Innholdsfortegnelse for 28 May 2018 i Open Magazine

Several rogue elements have been active since the BJP came to power (‘Fear and Loathing in Aligarh’, May 21st, 2018). While development and economic gains are what the BJP preaches, the party is yet to prove itself capable of creating and nurturing a tolerant, open and free society. Prime Minister Narendra Modi may be great in diplomacy and a powerful orator, but if his government does away with discipline in society, then electing him to high office would have been a mistake. By discipline, one also means leaving educational institutions alone and free to function. To create any sort of havoc at a university campus, and particularly one as well respected as AMU, is a shameful thing. There have been several other instances of vandalism at non-Hindu colleges, such as…

INDIA’S PARLIAMENT HAS justifiably earned itself an unsavoury reputation for the constant disruptions that prevent both legislation and meaningful debate and discussion. As someone who has been a member of the Rajya Sabha for two years—that would count me as a relative newcomer—I share that enormous sense of frustration, and more so when the whole business of disruption is accompanied by a sense of brazenness. Yet, there is one facet of Parliament that works well but unfortunately doesn’t get adequate appreciation. The elaborate committee system—standing committees, consultative committees and joint parliamentary committees—offers MPs an opportunity to study subjects in detail, scrutinise legislation, prod officialdom and, in short, facilitate greater accountability of the Government and the state. It is also decreed that the proceedings of the committees are confidential—including depositions by…

EVEN AS BS YEDDYURAPPA has been sworn in as the Chief Minister of Karnataka, a legal battle and controversy have dogged the decision of Governor Vajubhai Vala to invite BJP’s Yeddyurappa to form the state government. On the face of it, the decision appears questionable as the BJP does not have the requisite number of legislators for a simple majority in the Assembly. But this is a simplistic and even too-clever-by-half argument. By precedent, prescription and a binding judicial verdict, the strength of a legislature party that has formed the government in a state is to be tested on the floor of the Legislative Assembly and nowhere else. There are obvious exceptions to this. If, for example, the Governor finds that on paper a claimant for power has only 10…

It is all well to say how important cricket is, and how its most respected format, Test cricket, must be saved. But behind the scenes, there is always some arm twisting going on in the ICC to serve the self-interest of one or more cricket boards. The ICC has just cited its over-reliance on Indian revenue as the big weakness in its effort to make cricket a global game. According to it, because of this skew, the earnings of world cricket are unevenly distributed, which puts other country boards at a disadvantage. We saw a bit of this recently when India refused to play a day-and-night Test against Australia in an upcoming series. This format is being looked at as a way to revive interest in unlimited-overs cricket. But India…

THE ONLY STORY BY JULIAN BARNES (Jonathan Cape)  With every novel, critics claim that Julian Barnes is at the top of his game. The Booker-prize winning The Sense of an Ending (2011) cemented his reputation, but it would seem that Barnes is actually getting better with age, and one wonders, how is that even possible? His most recent novel The Only Story opens with the lines, ‘Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.’ With this query in mind, the novel tells of a love story between a young boy and an older married woman, set in a town beyond London, in a time around 50 years back from today, and…

IF YOU WANT recommendations of children’s books that involve suicide, depression, addiction or any other psychological problems, please stop reading right now. This listicle of children’s books only includes those about adventure, spies, magic and joyous forays into the wilder realms of the imagination. If you liked Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and other tales of bravery and adventure, read on. A SKINFUL OF SHADOWS BY FRANCES HARDINGE (Harry N Abrams) Let us travel back in time to the politics and drama of the English civil war where 12-year-old Makepeace, the illegitimate daughter of the powerful aristocrat Lord Fellemotte, is shipped off to the ancestral home of Grizhayes to work as a kitchen girl. The Elder Fellemottes have a secret that the title brings out beautifully and menacingly;…

I AM BIASED, let me admit, being a man schooled in the ways of elephants, towards the criticality of the matriarch in the task of parenting. Among elephants, the man is not part of parenting. The bull does not spend even the teeniest bit of his time in caring for or bonding with his offspring. A dominant bull comes, woos, mates and goes his way. He may remain with his chosen lady for a couple of days, but after his shows of affection and passion, he just departs. Ripping apart brakes of bamboo in his hurried departure, he leaves his post-coital glen with never a backward glance. The lady goes back to eating grass, ripping up turf, whacking the dirt globules away from its green foliage and then munching mouthfuls…

BJP IS HARDLY ANY BETTER A dispassionate assessment of the Modi Government would show that there is nothing for Modi or Amit Shah to gloat about (‘Fear and Loathing in Aligarh’, May 21st, 2018). Things have become worse. The Prime Minister perorates from public platforms, talking ill of his opponents.AB Vajpayee never resorted to such language or potshots. He was grace and dignity personified. Furthermore, governors have set a new precedent by interfering in executive functions. Democracy within the BJP is absent. The Congress is full of sycophancy, but the BJP is hardly any better. T Santhanam WALMART IN INDIA Without an iota of doubt, Walmart is the best thing that could have happened to Flipkart and its employees (‘Let the E-Commerce War Begin’, May 21st, 2018). Not only will…

SO, ARE SUPERMARKETS going to get leapfrogged as a format by e-tailers even before they get a fair slice of Indian shopping bills? Walmart’s takeover of Flipkart seems to dangle that conclusion, and real-cart veterans of retail wars have done well to offer online delivery options of their own, just in case profitability flies off into cyberspace. Sales have already leapt that way, trends are trends, and few would argue against low-cost convenience as the future of retailing. Whatever the ground conditions, every compass is being reset by Amazon. But then again, are internet retailers really the inevitable masters of all they survey? Amazon has not only opened glass-front stores in the US for people to walk into (and out of without enduring a check-out queue), it has got itself…

WHO IS A great writer? Someone who sees the future while writing of today? Someone who can coin terms and phrases for posterity? American author and journalist Tom Wolfe, who died recently, ticks both those boxes. The terms he used to describe the excesses of the late 70s, such as the ‘Me Decade’, could easily be applied to the selfie-obsessed culture of today. Wolfe was not the unshaven rumpled journalist padding around in shorts; instead, he was the Man in the Suit, and a white one at that, occasionally accompanied by a gilt-tipped walking cane. When asked to describe his fashion style, he replied ‘neo-pretentious’. Which is a perfect description for much of what we see in today’s malls and on ramps. He popularised phrases such as ‘aw-shucks’, described by…

IN THE FOUR years that he has been in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has animated domestic politics in India and the country’s foreign policy by departing often from conventional methods and shibboleths. As he focuses on winning the next General Election, the key question is whether the Modi era will mark a defining moment for India, just as Xi Jinping’s ascension to power has been for China. The answer to that question is still not clear. What is clear, however, is that Modi’s stint in office has clearly changed Indian politics and diplomacy. In domestic politics, Modi has a stronger record: He has led the Bharatiya Janata Party to a string of victories in elections in a number of states, making his party the largest political force in the…

The interconnectedness of trade finance markets necessitate development of effective, cooperative partnerships in the financial sphere, to foster resilience and support growth in international trade. Trade finance assistance is generally provided by commercial banks and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). Banks are the major providers of trade finance and act as a means to reduce payment risks. Alongside, the role of DFIs, including export credit agencies as providers of long term loans, project finance, guarantees (insurance), and other risk mitigating products is also crucial. A well-functioning trade finance market enables firms which would otherwise be considered too risky. According to estimates, an increase in access to trade finance by 5% increases the production by 15% and induces the firms to hire 12% more staff. Cleary, trade finance can help revive the…

DON’T LET GO BY MICHEL BUSSI, TRANSLATED BY SAM TAYLOR (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) In a resort on the Caribbean island of Reunion is a father who may be a killer, a mother who has disappeared from a blood splattered hotel room, presumed dead, and a six-year-old who is trying to make sense of why she is on the run with her father. It is about human closeness, about obsession, and how one copes with a tragedy. In Geography Professor Bussi’s masterful thriller, we have a heart pounding chase that takes us from twist to twist until the shocker of a climax where a neat geographical anomaly plays a key role. Very satisfying read. THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW BY AJ FINN (HarperCollins)  Agoraphobic (afraid of open spaces) child psychologist addicted…

FICTION CRUDO: LOVE IN THE APOCALYPSE BY OLIVIA LAING (Picador) Laing excavated loneliness with her acclaimed The Lonely City (2016), about the examined life in New York in her thirties post breakup. Brainpickings called it a ‘memoir plus’, referring to the way Laing pushes boundaries. Her fiction debut centres around finding love at 40 in a similar kind of memoir plus. ‘She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn’t have a clue,’ says Kathy Acker, the commitment-phobic protagonist, who is getting married. Moving from a luxury hotel in Tuscany to a Brexit-paralysed United Kingdom to the rise of fascism, global warming and nuclear war-tripping Trump, Laing promises to deliver the most enjoyable literary rom-com…

THERE SEEMS TO be a sudden fascination in Hollywood with the 1973 abduction of John Paul Getty III. First there was the movie All the Money in The World which was released last year and now there is the TV series Trust with Donald Sutherland and two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Directed by Danny Boyle (of Slumdog Millionaire fame), the series delves into the lives of the Getty family. I speak to Swank, best known for her roles in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) about the show and more. You seem to have disappeared from the Hollywood radar. Why? I took three years off to take care of my dad as he got a lung transplant and I was his sole caretaker, so it was like…

THE DRAMA IS a distraction, a denial and a disappointment. It reduces Karnataka, where there is only one winner, as in any competition, to an autonomous, isolated piece of uncertainty, to a dispute that highlights the ungraciousness of the losers. Karnataka is bigger than the combined worth of all those damaged totems jostling for the microphone, and its message is louder than their nauseous ventriloquism. It is the newest sentence in a passage of India re-imagined. It just shows how we have come to take the history-shifting change in the largest—and most nonlinear—democracy for granted. It is as if we want to remain static and content with our received truisms even as India discards its oldest political superstitions. Everything has changed, and as Karnataka comes on the fourth anniversary of…

HIMANSHU ROY, THE former Crime Branch head of the Mumbai Police who committed suicide on 11th May with a bullet through his head, used to wear his machismo on his half sleeves, which were deliberately of a fit to accentuate his biceps. He was a hefty man with a walrus moustache who was particular about his look. The head of the Crime Branch, by virtue of the power it commands, is second only to the Commissioner, and for a few years Roy was the face of the police. After his crime branch stint, he also headed the state’s Anti-Terrorism Squad, another high profile posting that exuded power. It however doesn’t take much more than a few microscopic cells in the body to suddenly develop a life of their own to…

NO INDIAN PRIME Minister in recent memory has had on his shoulders the burden of steering both the Government he heads and the political party he spearheads. No Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru or his daughter Indira Gandhi has wielded such charm as a crowd puller and had the stamina to create history across new geographies. Unlike them both, he didn’t have the popularity and reach of a party apparatus moulded and mobilised by the Mahatma to fall back on. Whether one admires or hates him, Narendra Modi has over the past four years nearly perfected the role of a tireless campaigner determined to go the whole hog in politics, regardless of the grime and dust, election after election. He strode into the national field like a man possessed, like…

THERE IS A Brexit quip doing the rounds of embassies in Washington. Britain, it goes, is leaving the European Union, but America is leaving the world. This refers to the alarming rate at which President Donald Trump is ditching America’s international agreements and obligations. The international deal to bring a temporary freeze to Iran’s nuclear weapons programme was, on May 8th, only the latest to go by the board. It followed Trump’s decisions last year to exit the Paris climate deal and the ambitious Trans-Pacific Partnership, even as he keeps threatening to tear up more longstanding trade pacts, including the North American Free Trade, a two-decade-old agreement that has seen a quadrupling of trade between Canada, Mexico and the US. ‘America First’, one of Trump’s mantras, is turning out to…

ST CYRIL ROAD AND OTHER POEMS BY AMIT CHAUDHURI (Viking) One comes to Chaudhuri’s poems not expecting to be surprised by the poetic— it’s a given, we’ve encountered it already, for every sentence in his prose is suffused with the water of poetry. And yet beauty surprises, always. As I was re-reading them around the time I began working towards writing How I Became a Tree, acutely aware of how it might feel to be a plant and live through photosynthesis, I saw light as I’d never seen—light, plump and affectionate, and more. Milton’s phrase was ‘darkness visible’. Chaudhuri makes light visible—it’s a wonder because light is not meant to be visible, it is only meant to make things visible. I think it was DH Lawrence who said that Cezanne…

THE DEMON IN DEMOCRACY: TOTALITARIAN TEMPTATIONS IN FREE SOCIETIES BY RYSZARD LEGUTKO (Encounter Books) Legutko is a Polish professor of philosophy who witnessed the worst excesses of communism in his homeland. But 25 years after welcoming liberal democracy and observing its workings in the West, he paints a deeply troubling picture of what is now almost a theology. The book takes a hard look at Western liberalism and its shortcomings. WHY LIBERALISM FAILED BY PATRICK DENEEN (Yale University Press) The so-called crisis of democracy in the West did not emerge out of the blue with the election of leaders like Donald Trump or Hungary’s Viktor Orban. The last wave of globalisation that began in 1991 and entered a crisis phase after the 2008 financial crisis left a large number of…

A Mentor like No Other Aditya Chopra is a man of some pride, especially when it comes to actresses he’s discovered. When the audience’s response to Anushka Sharma was at best lukewarm in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, the filmmaker made sure he cast her in a major project like Badmaash Company opposite Shahid Kapoor (and in a completely different avatar), so she had another shot at making it. That film may not have achieved for the actress what Chopra hoped it would, but fortunately Anushka’s own acting chops helped turn the tide for her when she wowed viewers in Band Baaja Baaraat. The cycle appears to be repeating itself with Vaani Kapoor. The actress got pleasant enough reviews for her debut in Shuddh Desi Romance, but practically no work.…