Table of contents for 03 December 2018 in Open Magazine

THE WONDER OF DRONES Drones will change human lives for the better (‘The Day of the Drone’, November 26th, 2018). Since our cities are becoming overcrowded, we can hopefully use drones one day to beat traffic and maintain law and order. Drones also capture brilliant images with interesting perspectives. It is a delight to see videos shot using this emerging technology. Ashutosh Mishra WALMART’S PRIORITIES One of the biggest startup stories of India is Flipkart, which was bought by Walmart a few months ago (‘The Rise and Fall of Binny Bansal, November 26th, 2018). None of us would have imagined that both the founders would one day no longer be part of their own company. Since Walmart has made such a huge investment in the firm, it seems reasonable that…

THE WORD ‘LEGEND’ is too loosely used, but no one will dispute that Alyque Padamsee deserved to be called that. Not once, but twice over. First, of course, as an advertising man. Of all the iconic ads for which he is remembered, my own favourite is the Liril ad. If you are too young to remember, just use Google Search and see the replay with a bikini-clad Karen Lunel under a waterfall. Liril was a pretty ordinary, run-of-the-mill soap, and not remotely sexy. But to see Karen shivering in delight as the water cascades over and around her, made the soap special. (In an interview I read later, Karen said she was shivering because the water was cold!). If you are looking for logic in that ad, there’s none: why,…

TWITTER, THE COMPANY, is not unused to the perils of virtue signalling. Whatever it does to salvage its reputation as a vehicle of nasty politics only gets it despise. The controversy that Jack Dorsey, its founder, finds himself in because he was photographed holding a placard that said, ‘Crush Brahmanical Patriarchy’ is the latest instance, and it is entirely of his own making. Who can refute that India’s dominant culture is historically Brahminical? But whether there is something called ‘Brahminical patriarchy’ is entirely dependent on an ideological position. Patriarchy is a phenomenon across the world. In The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Francis Fukuyama writes that even in societies where descent and inheritance are traced through the mother, the system is still patriarchal. ‘Matrilineal…

Then it was the story of a fairy queen and a fiery sanyasin. Fifteen years ago, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in his penultimate year in office, in the neighbouring states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, two Congress strongholds, Vasundhara Raje and Uma Bharti featured in one of BJP’s most sensational liberation dramas. They brought to the arena the freshness of gender and generation, and as candidates set against two warhorses of the Congress, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan and Digvijaya Singh in Madhya Pradesh, they played the slash-and-surge script of debutants to perfection. On the stump, their arguments carried the conviction of culture shifters in politics. Raje called her campaign ‘Parivartan Yatra’; Bharti called hers ‘Sankalp Yatra’. Reporting them for an India Today cover story—‘The Rani and the Sanyasin’—was such…

AND HOW WAS your weekend?Was it as memorable as Alexander Zverev’s, who beat Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, to win a tournament that Rafael Nadal has never won? Moments before a curtain of blue confetti fell on the tennis season of 2018 in London and he stood clutching the sport’s most significant non-Grand Slam trophy in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other, Zverev had both his fists on the racquet and flicking the important stroke of his nascent career. Stretching every inch of his 6’6” frame to reach the edge of the ad court, Zverev’s hands whipped back an impossible down-the-line passing shot to win the final point of the year, and become the youngest champion of the ATP Finals since…

INDIA IS GRIPPED by Mughal fever these days. Seemingly obsessed with premodern India’s most famous empire, the saffron brigade works tirelessly to scrub Modi’s India clean of vestiges of the Mughals by writing them out of school textbooks, renaming cities and roads, and neglecting Mughal monuments. When Hindu nationalists are not marginalising the Mughals, they villainise these long-dead kings as proxies for modern-day Indian Muslims. All actions provoke a reaction. And so popular curiosity about the Mughals has expanded apace with Hindutva’s anti-Muslim exertions. The political abuse of Mughal history raises the stakes of popular knowledge about this dynasty and their legacies in India. Parvati Sharma’s Jahangir : An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal (Juggernaut; Rs 599; 319 pages) and Ruby Lal’s Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan…

MY HUSBAND makes fun of my one-minute homage to my lunch—I arrange the two vegetables and a small helping of rice on my plate, with a bowl of dal, another of yoghurt, and a glass of lassi forming the outer ring, and then gaze at it—before I pick up my fork to eat. Well, don’t you eat with your eyes first, actually, first with your nose, then with your eyes, and only then do the hands and fingers and mouth get moving? What’s wrong with wanting to gaze at a pretty plate of food? Nothing much, no, if it is physically in front of you, and you are about to satiate your hunger. However, what if the plate is in a photograph, and it was sent to you via Instagram…

Bhansali Pulls off a Coup The buzz in Bollywood corridors is that Sanjay Leela Bhansali may have pulled off a big coup. Industry insiders are saying the Padmaavat filmmaker has managed to rope in Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan to be the leading men of his next film. The actors have reportedly agreed in principle, and Bhansali is currently hammering out a bound script before other details can be locked. No word yet on what the film’s subject is, but the general consensus is that it’s a period project. According to those sources, it’s a two-hero one-heroine film, and word is that Bhansali has committed to Deepika Padukone that she will be his leading lady. It might be worth remembering that the filmmaker had dropped his plans to cast…

Inventions such as the typewriter, radio, calculator, television, computer, internet, etcetera, have revolutionised human lives and altered the way we function (‘The Day of the Drone’, November 26th, 2018). Drones are the latest technology to enter the picture and have become a craze among government agencies, including police departments, as a means to track crime or capture aerial views of a specified area. Dones might currently be used more for purposes of the state, but could well become an indispensable part of our lives and society in the long-run. Small drones are already being used by photographers and videographers to cover large audiences at rallies, sports events and marriages. Everything invented has its own advantages and disadvantages and is vulnerable to misuse. It remains to be seen what the future…

There is an ethical dilemma at the heart of Black Panther, the film. Do the people of Wakanda, this advanced fictional country, have a moral obligation to share their scientific advancements with the rest of the world? While the context is entirely different in the case of ‘uncontacted’ tribes of the Andaman & Nicobar islands—it is the rest of world that wonders if we should contact them—their attacks on visitors seem to suggest not. The other day, a US citizen appears to have been killed by Sentinelese while trying to reach them. Have these tribals kept away from the modern world because they consider it evil? Or have they chosen isolation out of fear of being enslaved? Many of us have romantic notions of the modern world being evil and…

AMERICAN-BORN, London-based author Lionel Shriver shot to fame with her seventh novel We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003), a book that probed a troubled mother-son relationship against the backdrop of a school shooting. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and after years of relative obscurity, Shriver suddenly became a well-known novelist. Her other fiction has explored a marriage in the world of competitive tennis (Double Fault, 1997), obesity (Big Brother, 2013) and life in a future dystopia (The Mandibles, 2016). Shriver also writes a column for the Spectator and has recently become increasingly known for her provocative views. These include: a rejection of identity politics, concern over the growing cordons on free speech, and a belief that the MeToo movement has gone too far. In 2016, she famously…

FOR SOMEONE WHO has closely watched every election, state or Central, since the early 70s, I discern a certain degree of indifference to the ongoing state polls. Mizoram might not register on the antennae of even the most hardened politicos, but surely the outcome in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh ought to be of some concern? But, surprisingly, Delhiites, otherwise clued in about all things political, seem uninterested. It may be because apart from the momentary bragging rights that winners get on December 11th, people are resigned to the fact that the results will have little or no bearing on who wins the Big One next year. Not to put too fine a point on it, this election will do nothing to diminish Modi’s stock (Amit Shah’s is a different…

WE HAVE BEEN told countless times how Facebook is not like other companies. That it is not so much a profit-seeking enterprise than an ennobling force meant to make the world ‘more open’ and ‘connected’. But as the events of last year have shown, this isn’t necessarily the case. The last two years have been a public relations disaster for Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to fix this by embarking on tours of ‘apology’ and ‘listening’ and promising to be less sloppy about issues of privacy and propaganda. But in private, we know now, Facebook has been doing something else entirely. Hidden in the sheep’s clothing of lofty ideals and nerdy neologisms, Facebook is, it turns out, just another corporate wolf. Cover-ups, smear campaigns, lobbying—none of this is beneath the…

FOR STUDENTS OF Modern Indian History, Vallabhbhai Patel is a fascinating character who needs to be situated in the context of how the events of early 20th century India played out. As a proxy indicator, a study of photographs of Patel over the decades brings out these changes quite effectively. From an upcoming pleader in a small town in Gujarat, Godhra, to a Westernised barrister in Ahmedabad to a mass leader in the course of a few decades reveals how India itself moved from a colony with no idea that it could ever attain self-government to one where its leaders took on the British and finally to one where the country attempted to gain Poorna Swaraj using the rulers’ own grammar. At the beginning of this period, the Indian National…

The electoral verdict provided something for both parties to feel reassured by. Republicans did well enough in conservative states to suggest Trump retains a decent chance of re-election in 2020 FOR RONALD REAGAN, Orange County was where conservatives “went home to die”. An area of affluent suburbs, south of Los Angeles, it was an incubator for the small-government conservative revolution of the 1960s. Under Barry Goldwater, it took over the Republican party. Under Reagan, his more polished acolyte, it took over America. Most of the county’s seven congressional districts have been Republican ever since. Yet in the mid-term elections earlier this month all seven districts elected Democrats to the House of Representatives. And where Orange County went, America followed once again. Well-educated suburbanites across the country forsook President Donald Trump’s…

IT’S NOT DIFFICULT to recollect our first memorable moment of Kajol on screen. She was the makeup-less girl with dreamy eyes and a unibrow looking right into the camera as the wind rustled her wild long hair. Reciting a poem about the boy of her dreams, she was like many 20-year-old girls at the time, who asked their mothers to keep their secrets safe. The year was 1995 and the film was Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Some may argue that Kajol had nine films behind her before this one, but it was this seamless tale of love that made us fall for her. She was much lauded for her effortless presence and performance on screen. She’s a ‘natural’ they all said, a term used sparingly for a time in Hindi…

THE WHITE HOUSE is a stuffy place, one of pomp, circumstance and 132 rooms. When the Obamas entered the White House in 2009, they brought with them a lightness and a youth. Now, there were children running on the slopes, and pet dogs that refused to be toilet-trained bounding through the corridor. It is this same non-officious and refreshing touch that former First Lady Michelle Obama brings to her recently published memoir Becoming. Little surprise that within a week of its release, it is America’s fastest-selling book of the year, according to Barnes & Noble. Given the political clime, which is all rancour and vitriol, Michelle rises above all of that to tell a humane and honest tale. It is presidential in the sense that it carries a dignity of…

ONE OF THE most common conditions that we see in the clinic these days goes by the name of ‘fatty liver’. Most of my patients with diabetes have some abnormality in blood tests done for liver functions, which suggests a fatty liver. The report could be with an ultrasound, done for other purposes, which says ‘Fatty Liver Grade X’. Most often these patients have no liver-related symptoms and it is a chance finding. It does however create a flutter in the patient’s mind—and more often than not, patients start attributing all their abdominal symptoms to the liver abnormality. Put simply, fatty liver means deposition of fat in the liver. The liver is a large organ on the right side of our abdomen below the rib cage. It receives a generous…