Table of contents for 12 November 2018 in Open Magazine

HEIGHT IS DIZZYING. Elevated reality alters perception, demands an appraisal, a re-reading. A statue, in metallic exaggeration, soars above the mortals not just to play with our memory—or our history books. It is a repudiation of death necessitated by the grievances of the living, or the under-appreciated greatness of the dead. A statue is a reminder: I’m here, forever, you’re indebted. And a declaration: I’m perpetually reborn in the beholder’s eye. A statue is more enduring than a slogan, larger than the words on a page, and easily comprehensible. It is not a sculpture. It is not imagination that shapes memory in stone and metal. It is the urgencies—political, social, and cultural—of the present that bring a statue to perfection. It is, unlike the animated passage of history, a frozen…

I’M OFTEN ASKED to list my 10 favourite Hindi films ever, over the last decade, since the millennium, or since Independence. We all enjoy compiling lists and disagreeing with them (though I avert my eyes from below-the-line comments). I don’t have five favourite Hindi films, or even 10, or even 100, but I’m quite happy to compile such lists at the drop of a hat, given the fun I have in preparing them. I’ve published these lists in The Guardian, Hindustan Times, for The British Film Institute and many other places, some of which have gone as far as to request my top 70 films (since 1947 in the latter case). Thirteen years ago I published a book, 100 Bollywood Films (British Film Institute/Roli Books), and I often reflect on…

Nothing could have spelt out the divergences in perceptions of wealth more clearly than the famous dialogue from the Hindi film Deewar. The bad guy tells the good guy, “I have buildings, cars, cash. What have you got?” And the good guy replies, “I have Mother.” As definitions of wealth go, it is game, set and match to the good guy. Wealth, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. A single hen that yields four healthy eggs a day may well symbolise more wealth than 10 that yield eight unhealthy ones. Kautilya, India’s first economist, grasped this 200 years before the Christian era began. It can be anything, he said, like money, grains, precious metals, labour, forest produce, etcetera. ‘The acquisition of wealth is always beneficial if it…

TWO HOURS SOU TH of Chennai lies the coastal village of Paramankeni where the writer Carlo Pizzati resides with his wife, the poet and novelist, Tishani Doshi. The isolated location of their home helps Pizzati write. He says, “The silence, the calm, the clean air, the massaging sound of the waves on the shore and the well-modulated rhythms of life boost the focus on inner dialogue.” Less romantically, he adds, “There’s nothing else to do, so you may as well get on with it and write.” Because one can be driven “a little loopy” amidst the silence, he’s devised a self-check mechanism—it’s acceptable for him to speak to their dogs, but when he hears them meting out life advice, it’s a sign he needs to head back to the city…

SINCE 2014, THE India Foundation has been organising an India Ideas Conclave. An initiative of Ram Madhav, a general secretary of the BJP who I got to know when he was a functionary in the RSS, its first four sessions were held at resorts in Goa. This year, it took place at a hotel in Aerocity, Delhi. What is unique about this event is that it sought to bring together all those individuals—writers, journalists, entrepreneurs, social media buffs and a few politicians—who constitute the Right ecosystem in India. Most of those attending are young and not always well known, and most are not BJP activists—though many were enthusiastic volunteers in the 2014 Narendra Modi campaign. More importantly, there is always a generous representation from south India and a sprinkling from…

WHAT MAKES A literary tradition? Perhaps it is the continuously renewed experience of earlier texts over long spans of time and across large, somehow coherent territory. In the case of China and India, this sort of experience has been in evidence for several thousand years, throughout what have long been the two most populous countries in the world. The poet Yuan Zhen (779– 831) celebrated his predecessor Du Fu (712– 770) as follows: “When my reading of poetry reached Du Fu, I understood that all things great and small were gathered in it.” Yuan Zhen goes on to give an account of the whole poetic tradition, each earlier poet adding something that Du Fu combined into a whole. Grade school students in the People’s Republic of China still study texts…

A little over two years ago, Adarsh Natarajan walked into a medical diagnostics lab in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, and asked to meet the founding doctors. At the very outset, it seemed to them that he had a sinister agenda. He dropped the term du jour—‘machine learning’—and it fell with a thud. Dr Vani Ravikumar, senior pathologist at RV Metropolis, was livid. “‘How dare you?’ was my first reaction. ‘You are here to tell me that my job will be made redundant in five years and that I should help you make sure of it.’” Dr Ravikumar’s area of expertise is cervical cancer detection, and Natarajan needed her to help him build an intelligent software that could detect the earliest signs of the disease better than a pathologist. “Adarsh was persistent and…

• House Rent Allowance (HRA): One of the most common allowances, the amount of exemption is least of the following—actual HRA received or 40% of salary (50%, if house situated in Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi or Chennai) or rent paid minus 10% of salary. • Conveyance Allowance: Don’t confuse this with transport allowance, because this is the expenditure granted to an employee to meet the expenses on conveyance in performing of his office duties. There is no limit for this. If such conveyance allowance is Rs 5,000 a month, then whole allowance is exempt. Hence, you may this may be exempt to the extent of expenditure incurred for official purposes. • Leave Travel Allowance: The bills for your travel against LTA can be claimed for exemption. It is allowed to be claimed twice in…

How carefully do you choose your words on social media? Do you avoid adverbs and clichés, like any good writer? Do you indulge in a bit of millennial cultural appropriation, a ‘bae’ here, a ‘woot’ there? Do you obsess, like Gustave Flaubert, over le mot juste even if it is just a tweet you are composing and not a modernist classic? Well, good for you. We live in a visual world, but most information, online and offline, is still relayed through text. Words like ‘computer’, ‘internet’ and ‘read’ are often dead giveaways, but what if even your everyday tweet could reveal your geeky stripes? What if someone told you that you were ‘less open’ because you used a lot of pronouns? What if an algorithm could learn more about you,…

MANY OF US were first introduced to the abstruse speculations of cosmology through A Brief History of Time, a book that catapulted its author Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) to worldwide fame. We encountered a veritable grimoire of super-science that was filled with strange diagrams of ‘light cones’ and one that was ominously about the ‘death of the sun’. The fact that it took eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach earth was forever etched into my memory. These ‘mind-blowing theories’ didn’t really help me in school but did trigger an interest in such far out inquires. As critics put it, Hawking wrote ‘a book that no one may understand in order to answer questions that most people weren’t even asking’. It didn’t matter that many of the 10 million people…

If you had a second act, what would it be? There are probably 7,000 things that I’d want to do. But I want to direct soon. I find myself heading in that direction. I am quite content with what I’m doing now, so I suppose it would be the same thing that I am doing now. I would like to have more time, but that is of my own doing. I can do that whenever I want, I guess. Would you include marriage in your second act? For sure. I have been married three times. I was married to Marc Antony for ten years; it was good, but it didn’t work out. But it did not destroy my vision of marriage. Because of the way that I was raised, I…

The Man Who Kept Aamir Hanging They’re saying Kapil Sharma has cleaned up his act and will resume his TV show shortly. The popular host was on a hiatus after a bout of erratic behaviour practically derailed his comedy show. But his team insists he’s had all the rest he required, he’s sorted out his priorities, and he’s itching to get back. What nobody is speaking about is the fact that Kapil rubbed Aamir Khan the wrong way recently. Those in the know say the Thugs of Hindostan star reached out to Kapil to discuss a possible film role, but the TV funnyman failed to keep the appointment with the superstar—not once, but twice. Understandably, Aamir was not pleased. Turns out Aamir thought Kapil was perfect to play the central…

IN THE LAST column, I mentioned how the Acworth Committee was set up. The Legislative Assembly of the Government of India considered the recommendations of the Acworth Committee in 1924. Most people only quote a particular section from the Acworth Committee Report. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) is probably one of the rare places where all volumes of the Acworth Committee Report are available. In this set, a specific section has been marked out in pencil. Subconsciously, everyone probably feels the urge to quote this. ‘We do not think that the Indian railways can be modernized, improved and enlarged, so us to give to India the service of which it is in crying need at the moment, nor that the railways can yield to the Indian public the…

The wealthy are different. They don’t just have more money, nowadays they also know more. Or own databases that do. The world is well past the formative stage of the Information Age, after all, and ever since Mukesh Ambani publicly referred to data as “the new oil” a couple of years ago, guessing who has what reserves of it—and stored where—has been something of a parlour game in India. “We have it in super-abundance,” the chief of Reliance Jio had said at a telecom conference held in Delhi, “It will be a new source of value and will create opportunities and prosperity for India and millions of Indians.” Less cheerful views of what binary digits—those harmless little zeroes and ones that make up data—could create have been aired too, most…

Since the economic reforms of 1991, India has produced more than 500,000 millionaires and dozens of billionaires. This unprecedented wealth creation has also increased wealth inequality exponentially. No end of it seems in sight. The rich will get richer. This new wealth in the modern age, especially anchored to infotech services and the cellphone revolution, has generated several unicorn startups, most of them started by smart young entrepreneurs who are also technology savvy. Of course, several have lost their fortunes as fast as they were accumulated, like we saw in Silicon Valley’s dotcom boom followed by the bust that occurred in less than a decade. You were a millionaire one day and homeless the next. Wealth creation in the modern age is different from the past. In the old days,…

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