Innholdsfortegnelse for June 13, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to the cover story, ‘Agenda AMU’ (6 June 2016). If previous education ministers have denied this university ‘minority’ status since as long ago as 1965, then why are we still debating the issue? Are there not greater issues to focus on for the upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh? For centuries now, we have been fighting for special status in some form or another. While protecting marginalised communities and uplifting them from poverty is an important objective, we should not let that consume every decision, especially not at the risk of quality and fairness. As your article rightly points out, Hindus at Banaras Hindu University are never up in arms for their institution to be granted special status. Such debates as the one over…

IT IS THAT time again. James Bond, the longest-running and perhaps greatest franchise in film history, is set for another reboot. One of the more celebrated Bond directors, Sam Mendes, is not going to be at the helm again. Also, arguably the best Bond incarnation may be turning in his licence to kill. Daniel Craig is said to have rejected a £68 million offer to return for two more Bond films, sending bookmakers, hype-makers, 007 enthusiasts and several British actors of a certain profile into a tizzy. Already, there are many angling for the role. Tom Hiddleston, who in the British spy-thriller mini-series The Night Manager (was it a Bond audition for him?) told a barman, “Excuse me, sir, could I have a vodka martini, please?” Idris Elba has been…

A WHIFF OF VICTIMHOOD adds to the aura of the singular leader. Convinced of history’s indebtedness to his destiny, such a leader lives in perpetual self-awareness, an extreme form of which is nothing but paranoia. When power is an inherited privilege, and where total submission is a prerequisite for loyalty, the fear of falling is a constant state of mind. The leader is a lone figure watching the shifting shapes of his own shadow. When the world shrinks around him, he sees phantoms, and enemies lurking in the corner. Mortality is a political inconvenience he is not trained to cope with. In falling, the finger still points towards the usurper who shattered the order. Being a victim is very Gandhi today. Maybe it is the least selling pastiche of a…

THE BONES OF GRACE Tahmima Anam Hamish Hamilton 411 Pages | Rs 499 I asked you why you loved me and you said love’s arguments are always teleological. You love someone because you already love them. You love their particular qualities, because you love them in the wholeness of their being. And because you love them in the wholeness of their being, you love the things about them that wound you —The Bones of Grace BANGLADESHI WRITER Tahmima Anam’s new novel, The Bones of Grace, is the final volume of her critically acclaimed Bengal trilogy. A Golden Age, the first, was published in 2007—and is often dubbed as the definitive 1971 novel in English. Set against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s muktijuddho, A Golden Age tells the story of Rehana Haque,…

HOW WOULD YOU react if someone made a joke on rape? A majority of women would find it uncomfortable. In liberal circles, it would be uncool. Feminists of all stripes would want it to be a crime under the IPC. The media would make a story out of it if a sufficiently important person said it. In India, it is agreed that a rape joke is distasteful. Yet, most men would think nothing of a rape joke; it is what they have grown up with in school and Hindi movies, but they are smart enough to know when to laugh at one and when not, depending on the people around. How would you then react if sexual assault victims went around telling rape jokes on stage? And they don’t do…

ONE MORNING DURING the Emergency, Pinarayi Vijayan, half-conscious after a night-long, brutal thrashing by cops, looked in the face of a senior police officer who had ordered the torture, and said, “Once I get better, I will take revenge on you.” The newly elected Kerala Chief Minister was then 30 and an MLA, and before he was sent to jail, his tormentors had crushed his toes with batons, besides inflicting other serious injuries. The police officer was stunned to see Vijayan’s defiance. Nearly two years later, reelected in the 1977 polls after the Emergency was lifted, the leader made a fiery speech in the state Assembly, brandishing the bloodsoaked shirt he wore that dark night and offering a damning portrayal of the Congress-led government’s actions from 1975 to 1977 that…

IF I HAD TO offer a metaphor for Cuba at this moment (and really, everyone who’s visiting Cuba at this moment feels they must offer something), I’d go for the tiñosa—the humble turkey vulture that circles the skies of Havana, the valleys of Viñales, and the hundreds of José Martí statues that dot the island. I think of tiñosas as gringos, patiently circling and waiting, and of the entire cigar-shaped country of Cuba as a delicately rotting pork chop in the sun. Friends who have visited Cuba before—in the time of the Período Especial, which has that trademark Fidel touch of making a bad thing sound good—tell me that there has always been an element of the predatory in Cuba. Hundreds of prostitutes lining the Malecón, Havana’s version of Marine…

‘X AND Y SITTING in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes a baby in a baby carriage.’ The ditties in school, Mother Goose’s tales and the movies of adolescence, they all reinforce the same sequence of events and an identical Romantic narrative arc. There really is no variation in this scheme of things. Why isn’t there a nursery rhyme that tells us about the sleeplessness of parenthood and the travails of partnerships? With The Course of Love (Hamish Hamilton; 222 pages; Rs 599), Alain de Botton helpfully addresses this absence of information by taking us into the world of post marriage and post child. Let’s say upfront that this is not a work of great literature. Lines of beauty don’t leap up and metaphors don’t…

ANY SCHOOL child can slip in giving answers under pressure. In Bihar, however, matters have taken a decidedly downward turn after the state’s school examination top scorers gave incoherent answers to rather simple questions. Take Bihar’s class XII Humanities stream topper. When asked what Political Science was about, the student responded that ‘prodigal’ science had something to do with cooking. She meant ‘political’ science. If this is incoherent, then consider what the Science champion had to say. His answer to what is the most reactive element in the Periodic Table was aluminium, which is actually one of the most inert elements. The video clip on which these gems were on display has now gone viral. This has forced the state’s education department to order an unprecedented review and retest of…

Diesel vehicles pollute the air more than petrol, but is that enough to ban them abruptly? Delhi already has a ban on new diesel vehicles over 2,000 cc and those over 10 years old. The National Green Tribunal is reportedly mulling similar bans in 11 cities. What will taxi and truck operators, who depend on these vehicles, do? And what of auto company employees who risk being laid off? If we ask them to make these sacrifices, will courts and governments guarantee that the air will be pollution-free henceforth? The transition to cleaner fuels comes at a cost that will take a heavy toll on the poor. WORD’S WORTH “Fresh air and innocence are good if you don’t take too much of them—but I always remember that most of the…

COUNTLESS BRAVE INDIANS went to prison under the Raj. Many served long jail terms, sometimes for life. Those who had attempted armed resistance were routinely executed, starting with the defeated rebels of 1857. In other cases, penal terms often amounted to a death sentence, such as for revolutionaries sent to the bespoke Cellular Jail on the Andaman Islands. The 16th-century Lahore Fort—the Raj’s most notorious detention facility apart from Cellular Jail—was however reserved for a rather select cohort. After my father, Sisir Bose, arrived there in October 1944, aged twenty-four, nobody spoke to him for a few weeks. Then the special superintendent of police in charge of the fort’s prisoners, Nazir Ahmad Razvi, paid him a visit and told him: ‘You look like an educated gentleman. This is no place…

IN A TRAILER WITH leopard print upholstery on the ceiling and a sluggish air-conditioner, I watch Richa Chadha talk to a colleague about an ageing villain’s dated acting style. “He is still dying in slow motion”, she says, her enunciation characteristically precise and her delivery deadpan. “It’s like, he is still falling to bullets fired in the 1980s,” she adds, before breaking into her trademark chuckle. Chadha is in the middle of shooting at a studio on the edge of Mumbai. The day we meet is the release of Sarbjit, with Randeep Hooda playing the eponymous hero and Aishwarya Rai, his sister. Chadha’s role, though small, is getting positive reviews. But she knows this only second hand. “I never read reviews or my own interviews,” she tells me. Soon, a…

IF YOU ARE a citydwelling Indian, you are very likely to have a low level of vitamin D. Also called the sunshine vitamin, the existence of vitamin D was first suspected by the Polish scientist Sniadecki in 1840, when he reported that children living in industrial, smoke-filled Warsaw were prone to develop joint pains and deformities (rickets), while those living in the clear atmosphere of the countryside were healthy. As the industrial revolution swept across Europe and North America, it brought rickets along with it. By 1900, more than 80 per cent of children in Boston were suffering from rickets. The vitamin was identified in the 1920s and it was confirmed that the main source of this vitamin was sunlight, not diet. A few decades later, the role of skin…

Sheer Silliness but Who’s Complaining? Never mind how Housefull 3 ends up performing at the boxoffice when it opens this weekend, it’s already the smartest ‘virally promoted’ movie in recent memory. Let’s face it, nobody’s expecting anything but sheer silliness from this third installment in the nonsensical comedy franchise. And the film’s stars have been reiterating just that through their amusing shenanigans during promotions. All it takes is a quick glance at any of the actors’ social media feeds—particularly Akshay Kumar’s—to understand the extent of tomfoolery that has gone on in the days leading up to the release. For one, the mock rivalry between leading ladies Jacqueline Fernandez and Lisa Haydon has yielded some hilarious videos. The two actresses sportingly lived out the popular ‘heroines-don’t-get-along’ cliché by filming short clips…