Final pdf for web 12th aug 13

What happens when a village gets electricity

l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

The story of KRK, a Bollywood wannabe

e v e r y

The online life of kids

w e e k

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INSIDE Seven reasons why Bhagwati did not win the Nobel

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Volume 5 Issue 31 For the week 6—12 August 2013 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers cover photo Ruhani Kaur

Meher Prakash Pathak

The cloak of progress and common good that our politicians hide behind is woefully short in concealing their naked greed (‘The End of Shame’, 5 August 2013).

We, the people, are responsible and complicit in letting them get away with this. We are responsible for giving Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler successful careers post their actions in 1984. For electing Narendra Modi on the We are responsible for premise that what giving Sajjan Kumar and happened in Gujarat Jagdish Tytler successful was ‘retaliation’ for Godhra, and hence careers post their actions justified. For raising in 1984 questions about the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan and turning a blind eye to the persecution of our own minorities—be it Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims in Gujarat or Sikhs in Delhi. For not being worried about Sanghvi writing public-opinion forming pieces when his own opinions have been compromised. For being ignorant about paid media and not realising ignorance is no defence. More than them, we have failed ourselves. There is no ‘we’. There is just me/us and them.  letter of the week Creativity and Bollywood

shagufta Rafique’s piece is a very tragic personal life story (‘The Bar Dancer Who Became a Writer’, 5 August 2013). I have much respect for her for being so candid (I am hoping this is not exaggerated because there is no way to validate it).

She mentioned that she would like to incorporate her real life experience [in her scripts] and that it would help her write honestly. This to me seems a bit difficult for her to achieve in Bollywood. For instance, even if she chooses to make a film of her own story, she won’t be able to pass it without putting in a snazzy item number or doing Kathak on a remixed song. Bollywood, for the most part, is a killer of creativity.  B Venkat

Ignorant: Whi, Me?

i seriously don’t understand this hysteria over ‘Allah hafiz’ 12 August 2013

(‘Wilful Ignorance’, 22 July 2013). The writer himself has stated that Urdu is an eclectic mix of many languages and has evolved over time—just as all languages do. There are hundreds of English words which have been indigenised and made part of Urdu. And English is no more native to this land than Arabic. If I can use words like ‘haspatal’ (from the word hospital) and compound phrases like ‘doctor sahib’ without being accused of trying to make a mockery of English and Urdu, than why can’t I say ‘Allah hafiz’? Yes, the history of the phrase is very political and the forceful introduction of the phrase in everyday life was part of Zia’s messed up ideological agenda, but the fact is that the meaning and political significance of phrases change over time.

People like me, who grew up a generation after Zia, picked up this phrase just like we picked

many English words and use them while speaking in Urdu.

Using ‘Allah hafiz’ for many (though not all) people today is nothing as fancy as asserting ‘the imagined superiority’ of Arabic over Farsi. And no, it is not a demonstration of their ignorance either. I am perfectly aware of the political history of this phrase, but I still choose to use it because for me its political meaning has changed.  fatima

Long Way to Orgasm

maybe women should ‘show’ their husbands how to reach orgasm, who then will be able to take care of it (‘That Elusive Orgasm’, 5 August 2013).

Secondly, Indian adults had better be adults about such stuff as ‘sex’ and ‘orgasm’.

Maybe this article and the likes of it should be part of the high school/college curriculum. Sadly, even the youth are extraordinarily conservative in this country. They too use ‘marriage’ as a euphemism for sex. If you find an unmarried 40-year-old in this country, people are shocked. The assumption behind the shock is that if you ain’t married, you ain’t getting any sex, and so you are still a virgin.  Sachi Mohant y

To Each His Own

it is all right for people to re-reverse the ‘brain drain’ if they want to. No one stipulated that this is a one-way street (‘Reverse Brain Drain: the Untold Sequel’, 22 July 2013).

After all, they are responsible for their own choices.  R oope sh Mathur

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The Politics of Mapping and Remapping India statehood

As the new state of Telangana takes shape, Darjeeling sees a revival of calls for Gorkhaland

Now that the UPA has announced the formation of Telangana, tremors of the development are being felt not just in Andhra Pradesh and Delhi, but also in one of the easternmost corners of India.

Darjeeling, home to Gorkhas and a part of West Bengal, is currently besieged with a 72-hour strike.

The leading political party in the region, Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM), is demanding a separate state called Gorkhaland. The strike, which began on 29 July, has brought life in this region to a standstill.

mumbai

12 august 2013

All schools, shops and offices are shut. Vehicles have mostly kept off streets. And one unidentified local tried to immolate himself. The strike also momentarily cut off the nearby state of Sikkim. NH31A, the highway that leads to Sikkim, passes through the Darjeeling hills. Although the GJM promised it won’t block the highway, a motorcycle and jeep from Sikkim were torched on the first day of the strike. Most vehicles from Sikkim stayed off the highway after this, although later a few started to ply under police escort.

According to Roshan Giri, general secretary of the GJM, “Our demand for a separate state is from long before India even got independence. It is as justified and meaningful as the demand for Telangana. The Centre and state governments have cared little about us.” The party has sent a letter making its case to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chief Sonia Gandhi.

The demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland intensified in the 1980s and led to a violent agitation in the region.

Over the years, the proponents

of Gorkhaland were appeased with the creation of councils with administrative powers.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is adamant she will not allow a new state.

After the recent strike was announced, she wrote on her Facebook account, ‘Darjeeling is a part and parcel of our state.

We are united and we will remain united.’ Giri claims the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration is a failure and the GJM is not going to be content with anything less than statehood. n Lhendup G Bhutia

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hindustan times/getty images

small world

contents

26

cover story Kids on Facebook

National anthem fascism

tamil cinema

A village finally gets electricity

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angle

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modernity

The new wave

newsreEL

Telangana: at long last

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Why it hasn’t yet been vanquished

john stillwell/afp

Congress spokesperson Raj Babbar caused a furore with his comments on how people might survive on a daily expenditure of Rs 28-32. His remorse was more PR than penitence behind the times

Badar Azim

Back from Buckingham r o y a l s n u b A boy from a Kolkata orphanage who became one of the Queen Mother’s royal footmen is now out of a job. Days after being thrust into the spotlight to announce the safe arrival of baby Prince George at the palace, 25-year old Badar Azim had to leave the palace and his job. Accompanied by the Queen’s press secretary, Ailsa Anderson, Azim had been the one to put up the hand-written acknowledgment of the royal baby’s birth for crowds and cameras to view. Azim had to leave the country after the Home Office declined him a visa renewal. English newspapers are full of speculation over why the young man, who was described as ‘well mannered’ and ‘punctual’, was not retained n

“People should have full meals two times a day. How one can have it is a very good question... Even today in Mumbai city, I can have a full meal [for] Rs 12”

—Raj Babbar to reporters at an AICC briefing, as quoted in The Indian Express

25 July 2013

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6

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“If my statement has pained someone then I regret it.

I don’t want my statement to harm my party in any way”

—Raj Babbar as quoted in The Economic Times 26 July 2013

around

Pretty Faces, Ugh Diets s i l l y Katy Perry may have looked fabulous on the July cover of Vogue but a lot of work went into looking like that. As the singer told Jay Leno, it was an extreme diet that made her coverworthy. She went on a complete cleanse and took a lot of “supplements and stuff”. Earlier this year she had posted a picture of herself on Twitter with big bags full of supplements labelled ‘upon rising’, ‘breakfast’ and ‘dinner’. Gwyneth Paltrow might be able to advise Perry on the cons of extreme cleansing. Paltrow, known for her 4 open

fastidious eating and cleansing routines, has said even she stays away from Master Cleanse—a kind of juice fast that permits no food, substituting tea with lemonade made with maple syrup and cayenne pepper. She says that the cleanse left her hallucinating after 10 days. Somebody ought to tell celebs that it is perhaps better to stick to solids, even if they look a little more so themselves. n 12 august 2013

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Self-styled star ‘KRK’

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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true life

Inside one of the world’s most opulent nightclubs

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of ■

dubai

■

The pixellated penis

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Institutional inertia at Kalakshetra

A Measure of Green c e n s u s After Mumbai’s tree-counting exercise last year, Delhi is expected to follow suit and begin its own tree census next week.

The Delhi Parks and Garden Society has roped in five resident welfare associations and as many schools for its pilot project. The counting is expected to begin next week in five areas—Rohini, Dwarka, Mayur Vihar, Chittranjan Park and Paschim Vihar.

According to officials in the environment department of the Delhi government, Nerolac Paints will supply eco-friendly paint for marking the trees counted during the exercise.

According to a report brought out by UN Habitat last year, Delhi ranked 58th among 95 cities on the world green index. As per the data compiled by the Delhi government, there are 414 species of trees in the Capital. n

of extra-marital sex, then presuming to ‘pardon’ a Norwegian woman who was reported raped

12 august 2013

Ranbir picks Johar over Akhtar

arts

F o r first convicting of the crime

Marte Deborah Dalelv, a 24-year-old Norwegian national, working in Qatar since 2011, was on a business trip to Dubai in March when she reported being raped by a colleague. Upon registering her complaint, Dalelv was given a medical examination and a blood alcohol test. She was detained for four days, charged with having sex outside marriage (outlawed in the UAE though not strictly enforced for tourists), perjury, and illegal consumption of alcohol (though alcohol is available in Dubai). Her attacker also got 13 months for sex and alcohol.

Dalelv was finally able to return to Norway this week after Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum issued a ‘pardon’. n

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Uncle Knows Best There is one more member of a certain Woods family prowling golf courses. Cheyenne Woods, Tiger’s niece.

The 23-year-old turned pro last year and launched her debut season on the European Tour a few days ago. Though she wasn’t successful in her first attempt to qualify for the women’s British Open next week, she gets one more shot at the major in a final qualifying event. Regardless, there’s the whole season ahead and Cheyenne is aiming high. “I want to be an established player on the LPGA tour, respected as a golfer rather than, y’know, Tiger Woods’ niece. But I realise it comes with the territory.”

Cheyenne has a strong bond with Tiger’s family. As a two-year-old she began tooling around with a club in the same garage as Tiger. Her aptitude was discovered by none other than the man who made Tiger, his father Earl Woods. Cheyenne, who is also interested in a media career, made news earlier this year, too, when she asked her famous uncle a question during a press conference at the US Open. n

diversity

angle

On the Contrary

The Patriotic Ant Bully On the idiocy of hitting a man for not standing up for the national anthem in a movie theatre M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

wife of actor-director Puneet Issar, and now relishing the snug reassurance of having done something of consequence because you hit a man on his head, ponder awhile on the causes and consequences of your action.

You hit him because he wouldn’t stand for the national anthem inside a movie hall in Mumbai, and after this show of violence, directly antithetical to this country’s founding principle of non-violent agitation, you were supported and encouraged by other fools in the audience. You think what you did was a service to the nation.

You did not serve anything except your convoluted sense of virtue.

What you ably showed was how easy it is to get a retinue in the name of king and country. This, in a more vitriolic form, is the tool of politicians. For example, before Narendra Modi’s national ambitions started to bear fruit, he relentlessly parroted the ‘asmita of Gujarat’, using this precise emotion as a shield against accusations of fomenting communal violence. As Raj Thackeray speaks about the greatness of Maharashtra, his party’s men attack taxi drivers. Much before them, there was Hitler and Mussolini who used the nation as the supreme ideal to dress up the politics of racism and mass murder.

You are not in that league and far removed from those vocations. But understand that patriotism, which you hold in such high esteem, is not necessarily noble, and exaggerated displays of it are suspicious.

Do you question why it is only in Maharashtra that men and women are made to listen to the national anthem when they go to see a movie? Did the legislators who imposed this have no faith in its people that they sought relentless reaffirmation of their patriotism? When you stood up for the national anthem in that theatre, were you not being forced to announce your patriotism at a timing chosen by someone else? You acceded to that coercion. Therefore ask this: are you a patriot or a puppet?

You were, as it turned out, not merely a puppet. You were a puppet who wanted to create another puppet of the man who

6 open

dinodia/corbis

D

eepali Issar, you, who are the

getting it wrong Exaggerated displays of patriotism can be suspicious

refused to stand up for the anthem. That he was not an Indian was just your bad luck.

That when revealed this you should tell him he was lying because he looked Indian was plain intimidation. He, as we know now, is an Australian of Indian origin. So, let us lean back and consider what exactly it is that you have done—you assaulted an Australian because he didn’t exhibit his patriotism… towards India.

How is it that moral rectitude only comes with such blazing fury for something so inconsequential? Your husband has directed a movie with Salman Khan, who, it is alleged, ran over pavement dwellers while driving drunk. Did you whack your husband on the head for casting him?

Did you whack Salman if he ever came to

When you stood up for the national anthem, were you not being forced to announce your patriotism at a timing chosen by someone else? You acceded to that coercion. So ask this: are you a patriot or a puppet?

your home? Or the hundred other injustices that you must have observed in the course of your low-tempered life. Take a walk on the street below and count the number of illegal constructions or child labourers. Did you keep on whacking people on the head or did you just swallow all of that as the daily grind of existence?

What is it about a man sitting in a movie hall that made it so imperative for self-righteousness to assert itself? It is the licence that comes with labels like ‘patriotism’.

There are many things for you to ruminate over. Begin with what your victim, the Australian, must be thinking of you and your country now. He was an ordinary man on an ordinary day on an ordinary outing, suddenly assaulted by a screeching woman egged on by a hysterical crowd. That is the image he carries back with him and it is not false.

Wholesome actions are those that make not just you but the environment joyous.

They add to the storehouse of happiness.

Miserable people, on the other hand, instinctively spread their misery to others.

In that movie hall, what do you think was happening? n 12 august 2013

india

A Hurried Man’s Guide to the Clean Chit to Srinivasan

The script for BCCI President N Srinivasan’s return was written at the time, it seems, that he recused himself from the organisation.

We were told at the time that he was not stepping down but stepping aside for an impartial investigation of charges of betting against his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan.

It Happens

Poetic Injustice Calicut University withdraws a critically acclaimed poem by a Guantanamo prisoner from its syllabus S h a h i n a K K the hindu archives

real

That enquiry, conducted by a commission comprising two former Madras High Court judges, came out with its findings this week and distributed clean chits to virtually everyone. It decided, says a report in The Hindu, ‘the arrest of CSK principal and Mr Srinivasan’s son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan for betting [did not have] a bearing on the involvement of The enquiry India Cements—and corredistributed spondingly—its Managing clean chits to Director, Mr Srinivasan’. virtually everyone

bikas das/ap

Their honours found nothing against Meiyappan because the Mumbai Police didn’t provide any evidence. They say they were not obliged to do so but they proba-

not gone for too long N Srinivasan, BCCI boss

bly don’t have much evidence. Absence of evidence is not proof of innocence but it is not proof of guilt either. And that is all that is required in the BCCI’s scheme of things.

Except, two days after the clean chit, the Bombay High Court heard a PIL by the Cricket Association of Bihar and ruled that the setting up of the enquiry commission wasn’t legal. The PIL, said an Indian Express report, had ‘alleged blatant bias by former BCCI President Srinivasan... in constituting the probe panel as he is the Vice Chairman and Managing Director of India Cements Ltd.’ So now, what happens to the ‘illegal’ enquiry commission’s report? Ordinarily, it would be junked. But the BCCI being the BCCI will employ delaying tactics and probably go in for appeal. Meanwhile Srinivasan will probably return to the Board’s helm again. Given that the betting scandal is already a distant memory, there won’t be too much of an uproar either. n

banning literature Calicut University Vice-Chancellor Dr M Abdul Salam

T

he poem Ode to the Sea is part

of the BA second semester syllabus at Calicut University.

It is written by former Guantanamo prisoner Ibrahim Al-Rubaish. Now the Vice Chancellor of the university, Dr M Abdul Salam, has ordered the withdrawal of the poem because the poet is an ‘Al-Qaida terrorist’. The diktat has sparked off protests among social activists and writers.

“This is absolute idiocy,” says K Satchidanandan, poet and former secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, in a Google group. “It is a poem about the sea and does not advocate terrorism. I don’t think [a poet’s] biographical background is of any importance in the enjoyment of poetry. Do we know anything about Vyasa or Kalidasa, or Homer, Sophocles or Shakespeare? Does that affect our appreciation of their work?”

Dr TT Sreekumar, an academic and cultural activist, says on his Facebook account, ‘Al-Rubaish was acquitted after six years of imprisonment. No charges have been proved against him. This anthology was edited by Mark Falkoff, professor of law at Northern Illinois University College of Law, and was originally published by the University of Iowa in the US. The poem is being taught

in that university. An American university is not worried of his al-Qaeda connection, but a university in Kerala is.’

Even the Dean of Language and Literature at Calicut University, Dr MM Basheer, says Ode to the Sea is a high quality poem. “It is a marvelous piece of literature.

Personally, I am very sad about this decision,” he tells Open.

“The V-C received complaints about this poem being included in the syllabus and asked me to Al-Rubaish look into the was captured matter. I checked the in Pakistan by the US army in background of 2001 for alleged the poet and learned that connections the allegations with al-Qaeda against him are true.”

Ibrahim Al-Rubaish was captured by the US army in 2001 when he was a teacher in Pakistan for alleged connections with Al-Qaida. He was imprisoned in Guantanamo till 2006. Ode to the Sea is from an anthology, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, a collection of 19 poems written by prisoners of Guantanamo.

But the point is, should those details matter? n open www.openthemagazine.com 7

business

c r u n ch When the going gets tough, the tough get going… or go shopping.

India’s big businesses, under financial stress on account of the economic slowdown, have been out shopping for loans to meet their capital requirements.

In the past four years, especially so.

According to a recent report on the BSE’s top 500 firms by India Ratings & Research, this had burdened their balance sheets to a point that any further leverage would impact their credit profiles.

The report expects the next year-and-ahalf to be very challenging for Indian companies, faced with high interest rates and slow capital rotation. While their debtors have delayed payments, their average outstanding period stretching from 47 days in 2009 to 51 days now (on the excuse of weak demand for goods), their input suppliers have become more exacting by reducing their average credit low velocity of money The slowdown is literal: big business has a problem of too little cash coming in too late span from 60 days then to 50 days now.

Trade channels paying later and suppliers The slowdown and a series of overseas are in currency trouble, since a wanting money sooner has forced has strained the slowdown related weak rupee means an enlarged debt businesses to take extra loans for day-tofinances of large problems has kept the burden. According to a Crisil report, day operations. “With revenue—shown on the books as ‘earned’—yet to be realised Indian firms owe foreign lenders over $200 firms enough to RBI’s monetary policy soon hurt their from acting in their billion, half of it unhedged against from debtors, the earnings and revenue credit ratings favour. The last thing currency risk. “Many large companies chase of corporates to impress [stock] businesses can afford might end up in Intensive Care,” says markets has pushed them deeper into is a downward revision of their credit Mukherjee. Small and Medium credit trouble,” says Deep Mukherjee, the ratings, which would make it harder for Enterprises have been sick even earlier. report’s author. them to get bank loans on reasonable To compound their woes, they have to The total balance-sheet debt of the terms. They could sell assets to raise cash, fend for themselves.

India’s macroecosurveyed firms has risen by 193 per cent nomic scenario is so poor that businesses, which would make stockmarkets since 2008, with interest expenses up a nervous. But this, says Mukherjee, may be staggering 226 per cent in the same period. big or small, cannot count on any help the only way out if India Inc is to avert a from policymakers. There is no fiscal This injures their ability to service the debt crisis. n SHAILENDRA TYAGI space for the Government to do anything, debt. Those that took cheap loans from

Market share in the US Market share in the EU in 2013, so far*, by value in 2013, so far*, by value India 5% bangladesh

7.1%

infographics partha p sharma

vietnam 10.2%

china 33%

2.6% vietnam 7.3% India

13.6% bangladesh

38.5% china

India’s Struggle to Clothe the West The Indian rupee has fallen far more than the Bangladeshi taka and Chinese yuan, which means India’s apparel exporters could make up for global sales lost on cost factors to Asian rivals Source OTEXA, Eurostar, Crisil reasearch compiled by shailendra tyagi

others 44.7%

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38% others

*Jan-March for EU and Jan-April for US

“I support Dr Bhagwati’s views, there should be passion for growth, and equally support Dr Sen’s model, which says there should be compassion for the poor… I think the Bhagwati model will never be complete unless complemented with Sen’s model” Union finance minister, on the Congress’ adoption of a mixed model for India’s economy, perhaps hoping to claim the intellectual blessings of both

P Chidambaram,

bloomberg/getty images

Corporate India’s Looming Debt Crisis

Dn Brwn’s Infrno Know all you need to about the latest, in a jiffy, with the Hurried Man's Guide.

INNOCEAN-092/10

The Hurried Man's guide is a comprehensive, yet concise piece on subjects in the news. So you can be informed and discuss these topics opics without having to read too much. From people, to events, from concepts to animals, nimals, this nifty little section gives you enough to make conversation, without putting others to sleep.

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the hindu archives

news

Division

Telangana: At long last

A new state is set to emerge amid sighs of relief in some places and chewing of nails in others anil budur lulla

to carve a separate Telangana state out of Andhra Pradesh—with the new state composed of the 10 inland districts that were added to Andhra in 1956 as part of its reorganisation—has seen celebrations in these parts, as expected. It has also come as a relief to millions across Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra, where tensions were rife on recent reports that the new state would include two Rayalseema districts and thus be called Rayal-Telangana.

Though protests have broken out in Rayalseema towns against the bifurcation, this anger is directed more at the Congress for its neglect of this backward region of Andhra than capitulation on Telangana, as they see it. In other parts of Andhra Pradesh (the remnant state), public sentiment seems similar. While people by and large are not dismayed at Telangana being given away, they want the government to pay more attention and devote more resources to the problems of their outlying regions. There are those, of course, who appear far from reconciled to the division. Groups fighting for a united Andhra have taken to the streets, angrily setting public property

The Centre’s decision

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on fire and blocking traffic in protest.

Observers feel that the Congress should move quickly to address issues of regional imbalances and economic development to quell the anger of protestors. But the party appears content in its assumption that the ‘united Andhra’ movement will fizzle out in a few days.

The status of Hyderabad as the capital of both states for 10 years remains a tricky question because the city is located in Telangana now and has no border with the rest of AP. For many, this is in fact the biggest question of all. Andhra’s capital remains a city of dreams for ambitious youngsters in Rayalseema and the coastal areas, and the thought of it eventually being Telangana’s capital disheartens them. It is true that Hyderabad is not just the centrally-located administrative capital, the sweat and toil of migrants— many of them from those parts—has played a significant role in the city’s success. Be it the film industry, business or trading activity, and lately even the infotech industry, much credit must go the industrious folk who came to Hyderabad looking to make their fortunes.

A large chunk of the money that moves the commerce of the city has also come from other parts of Andhra, especially the rich belt of Vijayawada, Guntur, Nellore and Visakhapatnam. Since 2008, Hyderabad has seen several swanky malls, restaurants, star hotels and showrooms spring up, many bearing glitzy foreign brands. Volvo, a new entrant to India’s luxury car market, has been a roaring success in Hyderabad, with its local showroom accounting for over 40 per cent of its all-India sales. More interestingly still, Harley-Davidson, the American motorcycle company, chose the city to open its first showroom in India. The city is also known as a medical hub, drawing patients from the rest of India and abroad.

Till some years ago, the city’s real estate market had been in boom, most visible in the glassy skyline that emerged as ‘Cyberabad’ on its outskirts in architectural contrast with the old city of Nizami spires and domes. But that boom did not last. “All development had come to a standstill in the last four years of the pro-Telangana agitation,” says a builder, “Projects came to a halt as nobody was sure of the future status of Hyderabad. If 12 august 2013

celebration Pro-Telangana activists are overjoyed by the Centre’s decision of 30 July

the city went to the new state then businesses would have fled and demand for housing and commercial space would have dropped.” That fear has been allayed, but not entirely. “Even now,” he adds, “confusion persists and a permanent solution has to be found.”

Meanwhile, the pro-Telangana agitation had seen property prices rise in Vijayawada, since it was tipped to be the capital of Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra. “In the last decade, Vijayawada witnessed a fivefold boom [in prices],” says V Bhaskar Rao, an economics lecturer.

One industry that is left at something of a loose end is Hyderabad’s Telugu film industry, which produces the highest number of films in India every year. Most people who work here are originally from the coastal and Rayalseema regions. In fact, the films this industry churns out reflect the aspirations of the people of Andhra more than Telangana, where the Telugu spoken differs a little from that elsewhere.

V

ocal groups in favour of a samai-

khya or united Andhra want the Centre’s decision reversed. They want to know what right the Congress has to determine the fate of the state when the Justice Srikrishna Committee that examined the proposal of Telangana had clearly stated that there was no political consensus on such a carve-up. That committee had also suggested that the state be kept united and constitutional guarantees be provided to develop neglected areas.

While the Congress may appear to have scored a point over its political rivals by taking a bold decision, it is worth noting that regional political parties such as the Telugu Desam Party and YSR Congress Party are still divided over the bifurcation. The YSRCP, led by Jaganmohan Reddy, has been ambivalent to the extent that former Congress MLA and minister, Konda Surekha, who jumped onto the Jagan bandwagon, has questioned her new party’s commitment.

“The YSRCP is answerable to the people of Telangana who have supported [Jaganmohan Reddy],” she says, perhaps finding herself on the wrong side of the victory dais. Senior YSRCP leader MV Mysoora Reddy, however, has said the Congress had taken a unilateral decision for the sake of votes.

12 august 2013

Former Chief Minister and TDP leader Chandarbabu Naidu was never in favour of Telangana, and quite a few local leaders he had in these districts have deserted his party. He is still tightlipped on the division.

There is dissent within the Congress as well, with some party members unhappy with the division. Vijayawada Parliamentarian Lagadapati Rajagopal, head of the company Lanco and also one of the Lok Sabha’s richest members, had been trying hard to convince his party not to divide Andhra. “The decision of the Congress Working Committee is unfortunate,” he says, “I am confident the state will remain united and the Telangana bill will be defeated in Parliament.”

T

he Telangana movement dates

back to the 1950s, when a demand arose for a separate Telangana state comprising the 10 districts that were adminis-

By being decisive on Telangana, the Congress hopes to retain its influence in at least these 10 districts of AP, even if it means a dismal showing elsewhere. The decision to have Hyderabad as a joint capital was a way to defer this tough call, say partymen tered by the Nizam of Hyderabad. In 1956, the Telangana region was clubbed with the Coastal and Rayalseema regions that were earlier under the Madras Presidency to form Andhra Pradesh. But this left many aggrieved, and the proposal of a separate state of Telangana kept popping up from time to time.

The movement gained traction in 2001, when the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) was formed under the leadership of K Chandrasekhar Rao with a clear agenda: the creation of a separate state. The TRS was an ally of the BJP in the NDA and then switched to the Congress in 2004. But Rao later quit the UPA disillusioned. He famously went on a fast-unto-death in late 2009. The idea of this was to test how hard he could press his demand. His agitation was quickly joined by pro-Maoist elements and students of Osmania University.

The movement gathered steam after P Chidambaram, who was then India’s Home Minister, made a midnight

announcement of Telangana’s creation on 9 December 2009. The Congress has now done as it said it would.

Though the TRS has reacted with caution for now, the party says it will abide by its promise of merging with the Congress. “I had promised the Congress that ‘once you give us Telangana, I will merge the TRS with Congress’. I will keep my promise,” Rao said minutes after the Centre’s declaration of 30 July 2013.

On its part, the Congress expects the decision to solve multiple problems. The party, despite having a clear majority in the Andhra Assembly and 33 Lok Sabha members from the state, has been in turmoil here ever since the death of its former Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy in a helicopter crash in late 2009.

Not just the Telangana agitation, but also the popularity of the breakaway YSRCP led by the former CM’s son, Jaganmohan Reddy, had rattled the Congress.

Whether Jagan’s rise has been countered is not clear. Last week, Congress spin doctors floated the idea of a Rayala-Telangana to nullify the YSRCP’s popularity in and around Rayalseema by trying to merge Anantpur and Kurnool districts with the new Telangana state.

This idea, the brainchild of S Jaipal Reddy, would have split Andhra’s 42 Lok Sabha seats equally between the two regions and would have probably helped the Congress retain its influence at least in one of the two. But it was soon clear that the idea would cause a violent rupture in those areas.

By being decisive on Telangana, the Congress hopes to retain its influence in at least these 10 districts, even if it means a dismal showing in Seemandhra (as the rest of the state may now be known).

Congress sources say the decision to have Hyderabad function as a joint capital for a decade was a way to defer this tough call.

T

he Telangana decision is expected to set off demands for new states in other parts of India. Voices have arisen for a separate Vidharbha carved out of Maharashtra. Also, for the division of Uttar Pradesh into West UP, Porvanchal, Bundelkhand and Avadh Pradesh. In the east, Darjeeling has seen an agitation erupt; the Gorkhaland Janamukti Morcha (GJM), which had signed an autonomy accord for the administration of Gorkhaland, has revived its demand for full statehood. In Assam too, a Bodoland is being sought by Bodos. All said, India’s precarious balance of regional, linguistic and other identities may be in for rough times in the months and years ahead. n open www.openthemagazine.com 11

opinion

H a rto s h S i n g h B a l

d e m o c r ac y

Done in by the Vote Funding elections through corruption goes hand-in-hand with last minute announcements aimed at voters T h e a n n o u n c e m e n t of the formation of Telangana, soon after the ordinance on the Food Bill, is on expected lines.

The Congress’ strategy for the 2014 polls is unfolding exactly as anticipated, and the Land Acquisition Bill should be next in line. Together, the Food and Land Acquisition bills are a direct appeal to a large segment of the voting population, while Telangana is aimed at arresting the decline in the Congress’ seats in Andhra Pradesh, which were key to the formation of both UPA I and UPA II. The use of these last minute legislative and political initiatives as a means of winning an election has led many to express the fear that Indian democracy is now just about contesting and winning elections. These initiatives reinforce a pattern already evident in the run up to Assembly elections in most states. But it is not just the last year of the UPA II that should be seen as a paradigm for future elections; the entire five years of UPA II, including the four years of corrupt governance, are a depressing template for how future governments are likely to conduct the business of contesting and winning elections.

The Indian Parliamentary election dwarfs any other electoral exercise in the world. Dozens of political parties vie for 543 seats, and in most electoral constituencies there are at least three serious candidates in the fray. In 2009, the total number of voters for these 543 seats stood at 723 million and an estimate by the Centre for Media Studies placed the expenditure on the polls at Rs 10,000 crore, of which Rs 2,000 crore was the amount to be spent by the Election Commission as well as state and central governments. This implies that Rs 8,000 crore was estimated to be spent by the various political parties and candidates. Another estimate by Janmejaya K Sinha in The Economic Times, relying on spending in the US elections, arrived at a much higher figure of Rs 30,000 crore for Lok Sabha elections. More importantly, his calculations suggest that Assembly polls over a five year period end up costing about the same as a Lok Sabha election. Even if we go with the lower—and very conservative—figure, we arrive at an election expenditure of Rs 16,000 crore by political parties for Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

Against this, consider this study by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) which shows that between 2004 and 2011, 23 political parties, including the Congress and BJP, collected Rs 4,662 crore through donations, which suggests that they would have earned less than Rs 3,500 crore between 2004 and 2009. This leaves an enormous shortfall of over Rs 12,500 crore between the expenditure and income of political 12 open

parties for the 2009 election, and given that election expenditure doubled from 2004 to 2009 this figure should easily exceed Rs 20,000 crore in 2014.

Every estimate here is far more conservative than it should be, yet this calculation shows that political parties needed to have earned this amount between 2009 and 2014 through non-transparent, or to put it more bluntly, corrupt means to fund the shortfall in election expenditure. A large amount of this money can only be collected through preferential treatment in the award of large government contracts. Given that a political party is only one beneficiary in a chain that includes individual ministers and a host of officials in the bureaucratic hierarchy, it is difficult to imagine a corporation contributing more than one to five per cent of the total value of the contract to a political party. This would suggest that at the The UPA II may have very minimum Rs 400,000 charted out the future crore worth of government of Indian democracy– contracts at the state and three or four years of central level are directly corrupt governance influenced by the need to fund elections. And this is followed by a slew most certainly an extreme of announcements underestimate. whose appeal lies in While the public retheir ability to directly sponse has been of justified anger against the UPA II, influence voters this largely ignores the structural problems driving corporate corruption in India.

Though election spending in India is huge in absolute terms, spending per voter is still very low in comparison with the developed world. This suggests the problem is only likely to worsen. Given that attempts to curb or monitor election spending have been largely futile, suggestions related to state funding of elections really do not seem to hold out hope.

Those who can spend above and beyond the limit imposed by state funding will still tend to do better electorally.

Depressing though the conclusion may be, it could well be that UPA II has charted a roadmap for the evolution of our democracy—three or four years of corrupt governance followed by a slew of announcements whose appeal lies less in their efficacy and more in their ability to directly influence voters. Perhaps, the conclusion may not be inevitable, but our problem is that we are not even debating this very real possibility with any degree of seriousness. n 12 august 2013

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vulnerable The Delhi High Court is considering ways to tackle the problem of teenagers exposing themselves to online perils without knowing it

cyberia

the online life of kids

…and what cybercrime experts have to say about it Aanchal Bansal photographs by ruhani kaur

A

s Karan Johar’s teenybopper flick Student of

the Year pauses for an ad break on a TV channel, Bollywood stars Parineeti Chopra and Varun Dhawan appear on the screen to announce their WeChat IDs in a commercial for WeChat, a new Chinese phone messaging app—and rival of Whatsapp—that has just hit the Indian market. In the 30-second ad spot, the two filmstars urge their fans to ‘hang out’ with them. The app allows the exchange of text messages and ‘embellished’ photos, and also lets you send instant voice messages to a circle of friends.

Cybercrime expert Rakshit Tandon, just back from Lucknow after conducting a cybercrime awareness drive for school children in partnership with the UP Police, is gearing up for another round of workshops at some schools in Gurgaon. The WeChat commercial is on his mind. “WeChat is a new fad with kids these days. Then there is SnapChat... [though] Facebook is where it all begins,” he says as he wonders about an 11-year-old school boy he met in Lucknow at one of the sessions. “That kid already has a Facebook account, which is technically [not allowed, since FB only allows users who are 13 or older] and has 200 friends already,” says Tandon, “He is lying about his age and pretends to be a 21-year-old in his alternate universe. Who knows how many friends on his friends’ list are real? He himself isn’t.”

Having conducted over 6,000 school workshops over the past three years, Tandon knows what kids acting older than they are can get up to. “They start pretending they are grown-ups, they comment on pictures like adults [‘hot’ and ‘sexy’ being words in common use],” he says, “and more often than not, land in trouble with some objectionable content shared unknowingly that goes viral online.” Coming back to the example of WeChat, he ex-

12 August 2013

plains his fears. “We all know that the accounts of stars are monitored and so they will not share information that would harm them, but who is monitoring the accounts of these [underage] users? How many of their friends are real and who knows what is safe?”

Tandon cites the example of a 15-year-old schoolgirl he recently came across. “Some objectionable content was circulating online. When I got into her account—after she gave me her password—I found some images in her folders that [explained what had happened],” he says, “She had been clicking nude pictures of herself and send-

According to a survey report titled ‘The Secret Lives of Teens’, done by McAfee last year, Indian teens with Facebook accounts spend about 86 per cent of their available time on the site ing them to an older boy in school whom she addressed as ‘bhaiya’, nudging him to react to them. Somebody hacked into her email account and started circulating them online on Facebook… I had to counsel her separately and explain to her the danger of sending such pictures.”

The Delhi High Court is considering ways to tackle the problem of teenagers exposing themselves to online perils without knowing it. One question is of whether the safety and privacy measures offered by web platforms like Google and Facebook are adequate in the context of all the mala fide intent that is apparent in cyberspace.

The reason that social networking is under a judicial open www.openthemagazine.com 15

hide and seek Srishti Mukherjee gives her parents the slip by curtailing her Facebook presence and instead using gossip apps on her iPad that she hides beneath a book; her friend Rhea Goswami uses a blanket

lens right now is that a former RSS ideologue has filed a Public Interest Litigation in court, demanding that Western companies like Facebook, which have user bases that run into millions of Indians (FB alone has over 50 million), pay the Indian Government taxes on the revenues they generate in India. This PIL, filed in 2012 by KN Govindacharya, also alleges that online companies like Google and Facebook are in violation of Section 3 of the Indian Majority Act, the Indian Contract Act and the IT Act in allowing minors to open accounts.

While the High Court has directed the Government to look into the question of cybersecurity and asked for a ban on minors from opening accounts on online platforms, Facebook has embarked on a public awareness drive in apparent defence of itself. The social network allows a set of options by which users can choose their privacy settings, and can also report objectionable content or fake profiles, but it admits an inability to verify the bona fides of every profile.

In other words, it is for users to watch out for themselves. However, many users are just not old enough to do that.

And most of them seem too busy to bother anyway. According to a survey report titled ‘The Secret Lives of Teens’, done by McAfee last year, Indian teens with FB accounts spend about 86 per cent of their available time on the site. In an age where children are encouraged to go online for movies, music, apps and even homework in certain schools, the question of age and access to online platforms could come back to haunt society.

A

s three of her friends gather in her apartment in

an upscale locality of Gurgaon before heading out for a birthday party closeby, 14-year-old Rhea Goswami is glad she didn’t pay much attention to a party invite on Facebook the week before. It later turned out that the party, held at a local pub in Gurgaon, was raided by the police and several minors (under-18s) were found drinking alcohol and smoking hookahs. Most of them belonged to well-reputed schools. “My friend, who was invited to the party, forwarded the invite,” she says, “We didn’t go… who would convince our parents? And we weren’t interested anyway.”

But such invitations are common on Facebook. “It’s a way to connect with people from school—seniors and 16 open

class mates. You have to be on Facebook and if you are popular, it’s the number of friends on your list that matters,” says Rhea, a student of Gurgaon’s Heritage School.

She joined FB last year, right after her 13th birthday, and goes online mainly to upload pictures and comment on her friends’ FB walls and photos, apart from following her favourite boy band One Direction on Twitter and connecting with others on MySpace. One thing she had wanted to do after opening an FB account was join the ‘The Heritage School Gurgaon Confessions’ page, but her parents have forbidden her from it. This is a page that has members posting all manner of slurs about some schoolkid who happens to be in the line of fire. For example, a recent snipe aimed at a boy in class 10 referred to him as ‘a gay fantasy and a piece of shit’. This page is offensive, but Rhea says that FB ‘bitching’ is not only common but a feature few can resist getting access to.

Rhea says her phone, a Samsung Android, is her best friend these days. She wants a BlackBerry now and is hoping to get one of her mother’s hand-me-downs soon. “I will be on BBM too,” says she, referring to BlackBerry 12 August 2013

Messenger, the encrypted service that has driven governments worldwide up the wall trying to decrypt. “So far, it’s only Whatsapp.”

Rhea’s friend Yuvraj Chadha, also 14 and a student of Shikshantar School in Gurgaon, claims that his only interest online, apart from reading about phones and mobile technology, is to watch online fights as they happen in real time. “There is no end to the abuses and bitching hurled on the [FB] wall,” he says, “I usually get myself a bucket of popcorn before I settle down to watch one.” He describes one such entertainer, a chat between two girls from school over a boyfriend. “They had hit each other in school in the corridors and then took the fight online, which became very interesting,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. Bad language is an added attraction, he says. A typical fight between two girls often ends in name-calling. ‘You fat and ugly bitch’ is just an example of the sort of language that is in common use online.

Rhea and Yuvraj say they have heard of cyber bullying and people getting into trouble with their photos, but have not got into any trouble themselves so far.

“I sometimes don’t get the big deal everyone makes of this,” says Rhea, “I have my privacy settings, and anyway my parents are on Facebook too.” On one occasion, she recalls, several members of her family, including her father, created a fuss over a picture of hers on Facebook. “I was pouting in it,” she says, “everyone does that.”

T

hirteen-year-old Samarth Paul’s Facebook pro-

file proclaims him to be ‘in a relationship’, but he keeps mum when asked about dating online. He has had an account since he was ten; his father opened one for him by faking his age. “I used to play FarmVille on it, and now I have blocked both my parents from it. It’s about trust and minding one’s own business. I don’t interfere with their lives, why should they bother me with mine?” he asks, peering into the Samsung Notebook that he always carries along with his BlackBerry handset.

Yuvraj confesses sheepishly that he leads a double life on Facebook. He has two different accounts: one for his parents and family and another for himself and his friends. “Makes my life simpler,” he says as he wields another handset that has a battery life of seven days. “I am making my own phone,” he says with an air of determination. School bores him. “I have seven secondhand phones to study,” he says, adding that he is in the process of making a version of Zombie Game mapped on Gurgaon’s Galleria market.

The exercise of parental control on the online activity of children is a vexed question. There are limits to how much of it can be monitored. According to the McAfee survey, which sampled 1,500 children across cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad, nearly 79 per cent of polled parents believe that their children do not access age-inappropriate content. But nearly 61 per cent

awareness drive Students at a cybercrime workshop conducted by cybercrime expert Rakshit Tandon at Lotus Valley International School, Gurgaon

Yuvraj Chadha, 14, confesses sheepishly that he leads a double life on Facebook. He has two different accounts: one for his parents and family and another for himself and his friends also claim that their kids are way ahead of them in terms of technology and that they cannot keep up with them.

Many parents believe that playing net-nanny all the time is a bad idea. What matters is mutual trust.

“Parenting is not just about being a parent anymore, we have to be friendlier with them and let them be open, as they have an alternative life to resort to,” says Rhea’s mother Trinayni Goswami, a professional headhunter with a consultancy firm. “When Rhea wanted to start Facebook, we let her, but we do keep a ‘gentle’ check on her activities,” she says.

Rhea’s BFF (Best Friend Forever) Srishti Mukherjee does exactly what Trinayni fears. Harrassed by her parents’ constant questions about her Facebook friends and activities, Srishti hardly ever stays on the site. “I let them have the password. They keep blocking various requests I get from boys and other seniors in school,” says the class 9 student of The Shri Ram School, Aravali, in Gurgaon. But she blogs, reads fashion snippets and uses gossip apps, often hiding her iPad beneath a book. “It is always simpler that way,” she says, “[my parents] don’t have to know what I am doing during study hours and they are happy controlling my life on Facebook.”

According to Anindita Mishra, who runs a McAfeesponsored blog and an account on Twitter that counsels parents on their cyber worries, “Keeping a check on children is a tricky task as always. It has become tougher now because of the elusive online world that has taken over 18 open

our lives.” A mother of two teenagers and a teacher by profession, she says it is a tightrope to walk, but parents must keep a gentle watch on what kids are doing online.

Mishra mentions a Mumbai incident of two boys being ‘cybernapped’ by an online stranger who befriended them online, asked them for a meeting, and then kidnapped them for a ransom. “Similarly, there are hidden Trojans on popular websites like gaming sites, film and gossip sites and online videos and pictures that replicate your contact list and send inappropriate material through your contacts,” she cautions. “That’s when you find that your account has been hacked. Information and communication are the key.”

T

andon says that it is important for parents to make

their children aware of the distinction between private and public spaces. Online, these often blur without children realising it. An online platform that appears private may have hackers snooping around. Privacy loopholes can also be exploited. “It has to be constantly driven into their heads that your online life cannot be similar to your private life,” says the cybercrime expert, “Hence care has to be taken when it comes to sharing pictures and thoughts.”

However, there is no resisting the internet, he adds. “It provides an alternate platform with an opportunity for the use of bad language, sex and venting of anger away from parental control,” he says, “and there is no escaping that fact.”

While the Delhi High Court has directed Facebook to put up a notice saying that users below 13 cannot open an account, India has no specific laws that shield minors from online crimes. The court has asked the Government to look at legislation along the lines of the US Children Online Privacy Protection Act. But in the interim, parents need to acquaint their children with lurking risks. n 12 August 2013

assessment

Jagdish Bhagwati: Noble if not Nobel Seven reasons why this economist did not win the Prize

S

trictly speaking, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. There is a Bank of Sweden prize in memory of Alfred Nobel. That apart, I don’t think there should ever have been a Nobel Prize in Economics.

Friedrich Hayek (1974 winner) thought the same, and this was the reason he stated in his Banquet Speech: “The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.”

But I have another reason too. Unlike natural sciences, economics has no pathbreaking discoveries/innovations.

It is mostly a matter of incrementally chugging along.

With rare exceptions like Paul Samuelson (1970), Friedrich Hayek (1974) and Milton Friedman (1976), there are few who are head and shoulders above others. Despite the Prize being extended to non-economists Herbert Simon (1978), John Nash (1994) and Daniel Kahneman (2002), we’ll run out of exceptional people to award.

As with any prize, there are lists of those who should have got it, but haven’t. My list includes Joan Robinson and Frank Hahn.

There are also lists of those who shouldn’t have got it, but did. My list includes Gunnar Myrdal (1974). The Committee for the Economics Sciences Prize has a geographical bias in composition, though it does do something like a global search before forwarding names to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Leonid Hurwicz was 90 when he won the prize in 2007. Jagdish Bhagwati, born in 1934, is 79. He might still win the Prize, hypothetically. His contributions to international trade theory are phenomenal. This theory is no different from that of resource allocation, except that government interventions cause distortions. Bhagwati’s contributions to international trade practice have been no less phenomenal: such as arguing for free trade, arguing against protectionism, advising the GATT/WTO/UN. Nor should one forget his 1970 India: Planning for Industrialization, co-authored with Padma Desai, and similar work with TN Srinivasan. It isn’t just recent stuff that is being produced with Arvind Panagariya (there is more than one book). Much earlier, when liberalisation wasn’t the in thing, Bhagwati was one of India’s few contrarian

Bibek Debroy

voices. He didn’t side with the system and didn’t reap the benefits. He got the Padma Vibhushan only in 2000.

Does Jagdish Bhagwati deserve the Nobel Prize? He certainly does. Lesser mortals have got it. Will he get it?

Despite what I have said about age, I doubt it. Since the Prize started in 1969, 71 individuals have won it (prizes have been shared); 85 per cent have been US citizens (including the naturalised). There have only been five from outside the US and Western Europe: Arthur Lewis (1979), Robert Aumann (2005), Leonid Kantorovich (1975), Amartya Sen (1998) and Christopher Pissarides (2010), with Arthur Lewis and Amartya Sen being the only ones not of European descent. Elinor Ostrom (2009) has been the only lady. No matter how much statistical control is done, some suggestion of geographical and gender bias is inescapable. Paul Krugman won for international trade, drawing on earlier work that Bhagwati had done, in 2008.

That’s when Bhagwati should have been a co-winner. I suspect that window is gone. Bhagwati has won a fictional Nobel in a 2010 episode of The Simpsons. I fear it will remain that way.

There are reasons, none very convincing.

First, Bhagwati is brusque, sharp with wit and repartee, not caring much for pleasantness and relationships. Second, prizes are not invariably won on merit. Like any other award, there is lobbying. This doesn’t matter for sureshot ones like Samuelson, Hayek or Friedman. But it does matter for those at the margins. I am not sure how successful Bhagwati has been at this, assuming he was so inclined. Third, a refinement of this, there is cultivation of the Committee itself, perhaps even efforts to influence its composition. Fourth, international trade is seen as somewhat esoteric and abstract. It doesn’t affect people’s lives the way a famine does. Fifth, belief in markets makes it a little harder to earn Nobel Prizes, though there have been exceptions. Sixth, flowing from that, while you do not have to be a bleeding heart, being one makes it easier.

Seventh, and this is the bottomline, if you want the Nobel Prize, you need to figure out a strategy and work towards it. I am not sure Bhagwati has had a strategy. Even if he has had one, it hasn’t been particularly successful. But one can think of winners who have clearly followed a strategy, evident in their professional and personal dealings.

While I am sad that Bhagwati hasn’t got the Prize, and probably never will, there is a silver lining to this in the context of what Hayek said: Bhagwati hasn’t developed pretensions to being omnipresent and omniscient. n

He won a fictional prize on The Simpsons.

I fear it will remain that way

12 August 2013

open www.openthemagazine.com 19

s e l f -s a b otag e

Not Quite Polio-free Enough Why India’s strategy to combat polio is mistaken KALPISH RATNA

T

wo days ago, when I picked up the

newspaper, I found myself in a time warp.

It was still Sunday, still 8 am, but dark as midnight outside. It had rained nonstop for twenty-four hours. The lights had failed. I was in a room lit tipsily by a powerful torch held up by a well-intentioned but very drunk ward boy. He was manan vatsyayana/afp

trying hard to focus the beam, but his hands shook—perhaps not from the alcohol, but from fear.

I was terrified too.

Stretched flaccid and helpless between us was a two-year-old girl who had stopped breathing minutes ago.

My job was to do a tracheostomy on her, make a small slit in her windpipe

and hook her to a ventilator.

That was soon done, her tiny chest was set moving again, but the worst was yet to come.

As I straightened up, the child’s unseeing eyes held mine with the question: Why did this happen to me?

This was bulbar polio—poliomyelitis affecting the brainstem.

The little girl’s brain was targeted by a virus that, more usually, attacks the spinal cord.

Her bewildered parents protested, “But we did give her the vaccine! How can this be polio?”

I had no answer then.

The year was 1983.

T

his is 2013, and I am reading of a child who asks the same question— a child who is deeply unconscious and paralysed.

Her parents have the same question.

Do we have an answer now?

Yes, we do.

But it cannot be said out aloud.

T

he parents are likely to hear this in-

stead: “It is very rare for a vaccinated child to suffer paralysis. Only one in 1.4 million vaccinations!”

How does that matter to these parents?

To them, their child is the rarest of the rare, she is unique, she is their own. She

is the only child on the planet who matters to them. At this moment they don’t give a damn that the other 13,99999 vaccinated children are fine. Their child is paralysed, their child may die.

When you are faced with one paralysed child, that child and that child alone becomes the face of the disease. She represents all of poliomyelitis, the sum total of research, discovery, invention and prediction about this disease. She becomes the template that must dictate all our strategy.

Here she is: a two-year old girl on a ventilator, paralysed in all four limbs, because she is infected with a Vaccine Derived Poliovirus.

Here she is, and, what are we going to do about it?

P

oliomyelitis is caused by an enterovirus. It is a single strand of RNA in an icosahedral (20-sided) shell of protein. Infection occurs when the virus is swallowed with food or water. It resists stomach acid, latches onto the lin-

Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by an enterovirus, but it is equally a disease caused by the virus of apathy, fatal in a country as poor as ours ing of the intestine, and replicates. From the intestine into the blood stream is a quick transit, and very soon the virus circulates through the body’s muscles.

From the nerve-muscle junction, the virus travels along nerves into the spinal cord, and sometimes into the brainstem.

Weakness in the limbs, leading to paralysis, is the result.

Poliomyelitis, literally, is ‘inflammation of the grey nervous tissue’, a label the disease acquired in 1874, when the site of affliction in the spinal cord was first discovered.

Throughout the course of the disease, and for weeks afterwards, the patient

hobbled progress Calipers hanging at the Delhi Council for Child Welfare orthopaedics centre in Delhi

sheds poliovirus in the stool. It spreads from person to person through faecaloral transmission—when you swallow food or water contaminated by infected faeces. Very common, almost unavoidable, in a country where less than 50 per cent of the population has sanitation.

Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by an enterovirus, but it is equally a disease caused by the virus of apathy, fatal in a country as poor as ours.

Polio does not make a dramatic entry in most cases. Often, the first sign in a child is paralysis. The euphemism AFP, heard more often than the dread word ‘polio,’ paradoxically tells the worst story. Acute Flaccid Paralysis translates as ‘sudden paralysis’ that leaves the limb (or limbs) floppy and useless.

While every case of AFP may not be due to poliovirus, most are. So why not call it the polio it is?

Shhhhhh! Polio is supposed to have been eradicated.

M

ost viral diseases have no cure.

All medical science can do is address the symptoms and consequences of infection. No matter how we dress that up, it only means that we can do very little.

Our strategy against poliomyelitis must therefore concentrate on defence. How can we prevent polio?

In 1983, when I confronted my first case of bulbar polio, it was nearly 30 years into immunisation. There was still a lot of polio around then. One of the greatest joys in paediatrics has been to witness the wane of poliomyelitis. Going, going, we told ourselves year after year, and yet it isn’t quite gone. And to the doctor who sees even one case, the disease seems unchanged.

But it has changed, and especially, in that one rare case.

If we are to eradicate polio, it is that change we must confront.

To understand that change, we need to find out more about the poliovirus.

Unlike many other viruses, it affects only primates, and there is no known natural reservoir. This means the poliovirus is not napping in some other species, waiting to make the leap to Homo sapiens.

Three forms of poliovirus are known— types 1, 2 and 3. All three are ‘wild,’ or open www.openthemagazine.com 21

exist in nature. Countries where polio is constantly present in the population are termed ‘endemic.’ Till recently, India was among them.

In endemic areas today, Types 1 and 3 are the infecting strains of poliovirus.

Type 2 is believed to have been eradicated; it was last isolated from a case in Uttar Pradesh in 1999. Both Type 1 and 3 can cause paralysis.

Any vaccine that prevents poliomyelitis must be effective against all three strains in order to prevent paralysis.

The first vaccine to be introduced was the Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine, also called the Salk Vaccine, after its originator. Since its introduction in 1954, IPV has been implemented in Europe. That continent is now polio free.

wide open India chose the Oral Polio Vaccine for mass immunisation and expected eradication by 2000

IPV is an injectable vaccine, and was thought difficult and unfeasible for use in the immunisation of the masses in developing countries. In the next two decades, it was also thought (wrongly), that IPV was poor protection in endemic areas.

In 1978, when the caseload of polio in India was around 500 cases per day, India chose the Oral Polio Vaccine, administered as oral drops, for mass immunisation. Three doses of the vaccine were then recommended. OPV, developed in 1961 by Albert Sabin, contains attenuat-

ed (weakened) live poliovirus of all three wild strains. The body responds by developing antibodies against all three strains to protect against infection.

OPV has one (questionable) advantage over IPV: it induces ‘mucosal immunity’ in the intestine. It prevents wild strains from replicating in the intestine. This means, hopefully, that a child immunised with OPV will not spread wild poliovirus by shedding large amounts of it in the stool.

But, after immunisation, the child will shed a lot of ‘vaccine poliovirus’

VAPP cases, 1998-2002 Year

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

Cases

124

206

151

120

203

This table is from the National Polio Surveillance Programme [cited 23 July 2005].

roger hutchings/corbis

in the stool.

It was hoped by a lazy government that India’s lack of sanitation might actually prove useful in conferring ‘herd immunity’ as the ‘vaccine poliovirus’ would spread through faecal-oral contamination.

Lazy? That’s too mild a word. Culpable is more apt.

T

hree doses of OPV should confer lifelong immunity against all three strains of poliovirus, and the statistics say this happens in 95 per cent of cases.

That is just statistics.

In truth, for the first ten years after OPV introduction, there was no great improvement. At best, the efficacy was 70 per cent. It was assumed that to step up efficacy, at least six to 10 doses of OPV were necessary. The ‘herd immunity’ OPV was fondly hoped to provide, through lack of public sanitation, also did not materialise.

The WHO’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched in 1988.

Its goal was eradication by the year 2000, and certification (the absence of wildtype virus for at least three years) by the year 2005.

In 1995-96, India joined this global effort, and the Pulse Polio Programme was pushed. By 2000, when we should have been polio-free, the goal was nowhere in sight.

In 2004, health professionals presented a memorandum to the WHO, The Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Government of India pointing out that the present strategy was not working. There were still wild poliovirus infections resulting in paralysis—and many of these in children who had been immunised. More disturbingly, it also underlined the occurrence of Vaccine Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis in the decade since the GPEI. This was, perhaps, the first time it had been publicly stated that Vaccine Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis (VAPP) is commoner than expected.

As far back as 1999, India had 181 cases of VAPP. How does VAPP occur?

You might want to look at it thus: how can VAPP not occur? OPV is a live vaccine—attenuated, yes, but live. Its very at-

12 August 2013

tenuation is an evolutionary prompt for it to mutate. Given the nature of the beast, its fight for survival in the host would make it mutate into a more virulent form. A Vaccine Derived Poliovirus is as if not more likely to cause paralysis as a wild strain.

In 2006, around 1,600 cases of VAPP were reported while the mass immunisation programme was at its pitch; how could they possibly be overlooked?

They were not. Paediatricians and epidemiologists have repeatedly raised angry voices against a strategy that depends entirely on OPV. Their recommendation, right from the mid-1990s, has been to include the Inactive Poliovirus Vaccine, the injectable IPV, in the National Immunisation Schedule.

IPV cannot cause paralysis as the virus is inactive and so it cannot mutate. Its only drawback is that it does not cause ‘mucosal immunity’ in the intestine.

A lazy government had hoped India’s lack of sanitation might confer ‘herd immunity’ as the ‘vaccine poliovirus’ spread through faecal-oral contamination This means that ‘herd immunity’ in areas with poor sanitation is not possible through IPV. Translated, this means that children immunised with IPV will not ‘shed’ weakened vaccine virus in their stool, and so will not transmit immunity by contaminating food and water with their faeces.

Think of it; it is a horrendous thought.

It also feeds into the old chestnut that poliomyelitis once was a ‘White Man’s disease’ and we smart Indians escaped it by defecating along the roadside.

Sorry, but that is wrong: India had endemic polio in towns and villages without indoor plumbing.

That argument against IPV does not hold water. The only other argument against using IPV is the cost and that it is not manufactured in India. Why not?

If the Indian Government is still buying into the WHO idea that OPV is the best choice for mass immunisation, how will we argue away VAPP?

L

et’s look at what we have to argue away: a nine-month-old boy from Thane, a ten-month-old boy from Beed, both in Maharashtra; an eight-monthold boy in Kalahandi, Odisha, a fivemonth-old girl in Jehanabad, Bihar— all of them have suffered VAPP this year.

They hardly count as statistics—unknown, unnamed as they are—but what if it were your child?

That is not a question Indian policymakers consider.

Right now, they are in the race for certification as a polio-free nation. Right now, India is looking good on paper.

The National Polio Surveillance website has an anodyne explanation for VAPPs. It just fails to mention that we are ignoring the near-universal strategy of including IPV in our Immunisation Schedule.

It also fails to mention that the people who actually deal with polio—paediatricians—are shouting themselves hoarse that we are not free of polio.

True, the pockets of wild poliovirus infection predominate in areas where mass immunisation has failed. Isn’t that because these areas have polio despite OPV? Isn’t that also because our perceptions are coloured by injustice? Aren’t these also areas that governments have targeted with draconian force and pogroms?

How can mass immunisation be perceived but as a method of coercion and control?

The events of Abbottabad are now fodder for Hollywood and Osama bin Laden rightly resides in the dungheap of history. By now everybody knows the story of Pakistani doctor Shakeel Afridi who was used by the CIA to pose as a vaccinator and collect Bin Laden’s DNA. As a result, all immunisation is suspect in the Af-Pak corridor and children are once again victims of polio.

Every time science is deployed as a political weapon, the distrust it engenders is violent and absolute. It subverts and criminalises the ethic of medicine. We might escape its consequences, but our children will not. n

Surgeons Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan write together as Kalpish Ratna. Their most recent book Once Upon A Hill is about the lost hills of Bombay open www.openthemagazine.com 23

sw i tc h

What Happens When a Village Gets Electricity Chibaukhera, a village 20 kilometres from Lucknow, finally got electricity for the first time in April this year, and all the television sets acquired in dowry started to come alive CHINKI SINHA Chibaukhera photographs by Raul Irani

H

is face is tense; shadows dance on

it. He is perched on a ladder against one side of a brick wall. His eyes are glued to a television set on the other side, a few feet away, watching Mithun Chakraborty in Maa Kasam. It’s a difficult position in which to watch TV but Gurvachan isn’t bothered.

The wall was erected around five years ago when the brothers in the family had a dispute. It pierces the room like an ugly

scar. On one brother’s side, an LG television is mounted on a wall, and a few plastic chairs are arranged around it in the fashion of a mini theatre. A bunch of children watch intently as Mithun returns to find both his sisters dead and pledges revenge. Their faces twitch and their mouths are agape. Beyond the battle lines, on the ladder, the other brother’s children, including Gurvachan, take turns to watch the hero’s antics.

On a shelf in the verandah outside the house is a broken TV set, possibly the second in the village, brought home in 1984

by Daya Shankar Yadav, a retired soldier and father of the feuding brothers— Virendra and Anil Kumar Yadav. The television ran on battery for years. It is Virendra Kumar’s son sitting upright on the ladder. Although Virendra doesn’t allow his children to go to his younger brother Anil’s side of the house, he doesn’t mind when they mount the ladder to watch TV. When Virendra’s mother was living in their house, the old TV set, a Core model of Sony One, was kept in her room.

Once a week, they’d charge the batteries and watch religious serials.

Mahima, his daughter, steps outside, goes around the house, peeps into her uncle’s house, lingers outside, but returns to her side of the house. “I will get a bigger and better television,” says Virendra.

“That side is wealth; here poverty. But it is a matter of time.”

I

n Chibaukhera, as in all of rural India, TV sets have become a staple in dowries. As per the 2011 census, 47 per cent of households had a television against 31 per cent in 2001. In the same decade, the number of households that owned a radio declined by 15 per cent.

But television came here before electricity. Chibaukhera got power only recently. Poles were stuck into the ground for months before a local politician came one afternoon in late April, cut a ribbon, and fans started whirring in the village, barely 20 km from Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh.

This village used to be cut off from the highway and could be reached only by

short-circuited By the time Guddi was able to use the old Texla she got in her dowry, it had begun to rust 12 August 2013

crossing a dry canal. It now has a narrow road. Chibaukhera isn’t a wealthy village, but a few families—the doctor Shivbalak’s for instance—own land.

Shivbalak bought the first TV set in the village in the early 80s. Two years ago, he bought a generator to power the wonder box. He paid Rs 2,000 per month towards the generator’s running cost. It is still there but lies unused.

Komal Singh, a young man who attends college in Aminabad, says Chibaukhera was favoured over the other two villages in the gram sabha to get electricity because they had better connections. Besides, they were willing to shell out money.

M

ewa Lal is intently listening to an old transistor. “Samachar samapt hua,” the news presenter signs off. Mewa Lal switches it off, and looks up. “We waited forever,” he says. “Every election,

When Manju’s sons switch on the TV after school, other children come to watch. She doesn’t mind. It is a prestigious thing to have a colour TV set we gave applications, approached local politicians, but electricity never came.”

In 1973, when he first experienced the luxuries of a light bulb and a fan in Mohanlalganj, he got together a group of villagers to try and get electricity to their village. It didn’t seem like a task—the village was in Lucknow district and near the city. A few years later, some of them collected money, bribed officials, submitted more applications, but nothing happened. Finally, Mewa Lal gave up.

“So many times I went to Lucknow.

They would tell me to wait, ask for money. They would say, ‘You walk four steps, and we will take one step’,” he says. “It was too much effort.”

Anil Yadav, an advocate, bought an LG television when his wife Manju was away at her parents’ house. She returned to find the front room turned into a mini theatre of sorts. She loved the television right away, but told her husband he had

spent too much—Rs 14,000—on it. “It isn’t a small sum of money,” she says, but in the next instant adds that more things are on their way because of electricity. A cooler is a necessity in this heat. And though wiring and connections cost money, barring three Dalit homes on the other side of the pond, most other houses have been wired.

Manju owns what is probably the second best TV set in the village of around 150 households. The best set belongs to Amaresh, a huge one his wife brought in dowry. Manju once had a smaller television set, but she gave it to her sisterin-law after a few years, fed up of waiting for electricity. There’s a DVD player too now, and a table fan, a gift from her wedding 14 years ago, which has been repaired and placed in this half-room.

“I used to get sad looking at the fan,” she says. “It hasn’t been easy living here.

I came from a village that had electricity.

But what choices did we have? We had to adjust.”

When her two sons return from school around noon, they switch on the television and other children start arriving to watch. She doesn’t mind. It is a prestigious thing to have a colour TV set in one’s house. Earlier, her kids, too, were part of a group that knocked on the door of every house with a television, asking to watch something on it. “It didn’t feel nice,” she says.

At 5 pm, Manju insists her sons switch off the idiot box and complete their school work before their father comes home. At 8 pm, the television is switched on again, and they watch it until 11 or midnight.

W

hen Hemlata’s son got mar-

ried last year, his wife came with a Sansui television set, a Videocon fridge and a mixer. The TV set is yet to be unpacked. They want to have a proper place, a nice table for it. The wiring also needs to be done; most wires don’t even have plugs. The set is placed in the living room for now.

When Hemlata came to this village as a bride, she brought along a transistor set, cycle and watch. “If this village had electricity then, I would have got more dowry. Electronic goods of different kinds,” she says. open www.openthemagazine.com 27

culture shock While welcomed by many, electricity is still approached warily by some. Stories like that of Neetu, 10 (below), who got an electric shock while plugging in a fan, are used as warning parables by elders to keep their own at a safe distance from ill-insulated plugs and outlets

The maroon-coloured Videocon fridge is used with utmost caution. Besides milk, there’s Shiny nail paint and lipstick stocked in there. The mixer is locked in her almirah. She is reluctant to use it. She also doesn’t know how to use it.

For many years, Hemlata wouldn’t tell distant relatives her village had no electricity. For her daughter Pratibha’s wedding on 29 April this year, she hired a generator from Mohanlalganj. It was the same day, the ribbon duly cut, that the lights came on in the village.

“Our village was never such a VIP village, but now it feels different,” says Hemlata, fidgeting with the transistor.

It looks archaic. She places it on a shelf.

A cheap music set blasts bhajans, while she rests under the fan. Not all the rooms in her house have been wired yet. She lives in a two-storey house and they are among the few wealthy families in the village.

A few houses, belonging to Scheduled Caste Pasi and Jatav families, are not part of the general cheer of electricity. They 12 August 2013

have other issues—crumbling walls and roofs that have caved in on their houses made of dry leaves and twigs.

In one of the houses that has just got power, an old man talks about other woes. His TV set, a black-and-white set like most others in the village of brands like Sonodyne, Texla, Classic DLX, Sony One, needs to be repaired. Like most other sets in the village, this one has also suffered a short-circuit.

At Suraj Yadav’s house, an old set with knobs and a wooden body has been the sole marker of prosperity for years. For 10 years, it has been preserved in the hope that when electricity comes, it will run.

But it is erratic in its performance. Suraj got this TV set as part of his dowry. There are other such antique sets in Chibaukhera.

M

ost afternoons, Ram Sahay sits

outside his house, fan in hand, keeping a watch on his grandchildren. They return from school, run to Anil’s house

to watch films, and roam the village until later squatting in front of the TV set.

Sahay is complaining yet again about the vices of electricity, and Priyanshu, his grandson, is looking to escape. A pedestal fan stands in a corner, but Sahay wouldn’t let Priyanshu switch it on. A few days ago, Neetu, a 10-year-old girl, was rushed to hospital when she got an electric shock while trying to plug in a fan. They say she was flung back a few yards and her fingertips turned black.

There have been other instances of electric shock in the village because officials forgot to install insulators near poles.

Priyanshu likes Salman Khan. The last film he watched was Bodyguard.

“Who is this Salman? I don’t even know his father, and here they are singing his songs as if he was their masterji in school,” says the grandfather. “In my time, I never watched any films. There used to be one theatre in Mohanlalganj, but it cost money. They shut it down later. Young men went to Lucknow to watch films in talkies, but we were forever in open www.openthemagazine.com 29

Walled Off Access to electricity in rural India is uneven, much like access to television in Chibaukhera.

In one split household, younger brother Anil’s children and friends crowd around his TV, while Gurvachan, Virendra’s son, watches from his perch on a ladder

our fields, tilling the land so we could eat.

This electricity is not good for children.”

In Mohanlalganj, before the days of electricity, those who could afford it would recharge their batteries for Rs 15, and their television sets would work for four or six hours.

Diksha, a short young girl, spends most of her time at Anil’s house these days. She finished her intermediate exams but didn’t manage enough marks to get admission to any of the nearby colleges. Not that she is too keen on it. Her mother is already planning her wedding. If only they had a little money, things wouldn’t look so glum. The family has one-and-a-half bighas of land, and the father does his best to provide for the family.

In their modest house, there’s a TV set with the brandname Kajal. It was part of her mother’s dowry. They brought it to the village 10 years ago. Since then, the family has almost made a shrine of it.

There are cheap plastic flowers, incense sticks and old photographs on and around it. A few photos are placed at its bottom. Years of waiting, however, wore out the television. It doesn’t work. They say it is like an old woman—it coughs and shudders, and collapses. Diksha’s mother found out there was no power in the village only after her wedding. It took a long time to adjust. Most daughters-in30 open

law have a similar story. They weren’t told and initially complained to their parents, but they were here, and they had to stay on.

Television sets have become a major cause for debt in the village. Ram Shankar Yadav lifts an embroidered piece of cloth to show a brand new television set. It is Akai, he says.

“I got it from Lucknow. I have to pay in instalments,” he says.

His wife grins through a gap in her teeth.

T

he villages of Rajakhera and

Sheetalkhera lie across the highway from Chibaukhera. For the more than 100 families that live there, it is a mystery why they have not been given electricity.

A large part of rural India is still without any power. The Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY), a welfare scheme launched in 2005 by

Television sets have become a major cause for debt. Ram Shankar Yadav has a brand new Akai. “I got it from Lucknow,” he says, “I have to pay in instalments”

merging similar schemes aimed at electrifying rural households, changed the definition of ‘electrified’ villages. Now, any village with at least 10 per cent of households electrified is deemed ‘electrified’. Under the scheme, households below the Poverty Line were to be provided electricity free of cost. As with most government welfare schemes, this one too suffers implementation failures.

The population of these two villages is over 100 families, the threshold for RGGVY benefits. The scheme proposes to cover habitations with less than 100 in phase II, but that hasn’t commenced yet.

The list is prepared by state and district officials and that’s why most villagers feel they were left out. Perhaps the counting was all wrong. They have grown in population over the years, but nobody cared to update the lists. They had been ready to pay bribes, but it was no help.

Sheetla Prasad is a thin man from Rajakhera, who says he likes to assist people in his village. He managed to get some education. He is a farmer, but wears pants and a shirt. On most afternoons, he rides his bicycle through the twin villages asking if anyone needs him to read letters, or for any other help. He points to a trail of mud tracks. More than electricity, he says, they need roads and houses.

“They say the village was approved for 12 August 2013

electrification. They had done a survey.

But nothing ever happened. We have no schools, no infrastructure. The children cross the highway to attend a primary school in Chibaukhera,” he says.

They wrote letters to the Chief Minister urging him to intervene. When a few girls of the villages passed their intermediate examinations, thus becoming eligible for laptops under a scheme launched by current CM Akhilesh Yadav, they wrote saying, what’s the point of giving laptops when students can’t even use them? They sent reminders. Now they are tired of protesting.

Nankai, who works odd jobs in the farms that belong to others, says it is unfortunate that the poor have to stage battles on all fronts. “How will our children

study? How will we ever get out?” she asks. Some time ago, about 40 poles had been dumped in the twin villages to set up power lines. The womenfolk guarded them zealously and once used broomsticks to chase away administration officials who came to take them away. They even laid thorns on the way. But then, in February this year, the police were called in, and the poles carried away on a tractor. Nankai wept for at least four days.

“I have no hope for us in this life,” she says. “They just forgot us.”

I

n Chibaukhera, Sarita, 16, switch-

es on an old TV set. But the pictures are blurry. She tugs at the wire, adjusts the knobs, but it doesn’t help. Her sister-

in-law is reluctant to switch on the pedestal fan. The baby would catch a cold, she says.

It is hot outside. Inside too. But they have been without electricity for so long that it doesn’t matter anymore. Only the television makes some sense.

The walls are plastered with posters of Bollywood stars. The girls bought them for Rs 10 at the village fete. There’s Katrina Kaif in full bridal finery, and Ajay Devgn and Juhi Chawla in police uniforms.

Sarita’s sister-in-law Guddi took the TV set out of its box two months ago. It had begun to rust. It is an old Texla, part of her dowry. It is sad that it doesn’t work so well, but as long as there is a TV in the house, Sarita doesn’t mind. n

pseudoscience

Jairam Ramesh and the Radiation Threat Sir, did you know that the book you endorsed was bullshit?

Dear Mr Jairam Ramesh,

W

hen one IITian meets another in any part of the world,

the first moments are invariably silent tributes to the cult of logic that both once owed or still owe allegiance to. The nerd code compels him to grant the other some respect, for they have both fought hard—for the marks, for the elusive women, for the money, for the name—and still have battles to wage. But the thing an IITian finds hardest to digest from a fellow IITian is a lapse of logic. I would know. I am an IITian.

It is with these feelings that I sat through your speech at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre as you launched a book titled The Radiation Threat written by Harsaran Bir Kaur Pandey.

I was not familiar with the author. The book itself didn’t seem interesting. But I was still clinging to your words as you made general statements about how the country needs technological advancement without losing sight of its ill effects and how this book has come at just the right time. Now, if you are promoting a book that pertains even remotely to science, I would listen to you, Mr Ramesh. Your credentials are endorsed by one of the holiest academic trinities I can think of: IIT-Bombay, Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. So the initial look of surprise on your face on seeing the innocuous looking chip given free along with the book (‘enclosed to minimise radiation effects’, as the book sleeve claims) and your casual acceptance with a plastic smile made me wonder if you had any idea what you were promoting.

Allow me. The Radiation Threat is an unsubstantiated and delusional piece of writing that promotes Vaastu and feng shui and ‘geopathic stresses’. I call it unsubstantiated because the ideas that the author puts forth as facts are under-researched and riddled with ambiguity—a panelist at the launch who represented the Centre for Science and Environment confessed as much, though more politely. Even modern architects who specialise in eco-friendly design do not think much of such ideas. Plus, the author cites common websites such as Wikipedia and Wisegeek. com to further her arguments. I call it delusional because, well, sample this: ‘For hundreds of years,’ writes the author, ‘the Chinese have been warning us about disturbing ‘Earth dragons’, or the natural energy lines deep within the bowels of the Earth. They believe that large-scale development activities like 32 open

blasting for mining, road and rail building, and constructing dams injures the Earth, releasing negative energies…’ Ah. So that’s why the Chinese have us all in such a flap.

The book is filled with instances such as this one, and if I were to pick on each of them, I could probably write enough to fill an entire issue of Open. The chip that caught you offguard, by the way, is a small rectangular rubbery thing for you to carry around, which is supposed to produce random waves of very high frequency (in terahertz) that randomise the nature of microwaves, thus rendering radiation harmless in some inexplicable way. It beats me how these rubbery little things can generate an electronic signal such as a carrier wave. Even if they do, by some bizarre breakthrough, there is no evidence for the claim that these randomised microwaves will be any less harmful biologically.

You gave your speech, got a picture taken and left, leaving me to make sense of this assault on my scientific temperament. The inventor of the chip, Mr Ajay Poddar (ironically, another IITian) made a small demonstration of how the chip worked. He asked an old man to stand with his arms rigid and outstretched. He then tried to force down one of the old man’s hands with one of his own, which he couldn’t. Then he gave the old man a working mobile phone in the other hand and repeated the exercise.

This time, Mr Poddar managed to push the old man’s hand down, leading him to conclude and exclaim that radiations from the phone interfered with the brain’s signals to the man’s arm muscles. He then put the rubber chip on the phone in the old man’s hand and tried again. This time, he couldn’t do it, concluding that the chip worked. I wondered what you would have made of this.

The author of the book is an energetic woman in her mature years. In her opening speech, she mentioned how her heart would jump into her mouth every time her granddaughter would pick up her iPad. I couldn’t help imagining a hyperactive jack-in-the-box heart lodged in her chest. You, on your part, complained that you have somehow developed a reputation of being anti-technology and anti-development.

I wonder why, Mr Ramesh, I wonder why.

Until next time, Siddhartha Gupta 12 August 2013

spirited campaigner In Kolkata, Chakraverti runs the Wiccan Brigade, which aims to eradicate superstition

anjan dutt production

belief

The Witch and the Spirits She Has Known

Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, who claims to be a witch, has written her third book. Supernatural beings, she maintains, are all around us Aastha Atray Banan

I

psita Roy Chakraverti, India’s first

‘out’ witch, describes her first brush with the supernatural as one that didn’t make sense when it happened. “I would observe the visitors who came to my house and would be surprised to see that I could see another print on their faces,” says Chakraverti over the 12 August 2013

phone from Kolkata, “I was to realise later that I could see their past lives. I think my attunement with nature was always there.” She has grown acutely conscious of being surrounded by the supernatural since then.

Recently, she had to let go of her dog Kalu. It was suffering old-age illnesses.

But even after it died, she says it continued to follow her around. “I would often see its paw prints on the floor leading to my study and smell its wet fur next to me,” in her words. “Outsiders would comment on the paw prints as well.

The dog was as attached to me as I was to it. I feel that it never really left me. It may not have been my first encounter with the supernatural, but to my mind it was one of the most touching. It also proved that just like humans, animals have spirits too.”

A Wiccan high priestess, Chakraverti is out with her third book, Spirits I Have Known, published by HarperCollins.

Before this, she wrote Sacred Evil, which talks about her time as a Wiccan healer, and Beloved Witch, her autobiography.

Spirits is a collection of Chakraverti’s case files: the story of an ageing actress obsessed with a mannequin replica of herself, a grieving husband trying to contact his wife’s spirit, a young woman haunting a famous hotel in Puri, among others.

Many of these cases Chakraverti picked up from her travels around the country, trying to help people out, be it people who felt haunted or women ostracised on allegations of occult practices. In Beloved Witch, she talks about village women being branded ‘witches’ and burnt to death. “Most areas [in India] are male dominated, and various lobbies, including politicians, use superstition to play upon the vulnerabilities of rural people,” says Chakraverti.

W

iccans believe in pagan gods and the ritual practice of magic. At a young age, Chakraverti had sensed she was different, but didn’t let it faze her. She says she had a strong sense of selfhood, of a superiority drawn from her “background, intelligence, looks and special abilities”. Her mother was of a royal family and her father was a diplomat. It exposed her to subcultures in other parts of the world. She was drawn to the Wicca

12 August 2013

in Canada and realised that this was her calling. In 1986, she declared herself a Wiccan witch. “The Wicca taught me that my mind was more focused than others. I could align myself with natural forces, which gave me an edge over other people. I could exert an influence over a person if I so desired. At the same time, I had in me a certain detachment, which made me indifferent to things most people craved.”

Some of the stories in Spirits are as startling as they are engrossing. ‘The Spirit Machine’ is about a gadget designed to communicate with the world of spirits.

“Almost a hundred years ago,” she says, “Thomas Edison had allegedly invented [this] machine. He considered it part of the natural. It reaches out to another dimension. It picks up soundwaves and voices from the other side. And no, we are not imagining it.” A few years ago in Kolkata, Chakraverti had used this machine to check if the claim was correct.

Recently, Chakraverti had a spat with Ekta Kapoor over the representation of a witch in “superstitious and degrading light” in the film Ek Thi Daayan More recently, she tried to recreate its components for an experiment in contacting the supernatural.

The story titled ‘Mannequin’ is especially dear to Chakraverti. In it, the ageing actress who is obsessed with staying young takes to an ancient Hebrew craft.

She creates a Golem to bring her youth back. But instead, it unleashes sinister powers. “I finally had to intervene to help her ground herself and help her unleash herself from the vicious circle she had got herself into,” she says. The Golem is also present in another story, a Slavic folktale called ‘The Clay Boy’; a lonely couple fashion a child out of clay. The child does not stop growing, eats all their food, livestock, and then the parents.

In Kolkata, Chakraverti runs the Wiccan Brigade, which offers lessons on Wiccan philosophy and how to use them for larger purposes. This way, she and her students aim to eradicate superstition.

“In my Wiccan Brigade, I have started a wing for psychic investigation,” Chakraverti says. “We have visited spots in the country considered haunted, including Bhangarh [a fort said to be haunted] in Rajasthan. We attempt to find out the truth behind myths. Our work is not only to investigate but also analyse and sift the truth from gimmickry. We follow the path of mystics like Sri Aurobindo as well as scientists such as Edison. I know many orthodox organisations are outraged that anything Wiccan can be so ‘scientific’. It takes the wind out of their superstitious sails.”

Chakraverti has faced flak ever since she declared herself a witch a quarter century ago. The Chief Minister of West Bengal at the time, Jyoti Basu, even led protests against her. Her second book was made into a movie starring Sarika called Sacred Evil. Before its release, a petition was filed with the Censor Board that called the certificate it was granted ‘unethical’. But according to Wikipedia, the Board let the film pass, saying, ‘We are very careful when we screen sensitive movies. But, there is nothing in the movie that is objectionable, or will hurt the sentiments of the community in question.’

Recently, Chakraverti had a spat with Ekta Kapoor over the representation of a witch in the Balaji-produced film Ek Thi Daayan. “It showed women in a superstitious and degrading light, and those women were being called witches. It was promoting superstition, which is already a bane in our country, and its initial promos were calling these ‘true life’ incidents, which was later changed to ‘fictional’. In a country where the National Crime Records show more than 800 women killed as ‘witches’ between 2008 and 2012, I felt it was irresponsible of the filmmakers to project women in [such] demeaning light… As a person who has studied and lived the true Wicca [life], I could not permit this.”

Asked if the supernatural has ever scared her, she says, “No.” It is the real world and its evils that scare her. She just wants her readers to know that the supernatural is part of our daily lives. “Spirits co-exist with us at all times. The dimensions are blending and overlapping.

There may be a spirit sitting next to you right now.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

babu/reuters

da r k co m e dy

After the Cinema of Disgust

A close reading of the renegade New Wave of Tamil Cinema K Hariharan

for over 50 years. But today’s young new Tamil filmmakers and their melodramatic audiences are not alone waging these countercultural battles on the silver screen.

Studying this onscreen battle as a source of inspiration for quite some time is Anurag Kashyap. He declared that the finest Indian cinema is undoubtedly emerging from Chennai. Oddly, he added a crazy but significant footnote by saying that they were all products of the informal film school run by the DVD pirates of Burma Bazaar. It may sound condescending to some, but it is almost the truth and here lies the twist to the new mannered assertion in these films.

Elsewhere, this could be compared to the same terse way in which the Coen Brothers sniped at the Hollywood system of making and marketing their typical ‘heroic’ feel-big movies or the way Bosnian Kusturica blasted the mindless Yugoslavian wars in the early 90s through his eccentric comedies. Quite aptly, in the book Cinema of Outsiders, writer Emmanuel Levy says that ‘the Coen Brothers are clever directors who know too much about movies and too little about real life’. Most readers may be jonathan torgovnik/getty images

I

f there is an Indian cinema celebrating the coming of an ominous nightfall, it should be the dark Tamil comedies that enthrall millions of viewers across this state. One does not know whether to call it an aberration, anarchy or a result of political dysfunctionality. Eight years ago, I called the cinema of Tamil film directors M Sasikumar and Bala ‘the celebration of disgust’, a sort of carnival enacting the slaughter of anything that connected the South Indian even remotely with Tamil chauvinism. They belonged to a generation that cheered a Bollywood singer called Udit Narayan, who ruined every possible Tamil lyric that was written for him.

Tamil audiences, in turn, danced with scores of Hindi film actresses who could never get a word of Tamil onscreen even edgeways. ‘Gaana songs’ nurtured by lumpen underdogs for funerals and communions became the melodic anthem even at discos in Chennai.

Such was their way of condemning the strangleholds of Dravidian puritanical images of Sivaji, MGR and others wallowing in the syrupy rhetoric written by Karunanidhi, Kannadasan and their ilk to protect their autocratic fiefdom

familiar with works of the Coen Brothers, but can they place the renegade New Tamil Wave on par with their kind of irreverence?

Of the debutant directors of dark comedy, three works deserve special mention: Balaji Tharaneetharan’s Naduvula Konjam Pakkathu Kannum (NKPK: ‘Some pages in the middle are missing’), Nalan Kumarasami’s Sudhu Kavvum (‘Thou shalt not gamble’) and Kartik Subburaj’s Pizza. All of them share one amazing lead actor, Vijay Sethupathy.

The difference between the stylised works of the Coens and these filmmakers is the legacy that they have inherited through the critical concerns surrounding the betrayal of a Tamil Dravidian Utopia by corrupt political leaders in films such as Paruthiveeran by Ameer, Pithamagan by Bala, Anjathey by Mysskin, Subramaniapuram by Sasikuma, and others. These films in turn resonated with the dysfunctional portrayals of society in the works of Kim Ki Duk (Coast Guard), Almodovar (All About My Mother), Rodriguez (Sin City), Katia Lund (City of God), etcetera. The new anarchic Tamil cinema had gone far too global for the rest of the nation even to imagine. And ‘anarchy’ is often a symbol of healthy organic progress. Many critics dismissed these violent films at the time as ‘rural slash-knife’ films from Madurai. And despite their condemnation, more such films emerged. Some of them went on to win national awards and international acclaim. But the power of these films was not only vested in their unique portrayals of urban Tamil Nadu but also in some of their cinematic self-reflexivity. They were artists in love with cinema first and their subjects later; artists who studied society through the films they loved and not the experience of real life. Did they perhaps believe life was just too unreal for comprehension?

Continuing with Levy’s earlier asserkollywood calling (Facing page) An artisan paints a portrait of Tamil actor Vijayakanth in Chennai; A projector operator at Abirami theatre in the city open www.openthemagazine.com 37

tion that these films reflect other movies rather than real life, there is no doubt that films like Pizza and Soodhu Kavvum have very little connection with so-called real ‘worldly issues’ such as dowry deaths, farmers committing suicide or adulterated food. Though NKPK claims to be based on a true incident, its film language works around pure cinematic concerns. These films virtually labour with concepts that have been nurtured by their unquenchable thirst for ‘world cinema’ and the inspirational ‘bazaars’ of their predecessors. They articulate their scripts like self-taught software nerds in the process of gorging scores of films downloaded from the net. Pizza is about a cunning delivery boy who uses the text of a ghost story written by his girlfriend, the femme fatale, to deceive his employer and friends; Soodhu Kavvum deals with self-styled gangsters who ‘choose’ to practise ethical ways of kidnapping by writing down their five commandments; and NKPK walks us through a narrow time zone of a character trapped in a temporary loss of memory.

W

hat does all this imply? In a docu-

mentary titled The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek states that “cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It does not give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire”. According to him, cinema works more on the intimate synergies that exist between viewers and the screen rather than the purported intentions in the screenplay as devised by the filmmaker. It is the terms of such relationships between Tamil viewers and their cinema over the past five decades that actually become the contexts that provide Balaji, Nalan and Kartik the precise resources they need to connect with their own ideation and later even seduce themselves into the very same narrative as ‘spectators’.

The story in Pizza is narrated by the delivery boy to his gullible boss and coworkers. Through them, he seduces the audience to believe a concocted falsehood as the real story in the same way a soothsayer convinces aggrieved believers to perform ridiculous acts such as tonsuring heads or sacrificing goats in order to redeem themselves of their predicaments.

38 open

Soodhu Kavvum seduces its viewers to challenge a traditional moral that states that ‘speculation will always fail’ by deconstructing the horrific world of kidnapping in the most hilarious ways. The film asks us to ask, ‘Are we fools in this age to believe that ‘gambling’ is a bad activity when stock markets and treasury bonds are stacked up like playing cards in casinos?’

NKPK weaves its tale with the primary character trying to revive a sudden lapse in his memory after a minor fall playing cricket. Compounding the problem is the fact that he is supposed to get married the next day and his three close friends want to hide his amnesiac condition. However, what drives the film is a kind of Bunuelian obsession with time as a memory jog. The constant reiteration of a few set dialogues, while serving the purpose of evoking humour, is actually an exercise in crossing the thresholds of what constitutes memory and the ‘unforgettable’ for the viewing audience. It is

In Soodhu Kavvum, the filmmaker explores the macabre in the urban subaltern world committed to drinking, smoking and crime as if it’s a credo truly a film which generates itself in the way its calculated shots are structured.

For practical purposes, all rules in scriptwriting and direction have been violated.

I would like to see the aesthetic here born in the irreverent tone of disgust or Bibhatsa as enunciated in the Natya Shastra. ‘Disgust’ is a reaction that we feel when we are actually pushed into a corner after encountering the feeling of complete frustration. In the European and Hollywood scenario, we witness this aesthetic in the mass production of ‘horror’ films that hit theatres every year.

Such an emotional basis is the starting point for the ‘horror’ film genre in most international cinema. Indian films, however, have desisted from entering this realm simply because the antagonistic forces or ‘villains’ have never had an identity of their own. They were just the bad wall dividing the hero from his her-

oine that had to be brought down with sheer pleasure.

In a journal entitled Senses of Cinema, Thierry Jutel remarks ‘Cinema is a philosophical machine before it is social body.

While cinema emerges out of a history of modes of representation, it mobilizes a unique combination of sensory perceptions and narrative. Cinema’s relation with technology is therefore not so much about what means of production are used by filmmakers, but rather what forms of perception, what modalities of creative and spectatorial involvement are facilitated by the operations of cinema’s visual regime and what they tell us and teach us about the world in which we live.’

Watching Pizza makes one realise how Indian cinema has neglected this tone of ‘disgust’ that has been the driving force of many powerful visionaries from Kubrick, Hitchcock and Ridley Scott to the modern day Coen Brothers. In Soodhu Kavvum, the filmmaker explores the macabre in the world of the urban subaltern committed to drinking, smoking and crime as if it’s a credo. Their relentless pursuit of speculative wealth and conflict with law enforcement agencies are taken to the level of the absurd, climaxing with the most fearsome cop shooting himself in his ass. The film even goes one step further with an irreverent and surreal song that features characters with no connection to the main story at all, an item number in the truest sense of the term. And in NKPK, the screenplay challenges the viewer to negotiate the repetitive motions of an eccentric character who keeps doing the same things much to the dismay of his three friends who in turn represent the audience. The absurdity of this drama, which is the central focus virtually driving the audience insane like the primary character on the screen, could actually make the audience undergo that sense of disgust.

D

ue to several factors of moral, eco-

nomic and political engagement, Indian filmmakers can only hate ‘today’s’ system deeply, and yet depicting one’s anguish as a ‘horror’ film has never been seen as an option. Indian Cinema’s self-sustaining systems of production and distribution have not allowed it to spread its wings like Koreans 12 August 2013

frederic soltan/corbis

the drive to step out of the rut A movie set in a studio of Kollywood, which is how the Tamil film industry based in Chennai is often referred to

and Iranians to become internationally significant. And there is always the fear of the Censor Board and dozens of outfits waiting for the least provocation to pounce on the film and maul it.

To compound it further, Tamil Cinema is isolated even further within South India. Sadly, our self sufficiency has also been our bane. Filmmakers here can only envy the courage and guts of Fritz Lang’s Nosferatu, Bunuel’s surrealistic films and the stylised horror in the works of Tarantino, David Lynch or Paul Anderson. We seem to be chained to the nostalgia of a long lost ‘peaceful’ past, but in these new Tamil films we discover redemption coming through not in the acceptance of a ‘formulaic’ authority but in the comic enactment of an emotion called ‘disgust’. Strangely, this mutated variety of emotion can only happen in the weird and almost unclassifiable realm of Indian dramaturgy.

Another redeeming quality of these films is their ability to achieve high-quality images. New generation techies have practised their craft making dozens of short films uploaded on YouTube. They come armed with storyboards, ultracomfortable with small DSLR cameras and limited lights, edit scenes on location on their laptops, complete their VFX works in tiny home studios, and even 12 August 2013

mix their 5.1 soundtracks in their backyard. And all this happens for less than Rs 1 crore a film, which would be the cost of making a low-budget documentary in the US. Interestingly, these films have buyers despite the fact that there is none of those songs or endlessly choreographed fights. But the fact that every film has to open in over 250 screens (of the 850 in Tamil Nadu) on a Friday creates a huge jam. Several films have to stand in queue and vital monetary resources are blocked. Compared to their predecessors in the 80s like Bharatiraja and K Balachander who churned out a film every nine months, the new lot has to wait untiringly for the next opportunity to show up. What needs to be commended is the fact that these films are possible only with the vigorous support of hundreds of ‘jobless’ youngsters in the cities and small towns of Tamil Nadu.

And if they are still searching for some kind of utopia like the characters in these films, it is a pointer that the young Tamilian is still alive and kicking.

In Tamil Nadu, these films are a commemoration of the shame that the liberal young generation of the 21st century feel about their thoughtless grandparents who had soaked themselves in the fantasy of Tamil nationalism. The disconnected new Tamilian wonders what

must have gone wrong with their elders who gave them ‘authentic’ Tamil names and even Russian names like Stalin and Trotsky. They wonder what must have motivated them to scream ‘Down with Hindi’ while their elected politicians continued to go about spreading caste hatred, amassing wealth and currying favour with their ‘Hindi’ speaking Delhi allies.

The paradoxes of being Tamilian today are so inexplicably complex, with the Dravidian identity still ingrained in their DNA, that there is no other way for the new generation but to embrace Bibhatsa in wholehearted ways. For all practical purposes, Tamil politics and its socio-political negotiations are almost caught in a fascist rut. And for the moment the new Tamil Wave has swept into an amicable zone of black comedy. These films are unparalleled success stories, raking in several times more money than regular runof-the-mill entertainers.

Will these films create a new sensitivity that can possibly empower citizens to better comprehend their situation? Will the deep discontent embedded in these films rub off on their viewers to overthrow a decadent political system in which Tamil Nadu is trapped? Will it all depend on how long these black comedies last before they enter the dark genre of ‘horror’ cinema? n open www.openthemagazine.com 39

sandeep rasal

dress to impress KRK is styled by Firoz Shakir, the man responsible for Govinda’s trademark get-up in his heyday

s e l f d e vot i o n

The Other Khan An encounter with a Bollywood wannabe Lhendup G Bhutia

T

here is a subspecies of Homo sa-

piens that has hitherto gone unnoticed by scientists. Its male members walk with heavy arms and wide puffy chests, are hairless above the waist except for their heads and faces, and seem to possess subnormal intelligence.

Their origin is unknown, but they are mostly found in the Four BungalowsLokhandwala stretch of Mumbai, prowling around coffee shops. The street term for them, ‘Bollywood strugglers’, only explains a little of what they do.

In one bylane of Andheri, however, you may spot an unusual specimen. He is rich, ageing and crass. He wears axiomatic T-shirts and tight-crotch pants. His name is Kamaal Rashid Khan. Or, KRK, as he likes to call himself.

Khan leapt out of nowhere onto TV screens in 2008 in trailers for a B-grade Bollywood film, Deshdrohi, which he directed, produced and starred in. He wore a fringe, leather pants and a light moustache, and delivered dialogues that would make Shatrughan Sinha blush. The film was about a man from Uttar Pradesh fighting politicians in Mumbai who were ill-treating migrants. It was perfect timing; North Indians were then being attacked in Mumbai. The film was banned in Maharashtra. In response, Khan moved the High Court. It was eventually released in the state, many months after its first screening, but Khan was all over the news. He got what he wanted: exposure.

Khan has an office in a house in Versova. He lives a short distance away on the same street in a palatial bungalow that is an ode to self-devotion. His home has a glass front and bears his initials in large size, the ‘R’ in ‘KRK’ marked in red with the two Ks in grey. Inside, he looms

12 august 2013

on every wall. There are life-size photographs of his on the walls of his living room, along his corridor, and in his gym—with him either holding a gun or wearing sunglasses. In other pictures, he is either receiving or presenting awards, or hobnobbing with the likes of Mahesh Bhatt and Jagdish Tytler.

It seems surprising, therefore, that when he answers his door, he is wearing spectacles. Dressed in a T-shirt over tracksuit pants, he holds a can of Red Bull. “KRK does not drink or smoke,” he reminds us, referring to himself in the third person.

When B-movie actor KRK dislikes someone on Twitter, he hashtags them as ‘2RSPpl’—apparently short for ‘doh paise ke log (two paisa people)’ His large living room has a surveillance camera and the couches are big and colourful—blue cushions on green couches, brown cushions on orange couches.

On the ceiling, each lamp is framed with ornate wooden carvings. There is a large bedroom on the first floor and a gym occupies the entire second floor.

When our photographer whips out a camera, KRK disappears for a while.

When he returns, his hair is gelled, and he is wearing a black coat with a white trim. There is a silver bracelet on his right wrist and a chain with a gun-shaped pendant on his neck. His track pants are still on. “Please don’t take my tracks,” he says.

It is a plea aimed at the photographer.

S

ince Deshdrohi , Khan has ap-

peared in a few TV shows, including Bigg Boss, and is often seen at Bollywood parties. He has not done anything particularly remarkable so far, but has earned the reputation of being a thug in the little that he has. He was the first person ever to be evicted from the Bigg Boss bungalow— for his violence. He had said unprintable things and tried to assault two contestants on the show. In another instance, he insulted two hosts of a show on Zee TV when they presented him with a spoof award. He threw the trophy and swore, even as his bodyguards pushed a few people around, all of it on camera.

Surprisingly or not, KRK has found plenty of fans online. He has 136,000 followers on Twitter, a sizeable number of them real people, presumably. The movie reviews he posts on his YouTube channel get a lot of ‘views’—his Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani review, for instance, got 75,000. He has also put photos of himself online, which can be downloaded as wallpaper. His tweets range from hilarious to crass. He once tweeted a photograph of two papayas and compared them with Bipasha Basu’s bust in the film Jodi Breakers. He has gotten into altercations with Sunny Leone, and rattles off the names of actresses he wants to sleep with every other day. When he dislikes someone on Twitter, he hashtags them as ‘2RSPpl’—apparently short for ‘doh paise ke log (two paisa people)’.

Kamaal R Khan is silly, no doubt. But sometimes you need a buffoon to call out the buffoonery in Bollywood. In a film industry that thrives on back-scratching and self-promotion, that’s probably one reason that KRK garners large audiences.

Sitting with his legs tucked under him on open www.openthemagazine.com 41

his couch, he says, “Let people get upset or say what they want. KRK doesn’t care.”

Unlike others in the industry, he says, he has a successful business unrelated to cinema—he arranges labour for projects in the Middle East and also has apparel and construction interests. This means he does not need to be beholden to anyone. “When they meet me, they say I am ‘awesome’,” he says, “Kareena [Kapoor] sought me out recently at a venue and said, ‘Kamaal, you are awesome.’ I am not an idiot. I know what they mean when they say that. But I don’t care.”

Each tweet of his, he says, is carefully thought out: “I make an aim for myself. I need to be retweeted a number of times. I need to be spoken about. That is essential.

This is showbiz.” He frequently leaves many of the film fraternity miffed with his comments. Some even approached the Federation of Western India Cine Employees to have action taken against him. An FIR was lodged with the police against him when a Lucknow man named Amitabh Thakur took offence to his views on Dhanush in his review of Raanjhanaa on YouTube. “Sir, I don’t know whether you [Anand L Rai, the film’s director] are from UP or not, but I am,” he says in the video clip, “In the whole of UP, you will find cobblers and sweepers who look like Dhanush but you will not find a single Brahmin of such dirty looks as him in entire UP.” According to Khan, he is not rude, just someone who calls a spade a spade. “An actress will dress to titillate. Yet, when I say, ‘I’m titillated’ then apparently I’m being offensive and rude to the actress,” he complains. “If I don’t like a film, I’ll say it’s bad. If I don’t like someone, I will say that too. Do you know the number of people I block everyday on Twitter because they’re turning abusive?” Every week, he claims to block at least 10 individuals who are so upset with what he has said about their idols that they’ve started swearing.

K

han was born in UP—in a village near Deoband—to a family of farmers. He has five younger brothers who work with him in his business. He says he left home at 16 to become an actor in Mumbai. Someone from his village was working in the film industry, but when

42 open

Khan reached the city, he learnt that his fellow villager was just an extra. After about half a month, realising he wouldn’t make it as a film star, Khan left for Delhi.

He did a variety of odd jobs there before he helped someone get a work visa for Dubai. “I made about Rs 10,000 as commission for that job, a great sum of money for me then, in the early 1990s,” he says. So he stuck with the visa business.

Some years later, Khan started Kamaal International Exports (Recruitment and Consulting), a firm that sends unskilled labourers from India to countries in the Gulf. He says his firm sends around 1,000 labourers there every year. He also started exporting garments to those countries and turned into a builder once an opportunity arose. “Whatever I have tried, I have done well,” he says, “But what kept haunting me was my failure in Bollywood. That’s when I moved to Bombay from Dubai in 2004.”

Determined to succeed with celluloid,

“Kareena sought me out recently at a venue and said, ‘Kamaal, you are awesome.’

I am not an idiot. I know what they mean when they say that. But I don’t care” Khan first produced a low-budget Hindi film named Sitam. He followed this with two successful Bhojpuri films, Tum Hamaar Haoo and Munna Pandey Berozgar—the latter, as he points out, was the first Bhojpuri film to be shot in London. Then came Deshdrohi.

There is something fishy about Khan’s claims. He tells me he is 39 years old, for example, although his website says he is 33. Most news reports put him around 50, which seems closer to the truth. His name is actually just Rashid Khan. He appended ‘Kaamal’ later. He says he is a bachelor while some websites claim he has a wife and two children in Dubai.

He says work on Deshdrohi 2, about the life of Abu Salem, will start soon. Sudhir Mishra will direct it, or so he says, and he will play the gangster lead. In his imaginary world, it seems KRK is as big a star as SRK. While SRK has a bungalow called ‘Mannat’ in Mumbai, KRK has named his

mansion in Dubai ‘Jannat’. While he was on Bigg Boss, he told host Amitabh Bachchan that he lives in a 21,000 sq ft mansion in Dubai, and that he gets his milk from Holland, water from France and tea from London. To mark the grace of his grandeur, he even offered Bachchan a role in Deshdrohi 2.

Firoze Shakir, a Bollywood costume designer who was introduced to KRK by Shakti Kapoor, says that Khan is a wellconnected man. Although Shakir doesn’t explain his statement, he seems to imply that he has useful political links. “When I met Ajay Devgn some time back, he had just visited KRK in Dubai,” says Shakir.

“One of the first things he said to me was, ‘Do you know? KRK lives in a palace’.”

Shakir, who was responsible for Govinda’s trademark get-up in his heyday, now works on Khan’s wardrobe.

“KRK likes his clothes to be a little flashy... they should have a little bling in them. And I think what he wears now suits him,” says Shakir, “It brings out his personality well.”

Comedian Raju Srivastava, with whom Khan had a run-in on Bigg Boss, finds Khan temperamental: “One moment, he is a friendly chap. He participates when I’m cracking jokes [on the show]. The next, he wants to get into a physical fight.” Srivastava was surprised when Khan invited him for dinner to his house at the end of the show season. He accepted it hesitantly, he says. “But throughout dinner, he was cordial,” he recounts, “We had food, sang a few songs, danced a bit. I think he does half the things [he does] just for attention.”

There are many in Bollywood who speak of themselves in the third person.

But it takes special self-reverence to do it with one’s initials. Khan’s conversations are littered with dropped names.

“Deepika has my phone number”, “I met Amitabh a few times in his house” and so on. And he certainly has an exalted image of himself: “Why does Shahrukh Khan call himself SRK? It is actually SK. I, on the other hand, am KRK.” It’s easy to dismiss Khan as crass and idiotic. But, spending time with him, you realise who he really is: a middle-aged man in flashy clothes, too plainlooking to be a star and too impolite to gain friends. No one has probably said this to him. Or perhaps he just doesn’t listen. n 12 August 2013

between the sheets

The Best Sex of My Life

Why I won’t ignore my mental reel of sexual highlights sonali khan

A

ll of last week, I was confined to bed. And not

in a way that makes you think about that week decades later in the shower—when the bed rocked, headboard shook and windows rattled, thanks to your wild howling at the moon. It wasn’t the kind of confinement that provides fodder for the mental reel of your sexual highlights, the kind that you replay your whole life, the kind that stands out from the 200 other times (yes, I’m optimistic) you had sex that year or every year after.

Yes, you inferred right—it’s been a while, but that’s not the point.

The point is the chain of events that unfolded as I was stuck in bed with stitches so painful in those parts of my body, they made me question the sanity of women who voluntarily reproduce. It was excruciating.

And even though The Boyfriend assured me that I looked like a vision, albeit an unbathed one, in the mucous-coloured, standard-issue, backless hospital gown, all physical contact between us was limited to the holding of hands (after thoroughly scrubbing them with 99.9 per centgerm killing disinfectant, of course).

Three days after my surgery, I was allowed visitors. I could see The Boyfriend needed a break from our uninterrupted anti-bacterial togetherness. An hour after he left, in walked the undisputed star of my reel of sexual highlights. The Alpheratz to my Andromeda. I was seeing him after six months, but this was the first time since he gambolled into my life three years ago that I was meeting him while I was in a committed monogamous relationship.

We chatted easily enough. I asked about his dogs, and he reciprocated with polite inconsequential questions that he’d forget within minutes of walking out of the door. I don’t blame him. We’re not friends, so I can’t call him a ‘fuck buddy’. And the Biblical knowledge we shared of each other’s body renders the ‘acquaintance’ tag useless, too. So the only way to describe him is—quite simply—as the most toe-curlingly spectacular lover I’ve ever had.

Half an hour later, he left. But already, I was imagining him naked. Yes, I’m going to girlfriend hell for those memory flashes.

Much later that night, as The Boyfriend slept, sprawled

awkwardly on the companion’s cot in the hospital room, I thought about my guilt. It’s the biggest relationship cliché in the history of men and women—can you be friends with your ex? Magazines have made mini-fortunes peddling gyaan and complex psychological studies to women who can’t decide whether they want to accept or decline that lifealtering friend request. Then there are those, like me, who are friends with almost all their exes. Barring one or two trainwrecks, I’ve had no problem re-establishing the prehookup state of my friendship with my exes. I suppose it’s easier to stay friends if you haven’t stockbyte/getty images exchanged I-love-yous, sometimes several times a day. So yes, I believe that a girl can be ‘just friends’ with an ex. But can you ever have a Platonic relationship with the best sex of your life?

I’ve realised that almost all literature on relationships, love and exlovers presupposes that sex is better when you’re with someone you love.

I can’t wholly disagree. If I was to list the three best lovers of my life, The Boyfriend would easily make the cut. But I also believe it’s possible to share pyrotechnic chemistry with an almost-stranger; that the best sex of your life can be utterly devoid of emotion.

Like the one-night stand that turns addictive. Or the fling that feeds off your shared sexual frenzy. What then? What if the man/woman who rocks your world isn’t exactly an ex and hasn’t broken your heart? Can you ever look at such a lover and not feel the stirrings of what makes him/her so perfect for you in the sack?

When I think about my own relationship, I know that no matter how good the sex, I won’t step over the lines we’ve mutually decided and drawn. I respect him too much to cheapen what we share or inflict such deliberate hurt.

When you feel that way about a person, shouldn’t that say enough about the relationship than feeling the need to pretend that sex with every other person in the past was just entry-level? Because let’s face it, for a lot of us, it was pretty damn great. n

You can be friends with an ex. But can you have a Platonic relationship with the best sex of your life?

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Sonali Khan was holding on to her virtue, and then she fell in love...with several men.

She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 12 August 2013

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O p e n s pa c e

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61 Cinema reviews

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Tech & style

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Censorship in Books A Matter of Rats Selling Hemingway to New Readers

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How to Spend Your Money

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revitalising kalakshetra The once revolutionary dance school started by Rukmini Devi needs to be shaken out of its inertia 56

true life

How to Spend Your Money The owner of one of the world’s most expensive nightclubs, where a table spend can be close to $100,000, on why creating great parties is an art in itself Michael Van Cleef Ault

You are in a fancy Asian nightclub. The music is great, the night is young. You order the club’s most expensive cocktail. The moment you do, everything at the club comes to a halt and you become the focal point of the room. Two security guards proceed to your table, followed by the manager of the club bearing a stainless steel briefcase (accompanied by a third guard).

Before you begin to wonder what unspeakable crime you may have committed, they are joined by two girls and the club’s VIP services manager. She is holding a bottle of 1985 Krug champagne. Two more girls from the staff and two more security guards bring up the rear.

The briefcase, which is smoke-filled, is opened to reveal the ingredients for the cocktail—Richard Hennessy cognac infused with gold flakes, a smoke-infused raw sugar cube with Jerry Bitters—as well as a shiny stone and silver-and-crystal champagne flute. The manager then prepares the cocktail before you. The VIP services manager tops it off with the Krug before carefully lowering the stone—a one carat flawless Mouawad diamond—in the glass by a chain.

You are in Pangaea Singapore, one of the world’s most expensive nightclubs, and the drink that you have ordered is the Jewel of Pangaea, East Asia’s most expensive cocktail, which has added another $32,000 to your tab. And yes, you get to keep the diamond.

12 august 2013

H

ow many nightclub owners of the past 30 years can you think of who are household names? See, that’s my point.

I am 50 now. I have been designing and operating nightclubs for over three decades. Of the 30 nightclubs I own that cater to the über-rich, Pangaea Singapore is the costliest and most profitable.

Our parties are among the best known in town. To run a nightclub successfully, one needs to be not just a businessman—sure, you need somebody to take care of the books—but also an artiste, one who knows how to make the party pop.

The greats over the years were Steve Rubell of New York’s Studio 54, who changed the game beyond all recognition; Howard Stein, my mentor, who owned world-famous brands such as Xenon in New York; and Monaco’s Regine, who founded Jimmy’s in the early 1970s. She was a tough creative woman before whom every man I know would cower. She remains, to this day, the only club owner who tried to execute a worldwide club roll-out in every major city. Whether I am fit to be among these rarefied few, people will judge for themselves with time.

The works of current nightclub owners don’t interest me. Most don’t pay attention to details, such as the air being too cold or music too loud, given the early time or lack of guests. There are countless such details that can compromise customer experience. And if you compromise customer experience too often, you are finished.

I

have observed the nightclub cul-

ture closely for more than three decades now. My first such experience was when I was about four years old. It was a family tradition to throw parties, not so much as a business, but more for charity. My mother, Faith Van Cleef, did it, and my grandfather before that. I got a first-hand experience of how great parties were thrown. I saw the benefits of a strong contact book, and I started building mine when I was about seven or eight years old.

12 August 2013

behind the party The Jewel of Pangaea (left); and Ault (second from left) at Pangaea club in Singapore

Before I built my first nightclub in the 1990s, I was a promoter for a lot of top clubs in New York, such as Studio 54, Area, The Tunnel and Maxime’s.

Post that, I created and ran nightclubs in joint ventures with other operators.

In spite of the regular socialising, I did not consider myself a party animal even when I was in my 20s and 30s. I worked on Wall Street for about six years, in Hongkong Bank, Barclays and Bank of New York. My step-father, Dean Witter, in his day, had the second largest brokerage firm in the world.

But banking had no creative outlets for me. This is why I left my job as a banker and ended up partying so hard.

Today, my phonebook and email list cumulatively runs into over 1,200,000 contacts. It is a tool of indescribable potency. Imagine being able to reach out to 1.2 million of the most fashionable, fabulous, famous, interesting and wealthy people on the globe, including the world’s press, at the click of a button. Presidents, royal families, actors, musicians, sports stars. It is a remarkable position of power, and must be used responsibly. They must know you; this list in anyone else’s hands is meaningless.

Access to such an elite crowd has also meant that I have witnessed some

memorable moments in my clubs.

People go through an entire spectrum of emotions when they are drunk. And sometimes, you have people in the club who are really, really talented.

They often go ahead and put on a show.

It can be a lot of fun.

I am a big fan of Al Pacino, particularly because of Scarface. There is a scene at the end, when the character he plays, Tony Montana, says, “Have a look at my little friend” and goes on to blast through a door. One night, Pacino enacted that scene for everybody. It was brilliant. Then there was Jack Nicholson, who became Jack Torrance once again, and did a couple of scenes from The Shining. Once, Sting came in and did a 30-minute solo. I remember him singing So Lonely and Message in a Bottle.

Often you have a great conversation and don’t know who you were talking to till the very end. This has happened to me with Bill Gates.

T

hrowing a great party is

a matter of sound judgement and skill. In the words of Steve Rubell of Studio 54, “The key to a good party is filling a room with guests more interesting than you.” Rubell open www.openthemagazine.com 47

was known to guard the door of his nightclub zealously and would only allow in people who he thought were glamorous enough. And it wasn’t only about looking good; he would focus on getting the right composition of clubbers, White and Black, straight and gay, male and female. He called this strategy ‘mixing the salad’.

Once inside, Rubell would ensure that A-list celebrities were showered with gifts and attention, so that they would keep returning to his club. It was a place where physical intimacy wasn’t limited to the dance floor. Studio 54 had the Rubber Room where you’d often find one or two couples having sex and a few snorting cocaine.

In my clubs, apart from good composition and personalised attention, I take pride in saying that the staff goes through a rigorous philosophical scanning process before they are hired.

We aim to get into their heads. We don’t just check how fast they can get drinks to the tables. They should understand and evolve with the situation on the ground.

The waitresses treat you as equals.

You allow them to guide you into a fantasy. After all, you are looking to let go of your stress. At some point in the evening, the staff is able to drive you into a surreal world and the party pops.

Then you become the party.

T

he failure rate among nightclubs is almost 100 per cent; all clubs close at some stage. Studio 54 had a 33-month run, which was remarkable.

There are markets where top clubs have achieved the 20- to 25-year mark, but in my opinion, this is more a function of the market than the club. In other words, lack of competition.

Running a nightclub is a risky business, and the biggest risk is choosing the right people and avoiding the wrong, not just with respect to business partners but also the guest list.

Over the years, I have had to throw out dozens and dozens of celebrities. I have also permanently banned some of the most famous actors and 48 open

rockstars. We do give people a lot of leeway, but we do not compromise the comfort of any of our customers.

Rockstars are treated like regular customers and regular customers are treated like rockstars.

W

e stepped into Asia for the first

time with Pangaea Singapore.

What amazes me is the sheer amount of capital here. You have rich Koreans,

Imagine being able to reach out to

1.2 million of the most fashionable, fabulous, famous, interesting and

wealthy people on the globe, including the world’s press, at the

click of a button.

Presidents, royal families, actors, musicians, sports stars. It is a remarkable

position of power Chinese, old Malaysian families, Indonesians and even Indians stashing their money in Singapore. It is called the Switzerland of Asia. And even the Swiss are coming here. There is just so much disposable income.

Typically, a nice table with a prestigious location has a minimum spend of $5,000. More often, $30,000 is considered a very impressive tab. A large table spend can exceed $100,000. And

these are common nightly events for us. I know of a table bill in a friend’s club that went to $685,000.

What you spend on is not just the drink and music, but the entire experience. Take the concept of bottle service, in which people sometimes pay as much as 2,000 per cent the marked price of a bottle to have it on their table. It’s not the bottle they are buying, but the real estate of their table. Top tables are front-row seats to the wildest entertainment experiences on the planet. And, of course, when you buy a highly visible table and spend on large expensive bottles, you are buying ‘face’.

Even when you buy the Jewel of Pangaea, the presentation really is half the fun. Our celebrity mixologist, Ethan Leslie Leong, leads a parade of stunning wait-staff and an impressive security team, with sparklers through the room, while acting as the courier of a steel-sided briefcase that contains the diamond. And then the show begins. Naturally we could have artificially elevated the price with a larger stone, but in our case, the show and drink are a significant part of the experience.

Singapore is not the only market with that level of cash; there is Hong Kong, Indonesia and China too.

And India, of course. In Pangaea Singapore, our highest paying and most consistent customers are overwhelmingly Indians.

We are stepping into India this year, too, opening Pangaea at The Ashok in Delhi. I have been to the top clubs in Bombay and Delhi but I don’t think they are doing a world-class job.

Although the culture here and the music is different, their parties don’t pop. People warm up at the clubs and head to the farmhouses of wealthy people, which is where they get crazier. But why would you do that? That’s what a nightclub is for. There is no reason to leave—if the energy at the club is right. Why would you want to collect people and drive off, breaking the momentum? n As told to Siddhartha Gupta 12 august 2013

Books The Pixellated Penis and Other Tales of Modern Censorship Why fear of India’s obscenity law turned HarperCollins prudish on a recent graphic novel, but doesn’t stop the publication of explicitly illustrated versions of the Kama Sutra DEVIKA BAKSHI

O

n page 45 of Paying For It, Chester

Brown’s graphic memoir—in the sense of a graphic novel, not in the sense of being explicit, though it is also sometimes that—about paying for sex, there is a cloud of grey dots where a condommed penis should be. This is surprising, not only because Brown’s book is a sexual memoir, but also because it is otherwise full of uncensored nudity, or, more precisely, of minimalist line-drawings of unclothed people.

Brown’s cartoon people are by no means smoothed out Barbies and Kens; they have all the parts people are supposed to have. But on the four occasions in the book that Brown chooses to zoom in on those parts—his own— they appear pixellated almost beyond recognition. His cartoon penis is still visible at a safe distance throughout the rest of the book.

VK Karthika, publisher and chief editor at HarperCollins India, which is publishing Brown’s book in India, says this was a discretionary measure to pre-empt accusations of obscenity, taken on the advice of Harper’s lawyer.

Four close-up shots, a total of nine panels in 227 pages of eight panels each, were blurred. The logic behind the selective pixellation is that these four sequences—which depict, in order, the putting on of a condom, masturbation, a thorough manual examination conducted by a woman (no, that is not a euphemism), and impending fellatio—are more graphically sexual than others, hence more likely to be interpreted as obscene.

I

ndia’s obscenity law, Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, is ingeniously vague in its definition of what can be

12 August 2013

called obscene, exemplary of the way semantics can be employed in the service of point-avoidance.

To wit: ‘A book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting representation, figure or any other object, shall be deemed to be obscene if it is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect, or (where it comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items, is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read,

During the search of Hachette India’s office, Customs officials apparently picked up, perused, then dropped Naomi Wolf’s latest, Vagina: A New Biography— they couldn’t have known it was not erotic in the least see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.’

Such a law does little to aid an understanding of what makes something ‘lascivious’, what can be considered to ‘appeal to the prurient interest’, or, indeed, what constitutes the depraving and corrupting of persons. Instead of concretising the offence, the law throws a cluster of nervous words wide open to subjective interpretation. It seems to make it possible to deem obscene and therefore penalise almost anything; but in a generous corollary of ridiculousness, it also includes a similarly open-ended provision for exceptions:

‘This section does not extend to (a) any book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation or figure, (i) the publication of which is proved to be justified as being for the public good on the ground that such book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation or figure is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or other objects of general concern, or (ii) which is kept or used bona fide for religious purposes; (b) any representation sculptured, engraved, painted or otherwise represented on or in (i) any ancient monument within the meaning of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 (24 of 1958 ), or (ii) any temple, or on any car used for the conveyance of idols, or kept or used for any religious purpose.’

This final caveat is, presumably, what ensures permanent protection for any reproduction, no matter how explicitly illustrated, of the Kama Sutra. The exemption earned by this ancient text on sex, love and living well—commonly understood to be and disseminated across the world as a how-to guide to a baffling array of sexual acrobatics—is presumably a function of the text’s age, or else every other new age sex-manual could claim the same.

This is a rather flimsy distinction, which pivots, no doubt, on the ability to claim the Kama Sutra as a ‘sacred’ text, although defenders of it may be hard-pressed to pinpoint what exactly makes a reductive, photo-illustrated ‘Kama Sutra’ (of which there are many) any more sacred than a generic photo-illustrated compendium of sex positions. Nevertheless, the Kama Sutra’s antiquity makes all the difference; its open www.openthemagazine.com 49

publication goes on unhindered while other books are seized for presuming to make explicit in their titles the ancient text’s tacit promise of ‘great sex’.

A consignment of books imported

by Hachette India was recently seized by the Indian Customs Department when a couple of the titles in the incoming invoice jumped out at officials: Letters to Penthouse and Daily Sex: 365 Positions and Activities for a Year of Great Sex!—the former perhaps because its title included the name of a publication banned in India (never mind the fact that several volumes of Letters to Penthouse have been published in India for over a decade now); the latter presumably for the words ‘Great Sex’. Shortly thereafter, a search of Hachette’s Gurgaon office was conducted by Customs officials.

Thomas Abraham, managing director of Hachette India, says the search seemed a bit mysterious; it was only afterwards “that it was clarified that the search was for ‘objectionable material’, though the tenor of questions suggested that books with sexual content were being looked for”. The documentation made by Customs afterwards, while stating that nothing incriminatory was found, did not specify the cause for the search in the first place. During the search, officials apparently picked up, perused, then dropped Naomi Wolf’s latest, Vagina: A New Biography—they couldn’t have known it was not erotic in the least.

When Hachette’s sales director, Somu Sundar Reddy, was summoned to a deposition, he went prepared with an extended document outlining the differences between pornography and erotica and describing what Abraham calls “the current cultural context”, despite the non-specific nature of the summons. He found the Customs officers fairly understanding, but returned with no greater clarity on the outcome.

Abraham says the only visual elements at risk of being interpreted obscene in the entire consignment were the line-drawing diagrams in Daily Sex, which he describes as “stylistically, the kind you find in Biology textbooks”.

Similar diagrams have frequently appeared along with magazine sex ad50 open

vice columns, some fashioned after the Kama Sutra. Had Hachette sneaked those two sacred words into the book’s subtitle, it may not have been seized at all.

C

ertainly, the sensitivity seems to

be about visually graphic material, else how do you explain the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon? To say nothing of the piles of used Mills & Boon paperbacks accumulating at pavement booksellers and magazine stands across the city, nor of the increasingly frequent collections of erotica brought out by reputable publishers without a hitch.

And though the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s women’s wing, Durga Vahini, can find it in their hearts and schedules to spend hours shouting themselves hoarse about an exhibi-

On the four occasions in the book that Chester Brown chooses to zoom in on those parts, they appear pixellated almost beyond recognition.

His cartoon penis is still visible at a safe distance tion of nudes at a gallery in a South Delhi enclave where nobody’s likely to be sympathetic to their cause, they haven’t, so far, exercised their passionate censoriousness to have books of nude art and photography seized from bookstores.

This would seem to indicate that things are, in fact, “easing up”, as Karthika puts it. Perhaps this is why she seems largely unconcerned about Harper’s forthcoming publication of a book of artistic nudes by Open correspondent Mihir Srivastava. While they did choose to omit some works that depict male genitalia in favour of tamer nudity, Srivastava’s sketches themselves will not be pixellated.

The graphic novel, Karthika explains, has an audience with “a certain sophistication”, affording it a kind of natural protection from “the wrong

eyes”. Even so, it isn’t hard to imagine that the graphic novel, new to the Indian book market, might be peculiarly vulnerable to the obscenity police: too visual to escape notice, too lowbrow to qualify for an ‘artistic’ or ‘ancient’ exemption. And Harper, or at least its lawyer, must have had some inkling of uncertainty about how nudity—even casual nudity—in this form would be received.

Perhaps there was the lingering shadow of Savita Bhabhi, star of the eponymous and enormously popular pornographic webcomic series, which was banned in 2009 on a shaky interpretation of the Information Technology Act of 2000, which regurgitates the same ambiguous blither about lasciviousness and prurience and depravity as Section 292.

Savita’s (ultimately temporary) banishment from the web resulted in an eruption of discourse around censorship and pornography, led primarily by the Centre for Internet and Society.

Many critics of the decision at the time brought up the Kama Sutra, pointing out that if explicit sexual images were the problem, we’d have a substantial backlog of scripture and sculpture to erase off our cultural database.

Brown’s book is neither as pornographic as Savita Bhabhi, nor as life-like in its depiction of naked bodies as nude art. Why, then, the selfcensorship?

Karthika maintains the pixellation in Paying For It was “not about censorship” so much as “making sure the text was not hijacked away from its context” into a conversation about obscenity. Such a controversy would have obscured the book, which she felt so strongly about publishing that pixellating a few penises was a small price to pay.

It is quite a book. Brown has a wonderful minimalist style and an eye for situational comedy, often at his own expense. His frankness is utterly charming, but it is never allowed to compromise the (relative) privacy of the women who appear as re-named characters in the novel, and whose faces are uniformly obscured by speech bubbles.

12 august 2013

Oytun Karadayi/getty images

But ‘indecent’ is, again, one of those words that is hospitable to all sorts of meaning, and no amount of disclaimers is likely to deter the more determined among this country’s plentiful moral vigilantes. Those who will take offence will take it despite the pixellated peace offering. The nine blurry penises are, ultimately, a conciliatory gesture to those who cannot be conciliated.

A

the problem with nudity India’s obscenity law is vague about what ‘appeals to the prurient interest’

It is worth noting that while keeping the book in context may save it from being accused of titillation, it would unlikely do much in the way of protecting it from accusations of encouraging prostitution, nor from those litigious flag-bearers of feminine modesty who have for years found solace in laws like the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act of 1986— which was put to immediate use by Odisha Chief Minister JB Patnaik to recall an issue of The Illustrated Weekly of India from newsstands in his state that year allegedly because it carried an im12 August 2013

age of a semi-nude woman.

A book about paid-for sex is virtually an invitation for complaints about indecency and about representations of women. Brown’s emphatic pro-decriminalisation anti-regulation stance vis-a-vis sex work—clearly inflected by his Libertarian politics— is not for everyone. But it isn’t thoughtless. And though he allows himself the most convincing voice in the narrative, he does provide alternate perspectives. His endnotes and appendices are dense with citations and caveats.

rather more compelling

rationale for this discretionary selfcensorship is that it was intended to dull the potential impact on any children who might accidentally start reading it thinking it was your average comic book. Books, Karthika points out, do not, unlike films or music, come with ratings or Parental Advisory banners (though, thanks to the ageblindness of torrents, those now seem like quaint artefacts, relevant only to those of us who attempted to buy cassettes and CDs of The Marshall Mathers LP or Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water in the early 2000s). And a graphic novel is intuitively more likely to be picked up by a child than your average book is.

In this context, the pixellation seems like a gesture of good faith, a small mercy to the parents of that curious child, who, Karthika imagines, would have less trouble with naked people just standing around than with the graphic close-up depiction of sexual acts.

But “books are hardly the stuff of corruption anymore,” Karthika says. The internet took care of that.

Besides, she adds, after the Fifty Shades trilogy glided onto (and subsequently flew off) bookstore shelves with barely a smudge of red ink, “I don’t see how any court in the country can ban this.”

All the same, she says, “Why push it?” Indeed, that is the prudent position. But perhaps we ought to push it anyway. Because there’s a point at which rampant prudery becomes more embarrassing than run-of-the-mill prurience. And that point is probably the pixellation of a cartoon penis. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Books Heaven, Hell and Earth Amitava Kumar’s A Matter of Rats casts Patna in a triple role of memory, magnet and mundanity. It is a good book. With one more nudge, it could have been a great one aditya sinha A matter of rats

By Amitava Kumar aleph book company | 140 pages | Rs 295

A

mitava Kumar’s biography of

Patna, A Matter of Rats, is in ‘meow-meow English’. A rodent’s tale told with a feline tread may sound like a mixed metaphor, even a paradox, but then that’s what Kumar makes of his hometown, Bihar’s capital: a city in which depression and exhilaration are twins that were, as in the movies, separated at birth.

And he chooses to tell its story through a collection of stories: a journey into Bihar’s countryside to investigate a Swiftian Modest Proposal to tandoor-ise rats (giving new meaning to the term ‘killing fields’); a schoolboy’s sketches of Patna’s long-lost historical grandeur; Shiva Naipaul’s slippery reportage on Bihar; Patna in a triplerole of memory, magnet and mundanity—or, Heaven, Hell and Earth; a very Bihari romance gone sour; and finally, an angst-filled epilogue.

It’s a compelling read and at 140 pages, it’s breezy as well. However. In the background of any biography of an Indian city will always loom Suketu Mehta’s take on Bombay, Maximum City, and while you may argue that the scope and portraiture of the two books are incomparable, the intent of the two is without a doubt similarly ambitious. Certainly, A Matter of Rats is no milk-and-water cop-out like Amit Chaudhuri’s take on Calcutta, and Amitava Kumar’s collection stands on its own as a fine book. Yet, when you read it, you can only wonder what could have been.

Much was expected of Amitava Kumar. His last book, A Foreigner

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Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, was a meticulous piece of journalism about two terror convicts whose stories served as a left-wing critique of America’s War on Terror.

As is true of the best intellectuals, Kumar is able to discern (and join the discourse on) the intertwined strands of politics and language, and he does so in A Matter of Rats, keeping company with poets whose words try and restructure the social order (and also with those like Patna-born Ravish Kumar, award-winning NDTV journalist, of whom a Delhi University professor said: “[His] kind of language comes from someone who has social understanding.”). And of course, as an

Most Biharis feel shortchanged by the way their state and even Patna are portrayed in literature and the media; even Al Punch in 1906 ‘reported that paikhana, or excrement, was being thrown from cars...’

English professor at Vassar College in the US, he’s a non-resident Pataniya, which brings up the wise old saying: you can take a boy out of Bihar, but you can’t take Bihar out of a boy. (He confesses, though, that when he visits Patna he sees it with an outsider’s eye.)

Still, the book works quite nicely as it is. It begins with ‘The Rat’s Guide’, a meditation on rats, with startling facts about rats (they get drunk in Patna), and a visit to watch members of the Musahar community catch rats—with their bare hands—in a field. Musahars are pretty much the Dalits of Dalits. A bureaucrat tells Kumar of his dream

to get people eating rats (they’re tastier than chicken, a Musahar named Sinhasan tells Kumar), not to change the popular perception of rats as much to change the perception of Musahars.

This trip into primitivism makes Kumar muse about the highway to progress—‘It was littered with fresh carnage.’ It is a shrewd and engaging piece of reportage.

Since rats show up nowhere else in the book but figure in its title, you have to wonder if Kumar was just setting the book up with a chapter that shows the hopelessness of Bihar’s backwardness to heighten the drama of the following chapters, or whether he was presenting a metaphor of Biharis as creatures of resilience, with an ability to gnaw through concrete and go two weeks without sleeping. Perhaps it was both, for the next chapter time-machines through Bihar’s glorious history and Patna’s past as the Subcontinent’s first grand city. It would have simply been a better-told version of the innumerable lectures my father gave me growing up if it hadn’t been for the story of Napoleon’s bed ending up in Patna. Yes. You’ll have to read it to believe it.

Most Biharis feel shortchanged by the way their state and even Patna are portrayed in literature and the media; eventhe Urdu journal Al Punch in 1906 ‘reported that paikhana, or excrement, was being thrown from cars at the east end of the park at 10 pm every night’.

Kumar gives us a compendium of literary praise, mentions and run-downs; but one delicious anecdote concerns VS Naipaul’s younger brother Shiva, who was scathing in his writing about Bihar—possibly because he slipped and fell in some mud. Yes, do read it.

Then comes the interesting analysis of the three types of Pataniyas: the emigrants, the immigrants and the ones 12 august 2013

prashant ravi/bihar photos

highway to progress ‘It was littered with fresh carnage,’ writes Vassar professor and one-time Patna boy Amitava Kumar

trapped in between. The first category includes the conceptual artist Subodh Gupta, who in part has made it big by referencing very elemental fragments from his early life in rural Patna.

The last category includes Anand Kumar—from whom Amitava Kumar picked up the ‘lovely, eloquent phrase “meow-meow English”’, indicating the privileged in Patna society—a child prodigy who never made use of a Cambridge admission for mathematics due to poverty and the untimely death of his father, but who now runs an IITentrance-exam tuition centre that is so successful that rival coaching centres hurl bombs at it. (Imagine how impoverished Anurag Kashyap’s cinematic imagination would be without the reality of Bihar.)

The emigrants include a steady 12 August 2013

stream mostly from around the state, arriving for medical treatment, employment or political activism; like Irfan, who came to Patna from Allahabad to design a magazine and married a beedi worker before leaving for Delhi to work in television. As Kumar says, the marriage ‘was a rebuke to every academic leftist I knew’.

The book’s last chapter is the love story of tattered poet Raghav and the much-younger Leela, whose title is taken from a song from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, namely Emotional Atyachaar. It is filled with love, strangeness, bitterness, public-laundering and poetry.

It is very much a metaphor for Patna, and could have only followed the rest of the book as an emotional punctuation mark. It is, along with ‘The Rat’s Guide’, a bookend for the collection.

It isn’t, of course, the final word. That comes in a short, poignant epilogue about Kumar’s parents, who are on their inexorable march towards life’s only certainty: its end. They are what bring Kumar back to Patna, again and again; and on each trip, he sees them visibly age a bit more. They are ultimately his measure of Patna. They are why, though Kumar loves Patna, he is scared to death of it.

A Matter of Rats is a good book, a satisfying read. The characters are sharply etched, highly memorable, and unlike in Maximum City there are no ‘composite’ characters here. Each person is true and alive, in all senses. Yet in the end, it is so good that you think: one more nudge, and it could have been a great book. But you should read it, even if you’re not a Pataniya. n open www.openthemagazine.com 53

Books “It’s Like Fine French Cooking” Michael Katakis, writer, photographer and manager of the Ernest Hemingway estate, on why people will never tire of the late writer’s works gunjeet sra ashish sharma

more than a click A well-known photographer, Katakis believes that his images have won acclaim because he cares more for his subject than the photograph

M

ichael Katakis is a man of

many roles. Last year, this Paris resident was appointed ambassador of the British Library.

A well-known photographer, his images hang in some of the most prestigious galleries in the UK, such as the National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Geographical Society, The National Army Museum, as well as in a special collection of Stanford University. Yet it is writing that 61-year-old Katakis believes he was truly born to do. “For me,

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the camera has been a sketchbook to go to the writing. I have been struggling with words all my life. I don’t struggle with pictures. Essentially I would call myself a writer who happens to take pictures,” says Katakis as he sips on his green tea at Taj Hotel, New Delhi.

Katakis has one more interesting job.

For the past 13 years, he has been manager of the Ernest Hemingway Estate, a job he was persuaded to take up by Patrick Hemingway, the youngest of the late writer’s sons. As the literary

rights manager to the estate, all permission requests related to Hemingway’s works are directed at him.

Katakis states that the Hemingway family is currently not granting permission to publish “unpublished works or derivative material” of the author, though last year, the Random House imprint William Heineman did acquire the rights to alternate endings to his most popular work in an edition titled A Farewell to Arms: The Special Edition. This edition, which in12 august 2013

cludes early drafts of essential passages, the author’s own 1948 introduction, a selection of handwritten manuscript pages and the original 1929 cover artwork, was put out with a clear purpose: “To show to his fans and critics the meticulous hard work and discipline that Hemingway put in all his work. Also to help them better understand the author as each ending contemplated is so different from what he actually chose,” says Katakis.

It is the Hemingway estate that has bought him to India. “I came here to talk to Simon & Schuster about Hemingway e-books, what they are doing to develop that here. We want to see how to tap the Hemingway market here, get some Indian writers who have an affinity to the author to give an introduction to his work.” Katakis feels that Hemingway’s work resonates well with each new generation and has been selling more and more every year since the 1950s because it talks about the essentials of life. “It’s like fine French cooking—reduction, reduction, reduction to the point where you plant the idea in the head without really stating it. Hemingway talks of love lost, love found and writes about things which are very humane and relatable. His writing propels you into a certain kind of nostalgia,” he says.

These are things that Katakis, too, has been acutely aware of, having lost his mother as a child and more recently, the love of his life—his wife, anthropologist Dr Kris Hardin—to a brain tumour. Katakis and Hardin together had spent over 35 years travelling the world, visiting places such as China, West Africa, Cuba, Hungary, Morocco, Turkey, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Italy. He now spends the majority of his time in Paris.

The American-born writer says that he and his wife had left the US since they did not believe in the capitalistic system of governance. “We were not wealthy. We had nothing except our defiance, so we left,” he says. Katakis, who calls himself a “reluctant optimist”, seems to bear an almost childlike naiveté. He believes in utopian world and repeatedly quotes philosophers to enunciate a point, but it is his 12 August 2013

empathy and keenness to soak in life that astounds you. Whether it is nuances of everyday Indian life in Old Delhi or the apparent longing to read he noticed in the face of an illiterate autorickshaw driver in Varanasi, there is nothing much that misses his eyes.

A keen observer of life who calls himself a traveller and not a tourist because he “despises tourism”, he engages with life in ways that most photographers don’t, and can tell you in detail the fears, hopes and dreams of each subject of his portraits. “A photograph by him is an exercise in clarity, economy and purpose… his photographs treat the world with dignity,” comedian and writer Michael Palin had said at an event in London last year. Katakis’ photographic work is a stunning compilation of monochromatic visuals of

“Hemingway talks of love lost, love found and writes about things which are very humane and relatable. His writing propels you into a certain kind of nostalgia” everyday life and people in places he has travelled to. “I shoot in black-andwhite because I want the subject to be the only focus, without even a pretty blue as distraction,” he says.

His goal is to click 25 extraordinary photographs in his lifetime; so far, he feels, he has only taken seven such images.

Yet, Katakis believes that cameras are intrusive. “The reason why my photography has been received so well is because I care so little about it. One of the secrets of clicking a great picture is that you care about the subject more than you care about the pictures. The problem with most photographers being mediocre these days is that the pictures that they click are reactive and not reflective in nature... they don’t wait for life to reveal itself in their quest for perfection,” he says.

“A good photograph, like a good book, must reveal itself,” he pronounc-

es. Everything with him always goes back to writing as he feels great books are fixed in time in a way nothing else can really be. “Books are one of the finest inventions on the face of this earth,” he believes.

Katakis has had a passionate affair with books and writing, strangely enough on account of his difficult childhood in the US. After his mother’s death, this son of immigrant parents started being haunted by images of his ailing mother. To help him get over his fears, his father started reading to him at bedtime and later took him to a library in Chicago and introduced him to a librarian who would change his life. “The moment I walked in, she took me by the hand, showed me the rows of books and said, ‘Every word in all of these books is a thread that will weave a magic carpet for you and make you travel to another world, a kinder world.’ That day changed my life.”

It is books that made him dream of travelling and seeing the places that he had read about: to document them through his lens and words, ultimately adding nine books to his name.

His next book, titled A Thousand Shards of Glass, due for release next year, is on the US. “It is an honest critique of the system. Initially I thought I was writing this book for my fellow Americans, but now I feel it can be used as a warning sign for all those nations that want to emulate us.” Even though it is non-fiction, Katakis says he struggled with the writing, editing it at least 37 times because he wanted to make it simple. Unlike most of his collection of essays, it starts and ends with a poem. “Poetry speaks for what we long [for]… for what might be.” The book is perhaps catharsis for a man who feels that his country failed him.

“After that, it’s finally going to be fiction. Like all fiction, it’s going to be non-fiction designed as fiction,” he laughs. As he finishes his green tea, Katakis sums up his India experience as ‘extraordinary’ and says that he will be back in exactly eight months. This time to travel and document and add yet another chapter to his meanderings across the globe. n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

dance A Lost Idyll In its almost 80 years of existence, Chennai’s Kalakshetra has become more about preservation than innovation. The appointment of a new director may breathe new life into this once-revolutionary institution gitanjali kolanad

I

have to struggle not to wax nostalgic about my years at the dance school Kalakshetra in the early 1970s. The location close to the sea, the simple thatched cottages shaded by flowering trees, the young students in simple cotton dance practice clothes, the prayers of all faiths sung under the banyan tree, it all still seems idyllic. That this had once been a hotbed of the most radical ideas of art had already long been forgotten.

india today group/getty images

In 1936, when Rukmini Devi started it, the very thought of a dance school was revolutionary. Until then the dance form we now call Bharatanatyam had been the exclusive intellectual property of the thevaridayal, or devadasi, and her community. Only the male nattuvanars claimed the right to teach and play the cymbals during performances. In an intuitive leap, Rukmini Devi realised that the dance had a conceptual shape beyond the physical

bodies and historical contexts within which it had existed—that was something no one owned, and that was what she set out to discover and teach.

Rukmini Devi’s re-envisioning of the dance form had been ahistorical, but by the time I came to Kalakshetra in 1971, less than forty years later, it had acquired a historical gloss: Natya Shastra blah blah blah two thousand years blah blah blah temple dancers blah blah blah. It was a neat conjur-

ing trick, directing the gaze away from messy, inconvenient facts in the recent past to a distant, hazy and surely much more glorious era.

Even when Rukmini Devi ran the place, the serene exterior hid passions, affairs and intrigues. A senior staff member grabbed and groped female students, including me. One man on campus was a notorious womaniser, rumoured to be having affairs with not one, not two, but three of the teachers.

Students weren’t even supposed to talk to the opposite sex. Dance teachers were dictatorial. If I wore six bangles on one wrist, I had to wear six on the other—No Asymmetry Allowed!

Though there was much I hated, I stuck it out for three long years because at some level the training seemed to work. Young bodies came

into Kalakshetra as lumpen flesh and emerged four years later as dancers imprinted with the ‘Kalakshetra’ style.

Despite all the protestations of ‘tradition’, what set this dancing apart from other Bharatanatyam performances of that time were the hallmarks of modernism: clean, unfussy choreography, energetic pacing without too much digression, elegant costumes in carefully composed colour schemes.

Kalakshetra stood for spareness, refinement, simplicity at a time when the prevailing aesthetic in Madras was over-the-top excess.

In the dance dramas, that style was shown to its best advantage. One year while I was a student, the whole Ramayana series was staged in the theatre ‘built according to the precepts of the Natya Shastra’ (never mind that

By the early 1990s, the Kalakshetra style had become a victim of its own success in overcoming competing aesthetic values.

The elements that had once made the style stand out were now standard Bharata said not a word about microphones or lighting boards). Even for me, a teenager brought up in the West, with no emotional connection to the story of Rama’s exile, the ballets exerted an aesthetic power. I was often moved to tears without knowing why.

Maybe the nature of the style and the method of teaching it, which supported dancing in unison, accounted for there being no Kalakshetra dancers among the top solo dancers of the time.

Before Rukmini Devi passed away in 1986, there was a palpable sense that the best and brightest of those who had benefitted from its training had no choice but to leave in order to make their mark on the dance scene. under the banyan tree The simple thatched cottages shaded by flowering trees and students in cotton dance practice clothes still seem idyllic

Professor CV Chandrasekar was teaching at University of Baroda. Shanta and Dhananjayan were building a performing career as well as teaching at their own institution. Kunhiraman had gone to California. But none of these dancers made it to the very top.

Yamini Krishnamurthy had done so, and she had studied at Kalakshetra, but somehow she didn’t count, her own beauty, style and charisma obliterating any effect of the training. It was only when Leela Samson came to Delhi and quickly became one of the handful of top young dancers in India, that ‘Kalakshetra’ was used as an adjective for a top dancer.

By the early 90s, the Kalakshetra style had become a victim of its own success in overcoming competing aesthetic values. The main elements that had once made the style stand out— precision of hand and arm positions, a deep, held, aramandi, and clarity of footwork—were now a standard that every dancer on stage displayed.

Pure dance, which is easier to watch in large proscenium theatres, was taking precedence over abhinaya, the expressive element, which communicates best in an intimate setting. One didn’t need to watch a Kalakshetra dancer to enjoy these attributes in a dance performance.

Yet Leela held her own in a field that included brilliant charismatic dancers like Malavika Sarukkai and Alarmel Valli, bringing a depth and sophistication to the Bharatanatyam repertoire that couldn’t be found in any other Kalakshetra dancer, while remaining one herself.

Meanwhile Kalakshetra took pride in its own inertia. The Rukmini Devi dance-dramas continued to be performed, and the star dancers who had danced in them choreographed their own imitations, but Rukmini Devi’s genius hadn’t rubbed off on even those closest to her creative acts. She had groomed no successor. Her death left a vacuum, which the Ministry of Culture, now in charge, seemed in no hurry to fill.

So when Leela was appointed the director of Kalakshetra in 2005, it seemed like an ideal convergence, though it open www.openthemagazine.com 57

was Kalakshetra that needed Leela, not Leela who needed Kalakshetra. With her arrival the dance school seemed, from the outside, to burst into life.

There were top performers from all over India, poetry readings, film showings, craft bazaars and, after a long time, interesting people expressing radical ideas on art. As just one example, Anand Patwardhan screened his film about Dalit musicians, Jaya Bhim Comrade, provoking discussion about Brahminism and caste at Kalakshetra.

And any time one went into Kalakshetra, there was Leela. She was very approachable, like a gracious host, personifying the open spirit of the place.

The first rumblings of problems were so petty it was difficult to take them seriously: a Ganesha shrine had been dismantled; Kalakshetra dancers weren’t allowed to honour Sri Sri Ravi Shankar; a former professor’s daughter hadn’t been appointed to a teaching position.

And if we on the outside asked ourselves why Leela herself was not creating new work for Kalakshetra, well, she must be awfully busy, and if what was being created by senior staff was kitsch at best (The Man in the Iron Mask?), it must be because the new culture needed time to come to fruition.

Leela’s resignation in 2012, well into her second term, came out of the blue to those of us not in the know. On the surface it seemed to be about the issue of her age. The Ministry of Culture had specified that the director could not be over 55 when starting, but had left the question of retirement open-ended. Without a clear directive, Leela became vulnerable to the default retirement setting once she turned 60.

Dancers around the world came together in support of Leela, though aware only of the issue of age, which dominated the online forums in which this was discussed. The general feeling was that Leela had resuscitated an institution that had become moribund, and a technicality should not cut her term short. The board asked Leela to withdraw her resignation; the Ministry of Culture, which first ac58 open

cepted it without—it seems—giving it much thought, now accepted her withdrawal with equal insouciance.

Leela did not return to her post for long. This time it was neither the board, nor Ministry of Culture, nor Leela herself who was responsible.

The 16 dance and music teachers of Kalakshetra came together against her re-instatement, arguing that once a resignation has been accepted there is no procedure by which it can be withdrawn.

By then it had become clear that age was far from the most contentious issue of Leela’s tenure as director.

Many more serious administrative questions were raised: how a contract for Rs 3.9 crore was awarded to Madhu Ambat for documenting the Ramayana series of dance-dramas, how new

Value judgments by outsiders are irrelevant. In a thousand years Rukmini Devi’s dance dramas will look exactly the same, and future generations will find them as beautiful as ever hirings were made without authorisation, how a contract for renovations to the main theatre was awarded, and so on.

Leela’s answer to my questions, in an email, was, ‘I don’t have to defend myself’. But that may be exactly what she does have to do, as cases against her are on-going in the courts. Gopalkrishnan Gandhi, the present chairman of the Board of Directors, stressed that as a Government-funded institution, its board must ensure transparency and accountability, even if that is seen by the director as ‘un-supportive’ or ‘obstructionist’.

A dance teacher who has been with the institution since Rukmini Devi’s time defended their joint action, saying simply, “We are artists too.” She disputes the perception that Leela brought new relevance to Kalakshetra.

The day-to-day work went on as it al-

ways had, before, during and after Leela. I suggested that dancers in a recent remounting of Gita Govinda were about as exciting to watch as cold porridge; she disagreed vehemently.

I said the costumes looked like they were badly stitched from old curtains; she countered that they matched the costumes of the original exactly.

Value judgments from outsiders are irrelevant. In a thousand years, she said, Rukmini Devi’s dance dramas will look exactly the same, and future generations will find them as beautiful as ever.

Gandhi too takes a long view, noting that ‘every director, like every student and teacher...will have to bid farewell to Kalakshetra, and Kalakshetra will have to cope with the pang of that parting.’ Given the breadth and depth of talent in this country, he and the search committee set out with cautious optimism to find a new director, who, without falling into simplistic categories such as ‘administrator’ or ‘visionary’ would be able to nurture the ‘Kalakshetra bani’.

That the search committee chose a dancer of another bani, in fact, the Vazhavoor school, was a radical move, illustrating how little old labels mean in Bharatanatyam today.

Over the 77 years of Kalakshetra’s existence, the field of endeavour had shifted from discovery and invention to preserving and passing on. Rukmini Devi’s iconoclasm was slowly reduced to iconography. But now that unthinking reverence has given way, putting Priyadarshini Govind in charge has the potential to spark a creative revival.

Priyadarshini Govind is the premiere dancer of her generation.

Her dance is like water, brilliant and clear as ice one moment, melting and fluid the next, and positively steamy in the erotic sringara padams. That she is not an insider may well work to her advantage in navigating the internal politics of the institution. Kalakshetra teachers will admire the perfection of her adavus; they can learn from her sensual grace, if they are willing. If only I could be young again, I’d sign up to study at the new Kalakshetra. n 12 August 2013

science

circalunar rhythm The reproductive cycles of many organisms, especially marine ones, are linked to changing levels of moonlight and tidal cycles, both of which are governed by phases of the moon

Unreliable Recall By planting a false memory in rats, scientists show humans can have faulty memories too

The Lunar Cycle Influences Sleep

I

n the science fiction thrill-

er Inception, a team of individuals has the ability to plant ideas or memories in another’s subconscious. As it turns out, such a possibility may not always remain the stuff of science fiction. A group of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology has successfully implanted false memories in the brains of mice. According to Science, where their research was published, these false memories can be easily induced and are just as strong as real memories.

The researchers managed to encode memories in the brains of mice by manipulating individual neurons. Memories of experiences are recorded as engrams in brains.

These engrams are encoded in physical and chemical changes in brain cells and in connections between them. For this experiment, the scientists inserted a gene for a protein that is sensitive to light. This allowed them to turn cells in the hippocampus area of the brain—which is involved in forming memories—on or off by exposing them to light.

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In the experiment, the researches placed mice in a chamber for a day and allowed them to explore it. The mice thus acquired a memory of the environment and its safeness.

The next day, the same mice were placed in a second chamber and given a small electric shock. At the same time, they shone a light into their brains, thereby triggering memories of the first chamber. In the next part of the experiment, when the mice were placed in the first chamber, where they had previously roamed freely, they froze with fear.

According to the researchers, this occurred because when they were reliving the memory of being in the first chamber an electric shock was administered, thereby causing a false association to form. The same mice were later put in a third chamber, where they were not given any light flashes or shocks. They remained unafraid.

The lead author of the study, Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel prizewinning scientist, told The Guardian, “Humans are very imaginative animals. Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So, just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with bad or good high-variance ongoing events. In other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you.” n

The moon can influence our sleep patterns, according to a study published in Current Biology. In the new study, researchers studied 33 volunteers in two age groups in the lab while they slept. Their brain patterns were monitored while asleep, along with eye movements and hormone secretions. The data show that around full moon, brain activity related to deep sleep drops by 30 per cent.

People also take five minutes longer to fall asleep, and they sleep 20 minutes less overall. Study participants felt their sleep was poorer when the moon was full, and they showed diminished levels of melatonin, a hormone known to regulate sleep and wake cycles. n

Women’s Height and Cancer Risk

The taller a postmenopausal woman, the greater her risk for developing cancer, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. In this study of 20,928 postmenopausal women, researchers found that for every 10 cm increase in height, there was a 13 per cent increase in risk of developing any cancer. Among specific cancers, there was a 13 per cent to 17 per cent increase in the risk of getting melanoma and cancers of the breast, ovary, endometrium and colon. There was a 23 to 29 per cent increase in the risk of developing cancers of the kidney, rectum, thyroid and blood. n 12 august 2013

ISO 6425 for Divers’ watches

tech&style

ISO 6425 testing of watches for water resistance or water-tightness and resistance is more stringent than that for non-dive watches, because every single watch has to be tested, and at a depth 25 per cent greater than their rating

Huawei Ascend Mate This gizmo can be used either as a smartphone or tablet

Omega Seamaster w Diver ETNZ Limited Edition

Price on request

gagandeep Singh Sapra

Rs 24,990

It celebrates ETNZ’s campaign to claim sailing’s greatest trophy.

‘Challenger for the 34th America’s Cup’ is engraved around the outside of the case back. Its exclusive chronograph is equipped with professional dive features including a unidirectional rotating bezel and a helium escape valve. It is water resistant up to 300 metres. Only 2,013 units of this model have been produced. n

W

ith a huge 6.1 inch IPS LCD that can display 1,280x720 pixels resolution at a 16:8 ratio, the Huawei Ascend Mate feels big. The screen is sharp and the phone is quick on its heels, thanks to its Quad Core 1.5Ghz processor, 2GB RAM on board, 8GB ROM and its storage that is expandable to 64GB using a micro SD card.

The LCD uses something called Magic Touch that enables you to use the touchscreen even with thick gloves on. Maybe not a big deal in a hot region, but in case you are out in the cold you can use this smartphone without spending money on capacitive touch gloves.

This smartphone features an 8 megapixel back-illuminated sensor and performs well on both day and night photography. The front of the phone has a 1 megapixel camera that is decent enough to take some self shots or conduct a video call.

Like most phones today, Ascend Mate uses a micro USB connector to charge it. The phone features a vol-

12 August 2013

ume rocker and a lock button on one side. On the other side is a micro SD card slot. A micro SIM slot lies on top of the phone.

The Ascend Mate features a mono speaker and it comes with Dolby certification. Huawei bundles a headphone, but you will need to upgrade this in case you want to enjoy a better experience. The battery in my tests lasted more than a day and I was happy having a battery that still had 20 per cent charge the next morning.

In my tests the phone performed pretty well on the daily tasks of browsing the web and playing some games. However, though the processor is a Quad Core 1.5GHz, it won’t match the speeds of some of the expensive phones in this bracket.

The main drawback for me is the size, but with people looking at the phablet market seriously, the 6.1 inch screen makes sense if you are trying to carry just one device. And with its solid build, good display and long battery life, this phone becomes an attractive option. n

Switch Bluetooth Speaker

$149.99

Native Union’s Switch has an award-winning design that lets you place the speaker block vertically or horizontally. Hence the name Switch. This Bluetooth speaker block has three speaker units that ensure optimal sound quality. Featuring a full duplex microphone, it also acts as a good conference call system. An intuitive volume wheel, inspired by the hi-fi audio systems of the days gone by, makes the Switch easy to operate. And interestingly, you can even charge your mobile phone from its 1,800 mAH battery that on full-charge lasts up to 14 hours. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

things people do for cinema For 36 hours before shooting his shirtless scenes for The Wolverine, Hugh Jackman did not drink any fluids at all. This dehydration technique tightened him up and gave him the “ripped” look he wanted, according to him

The Wolverine An entertaining film that shows us an interesting social structure in corporate Japan ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Issaq Director Manish Tiwary cast Prateik Babbar, Amyra Dastur,

Evelyn Sharma Score ★★★★★

oto, an, tao okam Cast hugh jackm rila fukushima mangold Director James

N

agasaki was devastated by a B-29 bomber on 9 August 1945 and The Wolverine begins with this scene. Logan is Wolverine, a mutant who can heal himself and live an abnormally extended lifespan. He is a prisoner of war in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing and saves the life of a Japanese soldier. Years later, this soldier is a Japanese industrialist who has set up Yashida Corporation. He sends for Logan because he says he wants to repay him.

The film is shot largely in modern Japan, and of all the X-Men films, this is the most respectful to a foreign culture. Director James Mangold has said that in terms of ambience, he wanted to evoke the atmosphere of a Yasujiro Ozu film, particularly Floating Weeds (1959). He hasn’t succeeded—where is the tatami shot?—but he has put together a very watchable film by showing us an interesting social structure in corporate Japan and by entertaining us with a 62 open

terrific action sequence aboard a bullet train from Tokyo to Nagasaki.

Logan (Hugh Jackman) returns to find the devastated city resurrected.

This time he is protecting the granddaughter of the man whose life he saved in 1945, and a persistent sense of deja vu permeates the film. Soon it will be ‘Nagasaki Mon Amour’, as Logan falls in love with his ward, Mariko Yashida (Tao Okamoto). Dare one say it, but a sense of regret for a transgression of history comes across in this gentle passage of film and it is all the more poignant because it happens in the most unlikely of places, a superhero movie.

The finale of The Wolverine is disappointingly familiar because it is whipped up in the usual implausible manner, with mindboggling obstacles that Logan has to circumvent or overcome, but till that climax the movie can be listened to for its conversation and watched for its panoramic view of a beautiful urban landscape. n

The House of Mishra and House of Kashyap takes the place of Montague and Capulet in this film. Varanasi is Verona.

So what’s in a name? Surely that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Unfortunately, that poetic polemic doesn’t work in this adaptation and what we end up seeing is a farce, not a tragedy.

The crumbling architecture of the Kashyap haveli, balcony and all, is where it begins when Rahul Mishra (Prateik Babbar) woos Bacchi Kashyap (Amyra Dastur). The love story is fairly ordinary and the warring clansmen of their respective families behave like members of any other feudal set-up in Uttar Pradesh.

Shakespeare seems rather extraneous to it all and apart from the vibrant streets of Varanasi and one scene when the lovers first glimpse each other through a sea of multi-coloured faces at a Holi celebration, the movie falls flat.

Badly written, the film is unable to conjure any drama. Prateik Babbar’s performance is particularly bad. You can scarcely recognise him as the sensitive actor from Dhobi Ghat.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature of this movie is a lovely night scene on a boat by the Ganges, with lights twinkling on the river bank. n ad

12 august 2013

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Ex Factor

It seems things have gotten serious between Bipasha Basu and Harman Baweja. Friends are even suggesting that the couple has talked of marriage. Their relationship became fodder for tabloids ever since Harman was seen living it up with the Jism star and her friends in Goa on her birthday weekend earlier this year.

Apparently the couple enjoys taking off to Goa every chance they get and it was on their recent return from one such holiday that friends noticed that they’d got closer. Although gossip rags have repeatedly insisted that the couple hooked up while on rebounds from their respective break-ups, Bipasha’s closest girlfriends are pleasantly surprised by just how happy she seems with Harman.

It’s ironic that Harman’s former girlfriend, Priyanka Chopra, was in a long on-off relationship with Shahid Kapoor, who briefly dated Bipasha while cooling off from his affair with PC. Meanwhile, Harman was said to be involved with Shamita Shetty briefly after his romance with Priyanka froze over. And Harman and Shahid were buddies once who went out on double dates and holidays to Bali with their respective girlfriends—Harman with Priyanka, Shahid with Kareena Kapoor!

Even more interesting, Bipasha never quite hit it off with either Kareena or Priyanka. But she’s got along just fine with both their exes.

On the Kapoor Calendar

When Ranbir Kapoor decided he wasn’t going to do Zoya Akhtar’s next film—in which the Luck By Chance director had hoped to cast Kareena Kapoor and him as siblings—she quickly offered Ranveer Singh the role she’d originally written with Ranbir in mind. And Kareena, too, has made way for Priyanka Chopra. To be fair, that’s brave casting on Zoya’s part, especially since Ranveer and Priyanka are paired opposite each other romantically in Gunday, which they are currently filming. Meanwhile, one more actress is yet to be cast in Zoya’s film as Ranveer’s romantic interest. The drama, believed to be centred around 12 August 2013

an extended family, will also likely feature Anil Kapoor as Ranveer and Priyanka’s father.

Ranbir Kapoor, on the other hand, has greenlit a film to be directed by Karan Johar next year. The actor and filmmaker are currently spending substantial time together filming Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet in Sri Lanka. Ranbir plays the leading man in the ambitious film that traces the early history of Bombay. Karan, of course, was famously roped in by Bombay Talkies co-director Kashyap to play the bad guy in Velvet, a Parsi journalist. Kashyap had originally offered this role to Naseeruddin Shah, but quickly turned to Karan when things didn’t work out with Naseer.

Mediated Friendship

These two A-list male stars have never been friends despite having many friends in common. Their wives are thick, but the men have consciously avoided running into each other.

Last year, matters got worse when they clashed over a shared release date for their movies, with one blaming the other for bullying cinema owners into giving him more screens, while the other defended himself by describing the accusations as baseless and untrue.

However, a source close to both actors reveals that while they may have differences with each other professionally, there’s no truth to rumours that they spend all their time plotting each other’s failure. In fact, when one of them was dragged into a recent controversy not of his own making, the other actor reportedly called up the first actor’s wife to check how the family was doing.

Apparently the two men have more than once exchanged notes on false tabloid rumours through friends. One hears that they have reached out to each other and explained the truth when false quotes attacking the other have been attributed to them. Their wives, too, stay closely in touch and maintain peace between the husbands. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

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The Peacemaker of Juhu

Krishna Das, aged 50, has been coming to this particular traffic signal in Juhu Circle, Mumbai, for the past five years to spread harmony. According to people living in the area, he stands here for four or five hours each day holding a placard that reads ‘Follow your religion, love everybody’. Dressed regularly in white, he smiles into each passing car, waving at those who make eye contact with him. According to him, many Bollywood actors and other famous personalities greet him when they pass by.

Das was a garment salesman in the 1990s when he says he had a ‘spiritual awakening’. He then left home and went to Chitrakoot and the Himalayas, meeting gurus and imams. That’s when he realised that followers of different religions wouldn’t always see eye to eye. “The solution is my short message which is written on the placard,” he says 64 open

by as h i s h s h a r m a