Innholdsfortegnelse for January 6, 2020 i India Today

It’s never easy choosing INDIA TODAY’S News-maker of the Year, but our task was much easier in 2019. In May this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his party to a landslide Lok Sabha victory, even larger than the one in 2014. The win came against heavy odds—an economic slowdown, agrarian distress and anti-incumbency. It cemented Modi’s rise as a political phenomenon who successfully converted this election into a presidential-style referendum—him versus the rest. Much like Indira Gandhi did in 1971, the last prime minister to win a second consecutive majority. Modi has been our Newsmaker of the Year three times—more than anyone else—since we introduced the concept at the end of 2001. All that has happened in the past few months would not have been possible had Modi not…

“BUT THESE ILLITERATES—IF YOU CUT OPEN THEIR CHEST, YOU CAN’T FIND TWO WORDS INSIDE THEM, JUST LIKE PUNCTUREWALAS ARE THE ONLY ONES OPPOSING THIS LAW” Speaking in Kannada at a rally, BJP member of Parliament TEJASVI SURYA showed that you can be both literate and a bigot at the same time. Translations of his speech may differ, but he said “puncturewala” in ‘English’ and, as many pointed out on social media, it can be interpreted as a slur against Dalits and Muslims in particular, many of whom man such shops. Many protesters against the NRC and CAA argue that the motivation behind the legislation is ugly prejudice. In his defence, Surya demonstrated their point.…

1 CHIEF OF DEFENCE STAFF Single-point military advisor to the defence minister on tri-services matters. The three chiefs will continue to advise the defence minister on matters concerning their respective services Member of the Defence Acquisition Council (headed by defence minister and including service chiefs and defence secretary) and the Defence Planning Committee, headed by NSA Ajit Doval Will not exercise any military command, including over the three service chiefs Will bring jointness in operations of the three services within three years; will also promote equipment indigenisation 2 SECRETARY, DMA Will head the proposed Department of Military Affairs (DMA), the new fifth department within the MoD. He will be senior to the defence secretary and on par with the seniormost civilian bureaucrat, the cabinet secretary Will promote jointness…

DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE Half the Night is Gone by Amitabha Bagchi “Bagchi’s novel, a post-colonial saga that unfolds over three generations, adroitly explores human relationships, and the intertwining of fates and cultures in a thoroughly Indian context” SHAKTI BHATT FIRST BOOK PRIZE Early Indians by Tony Joseph “Early Indians […] puts to rest the ugly debates about the ancestry of modern Indians by revealing an undeniable truth: we are all migrants; we are all mixed” JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURE The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay “It is a wonderful experience for a reader to be inside the head and heart of this flawed, fallible but always plausible narrator-as-protagonist, protagonist as perpetrator, observer and (sometimes) victim” PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION The Overstory by Richard Powers “An ingeniously structured…

FICTION The Angel’s Beauty Spots by K.R. Meera ALEPH ₹399; 136 pages Meera is unapologetic about women’s lives, their desires, and the damage they do and suffer The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S. Laskar FLEET ₹550; 272 pages A novel set in the US, where a brown woman is shot by the police in front of her McMansion The Fate of Butterflies by Nayantara Sahgal SPEAKING TIGER ₹450; 144 pages In her latest novella, Muslims have been herded into camps by the Indian government NON-FICTION Good Talk by Mira Jacob BLOOMSBURY ₹599; 368 pages Jacob writes about the difficulties in talking about identity and racism to her small and her Trump-voting parents Early Indians by Tony Joseph JUGGERNAUT ₹699; 288 pages Joseph has written a clear-eyed account…

Just now, I crave ignorance. For months, I’ve lusted for nepenthe, the mythic draught that dispels the agony of pain, and it arrived this morning, in a fat brown paper package, for a modest Rs 999. Let me explain. On the job, I’m usually on the cushy side of the table. But it’s been a rough month, with a growing catalogue of miseries, and I am now, inescapably, a patient. I would escape this surreal landscape if I could, but I live here, dammit, and I’m not ready to quit. I need to get cosy, to be told that illness is a mere trompe-l’oeil. I want to hear the reassuring purr of my efficient machine, that old reliable which will whiz me past all roadblocks, disasters and restore me to…

Since Harry Potter debuted in 1997, books, films and fan material related to J.K. Rowling’s novels have proliferated faster than cursed objects in a vault at Gringotts. There are academic treatises, pop literary analyses and, of course, countless works of fan fiction. It was only a matter of time before someone wrote a novel about the phenomenon and the fandom itself, and the premise of Keshava Guha’s Accidental Magic—four fans drawn together through Potter—is ripe with possibility and also brilliantly saleable. There’s the protagonist Kannan who, like Harry, travels far from home (Bengaluru) for school (Boston), but is a passive anti-hero who takes initiative only rarely and abortively. His only friend is Curtis Grimmett, an older white liberal radio host who fetishises England. Privileged young Harvard graduate Rebecca feels like…

If there is one group in India that is united in its loathing for the police—perhaps even more than student protesters—it would have to be truck drivers. Towards the end of Truck De India, we meet driver Akhilesh Singh, who recounts with glee how he once happened to give three armymen a ride from Siliguri to Delhi. Every time a policeman or a goonda stopped him for some money, the three handled the situation with a slap or two. “Saved me five thousand rupees,” says Akhilesh. That little anecdote contains all sorts of commentary, left to the reader to infer. This is one of the charms of travel-writing—it allows room for the incidental, which often ends up being significant. In his first book, Truck De India, journalist Rajat Ubhaykar explores…

Around the beginning of the year, I was preoccupied by 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. His ambitious plunge into the complexities of our era is an attempt to seize the confusion and shine light through the maze of the present moment. I spent some time with The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and I was reading this intermittently as an amateur generalist. It became a companion while working on my large painting titled ‘Ellipsis’. My interest was not so much scientific but how these questions about evolution and common descent were creating a parallel speculative abstract imagery in my head. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli: Here again I was reading from the edge, walking away and returning, letting the gap between our…

The second India-US 2+2 joint meeting of their foreign and defence ministers in Washington, DC, on December 18, marked another milestone signalling political and strategic coordination, but parallel developments also exposed some ongoing and emerging challenges for the relationship. In a special gesture, showing his continued personal commitment to advancing the partnership, and following his unprecedented presence at the ‘Howdy, Modi’ event with the Indian prime minister in Houston on September 22, President Donald Trump received the visiting Indian ministers, Rajnath Singh and S. Jaishankar, in a 40-minute Oval Office meeting—this despite his intense domestic preoccupations on the very day that the US House of Representatives was voting to impeach him. Though the 2+2 meeting signalled progress in strategic consolidation, trade disagreements remain unresolved The substantive joint statement, issued after…

Politics, like money, never sleeps. Nor does Narendra Modi. Or so it seemed in 2019 when the prime minister was perennially in fast-forward mode, working punishing hours even on holidays and setting a scorching pace that his colleagues and rivals found hard to match. On Christmas Day, for instance, he chose to launch the Atal Bhujal Yojana, aimed at improving groundwater levels in 8,300 villages in seven states. Modi may have turned 69 this September, but he remained indefatigable in pushing through a radically new national agenda that he and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had set in a year full of tumult, trials and tribulations. Ironically, the year had begun on a bleak note for Modi. His political ratings were plummeting and the BJP had just lost the three…

WHEN SHE TOOK over as finance minister at the end of May, Nirmala Sitharaman had critics aplenty and sympathisers none. It didn’t help that she had to fill in the enormous shoes of the now deceased Arun Jaitley. India’s first woman finance minister, Sitharaman had a little over a month in which to present the Union budget. It was a juncture when nearly all indices of the economy were going slow, be it investment, manufacturing, jobs or the rural economy. Window-dressing the budget in a red bahi-khata instead of the customary briefcase inspired little hope; the document itself spooked markets and economists alike, with measures such as the surcharge on foreign portfolio investors and issue of sovereign bonds in foreign currency. As bad news on the economic front mounted and…

JANUARY 21, 2019 Battle of the Bulge Army chief General Bipin Rawat unveiled an ambitious blueprint to restructure the bloated Indian army and make it a lean and modern fighting unit. But what stands in the way? JANUARY 28, 2019 The Lion King Two of his films earned a collective Rs 500 crore in 2018; he became the face of 26 brands and is one half of the #DeepVeer power couple. An ode to Ranveer Singh, the new hit-machine in tinsel town MARCH 25, 2019 The Balakot Revenge Exclusive insights on how India planned the Balakot strike, with detailed intelligence on the targets and a combination of sophisticated weaponry and aerial strategy MAY 13, 2019 The Challenger In an exclusive interview, Rahul Gandhi spoke of his sense of the popular…

“In all the three countries [US, UK, India] I’ve cared about...the world as I knew it seems to be coming to an end, or undergoing a change so radical that some other kind of world is going to follow it” Salman Rushdie, Booker nominee again with Quichotte “The call to action is not just for academic economists—it is for all of us who want a better, saner, more humane world. Economics is too important to be left to economists” Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (2019) “India is my country. The relationship is so instinctive that, like an unwritten constitution, I had never before felt it necessary to articulate it” Aatish Taseer, whose Overseas Citizen of India status was revoked…

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Poet, translator, critic The three books I read came towards the end of 2019. Two of them are reissues, but rejacketed and put out by a publisher different from their previous one. They are Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama (Penguin), which comes in a 30th Anniversary Edition with a new Afterword, in which Sealy makes the acute observation that literary English, in this country, is “devoid of spoken depth, by turns shallow and stilted”; and Arshia Sattar’s Lost Loves: Exploring Rama’s Anguish (HarperCollins), which sees the Valmiki Ramayana for what it is, the story of a young couple. The third book is Adil Jussawalla’s Shorelines (Poetrywala), a collection of late poems that comes out as Jussawalla approaches his 80th year. Among them are some of the best…

I am writing this just as the impeachment hearings on Donald Trump have come to a close in the House of Representatives. Over the past few years of this appalling presidency, I have been interested in reading books, especially fiction, that respond to the ongoing crisis in our midst. When the year began, I taught Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. The narrator and a poet are getting married. There are all kinds of remarks about the US president; there’s adequate analysis, but I was thrilled by the casual entry of news into the novel: ‘Back inside, they were eating more cake when someone shouted Steve Bannon’s resigned. They all checked their phones.’ Later, during the summer, I read Afternoon of a Faun by James Lasdun, a novel that, in a subtle…

HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt VIKING ₹499; 320 pages The book attempts to comprehend our approach to governance and society. It’s unputdownable WHO WAS SHIVAJI? by Govind Pansare LEFTWORD BOOKS ₹150; 110 pages This old book humanises Shivaji and reveals so much that’s hidden by the Hindu chauvinistic view of him BEING GANDHI by Paro Anand HARPERCOLLINS ₹250; 128 pages The book on a young boy doing a project on Gandhi during the terrible pogrom against the Sikhs in 1984 is a wonderful introduction for youngsters to Gandhi…

In mid-December, Gaur Gopal Das, an engineer-turned-lifestyle-coach, dressed in saffron robes, addressed a packed house at the sprawling, historic trading floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange building. One of the first speakers at the Dalal Street Lit Fest Exchange (and author of Life’s Amazing Secrets), Das was thronged after his talk by students and professionals alike. The stock exchange might seem an unlikely venue for a lit fest, but now in its third edition, the two-day event focused on finance and literature has come into its own. “How do we bring people together and create a forum for exchanging thoughts and sharing ideas freely?” asks Ambarish Datta, managing director of the BSE Institute, which runs the event. “It started as an experiment. But at the end of the day, the…

Q. What was the most difficult part about writing this book? In general, when you write your autobiography, you revisit the painful moments. And you have to think about what those moments meant to you. Probably the most difficult part was revisiting my mother’s death when she passed away in 2015, right after which I had to go to a tournament. Q. The Tata Steel Chess India Rapid and Blitz last month was disappointing. How do you bounce back? When you are really disappointed, you should find a way to disconnect. The brain is the only organ that doesn’t recover with rest; it recovers with a change of scenery. So, I’ll try to do something different like spend some time with my son, since his holidays are coming up. Q.…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a crowd assembled at a BJP rally in Delhi that the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was essentially a fiction dreamed up by that contemporary Indian bogeyman, the ‘urban Naxal’. Union home minister Amit Shah’s repeated invocation of ghuspaithiya apparently did not indicate any government policy, at least in the short term. As for the NRC fiasco in Assam, 10 years and over Rs 1,000 crore spent to no effect and near-universal dissatisfaction—that was just the government diligently following the Supreme Court’s directions. But how many illegal immigrants (or “termites”, as the home minister might prefer to call them) are there in India? The government has been careful not to provide any official estimate. According to the 2001 Census, just over 5 million foreign-born migrants…

SHAKTIKANTA DAS assumed office as the 25th governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) at a time the central bank was the cynosure of all eyes, albeit for the wrong reasons. The previous governor, Urjit Patel, had locked horns with the central government on a host of issues, most importantly that of the RBI’s autonomy. With Patel’s acrimonious exit in December 2018, Das had his work cut out. Not only did he have to quickly mend the RBI’s relations with the Centre, he also had to do whatever possible to bring the tottering Indian economy back from the brink. The former task wasn’t as tough as the latter—after all, as secretary in the department of economic affairs, Das had shadowed his then boss, former finance minister Arun Jaitley, in…

FOR KAILASAVADIVOO SIVAN, 62, who joined the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 1982 when the country was bracing itself to join the spacefarers club, leading the Moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, as ISRO’s chairman was a rare fulfilling moment in his career. Though the hopes of landing a spacecraft on the Moon didn’t materialise after the Vikram lander failure, the evolution of the space exploration programme is no mean achievement. Still, the aerospace engineer, son of a simple farmer of Tarakkanvillai—a hamlet in Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari district—who sold a portion of his land to fund Sivan’s engineering education, could not hide his emotions when consoled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the wee hours of September 7. Chandrayaan-2 was India’s first attempt at a moon landing. Only three countries—the United States,…

Benyamin—the Malayali writer Benny Daniel—did not grow up a reader. Other than the Bible, which was read every night before supper in his orthodox Syrian Christian household, he had read no other books in his childhood. He began to read after moving to Bahrain in 1992. For the next seven years, he read voraciously, while working as a project coordinator at a construction site. Writing grew organically out of a readerly desire. “I wished to read about the situations I felt and saw around me. But I realised nobody was writing about it yet. So, I started,” he says in an email interview. His first short story appeared in the Gulf edition of Malayala Manorama in November 1999. There has been no looking back. Now the author of over 16…

Readers should be sceptical about year-end lists that purport to tell you what to read. There are few things more irrelevant to a volume of fiction and poetry than the year it was published. This is different for non-fiction, but only slightly. Perhaps what any given year does is impact the choices readers make, the books they seek out, the inchoate feelings that they perhaps wish to see reflected back at them in print. For instance, would it be surprising if we turned to Animal Farm, a book published in 1945? All animals being equal, but some more equal than others is a concept that might resonate with Indian readers right now. A translation by Daisy Rockwell of Krishna Sobti’s last novel, A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, was published…

With Find Me, André Aciman, author of the widely-acclaimed Call Me By Your Name, returns to some of the key characters from that evocative love story. The sequel—which isn’t quite a sequel—released in October, and is told through the viewpoints of different characters. Aciman spoke to us from the US. Excerpts: Q. How long had the sequel been on your mind? The story has been on my mind forever. After Call Me, I went back to another novel and once that was done, I tried to go back to [it]. I kept finding myself doing the same thing as Call Me. After several attempts, I gave up. Until I decided to write about the father, and then everything fell into place. Q. Was there ever a pressure considering the success…

“To the West, writers like me are interesting as we are from a place where horrible things happen” Only in her mid-30s, Meena Kandasamy is building a spiky, angular, fiercely singular corpus. A precocious teenage poet, she went on to earn a doctorate and become an activist, a trenchant critic of Hindu society. Kandasamy’s debut novel, The Gypsy Goddess, wrestled with the rendering of unspeakable atrocity—the burning alive of 44 villagers in Tamil Nadu in 1968 by thugs hired by local landlords—into art. Her next novel was another horror story, another attempt to render violence—this time in the context of an abusive marriage—into art. If Kandasamy’s first story was collective, her second zeroed in on an individual crisis, though her unnamed narrator could plausibly stand in for any woman in…