Innholdsfortegnelse for 08 May 2017 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Even after all these years, stories of violence and loss in Jammu & Kashmir still reek of trauma and injustice (‘Who Lost Kashmir?’, May 1st, 2017). It is terrible to see how human beings are hell-bent on destroying one of the Subcontinent’s most beautiful and picturesque regions, as well as one another. Who can win this war? More importantly, what can anyone gain from it? We have already ruined the lives and livelihoods of so many and shaken the confidence and future of the entire state. Can we really now blame the youth for fighting for the wrong cause? Can we call them ‘terrorists’ for throwing a few stones against a country that has more or less reduced them to images on a television screen?…

THERE WERE PLENTY of signs for quite a while that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), once the poster child of ‘clean’ politics in India, was in trouble. But when the results of the intensely contested municipal elections in Delhi came out on April 26th, ‘trouble’ was hardly an adequate description of what AAP was in. Delhi, don’t forget, is the party’s birthplace and backyard. Of the 270 seats up for grabs, the BJP walked away with a lion’s share, leaving AAP languishing a poor runner-up. The Congress finished third. Perhaps it is not fair to extrapolate the results of a civic election to an existential question about a political party. But view it—or wish it away—the way you like, the writing on the wall for it is clear. As an…

Delhi University’s decision to include Chetan Bhagat’s first novel, Five Point Someone, in its English Literature syllabus has kicked up a storm. The author, always up for a fight on social media, spent the week either battling criticism or being ‘honoured’ in having his work turn into course material. But what made even less sense than the curriculum inclusion was Twitter hounding Bhagat for it. Shouldn’t the target be DU and its idea of literature? Surely Bhagat is not to blame for a university’s choice. But then, he has also been accused of plagiarism for his latest novel, One Indian Girl, and perhaps his Twitter critics would find this a less frivolous matter to go after him for—if he is guilty of it, that is. It’s never easy to catch.…

THREE YEARS IS a short period in politics, but for BJP President Amit Shah, 52, it has been a long journey, literally, covering more than 500,000 km campaigning across the country, winning most elections and losing a few. Emerging from a meeting at his 11 Akbar Road residence with leaders of Himachal Pradesh and his home state Gujarat where elections are due, his face brightens up against his spotless white kurta as he dwells on the party’s prospects in states where it currently wields power and plans for states—accounting for 120-150 Lok Sabha seats—which it hopes to win for the first time. “People have great faith in Narendra Modi’s governance,” says the man who took over the reins of his party in 2014, referring to a change he has noted…

SOUTH INDIAN classical (Carnatic) music concerts are marked by a profusion of songs. A typical recital of, say, a musician like Sanjay Subrahmanyan or the late MS Subbulakshmi would involve about a dozen songs, sometimes more, sometimes less. In comparison, one can count on the fingers of one hand the number of compositions that feature in a Hindustani music concert by, say, the late Kishori Amonkar or Ulhas Kashalkar. A similarly small number of compositions might be performed in a Western Classical concert. Why are Carnatic concerts so reliant on precomposed songs? A significant part of the answer is, in a word, history. And 2017 is a good year to think about that history since it marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Tyagaraja (1767-1847), arguably the composer with…

NOTE TO MYSELF: Do not try to browse a book by TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan on the Centre’s relationship with the country’s Central Bank in a few moments to spare between critical tasks; you’ll get godsmacked, sucked in, and left agonising over the Reserve Bank of India’s freedom and what it implies to India’s success as an economy. First, the smack: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, said Voltaire.’ So begins Dialogue of the Deaf, and you’re reminded rightaway of Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth as Srinivasa- Raghavan drum-rolls the droll attributes of divinity that define the modern conception of a central bank: since it offers ‘succour to sinners as well as the sinned against’, it’s seen as a ‘saviour’, and, like all such, it’s…

ZELALDINUS: A MASQUE Irwin Allan Sealy Aleph 168 Pages | Rs 399 IF ONE HAS followed the career of Irwin Allan Sealy, one would take particular pleasure at this little detail. Each of Sealy’s texts invents an appellation for itself. If Trotternama (1988), his first, much acclaimed novel was a ‘chronicle’, in the manner of the ‘namas’ of the medieval past, the second one, Hero (1991) was a ‘fable’. From Yukon to Yucatan (1994) was a ‘journey’, the intriguing Everest Hotel (1998), a ‘calendar’, and my favourite, the odd and evocative, The Brainfever Bird (2003), ‘an illusion’. While Red (2006) was initially published without a specified provenance, it was later subtiled ‘an Alphabet’. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda (2014), a lyrical memoir around his house in Dehradun—re-invented as Dariya Dun…

MEMBERSHIP OF Parliament comes with some privileges, some of which are desirable and others less so. There are two that make you feel damn privileged. The first is the accommodation in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, a privilege that is to be cherished when Parliament is in session and when (as is the wont) you are summoned to meetings at very short notice. The quality of accommodation is variable, but living in the heart of Delhi spoils you silly. You are, in particular, spared the exasperation of having to sit for hours in the traffic jams that have become the norm ever since Delhi became much more than a bureaucratic hub. The second privilege I cherish is the right to special parking at Delhi Airport. There is a delightful feeling…

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF Vinod Khanna in hospital that got leaked and went viral has something heartbreaking about it. He looks weak and frail, unshaven and unkempt, and in his embrace of the people closest to him, you notice how his frame fails to even fill his hospital gown. It evokes a sadness that all pictures of men and women who have come to realise that they are in the final moments of their life do. But this image impacts us especially hard—because the individual is Vinod Khanna. His family tried to quell rumours of his poor health. But Khanna is now dead at the age of 70. A man who was so many things at so many points of his life—a villain, a hero, someone who chucked everything away to…

TOLSTOY FAMOUSLY WROTE in Anna Karenina, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Happy families are great fun to be part of or to be with, but they make for very boring stories. Sooraj Barjatya’s films are entertaining because of their songs and cuteness, but there is no salt to cut the sweetness. There is rarely a moment of dramatic tension in Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994), we have three hours where nothing much happens followed by a fall downstairs, which leads to a marriage being arranged although the couple had other plans. It could easily have been stopped with little upset to the family, but instead of this minor drama, Krishna directs Tuffy, the dog, to take a message to the groom…

FOR THE LONGEST time in modern Indian theatre, as it is seen today, there was a serious inexplicable vacuum when it came to finding stories of the real people behind significant events. First there was the age of great Sanskrit drama that gave Indian theatre a vast heritage of plays and playwrights to look up to. However, the tradition of written plays stopped after the eighth century and royal courts that patronized Sanskrit drama gradually switched to vernaculars. The Bhakti Movement that began in the Tamil-speaking regions of peninsular India, along with several other socio-cultural movements, aided in the growth and nurturing of local performance practices. Forms like Yakshagana, Kathakali, and Koodiyattam flourished in little pockets across south India. With the rise of local literatures in languages like Tamil, Kannada…

THOSE OF US who are fans of Sherlock Holmes often wonder how Arthur Conan Doyle dreamt up this nonpareil among detectives. To grasp a writer’s act of creation, we have to traverse the emotional and intellectual paths tread by that writer in a particular era. Sherlock was the fruit of a rather long and arduous struggle by Arthur, a child of an alcoholic father who was in and out of sanatoriums from the time Arthur turned ten, and a mother who was the mainstay of their home. Sherlock was also the product of Arthur’s experiences as a medical student under a brilliant and eccentric surgeon, Dr Joseph Bell, who provided the contours of the character’s mental makeup. In Arthur and Sherlock, Michael Sims gives us a layered and satisfying account…

In the Eye of an Award Storm Akshay Kumar says they can take his National Award back if they don’t think he deserves it. The 49-year-old star is aware that his critics have been questioning the jury’s decision to present him with Best Actor for his performance (if you want to call it that) in Rustom, and earlier this week when pesky journalists asked him for a reaction to the criticism, he responded with trademark calmness: “I’ve been working in the movies for over 25 years. If you think I don’t deserve it, you can take it back.” But Akshay also made it a point to add that he’s noticed “that every time whoever wins a National Award, a debate starts on who [deserves] to win the award.” Over the…

ONE OF THE legacies that the English handed down to us was the subject of ‘composition’ in school, beginning right from the primary level. In their education system, there was great stress on how to present the written word, a skill that has been gradually diluted after Independence, in part due to a lack of good teachers, in part the broadening of subjects taught, like the specialised sciences, where presentation is secondary, and, over the last decade, the incursion of technology that has changed language itself. Emoticons might use the symbols of English but it is a new language. The contents of Twitter, in its 140 character prison, would be unintelligible to an English speaker of a century ago. In the same manner as how French and English share a…

LET PURISTS FRET and pundits fume while politicians plot for all they are worth. I am convinced the worthy aspirations of the multitude will save us from being swept away by an avalanche of Hindi fanaticism. The ambitious young Indian is not a prisoner of geography. The world is his oyster. And the world isn’t Hindi-speaking. Indira Gandhi understood the score. I repeatedly come across contemporary versions of her story of the two knowledgeable Englishmen who were arguing whether tashri or rakabi was the right word for a small salver. Unable to decide, they asked their Hindi-speaking bearer. “Huzoor,” he replied, “hum toh isko ‘palate’ kehte hain. (Sir, we call this a plate).” Weaned on classical theories of nationhood, which regard linguistic unity as necessary for a country’s cohesion, Jawaharlal…

A HAILSTORM OF adjectives has accompanied journalist Prayaag Akbar’s debut novel in the wake of its release: ‘terrifying’, ‘haunting’, ‘grim’, ‘discombobulating’. So what could possibly be so unnerving about Leila, a slim, 224-page book about a woman searching for her young daughter? “I don’t think I was setting out to terrify people,” says Akbar, smiling, a day after the book’s Mumbai launch. “It wasn’t a horror story, that wasn’t my intention at all. I think I wanted to move people to really feel a sense of [the protagonist’s] loss. For me it was: how do I make that real for the reader?” Leila (Simon & Schuster; 224 pages; Rs 459 ) fashions an Indian city where the premium on purity has divided up denizens based on community; opportunities and facilities…