Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to ‘What, Me Worry?’ (25 April 2016). If Mamata Banerjee emerges victorious again despite her insensitive remarks after the Park Street rape case, the way her party workers beat up Jadavpur University Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra, and her failure to fulfill most of her promises when she dethroned the Left in West Bengal, then kudos to her for her charisma and the way she wins over voters. She also knows her political arithmetic too well to be defeated. Muslims, who were once staunch Congress supporters, have literally been taken in by her party, and this could play a pivotal role in her invincibility. Deepa Dasmunsi and Roopa Ganguly might be star campaigners for the Congress and BJP, respectively, but in terms of stature, they…

ONCE UPON A TIME, when the Leader was Great and his country was heaven on earth, influential newspapers in the West and elsewhere used to carry huge advertisements on juche, paid for by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Juche, in its most simplified version for capitalist minds, meant ‘self reliance’, but for the blessed subjects of the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, it was a way of life, and the only way, the official philosophy of self reliance and self defence under the watchful eyes of the supreme leader: ‘Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary…

ONE OF THE finest stalls at the India Art Fair 2016, for me, was the mini pop-up ‘museum’ set up by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), recently christened DAG Modern. And a museum of sorts it was, no doubt. Unlike the spectacle of avant-garde contemporary art displayed at most of the surrounding galleries, DAG Modern’s offering was seemingly understated, in fact almost sedate, even though it occupied a good deal of floor space, comprising mostly paintings and sculptures by the crème de la crème of 20thand 21st-century Indian art. Yet, in spite of the familiar media and the big names, the work it had brought together was remarkable—not only for being aesthetically outstanding but also for the intellectual rigour and coherence with which it had been presented. Since its start nearly…

OUR BEAUTIFUL Labrador, Rocky, passed away on 26 December 2015. He was 12. I began a garden in my balconies in January 2016, mixing his ashes in the soil and compost, and pouring it into cement, ceramic and terracotta pots that held a dozen roses and hibiscuses, three bougainvillea tree-shaped plants, two peach trees, two pomegranate trees, a wood apple tree, two lemon trees, a mandarin orange one, and a pair of bottle brush trees. One section on the other side of the brick railing was reserved for a dozen pots filled with the seasonal variety: in this instance, dahlias. It may sound macabre to those who don’t have pets, but it was my way of holding on to him. Every morning I would inspect the flowering plants for buds…

WHERE THERE is a large gap between demand and supply for anything essential, chaos will inevitably follow. Capitalism addresses it by the measure of money. Those who can afford it, get it; those who cannot, try to work or plot their way up. It is unfair, especially when people are born into money, but there has been little alternative. Communism addresses it by rationing. If there is a loaf of bread and 1,000 hungry people, it will break it into 1,000 bits which is often as good as nothing. In capitalism, 10 get satiated, 990 are still hungry. Which is better depends on where you are placed. In this moment of India’s history, we pay lip service to both worlds and end up getting neither. Extreme incompetence forces us to…

WHILE THE RELATIONSHIP of Sanskrit studies in India to that in the Western academy has been much discussed following the Murty Library controversy, not enough has been said about the wider context of classical education in India. Language debates and policy in India have regrettably eschewed discussion of the many pleasures and purposes of a classical education, of learning grammar and rules which can be creative and puzzling. There is also the benefit of face-to-face encounters with the past through direct contact with a text rather than a second-hand account. This allows one to learn to appreciate and understand different times, values and peoples, instead of imposing today’s mores, with all the restrictions that entails. Sanskrit does not enjoy the elite position in India that Classics has held in western…

‘ONE AFTERNOON ON a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.’ The first line of Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound (Speaking Tiger, 470 Pages, Rs 499) sets the mood for the rest of this grand historic tale. Translated into English last year, it combines history and events with myth, magic and hyperbole to create something truly fantastic. Dewi Ayu, a half-Dutch, half-Indonesian woman, renowned for her beauty and her smarts, is the matriarch at the centre of it all. Over the course of the novel, she and her four daughters suffer every kind of outrage. But it is through these ravages and atrocities that Kurniawan throws a blinding light on the genocide of 1965 in Indonesia, the three-decade long…

GHAJINI GULPED two-and-a-half litres of milk in three minutes flat. Ghajini, not Aamir Khan’s amnesiac character in the 2008 Bollywood hit, but a beautiful three-year-old jumbo with an elephantine memory. Her cleaved head, a machete mark that gave her the name, has almost healed. Unlike the man in the movie, she must remember the moment angry villagers set upon her as a two-month-old and rent her forehead asunder. She was the last to leave the fields that her family had ventured into and had seen the fury of man even before she learned to eat grain. But those macabre memories are in the past. Now, as she looks soulfully into my eyes, she is fully focused on milk. She has finished her second bottle of the day and lets out…

THIS MAY, a quarter century ago, a bunch of Tamil terrorists from Sri Lanka blew up Rajiv Gandhi. Killing any human being is brutal, but the trademark suicide bombings perfected by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) took murder to an almost indescribable scale of cruelty. With the efflux of time, much has been forgotten of that event. Velupillai Prabhakaran is dead and so are Sivarasan and Subha; few will remember the ‘one-eyed jack’ and his accomplice who committed suicide on the outskirts of Bangalore. The only survivours are the seven low-level operatives who took part in the conspiracy to kill India’s former Prime Minister. Their position in the conspiratorial chain, however, does not lessen their crime in any way. It is these seven—some of them spared the gallows…

There are two reasons why people get angry when the Government says they can’t withdraw half their provident fund until they retire: present needs are seen as greater than future security and they are better equipped to invest their money than the Government. For a poor country like India, it is usually the former, and that is why garment workers in Bengaluru hit the streets to force a U-turn on new PF rules that disallowed the employer’s contribution from being withdrawn until age 58. On the other hand, even the poor get old, and that is when a corpus is most needed. WORD’S WORTH “The fraction of a person’s income that it is reasonable for him or her to set aside for retirement depends on that person’s circumstances and values”…

THE PANAMA PAPERS have illustrated that political leaders anywhere are no longer invulnerable beyond their borders. Parking money abroad is no longer safe: a single data leak can lead to widespread geopolitical disruption, a prime ministerial resignation in Iceland, a judicial case in Pakistan. The precariousness of long-established ideas of geographical security confirm what other trends have suggested for some time: we have entered a period of sustained geopolitical volatility. Assessing this volatility, its antecedents, and its effect on the global economy is something like peeling an onion: we must peel each facet layer-by-layer—only hoping that in doing so our eyes do not water and the onion does not start to stink. The layers are indicative of both broad trends and specific ones. Sometimes, the layer underneath modifies or even…

ON a warm suburban Mumbai afternoon, in the quiet environs of a hotel lobby, the phone rings to inform me I am late. By a quirk of fate, or faulty mobile reception, it appears a text message informing her availability earlier had eluded my phone. She has been waiting, I figure, for at least 15 minutes. I rush to an ornate elevator, push a key, jab and punch more keys, but it refuses to budge. I run across the lobby, realising I need a keycard. I find the solitary receptionist occupied in a lengthy explanation of a customer’s itemised bill. Elsewhere people calmly go about their lunches and coffees as hotel and elevator instrumental pieces waft by. But by now, green and red veins have begun to throb all over…

THE LIVING Anjali Joseph Fourth Estate 232 Pages | Rs 399 ANJALI JOSEPH’S FIRST multiple award-winning novel, published in 2010, is set in a quiet middle-class Bombay neighbourhood— the eponymous Saraswati Park—and recreates its unhurried pace. To me, it marked a refreshing change from the ‘maximum city’ obsession of so much contemporary writing about the city, at least in English. From the high angle perspective of Saraswati Park, in her second novel Another Country (2012), Joseph’s lens narrows down cleverly to a slightly jerky, eye-level focus. In it, her narrative is like a camera closely tailing young Leela Ghosh, ever so often sitting inside Leela’s head, while she, having completed a posh education, attempts temp jobs in Paris, London and Bombay while navigating the complex inner worlds of youth, love…

Chronicle of a Sanitised Life Foretold It’s no secret that Munna Bhai MBBS director Rajkumar Hirani is working on a film on the life of Sanjay Dutt. Ranbir Kapoor will play the controversial star, but Hirani has revealed that the film will not be a salacious account of Dutt’s life, complete with his many crimes and misdemeanours. How can it? Dutt and his wife Manyata were the ones who approached the filmmaker to do the biopic and even offered to produce it. Rubbishing rumours that she’s in talks with the director to play Manyata in the project, Kangana Ranaut recently clarified that she has in fact been discussing a different film with Hirani—one in which she will play a comic role. There’s no clarity yet whether Hirani will direct or…