Innholdsfortegnelse for March 16, 2020 i India Today

137.74 million THE COMBINED following enjoyed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. So when he announced on March 2 that he was considering “giving up” social media, there was mass hysteria with hashtag pleas launched seemingly by the dozen. In the end, the PM clarified that he would be giving up his social media accounts to deserving women to mark International Women’s Day on March 8, disappointing all those who harboured the secret hope of a mass exodus of right-wing trolls. 32,605 FARMER suicides in Maharashtra from 2001 to 2019, show figures recently released by the state’s revenue department. 14,898 suicides were reported from 2015-2019; 8,071 from 2010-2014; and 9,272 from 2004-2009. The highest number of suicides in a year was 3,273 (2015) when the…

The coronavirus outbreak in China is taking a toll on the global economy. This has had a cascading effect on some politicians’ ability to deliver on promises. Capt. Amarinder Singh’s government in Punjab was to distribute 5 million smartphones among students, as promised in the run-up to the 2017 assembly election. After several missed deadlines, the government placed an order for 160,000 phones with a Chinese firm last December. The virus outbreak has delayed shipments, the CM told the Punjab assembly. It was probably a mistimed order anyway—December is the worst time for imports from China; the month-long Chinese New Year celebrations beginning mid-January mean that consignments take over 40 days to reach Indian shores. Now, with the coronavirus attack, the busy signals are likely to stretch indefinitely. LOOK, LOOK,…

The last line of Agha Shahid Ali’s poem ‘Chandni Chowk, Delhi’ gives Akhil Katyal’s new book its title, but the entire collection seems impelled by the poem’s opening command—“Swallow this summer street…”. In these Delhi poems, Katyal imbibes the streets and seasons of the capital city in order to, as he says, “make sense of it”. Katyal has been making sense of Delhi ever since he moved from Lucknow for his bachelor’s 17 years ago. He describes how living on his own helped him develop a relationship with the city. “You have your own space, but the city is always available—as escape, as wonder, as fun, as solace.” We meet in Jangpura Extension, where he now lives, and which figures in some of his poems, including the book’s first: ……

Q. When you compare some of your earlier films—ChashmeBud-door(1981),Katha (1983)—to the films of today, do you feel like we have stopped embracing the ordinary? Those films belonged to a time. Life has changed since. With Chashme Buddoor, we represented the youth of the ’80s, but youngsters are not the same today. Society and cinema reflect each other. I have a grouse, though. I have done other, more important films—Kamla (1984), Main Zinda Hoon (1988), Mirch Masala (1987). I don’t know why people don’t talk about all this work too. Q. Does working in web shows like Pawan & Pooja or Made in Heaven (2019) require a new mindset? Actors cannot afford to have different mindsets for different mediums. One can change one’s outlook for theatre, but when one is in…

The registration of sedition cases under Section 124A of IPC, now almost an everyday affair, is mainly critiqued as a misuse of law. However, framing it as ‘misuse of law’ fails to look at how misuse is part of the design of this law and its intended use. Critics of the law point to its misuse citing Supreme Court judgments defining sedition. In 1962, the Supreme Court, in Kedar Nath Singh v. State of Bihar, defined sedition as an expression against the government having a tendency to incite violence. A stricter test, following American free-speech jurisprudence, was laid down by the SC in 2011, in Indra Das v. State of Assam and Arup Bhuyan v. State of Assam, asking for only those expressions to be criminalised which amount to incitement…

After negotiations spanning over a year, the Americans have signed a peace agreement with the very force they had militarily dislodged from power in Afghanistan in 2001, describing it, with recourse to some linguistic gymnastics, as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is not recognised by the United States and is known as the Taliban”. President Donald Trump intends to personally meet the Taliban leaders. The agreement provides for withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan within 14 months, subject to the Taliban acting on its commitment to not allow the use of Afghan soil to threaten the US and its allies; intra-Afghan negotiations—scheduled to start March 10—between the Taliban and “Afghan sides” (a vague expression necessitated by the Taliban reluctance to talk to the Afghan government) to finalise a…

On February 24, Chittoor’s first additional district judge, M. Venkata Harinath, awarded the death sentence to Mohammed Rafi, 27, for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl at Angallu village, near Madanapalle, on November 7 last year. A 100-member police team tracked down and arrested Rafi 10 days after the crime, while he was trying to escape to Chhattisgarh. The charge-sheet was filed 17 days after the arrest, and the trial completed 90 days after that. Keen to broadcast his government’s steps to speed up judicial closure of crimes against women, Chief Minister Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy says, “It has taken eight years to punish the offenders in the Nirbhaya case, but under the Andhra Pradesh Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2019, offenders will be punished in less than a month.”…

Zeenat Aman knew very little about Kasturba Gandhi before she decided to play the Mahatma’s wife. Dearest Bapu, Love Kasturba, a play structured around letters between Kasturba and Mohandas, opened in Mumbai on February 21, as part of the Great Indian Theatre Festival, marking the return of the ’70s star to the stage after 16 years. “What appealed to me was that this was a play from Kasturba’s point of view,” says Aman. “It was about her interaction with Gandhi, which intrigued me. She is an unsung heroine, neglected in the annals of history. I was delighted to have the opportunity to play this exceptional lady.” Clad in a white cotton saree, head covered, seated at her desk, Aman’s Kasturba engages with Arif Zakaria’s Gandhi on questions of politics, marriage,…

IT IS 1943 AND D-DAY PREPARATIONS are in full swing in Britain. The Great Western Railway (GWR) has to produce vital equipment with limited resources. It also has to work out how to efficiently transport arriving American troops to their various bases and create an unbreakable cipher so that when men and material are moved to the coast to begin pushing back the Nazis in Europe, no spying enemy will notice. The solutions to all the GWR’s problems lie in India. Imtiaz ‘Billy’ Khan, Vincent Rosario and Akaash Ray are the only people in the whole of British Empire who can deal with each of the GWR’s issues. And thus they are brought to the GWR works at Swindon where, over a year, they will cope with terrible food, lack…

NO. OF CASES Worldwide: 93,158 Outside China: 10,566 India: 28 TOP 3 (outside China) South Korea: 5,186 Italy: 2,036 Iran: 2,336 DEATHS Worldwide: 3,202 India: NIL RECOVERIES Worldwide: 48,190 India: 3 GLOBAL SPREAD (no. of countries) COVID-19: 77 SARS: 30 ; MERS: 27 BASIC PRECAUTIONS ➡ Wash hands before touching face/ food ➡ Use hand sanitisers with alcohol content >60% ➡ Keep distance from anyone who’s coughing/ sneezing ➡ Visit a doctor if flu-like symptoms appear or if you’ve travelled to an affected country Note: Vitamin supplements offer no protection against COVID-19…

China and India share one of the longest borders in the world in the Himalayas. Much of it is inhabited by a variety of Buddhists—Tibetans, Ladakhis, Sikkimese, Bhutanese and Monpas. What is the geopolitical importance of this ethnic and religious landscape? How do Beijing and Delhi use Buddhism to score points against each other in the Himalayas? What role does the Dalai Lama’s government in exile in Dharamsala play in these calculations? A stream of books and commentary have discussed China and India’s interaction over the years—from the 1962 war to the current tensions around Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. With The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas, author Phunchok Stobdan reminds us that this tense relationship is also a struggle between the two nations to become the leading Buddhist…

The Battle for Bengal is officially on. On March 1, Union home minister Amit Shah sounded the clarion call at a big rally in central Kolkata, saying a “sonar Bangla (golden Bengal)” awaited the state if the Bharatiya Janata Party was elected to power in 2021. A day later, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee rolled out a massive public outreach programme, ‘Banglar Gorbo Mamata’, while denouncing the communal violence in Delhi as a ‘planned genocide’ and saying the BJP was “applying the Gujarat model across the country”. The ‘goli maro’ slogans heard at the rally—in an eerie reprise of the incendiary sloganeering by BJP leaders in Delhi—and the anti-Shah protests across the city by the Left and the Congress left no doubt that communal faultlines in the state were…

1 POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM by Natalie Diaz GRAYWOLF PRESS ₹1,179; 80 pages Diaz writes “hungry” sentences that “want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them”. So, sample this from her new collection: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” 2 HOMIE Poems by Danez Smith GRAYWOLF PRESS ₹1,179; 104 pages Written after a close friend passed away, Smith’s Homie makesareasonable claim—in a world increasingly plagued by hate, redemption can often only be found in friendship and its many rituals. 3 THE ABSURD MAN Poems by Major Jackson W.W. NORTON & COMPANY ₹1,978; 112 pages Described as a “knockout”, Jackson’s collection takes its inspiration from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, and examines everything from political unity to a failed marriage with…

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA Based on a 2004 Philip Roth novel, this six-part mini series asks what would have happened if an anti-Semite xenophobe had run against Franklin D. Roosevelt for US president in 1940—and won. HOTSTAR THE TEST It took a few losses and a ball-tampering controversy to prove that the Australian cricket team weren’t, after all, invincible. This sports documentary goes behind the scenes to track their comeback. AMAZON PRIME MENTALHOOD Karisma Kapoor returns from a long hiatus to helm a show about the madness of motherhood. Other “super-moms” in the cast include Sandhya Mridul, Shruti Seth and Tillotama Shome. ALTBALAJI, ZEE 5…