Innholdsfortegnelse for 06 August 2018 i Open Magazine

PAKISTAN AND DEMOCRACY It would be in the interest of Pakistan to opt for a true democratic set-up (‘The Bloody Biography of Change’ by TCA Raghavan, July 30th, 2018). A democratic and stable Pakistan will be of enormous benefit to India as well. But since real power there rests with Pakistan’s army, how the country will be able to adhere to true democracy remains a big question. At times, it seems that the latest elections are a sham. The late Benazir Bhutto believed in democracy for Pakistan, which is a must for economic growth and public welfare. But it is a difficult task to build a growth-oriented economy in today’s Pakistan, which is yet to show its commitment to democracy. In a globalised and competitive world, each country must be…

TWO YEARS AGO, when Nitish Kumar implemented prohibition in Bihar through a law that sought to imprison drunk people for five years, it was abundantly clear that it was going to fail. That he would impose some kind of ban on alcohol consumption was anticipated, but the ridiculousness of the punishments meted out was unexpected from someone who was thought to have common sense. This week, as he waters the law down, it is obvious once again that wishful thinking, even if with a sober mind, is at play. A PTI report on the amendments says: ‘Speaking during the ongoing monsoon session of the state assembly, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar said, “After lot of consultations and review of the liquor law in last two years we have decided to make…

IN THE FALL of 1443, a dhow bringing an ambassador from Timurid Central made landfall at the port of Calicut on the Malabar Coast of Southern India. Abdur Razzak Samarqandi was on an important mission to open diplomatic relations between the Timurid Empire and what was then the most powerful city-state in India. Vijayanagara, the great Hindu City of Victory, was then approaching the peak of its power, and controlled almost all the rich lands of peninsula India to the south of the river Tunghabadra. Abdur Razzak was not, however, in the best of moods. He stepped ashore after a long and gruelling land journey from Herat in Western Afghanistan through Persia to Hormuz, ‘where the heat was so intense that the marrow boiled in the bones and the sword…

AS A YOUNG geology student in Durgapur, West Bengal, in the 1980s, Rajat Mazumdar now recalls with affection how taken up he was with the debate around an ancient rock sample that had been discovered in Odisha. “The scientists who had made the discovery [from Presidency College in Kolkata] believed that they had found a sample that was part of an ancient crust and at least around 3.8 billion years old. Everyone back then was talking about it,” he says. But after the findings were published, several scientists were sceptical of the claim. And subsequent investigations revealed that the sample was old, but not that old. “There had been some sort of a miscalculation and it was found that it was actually about 3.3 billion years old. But it became…

1932 Silver Linings Playbook THE TIMES , LONDON, on March 1, 1932, one-and-a-half months before the Indians embarked on their first-ever official tour of England, published the following report: ‘The game gown on…The Delhi police may be having three sharp rounds with a rioting crowd in the Chandni Chowk, the crowded bazaar of the old city, but a mile or two away on the club ground set in the gardens that 400 years ago Shah Jehan built for his princess, a Roshanara side will be playing the Punjab Wanderers or an Army team from New Cantonments will be fielding in the white sunlight.…’ Here is the team for England: The Maharaja of Patiala, Captain (eventually withdrew in favour of the Maharaja of Porbander), K. S. Ghanshyamsinhji (Kathiawar), Vice Captain, Amar…

IN MILINDA BANERJEE’S The Mortal God, the title is a leitmotif that runs through the book. It is meant to draw attention to the connections between ideas of divinity, rulership, sovereignty and sacralisation of the political form. Hobbes’ phrase, the ‘moral God’, serves as a ‘provocative metonym’ to convey the ‘divinisation of the political’. However, Banerjee, in laying out divergent forms of political deployment of the divine, goes beyond the Hobbesian invocation of the State as a mortal god to suggest that ‘sovereignty or even divinity belongs potentially to everyone, and is not the monopoly of the state and of ruling hierarchs.’ The book suggests that expressions and markers of sovereignty do not exhaust themselves in Bodin’s or Hobbes’ theories of state sovereignty. A focus solely on these ‘state discourses’…

SHRAZA IS most commonly associated with the Bindu, a solitary black cosmic circle once described by the man himself as “the seed of all energy and source of all life”. SH Raza: Traversing Terrains, a major new exhibition on the legendary artist that will run through October in Mumbai, does its best to convey otherwise. “Without shattering the importance of the Bindu, we want to correct people’s understanding of how Raza arrived at the Bindu, what the Bindu is in the course of his own art history, and where it came from,” says Ashvin E Rajagopalan, a co-curator of the show. Neither a full-dress retrospective nor too marginal to be ignored, Traversing Terrains packs in just enough of Raza’s works from his early to later years to give visitors a…

SANDRA BULLOCK AND her criminal-minded friends in Ocean’s 8 plot to steal a very expensive Cartier necklace right off the neck of a guest at a party. Is this just another heist film? Sandra talks about what makes it special. What about Ocean’s 8 enticed you to do it? Was it the thrill of the heist? To me, the most important thing wasn’t the heist. I knew that would be executed and that would be fun, but to me it was important to show how these women just supported each other and liked each other and wanted the best for each other And live their authentic lives with each other. And I think [it’s] the same thing with friendship; as you get older, your circle of friends gets small because…

If even a bit of what Imran Khan’s former wife, Reham Khan, has written about him is true, then it is shocking that such a person is a celebrated public figure at all (‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll’, July 30th, 2018). Reham Khan must be given credit for having had the courage to not only rebuild her life but also pen a book on her experiences. It must not have been easy to find a publisher and write about such sensitive topics. Yet, it is important that she has done so because people must be made aware of who their politicians are behind closed doors. The persona that is presented at speeches and rallies is always a version that the person wants you to trust as authentic. However, it…

INDIA’S RELATIONS WITH the US have seen a measure of turbulence in recent months. But there is some good news on the horizon. An impending piece of legislation that would have injected bitterness in bilateral ties has now been suitably amended to take care of India’s sensitivities. The latest version of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), a law meant to sanction countries that have close defence relations with Russia, now exempts India. This paves the way for New Delhi to go ahead with the purchase of an S-400 air defence missile system, a Rs 39,000-crore deal that had been in the works for long. The S-400 is an essential weapon platform for India’s security in an increasingly hostile environment. With this exemption, the road is now clear…

Here’s a quiz. Who said the following words recently? “In the name of saving the cow, if you are shifting focus to whether someone is eating beef or not, then it is a sham… You want to save ‘gau-mata’ (mother cow) but what about ‘mata’ (mother)…? Our women are unsafe and you are protecting cows.” These words did not emerge from the liberal camp. They were spoken by someone from the other end of the ideological spectrum. These are the words of Uddhav Thackeray, ironically the leader of a right-wing party, the Shiv Sena, which has built its politics by bullying minorities and ‘outsiders’ (to Maharashtra) and pushing its idea of Hindutva nationalism. The party was content with goings-on so long as it was the state’s dominant right-wing party and…

IN THE HISTORY OF politics, it’s unlikely that anybody has ‘come of age’ as frequently—and as ceremoniously—as Rahul Gandhi, the 48-year-old Congress president and the party’s official prime minister-in-waiting. The latest rite of his coming-of-age was on July 20th, when he gave what was described by his admirers as a “stirring” speech in Parliament during the debate on the No-Confidence motion against the Narendra Modi Government. Rahul Gandhi is young only as far as political leaders go. The 36-year-old Sachin Bansal, who was declared the 86th richest person in India in November 2015, came of age 11 years ago when he co-founded Flipkart along with Binny Bansal, also 36 now. Sundar Pichai, the 46-year-old Chennai-born CEO of Google, was selected to head the world’s foremost internet search company in August…

Margo Jefferson is the author of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award-winning Negroland, a memoir about growing up as part of Chicago’s Black elite in the 1950s and 60s. ‘I call it Negroland because I still find the word ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts,’ she writes. Her first book, On Michael Jackson, is a contemplation on the King of Pop, whom she describes as ‘fragile and feral, percussive and sinuous, vulnerable and unassailable’. Jefferson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, and has worked as a cultural critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. She is currently professor of writing at Columbia University School of Arts. We met in London,…

NEW FACTS SOURCED from multilateral institutions that include the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund and collated by Brookings Institution last month showed that extreme poverty in the world has shifted its destination to Nigeria (with 87 million people in extreme poverty) from India (73 million). Even better, extreme poverty in India continues to fall. This is a big event. And yet, the extent of underreporting on this game-changing, hope-delivering data was shocking. Apart from the usual stories, the significance of India rising to a challenge that had seemed unsurmountable for the better part of seven decades was lost to the media. Like all other issues, economic, strategic or political, the way we view our world has been contaminated with politics-led, media-carted, quickly-consumed negativity, irrespective of facts. In…

A MEMOIR chronicles the author’s life until the moment of writing it. It is about what created a sense of belonging, what induced dissonance, and most importantly, what the author distilled from these experiences. In a food memoir, the author’s travails, successes and epiphanies are intimately linked to what he or she ate, and what the process by which the food arrived on the table taught her about herself. Barbara Frey Waxman defines the genre as ‘a culinary memoir that chronicles the growth and development of the memoirist through the lens of food memories, in narratives that either begin with childhood or that interpose frequent flashbacks to earliest formative experiences’. Globally, the travel memoir was all the rage in the 70s and 80s—think Bruce Chatwin (Songlines is one of my…

Worthy of Praise Saif Ali Khan may not be on social media, but he knows of practically every word that’s been written about his performance in Sacred Games. The best thing is that he has a sense of humour about it. He acknowledges repeated comments from fans about the size of Sartaj Singh’s butt, and chuckles while admitting that it does look “unusually large” on the show. Saif is also full of praise for reviewers who’ve spotted the ‘layers’ in the show, but doesn’t agree with the occasional carping that the Sartaj Singh track is less gripping that the Ganesh Gaitonde narrative, and that Nawazuddin Siddiqui pretty much chews up the scenery. “That’s unfair. Nawaz is great, but the show can’t only be about Ganesh Gaitonde or it would be…

FROM THE MOMENT it became clear that there was no immediate threat to Narendra Modi, the no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha became a routine exercise, another occasion for all the stalwarts to deliver a speech to a TV audience. I don’t believe that there was ever any danger of the Government being defeated on the floor of the House. The hype on TV bore little connection with the bored, dismayed expressions of MPs as they rescheduled their Friday travel plans to abide by the three-line whip of their parties. If there was any interest in the proceedings of the Lok Sabha on July 20th, it was centred on the performance of Congress President Rahul Gandhi. He was to lead his party’s charge against the Prime Minister, and all eyes…

GRAPHIC NOVELS HAVE been at the edge of literary consideration for a long time. Cultural tastemakers hemmed and hawed over them. Fans championed their artistic and literary merits, even as some of the art form’s top practitioners were unsure of what a ‘graphic novel’ was. Alan Moore, for one, widely considered a great exponent of it, called it a “marketing term” with a “gnawing hunger to be accepted”. Neil Gaiman, whenever he is complimented for writing great graphic novels rather than comic books, apparently feels like “someone who’d been informed that she wasn’t actually a hooker” but a “lady of the evening”. The term ‘graphic novel’ is, after all, a relatively recent coinage (of the 1960s); and the format—defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘a fictional story that is presented in a…

JUSTICE IN THE field of business suffers a classic affliction: rules for a few are framed by the many, and the many who frame them are mostly clueless about what the few do. No wonder viewpoints tend to clash: what’s too harsh for CEOs looks too lenient to lawmakers (and people at large); what’s plainly absurd to businessfolk is too complex for the majority; and what’s unjust to those who know their trade is okay in popular perception. What gets the go-by, alas, is empathy. It was to address failures of this kind that John Rawls (1921-2002) proposed his ‘original position’ test of fairness, one that can plausibly be recast as a sort of Rawlsian Roulette: imagine, for a moment, that everybody is to be spun around and reborn randomly…

THE POLICE CONSTABLE had something strange to report to his district chief. In 20 years of service in these parts in Telangana, he had never witnessed it before. Situated over 200 km from Hyderabad, the Jogulamba Gadwal district has recently been carved out of Telangana’s Mahabubnagar district. Accessible from the Hyderabad-Bengaluru national highway, the district comprises 194 villages and 65 tribal hamlets. In March this year, when Rema Rajeshwari took over as the police chief of this district and the neighbouring Wanaparthy, she asked constables of her rural police stations to take charge of three villages each and interact every week with people there. It is from one such area that the constable reported a new development: nobody in the villages he visited was sleeping outside his or her home…