Innholdsfortegnelse for 25 June 2018 i Open Magazine

PASSION FOR FOOTBALL Indians like to go where the action is (‘What Are We Doing There?’ by Deepak Narayanan, June 18th, 2018). This is why World Cup fever has not only gripped Indian cities, but many of us are flying over to Russia to watch the games live. It doesn’t matter if our country has a team there or not, for football fans have adopted countries that they support as much as they would do their own. The enthusiasm for World Cup matches will be evident in the number of big city restaurants and pubs that will be playing the games on large screens with promotional offers to attract football fans. It will be visible in merchandise on sale and private parties that will be held to watch various face-offs.…

EVERYONE IS allowed a political ideology, but a little bit of common sense must accompany it. Otherwise what awaits is the fate of Atul Kochhar, a chef based in the United Arab Emirates, who fell into the dangerous illusion of the social networking public square which goes thus: people spew, joust and rant on forums like Twitter thinking it is a drawing room conversation, whereas what it actually is like writing an op-ed in a newspaper under your byline and receiving instant letters to the editor. Indians are overwhelmingly communal and casteist in private, but in public most know enough to be decent and inoffensive. On social media, this distinction gets blurred. And people like Kochhar get sacked. There can be no rational explanation for someone throwing his survival instincts…

‘BUT’ TWAS A famous victory.’ It had to be. Both participants desperately needed it. Donald Trump had to show some success somewhere. As for the 34-year-old Kim Jong Un, he craved fiercely to demonstrate to his patron in Beijing and rival in Seoul, to say nothing of Korea’s former rulers in Tokyo, that he now walks and talks and sups with kings. He has shown himself to be the smarter of the two, not boasting on Twitter or rambling on at press conferences, spilling beans no one had heard of before. Unlike Trump who has made promises galore since the tête-à-tête, Kim is bound only by the vague wording of their joint statement which he can interpret as he likes, when he likes. That is how his country, arbitrary relic…

FATE, SOMETIMES TO an even greater extent than tactical acumen, controls the lives of international football managers—the 32 most important non-playing men at a World Cup. From the sideline, these frowning faces in expensive suits will coax, hiss, guide and berate their players towards the opposition’s box, towards the crucial end of Russia 2018 and, hopefully, towards the Jules Rimet trophy itself. For Argentina (and hence, Lionel Messi), that man is Jorge Sampaoli—a sun-kissed, attack-minded quinquagenarian, around whose perfectly bald head is said to sit an aura of genius; vouched for not just by Argentines but every football fan in Latin America. But it was fate (the puppeteer who plays chess with two queens, according to Terry Pratchett) that put Sampaoli in charge of his country’s dreams and Messi’s legacy,…

THE GOOD NEWS for Bill Clinton is that he doesn’t have to exert himself to outdo his presidential predecessors. Way before he became US president, Abe Lincoln wrote a murder mystery, The Trailor Murder Mystery, and got it published in his local paper, The Quincy Whig, in 1846. Abe’s dream was to become an Edgar Allen Poe, but alas, his writing style did not rise to those levels, preferring to hew close to his profession. The style is reminiscent of a judge summing up a case for the jury. Then we come to poor Jimmy Carter, who wrote The Hornet’s Nest (2001), a saga set in the American South. A reviewer panned it in the Guardian as ‘an unreadable book, one which leaves other unreadables (like The Da Vinci Code)…

I HAVE A FEELING I am doing this all wrong, the review of Running Away from Elephants needs to flow, aided by a drink or two amidst the cheery banter of a pub; not primly written during working hours at the desk. After all, it was ‘out of a drunken conversation’ that wildlife biologist Rauf Ali—who died at a young 62 in 2016—took the decision to write his story, even though he thought this was best left to famous—if boring—men. Thank the good lord for such spirited discussions, for who else but the most loved (but not always) maverick of the conservation world would have given us this hugely entertaining, no-holds-barred memoir? As an aside, if you are to read the book, as you must, it will convince you that…

OVER THE DECADES, we have seen John Travolta in various avatars. For many, he will always be the slick-haired Danny, totting a cigarette and burning up the dance floor in Grease (1978). For others, he will be the terrorist/agent in Face/Off (1997), and of course, who will ever forget the cold-blooded assassin Vincent Vega of Pulp Fiction (1994)? We can now see Travolta as the crime boss John Gotti in Kevin Connolly’s Gotti. Travolta’s wife Kelly Preston plays his wife in the movie as well. It is a role that Travolta has been pursuing for the last seven years, and it’s one that shows that the man retains his acting chops. Why have you been wanting to play Gotti? He just fascinated me as a very complicated character. He behaved…

Even if India is not playing in the FIFA World Cup, there is ample interest in the tournament across the country. The World Cup Issue (June 18th, 2018), was a good mix of politics, entertainment and analysis of the game and its top players. It is no doubt true that certain teams and names are favourites and there are die-hard fans supporting them. Millions are keen to see who will go on to win the Cup. Last time’s champions, Germany, will surely be under more pressure than other teams, given the trend of defending title holders getting eliminated from the reckoning right at the group stage. It is good that Open’s issue went beyond the obvious on the world’s favourite game to examine emotions and other aspects of football that…

US PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S recent summit meeting with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has spurred hopes for a political dialogue well beyond the Korean Peninsula. After the Trump-Kim meet, Shehbaz Sharif, a leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) and the brother of unseated Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, expressed hope in a tweet: ‘If the United States and North Korea can return from the brink of a nuclear flashpoint, there is no reason why Pakistan and India cannot do the same…’ That reflects admirable sentiment, but little else. For starters, the Indo-Pakistan problem is structural and is far more knotted than the mere de-nuclearisation of a recalcitrant country even if the latter task is also a tough one. Pakistan has waged a number of wars with India…

After a hiatus, Arvind Kejriwal is back to his public drama, the tack that he had used to such good effect to become a political force and then quit when he saw that as a chief minister in power, it didn’t usually work the way he would have hoped or wanted it to. His sit-in at the Delhi Lieutenant Governor’s office might sound ridiculous, but the purpose of theatrics is not always victory; it can also be publicity. In Kejriwal’s case, the idea is probably to inform the residents of Delhi and his own supporters among them that he is not responsible for any lack of governance or instances of corruption in the city. He is back in the headlines, even if he has attracted criticism for it. To that…

DEATH AND redemption, meditations and drama, the epic scale of Mahabharata and Ramayana and other poetries are some of the themes at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Noida. Kiran Nadar and KNMA curator, Roobina Karode have never shied away from imagining the infinite canvas. “I used to teach many of these works in college but I’d never seen them ,” Karode says. “I’m lucky to actually get to see these works— something that Mrs Nadar and KNMA have made possible.” That’s precisely the feeling you get when you walk into this exquisite exhibition from KNMA’s 4,300 (approximately 6,000 if you count each artwork in a series separately) strong collection of modern and contemporary Indian art that ranges from the late 19th-century miniatures to rare works by Raja Ravi…

A RUN SHOURIE HAS not always offered the most balanced judgments. His writings can be undermined by their polemical form and exaggerated character. His good and valuable insights are often lost in narratives that seem unruly. Yet, Shourie occupies an important, even unique, place in Indian intellectual life. This fact is not explained merely by his remarkable productivity—Shourie has authored more than 25 books. Rather, it rests on his capacity to consider questions and problems in direct terms, and venture suppositions that would be uncomfortable to many. Even when he is wrong—as he often is—Shourie tackles serious and profound matters, offers critiques that are unafraid, and goes where not all would be ready to tread. Shourie’s new book, Anita gets Bail, is a fine example of this capacity. It begins…

THE ITALIAN ARTIST Piranesi hit the big time in the 18th century with his etchings of Rome. His engravings of the Colosseum and other tourist traps were lapped up by the paying public. Just as his career was peaking, he started a new product line. And spent five years drawing prisons. Imaginary prisons. Impossible prisons. Labyrinthine, immense, utterly imaginary prisons. Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione belonged to a category called ‘Capricci’, paintings or ‘whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin’. These ‘whimsical aggregates’ also find expression in The Snake and the Lotus, a new graphic novel by Appupen (the nom de plume of George Mathen). However, Appupen’s world is driven by something far darker than architectural whim-wham. For more than a decade, he has been patiently building brick by brick, panel by…

A Refreshingly Candid Relationship Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt appear to have decided they will not let fear of the paparazzi or gossip mongers come in the way of their relationship. The young pair, who are currently dating by all accounts, have been refreshingly candid and unguarded about showing the world how they feel about each other. From Ranbir being spotted attending a preview show of Alia’s Raazi to an interview he gave GQ magazine in which he admitted the relationship “is really new right now”, you have to hand it to the famously low-profile-in-love leading man for putting himself out there. The couple made their first public appearance at Sonam Kapoor’s wedding reception. Since then, they’ve been seen coming and leaving the set of Brahmastra together, and last week…

A FEW MONTHS AGO, the student body of a famous British university wrote asking whether I would be interested in participating in a debate on the legacy of Winston Churchill. The question posed was: Is Churchill someone Britain should be ashamed of? Since a debate involves selecting a side, I chose to inform them that I would like to defend Churchill’s legacy in Britain. The doughty prime minister who inspired his nation to doggedly resist Hitler at a time when the German war machine was all powerful may well have a more contested legacy in India. Here, his contemporaries regarded him as the leader of the group that contested almost every clause of the Government of India Act, 1935, recalled his description of Mahatma Gandhi as a ‘half-naked fakir’, and…

THE FIRST RECORDED instance of the word ‘fuck’ in the English language, it appears, occurred sometime in 1528. It had occurred twice before, at least in other languages—hidden encoded in a 1500 satirical Latin poem and as ‘fukkit’ in a 1513 Scottish poem. In 1528, in a copy of the moral conduct guidebook of a monastery, an anonymous monk scrawled out the words ‘O d fuckin Abbot’. Back in the 1500s, the real obscenity for the monk was not the word ‘fuck’, but the word starting with ‘d’, probably ‘damned’, which he refused to spell out. Half a millennium later, in a world of varied new swear words, where extreme obscenities have lost their power to shock and ‘damned’, the more obscene companion of the word ‘fuckin’ in the 1528…

THE ONLY OTHER time I have come across a blind Indian man who is the protagonist of his pages, the only other time before I read Missing by Sumana Roy, that is, was when I devoured Ved Mehta’s autobiography Face To Face. It was a funny book for a 19-year-old to read so avidly, also it was odd that I happened upon it at a secondhand bookstore in Paris. Perhaps reading about a blind man navigating his way through India and America reflected my own feelings, being in a strange new country and trying to be a tourist alone, while my father worked. I walked across Paris, getting lost in side alleys and trying to interpret the Metro, while I read Mehta’s descriptions of going to the US for the…