Table of contents for 01 May 2017 in Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The success stories of some actors are wonderful reminders of the fact that even someone with no film connections can make it to the top (‘True Grit’, April 24th, 2017). Nawazuddin Siddiqui has proven that you only need to be able to act well and imbibe the personality of the character you are playing in order to do well in Bollywood. He has time and again aced roles that might have short screen-times but leave a powerful impact on the viewer because he manages to add nuance and life to the personality of the person he is playing. Indeed, when one reads his interviews and process of prepping himself for a film, one realises just how much of an effort he puts in simply to…

EVEN PEOPLE WHO know history are condemned to repeat it. Foolishly so, no doubt, but lessons that have been clearly learnt with burnt fingers are not so much forgotten as thought irrelevant. Otherwise what is the explanation for the ambushing of Hindi into India yet again when the question had been settled on the riotous streets of south India half a decade ago? This week, President Pranab Mukherjee decided to accept the recommendations of the otiosely named ninth report of the Committee of Parliament on Official Language. An article by the news agency PTI informs us what this entails: • ‘All dignitaries including the President and ministers… may be requested to give their speech/ statement in Hindi only’; • ‘Hindi could be compulsory till Class 10 in all CBSE schools’;…

WHEN A LYNCH mob kills a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh over rumours that his family had slaughtered a cow and had beef in the freezer, when ‘cow protection’ vigilantes thrash four Dalit men in Gujarat for trying to skin a cow, when two Muslim women are beaten up and accused of carrying beef, the sub-text is clear. It is not simply about whether one has the right to eat beef. The present political ruckus over cow slaughter and food habits is another stage in the ongoing struggle to define the identity of who gets to be called an Indian and who does not, and who gets to decide the issue. It is about using a ban on beef to create a homogeneous identity of an Indian. Worldwide, and historically,…

IN MARCH THIS year, the novelist Hari Kunzru wrote about his road trip from New York to West Texas. In his essay in The Guardian, the journey takes a backseat as the music of the Mississippi propels the story forward. Kunzru writes: ‘If I say it’s almost impossible to hear the blues now, that’s not because it’s unavailable, quite the opposite… since authenticity is catnip to capital, the blues has become a visual shorthand in advertising: a tastefully blown-out shot of a sharecropper sitting on a porch playing a harmonica, cut with a water droplet running down the flank of a beer bottle. It’s hard to think of another kind of music that has been so thoroughly hollowed out.’ White Tears, Kunzru’s fifth novel, is the story of how the…

I FIRST MET Salma Hayek in the late 80s when she was a soap opera star in Mexico. She had come to the Golden Globe Awards, not as a star but as a guest of one of the members of the press, so she was seated near me. I noticed her immediately and soon learnt that she spoke minimal English. In 1991, she headed for Hollywood and plunged into learning her craft. She soon made it in Hollywood, not only as an actor but as a producer and director as well. She married French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault and they have a daughter together. She divides her time between France, England and Los Angeles. She has just returned to Los Angeles to promote her latest film How to be a Latin…

SURPRISING THAT Mayawati should induct her businessman brother Anand Kumar into the family-owned Bahujan Samaj Party. For Mayawati, politics and business have always been indistinguishable. Politics had delivered enormous riches to the extended family of Prabhu Das, a retired MTNL linesman, once his primary-schoolteacher daughter came under the spell of the Dalit ideologue Kanshi Ram. She hasn’t looked back since. The journey from a one-room tenement in a jhuggi-jhopdi cluster in West Delhi to marble-and-granite mansions in some of the most tony estates in urban India has been short and eventful. It saw her become Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh four times, each term adding to the fortunes of Prabhu Das’ progeny. Anand Kumar was a jobless nobody till his sister achieved power. Rules were short-circuited to employ him as…

AT THE RECENT meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national executive in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a pitch for ending the pernicious practice of triple talaq that deprives women subject to Muslim Personal Law of legal rights enjoyed by most women in India. His words were soon echoed by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Those who are wont to see these voices as purely political will frame this issue differently. But the truth is that triple talaq has no place in a society that is run by a constitution. The practice has now reached a level where it mocks the rights of women. There are instances where triple talaq has been pronounced over WhatsApp and even through newspaper notices. The custodian of Muslim Personal Law, the…

Recently, playback singer Sonu Nigam (with 6.03M followers on Twitter) found himself as the eye of a social media hurricane. He had bemoaned, ‘when will this forced religiousness end in India’. He was referring to being woken up by the azaan in the morning. Realising that he had stirred a hornet’s nest he went on to tweet: ‘I stand by my statement that loudspeakers should not be allowed in Mosques & Temples. Period.’ But there was no unringing the bell. Nigam also went and shaved his head as a reply to Twitter threats. We are still wondering why he needed to do that. The problem, as we all will attest, is not ‘forced religiousness’ but noise pollution. And while religious institutions contribute to that we are all equally at fault.…

They found five litres of semen inside Neelofar’s body while conducting her postmortem.” The boy who says this is about 16 and lives in Kulgam in South Kashmir. He says he was told this at a ‘conference’ in his village recently. The teenager is convinced of this ludicrous claim about Neelofar Jan, one of the two women found dead in a rivulet in Shopian in South Kashmir in May 2009. After allegations of their rape and subsequent murder by security forces spread thick and fast that summer, there was widespread unrest in the state. In the din raised by the separatist machinery, the truth did not seem to matter at all. The probability of the two women having drowned was rejected. It did not matter that from 1995 to 2008,…

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, when I was a graduate student in Economics at the University of Cambridge, I recall participating in a discussion about the rise of East Asia’s Tiger Economies, still a fashionable subject in the early 2000s. One participant made an unusual point while comparing Singapore and Hong Kong (already at per capita income levels of advanced economies) with China (which was only beginning to shine). All three were populated largely by Han Chinese and none was a democracy in a true sense; all variations of authoritarian regimes. However, according to the participant, the reason Singapore and Hong Kong had thrived and China would continue as before was that the former had inherited the concept of ‘rule of law’ from the British, something which was alien to mainland Chinese…

AUGUST 25TH, 1938: ‘We took a long time over discussion of Isa 58: at family prayer & I suggested to them that one bond of oppression we could loosen was the heavy weights carried and drawn in carriages by men far above their strength. The size of the rice sack must be made very much smaller that was the only salvation for people who carry them on their heads and backs, another reducing the size of the man-drawn bandys and rikshaws in Madras. Actually people kill themselves drawing them. If our boys can rouse the mind of right thinking people & start a movement for breaking this oppression, they will not have lived in vain. It will be a hard task. Capitalism will rise against it as it means loss…

INDIAN RAILWAYS: THE WEAVING OF A NATIONAL TAPESTRY Bibek Debroy, Gurcharan Das, Sanjay Chadha, Vidya Krishnamurthi Portfolio Penguin 225 Pages | Rs 299 THE PURVEYORS OF DESTINY: A CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY OF THE INDIAN RAILWAYS Arup Chatterjee Bloomsbury 332 Pages | Rs 599 THE ADVENT OF the railways in India, like the advent of new technology everywhere, inspired opportunity while also provoking subversion. There were pioneers who envisioned a network to weld the country together as never before, while others, like Gandhi, perceived such welding as a means for “bad men [to] fulfill their evil designs with greater rapidity”. “There may be no diamonds at Golconda,” one commercially motivated baddie declared, “but there is the worth of a ship-load of diamonds in the cotton fields of the Deccan.” A few defeated…

WHEN I STARTED work in the world of conservation three decades ago, I thought I had to save tigers and elephants from poachers and hunters; men with handlebar moustaches and wrought-iron hearts, wretched and rusted souls drenched in blood, gore and junglesweat. Today, my team of veterinarians, biologists and sociologists catch tigers and leopards, elephants and bears to prevent them from being slaughtered by village mobs. The biggest threat to these large animals is not Veerappan or Sansar Chand anymore, the threat comes from the common man of Laxman, the aam aadmi of Kejriwal. The country is shrugging off a heritage that once included nature worship and has taken up arms against mega-fauna that intrude into the sterilised capsules of human existence. And thus, the Wildlife Trust of India that…

Star Surprise The star attraction of the ‘Da-Bangg’ live shows that are currently underway in the Far East and will continue across Australia is naturally Salman Khan, who toplines an ensemble of performers that include Bipasha Basu, Sonakshi Sinha and Badshah. But during the Hong Kong show last weekend, fans who’d shelled out substantial money for their tickets got an unexpected bonus when Akshay Kumar made a surprise entry and proceeded to perform at the show. The organisers of the show—Salman’s brother Sohail Khan and Co—had succeeded in roping in the Khiladi star to make an uncredited cameo. This isn’t merely rare in Bollywood, it’s virtually unheard of! When was the last time that a major A-lister agreed to do a supporting act in a show headlining another A-lister? It…

THIS PROMISES TO be the hottest Mumbai summer in years. So what does the Bombay Electric Supply & Tramways Company (BEST) do? It scraps its air-conditioned bus service. As a measure to cope with traffic congestion by reducing the number of cars on the road, BEST introduced 290 AC buses on 25 routes in 2007. It was hailed as a master-stroke, but different folks need different strokes. ‘Have car, will ride’ holds true everywhere unless a city actively discourages cars swooping into its central business district. London did that by imposing an extremely heavy congestion charge (around Rs 1,000 per day) in 2003 if you wanted to drive into a demarcated zone in Central London. It was the largest such exercise taken by any city in the world, and a…

THERE WAS MUCH to admire about the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan when he first appeared on the international scene. As the mayor of Istanbul, he had once been imprisoned for reciting a poem and going against the then military-backed leaders. When he became prime minister in 2002, although a political Islamist, he was looked upon with hope as a leader who was going to clip the military’s wings. Erdoğan did that and more. He went about fixing the country, generating economic growth, boosting civil liberties, talking of peace and conflict-resolution with Kurds, offering apologies and condolences for past massacres and genocides. Fifteen years later, that hope has all but shattered. He has overnight brought about the most radical overhaul the Turkish state has seen. Declaring himself as the winner…

It all began when ORGANIC INDIA's visionary founders Mr Bharat Mitra and Mrs Bhavani Lev, inspired by the lifetime service to society of their guru Sri HWL Poonja, felt a compelling need that they too should contribute to the good of society. Mr Bharat Mitra, Founder and President of ORGANIC INDIA, decided to start a company which would nourish every life form it touches — planet earth, farmers who grow the basic produce, the employees who work with them as well as the final consumer of the product. Back in the early 1990s in Lucknow, ORGANIC INDIA began modestly with eight farmers who agreed to grow tulsi commercially. The farms were closely monitored by our field staff for quality control. We also had to educate and train the f a…