Innholdsfortegnelse for March 21, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in PRERNA ‘A Village and a Wishlist’ (14 March 2016) brings out the extent to which a national Budget can make or break the livelihood of so many people in the country. While we are all fretting over having to pay more taxes on luxury items and our salaries, there are thousands of people simply waiting for a road to come up near their village, some food on their plates, a classroom for their children to attend and jobs for themselves. Yes, the upper and middle classes do get taxed more, but we are all part of a single country. We should stop thinking in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and start considering everyone in India an equal citizen. The rich must uplift the poor, even if it means paying…

FOR announcing a bounty on Kanhaiya Kumar’s head Barely two days after JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar was released on bail, posters were put up in central Delhi offering a bounty on him. Bearing the name of an organisation called the Purvanchal Sena, which claims to work for the welfare of people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and its president Adarsh Sharma with his mobile number, the posters in Hindi read, ‘Whoever shoots JNUSU president and traitor Kanhaiya Kumar will be rewarded Rs 11 lakh by the Purvanchal Sena.’ Sharma has since been arrested—on 7 March—by the Delhi Police. Political slugfests in India are understandable, but a gimmick like this goes into the realm of the criminal. What makes this both condemnable and amusing at the same time is…

FORTUNE FAVOURS THE brave but not necessarily the flamboyant. And certainly not flamboyance that refuses to go even in the face of criminal charges and bankruptcy. It is hard not to feel some pity for Vijay Mallya as those who broke bread and champagne with him in his many parties bay for his blood. Banks which colluded in shoring him up with thousands of crores even when Kingfisher Airlines was a lost cause now play victim. The media, which happily accepted his advertisements and wrote garrulously about his yachts and cars and the women in bikinis he propped up on each hand, now rail bitterly about fraud. There is weight in the allegations against him, but it is no more and no less than what many businessmen in India have…

VERSES OF A LOWLY FAKIR Madho Lal Hussein Translated by Naveed Alam PENGUIN CLASSIC | 174 PAGES | Rs 399 EVERY CHILD IN Punjab reads in school one or two verses of Shah Hussein, the Sufi saint-poet who prayed to Rama for nothing but a barnful of marijuana—and a mortar, a pestle and a piece of cloth to strain the heady bhang drink evocatively called sukkha in Punjabi, meaning ‘the giver of comfort’. He adds opium, a bowl and sugar to his list. Of course, the children read only the ‘clean’ verses. They don’t get to know that Shah Hussein fell in love with a Hindu boy Madho Lal and began calling himself Madho Lal Hussein. But when they finally do learn all that in college, they are not scandalised.…

BEGINNER’S LUCK Prakash Jha made his debut as a director with Damul (1985). Set in Bihar’s Gaya district, this story of a bonded labourer was a sharp commentary on caste politics. It won a National Award for Best Feature Film CAST PRIYANKA CHOPRA MANAV KAUL, PRAKASH JHA DIRECTOR PRAKASH JHA PRAKASH JHA is not a very subtle filmmaker. Broadly speaking, he is a political commentator in Hindi cinema, but he is not nuanced in his presentation, and the politics, usually set in his home state of Bihar, is in your face. Jai Gangaajal is certainly an improvement on his last tacky melodrama, Satyagraha, but it remains a simplistic film. The political landscape is the feudal and patriarchal world of Bihar that Jha has been obsessed with since his excellent debut…

IT IS RARE FOR a cricket team to cross the border between India and Pakistan. Political realities being what they are, relations between the countries are always frosty. Yet, the ICC having to shift the venue of an Indo-Pak match from Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh to Kolkata in West Bengal on security concerns is an embarrassment. Surely, preparations for the 19 March encounter could have been handled better. There was time enough. The HP government first said that it was not sure if it could provide adequate security for the visiting team. Later, it said it was in a position to assure the safety of all concerned. Whether this was a matter of a changed scenario or had something to do with politics was not clear. Predictably, as Open goes…

THIS HAS HAPPENED before, in varying degrees of catharsis as well as catastrophe. It is the story of the usurper erupting into national consciousness, of the stranger turning his biography into the destiny of a nation in thrall, of the self-ordained liberator shattering the idyll and setting off a new argument of nirvana. There were others before Donald Trump, who may be waylaid on the long road to the White House but not before he becomes the presidential candidate of America’s oldest— and the most storied—political party. Eight years ago, around this time in America, politics was a national exclamation: O!bama. The freshman senator from Illinois, who could write like a novelist and speak like a prophet, and whose life story itself was an exceptional narrative of cultural diversity, challenged…

ON 3 MARCH, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) president, 28-year-old Kanhaiya Kumar, walked out of Tihar jail after the Delhi High Court granted him conditional bail for six months. He was taken straight to the university, where, in a few hours, he emerged at the administrative block. At about 11 pm, a smiling Kanhaiya was greeted with loud cheers. He grabbed two mikes and did not stop for the next 66 minutes. His speech captivated a section of the political class, especially the opposition. To some, it even sounded like the bugle announcing the end of the Narendra Modi Government’s popularity. Kanhaiya became a handy argument against the Government. Some even hailed him as a possible challenger to Modi. Noted writer and niece of Jawahar Lal Nehru, Nayantara…

TWO DECADES AGO, India’s big fast food story was how the market had desified rather than deified McDonald’s, a model of efficiency that had worked just about everywhere else on the planet. In a twist of an old American saying, ‘Sell the sizzle not the steak’, the brand didn’t just keep its core global offering—beef—off its Indian menu, it went about selling the whole kitchen, so to speak: it had vegetarian and nonveg sections on display for all to see, complete with cooks in different coloured aprons to tell them apart. With its diet sensitivity credentials thus established in a famously fussy country, its McAloo Tikki potato burger was to prove a rage. McDonald’s Inc had success, marketers had a great case study of brand adaptation, consumers had a ‘burger’…

AMONG THE many squibs fired at conventional wisdom by the historian AJP Taylor is an intriguing assertion about the relationship between history and contemporary affairs. ‘The present enables us to understand the past,’ Taylor maintained, ‘not the other way round.’ Now, most historians believe that the careful study of the past is essential to shed light on the present. Taylor not only denied this, but underscored the fact that our view of the past is unavoidably shaped by current concerns. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce said as much when he claimed that all history is contemporary history. A corollary to this is that moments of crisis are usually a spur to historical re-imagination. Indeed, we owe some of the best historical works of the 20th century to this impulse. No…

ARCHITECTURE OF FLESH Ra Sh (N Ravi Shanker) POETRYWALA | 79 PAGES | Rs 225 PERHAPS BECAUSE we are programmed to admire fluidity in everything around us, taking it as a working definition of life, flesh appeals to us more than the mind. The mind, traditionally posited as the antonym of flesh, is a more democratic performer, but it is the flesh in action that brings the claps, whether at the end of a dance recital or in a wrestling bout. It is the performativity of flesh that Ra Sh (N Ravi Shanker) sets out to map in Architecture of Flesh. As someone who ran into Ra Sh’s poems on Facebook from time to time—where his prolificity is on generous display—I had the sense that here’s someone who was trying…

DIRECTOR Babak Najafi CAST Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman This is the Donald Trump version of terrorism. Had it not insulted the intelligence of its audience by being so daft, the movie could well be accused of fear mongering. Within the first hour we see British intelligence compromised and swarms of terrorists bringing London to its knees. Many of the city’s iconic landmarks are bombed, and a number of world leaders who have assembled for the funeral of the British prime minister are assassinated. The American President (Aaron Eckhart), however, has escaped and is on the run across London, protected by his ace Secret Service Agent, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler). The terrorist mastermind, Aamir Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul) plans to relieve the US President of whatever grey matter he possesses…

Now to Get Her to Say Yes After the paps snapped Ranbir Kapoor leaving Zoya Akhtar’s home last weekend, rumours quickly began doing the rounds that RK and Zoya might be in discussions over a new film. One can see why that would be an interesting narrative for the press, and even the trade… after all Ranbir had famously turned down roles in both Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do. Could it be that they’d finally found a project they were happy to work on together? As it turns out, there’s nothing cooking on the professional front. Ranbir was merely at Zoya’s home for an impromptu gathering. The filmmaker’s brother Farhan was also hanging out with them, as were other common friends. It is true, however, that Zoya…

PERSON OF THE WEEK MARIA SHARAPOVA IN THE WORLD of sports, Maria Sharapova has an incredible story. From her parents leaving Russia, to arriving in the US as a child, financially broke and without any understanding of English, with her father taking a loan to fund Sharapova’s tennis training. She is now a five-time Grand Slam champion, the world’s highest-paid female athlete and one of the sport’s most famous faces. Now, with her admission of having tested positive for a banned drug, there is a cloud over her career. The current World No 7 who will turn 29 next month, has already been battling a string of injuries lately. She dropped out of the US Open last summer due to a leg injury and recently withdrew from another tournament because…

ON THURSDAY, 4 March, released on bail after an unnecessary arrest, JNU Students’ Union President, Kanhaiya Kumar returned to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and gave a speech that has since invigorated leftists and liberals all over India. Though I consider myself left-leaning, I have to spoil the party: I am impressed by young Kumar, but I remain sceptical of many leftist positions in India, especially in metropolitan circles. So much so that just a couple of weeks ago, I had refused to sign a petition, circulated by left-leaning and liberal academics based in Europe: it was a condemnation of what was then being done by the police, authorities and some Hindutva sympathisers in the wake of the JNU controversy, including Kumar’s arrest on sedition charges. Not that I thought that…

ANDAL: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GODDESS Translated and edited by Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Ravi Shankar ZUBAAN | 190 PAGES | Rs 595 THERE ARE few people outside southern India who are aware of the kind of fervour that the ninth century poet-saint Andal generates, a fervour that can be aesthetic or religious, sometimes both at the same time. This teenage devotee who dies/disappears at 16 and immediately apotheoses into a goddess is as compelling to those who believe in the possibility of experiencing the divine as she is to those who are more sceptical. Her songs are known and sung, young girls dress up as her during her temple festival, her person(a) is beloved, intimate and inspirational. Who can resist a god-mad woman—whether she is Lal Ded or Mira…