Innholdsfortegnelse for June 20, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK The cover story, ‘The Story of a Riot’ by Rahul Bhattacharya (13 June 2016), was an insightful read. It was also quite shocking to read how indifferent Indians have become to death and the suffering of others. As a community, we have become numb to tragic events that don’t affect us. We have forgotten how to empathise with strangers almost completely. While I had heard about the Assam riots and the troubles there, and read about it in the news before, I never stopped to consider the human aspects of the devastation and hardly ever thought about the after-effects of the violence. But once you see pictures of blood-stained walls and families that have been left in such a bad way, you realise how devastating…

PARASHAR KULKARNI apologises for the frequent interruptions. He must put the phone on hold as he accepts the steady stream of congratulations. He is at Calabash, a biennial event in Jamaica known as much for its offering of sun and sand as its impressive literary line-up. The assistant professor of Political Science at Yale-NUS College, Singapore (with a PhD from the Department of Politics at New York University) has reason to celebrate. He is the first Indian author to win the Commonwealth short story prize, beating almost 4,000 entries to claim the £5,000 award for his story ‘Cow and Company’. Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James presented the award to him. His story had earlier been declared the winning entry from the Asia region. Talking about his foray into writing,…

“Veda, Smriti, sadacharah, Atmcmstushtireva cha, Etachchaturvidhah prahus-Sakshad-dharmasya Lakshanam. The definition of religion is four-fold; Veda, Smriti, Sadacharah (good conduct) and Atmanstushti (self-satisfaction)." This was Dr BR Ambedkar speaking on the Hindu Code Bill. He also said, "The point is whether we are competent to make any changes, the whole history of Hindu society shows that it is continually progressing from stage to stage. Otherwise how do you explain the numerous Smritis, one Smriti laying down one thing and another Smriti another? How do you explain this? Society is continuously progressing and something has got to be found which is appropriate to the Sadacharah or Vyavahara Dharma." I have refrained from using the word dharma so far and will continue to do so. But we now have the expression meaning good…

SHASHI KAPOOR: THE HOUSEHOLDER, THE STAR Aseem Chhabra Rupa 196 Pages | Rs 395 MY CHILDHOOD memories of Shashi Kapoor are mainly of ‘Amitabh’s favourite heroine’, as one waggish description of the time had it. Kapoor was the fair-complexioned second lead and occasional foil to the superstar in films ranging from those signposts of the Angry Young Man era, Deewaar and Trishul, to the fast-paced thriller Shaan and the goofy comedy Do aur Do Paanch. Through most of these pairings, he was a gentle, jolly co-star; it was scarcely believable that his Trishul character, the pampered younger half-brother Shekhar, could hold his own against Bachchan’s smoldering, forged-in-iron Vijay during a climactic fight scene. In the early 1990s, there was the plump, droopy-eyed man apologising in a magazine interview for making…

I, THE SALT DOLL Vandana Mishra Translated by Jerry Pinto Speaking Tiger 221 Pages | Rs 299 FOR VARIOUS REASONS, autobiographies and biographies are the most contentious of genres, and women’s autobiographies, or the lack of them, the subject of much scrutiny by feminists. One of the main reasons for women’s ‘storylessness’, as George Eliot puts it, is, obviously, their lack of education. This connection can be seen at its clearest in the sudden appearance of women’s autobiographies in Marathi at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries as a result of the reformist movements in Maharashtra at the time. The autobiographies of Ramabai Ranade and Lakshmibai Tilak, wives of well noted men, are two of the best known. There have been many more women’s autobiographies…

All It Takes to Make an Actor Salman Khan’s brother-in-law Aayush Sharma has been sweating it out in the gym lately, working on a six-pack that he might flaunt when he makes his acting debut soon. The twenty-something-year-old husband of Salman’s little sister Arpita will reportedly be launched in a film by the superstar, who has been grooming the young man over the last year or so. Aayush, who was born and raised in Delhi, far away from the arc-lights, was first dispatched to assist director Ali Abbas Zafar on the sets of Sultan, but unit members say he was never really entrusted with any heavy lifting like ADs usually are. “He was present on the sets to observe, rather than do anything,” one source reveals. Salman also reportedly gave…

WHILE ONE SHOULD appreciate Anurag Kashyap’s sentiments when he speaks it being akin to being in North Korea when dealing with the censors, alas it can be no more than poetic licence on the wings of frustration and anger. In North Korea, Kashyap— starving, gaunt and enslaved—would actually be making movies that show filmmakers in ecstasy at being censored and he would believe it too. The censors want ‘Punjab’ to be removed from the title Udta Punjab, a movie he has co-produced, and also names of the state’s cities dropped. Among other things, they don’t want a dog to be named ‘Jacky Chain’. Even so, Kashyap’s situation is true Indian. The primary Indianism here is the very existence of the Censor Board in an age when children can access hard…

THE CULT OF Don DeLillo is built on ideas wrapped in the most stylised sentences of American fiction. Take these stray epigrammatic insights by the Stenmarks, two philosopher-promoters of the death-defying scientific establishment somewhere in the desolate remoteness of the planet, tremor-proof, the only disturbance that shatters the silence being the resonance of words mined from the deepest recesses of a mind that is in constant combat with the idolised as well the idealised order of the present. ‘In time a religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives… In one form or another, people return to their death haunted roots in order to reaffirm the pattern of extinction… Ready to die does not mean willing to disappear. Body and mind may tell us that it is…

WHEN BRITISH ROCK band Coldplay released a music video earlier this year, it made news for everything but the music. Set in India, the video featured lead singer Chris Martin doing ‘Indian’ stuff, such as playing Holi on the streets armed with a full band, singing on top of a terrace in the old part of the city, riding a black-and-yellow cab driven by a Sardarji, and hanging around in old forts dreaming about peacocks and Bollywood stars. It also featured pop icon Beyoncé wearing an Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla anarkali gown, a dupatta on her head, a mathapatti (jewelled headgear) and hennaed hands, and a short cameo by Sonam Kapoor playing a mysterious, dark-eyed village belle. Almost immediately, the backlash began. ‘Cultural appropriation,’ clamoured the critics, a buzzword in…

FINDING MY WAY Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and S Anand Juggernaut Rs 1,499 FINDING MY WAY can be seen as a memoir of a Gond visual artist, now in his mid-40s. But that is only one way of looking at this genre-defying book, written jointly by Venkat Shyam, the Gond artist, and S Anand, writer and founder of Navayana, a progressive publishing house focusing on caste and marginalised communities. The book can simultaneously be viewed as a history of Gond painting, an introduction to Gond culture, a subaltern narrative about contemporary India, a critique of modernity, and finally, a work of art itself. About one-square foot in size, Finding My Way has the look and feel of a coffeetable book because of its shape and appearance. Like many books of…

BENITHA PERCIYAL’S sunlit studio smells exactly like I thought it would; traces of incense waft through it, punctuating the lingering damp sea-scent of Chennai. A window at the back eloquently frames the tiled-roofed church and its adjoining conical pillars that are poised as a poetic backdrop to Perciyal’s spiritually inclined artistic practice. Escorted by her husband Prasanna Nagarajan, I’d stopped at each landing as I made my way up to the third floor, not to catch my breath but to appreciate every slight increase in vantage point that offered a better glimpse of the once grandiloquent cinema hall with its faded and chipped red borders and otherwise yellow palette. Sounds of frenetic outdoor activity resonated around us, reminding us of our location on the busy Parry’s Corner. Had I visited…

HAS INDIA FINALLY given up the ‘hesitations of history’ that marred its relationship with the US for so long? These hesitations were turned into the stuff of history many years earlier. What Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US signals is a degree of comfort and understanding that comes after the air has been cleared. India-US ties are famous for their frustrations and missed opportunities. In 1961, during a visit to the Taj Mahal, US Vice-President Lyndon Johnson let out a yell. Supposedly to test for an echo at the monument, it was more telling of his frustration with Indian leaders. Then came America’s famous ‘tilt’ towards Pakistan in 1971 that led nowhere. After a quarter century of stasis came the first moves towards rapprochement. In the 1990s and…

What makes Muhammad Ali great? Lennox Lewis only lost two fights in his career (Ali lost five) and retired as the champion (Ali didn’t). But who remembers Lewis? Ali’s greatness was in his ability to not just win, but negotiate defeat. To stand up if needed against an entire nation without hope of victory; in refusing to go to war for the US against Vietnam because he just couldn’t let White men dictate his destiny anymore; even willing to be exiled from boxing for it. But he returned. And he won, older now and against opponents younger, faster and stronger. Some boxers get destroyed by defeat, like Mike Tyson. Some, like Ali, find character and come back swinging. WORD’S WORTH “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognise,…

BARRING A SURPRISE of epic dimensions, the United States of America will see Hillary Clinton take on Donald Trump in the election for its 45th president. Having wracked my memory, I can think of no American presidential candidate who has inspired such broad, cross-party distaste as Hillary does. Except for Trump. The election will pit The Unloveable against The Despicable. It has been the custom in America in the last four presidential election cycles for Republicans and Democrats to despise each other’s candidates, but never their own. Remember the hatred for George W Bush among Democrats, which bordered on the unhinged; or the kooky reviling of Barack Obama by many Republicans? Even in his second run, however, Republicans stood by a wounded Dubya. Their adulation may have dimmed somewhat when…

ON 22 MARCH, Saiyad Faraz Ashraf took the Delhi Metro as usual from Malviya Nagar to his office in Gurgaon. He was worried, but apparently not enough. He had got married just two months earlier—his wife was still studying in Gorakhpur—and it was time he applied for a car loan and found a bigger apartment. But the preceding weeks at work had been rocky. CommonFloor, the realty portal where he was employed as a senior research analyst for the past two-and-a-half years, had just given in to a distress sale to Quikr. Over a hundred employees had already been told they had no place in the restructured organisation. But he was a top performer, he reasoned with himself. He would retain his job. He had to. When the email came…

“EVERY CHOICE I HAVE MADE IS BY VIRTUE OF MY EXPERIENCES AND WHAT STAGE I WAS IN AT THAT POINT OF TIME IN LIFE” Radhika Apte, actor IN A RECENTLY released online video called Find Your Beautiful, Radhika Apte looks at a picture of her sixyear-old self in a dance costume. ‘I often wonder what I would say to you if I met you today?’ she asks her younger self. Through the video she addresses a cross section of women asking them to love themselves and to find the beauty within. Her voice is personal, emphatic and she almost sounds like that one friend who never fails to perk you up on a bad day. It’s a clip that encapsulates Apte’s rollercoaster of a journey as a performer. From her…

THE LOVERS Rod Nordland Hodder & Stoughton 362 Pages | Rs 399 AFTER THE TALIBAN were finally vanquished, Afghanistan adopted a constitution written with the help of international scholars and the landmark EVAW (Elimination of Violence Against Women) law was enacted in 2009 by presidential decree. This law declared that ‘women should have equal rights with men, that a girl became a legal adult with full civil rights at age eighteen, that no girl could be married before the age of sixteen… and so forth’. An ideal law. But in a less than ideal society, it is a mixed blessing. Because while it gives women the courage to take their destinies into their own hands, there are no penalties for its violation, so its protection of women is largely illusory—as…