Innholdsfortegnelse for August 1, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK This refers to ‘The Preacher’s Progress’ (25 July 2016). Sometimes the Islamic scholar Zakir Naik is projected as a second Dawood Ibrahim. The tone and tenor of his speeches are entirely wrong and should be banned, they only promote hatred and division between communities. Religion is a personal matter and it should be entirely up to individuals how they wish to pursue or interpret their relationship with God. Not only is Naik using religion and his ‘interpretation’ of it to make millions of dollars that fund his frequent trips abroad, but he is also limiting the public’s right to choose their method and way of worship. Who is he to tell us men can beat their wives according to God or what constitutes ‘jihad’ and…

A COUPLE OF days before the horror in Nice, there was this story in The New York Times about a philosophers’ spat over Islam. Very French indeed. It was between two former friends who have written some of the most original arguments on the single most powerful idea that continues to terrorise the world: radical Islamism. Their differences are more than a matter of phraseology; they reflect the persistence of a divided perception that goes beyond talking shops to the highest offices of power in Paris and Washington and even Delhi. Olivier Roy believes jihad today is driven not by the Book but by the man from the margins, swayed by fantasy. All terrorists, he says, are not Salafists, and the biography of every killer cannot be fitted into the…

I DON’T REMEMBER such a rainy summer in London. May and June have been grey and damp and the two months when the garden is at its best have been almost wasted. The months are brief, but the days are long. Yet it has been a grey backdrop to political confusion to rival the last days of Rome. Rain songs are not desirable in our damp climate. ‘Rain, rain, go away’ is more the thought than the oddly chirpy ‘Singing in the rain’. Yet rain songs in Hindi films can help us imagine what rain means in another climate, where an entire society is dependent on the lifegiving annual monsoon. Rain songs are usually associated with eroticism and fertility, carrying the emotional meaning and aesthetic associations in their lyrics, musical…

How Diana Got Her Groove Back Okay, so she’s no Meryl Streep (who is!) but it’s still a mystery why Diana Penty couldn’t find one film offer worth taking up after making her debut in Cocktail opposite Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone. Film industry insiders say the pretty model just didn’t have her heart in the movies, and chose instead to pursue a career in advertising. But that sabbatical now appears to be over. We’ll see her next in Happy Bhag Jayegi, a light-hearted comedy produced by Tanu Weds Manu’s Anand L Rai, in which she reportedly plays the title character, a feisty Punjabi girl—on the lines of Geet from Jab We Met, some say—with unconventional solutions to sticky situations. Whoever’s advising her appears to be doing a good…

IF A MAN Booker award-winning novel was found to have lifted numerous passages from the book that had won the previous year, imagine the frenzy in the world of literature. Or if the Oscar for Best Film was found to have dialogues from the movie that won the year before. Usually such stealing does not happen because of two reasons—integrity and intelligence. Most people know that to plagiarise is unethical, but to do it in a manner that you are 110 per cent certain of getting caught is taking stupidity to another level. Writers are, however, held to a higher standard than potential first ladies of the United States. Melania Trump has just been caught with her speech at the Republican Convention having borrowed heavily from Michelle Obama’s address at…

JULY 2016 is being celebrated, at least by the media, as the 25th aniversary of India’s liberation from the dirigiste policies of the previous 40 years. The Budget of July 1991 has been made to go down in history as a ‘pathbreaking’ one, the Budget that set free, in then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh’s words, the ‘animal spirits’ of Indian businessmen. At the end of his speech, he quoted Victor Hugo to say that no one can stop an idea whose time has come. What people don’t know—or didn’t until a recent biography of the then Prime Minister set the record right—is that Singh’s first draft of the Budget was a socialist document. The Prime Minister, says his biographer, asked Singh, “Is this for what I chose you?” Singh came…

LATE PAST MIDNIGHT on Monday, once everyone at home had gone to sleep, Lhendup G Bhutia walked into the guest room of his matchbox apartment that he liked to call his study, climbed a wooden stool which he had stacked atop a white plastic chair at the centre of the room, and, looking up at the ceiling fan, strung a rope around it with a noose large enough for the job at hand. The following morning, when well-wishers asked his partner why he had done what he had, and if she had noticed anything suspicious, she confirmed that he had indeed been behaving oddly for the last few days. “He’s been stepping out a lot these last few days,” she said. “Not sleeping, like. Not talking. A little cuckoo really.…

ON A RAINY JUNE day in Chennai last year, 37-year-old Thangavel Ramalingam met Rajinikanth for the first time. Not as a zealot whistling through one of his films first day, first show or part of a collegiate flock thronging his residence, but as a colleague. Ramalingam’s world had been thrown into ferment a few days ago when his classmate—from the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai—and filmmaker Pa Ranjith, with whom he had worked on Madras, called to say that he had snagged a film with Rajinikanth. Ramalingam was to be the art director. “I couldn’t comprehend it at first,” he says. “I had not even fantasised about such an opportunity. I can honestly claim to be among Rajini sir’s biggest fans. Growing up in my hometown, Peravur, I screened…

LESS THAN A week after a botched coup by a section of the Turkish armed forces, emergency has been imposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A counter-coup is now in effect. To begin with, the coup attempt on 15 July was so inept that it bordered on a Potemkin show of sorts. A bunch of soldiers rammed into broadcasting stations, tanks ran around with no aim, and a host of other inexplicable mistakes—from a coup planner’s perspective—made it a non-event. That performance was no match for what Erdoğan unleashed. With his huge mass of supporters in Central Anatolia behind him, the president had something else in store. Over the past week, close to 50,000 employees in different government departments have been sacked, including that of education, Erdogan’s chief target in…

As it stands now, the Supreme Court has offered Rahul Gandhi two options for his 2014 comment that connected the RSS to Mahatma Gandhi’s murder: either he apologises for the remark or faces trial. A more politically astute response for Gandhi would be to refuse, stretching out the matter in court, and perhaps if it comes to it, get imprisoned. But what if he did say sorry? Would the apology, while satisfying the Judiciary and perhaps being read by many as a sign of cowardice, have any meaning in intent? For an apology to be real, a person must feel apologetic. One that is made under an ultimatum is merely a convenience. WORD’S WORTH “It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do…

WHEN PEOPLE ASK me ‘What is your favourite city?’ I typically mention two: Calcutta and Boston. Calcutta is where I grew up and had all my education, and it’s where I have lived all my life. Boston was my home abroad for a couple of years in the end-1950s as a young wife and mother; my husband Sisir took advanced training in paediatrics there and I accompanied him to what seemed then to be a very faraway land. There I had my first experience of a foreign country and an alien culture. I found the United States of that time welcoming, on the whole—this was before the complacency of its society was upended by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the rise of feminism. But there was a…

THESE ARE DAYS in which Indians should admire their neighbouring cousins, doffing topis to them for jobs well done. After a 10-year campaign of hectic hygiene evangelism, Bangladesh has declared that it is now a country entirely free of open-air defecation (even as two-thirds of the people of much richer India continue to move their bowels al fresco). To the unflushing west, Pakistan—which hasn’t played a Test series at home since 2009—defeated England at Lord’s in one of the tautest Test matches in recent memory. Its team came to Lord’s as a twitching underdog; it left with a military swagger, right down to pushups on the holy green, as well as salutes and other playful martial affectations. Bangladesh’s achievement is the greater, of course, in the grand scheme of things.…

THE PHILOSOPHER: A HISTORY IN SIX TYPES Editors: Justin EH Smith Princeton University Press 272 pages | $27.95 IN MARCH 2006, soon after the publication of Manliness, a controversial book that extolled manly virtues allegedly at the cost of women, author Harvey Mansfield was asked an unusual question: how could there be women philosophers when women were not allowed into top academic institutions until recent times? The unflappable Mansfield replied: universities produce doctors of philosophy and not philosophers. So what exactly do philosophers do? The academic answer would be about the study of specialised questions like free will, the problems of rationality (and irrationality) and a host of arcane questions. Many, including Justin Smith, a professor of science in Paris and the author of The Philosopher: A History in Six…