Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2021 i India Today

If 2020 was the year that changed everything, 2021 begins with many questions about what lies ahead. We are trapped between a pandemic that is still raging in many parts of the world and the promise of a post-pandemic world with the launch of several Covid-19 vaccines. This is a hopeful beginning for the new year, especially with two vaccines cleared for use in India. As we know, the vaccine is not a cure for Covid-19, only a means to slow the spread of the virus. It will be at least two years before a large percentage of the global population is vaccinated. We are, therefore, now in a twilight zone with the pandemic. What are the contours of this new world and, more importantly, what does 2021 have in…

Political leaders of all hues are converging on the Woodlands nursing home in Kolkata where BCCI president Saurav Ganguly is recovering after an angioplasty. Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar was the first to visit, followed closely by West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah called to enquire about Dada’s health. Other visitors include Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, BCCI’s Jay Shah and Union MoS for finance Anurag Thakur. Mamata has reportedly instructed party leaders that they should be seen at the hospital. The overwhelmed hospital has now created a special Ganguly lounge to cater to the VIPs.…

When I wroteTenLessons for a Post-Pandemic World at the height of the pandemic’s first wave in mid-2020, we were living through the first phase of the Covid-19 crisis. It was a public health crisis that left governments scrambling to lock down—and the public sector, especially in the US, largely failed. That phase will soon be behind us. Vaccines for the novel coronavirus—some using innovative mRNA techniques, and developed by international teams at a breakneck pace never before seen—have begun rolling out. Therapies have cut the death rates down, and new and cheaper tests are being developed each month. We have entered the second phase of the crisis, which will be led by the dynamism, innovation and competence of the private sector. There are still challenges of distribution and we must…

“Hope 2021 is better than 2020” sets a really low bar when it comes to New Year wishes, but as the battered global economy limps back to normalcy, it is likely that 2021 will be better, particularly now that we have vaccines. The question is, how much better? Unlike some past pandemics that reshaped economies with their high fatality rates, the economic impact of Covid-19 was primarily through the administrative interventions to slow its spread, as governments bought time to understand it better, and for the development of vaccines. So then, if lockdowns caused the economic slowdown, should not their lifting bring economic normalcy? Unfortunately, economic recessions can also impair productive capacity, somewhat like a piece of metal that once bent cannot be fully straightened again: firms shut down, households…

As usual, Shakespeare was right. As he said, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads to fortune.” Such a tide has now reached India’s shores. If India decides to sail out on this tide, it will achieve great fortune. One fact is indisputable. No country has as great a gap between its potential and performance as India does. There is now global data that confirms that Indians are among the most naturally competitive animals in the economic realm, if not the most competitive. In the most competitive human laboratory in the world, the US, Indians are the ethnic group with the highest median household income (roughly $100,000). If Indians in India could achieve half the median household income of Indians in the…

The year 2020 was an unforgettable one. While memories of the pandemic will haunt a generation, it will also be remembered for the changes it triggered in our lives. It was a year when a lot “paused” and a lot got permanently reset. How people consume media is no exception. Media and entertainment entered 2020 in a bipolar setting—armed with technology, imagination and impatience, a group of media entrepreneurs and visionaries determined to disrupt it. The other, a much larger group of media owners and professionals, retreating further into their age-old silos and almost determined not to change anything. Suddenly in March, normal media activity came to an abrupt halt—theatres were the first to shut down. Almost all forms of content production—movies, TV, streaming—in most countries were suddenly paused. Advertising…

Politics and society” just about covers everything, except—I was going to say—music, religion and love. But wrong! At least in India, the India of our times, those three are at the heart of our politics. When T.M. Krishna’s book Sebastian & Sons appeared in January 2020, few would have linked that title to music—the family-based establishment that has been making the mrdangam. Fewer to controversy. But as word got around that the book was as much about the animal hide used for the percussion instrument as about its great sound, and about the exclusion from due recognition of its makers by its users, reaction set in. Its official launch was cancelled with a new venue being found at the last minute. This gave the book exactly the notice it deserved,…

1 In Service of the Republic by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah While I disagree with some of their premises and recommendations, these two economists have been deeply involved in policy and institutional reforms over decades. Their book highlights the critical importance of state capacity in the success and failure of the Indian State—something we haven’t paid much attention to still, influenced by the now anachronistic belief in the intrinsic efficiency of a small government. 2 Breaking Through by Isher Ahluwalia The autobiography of one of India’s best economists and her struggles in a world dominated by men. Isher and her husband (Montek) left very successful careers in Washington’s Bretton Woods institutions for public service in India. Many of us have tried doing so, but unsuccessfully. It made compelling reading…

Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao was on the farmers’ side when the Centre passed the farm laws in September. However, a fortnight after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on December 13, he seems to have taken a U-turn. Embracing the PM’s ‘One Nation, One Market’ concept, KCR now plans to end direct purchase from procurement centres in the villages and scrap the law on crop regulation. After-effects of the BJP victory in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation poll?…

With the exception of a stressed financial sector, India went into the coronavirus crisis with sound economic fundamentals. The lockdown in response to the threat of the virus created unprecedented friction in transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services as well as of inputs, including labour. The friction afflicting transactions in goods and services constituted a demand-side shock while that in inputs, a supply-side shock. The greater the degree of this friction in an economic sector or geographical region, the greater was the severity of the shock. Influenced by the large fiscal stimuluses announced by developed countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany, the vast majority of commentators had called for a similar fiscal expansion in India immediately after the announcement of the lockdown on March…

Covid-19 has been without doubt the worst health crisis I have seen in my lifetime. I can’t think of any other comparable event that has had this kind of debilitating impact on people, not just across one country but around the world. The first lesson of the pandemic was the lack of preparedness of health systems in countries across the world, including the most high-income ones. The gap was mainly in the area of public health—detection, surveillance, prevention and response to infectious disease threats. Systems need to be in place, including trained manpower, real-time data collection and analysis, quality-assured laboratories, a risk communication strategy and empowered health authorities who could advise the administration on action needed. Paradoxically, we have observed that some low- and middle-income countries, which relied less on…

In January 1950, newly independent India emerged as a republic with a new Constitution that had been forged against a backdrop of great anarchy in the preceding decade. The India of the 1940s had witnessed the Second World War, the Jewish Holocaust, the atomic bomb, Partition riots and the murder of the Mahatma. The founders of our republic consciously chose a path that steered the country away from the causes of violence of the past decade, and set it on a route to a peaceful rise as a functional democracy that protected every citizen. The evening before the signing of the Indian Constitution, Dr B.R. Ambedkar gave three warnings to India. He warned India to avoid agitations and only resort to constitutional means to settle political questions. Secondly, he enjoined…

Winter solstice. Concealed in cloud, Jupiter and Saturn kiss unseen. With 78 million lives interrupted by a speck of RNA gone rogue, Earth is a grisly planet. Even in an appalling year, because life is more than srushti pushti nashti, bookwards we leaned, inevitably reading more about pandemics. Words, words, words—but you’ve heard that one before. Mark Honigsbaum, with nine examples of pestilence, paints the 20th as The Pandemic Century. Armed with germ theory and antibiotics we swaggered while new pathogens spilled past species barriers. “The only thing that is certain is that there will be new pandemics and new plagues,” he guarantees. Slavoj Žižek begins Pandemic! thus: “In proposing how to tackle the crisis we must all become philosophers.” Daunted? Don’t be. Žižek writes from the crypt, dead philosophers…

Who is an Indian? That question, which was at the heart of the anti-CAA protests, also animates a crop of recently published biographies. Threaded through these life stories are debates about who counts and who does not—and if the idea of India is inclusionary or exclusionary. It is appropriate to start with the Mughals. Ira Mukhoty’s Akbar provides a wide-ranging account of an emperor who was likely illiterate and dyslexic. Nevertheless, Akbar was shrewd enough to accommodate India’s diversity through the idea of sulh-i kul (universal peace).SupriyaGandhi’s The Emperor Who Never Was responds to that fiercely debated hypothetical: what if a supposedly-tolerant Dara Shukoh had become padshah instead of Aurangzeb? Gandhi rubbishes hackneyed portrayals of the prince as a liberal who could have averted communal bloodshed of the modern era.…

Q Your second web show is the Amazon Primepoliticaldrama Tandav. Are you surprised it has taken us this long to have a series centred around politics? It’s why I did the show. Politics is fairly exciting and dynamic to dramatise. We are political people, we talk about it a lot and it is a part of our lives. Tandav is not a documentary, but we have tried to be realistic and push the envelope in a commercial way. You would hope that real people are not this extreme but who knows, may be they are? Q You are also one of the few mainstream actors who shuttles between big screen films and web. When I did Sacred Games, senior producers told me I will end up being a web actor.…

Maharashtra social justice minister Dhananjay Munde is the man to watch out for within the Nationalist Congress Party. Nephew of the late BJP leader Gopinath Munde, the young minister in the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi government is the first to release his report card every month. Party chief Sharad Pawar has asked all NCP ministers to follow suit. Munde has also launched an online platform called Maha Sharad, named after Pawar, where NGOs can provide help to the needy. He sure knows where the power centre is.…

In a marriage, they call it the seven-year-itch when the romance sours and partners start looking for better prospects. You could say the same about Indian politics, and the relationship of prime ministers with their electorate after seven years. Indira Gandhi seemed invincible in 1971 after the Bangladesh War but, by the seventh year of her tenure, the oil shocks of 1973 and student agitations that year gave birth to the JP movement, which ultimately led to her defeat in 1977. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance seemed certain of re-election in 2004 in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s seventh year at the helm, but they underestimated the strength of the Opposition coalition and paid the price. After a convincing re-election in 2009, Manmohan Singh and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance were cruising—till…

In 1991, multiple factors produced a military-strategic crisis unseen in India in previous decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union, New Delhi’s strategic partner, created a support vacuum which extended far beyond the immediate problem of sourcing spares for its Russian-origin military machine. A balance of payments crisis that year—most of it fuelled by an arms buying spree in the 1980s—led to an economic crisis which led to the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) pledging gold to raise foreign exchange. The Indian army had exited a bruising counter-insurgency deployment in Sri Lanka. It had already been fighting insurgency in the Northeast for four decades when it entered Jammu and Kashmir to fight a Pakistan-supported insurgency. The economic crisis that year, however, led to an economic liberalisation that created wealth and…

The year 2020 was, I dare say, the most tumultuous, the most catastrophic and the most defining year of our lifetime. This crisis has no precedent—there is no rulebook that tells governments what to do, how to shut down economies and when to re-open them. The virus is a mutant, it jumped from its animal host to humans; it is pernicious because it seems to find new ways to hide itself—we can be asymptomatic and yet be a carrier of infection. We slipped into 2020 without any indication of the horrors that awaited the world. Something was happening in Wuhan in China but not many of us noted it. What was on our screens was another worrying sight—bushfires scorching vast swathes of Australia, killing people, wildlife and destroying homes. The…

The year 2020 was, for me, one for reading books by famous, best-selling authors whose works I had not read before. First is the Belgian author, the late Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret murder mysteries were wildly popular in mid-20th century Europe. I enjoyed Pietr theLatvian andMaigretat Picratt’s for the precision of the story-telling and the political incorrectness. Classism, racism and misogyny, dealt out with unapologetic aplomb. Nasty, but upfront. Next, four books from Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. Most of these take place in the fairy-tale village of Three Pines, in Canada’s Québec. The meals are described in such mouth-watering detail that we can barely tear ourselves away from the table to notice the bloodied corpse spread-eagled across the carpet. The character portraits are as charming as the dénouements…

In 2020, the year of the India-China reset, when tensions were high and the story became one of rivalry and territorial dispute, much of my reading was contemporary. Power Shift: India-China Relations in a Multipolar World by Zorawar Daulet Singh examines India-China relations in the current geopolitical context and should be on every India-China watcher’s list. Equally interesting in building the larger narrative and explaining China’s new assertiveness was China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism by Oxford professor Rana Mitter who never fails to see deeply and write well. A real and unexpected delight was Gazing Eastwards: Of Buddhist Monks and Revolutionaries in China by Romila Thapar, her diary of several months spent in China in 1957 studying the remarkable murals and sculpture at…