Innholdsfortegnelse for July 25, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to the cover story, ‘Inside the Justice Bazaar’ (18 July 2016). The people of the country put their faith in the hands of a venal judicial system, it seems, and as observed in the story, they are being let down. Middlemen are living a luxurious life and judges have assets disproportionate to their income. This buying and selling of verdicts affects the poor as they suffer without anyone to help them. In a country where the average rural resident is already a victim of poor sanitation facilities, failing infrastructure, inadequate schooling and a lack of employment opportunities, the least they deserve is justice, and law and order. While infrastructure can still be developed and is a work in progress, a basic thing like…

The Case of the Hello Kitty Limousine Did you hear the one about Rajinikanth and the‘hijacking’ of the Hello Kitty limousine in Malaysia? The story got some traction in Malay media in October last year, but was more or less overlooked by the Indian press. According to some reports, when the Tamil superstar landed in Kuala Lumpur to shoot Kabali, his security detail forcefully diverted a private limousine to ferry the actor to his hotel in Malacca, itself a considerable drive from the city. The stretch limo—which had Hello Kitty stickers plastered all over it—had been sent to receive a local supermodel from the airport, who was expected at a restaurant opening that evening. But eventually she had to take a taxi after waiting roughly three hours for the limo…

IN AN IDEAL world, death would not be certain and taxes would be either direct or indirect. Definitely, there would be no service tax, an arbitrary extortion tactic that the Indian Government hit upon many years ago and continues to deploy with abandon. However, we neither live in an ideal world nor an ideal country. This is the way things are, and should thus be the starting point for any meditation on the ‘fat tax’ imposed by Kerala’s new government in its maiden budget. Junk food—including pizza, burgers and donuts—sold in Kerala by branded restaurants would invite a 14.5 per cent tax, which is pretty hefty by any standard. The state’s finance minister says that the motive is not really to make money but to improve the food habits of…

THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC of Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister are the foreign trips he has racked up—16 in his first year, followed by another 10 in his second year in office. It seems he likes nothing better than jaw-jawing in foreign climes. For all the media hoo-ha, Modi’s tours are fetching diminishing returns, with each new foreign tour appearing less fresh, less substantive, but more wearisome. Consider Modi’s interactions with the US President: He has met Barack Obama seven times in all, four times in America, and twice on visits to Washington. But a few days before the supposed honour done Modi with the invitation to address the US Congress, the US Senate rejected recognising India as America’s ‘global strategic and defence partner’ and the White House did not…

Ten policemen stand guard with lathis in their hands outside the office of the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) in Dongri, Central Mumbai. The shutters of the establishment are shut. Located some distance from Hazrat Imam Chowk, this is the office of Dr Zakir Abdul Karim Naik, the controversial televangelist who is in the spotlight following the terror attack of 1 July at an upscale eatery in Dhaka. The cops have been told to keep tabs on who is going into and what is happening in this office. Since it has not opened from the time they took up vigil here more than a week ago, they have nothing to do but chat amongst themselves, speak on mobile phones or listen to music with headphones. Their presence does not even evoke…

IT SEEMED ODD that perched at an altitude at Kheerganga, nestled under a tent near the hot sulphur springs, with the feisty Parvati bellowing in the distance under the haloed light of a glistening, almost-full moon, I should dream of my neighbour, Rehaan Engineer, back home in Delhi. I’d spotted him walking through one of the bylanes of Kailash Hills, where we live, and when our eyes met and we recognised each other, he greeted me the way he always does, with a warm, bear-like hug, during which I rested my torso against his taut muscles. When I’d moved into the neighbourhood four years ago, a friend had informed me that the area was also the site of his residence. But I didn’t fathom then the degree of proximity between…

HALF LION: HOW PV NARASIMHA RAO TRANSFORMED INDIA Vinay Sitapati Penguin Viking 391 Pages | Rs 699 SONIA GANDHI’S cussedness is such that in the 25 years since PV Narasimha Rao changed India’s landscape by liberalising our economy, and the nearly dozen years since he died, there is scant literature on the five years he served as Prime Minister. That’s a shame, since those action-packed years were witness to the Babri Masjid’s demolition, the proliferation of banking scams, Punjab’s recovery, decrease in Kashmir’s militancy, and preparation for a nuclear test. Former Indian Express reporter Vinay Sitapati threads all this into Half Lion: How PV Narasimha Rao Transformed India, a welcome entry to Indian political biographies. In popular imagination, Rao is known for what he didn’t do. He did not protect…

FIRST HAND: GRAPHIC NON FICTION FROM INDIA Editors: Orijit Sen and Vidyun Sabhaney Yoda Press 386 Pages | Rs 595 IN THE STARKLY drawn Ellipsis, Ikroop Sandhu recounts the legend of her great grandmother, who died one morning in her village in Punjab and then came back to life. She told the story of her journey to the ‘other side’ to her family. “The jallads had come for me and they seemed to hate me and my death... They pulled me by my hair... thorns shred my clothes and broke my skin.” But it turned out the jallads had made a mistake. “You were meant to bring Sachwant Kaur,” they were told. “They kicked me and I tumbled through the tunnel and came back here.” Stories like these are the…

LAST WEEK, I received a frantic call from a lady telling me that her frail 70-year-old mother (who I was treating for diabetes) tripped on a rug next to the bed and was unable to get up. She was taken to the nearest hospital. The next morning, I got a call confirming my worst fear: she had fractured her hip bone. The daughter was told her mother had osteoporosis and required surgery. The fall, she said, was not really on a hard floor, and not from a height; so why did her bone break? This is what happens in osteoporosis, which means ‘porous bones’—sieve-like bones that break with minimal injury. Typically, it does not pain till a bone breaks. Our skeleton provides a frame for our body and protection for…

IT HAS BEEN a while since the Supreme Court began adjudicating in what are commonly understood as political matters. Politics in Indian states, even at the best of times, is volatile and its froth often leads to legislative disputes. Earlier this year, the court prescribed a detailed process by which a floor test for a majority was to be conducted in the Uttarakhand Assembly. That was the second time the court had taken such a decision. Even by those standards, the apex court’s orderof 13 July to revive a dismissed state government is unprecedented. In a 329-page judgment, five judges provided a detailed rationale for taking the step of restoring the Nabam Tuki government in Arunachal Pradesh, which had been dismissed under Article 356 of the Constitution on 26 January.…

Supreme Court judges of the US never retire. Owners of companies rarely let go in their sixties, but their executives have that ceiling. Politicians belong to that privileged class of people who have no retirement age, and so it would seem somewhat tragic for Najma Heptullah to have had to resign reportedly because she had crossed 75 years, the Modi regime’s unofficial cut-off for ministers. Retirement is going out of vogue in the West because their population is ageing. A country full of young people like India has no such concerns. The only people who are safe are those who are considered indispensable. You can take a safe bet that 10 years down the line, when Modi turns 75, if he is still Prime Minister, there won’t be any retirement…

The politics of language is built on evasion and conceit. It looks at truth and retreats to convenient semantics. It seeks the poetics of suffering even while the realism of fear and terror overwhelms the day. It comforts only the conscience of those who refuse to break out of the inherited truisms of the correct argument. Language shields a soothing lie. It is the politics of language that makes the passage of radical Islam smoother, whether it is in Kashmir or elsewhere in the world. Take Kashmir. How calming a moral experience it is when we return to the snow mountain, to alienation and resistance in paradise. Or, when we can join the homegrown intifada and throw stones, even if metaphorically, at the ‘occupying forces’. Or, when we can divide…

A missing person’s complaint is usually made at a police station. But this one went directly to the Chief Minister of Kerala. And not one, but 21 people were reported missing, all Muslims: 17 from Kasargod district, four from Palakkad. They all knew each other, were financially sound and well-educated. Family members add all were extremely religious, almost too much for their comfort, and wanted to follow the Qur’an in its literal sense. They had often gone on mysterious outstation trips lasting weeks or months but had remained in touch with their families. This time the frequency of messages came down and finally stopped. The families of 15 missing from Kasargod contacted one another and found the messages received to be similar. Some hinted that they had reached ‘Daulathul Islamia’…

FOLLOWING TIPU’S DEATH, one of his munshis wrote for the British a short account of the late ruler’s court. In it, he provided a brief description of Tipu’s appearance: He was middle sized, of a tawny complexion, smooth open eyebrows, a broad ample forehead, dark grey eyes, a high nose, long neck, broad chest, slender waist, spindle legs, short mustachios, with his lower beard shaven. Other commentators referred to his tendency to plumpness. A well-known contemporary portrait of Tipu (on the cover of this book), by an Indian artist and now in the collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, conforms to such a description. Seated in profile on a red masnad, Tipu is very much a king. He wears a green turban with a ruby and pearl sarpech, a…

HANDS: WHAT WE DO WITH THEM—AND WHY Darian Leader Penguin 128 Pages | Rs 490 (Kindle) IT WAS THE title that first caught my attention. It was so obvious that it seemed laughable, but then it also piqued interest. Darian Leader, British psychoanalyst, author and frequent contributor to The Guardian, has a knack for the click-baity book title, his previous ones being Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, Promises Lovers Make When it Gets Late and What is Madness? It is often the most obvious questions that spur interesting answers. This book is proof of that. I have always been intrigued by hands, the construction and movement of them, the lines that run through and the lines that vanish. Hands make for fascinating photos and art. Not…

THERE IS nothing like a caged animal to evoke sympathy. Or it could evoke the very opposite feeling, that of cruel dominance and pitiful loathing. If the two did not occur alternatingly in the human species, sometimes even together in one being, there could not have been the mad adrenaline of Roman amphitheatres with animals being confined and killed for sport. If the latter emotion were absent in the human species, I would have missed the horror of seeing a pink-shirted young lout stubbing a cigarette out into the dreamy eyes of a silver pheasant through the bars at Delhi Zoo. This was many aeons ago, but not long enough for me to have forgotten either the colour of his shirt or the incredible horror I felt in being witness…