Innholdsfortegnelse for 09 July 2018 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in THE PRICE OF POOR POLITICS A fractured verdict brought two unnatural allies, the PDP and BJP, together in Jammu and Kashmir (‘Separation in Srinagar’, July 2nd, 2018) in 2015. There was uneasiness between the two since the very beginning and their relations deteriorated, but somehow the alliance stayed in place for around three years. Given how things were progressing in the state, the BJP did not have any choice but to break free of the coalition. It was an open secret that the PDP wanted to go soft on stone pelters and others because of the fact that it was the party’s core constituency. Sadly, vote bank politics took priority for this party over the national interest. Now the state is under Governor’s Rule and its people will have…

IT WAS AROUND the beginning of 2009 that I first got onto Twitter. I came across a slightly puerile and over-opinionated article in an Indian newspaper mocking LK Advani’s use of blogs to signal the tech-savvy nature of the BJP campaign. Blogging, the journalist suggested, was horribly dated. Those at the frontier of online fashion now used Twitter. Some nine years and more than a million followers later, I am still on Twitter. I may not post messages regularly, but I do check the site. There was a time when its fights and controversies excited me and occasionally propelled an intervention. These days, however, unless I have something frightfully original to say, I try to stay away from posting messages. Better still, I try to reserve comments for my newspaper…

IT IS INTERESTING to see the manner in which Nikki Haley and the last big Indian-American name in American politics, Bobby Jindal, are viewed in India. Both are Republicans and former governors. Piyush became Bobby and converted to Christianity. Nimrata became Nikki and converted to Christianity. And while Jindal’s reception in India was at best lukewarm, Haley’s has been another matter. On her current trip to India, where despite US-India relations not being at their best, her reception has been very good. In a way, it comes down to the manner in which they have dealt with their race. Jindal has been seen as someone who has distanced himself from his Indian roots. Haley, in comparison, is different. In interviews and even speeches, she often recalls her Indian origin and…

DIVYA SPANDANA HAS fans requesting selfies with her wherever she goes. This actor-turned politician from Karnataka who now heads the social-media division of the Congress party obliges such entreaties as if by force of habit. When she sits back to chat, she says she is saddled with work, and it shows: in between sentences, she sinks herself into her many mobile devices and makes umpteen calls, all to do with work. “I take on a lot of stress and my work doesn’t end at all,” Spandana says with a smile. The work has paid off. She has revamped the social-media wing of her party, of which she was earlier an MP, having won the Mandya seat in Karnataka via a by-election in 2013 and lost it a year later by…

Ranbir’s grandfather Raj kapoor and Sanjay’s mother Nargis starred in over a dozen films including aag, Barsaat, awaara and Shree 420. the logo of Rk films bears the iconic pose of the pair from Barsaat Sometime during the 80s, when Rishi kapoor was making multiple films with tina munim, Sanjay dutt stormed the actor’s home to beat him up on suspicions that Rishi was making a play for tina, his girlfriend at the time. Rishi’s then-fiancée Neetu Singh convinced Sanjay these were just rumours, as Rishi was in a relationship with her Rishi kapoor considers Priya and Namrata dutt his sisters. they participate in Raksha Bandhan ceremonies to this date Ranbir kapoor spotted his idol Sanjay Dutt for the first time at the age of 10 in 1992 on the…

EDEN HAZARD IS tumbling along the left border of the penalty box, like an unfurling carpet. Seconds earlier, he was upright and hunting down the ball deep into the Moscow field, deep into Tunisia’s territory, once man and object had been released into space. But when a protruding knee (of Syam Ben Youssef, a Tunisian defender) crunched into his thigh on the edge of the box, Hazard tripped, fell and began to roll. The Belgium captain’s body flipped four times. On the first turn, the camera caught him grimacing. On the next, Hazard’s eyes searched for the referee. When his body stopped rolling, he rose with a smile. The referee had pointed at the spot. Hazard is a threat anywhere on a football field—in the hole behind the striker or…

SUNLIGHT FLOODS THROUGH the red-bordered doors of the balcony in Arpita Singh’s studio. It is mid-April; the impending heat of summer is still at bay. When I enter, I spot the 80-year-old artist seated on a chair, leaning towards the table, her fingers gently guiding her brush as she configures a new watercolour. Her white hair is unkempt. The fabric of her dress resembles the pastel-toned colour palette of her artwork. We slip into conversation with unexpected ease. There is familiarity. She is happy that I have finally made it to her studio, considering my brief history of unkept promises to visit. Her discomfort with technology has made it difficult to be in touch with her. Most of our conversations have unfolded at exhibition openings or talks. “Vivan [Sundaram] asked…

ALL THE LIVES We Never Lived, acclaimed novelist Anuradha Roy’s latest—and finest yet—book, is set for the most part in Muntazir, a quiet town with ‘the sense of hills nearby’. This description of the place would be apposite for the novel too. There are grand events that surround the principal action—the independence movement in the Subcontinent and World War II raging in Europe, its ripples felt as far away as British India and Dutch-held South-East Asia. Historical characters enter its pages with a jaunty naturalness: the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore; singer Begum Akhtar; dance scholar Beryl de Zoete; and one of the principal arbiters of the plot, Walter Spies, the German artist, curator and writer. And yet, while the rumblings of great matters of state and grand trajectories of art…

Getting Serious in Tinseltown The tabloids have already declared that Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt will tie the knot in 2020. Neither actor has made any revelation of the sort, but it hasn’t stopped our overenthusiastic hacks from pre-empting their life plans. Refreshingly, neither Ranbir nor Alia have made any effort to deny their romance. Yet both are being especially careful not to fuel the frenzy. Ranbir, who can’t seem to escape questions about Alia while promoting his new film Sanju, has explained what he’s like in love, describing it as a “privilege”. But anyone seeking specifics will likely be disappointed; Ranbir’s not taking the bait. Alia too has said she won’t make an effort to deny what is the truth, but she’s not dishing anything on the when, how…

The Congress is trying all sorts of ways to counter the popularity of the BJP and Narendra Modi (‘The Great Indian Rope Trick’, July 2nd, 2018). However, thinking that what worked during Indira Gandhi’s time might work again in today’s day and age is not a practical line of reasoning at all because times have changed. Indira Gandhi, for example, never had to handle trolls or tweets or social network platforms. The success of a political campaign today is also related to how you harness social media and your public image through TV and print media. This is something that the opposition has not been able to do nearly half as effectively as the BJP and Modi. Moreover, the BJP talks in concrete terms of what it wants to offer…

INDIA HAS JUST been ranked the most dangerous country in the world for women, according to a global survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Washington Post reports that this was, ‘because of its high incidence of sexual violence, lack of access to justice in rape cases, child marriage, female foeticide and human trafficking. India outranked such countries as Syria and Afghanistan — second and third — that are currently at war.Experts interviewed for the poll said India had topped the list because its government has done little to protect women since the controversial rape and murder of a young student in 2012 prompted widespread outrage and changes in the country’s rape laws.’ The survey is an obvious exaggeration. India would rank low, but not at the bottom. But if…

INDIA’S LIFE EXPECTANCY has almost doubled since Independence, and has now reached 65, though it remains much lower than in the richest countries (in China, it is 76). Even if we factor child mortality into this, India’s population remains one of the youngest in the world, with about half being under 25 and two-thirds under 35. If the majority of the film audience is drawn from this youth segment, then why are most of Indian cinema’s major male stars so old? Looking at unreliable statistics of the biggest box office successes of all time gives slightly different figures. All these films came out in the last 10 years, and the most popular stars are Aamir Khan (born1965), Shah Rukh Khan (1965); Salman Khan (1965); Hrithik Roshan (1975); Prabhas (1979); Ranveer…

HOW do you respond when the country’s top filmmaker offers you the role of a lifetime? Well, if you’re Ranbir Kapoor you turn it down via text message. That’s basically what happened when Rajkumar Hirani, writer-director of the Munnabhai films, 3 Idiots, and PK, sent the 35-year-old actor a message, roughly three years ago, asking him to meet for a film he was planning to make. Ranbir, who Hirani subsequently discovered is “pretty aware of what’s going on in the industry at any given time”, had a fair idea of what the director and his writing partner Abhijat Joshi had been working on. He responded to Hirani’s request for a meeting saying he’d be happy to, but added, according to the filmmaker, “that ‘I hope it’s not [about] the Sanjay…

A LARGE CUT-OUT of Argentina’s Lionel Messi, in a blue shirt and a white mundu, placed prominently by the highway in Pattikkara, Thrissur, Kerala, wishes you Eid Mubarak. There’s a cut-out of Brazil’s Neymar da Silva Santos Junior too. Astride a bike and sporting a mundu, the world’s most expensive football player is framed by a promise to bring home the World Cup: ‘This is the word I have given to the Good Shepherd of Rio de Janerio and to everyone who loves football.’ Brazil and Argentina. Teams that divide Kerala into two factions; teams that Kerala loves more than any other. Evidence of this undying love litters the streets of the state during major international tournaments. Football has never lacked an eager audience in the northern districts, but it…

SEX EDUCATION NEEDS TO BE SENSITIVE TOWARDS NOT SOME NOTION OF CULTURAL MORALITY, BUT TOWARDS REAL CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS—WHAT THEIR NEEDS ARE FOR DECADES NOW, feminists and anti-porn activists worldwide have been speaking up against the proliferation of porn on the internet, claiming that it subjugates women and perpetuates gender violence. In her debut book Cyber Sexy; Rethinking Pornography (Penguin; pages 255; Rs 399), Richa Kaul Padte views it as an empowering space, particularly for people whose desires and identities have been marginalised by society. She questions the male gaze theory, highlighting women’s agency. ‘On the internet, women aren’t just stared at, they are staring right back. And who’s to say which gaze is more powerful?’ she writes. Kaul Padte began thinking about internet porn in 2013, when a…

ON PAPER, INDIA is a country of laws. With laws ranging from ones that prescribe fines for jumping traffic lights all the way to those meant to ensure ‘social justice’ in the form of guaranteed rights to food and even employment. By this measure India should be a paradise. Instead of being a rechtsstaat based on justice and rule of law, the country is pretty lawless with probably the most visible demonstration coming from widespread corruption—from petty officials demanding bribes all the way to allocation of natural resources at the hands of venal politicians. In The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics (Princeton University Press; 264 pages; $35), Kaushik Basu, India’s former Chief Economic Adviser, lays bare the dynamic underpinning a plethora of laws and lawlessness…

TWO YEARS AGO, in another summer, Britain revolted in a cathartic assertion of nationhood. The Brexit vote was the precursor to the ‘nativist’ uprising that would later put the outsider in the front row of populist politics. It was not, as generally misunderstood, a vote against Europe, or its values. It was not an anti-civilisation vote. It was a disillusioned people’s protest against what they came to see as an extra-territorial bureaucracy with no democratic norms. It was not the inevitable transformation of the United Kingdom into Little Britain, inhabited by smug troglodytes with imperial pretences. It was a return to the comfort zone of community and familiarity; an English pastoral authored by ordinary people who wanted to regain a sense of belonging. It was also a moment for blue-blooded…

IN RECENT DAYS there has been extensive commentary on the 43rd anniversary of the Emergency that was imposed in India in June 1975. Parallels—mostly faux—have been made with the present time, with some commentators going as far as to say that an ‘undeclared’ emergency is ‘on’ in India. This is unfortunate, as none of the features marking that ugly phenomenon are visible. Individual freedoms, including a free press, are robust as ever; there is no targeting of political parties or workers; and no midnight knocks have been reported in recent memory. These and other cherished freedoms continue to be valued, both at the level of government and society. Why do such allegations gain traction when there is little evidence of a suspension of democratic rights? Political scientists have debated this…

The Indian nightingale Lata Mangeshkar rarely reaches out to the public anymore. The last time she made a point to speak was to register her threat of moving out of Mumbai if a flyover was constructed near her house on Peddar Road. But over the weekend, an anonymous member of her family reached out to the media, this time to protest against the manner in which one of her songs had been used for a female orgasm scene in the Netflix anthology film Lust Stories. Depicting female desire is rare in cinema. And it is almost nonexistent in Hindi films. Yet, we have two films less than a month apart, Veere Di Wedding and now Lust Stories, that depict female orgasms and a sex toy. It is a remarkable moment.…

IT’S A SAD reflection of our times that smearing and libelling our now-distant colonial past have become a popular substitute for soul-searching about our own failures, abuses and atrocities in the present. With popular and social media happy to circulate the wildest rumours and allegations, quotations out of context, half-truths and even blatant untruths, it’s hard for historians like me to insist that condemnation needs to be evidence-based, or else descends into character assassination. Let’s take the current campaign of vilification, skilfully orchestrated by a few articulate and ambitious individuals, against Winston Churchill, once regarded as the hero of Nazi defeat in World War II, now demonised by publicity-hungry detractors as a war criminal with more blood on his hands than Hitler, Stalin and Mao put together. There was a…

SAY ‘KASHMIR’, and most people would reach for images of stone-throwing teenagers and harried soldiers. Every other aspect of life has been eclipsed by the protracted violence. Or been devalued as insufficiently urgent by comparison with the fight-to-the-death between the State and militant groups. For many of us, the first, instinctive, tragic response on hearing a Kashmiri place name is to locate it on a list of towns and villages associated with some horrible atrocity, some act of brutalisation. Such a list of place names would not—thankfully, not yet—feature Burzahom (Burzahama), 16 km northeast ofSrinagar, and Gufkral, near Tral in the troubled Pulwama district. These names are infused with the region’s deep history. ‘Burzahom’ enshrines burza, from the Sanskrit bhurja, the birch tree, on whose bark some of the earliest…

IN A WORLD WHERE WOMEN ARE BARELY SEEN IN PUBLIC, QANDEEL DECIDED TO TAKE ON SOME OF PAKISTAN’S MOST HOLY COWS. HER WEAPON WAS HER PHONE AND A WARDROBE OF REVEALING CLOTHES IN HER SEMINAL book Women who Run with Wolves, poet-psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes appeals to the ‘wild woman’ that hides within all women: ‘To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.’ History is full of women who were derided for their transgressions but their legacy has enabled us to work, vote, control our bodies and right traditional wrongs. Sometimes the most unlikely women pick up the fight—and leave an impact that changes the status quo with their death. Such is…

RYAN REYNOLDSHASestablished himself slowly and surely over time. He took his first steps in TV serials like Scrubs and Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. It is with the superhero films that he has truly grabbed attention: there was Green Lantern is 2011, Deadpool in 2016 and nowDeadpool 2. Deadpool, the franchise, seems to be working out well for him, going by worldwide box-office collections. He has been married to Blake Lively since 2012, they have two children, and the family of four has proven to be a paparazzo favourite. When one makes a sequel, the expectation of fans needs to be taken into consideration. So were there any pressures? We wanted to take the tenets of Deadpool1 and fuse them obviously into a different story. We weren’t…