Innholdsfortegnelse for April 25, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Congratulations for your great cover story on Ambedkar (‘Slayer of all Gods’, 18 April 2016). The message is clear that Ambedkar may not have been a hero of the Indian independence movement, but he is the man who built Independent India. His statue, with its ubiquitous blue suit, is a common sight at bus stands, bastis and universities, but it would do his life no justice to have it overshadowed by iconography and idolatry. Like most great men, he was one of the most misunderstood individuals of his time. As Independent India’s first Law Minister, Ambedkar collaborated closely with Nehru to fight oppressive social hierarchies in India. He hit the nail on the head when he said that the caste system is the root cause…

THE GATEWAY OF INDIA was built for one of Prince William’s forefathers to step onto Indian soil as its owner. Last Sunday, opposite the Gateway, at the Taj Palace Hotel, when all the blue bloods of Mumbai, from Sachin Tendulkar to Shah Rukh Khan, waited for William and his wife Kate Middleton to arrive for a fundraiser sitdown dinner, there was just a hint of life as it must have been once upon a time in India. The rich and famous were on time, an extraordinary phenomenon with Bollywood superstars, lined and seated to receive a 30-second acknowledgement through the kind beatific eyes of royalty. Before the event, William and Kate met the 93-year-old owner of a café called Britannia in south Mumbai. It is a rather unremarkable little eatery…

EVERY ONCE IN Awhile, there will be an attempt to measure "happiness'. For example, there is a World Happiness Report and you will no doubt be unhappy to learn that in 2015, India was ranked 117 out of 158 countries. Switzerland was at the top and Togo was at the bottom. This Report is partly the result of a UN General Assembly resolution in 2011, asking countries to try and measure happiness of their citizens and use those indicators to shape public policy. In the 2015 Report, Switzerland was first But second, third and fourth were Iceland, Denmark and Norway. No doubt cold climates and absence of the sun make people feel happier. There is a lot of misinformation about Bhutan’s gross national happiness (GNH). GNH isn’t an alternative to…

AT THE END of March, in the middle of Britain’s Easter holiday break, the board of Tata Steel, meeting in Mumbai, caught this country’s political and industrial leaders napping. The sudden announcement that the company wanted to sell all of its UK holdings was as unexpected as it was traumatic. Since then, the shock of the decision continues to reverberate while serious questions are being asked about what it means for Britain’s industrial and strategic role in the modern world. The minister responsible, the business secretary Sajid Javid, could not have been further away from the eye of the storm. He was on a visit to Australia from where he promptly called the Tata boss, Cyrus Mistry, before flying home to take charge of the crisis. Both the prime minister,…

WHY ARE WOMEN exempt in the Odd-Even plan of the Delhi government? Because Arvind Kejriwal believes the city’s public transport is not safe for them. At a press conference, as reported in Mint, Delhi’s Transport Minister Gopal Rai said, “We held a meeting with various women’s associations. The suggestion that came was that while women want to play a part to save the environment, until security is ensured, women should be exempted. The Delhi CM has decided that security measures are not at par and the government has decided to exempt women from this phase.” The Odd-Even rule exists between 8 am to 8 pm. Let’s concede that Delhi is dangerous, but is it so in daylight in crowded buses and metros? It is horribly inconvenient, but is it physically…

WAR IS THE bloodshed that national histories never overcome. It is the heroism with which both winners and losers measure their morality. It is war that has legitimised the geography we have inherited, for better or worse. It is where death, the sheer scale of it, is an honour foretold. War is the theatre where the leader builds his own mythology—and remains alive to pop the cork. It goes on, and as the great Athenian would have said, only the dead will see the end of it. It has spawned some great writing, and great movies, too. War junkies may go ecstatic on classicists such as Thucydides and Homer, Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, all thinkers and poets of the battlefield. Is there an epic without a war, in any language?…

QUITE LATE INTO the proceedings, auctioneer Richard Madley raises his left hand to reveal an unknown name. With his glasses drawn to the edge of his nose, his voice booms through the speakers. “It is player number 171,” he says. “M Ashwin.” The date is 6 February at the ITC Gardenia hotel in Bengaluru, the venue for this year’s IPL player auctions. After months of apprehension—with two teams suspended, big cricket administrators cut to size, and two Supreme Court-appointed committees putting the BCCI to scrutiny—here we are back again, thick in this money-spinning jamboree. By the time Murugan Ashwin’s name comes up, the fate of most big names in Indian and international cricket among the 351 players up for grabs have already been decided. One could be forgiven for thinking…

THERE IS NOTHING new to say about Shakespeare. But 2016 marks the 400th year of Shakespeare’s death (23 April) and once more we will realise that he is quite simply the greatest playwright. And he is ‘great’ not because of the words he wrote with his quill, but how they have passed from the pages of literature into the parlance of the everyday. It would be a disservice to think of him as a transcendent godlike figure whose words are set in stone. The most interesting adaptations of his work use him as a wellspring and muse and not as a prescription or diktat. We remember him well when we acknowledge our personal relationship with him. Most of us first met him in school. We studied the abridged plotlines of…

JAMES SHAPIRO, professor of English at Columbia University, New York, is arguably the leading authority on Shakespeare the world over. With half a dozen titles to his name, he has spent much of his adulthood delving into medieval and early modern drama. His most recent book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 has won universal acclaim and has been called a ‘dark, enthralling, and brilliant narrative’. It took Shapiro 10 years to write the ‘thick description’ of what a writer’s life was 400 years ago. Shapiro did not grow up reading and admiring Shakespeare. His interest in the bard was spurred by watching his plays. As a 17-18-year-old he would fly from his home in New York to London and watch 20 plays over 20 days. And found himself…

Act 1, Scene 1 Night. The Kapadia’s Kothi in New Delhi. Rahman Murtaza climbs the wall and enters the front garden Rahman: But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juhi is the sun. It is my laila, O, it is my jaan! O, that she knew she were! Juhi Kapadia appears through the French Window onto the balcony Juhi: O Rahman, Rahman! wherefore art thou Rahman? ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Murtaza. What’s Murtaza? it is nor haath, nor pehr, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a kamal By any other name would bloom as fair;…

THE INDIAN JUDICIARY has been described as the most powerful judicial force on earth by the Marxist historian Perry Anderson. In recent days, the higher judiciary has proved the point amply by going into areas that were never part of its ambit in the original Constitutional framework. On Wednesday, 13 April, the Bombay High Court ordered that cricket matches that are to be held after 30 April in the presently parched state of Maharashtra be shifted to other states. Not only that, the Court also ordered the Board of Control for Cricket in India to ensure that 6.4 million litres of water be supplied to drought-affected villages, which will be nominated by the court. In another decision, the Supreme Court has asked the Reserve Bank of India if the total…

That Gurgaon should now be called Gurugram, as Haryana’s BJP government has announced, is unsurprising. In general, our politicians love to change the names of places. This is because it takes zero effort, distracts from what they should actually be doing and finds support from a certain set of constituents. It may feed a sentiment of one kind or another, but makes not an iota of difference to people living there. A district by any other name is just as miserable. The Shiv Sena famously did it to Bombay just over a decade ago, changing its official name to Mumbai. Calcutta has become Kolkata and Madras has been renamed Chennai since. Delhi, perhaps, is next. WORD’S WORTH ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other…

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago this month, a motley band of revolutionaries launched a short-lived urban insurrection against the world’s mightiest imperial power. The setting was Dublin, the capital of Ireland. It began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, and ended six days later on Saturday, 29 April, with the surrender of the rebels. At the time, the week-long drama in Dublin seemed destined to go down in history as no more than a footnote. It was a small event in the midst of the epic battles of World War I. In Ireland itself, the public reaction to the rebellion was ambiguous. Most people appeared indifferent, and some hostile. But what seemed then to be a madcap rebellion by a bunch of adventurers led within six years to British withdrawal from…

SHE IS THE WOMAN at the centre of a storm. But it is impossible to tell. She sits with her hand grasping the mattress as if steeling herself to remain seated when she’d much rather flee. Her story is making headlines across the country, but she prefers to read Grihshobha to newspapers. She is deemed the next Shah Bano, but has only the faintest idea who that is. (If Shah Bano proved to be historic for the issue of maintenance post-divorce, Shayara Bano might prove to be the same for pre-divorce.) Her case has reached the Supreme Court, but she has never set foot in Delhi. Meet Shayara Bano, the petitioner in the case that questions the legality of triple talaq. She is the ‘35-year-old from Uttarakhand’ whose writ petition…

In a world where vacations are planned down to the last detail and experiences are treasured, some destinations have risen to be ranked above many others. Memories are made and shared on social media to add badge value that takes the holiday-maker closer to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Inspired by what we see on television, by what we read and what our friends post, we set out to be different. And to bring back bragging rights. Open Avenues looks at some luxurious locales that turn the mundane into the magical… Down in The Abbey Lush green meadows, chandelier-lit halls, regal upholstery, massive, ornate homes, filled with art and antiques, sequinned dresses and grace and old-world charm. In six seasons,‘Downton Abbey’brought alive on screen the royalty of the…

I BECAME ENTRANCED WITH Macbeth on a warm summer evening in 1967, when the rest of Presidency College, Calcutta, had left after yet another day mutilated by Naxalite violence and police response. Our first year undergraduate class began late in the day for our professor, Tarak Nath Sen, came according to a schedule determined by his uncertain health. A rare passion brought him to campus amidst the periodic bombs; our awe was such that we waited even if it meant staying on till after sunset. Legend had it that he taught King Lear to MA students from the last page, on the assumption that if they did not know the play thoroughly before they entered his class they were not worthy of his attention. He was more generous to undergraduates.…

MY JOURNEY WITH Shakespeare began 20 years ago. I translated his play Taming of the Shrew into Hindi in 1995 in Delhi. It took me about three months to do it, but the most bizarre experience was that despite having worked with the text for a good three months, I hadn’t understood the play fully. It was after watching the production come alive on stage that I could really comprehend it. That was such a big realisation: Shakespeare is meant to be watched. I really do feel Shakespeare is not meant to be read, at least by us, and not until you actually speak that English. He wrote his plays in such a way that the actual pleasure is in watching it. That said, I can’t stand any of the…

Stalled After Take-off Dum Lage Ke Haisha co-stars Ayushmann Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar have suddenly found themselves with too much free time on their hands. The actors were filming their new project Manmarziyan in Shimla currently, but returned from what was meant to be a long shoot, a little over a week into the schedule. Turns out that things quickly soured between producer Anand L Rai (Tanu Weds Manu) and director Sameer Sharma (Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana), leading to a shutdown on the project. The official word is that Rai was not happy with Sharma’s work over the few days that the camera rolled and decided to pull the plug on the film. But insiders say that Sharma’s decisions were being undermined and his approach to directing the film…