 6 am. That’s by their clock, which, more often than not, has no relation to other time-pieces. The banging and digging and hammering stops at 10 in the evening, but here the Metro clock, which runs really fast in the mornings, slows down dramatically, and our dreams (if we are lucky enough to have them) have rock concerts, wars with cannon fire and the Sriharikota launch site as their themes. But then, Mumbai is upgrading. We just learnt a week ago how it is upgrading in other ways too. ‘Mumbai Grows, Pollution Soars’ was one newspaper headline. The city’s PM 10 level (that’s not an abbreviation for Modi’s different avatars, but for Particulate Matter)…

ON AUGUST 7TH, in the world of Malayali cinema, yet another chapter is about to open up where alpha males, because of their cluelessness about how the world has changed, will inflict further embarrassment on themselves. That is when two or three actresses will walk in to face a forbidding array of men in the industry and make their case on exactly why the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists, the powerful monopolistic pseudo union that has destroyed the careers of those opposed to it, needs reform. It will not be a genial affair, and, at the end of the meeting, the men in the room will think they have taught women yet another lesson in keeping to their place. Over the next few days, they will come to terms with…

I WOULD HAVE HAD a perfect holiday on the west coast of Scotland had a friend not emailed me a link to The Road to the Isles, a song which has traditional roots but around World War I became a popular music hall number and military march. Even though my ancestors left the Isles over a century ago, I was misty-eyed, reaching for my tartan-shortbread-whisky, as we drove up the Road to the Isles, known more prosaically as the A830: A far croonin’ is pullin’ me awayAs take I wi’ my cromach to the road.The far Cuillins are puttin’ love on meAs step I wi’ the sunlight for my load. We used to spend our family holidays on the West Coast and the Isles in the 1960s and 1970s and…

AS AN EMERGING STAR, there were two things Kamal Haasan knew he had to get behind: being short and being a school dropout. A whipsmart actor roaming the theme park of the Tamil imagination, his delivery was convincing and his characters memorable. Like the rasping waves that thrashed his home town in Ramanathapuram, his low guttural voice seemed to command awe, respect, even dread. Stature was his if he wanted it. He would grow tall enough to play a dwarf in Apoorva Sagodharargal (1989)—a role that became a milestone in his career, the first of many that would use body language and make-up to elevate a character. Directed by Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, it became the highest grossing Tamil film of all time, until its collections were broken by Baashha, the…

FOR A GOOD MANY YEARS , it appeared there was little that could keep the writer Martin Amis away from his cigarette. Laid-back interviews with him are very often filled with references to his smoking. Even in his books, characters are almost always lighting or torching a cigarette. John Self, his celebrated character in Money, tells the reader directly at one point, as if standing in for his creator, ‘Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.’ Late last year, when Amis was in Mumbai for a literature festival, I saw him on stage reach into his jacket and pull out something shaped like a pen but with no accompanying notepad to follow. As the talk progressed, he began to chew on it like a nervous school…

THOUGH THE DRAVIDIAN movement is nearly hundred years old and political parties bearing allegiance to its ideology have ruled Tamil Nadu for more than 50 years, English language biographies of the movement’s tallest leaders have been few and far between. While Indians have not done particularly well in the production of modern biographies that are based on meticulous research and interviews, the problem is exacerbated in Tamil Nadu by a serious handicap: local political discourse leans heavily on, among other things, the personality cults built around individual leaders. No wonder, then, that hagiographies and partisan accounts abound, while biographies providing critical insight into the minds and personalities of political stalwarts are relatively rare. Attempts at biographies in English are sometimes stalled or invite legal trouble. Vaasanthi’s biography of former Chief…

SCOTT HARTLEY HAS spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, leaving aside a year spent leading Google’s teams in Gurgaon and my own birthplace of Hyderabad. In The Fuzzy and The Techie, he shares an important lesson from his work with Google, Facebook and other large firms. It is a timely book. Change across the industrial world is accelerating as the influence of digital technology spreads from Silicon Valley—where four of the five largest technology businesses on the Fortune 500 list are headquartered—to the global manufacturing, energy, agriculture and transport sectors. We have entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While understanding new technology has become central across every sector, Hartley says the value of ‘Liberal Arts’ education offered by many Ivy League universities has been overlooked. Few have commented on…

IN THE EARLY 1760s, Nainsukh of Guler, the great master of the Pahari qalam, painted a time machine. The Philadelphia Museum of Art catalogues it as The Poet Bihari Offers Homage to Radha and Krishna. Once a manuscript folio, to be held and viewed by a royal patron rather than mounted on a wall, this isolated page now rests in a reserve collection far from the hills where it originated. Rendered in opaque watercolour, gold, and silver-coloured paint on paper, Nainsukh’s painting presents us with a heightened moment of encounter. The morning sun gilds everything it touches, including a verdant vista, the marble railings of a palace terrace, and a canopy below which, on a jewelled throne, sit Krishna and Radha. Regal divinities, these figures radiate idealised youth. They and…

SOVIET INDIA MADE a comeback when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was attacked for being pro-industrialist. The Prime Minister, on his part, refused to be dictated by the oldest morality of Indian politics: it’s sinful to be rich, and wealth is venom. I’m not scared of meeting industrialists in public, he said, and stuck to his so-what position even as the Congress played up its sanctimonious politics. Modi’s critics were merely borrowing from the hoary history of poverty politics. It was a best-selling morality tale, and still is: wretched India, as photogenic as a Unicef ad, set against a soul-sucking plutocracy. It was also a necessary condition for the sustainability of socialist India, whose detritus has not been fully removed from our political mindset, not yet. There will be no slogan…

It is slightly surreal that UK court proceedings over the extradition of Vijay Mallya, who is wanted in India for alleged fraud and money laundering, should result in a discussion on the availability of natural light in an Indian prison cell. But that seems to be the nub of it. According to reports, the judge asked Indian authorities to submit a ‘step by step video’ of Barrack 12 (of Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai, where Mallya will reportedly be kept if extradited) ‘to see where the windows are… shot maybe at mid-day with no artificial lighting’. This made front page news. But it is by no means unreasonable. Prisoners have every right to a dignified existence. Indian jails are very often overcrowded and in pitiable condition. And Mallya might just…

ONE DAY BACK in March 2012, I was serving as a panellist at an event at Columbia University on US-Pakistan relations. At the time, the bilateral relationship was struggling to recover from one of its most difficult periods in recent memory. A succession of crises—the infamous Raymond Davis affair, when a CIA contractor opened fire on a busy street in Lahore, killing two Pakistanis; the US unilateral raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad; and a Nato strike on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that killed at least two dozen Pakistani troops—had plunged the partnership into deep freeze. Once the event’s question-and-answer session began, a Pakistani student seated at the back of the room raised his hand and waved it around wildly. He clearly wanted to make a point, and quickly.…

It will not be out of place to assert that the success of the usage and the proliferation of solar energy technologies will only be possible through a two-pronged strategy – a sound financial support mechanism, coupled with a constructive policy initiative which catalyses investments into the sector, both of which need to exist in tandem. An Exim Bank Study titled ‘International Solar Alliance: Nurturing Possibilities’ has drawn out various financial structures that could help fulfil the objectives of ISA. These financial structures inter-alia, entail collaboration among the development financial institutions of the member countries, concessional financing from multilateral/regional development banks with the provision of sovereign guarantee from the borrower country. The Exim Bank Study – ‘International Solar Alliance: Nurturing Possibilities’ has drawn out various financial structures that could help…

SIMON KUPER IS one of the world’s most renowned football writers. A widely read Financial Times columnist, Kuper, who co-authored Soccernomics with sports economist Stefan Szymanski, had been working on region-specific editions of their best-selling work. Recently, they came out with a revised edition of the book, drawing upon new market inputs and data. The 48-year-old Uganda-born British writer, who grew up in the Netherlands and UK and now lives in Paris, has closely followed politics and markets associated with football. As a young man, this alumnus of Harvard and Oxford universities had toured 22 nations in the mid-1990s on a shoestring annual budget of £5,000 while working on his outstanding book, Football Against the Enemy. He is also the author of The Football Men, a collection of profiles of…

“CHARACTERS ALWAYS arrive in fragments,” says the writer Mahesh Rao, “but those fragments are frequent and innumerable during the planning and writing of a novel.” The term ‘backstory’, to him, “sounds too cohesive and systematic for this process”. He finds that creating a character is “more of a question of stitching together these fragments” and “pulling on them in different directions, rejecting many, occasionally retrieving some”. It is this exercise that allows him to achieve “the complexity you’d like to see—say, a character’s relationship with her ex-husband, her love of boxing matches, the envy of her colleagues”. He doesn’t always get it right. The editor of one of his short stories once sent him this comment about a character’s dialogue: ‘I really don’t think he would say that.’ “When I…

WHEN JOHN BONHAM died in 1980, he had some 40 vodka shots in his system. Bonham was the drummer of Led Zeppelin, arguably rock ‘n’ roll trailblazers and inarguably complete tools. There’s this thing that happened—allegedly—in 1969 involving the band, its crew, another band, and a young woman in a hotel room. The story has shifted form and shape over the years; without getting into the graphic details, it’s referred to as the ‘shark episode’ or the ‘mudshark incident’. Needless to say, it’s horrifying. David Bowie, when he died in 2016, was eulogised as this genius and a great role model for the youth, neatly glossing over all the depravity and misconduct he’d been associated with, including but not limited to the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl. There are…

Not Everything Ends Well in Bollywood It was Sultan director Ali Abbas Zafar who spilt the beans about Priyanka Chopra’s engagement to Nick Jonas in a sly tweet congratulating the actress, while revealing that she had left his new film as a result. Priyanka, who earlier this year had signed on to star opposite Salman Khan in Zafar’s sweeping epic Bharat, reportedly dropped out of the film after going back and forth with the makers all of last week, trying to figure out if she could still squeeze the project into her schedule given that she now had a fiancé at the other end of the world. When it became clear that it would be hard to juggle both things, Priyanka is believed to have politely asked to be let…