Innholdsfortegnelse for October 31, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK When one thinks of the US President, one thinks of Kennedy and Bush and Reagan. Trump (‘The Ugly American’ by Tunku Varadarajan, 24 October 2016) will never be able to represent the nation at home or abroad. Already his campaign has been riddled with scandals. Worse, his reaction to everything is to point fingers back. At least Hillary Clinton accepts allegations with poise, cool and dignity. The leader of a nation must be able to maintain calm in times of crisis. Trump’s scandals prove that he has no respect for women, humanity and immigrants. These are dangerous traits for a leader to possess. He is obsessed with himself and has started to look like a joke now. The sad part is that he doesn’t seem…

The mind of Prithvi Maske, who heads the NGO that filed a police case against the film festival MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) which was to screen a 1959 Pakistani movie, believes that India is at war with Pakistan. He is wrong. War is what is happening in Mosul, as tanks roll down to ensiege a city bombarded a thousand times from air and a million civilians are held as human shields by fundamentalists who will blow everyone to bits, including themselves. That is war. In Maske’s war, the greatest act of valour is to ambush a police station with a petition followed by a press release and then bask in the glory of victory on unexpectedly finding that MAMI has pulled that movie out. He now waits for…

Here’s a contrafactual: Say, the terrorist attack on the Army camp in Uri hadn’t happened, and the much-trumpeted Indian ‘surgical strike’ in retaliation hadn’t materialised, the Eighth Summit in Goa of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group, far from pivoting centrally on the issue of ‘terrorism’ in South Asia, would have debated measures to increase intra-BRICS trade to inure these states against market-induced swings on Wall Street and in London. And discussed ways and means of this group emerging as a forceful political and economic bloc to balance the power of the United States and Western Europe, and to stabilise the international system careening off in different directions. The desire to rise as a geopolitical power house was the impulse behind the formation of BRICS in the…

Arif Mohammad Khan was just 35 when he resigned from the Rajiv Gandhi Cabinet in 1986, lashing out at the Congress Government for yielding to Muslim clergy and for failing to protect the right of Muslim women to maintenance following a divorce. Khan had delivered a passionate speech less than a year earlier, defending a Supreme Court judgment awarding alimony to Shah Bano, a mother of five children, from her former husband. He wrote his resignation letter in the Lok Sabha when then Law Minister Ashoke Sen introduced a bill to reverse the court verdict. Khan, still a champion of progressive Muslim thought 30 years later, speaks to Executive Editor ULLEKH NP on a range of issues, including the ongoing tussle over triple talaq, polygamy, Muslim insecurity and Constitutional propriety.…

Reading JM Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus (Penguin Random House; Rs699; 272 pages) can best be likened to visiting your favourite bistro after a hiatus. To your horror, you discover the chef has removed from the menu those succulent pieces of chicken you’d sink your teeth into. Gone is the comfort of your medium-rare steak. In its place, you’re given an all-vegan fare—leafy, bland, forgettable. Coetzee’s own eating habits befit the analogy. His vegetarianism makes him a veritable activist. “I find the thought of stuffing fragments of corpses down my throat quite repulsive, and I am amazed that so many people do it every day,” he had said. But man’s capacity for this unthinking cruelty is what had once made his writing so meaty. Schooldays isn’t just marked by its…

In the days when we were a little carefree and with greater time on our hands, my friend Arun Jaitley and I, not to mention other friends, used to meet up in London during the summer holidays. Both of us liked London in our own way; he because it was a familiar comfort zone and me because it was the city I had spent the best years of my youth. Yet, there was a point of sharp disagreement: on the question of food. Arun had a few familiar restaurants he loved dining in. These included the Bombay Brasserie on Gloucester Road, Veeraswamy’s on Regent Street, Gaylord on Mortimer Street and the top floor cafeteria of Selfridges. It is not that I dislike any of them. The Bombay Brasserie remains an…

BY ALL ACC OUNTS the visit of Aung San Suu Kyi to New Delhi has gone off well. The effusive photo-ops and the formal meetings between Myanmar’s best known leader and her Indian counterparts point in that direction. But behind these events that are meant to convey positive tidings, lurk deeper currents. As with most other neighbouring countries, Myanmar, too, is engaging in its own variant of a ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy. The ‘neutrality’ is not between two power blocs, as in the classic variant practised during the 1950s, but between two rising powers, India and China. There is ample evidence of this in Myanmar’s outreach to the two countries. During its period of isolation, when it was shunned by Western countries, Myanmar’s traditional benefactor was China which supplied the beleaguered…

Rumours exist in the vacuum left by an absence of credible information. If a chief minister of a state vanishes from the public eye for over a month, hearsay will gain force. Should the police then arrest all those who they suspect of rumourmongering? The easiest solution to dispel the rumours over Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa’s illness would be to come out with the truth along with evidence. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. Instead, there have been over 50 cases files and seven people arrested. This paranoia is reminiscent of totalitarian societies. WORD’S WORTH “I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about, I have even heard on good authority that I was dead.” Mark Twain…

The news that the United Nations Security Council has elected the world body’s ninth Secretary-General, the former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres, has put an end to the mounting anxiety around the globe about the risks of a protracted standoff. The Council’s first four ballots had produced something of a stalemate, with all the dozen candidates in the fray attracting a number of negative votes, and it had been feared that the two negative votes that Guterres carried in the fourth ballot were those of permanent members opposed to his election. On the fifth ballot, however, this turned out not to be the case, and a general sigh of relief could be heard around Turtle Bay as consensus was announced on his name. As the candidate who came second last…

A pilot study found 56.7 per cent of Indians display orthorexic symptoms with 70 per cent of them being females under 25 Everyone knew that when they invited Sujata Verma (name changed) home for dinner, they had to be extra careful with the menu. Vegetables had to be organic and seasonal. They had to be washed in an ozone vegetable cleaner and cut using knives that had been sterilised in boiling mineral water. There could be no fat, gluten, lactose, fructose, soy or sugar in the food. She insisted on only organic Himalayan rock salt on the table. There could be no cheating. Verma would make sure she was in the kitchen while the food was being prepared. Close friends and family tolerated this obsession with eating healthy. Her mother…

PAUL BEATTY The Sellout l Pan Macmillan Rs 399 I Pages 289 ‘FOUNDED IN 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the Chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community.’ The plot of The Sellout is propelled by the mysterious disappearance of Dickens from the map. The narrator speaks in a voice that is as LOL as an Ogden Nash verse, and as dark as the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Readers will find themselves taken on a roller coaster ride that is as twisted as it is exhilarating. It is little surprise that Beatty started out as poet as the meter of his lines would easily lend themselves to…

THE ASSASSINAT ION OF RAJIV GANDHI Neena Gopal Viking 273 Pages | Rs 499 The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 was as shocking as that of another young leader, John F Kennedy, in 1963. There were differences in the two cases—of method as well as the nature of the conspiracy. In the case of Rajiv, a well-laid conspiracy leading back to the embittered chief of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, V Prabhakaran, is well established. In Kennedy’s case, Lee Harvey Oswald’s motives remain fuzzy and we do not know even today whether he acted alone or was part of a wider conspiracy. The result is that we periodically revisit the Kennedy assassination with new theories and angles. As for Rajiv, the basic story is fairly clear, but newer…

Unfriended The once-envied friendship between Karan Johar and Kajol appears to have soured beyond repair. The filmmaker and the actress famously fell out after her husband Ajay Devgn got into an ugly war of words with Karan, and the actress refused to apologise on behalf of Ajay. Recently, in the weeks since it became clear that Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Shivaay would clash during the Diwali release week, the actress explicitly made it known that her loyalties lie with her husband, going out of her way to tweet supportive messages for Ajay while he was involved in an open takedown of Karan in the media. Earlier this week, thanking his ‘mentor’ Aditya Chopra and his ‘friend’ Shah Rukh Khan for “making my dream come true” while celebrating the 18th…

Ideology has a habit of dying prematurely and returning from the ruins to haunt us. Daniel Bell said it first, before death-watching became an academic pursuit. It has been more than half a century since he wrote, in The End of Ideology, that ‘a total ideology is an all inclusive system of comprehensive reality, it is a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seeks to transform the whole of a way of life. This commitment to ideology—the yearning for a cause, or the satisfaction of deep moral feelings— is not necessarily the reflection of interests in the shape of ideas. Ideology, in this sense, and in the sense that we use it here, is a secular religion’. In the 50s of the West, he saw the exhaustion of Utopia;…

That first thing that goes once a person enters politics is the moral sheen, and while we must hope that this fate does not befall Irom Sharmila, history rules that it is almost inevitable. Consider Arvind Kejriwal, who no one calls corrupt even now, but he is not really the role model a million mothers want for their sons either, just of a constituency that he cultivates to remain in power. Politics is dirty business, but unfortunately also the only one there is for substantial change. Irom Sharmila, who on 18 October floated her political party Peoples Resurgence and Justice Alliance or PRJA, could be poised for great things in Manipur, an embattled state for too long. She has recognition, an essential necessity for public life. She has a cause…

THIS SERIES IS called’A Gnostic’s Diary’. So far, I haven’t sought to explain the expression. I constantly meet people who proudly proclaim, "I am an agnostic." Or, "I am an atheist." People have a right to their beliefs. But I wish they would explain what they mean. In both words, ‘a’ is a negative. Therefore, you cannot tell me you are agnostic until you explain the ‘gnostic’ you are negating. You cannot tell me you are atheist until you explain the ‘theisf you are negating. The word agnostic is derived from the Greek: a + gnosis. Gnosis means knowledge. Gnosis is cognate with the word (jnana), also meaning knowledge. Agnostic will be ara^r, ignorant. Is an agnostic saying, ‘I wish to remain ignorant’? Or (a) ‘I don’t know.’ (b) ‘I…

GLUTEN FREE Cutting gluten out of your diet when you’re not allergic or intolerant to it will not make you any fitter or healthier. Gluten is an important protein and especially crucial for vegetarians SUGAR FREE Most sugar-free products available add artificial sweeteners and chemicals to make them tastier, making them equally harmful to your health. The key to managing sugar is moderation FAT FREE Fat is essential for the brain and muscles. Fat-free doesn’t mean sugar-free and companies do add large amounts of salt and sugar to compensate for the lack of ‘mouthfeel’ delivered by fat FRUCTOSE FREE This is one of the most unnecessary fads to fall for because fructose basically means fruit and while people are allergic to certain types of fruits, it’s not the fructose that…

HARIVAMSHA translated by Bibek Debroy Penguin 443 Pages | Rs 599 It is with the pleasure of fore-knowledge and a sense of familiarity that we come to the Harivamsha in Bibek Debroy’s new translation, a grand finale to his admirable effort as a translator of the complete Mahabharata. In the Harivamsha, we encounter beloved stories and characters—Putana’s death, the lifting of Mount Govardhana, the dance on Kaliya’s head. We feel Devaki’s pain and Vasudeva’s fear, Yashodha’s love for and exasperation with her naughty boy child, Balarama’s solid presence, the bewildered enchantment of the gopis and Krishna’s own knowing playfulness. Knowing the stories or the text should not prevent us from reading this book. In fact, it should give us the reason to read it and enjoy the stories anew. The…