Innholdsfortegnelse for June 6, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Your cover story (‘The Dead Old Party of India’, 30 May 2016) reveals how the Congress is slowly and steadily losing its power base across the country, and for good reason. Prime Minister Modi has rightly termed the BJP victory in Assam ‘historic’. He has delivered two glorious years for India. No politician in the past 30 years has occupied the public mind the way he has. As far as Rahul Gandhi is concerned, the major hurdles in his path are his inexperience and inaccessibility. He has different plans in mind, but not only are they not working, he is also unable to convey these for public criticism or approval. If Congress has Rahul, then the BJP does not need to search for a new…

IF THE BJP finally opened an account in Kerala’s Assembly election, no one is surprised that it was O Rajagopal who did it, perhaps the apt culmination for a political career spreading over 50 years in a state where his party had a marginal presence. Rajagopal had contested and lost elections 13 times before this. That he is now 86 years old just makes the victory all the more sweet for him. “Even AK Antony [Congress leader and former Chief Minister] ridiculed us saying that we have to take a visitor’s pass to enter the legislative Assembly. My victory is a reply to all of them. It is a positive sign that the bipolar politics in Kerala is changing,” he says. Rajagopal is admired and liked across party lines and…

THAT INDIA AND Iran have had much to share culturally over the ages is a diplomatic cliché in bilateral relations, but the facsimile display that the Indian delegation put up in Tehran of a centuries-old manuscript of Kalila wa Dimna—tales of the Panchatantra in Persian—for Prime Minister Modi’s mid-summer visit served as an eloquent background score on the value of an allseason friendship under all the stresses and strains of high-stakes power play. Chabahar, after all, means ‘four springs’: from ‘chaar bahaar’. The Chabahar Deal, by which India will invest a massive sum to modernise a seaport at this strategic location in south Iran, is already being seen as a grand geopolitical move in today’s Great Game. It’s an initiative that could counter China’s sponsorship of Pakistan’s Gwadar port, which,…

Fiction The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith) (Hogarth | 188 Pages | Rs 550) Once a book has been blessed with a Man Booker International Prize, the appreciation that comes its way is expected. But with The Vegetarian (originally published in South Korea in 2007), the praise has been more than lavish. This three-part novel, which starts with the simple decision of a wife to turn vegetarian, evolves into a rollercoaster of fractured relationships, desires that are met and those that are thwarted and the disintegration of institutions. Rich in imagery and rippled with violence and subversion, this is one of the most exciting international translations to have emerged of late. Importantly, it reminds the Anglophone reader there is an entire universe of outstanding literature we are…

THE HEADY TIMES of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s were underpinned by the idea that the internet would fundamentally change the nature of the way the world conducted life and business. It was true and yet the debris of most companies who participated in it lay strewn by the wayside by the beginning of the millennium. It is not always good to be ahead of the times. The first mover does not always win. This week, newspapers reported that Flipkart had decided to defer by six months the joining of IIM graduates who had been recruited during campus placements. This is unusual, not least because IIM graduates have no dearth of companies to join, and it is hard to see why they would wait six months for Flipkart.…

When fiction enters the autonomous space of faith, it humanises the sacred, and the profanities of inquiry become as engrossing as the possibilities of belief. Jesus’ dream on the cross in Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation is perhaps the most intimate portrait of the crisis of being the chosen—and more daring than the Gospels, of course. Kazantzakis was no god slayer; his imagination only liberated a Jesus trapped in the certainties of scriptures. The freedom of fiction gets a further uplift in José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, where even the immaculate conception is denied divine sanction, and where the Son of God is a man torn apart, and the cross does not bring an end to his disillusionment. It is faith that shelters some of the most…

WITH ITS ELECTORAL VICTORY in Assam and a double-digit vote share in Kerala, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) finally seems to be entering those zones of India which were long held out of bounds for it. Lest one consider these mere flashes in the pan, the party’s earlier success in Haryana and its entry to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) as a coalition partner are indicators that BJP is well on its way to become an ‘all-India’ party. Is the party finally a force to reckon with across the country? Or is its string of successes since 2014 just a fortuitous outcome of India’s complex electoral landscape? The two positions are rather extreme—one triumphal and the other of denial—and the reality probably differs somewhat from both. Historically speaking, however, the factors…

ROHAN MURTY NEARLY became a professor. It had been his dream and his father’s. After a PhD from Harvard where he was also made a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows, he interviewed at a few American universities hoping to live a scholarly life. He had certainly become acclimatised to the company of illustrious academics and still recalls evenings spent in sparkling conversation with Nobel laureates. But marriage (Murty and Lakshmi Venu, daughter of TVS Motors Chairman Venu Srinivasan, have since divorced) and other circumstances tugged him back to India. “When my classmates were applying for internships, I never bothered because I knew I was going to be an academic. To give up that dream was a difficult decision, it took me four months,” he says. Not that he…

Woman of the Dead by Bernhard Aichner (Scribner | 288 Pages | $26) A revenge story—one where you sit with the heroine in the payback time chair. In the first chapter, ‘Eight years earlier’, Brunhilde Blum (she hates being called Brunhilde), 24, drowns her adopted parents while out on a fishing trip. She was adopted by a couple who ‘trained her like a domestic pet.’ Blum marries Mark, a policeman, who hears her cries in the boat and gathers her in his arms. Eight years and two kids later, Mark is run over by a car. At first, she thinks it is an accident, but when she is clearing out his belongings, including his cell phone, she hears a recording of Mark’s interview with a woman. Blum tracks down the…

How to Beat Gossipmongers A video from the premiere of Sarbjit last week—in which a visibly grumpy Abhishek Bachchan appears to be walking away from his missus midway during a photo-op, even as Aishwarya looks on helplessly—has gone viral, leading to widespread speculation that the couple was having a bad day. The actors’ reps promptly jumped into damage control mode, urging journalists to retract the story and to take down the video. They insist that the actors’ body language has been misinterpreted by gossip-mongers. The actors have communicated through their spokespersons that after posing for a round of pictures with his wife, the proud husband thought it’s only fair that the lensmen snap a round of solo pictures of Aishwarya as she was after all the star of the evening…

LOYALTY PLEDGES often evoke sniggers and mirth in a democracy. All they do is diminish the stature of the person to whom the pledge is made. This is the situation which the Congress party finds itself in after the newly-elected legislators to the West Bengal Assembly were made to sign an undertaking promising ‘unqualified’ allegiance to the party led by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. The initial reaction to news of the happenings in the West Bengal unit was along predictable lines: after all, the Congress has a history of sycophancy towards its ‘supreme leader’. One only has to remember DK Barooah’s ‘Indira is India’ line. But that will be a category mistake. What is being displayed is not sycophancy of some party leader in a far-off province. A reading of…

A Governor in India is an ornamental post except for that rare Constitutional crisis when he or she can play an important role in the state. The appointment is therefore largely political, with the appointee’s loyalty to the centre, especially at such moments, counting for most. The choice of Kiran Bedi as Lieutenant Governor for Puducherry is thus no surprise. Over the last few years, she has been loyal to the BJP, standing for Chief Minister in Delhi and also echoing its voice in public debates. It must have been an easy decision. WORD’S WORTH “The function that the Governor has to fulfil, as it is now borne upon Members of the House, is that of a lubricator... He is not to interfere, but he has just to smoothen matters”…

I CANNOT UNDERSTAND the hue and cry over West Bengal’s election results. The scale of the Trinamool Congress victory may have somewhat exceeded expectations, but victory was never in doubt. As Mamata Banerjee said not long ago, she was the candidate in all 294 constituencies. The vote was for her, the one known face in the fray. A Marxist win would have brought a virtually anonymous Surya Kanta Misra to the fore. Nobody knew if Congress dared to dredge a chief ministerial candidate from its ranks of drab mediocrity. The Bharatiya Janata Party is still only a spectre lurking in the shadows of bigotry. Pitted against anonymity and nonentity, Didi—elder sister—walked into victory. What now? She can go on distributing largesse to the needy, but that won’t enrich their lives.…

TWO YEARS AGO, Priya Aurora, a 39-year-old writer with a media company in Shimla, boarded a bus to her office. The seats were taken and as she stood on the gangway, someone got up and offered her one. Priya realised with some shock that the person had thought she was pregnant. She had always been overweight but the scales had now hit 100 kg, embarrassing even her children, one of whom told her at a birthday that the best gift would be if Priya became thin. The bus incident happened in December 2014. From 1 January, she began to test something her brother had suggested. Called the ketogenic diet, it involved bringing down carbohydrate consumption to the barest minimum. She dropped roti, rice and sugar, simultaneously replacing it with fat…

CAST Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence DIRECTOR Bryan Singer IN THE BIBLE, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse ride on black, red, white and pale horses and represent the conditions of human suffering to come: pestilence, war, famine and death. It is an apocalyptic vision of the future. The X-Men of Marvel Comics, who flit through various episodes of history before they come back to the late 20th century as mutants, are, in this episode of the franchise, trapped by an ancient and powerful mutant called the Apocalypse and turned this time around into characters from the Christian tradition: the four horsemen. Together, their job is to wreck havoc on the modern world and then remake it in a fresh image. But there is too little rumination on human…