Innholdsfortegnelse for March 28, 2016 i Open Magazine

IF YOU ARE planning to get away, there are any number of reasons to validate the urge. The noise pollution has reached an alarming level, posing toxic threat to the senses. The kind of words coming from cultural commissars and apprentice revolutionaries has already made this place hostile to arguments. Statements that divide the mind thicken the atmosphere, and contribute further to this season of hate. It should not be the only provocation for a change of scene. Travel is not escapism. And when you are on the road, as our writers are in the following pages, it is a motion of the senses, an exhilaration activated by the mystery of places and the familiarity of strangers. It is freedom too, as memories are set aside by the onrush of…

IN HER book Culture of Encounters, Assistant Professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark, and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, Audrey Truschke attempts to clear up some popular and dangerous misconceptions. As a scholar of Sanskrit and pre-modern Indo-Persian, Braj Bhasha and modern Hindi and Urdu, she had been able to delve into hitherto inaccesible archives to prove that accounts of alleged Mughal intolerance are often exaggerated, if not outrightly false. In an email interview she writes that the Mughals were interested in Sanskrit for a plethora of reasons, including intellectual and religious curiosity and to better understand their subjects. Excerpts from the interview: Your book challenges some deeply held beliefs on Mughal rule in India. In highlighting the role of Sanskrit scholars during the reigns of Akbar,…

‘I’D POKE my head into his office and find his lap. Occasionally, he’d show me drafts of his work—an article for The New Yorker, an op-ed for The Guardian— and I’d pore over each one, trying to impress him with my thoughtful feedback. He ultimately made it clear that anything but my gushing approval would be ignored. But I didn’t mind. He was the writer, after all.’ What are the Key Result Areas of the wife of a famous husband? Is she to hold a candle to his glories? To dutifully feed his ego, tolerate his tantrums and pander to his demands? Or does she live her own life on her own terms? Padma Lakshmi had the good (or, perhaps, bad) fortune to marry one of the most famous authors…

THIS WEEK, thousands of miles away from the country she called home, one of our most important but relatively less remembered artists is having a retrospective in New York City. Met Breuer, the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s contemporary art programme, opens an exhibition of the paintings, drawings and photographs of Nasreen Mohamedi, who has been consigned to the league of the venerable but obscure in India. Like VS Gaitonde, who came into the limelight a couple of years ago when one of his paintings fetched an astronomical price at a Christie’s auction, Mohamedi’s name, too, has come up in public discourse in relation to her international acclaim. Deepak Talwar, director of the Delhi- and New Yorkbased Talwar Gallery, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts (KNMA)…

Anticipation No More Nobody’s saying anything just yet because both want to see who blinks first. But word on the street is that the big Salman Khan versus Shah Rukh Khan clash that we’ve been hearing about for months may not happen after all. Shah Rukh’s still shooting Raees, and the Salman-starrer Sultan is full swing into production too. According to informed insiders, right now both films will have to really get their act together if they’re serious about making an Eid release around August. Meanwhile, Aamir Khan, while celebrating his 51st birthday earlier this week, dismissed reports that his wrestling drama Dangal was being pushed up for an Independence Day release (which would mean it would clash with his Lagaan director Ashutosh Gowariker’s Mohenjo Daro). The actor clarified that…

ON A MORNING in mid-January, I stood outside the train station at Carmarthen, a county town in the United Kingdom, with a GPS-enabled phone in one hand, the handlebar of my bicycle in another. I entered my destination in the phone—’Skanda Vale temple’. The map showed me a long, winding road uphill for the next 15 km. Within the first 15 minutes, I had to get rid of my woollens. In the next thirty, I stopped admiring the lush green countryside and the countless sheep grazing on the farms, concentrating instead on gulping in as much oxygen as I could with every breath. Thankfully, my phone rang, giving me an excuse to stop. It was a private number. “I am calling from Skanda Vale,” the person on the other side…

CULTURE OF ENCOUNTERS: SANSKRIT AT THE MUGHAL COURT Audrey Truschke ALLEN LANE | 336 PAGES | RS 699 ‘It is high time we discarded our love for a fabricated past in which the Mughal kings are vilified as religious bigots and destroyers of Indian culture and society,’ says Dr Audrey Truschke about her ground-breaking new book Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. A PhD graduate of Columbia University, now working as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Religious Studies at Stanford and an assistant professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University, Newark, Truschke certainly has the credentials and the courage to defend her thesis. Keenly aware that the politics of violence targeting Muslims today not only clouds the lens through which we view the Mughals but…

THE GREY SKIES split open, cool showers poured down and a ceremonial rainbow arched over the seven-acre stage. The Yamuna was awash in the golden rays of the setting sun and its waters danced to the musical strains of a thousand nadaswarams. The stage was set for the opening of the World Culture Festival (WCF) in Delhi. It seemed like the festival, organised by India’s Art of Living Foundation— which had courted innumerable controversies till the last minute—needed divine intervention to kick-start. Despite untimely rains (which made it a challenge to get to the venue unless you were a dignitary), thousands of devotees walked hand-in-hand for more than four kilometers over muck and slush to catch a glimpse of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s vision. An easy option was to give…

JESSE THE JUGGERNAUT Jesse Owens, who inspired the film Race, is perhaps the best-known track-and-field athlete in sports history. He has been ranked among the top ten North American athletes of the 20th century by ESPN CAST STEPHAN JAMES, JASON SUDEIKIS, ELI GOREEA DIRECTOR STEPHEN HOPKINS THE FINEST FILM footage of the explosive speed and natural charm of Jesse Owens is to be seen in Olympia, arguably one of the greatest documentaries on athletics ever made. Ironically, and politically incorrectly, it was the artistry of Leni Riefenstahl combined with the propaganda machinery of Joseph Goebbels that gave Owens his grand stage. Even today, after all his records have been broken, he looks a great athlete, virtually unbeatable as he won those four 1936 gold medals in the space of a…

‘OUR GENERAL experience is that every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.’ Father Brown’s words in GK Chesterton’s The Man with Two Beards holds true for the way in which most crime fiction writers conceptualise evil. The modern day detective story sees evil in a subjective way, as something all men are capable of. The view that evil is in everyone, and given the right circumstances, each person has the capacity to murder, was less prevalent in ancient times. Then, man objectified the impulses of his soul and gave it godly shape; the devil, Satan, personified evil, an absence of good. So, in a seemingly locked-room murder, the common consensus in…

—This is an expression one encounters all the time is how it is broken up. Translated, this means ‘The world is indeed a family.’ No expression should be plucked out of context, ignoring the rest of a shloka. Unfortunately, that invariably happens with vasudhaiva kutumbakam. The complete shloka states ‘This calculation of what is mine and what is someone else’s is for a narrow-minded person. For a person who is generous of heart, the world is indeed a family.’ The ordinary person doesn’t show a vasudhaiva kutumbakam mindset. It is meant for those who are exceptional. Where is the original text from? There is a rather remarkable piece of detective work done by Sarvesh Tiwari, tracking the expression down through Hitopadesha, Panchatantra, Vikarama-charita and Mahopanishad. You will find this at…

DIRECTOR Shawn Arranha CAST Himesh Reshammiya, Naseeruddin Shah, Shekhar Kapur Since this is a film with Himesh Reshammiya in the lead role and since this man cannot act to save his or anyone else’s life, he needs moral support. Well, he has got it in Teraa Surroor with Naseeruddin Shah playing a lovely cameo as ‘The Bird’, Dharamraj Santino. A jailbird, obviously, he has a vast amount of knowledge on how to execute prison breaks. During a series of conversations he has with a nationalist gangster called Raghu (Reshammiya)—a patriot who forces you to hail ‘Bharat Mata’ before he puts a bullet in your head—Santino explains the strategy of a breakout from a high-security jail in Dublin. Raghu’s wife, Tara (Farah Karimaee), has been framed and the movie is about…