Innholdsfortegnelse for February 1, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in KRITI DHAWAN The article ‘Getting Even With the Odd Chief Minister’ (25 January 2016) aptly brought out the true nature, personality and behaviour of Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Whether it is the odd-even rule or his battles with the BJP, the man seems more keen on fighting battles and raising controversies than ruling the capital city. There are so many other problems that have been overlooked, particularly in the fields of education and health. Why should he invest so much time, resources and energy on traffic and pollution alone? Publicity alone will not make anyone a great chief minister. One has to back words up with measurable actions. And so far, I find there is nothing I would remember him by, aside from his tweets. If you read…

FOR adopting Western capitalist ideas like cost cutting by slashing the salaries of its fighters Commodities have nosedived, stocks markets are going from bear to bear, oil is touching lows that existed only in mythical times, and everyone is waiting to see if China will drag the whole world into recession. While cost-cutting may be justified by any institution in such trying times, you certainly don’t expect ISIS, that destroyer of nations marching towards a universal caliphate, to also adopt such blatantly capitalist measures. But such is life. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, ISIS has cut the salaries of its fighters by half. This was decided by its treasury ministry in a recently released paper. The reason cited is ‘exceptional circumstances’. A US strike that destroyed a…

THE ONLY GANGST ER I had any acquaintance with was a schoolmate and he was not very successful at it. In college, he became part of a rough group and later went on to bigger things, once even appearing in a magazine photo standing behind an underworld don in south India. During those days, my memory of him is a chance meeting at a suburban railway station in the all-black uniform of the Sabarimala pilgrim. He regularly went to the hill come season time, but, alas, the faith didn’t help his career. The Mumbai Police’s encounter squad cracked down on the underworld in the late 90s, killing or voluntarily retiring most of them. Luckily for him, it was the latter. It took just a few police beatings and a stint…

ALL GOOD HOTELS in China serve a buffet breakfast. My wife and I are thus spared Natwar Singh’s dilemma in Wuhan in 1956. We are also denied the excuse to talk to strangers. ‘Today, for the first time I went to the dining room hoping to have a proper breakfast,’ Natwar wrote after three days in the hotel. ‘Easier said than done. The menu was in Chinese. The waiters did not know English.’ While a hungry and frustrated Natwar grappled with unintelligible waiters, in walked a stunning woman in a colourful Chinese dress with short hair and wearing lipstick. She was Han Suyin, author of the best-selling A Many Splendored Thing. She interpreted for him and became a lifelong friend. Buffets have their uses. I was once told in Germany…

A RECENT CONFERENCE AT The Ashok in the Capital on an ambitious energy efficient irrigation scheme mooted by the Government saw a motley crew of participants and potential consumers. Many of them were different from the usual corporate honchos one sees at such gatherings. They were farmers who had come from various parts of the country to listen to Power Minister Piyush Goyal, who promised that the Government would invest some Rs 75,000 crore over the next five years to procure and distribute 30 million sophisticated pumpsets. As officials of Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL, a JV of NTPC Ltd, Power Finance Corp Ltd, Rural Electrification Corp Ltd and Power Grid Corp of India Ltd) proceeded to explain that the cost of the pumps would be recovered by the end…

Picking up the Pieces Just a little over a fortnight since they staged that balcony kiss to shut up nosey tabloids that had aired suspicions that there was trouble in their relationship, it appears that Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif may have indeed split. It’s what all the gossip rags are currently obsessed with, although neither actor has confirmed or denied the story. Everyone seems to be reporting that Ranbir has left the home he was sharing with Katrina until recently and has moved back with his parents. There is one narrative that inevitably involves Salman Khan. According to that version, Katrina had a twohour face-to-face with her ex before calling it quits with RK. Kat, who’s been promoting her new film Fitoor for the last few weeks, has been…

THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated that the number of migrants entering Europe could touch the 4-million mark during 2015-17, making it one of the biggest movement of humans in recent times. The IMF’s analysis was largely about the effects of migration on the continent’s economic output—which it estimated to rise modestly as governments increase welfare spending to look after this huge mass—and its impact on labour markets. But beyond these benign issues lurk tougher matters. Because of this migration and its potential negative effects—security is often cited as a problem—European countries are reinstating border controls that had earlier been reduced or done away with in the wake of the Schengen agreement. Instead of forming a new kind of continental polity like the US, Europe may see its integration…

THERE WAS A sage named Ashtavakra. The name comes from (ashta), meaning eight, an (vakra), meaning crooked. There are references to Ashtavakra in various texts. The story of his deformity is narrated in the Mahabharata, in Vana/Aranyaka Parva. Ashtavakra's father was Kahoda (or Kahola). His mother was Sujata. When this incident happened, Ashtavakra was still in Sujata's womb. He hadn't been born. Kahoda recited the Vedas, and, reminiscent of Abhimanyu in Subhadra's womb (when Arjuna spoke about chakravyuha), Ashtavakra listened attentively. Getting thenuances of correct pronunciation is extremely important, especially with the Vedas. Kahoda couldn't get it right. From inside the womb, Ashtavakra protested. There were eight such occasions and Ashtavakra protested eight times. Proud of his own learning, Kahoda cursed Ashtavakra that he would be born crooked in eight…

THIS DECEMBER WILL mark the 70th anniversary of the start of India’s Constitutional journey. On 9 December 1946, the Constituent Assembly of India sat for the first time. It completed its work three years later. Over that period, almost every aspect of India’s Constitutional (and political) life was discussed threadbare. The best guide to those proceedings remains the debates of the Constituent Assembly. These have been supplemented by the memoirs of those who participated in the events of that time. Another layer has been added by scholarly literature on the subject. Essays and journalism round off the discussion. All this, however, is just one aspect of India’s reality even if it is a very important part. Since then, the ‘literature’ on India has grown astronomically. Hardly a day passes without…

ART IN DEFIANCE OF GENDER The Danish Girl is inspired by the true story of an artist couple, Einar and Gerda Wegener. Einar had male-to-female reassignment surgery done in Germany in 1930, the first such operation ever THIS FILM has got all the right ideas. It talks about how education has become big business, and about how the values associated with the vocation and true meaning of good teaching are at threat. When an educational institution decides that attracting students from well-off sections of society is the only objective, the quality of learning suffers. So clearly, Chalk N Duster has its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, the execution of the film includes a few outrageously melodramatic scenes, and these clichés take a lot away from the overall impact. Jyoti (Juhi…

Countless faiths shattered when former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje admitted his role in match fixing and soon after some favourite Indian cricketers too were forced off the pitch. International club football regularly sees its share of matchfixing scandals. But tennis wasn’t a sport that in the popular imagination was associated with such cheating. That has now come into question. World No 1 Novak Djokovic recently revealed that he had been approached to deliberately lose a tennis match early on in his career and offered £110,000 for doing this. He refers to a 2007 incident, when, he says, “I was approached through people... working with me at that time. Of course, we [rejected] it right away.” His statement came in the wake of a BBC-Buzzfeed joint investigation that claimed…

FIRST THERE WAS the suicide. In his final moments, Rohith Chakravarthi Vemula, a 25-year-old PhD scholar at the University of Hyderabad, did not lose his eloquence or elegance. The note read: ‘Maybe I was wrong, all the while, in understanding the world. In understanding love, pain, love, death. There was no urgency. But I was always rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, for some people, life itself is a curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.’ In death, reportedly precipitated by campus hate, he became a totemic figure of victimhood in a land without justice. His existential trauma, as revealed in a note that was written better than some of the mushy, angry…

And begin Begin to begin Begin to end THE WORDS of Karthika Naïr’s poem echo around the round stage of the Roundhouse, repeated, overlapping, painting a soundscape for the dancers to start. Begin again Begin to win Begin to end But where do you begin? And where does it all end? The questions circle around each other endlessly in Until the Lions —a dance piece by Akram Khan, adapted from a poetry book by Karthika Naïr, inspired by the mother of all epics, the Maha (great) Bharata (story of the Bharata dynasty), the originary text for the development of Hinduism and the idea of India as a nation state. Recognising that all beginnings are mid-way points in other stories, I can trace my entrance to this story to a train…

current There are several ways to look at this film, but it will resonate most strongly if you see it as the heartbreaking story of a happy marriage that vanishes before your eyes. The husband, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) is a landscape artist, and the wife, Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), a portrait painter. They have been married for six years when a mysterious person enters their marriage. It is a woman called Lili Elbe, trapped inside the body of Einar. The period film is set in the mid-1920s in Copenhagen, when European doctors had no clear idea of what makes up sexual identity or how to resolve issues that arise from it. Gerda is at first enchanted with the idea of her husband dressing up as a woman— even turned…