Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in RAM DARGAD Is Swapan Dasgupta (‘Being a Conservative’, 11 January, 2016) trying to confuse the subject of conservatism in India with generalisations? We should be proud of our heritage and the achievements of ancient India, and at the same time be aware of our weaknesses. The illegal destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 cannot be justified on the basis of another version of history. If reverence for the cow is a part of Indian culture, so is tolerance, which keeps us from imposing our food habits on others. All acts of fanaticism need to be condemned. We need leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, not the likes of Sakshi Maharaj. We should be proud of the achievements of ancient India and at the same time be aware of our…

The Middle East is riddled with Shia-Sunni tension these days. In this sectarian climate, while various nations try not to unscab old wounds, if not build cordial relations, Saudi Arabia seems to care little. The Sunni-majority kingdom recently executed a popular Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr (a vocal critic of its royal family), on vaguely defined charges of ‘terrorism’ along with 46 others. His execution was seen as a blatantly political move and has worsened already hostile relations with Shia-majority Iran, which had asked for him to be pardoned. The al-Nimr execution dangerously combines both sectarian and state rivalry. Angry Shias have rallied in protest not just in Bahrain, India and Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, but even further in the UK. Al-Nimr was from a family known for its resistance…

ONE OF THE peculiar arguments made by opponents of Facebook’s Free Basics, a service that gives telecom consumers access to a limited set of applications without incurring data charges, is to throw illustrations of real life people who benefited from the internet. This was how Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, began a co-authored comment piece in The Times of India. He talked about Sanjay Sahni from a remote village in Bihar who, one day in Delhi, ‘got his hands on a computer and simply typed: “Nrega Bihar”.’ He found NREGA data about his village, proof of discrepancies, and that led the village to fight for its rights. The anecdote was rounded up with the lines: ‘Sahni’s crusade was only made possible because he had access to an…

After almost a year of hectoring at the hands of the opposition, in late December, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting of his Council of Ministers. Through the year—and earlier as well—a united opposition refused to support the Government’s reform-oriented legislation in Parliament on various grounds. From a high in May 2014, the end of 2015 led to a fear of the Modi Government being gripped by a fatal disease that had killed the previous one: policy paralysis. Far from being gripped by this fear, Modi told his ministers that they had no reason to be disappointed at their performance. The Prime Minister felt that plenty of positive action was taking place in different ministries; what was missing was a communication drive to convey what the Government was doing.…

IN 2012, WHEN Paula Reed worked as fashion director at Harvey Nichols in London, she noticed curious things taking place on the menswear floor. “Our buy of Givenchy, Kenzo, Raf Simons and (Alexander) McQueen sweatshirts, T-shirts and bomber jackets were being snapped up as eagerly by the girls as they were by the boys,” she recalls. Her team took the obvious next step: they shifted a selection of the menswear stock to the fourth floor where contemporary women’s wear lived. “And it has gathered momentum every season,” says Reed, who now works at luxury e-commerce retailer Boutique 1. She affirms, “I guarantee that this decade will be defined by athleisure.” Equated with sporty casuals, ‘athleisure’ is the coming together of activewear and leisure clothing, and is predicted to be one…

KALKATTA Kunal Basu PICADOR | 312 PAGES | Rs 599 KUNAL BASU’S NEW novel Kalkatta, as the title screams, is about the other Kolkata, where the first ‘a’ hasn’t yet lapsed into the Bangla ‘o’. It is about a pocket of the metropolis where non-Bengalis try to become true Kalkattawallahs. It is about the outsider’s journey to be the insider. Kalkatta begins with young Jamshed Alam trying to become Indian. He is the boy from Geneva—not the Swiss city, but the biggest refugee camp of Bihari Muslims in Dhaka— whose family bribed its way out of the miseries of Bangladesh for a new life and a new identity in Kalkatta. Jamshed’s ammi, Rukhsana, tells his father, Abu Alam, “Our Jami can become the prime minister of Kalkatta.” For, in her…

REMEMBER THE DAY high art was trash-borne? Warholian graffiti of Madonna on soup cans? Well, you could think of vodka the same way: as postmodernism bottled. Unlike whisky and brandy, which require shamans and blenders calling for elaborate rituals to concoct the drink, vodka, made from humble things like potatoes, sugar beet molasses and grain—virtually anything with starch or sugar—screams of modesty. Visit a place where it is made, and you get what you see. There are no gothic trapdoors, no dark and brooding cellars, no flights of steps inside to complicate the narrative. It dispels the very miasma of mysticism, hoary times and creation myths that shroud other drinks. In the past, all they had to do was toss some yeast into mashed grain or fruit, ferment it, distill…

THE ILLUSIONIST The comedy adventure Monster Hunt is the directorial debut of Hong Kongbased animation artist Raman Hui, who was hailed for his work on such hit films as Shrek the Third and Madagascar A ‘POINT BREAK’ refers to the crest of a wave as it breaks on its way to a sea shore. Surfers search across the world for the best points that create the greatest waves on which they can ride their boards. One memorable scene in Apocalypse Now has a surfing nut who happens to be a commanding officer (Robert Duvall) in the Vietnam War taking time off from a helicopter attack mission after he spots a terrific point break on a Vietnamese coast. It is clearly an extreme sport with a near fanatical following, and this…

The Half Boyfriend When Sushant Singh Rajput walked out of Mohit Suri’s Half Girlfriend, producer Ekta Kapoor realised she needed to move quickly. She’d made Mohit and author Chetan Bhagat (on whose book the film is based) equal partners in the film’s profits, and the clock was ticking—Mohit was committed to other projects too. According to the grapevine, Ekta and her team reached out to Arjun Kapoor, who was busy hosting Khatron Ke Khiladi in Argentina at the time. A brief treatment of the script was reportedly dispatched to the actor, and negotiations with his managers in Mumbai started quickly. Insiders reveal that Arjun’s team succeeded in swinging a sweet deal for the star because they knew the producers were racing against time to put the film into production. It…

THESE ARE ARE DAYS of clean air in Delhi. With the even-odd formula for plying vehicles in the national capital, one could even say the roads are heaving a hearty sigh of relief. The issue, as always, is one of costs. If traffic has lightened on the city’s roads, its public transport mainstay, the Metro, has begun creaking with the increased load. The frequency of Metro train services has been increased almost to the maximum that can be achieved without flouting safety norms. There is also talk of India moving directly to Bharat Stage VI (BSVI) emission norms for vehicles from April 2020, leapfrogging directly from BSIV. The cost? Refiners will have to invest more to distil the cleaner fuel needed. Activists may say that these investments will be more…

WHEN DOES A nudge turn into a push? And when does a push become outright coercion? These are questions that ought to confront cyber businesses nowadays, especially those that have gained market dominance on account of an ill-understood thing called the ‘network effect’. A nudge in itself would be quite alright, at least as outlined as a strategy in a 2008 book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein titled Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 312 pages). In this splendid volume, these two behavioural economists make a case for what they call ‘libertarian paternalism’—a gentle way for leaders to redirect incentives in ways that achieve favourable outcomes. The idea was aimed not at CEOs, but at governments, which were urged to craft public policy in…

THE ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS Manjula Padmanabhan HACHETTE INDIA | 348 PAGES | Rs 550 THERE ARE various quotations that come to mind while reading Manjula Padmanabhan’s latest novel. The first is Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’, in this case pretty well all the people on the planet. Then there is Bishop Heber’s phrase ‘and only man is vile.’ Finally there are the words of the famous biologist EO Wilson that I heard in a recent interview. Commenting on the cause of the selfcreated problems our species face, he described the human race as having “a Paleolithic nature and God-like technology”. This novel lays bare our Stone Age nature only too well, and its characters live in a world where God-like technologies appear successful only in inventing different circles…

COMMITTEE OF THE WEEK THE LODHA PANEL FOR MUCH OF last year, even as Indian cricket appeared to undergo a propitious phase, successfully transitioning from a team led by a senior captain to an aggressive young one with convincing victories against top sides like Sri Lanka and South Africa, off the field, in the air-conditioned boardrooms of the BCCI, a growing sense of unease and trepidation was beginning to descend. What exactly was the Supreme Courtappointed Justice RM Lodha Committee going to find and recommend? If you went by the committee’s decisions last year, of handing two year suspensions to two IPL teams and lifetime bans to its owners when everyone seemed to expect much lighter sentences, it couldn’t have made BCCI’s mandarins rest easy. The Lodha committee spent last…

The Pathankot airbase attack, which carried on for several hours and resulted in the death of seven Army officials and six terrorists, is believed to have been the handiwork of the terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). According to Army officials, the terrorists were highly trained and given specific directions. Some reports suggest that a few more JeM terrorists may have sneaked into Delhi to carry out a similar strike. The city has now been put under high alert until Republic Day. India has responded to the attack by asking Pakistan, where JeM is believed to have its base, to act against the terror outfit, beginning with the arrest of its three operatives who are said to have coordinated the Pathankot attack. The JeM is a relatively new outfit. It was set…

DURING A LECTURE some years ago in Vienna, the philosopher Charles Taylor remarked upon the fact that tolerance seems to have become a bad word in our day. This might be the case, he suggested, because it often implies a hierarchical and majoritarian form of sufferance, rather than the full and equal recognition of difference that democracy demands. In phrases like ‘zero tolerance’, for example, we see the way in which a word that had once been a liberal virtue, has come now to represent a vice so great as to put liberalism itself at risk, with everything from veils in Paris to miniskirts in Riyadh and sometimes even Bengaluru capable of becoming intolerable. The irony of this situation, argued Taylor, is that while such criticism of tolerance emerged among…

THE LOVE OF STRANGERS: WHAT SIX MUSLIM STUDENTS LEARNED IN JANE AUSTEN’S LONDON Nile Green PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS | 416 PAGES | $35 THE FIRST three decades of the 19th century were bad for the Persian Empire. At the start of the century, Karabakh, Shirvan, Quba and Baku were lost to the Russian Empire. By 1828, Persia had lost all its possessions in the Caucasus including the Khanate of Erivan—modern day Armenia—and the Khanate of Nakhichevan. These humiliations were cemented by the Treaty of Turkmanchai that year. The reverberations of that incident can be felt even today— from Baku to Ankara and from Tehran to Aden. The response to these unfolding disasters was predictable, to an extent. Geo-strategically, Persia found some help from Britain, which, in turn, was alarmed at…

“Maybe at some level I’m making it all up. I’m protecting myself by putting up a face to the world. But the fact is I genuinely enjoy putting up a show” RANVEER SINGH, actor FIVE YEARS ago when Ranveer Singh made his debut in Hindi films, his story seemed too good to be true. He was an average-looking Bombay boy with no industry connections being launched by one of India’s biggest production houses. As the loud-mouthed, over-ambitious Dilli da munda in Band Baaja Baaraat, he became a household name almost overnight. He was nothing like the conventional Hindi film hero. He did not come with a famous surname, did not flash a sixpack and did not even say the ‘right’ things as the new kid on the block. Many called…

Liebe Frau, I wanted to write and thank you because it’s not everyday that I’m thought of in the same naughty, spicy breath as Sunny Leone. I can’t speak for all small-built ladies, but for myself, the prospect of occupying the same troposphere as Sunny is thrilling. I’m the lesser star, of course, but I’ve since learned that Sunny has aspirations to write. She advocates for PETA. We’re basically soul sisters. She just doesn’t know it yet. I mention Sunny because she’s the only porn star worth talking about in India. My entry into the industry was quite different. Subversive, I’d like to think. I know everyone bandies about how they ‘just fell into’ their careers, but it’s really how it was with me. When I began dancing, all I…

Monster Hunt comes to India after having been the highest grossing Chinese production ever. The film is interesting because it takes the traditional xenophobic and nationalistic cultural attitudes in China and makes several points about them. The story is a simple one about monsters and humans and how they should learn to live together. This theme of how to get along well with strange beings seems a metaphorical message for people to be more accepting of cultural differences. In the China of the movie, monsters are considered a delicacy and there are monster hunters who catch them and sell them to be eaten at the finest restaurants. There are also certain monsters who disguise themselves as humans to escape, and who then become monster hunters themselves in the lucrative monster…