Innholdsfortegnelse for 16 April 2018 i Open Magazine

PRIVACY WOES Any data used for an internet application in never safe, because once the information goes onto the web, security measures are of no use (‘The Foreign Hand’ April 9th, 2018). Such data is available for public consumption and does not remain private. This is the basic principle of the internet. The Congress is blamed for misuse of Face-book data. Tomorrow, the BJP may use it and no one would know. The less said about the BJP’s manipulation, the better. On this matter, no political party or politician is trustworthy. They have only their self-interest in mind and are least bothered about people’s welfare. M Kumar MISGOVERNANCE IN UP Your article rightly exposes the misgovernance of pontiff- turned-political-leader Yogi Adityanath (‘The Yogi in His Labyrinth’, April 9th, 2018). Right…

A SHORT FAMILY HOLIDAY in Shimla led to my visiting once again the grand Viceregal Lodge that is now the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. This erstwhile summer retreat of all viceroys from Lord Dufferin was, arguably, one of the grandest buildings of the Raj until it was upstaged by the Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi. The two buildings represented different facets of British rule in India. The castle on Observatory Hill was something straight out of Scotland and reflected both the exclusivity and self-confidence of the Raj in its Victorian heyday. The palace on Raisina Hill in New Delhi didn’t lack the grandeur and authority of an earlier era, but it displayed a measure of accommodation of India’s own heritage. When the second President of India,…

FREEDOM OF PRESS is a vital freedom. In India, it is also a prickly subject with a history of efforts by governments to tame it. But it is the nature of its robust democracy that any attempt—real or perceived—at muzzling the media fizzles out fast. The fate of the ill-conceived guidelines on ‘fake news’ by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry is a good example. These guidelines were issued without careful thought and, more damningly, without any consultation with journalists or regulatory bodies like the Press Council of India or any broadcasters association. The penalties for professional transgressions were harsh: withdrawal of accreditation in a graded fashion from temporary suspension all the way to permanent expulsion. In India, accreditation is not a badge of privilege, but one of getting access to…

In India, a good posting is a bureaucratic pursuit. Babus are constantly hustling to be posted somewhere comfortable—nothing like a committee, of course—where there is ideally little work and a lot of power to be wielded, with all its accompanying benefits. The comforts of a plum posting, it appears, aren’t lost even on ascetics. Babas aren’t all that unlike babus. Five religious heads in Madhya Pradesh who had earlier announced a 45-day-long protest march from Indore to Bhopal, alleging corruption in the planting of saplings along the Narmada river, have now been granted Minister of State status by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. The babas have been appointed to a committee set up to create awareness on tree plantation, water conservation and cleanliness along the river. As a result, there…

THE LEFT MAY be down, but it’s still not out. The most visible presence of the Left is in the media and in the textbooks of Indian history which, for some reason, the BJP Government hesitates to change. Soon after the completion of the tenure of the previous Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and the reconstitution of the Council, Leftist historians voiced their alarm and protested against attempts to impose ‘legislated history, a manufactured image of the past, glorifying certain aspects of it and denigrating others....’ followed by an ‘open letter from overseas historians and social scientists’ warning against ‘a dangerously pervasive atmosphere of narrowness, intolerance and bigotry’ and ‘a monolithic and flattened view of India’s history’. An eminent historian immediately announced publicly that none of the members of…

ON HOLI MORNING, I traipse, along with my daughters, a hundred or so metres to the adjoining apartment, where our new neighbours have invited us to a yard party. We are greeted with warm, gentle caresses of natural, rose-scented, turmeric to our faces; the party invitation read ‘natural dyes only’. Conversation is slow like the late morning sun, and it drifts inevitably to the subject of the ‘Delhi incident’ in which earlier that morning a man flung a semen-filled balloon as part of his Holi festivities. Someone sighs and exclaims how happy she is to live here in Goa, where the playing of Holi among strangers in public spaces is virtually unheard of. Someone else chimes in saying what a huge relief this is and how lucky we are to…

FOR DELHITES LIKE me who have spent pretty much all our lives in the capital city, the Delhi of today, in terms of citizen services, is a much improved place from what it was, say, three decades ago. I remember riding in buses, on our way to college, that would lean over to one side of the road precariously from the weight of all the men who were hanging on to them. For women, particularly, those buses were a nightmare. There was not a safe space where you could stand or sit that was not fraught with danger, night time travel was impossible, and sexual harassment—known as ‘eve teasing’— was the order of the day. I remember times when there were long power cuts and we never knew when, or…

IN BORN TO Be Hanged, author Syeda Hameed likens Pakistan’s late Prime Minister and President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the protagonist of a Greek tragedy. Hameed draws parallels between Oedipus of Thebes and the ‘boy from Larkana’ Bhutto, both ‘larger than life’ men who were cursed by the gods to die a horrific death. The author confesses that for 20 years, she has ‘lived’ with a man she has never met. Her research over the span of these two decades comes primarily from speeches, letters, interviews and archives from the Bhutto family’s personal library. For her research, Hameed interviews Dr Mubashir Hasan, Bhutto’s close associate and co-founder of the Pakistan’s Peoples Party (PPP), a number of times. His personal anecdotes and perspective on Bhutto provide a distinct voice and lend…

Cellulose Cinema as a Lost Cause Hollywood’s master filmmaker Christopher Nolan was in Mumbai last weekend to espouse the cause of celluloid film. The Inception and Dunkirk director met with film industry bigwigs, fans and mediafolk to make a plea for saving the medium of photochemical film from the onslaught of the digital format. Nolan, who insists on shooting only on analogue film, revealed that along with other heavyweights like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, JJ Abrams, and Zack Snyder, he’s been fighting against the shutting down of film labs and processing facilities globally. At a sit-down event, Amitabh Bachchan argued that he enjoys the liberty that shooting on digital allows him. The actor reportedly explained that while shooting Pink, the filmmakers set up six cameras that kept rolling continuously…

There is no denying the fact that Facebook has a dark side to it, with its users always vulnerable to pilferage, leaks and misuse of their personal data (‘The Foreign Hand’, April 9th, 2018). But it has come as a rude shock that Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based firm that helped Donald Trump win in the 2016 US election, has not only made inroads but gained ground in India too, with the Congress allegedly considering the firm’s services to regain power by hook or by crook. This is a clear indication of a foreign hand in Indian politics. While the BJP had employed hundreds of young data scientists and others to its advantage in 2014, the Congress seems to be relying on a foreign firm to save face. But it is…

TO A LARGE number of those who saw the acquittal of Salman Khan in the case where his car ran over pavement dwellers in Mumbai, his five-year jail sentence for the poaching of two blackbucks in Rajasthan seems like karma that came calling in its mysterious way. Because by deed alone of this specific case, half a decade seems a little too much for the killing of an animal, even if it is an endangered species; and for something that took place almost two decades ago, with the man who committed the crime different from the man who got the sentence. How do we remember Salman of those days? Brash, impudent, reckless, a hint of violence merging with a kilo of attitude surrounding him as he walked with chest broadened…

FOR MUCH OF the world, a word for the inner whorl of a flower has come to convey a boxy contraption of metal on wheels. This is bizarre. But as the marketer of the planet’s most popular sedan ever, Corolla, Toyota would be proud to plead guilty for it. While it hasn’t quite been able to nudge Volkswagen aside as the globe’s top automaker, with even the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi combine having stolen ahead in 2017 (with 10.6 million vehicles sold), few doubt its determination to become No 1. This, after all, is the company that spelt doom for Detroit. From a global perspective, thus, it’s an odd sight indeed to have Toyota lean on Suzuki for a leg–or gear, rather—up in the Indian market. For observers closer home, however, it’s yet…

FOR the first 130 years of its existence, cricket, as a sport, did not lend itself well to the concept of Dream Teams. Essentially a year-round competition between countries (unlike football, whose calendar prioritises club over nation), cricket’s Dream XIs lived fleetingly at the back of student notebooks, in video games and, sometimes, in a bar in Kent, England, called Lashings, whose quirky owner spent money to assemble everyone from Brian Lara to Wasim Akram to Sachin Tendulkar to play for his pub side. Against other pub teams. It was a bit of a joke, this concept of Dream Teams; until, in the 131st year of the game, Lalit Modi gave the tragics hope. With friends in high places and with his singular vision to see the best play against…

IN A RED sari and orange blouse on her four-foot frame, she looks like a child in a fancy dress competition. Her bangles jangle as she lifts her hennaed hands to take an injection. “My 12-year-old daughter put mehndi on me last night,” she says. This is Kaushalya’s third trip to the clinic to take a shot of Depo-Medroxyprogesterone Acetate (DMPA). Her first visit was last year when she heard from a doctor in her slum locality that the Government had launched a new contraceptive injection that she would need to take just once every three months. Married at 14, the 28-year-old mother of four narrates her story without a grimace. Her mother passed away before she barely began walking. The youngest of five siblings, her father and brothers got…

SOME YEARS AGO, when director Mira Nair visited Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Thiruvananthapuram, her first question was, “Who is Balachandra Menon?” That morning, Nair had met Kerala’s education minister and introduced herself as a movie maker based in the US. The minister’s first question was, “Do you write stories?” “No,” replied Nair. “Do you act?” he asked. She only made others act, she said. Then came the minister’s proud statement: “Our Balachandra Menon does everything. He writes stories, dialogues, acts and also directs.” Nair wanted to know from Gopalakrishnan if that was true. “Not just that it is true, but the minister hasn’t told you everything,” replied the maestro. Menon, 64, is much more, of course, as we learn from his autobiography Start... Action: Musings of a Movie Maker (Konark Publishing;…

ELEPHANTS ARE taking to the streets across the country. In Mumbai, a hundred and one gaudily painted works of art, each the size of a tubby pachyderm calf, have taken the city by storm. Very soon, larger, more audacious elephant representations will be walking the evergreen forests of Kerala, the tea gardens of Assam and the Doon valley of Uttarakhand. Come August, and the capital of India will be besieged by elephants. Not live ones, but creations of the human mind and hands, representing their cause. What is drawing these elephants into town? Why are the behemoths gathering in full strength and what trunk call are they playing out? The answer lies in a migration of elephants perhaps three-and-a-half million years ago. That was approximately when the first elephant appeared…

IT’S THE NEW four-letter word that threatens the last remains of political sanctity. It corrupts the minds of the gullible public and the best intentions of the virtuous leader. It creates an alternative that subverts, distorts, and even destroys the democratic order. It is the invisible ink that legitimises falsehoods in your morning paper; and on social media, it’s the sorcery of data. It’s the evil that changes our lives as an adjective as well as a noun. It’s spawned a new war on the lie. It’s fake. And fake news has the urgency of a cliché. Our Minister of Information and Broadcasting was not the first government official to hold a whip in the name of truth. The Minister wanted to rein in the peddlers of fake news, and…

LET’S TAKE THREE public statements by Sachin Tendulkar over the last two weeks. The most recent is his reaction to a tweet by Shahid Afridi who had said he found the Kashmir situation ‘appalling and worrisome’ with ‘innocents being shot down’ and asked why international bodies like the UN weren’t putting a stop to it. Tendulkar’s reply: there are capable people managing India and outsiders have no business telling us what to do. Fair enough. Then there was the Australian team getting caught on camera ball tampering, on which he tweeted, ‘Cricket has been known as a gentleman’s game. It’s a game that I believe should be played in the purest form. Whatever has happened is unfortunate but the right decision has been taken to uphold the integrity of the…

ONE OF THE MOST powerful political speeches of the 20th century was Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream.... His dream was more than just a hopeful vision or a wish, but also prophetic. This waking dream or wish for the future is different from the sleeping dream, where the dreamer may not have any control over the dream, but whose interpretations give us great insights into ways in which different cultures understand the workings of the human mind. The one thing these dreams have in common is that although their material and ideas may come from our pasts, they are about our presents and our futures. The science of sleep is a medical matter, and in today’s world sleep anxieties and insomnia are much discussed, but I am…

I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy’s phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British. Everything about the sport seems suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations possible with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unrestrained by anything so mundane as a written score. The glorious uncertainties of the game echo ancient Indian thought: Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter can come along and bowl you. It is almost,…

IN OCTOBER 2017, there was a question on the Kaun Banega Crorepati show, ‘Which member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet resigned and founded a new party in 1951?’ It wasn’t one of the early-rung questions. Even then, I was surprised when the participant got the answer right. Perhaps I am being unfair. But I suspect, twenty years ago, in a similar situation, not too many participants would have known. Independent India’s discourse has been shaped in a certain way. Moulded through that jaundiced view, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee hasn’t got his due. The naming of educational institutions, roads, bridges, buildings, swimming pools, towns and schemes after him is a relatively recent phenomenon. Perhaps the only exception is the University of Delhi’s Shyama Prasad Mukherji (spelt thus) College. However, even for this…

JEWELLERY IS TODAY often seen as a mere accessory, a wasteful one at that too. But in India, the history of jewellery also hints at the story of our civilisation. In India, jewels are not mere adornments, they are markers of identity itself. They tell of family stories and community backgrounds, of individual tastes and preferences. They showcase the finest Indian aesthetics and creativity, workmanship and artistry. In our culture, ‘jewellery is an essential part of a woman’s physical reality’. As Indologist and historian Wendy Doniger writes in The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry: ‘On statues of goddesses (I know the South Indian bronzes best, but it is true much more broadly), the bracelets and anklets seem part of their skin, more a part of…

THE PROTAGONIST OF my favourite story (‘Yellow Rose’) in Anjum Hasan’s remarkable, radiant collection of short fiction, A Day in the Life, is the 23-year old Gulfam, an app designer with millennial predilections. Gulfam, like her peers within their class demographic, runs a startup with her friend Mathew, and dreams of ‘world happiness bred by a universal conversion to in-the-moment functionalism, played out in a perfectly controlled indoor existence. She loved futuristic movies awash with jargon and sleek gadgetry in which neither human nor physical nature intruded—no erratic clouds moving across the sky, no sudden moods altering the state of one’s existence.’ Gulfam’s mother, Nusrat, a writerflâneur-conversationalist, who is ‘always writing a story’, is ever mystified by the weirdness of her offspring. At one point during the day—most of the…

STEVEN SPIELBERG IS one of Hollywood’s most successful and influential directors. He has been churning out hits since the 70s: Jaws (1975), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler’s List (1993), Minority Report (2002), The Post (2016), to name a few. How has he pulled off this illustrious career? How did you get started in this industry? I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and was a big movie fan. I would go and watch any movie I could afford to. I remember hearing a murmur and getting an idea for a story; I remember that murmur because I had never had it before. I was around 15 years old then. I had the story but I did not have it worked out. It was only an idea for a movie. In those days we…