Innholdsfortegnelse for October 17, 2016 i Open Magazine

editor@openmedianetwork.in LETTER OF THE WEEK Baba Ramdev and his ever-growing empire never fail to make for interesting reading (‘Ramrajya’, 10 October 2016). He is a man of many skills and talents, the most important of which is his ability to market himself. He knows justwhat to say, what to sell, and how to make something appeal to the masses. One cannot fault the purpose of Patanjali on paper at all. And this reflects in the surprisingly quick manner in which the brand has grown across the country. People think that because this is a company governed by a sanyasi, it will be pure and good for them. Of course, its products are not bad. But one does wonder exactly how organic some of them are. We only have Baba’s word…

EVEN IF THE BCCI had been unable to disburse any money for the third Test against New Zealand, as it threatened, would it have mattered? It is unlucky for the organisation that the Lodha Committee asking banks to stop BCCI’s payments to state associations should have happened when a Test series was underway because no one watches Test matches. Fewer people are also watching One-Day matches. If the TRP numbers for the latest IPL were any indication, then even that has dropped. It would be interesting if people are just fed up with cricket, but that is not going to be the case here. Cricket, in its longer versions beyond T20, is a pretty boring game. Baseball, basketball, football ask only a couple of hours of its fan, ODI cricket…

Donald Trump needs, in short, not a miracle, but a fair wind, perhaps a stumble from Clinton, and above all, to restore his recent discipline THE SCENE I am about to describe really happened. I saw it with my own eyes, on a stormy night last week, at a small airport in Melbourne, central Florida. Before a crowd of 10,000 people (with thousands more shut outside), an obvious con-man stepped from his vast blue personalised jet, and just stood there, at the top of the wheelie steps, gazing at the sea of gaping mouths, the sparkling constellation of phone cameras, listening to the excited screams, the shouts of adulation, drinking in the crazed Trump-mania echoing around the hangar. It was like a visitation from a prophet, or even a Telugu…

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES: THE FOOTBALLING HISTORY OF ARGENTINA Jonathan Wilson Nation Books 411 Pages | Rs 1000 NEEDING TO WIN by a margin of at least four goals in its second round match against Peru to progress to the 1978 football World Cup final, the hosts Argentina wound up putting six with no reply into their opponents’ net. At the time, the journalist Brian Glanville had claimed that the Peruvians were ‘obviously bought’, a suspicion fuelled not least by the fact that Peru had won handsomely against Scotland and Iran, and drawn with The Netherlands, in their first round games. This theory has since seen several iterations, as Jonathan Wilson shows us in his compelling and comprehensive new book, Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina. In…

AFTER MY MOTHER died in 1992, the frequency of my visits to Kolkata—or Calcutta, as I instinctively call it—diminished progressively. Caught up in the hurly-burly of the profession, there was little cause to visit the city of my birth and childhood. There was always an annual visit, not least to sample the delights of the family cook who guarded my mother’s recipes fiercely. But it was apparent that Cal was slowly but surely receding from the family’s must-do list. Four years ago, I regained possession of a house in south Kolkata. The house, built by my grandfather in 1932 was approaching dilapidation. The roof leaked, the roots of a dreaded banyan tree were visible at various points and the balconies overlooking the street had been turned into bathrooms. It looked…

THE ON-GOING visit of Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to New Delhi has all the trappings of a routine visit by a head of government: briefings, photo-ops, Q&A sessions with the press, etcetera. There is, however, one difference this time. Wickremesinghe has come to India soon after a summit of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) leaders in Islamabad was cancelled. The Sri Lankan leader has publicly said that SAARC needs to address the issue of terrorism, or else it will not last. His words have been 32 years in the making. In retrospect, SAARC—inaugurated with much fanfare and promise in the heyday of ‘South-South’ cooperation— appears a stillborn group. Unlike other similar groupings in Southeast Asia, North America and Europe, SAARC never managed to get basic things…

Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister of Bihar, has brought in another law on prohibition after the first was struck down by the High Court. It is said to be as or even more draconian. If this gets struck down too, what will he do? Can he go on trying to enforce the same? Obviously, not. When a politician wants to implement a populist measure that is not legal, he does it anyway and then leaves it to the courts. That shows he tried. Most people already know this trick. Chances are the second law is Nitish’s way of convincing his voter that he tried and tried until he couldn’t any longer. Otherwise, why not try milder legislation that doesn’t penalise entire villages and property owners if someone has had a drink…

“TODAY OUR JAWANS ARE DYING AT THE BORDER AND I’M NOT SURE HOW TO TELL THAT STORY BECAUSE A FILM IS NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH” Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra When you walk into filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bandra office, you get a sense of nostalgia. Not of having been here before, but of having experienced stories that were born in this space. The high ceiling, the smell of varnish, a traditional wooden rooftop above, a massive film library on one side and a writer’s table on the other, and an easy couch in the middle of the room where Mehra sits discreetly. He’s scribbling something on a piece of paper. He greets you, and notices you’ve pulled out a book from his collection. It’s the shooting script of Michel Gondry’s…

IN THE JUNGLES OF THE NIGHT: A NOVEL ABOUT JIM CORBETT Stephen Alter Aleph 193 Pages | Rs 499 AN AUTHOR fascinated by man-eater slayer Jim Corbett has a tough task. At least four biographies of the famed hunter of man-eaters and bestselling author exist. His fans have written blog posts, articles and books on him, even pinpointed locations mentioned in his books. So how can a writer approach the subject with a fresh perspective? Faced with the quandary, Stephen Alter switched genres: he fictionalised his subject. The result is In the Jungles of the Night: a novel about Jim Corbett, the title excerpted from William Blake’s The Tyger. Alter writes fiction and non-fiction books with equal deftness. Based on what Jim reveals of himself in his books and DC…

JUST LAST MONTH, a 40-year-old business executive reported to our emergency room complaining of nausea and shortness of breath. She had first tried to treat herself with antacids for several hours. She was taking treatment for diabetes irregularly, and had the usual stressful lifestyle of a modernday metro dweller. Although she denied chest pain, tests revealed evidence of a heart attack. She recovered safely after an emergency procedure. Her story tells us several things. First, people with diabetes are at two to four-fold greater risk of heart attacks, often at a young age. Second, the presence of diabetes negates the relative protection that women enjoy with regard to heart attacks. Third, often people with diabetes may not have typical symptoms of ‘crushing central chest pain’, so one needs to have…

DON’T GLOAT. Be restrained. Finally Narendra Modi had to tell his war-mongering legion. After the midnight adventure across the LoC, the leader of India Resurgent could have played the warrior king. He could have deployed his rhetorical armoury to satisfy the base. That’s what he was good at, said conventional wisdom. He kept quiet, and the dignity of his demeanour was noticeable amidst the frenzy of bloodlust. For some of his colleagues, though, it was all North Korea suddenly. The Defence Minister was on a metaphorical spree, not realising the enormity of embarrassment he was causing the Great Leader. Pakistan has not recovered from the anaesthesia even though the surgery was over a while ago, he said, in a cruder fashion in Hindi. It was as if the nationalist rearmed…

DOES THE MILITARY operation conducted by Indian para commandos across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in the wee hours of 29 September change the fundamentals of India’s strategic dynamic with Pakistan? The answer is ‘no’. A single military operation, however successful at the tactical level, cannot by itself impose sufficient deterrent costs on the enemy or demonstrate India’s strategic resolve, which has been found wanting for years. New Delhi has a long way to go before it can hope to reform the Pakistani military’s conduct or deter its rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency from staging more cross-border terrorist strikes, whether in India or on Indian targets in Afghanistan. The Indian Army had conducted cross-LoC operations previously, often in reprisal to military provocations, such as when…

FOR MUCH OF his life, Sai Kumar assumed that people could seek sexual arousal only through pornography. To him, it was a biological response, something that people would occasionally experience and often be caught unaware by. But to get themselves turned on, he believed, people needed to turn to an external agent. In particular, they needed to watch the act of sex, that mechanical performance on a screen. The performers themselves, let alone others fantasised in sexual roles, seemed inadequate to him. “For those with girlfriends or wives—and in the case of women, their boyfriends or husbands—I knew, it was different,” says Kumar. “But otherwise, I thought to get excited, you watched porn.” And then, two years ago, on an online forum where people were discussing sexual intimacy among other…

DEMOCRATS AND DISSENTERS Ramachandra Guha Allen Lane 317 Pages | Rs 699 THIS DIVERSE collection of essays begins with a sketch of the death spiral of the Congress, a party Ramachandra Guha credits with laying sound foundations for democracy in India. Since the third decade of India’s independence, though, the party has suffered the consequences of a severe leadership deficit. Indira Gandhi made dynasty the leadership principle, after which the political traditions the party could draw upon were circumscribed by filial ties. The final stages of the Congress demise begin with Sonia Gandhi stepping up, perhaps to keep a place secure for the eventual succession of her ‘entitled, privileged and yet incompetent’ son Rahul. By way of a historical parallel, Guha refers to the permanent eclipse the Liberal Party in…

Will They, Won’t They? So it appears there may be some movement on the Padmavati front. Deepika Padukone has revealed she’s “deep in prep” for her role in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s troubled epic, and word coming out of the filmmaker’s camp is that he will shoot a song sequence featuring the actress in the weeks ahead. Ranveer Singh, who will be in Paris next week to shoot one final song for Aditya Chopra’s Befikre, is expected to join the unit later. Depending on whom you’re speaking to, there are various theories about why Padmavati remains grounded. There is, of course, the ‘money issue’ and the matter of the ballooning budget. Meanwhile, Shahid Kapoor reportedly negotiated a cool Rs 8 crore salary for taking the second male lead in the film. It…