Innholdsfortegnelse for 02 April 2018 i Open Magazine

WE TEND TO be distracted by the wrong metaphors when a new Cold War is upon us. In the cathedral city of Salisbury in southern England, a former Russian spy and his daughter have been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent. Before the sidewalk operation featuring Soviet-vintage Novichok, it was the more discreet, and deadlier, polonium that was used to kill another traitor. Both were set pieces from a standard issue spy thriller. They are pure retro-horror, and a reminder that somewhere in this world, hardly united by the wreckage of the Berlin Wall, the long arm of the Evil Emperor won’t miss the stray dogs of the revolution. Salisbury and other such savageries score in the drama quotient test, but what ‘weaponises’ (a Steve Bannon patent) the war for…

Tracy Chapman once sang, ‘Sorry... years gone by and still / Words don’t come easily/ Like sorry, sorry.’ It seems Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal may have been a fan of the American singer. He has been shooting off apology letters by the shovels full to a clutch of people he once publicly derided as corrupt and venal. From Bikram Singh Majithia to Kapil Sibal’s son Amit, to… well, you name him, he had gone on the offensive only to find himself slammed with heavy defamation law suits. But the star of the AAP chief’s apology show, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, is proving to be his real nightmare. Jaitley had filed two cases against Kejriwal, seeking compensation of Rs 20 crore. Desperate feelers on an out-of-court settlement have not brought…

Some politicians are serial sex offenders. They get caught with their pants down, over and over. Sometimes the act is consensual. Sometimes, it’s consensual for a fee. And they cannot always talk their way out of the mess. A renowned legal eagle and Congressman recently went to meet a client at a five-star hotel in Lutyens’ Delhi. They had a good chat, made a good deal. As the client was leaving, the man in question leaned towards him and quietly suggested he arrange for ‘some company’. The client, clearly accustomed to such requests, stepped out. Soon enough, the ‘company’ herself appeared in the politician’s room. A few hours later, when the lady asked to be paid, the man directed her to the client who’d arranged it. At this, the companion…

WHILE PUBLIC SECTOR BANKS APPEAR HIGHLY SCANDAL PRONE, THERE HAVE BEEN ENOUGH SCAMS INVOLVING THEIR PRIVATE COUNTERPARTS THE INDIAN BANKING system has been in the news for the wrong reasons lately. A certain diamond merchant, who shares the same surname as the Prime Minister, has quietly fled the country after being accused of defrauding the Punjab National Bank of Rs 11,700 crore. Add this to the amount of Rs 8,500 crore owed by another flamboyant businessman now in exile, and you get almost two-thirds of the total government health budget. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Indian banking system is saddled with non-performing assets (NPAs), which is a polite term to describe loans that are never going to be repaid because they are to a large…

AT ITS MOST primitive, the idea of pooling the risk of bodily harm borne by individuals goes a long way back, perhaps all the way back to early man’s first grunt issued in warning of a wild beast that drew a ring of weapons out in group defence. Trial-and- error is probably all it took to make safety in numbers apparent. The very origin of language, the great leap that’s reckoned to have expanded the human brain about 300 millennia ago, is traced by some anthropologists to the exigencies of pack survival. Synaptic sizzles set off by twists of the tongue marked an inflexion point in evolution. For the next significant shield against danger, though, mankind had to await the invention of the zero—and the mathematical conquest of risk. Going…

IN 1957, WHEN Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka reinvented the radio by creating a pocket-sized version, little did they realise that they were starting a revolution in personal entertainment that would carry on unabated 60 years hence. Their company, which came to be known as Sony, continued to innovate along those lines by giving us the Walkman, the Disc-man and also the world’s first fully transistorised Trinitron TV set. While Sony did not invent any of these technologies, it was highly successful in packaging them in a form that consumers never imagined they needed. Other than a live theatre experience, every other form of entertainment can now be personalised. What developed over centuries as a community experience is being redeveloped today as a bespoke engagement of every individual. How Indians…

THIS BOOK ON the Afghan war and related subjects by Steve Coll is, by and large, a sequel to his earlier one, Ghost Wars. Coll mentions in his Introduction that at the time when Ghost Wars was published in 2004, Afghanistan and Pakistan seemed to be stable and relatively peaceful. However, over the next few years, the Taliban and Al Qaeda revived. Why did the seemingly successful lightning-strike American-led war of late 2001 fail to vanquish the Taliban and Al Qaeda for good? That is the question that Directorate S addresses. There were many reasons, Coll concludes, but Directorate S of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of the Pakistan Armed Forces was a primary one. The success of the Pakistani deep state in resisting and defeating every initiative to resolve the…

THE TROUBLE WITH biographies, particularly fictionalised ones, is their authenticity. At a time when every character, from Aurangzeb to Shivaji, are viewed more through boxed ideological windows than open facts, a new translation adds more questions than delivers answers. All through its 574 pages—most of them gripping, endearing and inspired, a few tedious—Shivaji: The Great Maratha gives the impression that it’s a biography, a history. But even though the detailing shows the work of a historian or a journalist, the book is classified under ‘fiction’. Respect to Ranjit Desai for impeccable research, and a literary debt to Vikrant Pande for translating a work that offers us a platform with which to situate this great hero, Shivaji Bhosale. But what do we take back as truth and what as story? I…

The Prospect of a New Beginning It was through a social media post by Janhvi Kapoor on March 19th that we learnt Madhuri Dixit will replace Sridevi in 2 States director Abhishek Varman’s next film. The film is reportedly a three-generational love story set during Partition, and Karan Johar, the film’s producer, had been ecstatic when Sridevi agreed to star in the film opposite Sanjay Dutt in one of its three romantic tracks. It would’ve been like coming full circle, given that they had last worked together in Gumrah, which Karan’s father Yash Johar produced some 25 years ago. But Sridevi’s untimely passing recently required the filmmakers to find a suitable replacement, and their search has ended with Madhuri, who has agreed. The big question now is whether the casting…

My friends from the West have never been able to understand the deep ambivalence of India towards Russia, or, to be more specific, Vladimir Putin—the strongman who has just won another resounding electoral victory. The wave of Russo-phobia that has gripped Europe— particularly the United Kingdom after the poisoning of a former Russian defector and his daughter in Salisbury—has meant that everything remotely associated with that country is now thought to be suspect. The hatred is particularly intense when it comes to Putin. He is perceived to be a complete thug, lacking all scruples, who will do just about anything to get his way. The Russian president is accused of undertaking a systematic campaign to destabilise the European Union, trying to influence the course of political life, manipulating elections, sending…

BACK IN 1989, The Economic Times decided to write a series on Rajiv Gandhi’s five years since 1984. The late Gopi Arora, principal secretary to the Prime Minister, gave a good suggestion: “Analyse what Rajiv has done, rather than what all he has not done.” Arora was a learned man and the Shakespeare in this was clear, namely, ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’ So that is how the series was structured—because the list of things that prime ministers must do in a democracy is impossibly long; the list of what they manage to do is correspondingly short. Jawaharlal Nehru recognised this best with his Robert Frost quote about miles to go before he slept. This doesn’t mean the focus…

SOON AFTER giving up his Indian cricket team captaincy in September 2007, Rahul Dravid gave an interview to the news agency PTI. The name of the journalist who interviewed him was Sutram Suresh. This month, both of them hit the news again, but in a somewhat different context. Dravid had lost crores in a Ponzi scheme and the man who introduced him to it was Suresh who had left journalism to be an LIC agent. The main man behind the scam, one Raghavendra Srinath, had appointed a number of LIC agents as the second rung to bring investments into his scheme. Dravid wasn’t the only sportsman to find his money disappear. Saina Nehwal and Prakash Padukone were also victims. As The Indian Express reported of Dravid’s police complaint: ‘The former…

IMAGINE A TOOL that enables the equitable distribution of subsidies to all who need it, while at the same time being armoured against fraud. Imagine a tool that enables financial inclusion for all, while being armoured against attempts at tax evasion and money-laundering. Imagine a tool that eases e-commerce and allows for instantaneous transactions on mobile phones. Now, imagine a tool that enables the Government to track anything and everything that any and every individual does. Also, imagine a tool which lays every user open to multiple forms of identity theft, and cyber impersonation. The Aadhaar or unique biometric identity was designed and promoted to perform the first set of tasks. But it has run into an endless string of controversies and now faces major constitutional challenges because it also…

IN THE SMALL town in Uttar Pradesh where I grew up in the 1980s, the only source of entertainment was the escape Bollywood provided. My father and I would often skip into a nearby film hall in the late afternoon to catch the matinee, and later in the evening I would devour film magazines and read about that same movie, its actors, its making, the scandals and controversies surrounding it. I was obsessed. Every month, I would ask my father to borrow and bring home film journals and magazines from the library of the college he taught at. Stories of the magical successes, haunting downfalls and torrid romances of celebrities were part of our dinner table conversations. I was a starry-eyed teenager, and this world fascinated me no end. But…

VLADMIR PUTIN HAS just been elected Russian president once again; he won 75.9 per cent of the votes. The only mystery here is why he stopped at that number. If Putin wanted, he could have got 100 or even 101 per cent. He is, however, a more cunning illustration of what Foreign Policy magazine once called ‘'The Dictator’s dilemma—To win with 95 percent or 99?’. The article under which this headline appeared was written after Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov had won with 97 per cent of the votes. Victories that other autocrats earlier had polled were also listed: Hosni Mubarak, 88.6 per cent in 2005; Bashar al-Assad, 97.62 per cent in 2007; Fidel Castro, 99.01 per cent in 2005. And then there was Saddam Hussein, who in one election managed…

THIS YEAR’S EDITION OF OPENOMICS OFFERS A WIDE ANGLED LOOK AT WHAT MIGHT SOON CHANGE—AND WHAT ALREADY HAS—BY WAY OF POLICIES AND PRIVATE INITIATIVES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE THE STORY OF India’s economic expansion at the best—and worst—of times could evoke the opening line of an old classic. The book, as you may or may not have guessed, is the Brahma Sutra. It’s in Sanskrit and its first sentence, ‘Athatoh Brahma jigyaasa’, an entreaty unto the truth that’s ultimately beyond us, says it all. The emergence of the Indian economy is mostly about mundane stuff like money, but it’s a tale too full of known unknowns to capture with due accuracy, let alone tell. The good news is that India appears to be in the throes of a furious debate…

MAPMAKER REMAINS ONE OF THE MOST ROBUST AND ACCURATE CROWD-SOURCED BIG DATA PROJECTS, ALLOWING US TO WALK INTO ANY VILLAGE IN ANY COUNTRY CONFIDENT OF FINDING OUR DESTINATION ONE OF MY best memories of my dozen-year career at Intel was being given a coffee table book, One Digital Day (1998), by Rick Smolan in collaboration with Intel. I had my then bosses Andy Grove, Gordon Moore and Craig Barrett sign the inside cover with comments. In his usual style, Andy demanded his ‘moving pictures within bound covers’ with a smiley. That was the true Andy style of encouraging you not to rest on your laurels but to always push forward. In this book, we explored a world where a soldier could see his newborn via video conferencing and conservation biologists…

THE BENGALURU-based startup Drivezy has an interesting idea. The company envisages a time in India when people, at least a large majority of them, will not buy cars. They will instead share them. “Just think about it,” says its co-founder Ashwarya Pratap Singh. “A car spends a majority of its lifetime unused in a garage. Add increasing maintenance and fuel charges, and the vehicle’s depreciating value. It makes no sense.” There are other reasons too, according to Singh, which make sharing vehicles more attractive. The disparity in income levels in India means a large section cannot afford to buy vehicles. And among those who do have the money, the attitudes of the so-called millennials are different: like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, Singh says, they prefer shared access over…

IN JANUARY 2017, Prateek Kumar, then 42, was assigned an infotech project in Hyderabad. It required him to travel to the city once or twice a week from his home in Bengaluru. Despite having been a software consultant for nearly 15 years, this was the first time he had taken on an outstation offer. A couple of months into the job, Kumar had three new entrants to his life, a life he once used to describe to his friends as “extraordinarily peaceful”—a marriage counsellor, a spinal therapist and a hypertension specialist. He initially attributed the stress he was perpetually feeling to the change in his work routine. But he soon came to realise that it wasn’t work that was the culprit, it was time. The six-hour commute from home to…

LIKE A DELAYED Christmas present, a boxful of thrillers arrived at my doorstep recently. I found to my delight that half the titles came from Harper Black, the loud and lurid imprint at the otherwise stodgily respectable publishing house HarperCollins, which seems to be upping its market share of pulp. Another book was from Blue Salt, the crime imprint headed by investigative journalist S Hussain Zaidi under the Random-Penguin banner. Then there was one new true crime book from Roli, who seem to be making a foray into the pulp market, and a posh-looking hardback thriller from Aleph. I was heartened to see this spread, considering the scarcity of Indian pulp in English just a few years back. In Nish Amarnath’s Victims for Sale (Harper Black, 317 pages, Rs 299),…

WHAT DOES IT mean to be a Muslim in India? Can a Muslim ever be a ‘normal’ human being? How can a Muslim prove that he is not a terrorist? Can ghettoisation offer security to citizens? Do politicians or religious leaders care? Neyaz Farooquee’s An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism: Growing Up Muslim in India is a poignant reflection on these and such other existential dilemmas facing India’s largest minority. Farooquee is a welcome addition to the tribe of young writers whose work is immersed in the lived realities of ordinary people. The narrative seamlessly lapses from the personal to political as he describes his childhood in a Bihar village and later-life experiences as a young man in the Muslim ghetto of Jamia Nagar in the capital. The account of…

IN THE BLOCKBUSTER and critically-acclaimed film Black Panther, the king of the African kingdom of Wakanda dies, and his son returns home to be crowned, but a powerful enemy stands in his way, putting Wakanda and the rest of the world at risk. The young king, bolstered by his allies, defeats his enemy and ensures the safety of his people, Lupita Nyong’o (who won the 2014 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for 12 Years a Slave) plays a member of his personal guard. She tells me why this movie is important. What did you learn from doing a movie with an all-Black cast? I learned that it is possible to make these kinds of films and nothing has to be compromised in order to make them. And the stories that…