Table of contents for 26 November 2018 in Open Magazine

WILL THE CBI RECOVER? The CBI has not been able to rise to the challenge of conducting independent and unbiased investigations, especially in those cases which involve politicians and powerful businessmen (‘Director’s Cut’, November 19th, 2018). Sadly, this is not a new story when it comes to the agency. Several times in the past, the CBI has also been questioned for its ethics. Mahesh Kumar There has been talk of cases of bribery within the CBI before, but now top officers are accusing one another of it. It is hard to have faith in the agency’s ability to crack down on crime. The present scandal is very bad news for the country because given the vast scale of alleged corruption, the CBI will not be able to come out of…

OVER THE YEARS I have had occasion to travel to many villages and small towns of England and Scotland. In each place there is invariably a simple war memorial that commemorates the locals who died in the Great War of 1914-1918. The fallen cut across classes. They include officers with titles and the sons of ordinary working-class folk, people who died in France, in Mesopotamia and in Palestine. Some died horrible deaths from mustard gas or were cut down in insane attempts to capture a few hundred yards of territory. The sadness that accompanies memories of the Great War has still not disappeared. It lives in novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, in the verses of war poets and even in the final episode of television serials…

EVERY CITIZEN IDENTIFIES with the railways. Therefore, every citizen has his or her own take on what railway reforms should be. Wi-Fi on trains, Delhi-Mumbai travel at 250 kmph, train stations that look like airports. Railway travellers are a heterogeneous group. While a small proportion travels on Rajdhani or Shatabdi, 95 per cent of passengers still travel unreserved. It’s not that the demands I listed are illegitimate. I will address some such sundry issues in the next column. In this one, I will list five key reform pillars that cut across all railway issues. Without these five, all other reforms will be non-starters. First, there is the question of privatisation. That word is freely bandied around. What do we mean by privatisation? Today, there is something known as the Indian…

THE EXPLOSION OF what are called MeToo allegations made me think of Masetto, the lusty, good-looking young labourer masquerading as a deaf and dumb gardener in Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Would he be classed as victim or aggressor? If he was the victim, then the eight nuns and Abbess who enjoyed his services were the aggressors and he could sue them for a fortune, having them and their money too. It could also be the other way round. Much would depend on the lawyers the two sides hired, the witnesses they bought and the evidence they adduced if the matter came to court. As it happened, a showdown was averted. When Masetto threatened to quit because ‘eight nuns and one Abbess are too much for one man’, the Abbess panicked, fearing…

FOR THE NEXT six to seven months, India will remain in the grip of extreme and partisan articulation of views on policy matters by the entire spectrum of political leadership. If the General Election of 2019 does not throw up a clear mandate for any side, such partisan posturing is likely to continue for longer. We saw this during the first term of the United Progressive Alliance Government when the mixed mandate of the 2004 General Election and the surprise defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance encouraged a sour BJP, licking its wounds, to try keeping the Manmohan Singh Government from settling down. Prime Minister Singh was not even allowed to introduce his Council of Ministers to Parliament. Given the extant political environment, we have to perforce…

FOR MANY YEARS, LONG BEFORE he installed a computer in his office, Kamlesh Vaswani would walk to nearby cyber cafés in a local market every few days, only to return disappointed. “Youths,” he says, recalling what he saw, “They were wasting themselves.” Vaswani describes himself as a “small lawyer” in Indore. Having practised law for the last 15 years, he takes what he gets in a small city, he says. These are mostly civil cases of matrimonial and property disputes and bounced cheques. But he has always lived and conducted himself with a strict moral code, he adds. Whenever he would visit a cyber café, either to consult cases or get copies of judgments, he would find the subjects of his observation—rows and rows of school and college-going male students—huddled…

DESPITE THE FACT that my eyes are not so good at the moment, I picked up this 400-page novel and devoured it in two sittings. Powerful storylines fluently told in a deceptively simple and colloquial style, strong, outspoken characters and plenty of action kept the pages turning. Woe betide you if you skip a chapter—you will miss another key twist in the plot. So who was Khadija Mastur, the author, and why is she not as well known as other Urdu and Hindi authors of the years immediately preceding and after independence, writers such as Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Manto and Bhisham Sahni? The internet is horribly quiet about her, calling her ‘An Urdu author from Pakistan’. But she wasn’t. She was born in 1927 in United Provinces and spent…

BASED ON THE true story of two men who escaped from New York’s Dannemora prison in 2015, Ben Stiller’s TV mini-series Escape at Dannemora brings to reel the real lives of the inmates who were helped by a female prison guard—played by Patricia Arquette—sexually involved with both. Stiller got his first big break in 1989 with the TV show Saturday Night Live after his parody of Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) impressed some people in Hollywood What was the challenge of shooting in a prison? The challenge was getting into the real prison—I felt that was the key. It has such a unique environment. This escape couldn’t have happened elsewhere—all its features combined to make that possible. The prison is 60 years old and nobody had ever before…

Never before has there been such a crisis in the CBI (‘Director’s Cut’, November 19th, 2018). The premier investigative agency of the country is now in a tug of war within. Scandals involving top officers of the agency are disheartening to read about. Each has an issue against the other and nobody knows for sure whose integrity is intact and who is not speaking the truth. In short, it is evident that all is not well with the CBI, which should be protecting the country from corruption, crime and violence, and has instead made a sorry spectacle of itself. Cases where the CBI has been soft on the accused in the past or let the accused flee the country do not speak well of how reliable the agency is when…

THE ONLY SURPRISE in the violence that happened in Tamil Nadu over the movie Sarkar is that it took so long in the coming and for that you have to blame the demise of J Jayalalithaa, the last political titan to come out of the AIADMK stable. The agitation swiftly petering out is also the result of the party’s headlessness, even though it was the alleged portrayal of Jayalalithaa as a murderous villain that sparked it off. The movie is patently political in a manner that only Tamil cinema aspires to and achieves. And in one project, it weaves in the ambitions of multiple players of the Tamil political landscape. Sarkar has been produced by Kalanithi Maran, who is from the opposition DMK fold. His own equation at present with…

IN HALF GODS, time periods and locations bleed into one other. Characters walk in and out of each other’s stories. And the effects of history permeate geography. But the most porous border of all is the one between genres—not a novel, not quite short stories, Half Gods (HarperCollins, 216 pages, Rs 499) works as an interconnected tapestry of tales moving through the US, India and Sri Lanka. In Akil Kumarasamy’s debut work of fiction, we start with ‘Last Prayer’ featuring Arjun and Karna, brothers living in New Jersey, with their grandfather Muthu, and mother Nalini, Tamil Sri Lankan refugees. Named after characters from the Mahabharata, the brothers appear and disappear periodically in the baggy folds of the narrative. In the second story, ‘New World’ we are transplanted to an estate…

FOR SOME OF the finest European novelists, ‘historical’ is an adjective made redundant by a sense of ‘being in the world’. The past is a permanent entrapment, irredeemable; and the rite of memory is what makes art an obligation, an intimate urgency of the living. The Jewish experience and World War II have altered the geography of freedom—and of cruelty. They have changed fiction, too. There could have been no poetry after Auschwitz, but when it did sprout on the charred earth of Europe, it carried within it all the abandoned sighs of a people. We re-read a Primo Levi or a WG Sebald to realise how a resonant word like ‘Holocaust’ still remains a throbbing incomprehension, and in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, as ‘history and warning’.…

THE LAST TWENTY odd days have seen a political storm in Sri Lanka. An unresolved constitutional crisis was the product of these events that began with the sacking of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on October 26th. Events continue to unfold on a daily basis in a manner that has severely damaged democracy in the country. Differences between President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe had been brewing for a while over a gamut of issues, something that led to his sacking and the surprising appointment of former President Mahinda Rajapakse in his place. This was a coup of sorts as Sirisena and Wickremesinghe had joined hands in 2015 to challenge Rajapakse who had acquired neardictatorial powers over time. Sirisena, notably, was a cabinet member under Rajapakse and defected from his…

For close to three decades now, Bollywood has been dominated by three superstars: Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir Khan. But in the last few years, murmurs of their impending fall have begun. Shah Rukh has had a poor run at the box office for a few years now. Salman has delivered a flop in Tubelight (2017) and an underperformer in Race 3 (2018). Now Aamir, whose marketing nous and star appeal ensured he hadn’t had a flop as a leading man since Mangal Pandey (2005), has delivered the unthinkable. Thugs of Hindostan (2018), made on a rumoured budget of over Rs 250 crore, may have crossed Rs 100 crore in collections, courtesy the long weekend, but is reportedly struggling at the box office. On its day of release, November 8th,…

The handloom industry is one of the oldest and the largest cottage industries in India, representing and preserving the vibrant Indian culture, giving employment to more than 3 million weaver households. Indian artists are now distinguished worldwide for their hand spinning and printing elegance. These activities are spread across thousands of towns and villages and involve transfer of skills from one generation to the next. The strength of the handloom industry lies in the fact that it involves low usage of capital and power, is eco-friendly and suitable for innovations and transformation with respect to market requirements. The Government has introduced various schemes for holistic development of the sector. Cloth production using handloom has been displaying an increasing trend over the years. The aggregate cloth production by the handloom sector…

URBAN INDIA’S SOCIAL media threads since last month, in the wake of the MeToo movement, reveal a dangerous silence. A silence around the sexual abuse of women, but also a silence around their thoughts. In anonymous and named women’s accounts on Twitter and Facebook, it seems almost as though, after years of being discounted, their inner turmoil is suddenly finding public voice and witnesses. I followed these real MeToo stories while also reading two fictitious tales about the desires, struggles and traumas of women: The Queen of Jasmine Country by Sharanya Manivannan, and Eating Wasps by Anita Nair. Both novels are rendered in the voices of different women—each burdened, in her own way, by a patriarchal order. The Queen of Jasmine Country delves into the interiority of a woman from…

MOHAN SAMANT HAD A conceptual grouse with the word ‘practice’. As both musician and artist, it was simply not something he did. He preferred to unequivocally renounce the very notion of practice as a private disciplinary engagement. ‘I do not practice the sarangi. I play it every day as if I am in a concert, sometimes very well, sometimes very badly,’ he once wrote. ‘Similarly, I don’t practice painting with drawing and sketching. I just paint and if I don’t like it I overpaint the same canvas twice, thrice, many times. I do not use drawings and sketches in preparation for the paintings, they are separate works altogether.’ By the 1950s, the 1924-born artist was proficient in both arts, though music predated his love of painting. ‘Music became the focus…

Sonakshi’s True Calling Sonakshi Sinha said in an interview to a daily earlier this week that Salman Khan is the only actor she’d sign a movie opposite without so much as reading a script. The point she was trying to make—and she says it in so many words—is that she feels so much gratitude to him for “making me find my true calling” that she’d break all her rules when it comes to her Dabangg co-star. Alas, when will actors realise that signing a movie without reading a script cannot—and should not—be justified, no matter what? Aamir Khan has said the only time he signed a film without reading the script was when his idol Dev Anand approached him to star in Awwal Number. Looking at how that film turned…