Table of contents for 08 October 2018 in Open Magazine

REMEMBER AMAR SINGH? The portly gentleman always on the side of the Samajwadi Party boss, Mulayam Singh Yadav? The one who virtually acted as the latter’s one-man brains trust? Well, that decades-long partnership suffered an unexpected rupture when Mulayam’s son Akhilesh Yadav came into his own as a politician, grabbing the reins of the party and expelling his father’s all-weather Man Friday. Around that time, Singh also found himself laid low by a kidney ailment. He seems to have recovered well, one is glad to report, having shed those extra kilos and looking relatively fit. What he appears set to regain is his political weight as he tries to make himself relevant to national politics again. After being away from the limelight for a while, Singh is now increasingly visible…

IT’S ONE OF MY FAVOURITE BOOK TITLES, AND IT SETS THE writer, a premature memoirist, apart as a rare moralist in an age unburdened by neologisms such as fake news and post-truth. Premature because the first volume of The Story of My Experiments with Truth, in Gujarati, was published in 1927, when the author, MK Gandhi, was 58; that is, 21 years before his death. When you read, or reread, the book today, the day of a debasing dispute between fact and truth, you realise the originality of the memoirist as prophet, philosopher and politician. He writes in the beginning: ‘But for me, truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the…

Building a Healthier and Happier Chhattisgarh When the current Government of Chhattisgarh was handed over the responsibility of running the state, it faced immense challenges like poor infrastructure, hunger, violence, backwardness, illiteracy and much more. The newly formed state had malnutrition-affected children, the tribal people trading wild berries in return for salt and witnessing deaths due to the absence of medical facilities. The government perceived and took on these challenges as opportunities for development. Doctor by profession, Chief minister chalked out plan to improve the health of women and child. The Anganwadi, a mother and child care unit of the government, were nourished in order to bring desired change. The center works on a community outreach method and has been instrumental in screening the health of children upto 6 years,…

TRIDIP SUHRUD, 52, IS a multilingual scholar and translator renowned as an authority on Gandhi and his intellectual tradition. While he was director of Sabarmati Ashram, he had helped create the Gandhi Heritage Portal, a free digital archive running into over 1.4 million pages. Armed with knowledge of all three languages in which Gandhi wrote, Suhrud has brought into the public domain literature on the man unpublished for long. Now professor and director of Archives at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, he is working on the diary of Manu Gandhi, a companion of Gandhi, that covers the crucial period of 1942 to 1948. He is also collaborating with other scholars on projects involving a tranche of Gandhi’s letters to his sons from prison and testimonies of over 7,000 indigo cultivators recorded in…

“THE INTERNET IS SUCH A PART OF PEOPLE’S LIVES, WE HAVE THESE AVATARS OF OTHER PERSONAS AND WE’RE LOSING THE INTEGRATION OF SELF IN AN OLD-FASHIONED SENSE. IT MAKES IT HARD TO MOVE THROUGH THE WORLD IF YOU’RE FRACTIONED” AM HOMES AM Homes is the author of 11 books, including short stories, novels, a memoir and an unclassifiable book about Los Angeles. Critics have called her the ‘chronicler of America’s suburban nightmares’, a ‘purveyor of suburban Gothic’ and a writer of ‘weird ambition’. Homes acknowledges that she pushes things to emotional or landscape extremes in order to tell a story, but she believes those extremes have gotten closer to reality. “It’s funny to say that my work sort of anticipates things like this, but now that it’s really happening, I’m…

The One Who Got Her Groove Back Shraddha Kapoor is having something of a moment. The young actress who hasn’t made much of an impression with her work thus far (just watch Haseena… on second thoughts, don’t) appears to be in a good place currently, riding high on the success of Stree, and the decent opening of Batti Gul Meter Chalu. In both films, she didn’t have to do the heavy lifting, but provided adequate support. In Stree, especially, as a mysterious out-of-towner suspected to be the witch terrifying a small village, she was appropriately enigmatic. She’s being perceived with fresh eyes, say industry insiders, “as someone who deserves a second chance,” in the words of one filmmaker. In the wake of a string of failures, there was some talk…

BETWEEN THE last column and the current one, we have seen Mumbai’s biggest annual festival. We are not talking Diwali, the Festival of Noise, but Ganeshotsav, which is Mumbai’s (and Maharashtra’s) very own event. The figures are staggering: the city’s families and communities installed a total of 196,826 Ganesh murtis. I wondered how such an exact figure was available. Did the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation have a special cadre called the Ganpati Gang (or more respectfully, the Ganpati Guild) which went into every gully and ghar, and under the pretext of darshan, quietly clicked their number-counting machines? Ah, but how the human mind (in this case, mine) complicates things and sees mystery where none exists! The figure was obtained by simply counting visarjans (a loftier word than ‘immersions’, though it means…

JAMES BOSWELL’S LEGENDARY biography of Samuel Johnson was based on first-hand experience of living, working and travelling with the great man for most of his life. Ramachandra Guha, denied that privilege, has done the next best thing—immersing himself for a decade in virtually everything Gandhi ever wrote or said and most of what other people wrote or said about him. What emerges in both massive volumes of this magisterial work is the most detailed account of Gandhi’s life ever written, though there have of course been several others. Among the archives Guha has trawled was an unexpected and previously untapped treasure trove of Gandhi papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Did Gandhi really change the world, as the subtitle of this book—Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World…

While the financing programmes offered by the Export-Import Bank of India (Exim Bank) have promoting India’s exports as their central theme, there is always an element of social consciousness, be it in terms of employment creation or other forms of socioeconomic development. For most developing countries, adequate infrastructure – secure energy, efficient transport, reliable communication systems, resilient sanitation, and affordable housing – is very important for economic development. The development assistance of the Government of India is mandated through the Exim Bank and focuses on development of infrastructure, industrialization, agriculture development, healthcare, and other such projects that may be overlooked by other traditional lenders. For example, most of the African nations are in dire need of energy to meet its growing economy. Forty African countries are solar rich, but less…

IN LAGE RAHO MUNNABHAI, the 2006 Rajkumar Hirani movie that made Gandhigiri a rage in urban India, a radio jockey who is the object of the hero’s affection asks him: “Do you walk on the path shown by Mahatma Gandhi?” Murli Prasad Sharma aka Munnabhai aka Sanjay Dutt replies: “Of course! I walk three miles everyday on Mahatma Gandhi Street.” Like all good jokes, it flies because it is true. Both about the presence and absence of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a fact that modern India has canonised the Mahatma to an extraordinary degree, naming at least 53 major roads in India and 48 roads outside the country, putting his face on currency notes in 1996, and adding his name to all manner of institutions, schemes and statutes not…

HUMAN YEARNING FOR RECOGNITION, FROM THE LEVEL OF BEGGARS TO THE DESIRE FOR VIBRANT AND STRONG NATIONS, HAS FOR LONG MIRRORED THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN THE CITY AND THE SOUL, EVEN IF THE FORMS OF DESIRE AND POLITICAL ORGANISATION HAVE CHANGED OVER TIME ANNIVERSARIES ARE OCCASIONS that call for celebration and at times for introspection, in case events panned out differently from what one expected. They also serve as excuses for dishing out something in case one is unable to come up with a right ‘peg’, as journalists say. It is rare that a single event forces one to look at the past, present and the future at the same time. In the last quarter century or so of the Great Moderation—political and economic—there has hardly been an event that could…

DEVELOPMENT IS OFTEN about connectivity. This term can be interpreted in many different ways, but one core element of physical connectivity is always transport. Within transport, there are various modes: rail, road, water and air. Some of these are squarely in the Union List of India’s Constitution. The Railways, for example. Also, ‘Highways declared by or under law made by Parliament to be national highways’, ‘Ports declared by or under law made by Parliament or existing law to be major ports, including their delimitation, and the constitution and powers of port authorities therein’ and ‘Airways; aircraft and air navigation; provision of aerodromes; regulation and organization of air traffic and of aerodromes; provision for aeronautical education and training and regulation of such education and training provided by States and other agencies.’…

‘The Taan Baan collection is a revival of the ancient Indian craft of hand-spinning and weaving organically cultivated cottons’ RTA KAPUR CHISHTI / Taan Baan ‘Khadi is the fabric of independence because it allows one to create easywear garments that evolve into a language of freedom by itself’ TANUSHREE CHATTERJEE / Shorshe ‘The texture of Khadi varies from fine breathable cotton saris to heavier fabrics for blouses and even jackets’ RTA KAPUR CHISHTI ‘The luxury of handmade Khadi, from its elegance to visual quality, is unbeatable’ NEERU KUMAR / Tulsi ‘Khadi is the fabric of choice for our Charkha collection as it resonates with our philosophy of local and sustainable clothing’ TANUSHREE CHATTERJEE ‘Khadi is all about conscious clothing as it’s a product of our own soil’ TANUSHREE CHATTERJEE…