Innholdsfortegnelse for April 4, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in KAPIL NAIR The travel essay ‘The Romance of the Road’ brought out some important issues regarding the condition of the highways in India. While I personally enjoy road travel and wish I could explore more of my country via highways, I inevitably end up taking a flight or train to my destination. This is not because it is any cheaper or less cumbersome but just because it is safer to travel by air or train than to risk a journey on the road. Highways here are not at all what they should be. Not only is the condition of the road itself horrible but there is no safety service available in large sections of public roads, especially in the mountains and other remote areas. While I do understand that…

At a time when most parties are leveraging the popularity of JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar for their own political ends, another round of controversy erupted when Congress leader Shashi Tharoor compared Kumar to Bhagat Singh during a lecture at JNU on 20 March. Tharoor said, “Bhagat Singh was a young man in his 20s with Marxist beliefs who had great passion for the Motherland. Kanhaiya has same qualities in common.” This statement, which was part of a 43-minute lecture and was made in the context of sedition charges put on people under the British rule, opened a can of worms with the BJP and the Twitteratti issuing counter-statements and politicising the idea of nationalism and love for the country. While Tharoor later clarified that he had no intention…

SOMETIMES A SMALL event with an almost harmless beginning becomes a hyperbolic space for discussion. In fact the trigger has little or no connection with the fate of the discussion. An almost mundane comment becomes the source of a major witch-hunt and then one realises that it is not the original text that is important but the contexts of discussion and interpretation. The events around the interventions of the AIMIM MLA from Aurangabad in the Maharashtra Assembly provide one such example. Imtiaz Jaleel was responding to the governor’s speech referring to plans to construct memorials for Shivaji, Bal Thackeray and Babasaheb Ambedkar. Jaleel’s speech was not a personal reaction to any one of the local icons. All he wondered or asked was, should public money be used for the construction…

EVERY FIVE YEARS, unfailingly in the month of March, VS Achuthanandan wades through the muck of machinations, outsmarting enemies within his own party to become the face of Communist Party of India (CPM) for state elections. A decade ago, on 15 March 2006, the party’s Politburo decided not to field him. Fierce protests followed across the state and even t-shirts with his image hit the market. Two days later, seven of the fourteen district committees passed resolutions demanding his candidature. On 21 March, the Politburo reviewed its decision and decided to fight the battle under his leadership. Achuthanandan went on to become chief minister after the election. Then, five years later, on 16 March 2011, the party’s state secretariat decided against his candidature for the Assembly election. The next day,…

WHEN SUMEET MITTAL’S girlfriend didn’t accept his proposal right away, he decided to turn to literature for inspiration. Borrowing from Rhett Butler’s proposal to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, Mittal played a guitar and sung under his lover’s window every night for two weeks, till she finally agreed to marry him. “Sex is so easy today,” says Mittal’s new bride, Aashna. “A booty call is only an app, phone call, SMS or FB message away. Romance is what women crave for now. It’s the new ideal because it’s missing in today’s dating game. I would love to be courted in the same way Jamie wooed Aurélia in Love Actually or like how Darcy runs after Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. I don’t want just a ring. I want…

FELUDA @ 50 Edited by Boria Majumdar HARPERCOLLINS | 176 PAGES | Rs 299 PERHAPS FEW OTHER characters in Bengali fiction stir as much sentiment in young and old readers as Prodosh C Mitter or Feluda, the detective character created by legendary writer-filmmaker Satyajit Ray for young adult readers. Feluda first appeared in a 1965 story in the children’s magazine Sandesh. He went on to feature in a host of Bengali films, telefilms and TV serials, starting with Sonar Kella directed by Ray himself in 1974. The character turned 50 last year. Feluda @ 50, curated and edited by Boria Majumdar, is in essence a tribute. In his introductory essay, ‘Decoding Feluda: What Makes the Fifty-year-old Tick?’, Majumdar weighs Feluda against detectives from across the world whom Indian readers have…

I COME FROM A long line of non-hunters and vegetarians. I have never even fished for fear that I might hook one, until a recent trip to the Amazon where I did catch a piranha. Somehow it felt alright to hunt a predatory fish, but not a predatory animal. Yet, the thought of a hunt breakfast or a hunting luncheon never fails to evoke a memory of the jungle, of setting out at dawn to sight the tiger and then having a breakfast of omelette, toast, poori aloo, a ripe mango and strong tea. Memory is a funny thing. It is a combination of what we experience in reality, and what we visualise while reading a particularly vivid description. In a 2003 study of 569 college students, 73 per cent…

THIS IS NOT THE END Alan Rickman, who plays a lieutenant general in Eye in the Sky, died this January. Famous for playing Snape in the Harry Potter film series, his final film role will be in Alice Through the Looking Glass (May 2016) TWO SISTERS come home for the impending marriage of one of them. The family is close but there are unresolved issues from the past. There are lies and resentment. Parental love is perceived as not evenly divided. The camera is mobile, accompanying the characters as they interact with each other, giving us the impression of a film shot in real time. This is Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2008). Kapoor & Sons has a remarkably similar theme and shooting style. It is about two brothers coming…

TURN “If anybody insults national sentiments, it cannot be tolerated. I demand strong action against the member for insulting the country” — Patil in the Maharashtra Assembly on 17 March AROUND “The resolution was moved by the Treasury Benches and it was passed without hearing the opposition out. Congress has never supported the resolution at any given time” — Patil to The Hindu on 22 March…

WHO IS THE best living Indian cricketer? Let’s rephrase that. Who is the person whose presence in your team guarantees a win? Virat Kohli is having a great run and after his knock in the match against Pakistan at the T20 World Championship, your vote, swung by the weight of current sentiment, might go to him. Mahendra Singh Dhoni in his prime, maybe? Or Sachin Tendulkar or Virender Sehwag? They are all wrong answers. If there is a match on and your opponent is chasing three runs in the last two overs, then the man who you should be having by your side is Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. All 22 players then come together to not get to the target. On Sunday as the country gloated in the…

SCHOOLS AND classrooms teach us history in incomplete ways. We learn about events and personalities, but not about contexts and characters. We are familiar with public images but remain ignorant of their human reality. We study timelines and chronologies, but fail to acknowledge that history is not restricted to the span of years, rather it seeps into the present, colouring everything in its path. In Incarnations: India in 50 Lives (Allen Lane, Rs 999, Pages: 636) Sunil Khilnani smites away the fuddy-duddiness of old history textbooks and stereotypical notions. He creates a work of staggering depth and scope to “show the adjacency of the familiar with the historically unfamiliar”, showing the reader that “history erupts into the everyday. By reading these 50 profiles, or listening to the BBC Radio 4…

DIRECTOR Gavin Hood CAST Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman This film shows you that Western military drone strikes on terrorist suspects in faraway lands does appear like warfare conducted in virtual reality. At least to the perpetrators. They sit in their sanitised war rooms and board rooms in London and Washington and watch the scenario evolve on monitors before deliberating on a strike. Then they examine, like reluctant soldiers, the consequent bloodshed and calculate the collateral damage. Eye in the Sky is an engaging film about this one-sided perspective. It takes just one case in point—a suicide bomber being armed with a vest in Nairobi. Within hours a blast could be triggered in a shopping mall. Equally, within minutes a drone could eliminate this threat. But a little girl…

VISIT OF THE WEEK OBAMA’S TRIP TO CUBA WHAT A REMARKABLE photo-op. Under umbrellas and a steady rain, with his wife and two daughters by his side, an informallydressed US president skips over puddles in Old Havana. In the fading lights of Sunday, the President strolls through the Cuban capital’s 500-year-old historic quarter, taking in the colonial plazas and the streetscapes; later steps inside an 18th century cathedral to meet a cardinal, followed by dinner in a small private establishment. If this wasn’t magical enough, nearby an unusual chant arose. These were, as reported by the media, “USA! USA!” This was, in symbolism, the Berlin Wall moment. The closing, at least in appearance, of the final remaining chapter in Cold War history. On 20 March, President Barack Obama arrived in…

JUST DAYS AFTER the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, a perpetrator of the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, a series of bomb blasts rocked Brussels. At least 34 persons have been killed and scores of others injured in blasts that rocked the city’s airport and a metro station. That attacks on such a scale were mounted with such impunity shows the Belgian intelligence authorities were caught unawares. Abdeslam was apprehended from the infamous Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels. It now appears that the terrorist had been hiding in Molenbeek for some time. Clearly, this district is an intelligence black hole. There are lessons here. Belgium, like most West European countries, takes pride in civil liberties for all its citizens. Those liberties have been abused in this case and at a great…

FEAR IS THE WEAPON of the last revolutionary who has god on his lips and blood on his hands. He has been here with us for a while. On the next table in the café. On the beach among holidaymakers, waiting. In the stadium, watching the game—and us. In the street. In the mall. He is the most familiar stranger of our time, invisible but a disembodied invocation rising from the ruins. He is not afraid to kill or to be killed; it is the fear of god, his submission to the Book, that aggravates his bloodlust. Somewhere in the sandy remoteness of Syria, he, the man in a black balaclava, wielding a knife, hovers over his victim, a figure on his knees, covered in orange robes, and the grotesquery…

MOST AFTERNOONS, DMK supremo M Karunanidhi enjoys a gulab jamun with his dosa. “He doesn’t have diabetes. He is in good health, although wheelchair-bound. He scans the newspapers and bathes three times a day,” says Durai Murugan, 78, principal secretary of the party and Kalaignar’s trusted lieutenant. Seated at an Art Deco desk in his home office in Kotturpuram, Chennai, he is eager to dispel the gloom about the party’s future, ahead of what is being seen as Karunanidhi’s climactic battle with his bête noire, Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, 68, who has enjoyed a popular, if tumultuous, reign in office. The DMK, flushed down the sinkhole of corruption charges in the last Assembly polls, is wilfully hopeful of making a recovery by allying with smaller parties and attacking Amma where…

What are people looking for when buying a home? How do you reach out to people with different criteria? Simple comforts of life are what most customers look for while buying a home and that will not change even in the future. People today prefer an allencompassing location which can take care of all their needs: be it work, play, live or eat. At Godrej Properties, our aim is to provide a holistic living experience to our customers. While there are the traditional mediums of print, outdoor, radio and television, we are reaching out to customers through various innovative, on-ground brand activations and sponsoring shows that are in synergy with the company’s broad engagement objectives. We have introduced numerous customised consumer engagement programs to connect with customers from various backgrounds,…

IT IS or should be a puzzle that an explosion of genius occurred in the tumultuous 17th century—a time of wars, civil strife and the continuation of post-Reformation religious agonies disruptive and destructive to an unparalleled degree in Europe’s history to that point. How does one account for the coexistence of the flowering of genius alongside the attrition of such conflict? Does the tumult of the century in some way explain its genius and those changes, or cause them, or might there have been even greater innovation if it had been a time of peace? The answer in my view is that the wars and tumults of the century helped to make the change possible because of the failure of authority in both theoretical and practical respects during the chaos…

How to Handle a Break-Up Katrina Kaif seems to have decided that she’s not going to let the break-up with Ranbir Kapoor pull her down. She reportedly went into a shell following the failure of Fitoor recently, avoiding all public engagements (even cancelling a cover shoot for the anniversary issue of a fashion glossy at the last minute), choosing only to step out when she had to be on the sets. During this understandably difficult time she completed filming Baar Baar Dekho with Sidharth Malhotra, and even participated in a schedule of Jagga Jasoos with Ranbir. She stayed away from parties, movie trials, and other such gatherings where the press would be in attendance. Until last weekend that is, when she stepped out looking nothing short of stunning for a…