Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/5/2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK There is no doubt that demonetisation is the boldest step taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi (‘Freedom At Midnight’, November 28th, 2016). The move may not convert our economy into a cashless one completely, but this will surely change people’s attitudes towards going digital, employing mobile banking and using plastic money. Eradicating black money, fake currency and terror funding were the three top-most objectives of this move. Now that the Prime Minister himself has asked for transparency in political funding, which no party or leader has ever done before, he should set the right example by disclosing all sources of the BJP’s monetary reserves, as we all know political cash bags remain the biggest place where hoards of black money are kept. I am sure…

Controve rsy and Nalanda University never seem apart. This is unfortunate for the fledgling university that was supposed to provide a modern link to an ancient institution. An order dating November 21st from the Ministry of External Affairs states that the university’s governing board has been reconstituted. Among the prominent academics to be dropped from the reconstituted board include Amartya Sen, Sugata Bose and Meghnad Desai. For critics of the Modi Government, this is confirmation that illiberalism is rife in India. In reality, things are not so black and white. Some of the problems at Nalanda University in Bihar aren’t ‘political’ in the sense that critics imply. Take the example of its outgoing vice-chancellor. Under the statutes of the University, a shortlist of three names is to be sent to…

In an apostolic letter, Pope Francis said that he was permanently extending to all priests the power to give confessional forgiveness to women who had gone in for abortion. This is reform in the context of the Catholic Church but came with his reaffirmation that abortion is still a grave sin. The idea that a woman going in for an abortion is automatically a sinner until absolved is somewhat jarring. To believe that life in its fullness begins at conception is only possible if a third party called God was behind it. Otherwise, life begins at birth, with organs and consciousness now developed and the baby a sentient being, an individual. Until then, it is a foetus, potential life and tissue, whose ownership is entirely the woman’s own. How can…

We need to dispose of some preliminaries first. ‘Demonetisation’ means that some kind of currency unit loses its status as legal tender. This is different from a currency being withdrawn from circulation. A currency unit may be withdrawn from circulation, but can continue to remain legal tender. In America, Section 102 of the US Coinage Act of 1965 is a guarantee against any future demonetisation. ‘All coins and currencies of the United States (including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banking associations), regardless of when coined or issued, shall be legal tender for all debts, public and private, public charges, taxes, duties, and dues.’ It is important to make this point, since there are misinformed reports that the US ‘demonetised’ high-denomination notes in 1969.…

THE INDIAN MEDIA and commentators, both in the press and on TV, were ‘surprised’ that Trump won. In this matter, they were one with the New York Times, Washington Post , CNN, Huffington Post, The Economist and dozens of you-name-its in the West. This is in keeping with a long tradition where our knowledge of the West is derived from official and/or mainstream sources within the Western establishment. We do not bother to develop an independent point of view. What is even more troubling is that our knowledge of other societies too derives from Western academia and media. Consider, for example, our knowledge of China or Japan or Indonesia—almost always based on Western scholarship. Of course, some would say that even our knowledge of India is largely derived from Western…

A STORY ABOUT MARICO Ltd in the recently published book The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea gives an insight into the mind of its founder Harsh Mariwala. In the late 90s, Mariwala had steered the company from an oil manufacturer into a multi-brand FMCG player, but Parachute, its brand of coconut oil, still remained at the core of his business. It was the leader in its category with 55 per cent market share. Hindustan Lever Ltd, the biggest of the FMCG behemoths, then suddenly decided that it wanted to capture this market. The multinational had successfully done something similar in the oral care category, with its toothpaste Pepsodent taking away substantial market share from Colgate. In 1998, HUL (Hindustan Lever Ltd later became Hindustan Unilever Ltd) relaunched its coconut oil…

Two’s Company All the stars—well, all the important ones at least—headed to Mannat on November 19th for an impromptu party hosted by Shah Rukh Khan after the Global Citizen Festival that evening. Coldplay’s Chris Martin was the star attraction, not surprisingly, and according to eyewitnesses, Deepika Padukone had his undivided attention pretty much the entire evening. The Bajirao Mastani star, who didn’t show up for the concert earlier, was rapt in conversation with the Coldplay frontman, much to the irritation of other actors who reportedly circled the duo numerous times, hoping to catch Martin’s eye and request a selfie or somehow join the conversation. “The other actresses looked particularly irritated,” a source tells me. “Deepika didn’t budge for over three hours. Not even for a loo break.” At one point,…

P ost-truth? I thought we should be talking about post-politics. At a time when the ruins of politics-as-we-know accumulate in the holy lands of democracy, definitions need a reappraisal. Maybe politics died the moment its oldest cliché was given a fresh lease of life by the insurgents who came from the grey zones of discontent— and ‘change’ looked ominous. Maybe it died when the professional politician, cosier in his inherited certainties, became the least trusted item in the market. In the late 60s, Karl Hess, an American commentator, wrote: ‘Power and authority, as substitute for performance and rational thought, are the spectres that haunt the world today. They are the ghosts of awed and superstitious yesterdays.’ His obituary of politics appeared when Western liberal democracy was pitted against Soviet…

THE TERM ‘CLASSICAL music’ can be a misleading label. Along with artistic sophistication and enduring appeal, it suggests an elitist aesthetic accessible only to a few. Mangalampalli Balamuralikrishna’s music was the opposite of elitism. Few Carnatic musicians have ever managed to kindle public ardour as he did in his long and controversial career—so much so that critics were mindful of the implications of a negative review. A deep voice that could span three octaves and skip assuredly from one note to another many tonal intervals away was just one of the reasons for his meteoric rise. His rigour with sahitya (lyric), especially that of Tyagaraja, and diction did not just endear him to senior musicians, it also imbued his renditions with bhava (emotion), making him the darling of devotionally inclined…

NOT FOR NOTHING is the Central Hall of Parliament also called the nation’s hall of gossips. Here, MPs, past and present, mingle freely over steaming cups of coffee and sumptuous meals—highly subsidised by taxpayers. The bitterness and acrimony witnessed in the House dissipates once you are in the Central Hall. Another constant is an array of journalists. A majority of them scavenge for morsels of news or insider information while a few others deign to offer gratuitous advice to favourite politicians. It is in the Central Hall too that superseded politicians discover kindred spirits in out-of-work journalists. During the life of this and the previous two UPA Parliaments, a certain pattern has manifested itself. A frisson of excitement invariably runs through the Central Hall the moment BJP leader Arun Jaitley…

IT WAS A warm July night and the year was 2010. A young aspiring actor waited for a car outside a brightly lit masjid in Bandra. She looked around nervously, knotting the end of her dupatta. Her mind was racing with a thousand questions. “Hey Divya, hop in,” she heard a voice beam out of a silver SUV. Vidya Balan was driving from her home in Bandra to her doctor’s clinic in Chembur and she’d promised to meet with this young girl on the way. She spent the next 45 minutes convincing the girl of how she must pursue her dream of becoming an actor.“Go for it,” Vidya said. “There are too many people who will tell you that you can’t do it. There will be too many times you…

IN THE FOREWORD to an aide’s book on presidential decisionmaking, John F Kennedy wrote: ‘The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself.’ Yet even if the process of decision-making was obscure, it was necessary and unavoidable: ‘We cannot escape choice.’ Coming from a man who held the future of the world in his palm during the Cuban Missile Crisis, these words are worth pondering. But they call for an attitude that few decision-makers have been able to cultivate: an acceptance of the limits of all knowledge, including self-knowledge. Indeed, few leaders in our times have displayed the temperament and ability to reflect deeply on the choices open to them: on the range and limits of action as well as their foreseeable and unforeseeable…

A poll by C-Voter for Huffington Post and Businessworld shows demonetisation having overwhelming support—93 percent thought it a good step and 66 percent even found it well implemented—in both rural and urban areas. Polls are tricky as we know after the American elections. But asking a thousand people selected through statistically objective criteria is still better that swinging whichever way our bias takes us, whether pro- or anti-Government. There is clear agony from demonetisation, evident from relentless queues outside banks even now, but to consider this apocalyptic is an optical illusion. The queues are not made up of the same people every day. The suffering lasts the hours they stand and ends with the withdrawn cash, not to return for many days. It is thus in keeping with the perception…

INDIA HAS BEEN on my mind after spending two weeks in Brazil, which I visited for the first time as co-investigator on an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK) Network Grant, ‘Cinema, soft power and the BRICS’, based in the University of Leeds, with colleagues who research Brazilian, Chinese, Russian and South African cinema. Our conference in Sào Paulo attracted a substantial audience and we spoke about the different BRICS countries and the way they use—or don’t—cinema to represent and brand them. The BRICS group is not a culturally coherent unit but is an interesting way of thinking about cultural interactions between countries without going through Europe or America. The cultural interchanges vary wildly too. While Indian cinema has been watched in the other four BRICS countries, with Mithun…

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT GOLF: Kevin Costner has a couple of Academy Awards, three Golden Globes and an Emmy, too, but he is still not the guy you would go to if you were looking for famous people who play golf. But he played Roy ‘Tin Cup’ McAvoy, in the iconic film, who famously mouthed the lines: “You know, someone once said that golf and sex are the only two things you don’t have to be good at to enjoy.” It is never too late to pick up the game, and enjoy it, too. Who cares if you are not good at it. One great shot and your day is made. The same Costner-as-McAvoy also said, “Such a pure feeling is the well-struck golf shot.” It might take…

IT HAS BEEN an exhausting day for filmmaker Gauri Shinde. She is juggling interviews, post production and incessant phone calls for her upcoming film Dear Zindagi. “It is easier making a film than promoting it,” she says with a sigh before settling down in her Khar office. “Thankfully, I have a cast who is enthusiastically promoting the film and I don’t have to do it on most days.” I ask her if perhaps this is one of the reasons why she took almost four years to come up with her second film, and she laughs out loud. “You have answered your own question. But jokes apart, this wasn’t the reason. In fact, English Vinglish doing well was reason enough for me to believe that I am capable of making my…

‘THE STRANGENESS of India brought to mind that other strangeness; my own country,’ wrote Octavio Paz when he was posted in New Delhi as the Mexican ambassador to India in the 60s. Strangely, the strangeness of Mexico, when I was there last month, brought me back to the original strangeness; that of India. I was there the week the nation was celebrating the Day of the Dead. In the highlands of Jalpan, in the reverberations of Mexico City and in the quietude of Huatulco, I found that strangeness. Something quite different, and yet, the similarity, striking. Blue skulls stared at me with toothy grins, children screamed through water fountains lit with rainbow lights, and a street artist with a Mohawk did up the face of any passing tourist in ghoulish…