Innholdsfortegnelse for 29 October 2018 i Open Magazine

DO NOT DERAIL METOO Timely action is a must to prevent misuse of the law and social media (‘Me the People’, October 22nd, 2018). The movement should not be hijacked by those who could be making false accusations out of revenge or for some publicity. Nowadays, there is fire without smoke. Mahesh Kumar MeToo is turning out to be a media frenzy and blame-game. The gloves are off and everyone is ready to have their say. This in turn adversely effects the seriousness of the charges and gravity of the situation, one in which several women have not felt safe in their careers and have been left traumatised by their male superiors or colleagues. What the movement needs is more debate and discussion on why these situations arose in the…

THE PAST FORTNIGHT has been dominated by the MeToo campaign. Regardless of the fact that the campaign is often accompanied by the rhetoric of piousness from its cheerleaders, some good will definitely come out of the revelations. If nothing else, it will warn those occupying high positions that their conduct towards their women subordinates must be exceptionally decorous and totally professional. Anything in either speech or action that can even remotely be construed as inappropriate carries a high personal and professional risk. Some of this awareness was necessary. Many professions, not least the media, that involved working long and unsocial hours had operated as boys’ clubs. Consequently, there was often a locker-room atmosphere that accompanied the job. Bawdy jokes and incessant swearing were often thought of as separating the boys…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IN BOOKS seldom make for interesting reading. The author thanks her near and dear, those who got her to write, those who fine-tuned what she wrote. Anna Burns’ list of acknowledgements in her 2018 Man Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman is similar; she thanks a host of people, literary societies and agents. But it is noteworthy for the mention of a charity and a food bank, Lewes District Churches Homelink and the Newhaven food bank, in East Sussex. Publishing a book is never easy, and in Burns’ case it was harder than most. To write this novel, she had to grit her way through terrible back pain (she is just recovering from surgery) and struggle for a roof over her head and food on the table. Winning the highest literary…

IN THE LAST column, I made the point that to understand India’s railway system today, one has to remember the past. Let me continue where I left off. Circa 1870, several links of the country’s trunk routes were falling into place. GIPR (Great Indian Peninsular Railway) connected Mumbai to Nagpur and Mumbai to Jabalpur. Meanwhile, EIRC (East India Railway Company) built the Howrah-Delhi line via Allahabad. Once there was EIR’s Allahabad-Jabalpur line in 1867 and GIPR’s Mumbai-Jabalpur line in 1870, the Howrah-Allahabad-Mumbai line could be opened in 1870. Around the World in Eighty Days was published in 1873. Phileas Fogg reached Mumbai ahead of schedule and bought a ticket from ‘Bombay to Calcutta’. However, despite what newspapers in London had reported, the conductor said: “The railway isn’t finished… The passengers…

WHEN DURYODHANA ORDERS THAT Draupadi be dragged to the assembly hall, she is menstruating and is covered by only a single piece of cloth. Her husbands have just gambled and lost her in a game of dice. She is now a slave. Her humiliation, Duryodhana and his brothers argue, is justified. Born out of fire, however, Draupadi is not one to take to submission or servility without a fight. The men in the room are her husbands, in-laws and acquaintances. She goes to each of them, and challenges these upholders of justice—Yudhishtira, Arjuna, Drona, Bhishma—to do what is right. They lower their heads. Some divine intervention ensures that Draupadi isn’t stripped, but the damage has been done. It’s undeniably dramatic to compare a contemporary social movement like MeToo to the…

GREAT MYSTERIES SURROUND Umesh Yadav’s career as an international cricketer; mysteries that go beyond the man bun that he currently sports at the top of his head. But that tuft of hair could well be the appropriate starting point to explain the riddles shrouding this unique Indian fast bowler. During the final stages of the second and final Test against the West Indies in Hyderabad, Yadav splattered Shannon Gabriel’s stumps to usher in his finest hour on a cricket field (an hour so fine that it immediately went down as one of the greatest feats achieved by a fast bowler in India) and he stopped by the pitch for a celebration worthy of the occasion. This is what occurred next. Ravichandran Ashwin, who had made his Test debut alongside Yadav…

AMONG THE MANY significant works that form part of Breaking Ground, India’s first-ever ceramics triennale, is Benitha Perciyal’s Let Them Own Their Land. As you walk around the Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, this sculptural piece makes you halt in your tracks. The vacant stare of the figures, the fragmented bodies, a palpable sense of tension—even anger—emanating from them, makes you feel that the work is alive. Also, the innovative use of frankincense, myrrh, coal, cinnamon and lemongrass with clay adds a layer of intrigue to the piece. Time, memory and the nature of transformation have always been the cornerstones of Perciyal’s work, and she takes this even further at the JKK. She draws on memories of watching farmers protest at Jantar Mantar during a visit to Delhi for her solo…

EMPRESS: THE ASTONISHING REIGN OF NUR JAHAN Ruby Lal WRITING THE BIOGRAPHY of a historical figure separated by over four centuries is a challenge. It is even more difficult when the subject is Nur Jahan, the powerful wife of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, whom she married when she was 31, and a widow. The fact that she proceeded to act as a ‘cosovereign’ for a number of years during Jahangir’s reign is widely acknowledged. There is also no doubt about her personal accomplishments, including her skill at shooting with a firearm—an unusual talent for a woman in that age. Her life lends itself to a detailed biography. Yet, it is not surprising that historians have, in the words of RubyLal, ‘offered only bullet-point synopses of Nur’s life: she issued orders, coins…

BASED ON THE true story of a gentleman bandit who holds up banks at the age of 70, The Old Man and the Gun (2018) sees Robert Redford playing Forrest Tucker, who is released from prison and promises to walk the straight and narrow but is tempted into one more heist. The man is suave and charming, characteristics that suit Redford. Not too long ago, he had announced he was giving up acting and that this would be his last gig. Born to a milkman father, he was once arrested as a teenager for borrowing a vehicle that had stolen jewellery in its trunk. Is this really your last performance as an actor? Never say never. On the other hand, I’ve been doing this since I was 21—that’s a long…

What had initially started with Tanushree Dutta’s allegations of sexual assault against Nana Patekar has since opened up a Pandora’s Box in India that doesn’t seem to be shutting anytime soon (‘The Female Lead’ by Divya Unny, October 22nd, 2018). What this movement highlights is that women don’t report such cases in fear of a social stigma or other repercussions not only in rural or small-town India, but even in metro cities. This is unfortunate, to say the least. Since these allegations have come from people of varied backgrounds, they are also a testimony to the fact that women are being harassed in every section of society. MeToo is all about creating an environment where women feel fearless and have a voice. It’s high time that men live up to…

THE PROBLEM WITH being a believer in any God is the absoluteness of the certainty that He is going to protect you. And then, from that assumption, to make a short leap to the senseless idea that it is also your responsibility to protect Him so that He can protect you. Ultimately, between this confusion of role-play, at the point when the hypothesis is to be tested, God coolly does a disappearing act. Which is just about what you are seeing happen in Sabarimala now. There is a Supreme Court order that now permits women of all ages to visit the pilgrimage spot. There is a Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led state government which has an avowed ideology that promotes rationalism and so is insistent on implementing that order. And…

SAY YOU BEGAN as rib or clod of earth say you were blossoming until someone stared too long at your shirt and leaned in unbuttoned pushed forced don’t mistake me this is not a poem against longing but against the kind of one-way desire that herds you into a metaphorical dead-end alley and how this can lead to a weakened epidermis and despair and nights of howling and who can you tell except mother friend cat while sky keeps on being sky and streets fill with danger say you survive and mostly you’re okay because turns out you can carry cauldrons of hurt and your heart is as strong as a giant carbon atom say you gather sisters and tell each other legends about when women were keepers of the…

Paul Scott began his career in the imperial army before he became a novelist. Looking back, he would write with a touch of nostalgia about his overseas posting: ‘India was also my home. It is difficult to describe but I think in a curious way India in those days was every English person’s home, even if it had not been visited. Because we ruled it and benefited from it, it contributed to our well-being and upbringing. It was mysteriously in our blood and perhaps still is.’ We read this early in the pages of The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience (Allen Lane, 640 pages, £30), the English historian David Gilmour’s book of life stories that remained untold even as the Raj continued to dominate the lately…

PEOPLE WILL TELL you that Mexico is like India, but it isn’t till you get there that you realise how true this is. I too felt the thrill when I visited this summer; here was all the spontaneity and colour of India, without the critical gaze and the woman’s daily concern for safety, even while there were incidents of crime and political danger one both heard about and perceived. Here was a sexier version of India, one layer of language between us. Here was the country I knew refracted by a country I understood viscerally, as a writer I admire had witnessed many years earlier. The past ‘was alive here—crepuscular and underground, but also palpable’, writes Anita Desai in The Zigzag Way, her 2004 novel set in Mexico. In India,…

When I speak of fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised? As of now, I would say Mohammed bin Salman is acting like Putin. He is imposing very selective justice. The crackdown on even the most constructive criticism—the demand for complete loyalty with a significant “or else”—remains a serious challenge to the crown prince’s desire to be seen as a modern, enlightened leader. I agree with MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) that the nation should return to its pre-1979 climate, when the government restricted hard-line Wahhabi traditions. Women today should have the same rights as men. And all citizens should have the right to speak their…

MUCH HAS BEEN made of the low turnout in the recently concluded local-body elections in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). At 35.1 per cent, the overall voting percentage is indeed low by Indian standards. There have been calls for the Union Government to ‘wake up’ and do the ‘needful’. These are standard tropes used by those ill informed about the state’s special and almost unique circumstances. The low percentage hides a story in itself. In the Kashmir region, the turnout was very low, at 6.7 per cent, while that in the Jammu and Ladakh regions was much higher, making the ‘overall percentage’ a more or less meaningless figure. What needs attention is the Kashmir Valley and not the other parts of the state. Here it can be said that headway has…

A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. Allahabad by any other name would still be crumbling, and the waters of the Ganga, which meet those of the Yamuna there, would still be polluted. Changing the name of a place is a favourite ploy of politicians to appear to have done something for it without having improved anything. Now that Allahabad is Prayagraj, it joins Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, Kochi and others as an example of a vacuous name change. It might please some Hindus as a response to alleged injustices of history, but that is but a momentary feeling. Their lives do not change for the better. But what is more puzzling is the popular resignation to—and at times approval of—this charade. It encourages politicians to think…

A FEW YEARS AGO, I found myself in one of the upper floors of a high-rise, gazing out of a balcony. It was a pleasant evening. Below, at one end of the building compound, there was a sort of a garden with a walking track. Children could be seen running about, chased by nannies and grandparents, many of them in nightwear and pyjamas, looking as if they were sleepwalking. This was a plush building. Several Hindi cinema celebrities and their families lived here. And if you didn’t lift your gaze from the garden below to the horizon above, to the cramped lanes and houses lumped together with so little breathing space, you could easily forget you were in Mumbai. “Good view, right?” my host asked me in Hindi. He was a…

8% OF ALL MATERNAL DEATHS IN INDIA EVERY YEAR ARE CAUSED BY FAULTY ABORTIONS 80% OF INDIAN WOMEN DO NOT KNOW THAT ABORTION IS LEGAL HERE 15.6 million ABORTIONS ARE CARRIED OUT EVERY YEAR IN THE COUNTRY.OF THESE 11.5 MILLION ARE NOT DONE AT HEALTHCARE FACILITIES “In countries that made an abortion law later—and that includes almost 90 other nations—policymakers had the advantage of making laws less restrictive than India’s” VINOJ MANNING executive director, Ipas Development Foundation…

‘GOING, GOING, gone…’ Banksy, the notorious, anonymous, anti-establishment street artist, thus audaciously captioned his Instagram post on October 6th, 2018. The accompanying photograph captured an iconic moment. It was art history in the making. The object in the spotlight—lot 67—was a print of his stencilled work, Girl with Balloon, originally a 2002 mural by Banksy on Waterloo Bridge in South Bank, showing a young girl letting go of a red heart-shaped balloon. The content was re-appropriated by the artist in 2014 in his campaign supporting Syrian refuges, with another variant used later in 2017 by him as a controversial reward in the form of free prints to voters in the 2017 UK general election to gain momentum against the Conservative party. In 2017, the work had ranked as the UK’s…

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD Mario Vargas Llosa Translated by Edith Grossman IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD, Mario Vargas Llosa delves deep into a period about which he has told us before—in his 1993 memoirs titled A Fish in the Water, which, besides revealing a lot about his childhood, also talked about his unsuccessful career as a politician. He contested the presidency of Peru, the country of his birth, against Japanese-origin Alberto Fujimori, and lost. The Neighbourhood, which appeared in English this year, is the Nobel laureate’s 18th novel, and recaptures the life of Peruvians under Fujimori’s notoriously corrupt regime which saw many prosperous businessmen and freedom activists flee the country in fear of ransom demands, torture and death. A writer who is rather vehement in his attack of political rivals, intellectuals and writers opposed…

I EAT THREE MEALS and don’t snack in-between. Not because I am dieting, but because if I snack—that is, consume a food or drink between meals—I am unable to do full justice to lunch or dinner. That upsets me because I really look forward to my lunch. Others may not have this problem. They may snack and also devour their main meals. Snacking, says a National Institute of Health study, contributes close to one-third of daily energy intake, with many snacks consisting of energy-dense and nutrient-poor foods. Indians love their snacks, particularly traditional ones—pakodas, masala peanuts, sev, Bombay Mix, kurkure, bhujiya, and so on. Not surprisingly, the savoury snacks market in India is ready to hit the Rs 1 lakh crore mark by the end of the current decade, growing…

Aamir’s New Hobby Aamir Khan is into smoking pipes these days. The 53-year-old star was introduced to the habit by a friend around the time he’d given up smoking cigarettes, and soon developed a liking for it. So much so the actor made an hour-long road trip to Milan from Como (where he was attending Isha Ambani’s engagement celebrations recently) to check out a highly recommended pipe shop. Apparently, he came back with over a dozen pieces, and let’s just say they weren’t cheap. His long-time Man Friday has since been trained to clean the pipes, maintain them and change the tobacco. The actor suddenly has a hole the size of a football in his schedule after he dropped out of the Gulshan Kumar biopic last week in the wake…