EXCLUSIVE THE TERROR FIELDS OF BENGAL
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HOW ABU SALEM TAMED BOLLYWOOD
17 N OV E M B E R 2 0 14 / R S 4 0
The Invisible Empress of Surrealistan How Jayalalithaa still rules Tamil Nadu
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Volume 6 Issue 45 For the week 11—17 November 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers
cover photo Ashish Sharma cover design Anirban Ghosh
17 november 2014
MY SHARIFF
The secret bond between politicians and business magnates is nothing new in India or elsewhere in the world (‘The Politicians versus the Plutocrat’, 27 October 2014). Mahatma Gandhi’s mission to challenge the mighty and ruthless British regime and compel them to quit India would not have been accomplished without the help and financial support of the then super-rich. It was the Tatas and Birlas before, and we now have the likes of the Ambanis and Adanis. Politicians are a Politicians are a breed breed who cannot who cannot survive survive and thrive without the financial without the financial support of corporate support of corporate entities that help and entities that help and finance them in order to finance them in order to extract favours extract favours. Both cannot live and flourish without each other. Everybody knows that corporates pay donations both to the ruling party and party in the opposition and lavish money on the party that is likely to sweep the next election. In my opinion, a parallel parliament, parallel government and parallel banking sector are running alongside. Most of the vital decisions are taken outside Parliament, and the House is there only to be shown to the people as a temple of democracy. Politicians and the super-rich always go hand in hand. The umbilical connection between them will remain, and like corruption, it could hardly be rooted out. letter of the week Unsung Heroes
the article ‘The Father Figure’ (27 October 2014), sums up the self-effacing services of Kailash Satyarthi to the children of bonded labourers across the globe. Yet, in the same article, the writer observes that ‘his work ironically has found greater sympathy outside of India’. Does Satyarthi belong to the category of all those Indian Nobel Prize winners who had achieved global recognition much before India discovered their great potential? The writer should have made references to the criminal casualness and utter disregard of India vis-a-vis her
establishment of India disown its champions of human rights as being ‘confrontationist’ and ‘anti-Indian’? The misfortune of many an Indian laureate is that s/he is honoured and hailed first in Western countries and only then recognised in India. SM kompella
Left Out
unsung and even humiliated sons at home. The Indian press woke up in a tearing hurry, rather belatedly, to realise that it had not sufficiently projected his role as a great Indian Civil Rights activist who blazed a trail in creating consumer resistance to products made by enslaved children. Much before Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace prize, the Indian media even lambasted Satyarthi’s ‘unclean’ connections and insinuated that he was a Christian in the guise of a Hindu, leading the rescued children on a path to Jesus. Why should the political
the author’s explicit animosity towards Left ideology is well known, though his explanations for the debacle of Left parties are not (‘The Last Fossils’, 10 November 2014). That the Left did not fight against inequality is a gross misstatement. The workers of CITU, AITUC, INTUC and BMS stood shoulder to shoulder in the February Bharat Bandh, protesting against the anti labour policies of the Government. That the ire of millions of strikers hardly reflected in election results exemplifies the political paradox. The Left’s campaign against the Government’s economic policies could not outscore the media blitz and the pomp with which images of leaders of other political parties were built by the corporate media. Would the big houses relish the emergence of vociferous critics of neo-liberalism? When cases of corruption and scams hit headlines, casting aspersions on many at the helm, the probity and simplicity of leaders like Jyoti Basu, Nripen Chakraborty, EK Nayanar and EMS Namboodiripad, were not focused upon for obvious reasons. Chandrasekaran
open www.openthemagazine.com 1
Why They Didn’t Kiss and Make Up A critique on the failure of the thwarted Kiss of Love agitation Since it is perilous to critique a movement launched by earnest yuppies with angry fingertips glued to Facebook and Twitter, let’s start with lauding the intent of Kiss of Love, that thwarted agitation in Kerala. When a bunch of Yuva Morcha thugs go about vandalising a restaurant just because young couples cosy-up there, who can argue against the unleashed anger? But do take a look at the photographs of those arrested after they tried to make their way to the protest in Kochi. 17 november 2014
Clearly, it was doomed to fail—they mostly show one or two brave girls with a large retinue of boys. A protest that by its very definition needs a 1:1 ratio between males and females was never going to be very effective when the ratio was 100:1. And it becomes 200:1 when you count those who would have come solely to see the kissing. On the eve of the protest, a couple, who reportedly organised the protest with a call on Facebook, set off something of a storm when they kissed on a television talk
show. That was about all that the voyeurs were going to get: photographs connected to the protest show the rest of them merely pecking at cheeks in ‘cousin brotherly’ fashion. It is of course symbolic, but if the agitation is for a sort of quasi-sexual freedom then kissing on the cheeks has to be cheating. Then there were the protestors against the protestors, men from rightwing organisations like Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, Sunni Yuvajana Sangatana and Social Democratic Party of
India. Their ostensible reason to be there was a mortal threat to culture, but more probably it was envy because in Kerala it is hard to get a girl and easier to join a political outfit. The Kiss of Love has moved from Kochi to Kolkata, where even if kisses are not exchanged there will be a couple of PhD theses written about it and definitely one novel. And then, it will spread like wildfire until, in that utopian future, everyone will be kissing in the streets and no one remembers why. n Madhavankutty Pillai
open www.openthemagazine.com 3
The Times Of India Group
small world
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contents
40 abu salem
8
When the don drew blood
10
hurried man’s guide
One World Trade Center locomotif
open essay
The anomalous imam
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1989: between history and memory
church burdwan
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in memoriam
sadashiv amrapurkar
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Empress of Surrealistan
Terror modules in Bengal
The Baddie Who Beat the Blues Bollywood may have cast its classic villains aside, but this actor kept the bad guy role alive and grunting Lhendup G Bhutia
efore the 1980s, villains in Bollywood films—most of which were essentially morality plays pitting good against evil—almost had it as good as the hero in character treatment. They had underground lairs, molls who fetched them whisky-sodas, and buttons which when pushed revealed pools of acid under the floor. They dressed flashily and delivered dramatic dialogues in a deep baritone. Unsurprisingly, a number of villains of that era, including the likes of Pran, Amjad Khan, Prem Chopra and Ajit, are still remembered. The 1980s, however, ushered in a different era. Films became almost entirely about the heroes. How the male lead, with insurmountable odds stacked against him, manages to win love or avenge loss through the course of 180 minutes. The films of this period were garish and mediocre, and those of the decade that followed were not much better. Except for Amrish Puri, who was already an established actor when the 1980s came, few found much success as villains in this period. The other exception was Sadashiv Amrapurkar. When the actor died on 3 November of a lung infection he had been suffering from for around a fortnight, the news brought with it a rush of nostalgia on social media from those who had worked with him to those who had seen his work. Since his debut in the 1983 film Ardh Satya, he’d played several memorable roles. The most famous among them were the roles of the don Rama Shetty in Ardh Satya; of a eunuch, Maharani, in Sadak; 4 open
cover story
Glasnost at the altar
and of the businessman Deenbandhu Deenanath in Hukumat. The films of that era may have been terrible, but Amrapurkar the actor would almost always make his mark. And he remained integral to Bollywood, mostly as a villain but sometimes also in comic roles, for over two decades. Amrapurkar was born on 11 May 1950 as Ganesh Kumar Narwode to an affluent Maharashtrian Brahmin family in Ahmednagar. Known as ‘Tatya’ among friends and family, he adopted the name Sadashiv Amrapurkar in 1974 when he made his foray into theatre. He did around Express Archive
50 plays and began to act in Marathi films. Sometime in 1981, the director Govind Nihalani was impressed by Amrapurkar’s rendition of a comedian cop in a Marathi play, Hands-Up!, and offered him the villain’s role in Ardh Satya. Nihalani told The Times Of India, “The writer of Ardh Satya, Vijay Tendulkar, arranged a meeting between Sadashiv and me. I watched his play and halfway through decided to cast him in a villain’s role, that of a don. I felt that if his comedy was good, he would also excel in a negative role...” The 1991 film Sadak, in which Amrapurkar played a menacing transvestite, also won him many laurels. After the Filmfare Award for best actor in a negative role was instituted the following year, he was its first recipient. Apart from films, Amrapurkar is said to have been a philanthropist and social activist, engaged in a number of social organisations. He was in the news last year when some miscreants assaulted him near his residence in Mumbai for his protest against water wastage during Holi. In all, he is said to have acted in around 300 films of various languages. A man so integral to Bollywood’s scheme of affairs in the 1980s and 1990s, he almost completely vanished after that period. He was last seen on the big screen last year—as an old, bald man in the film Bollywood Talkies. It was a role that lasted only a few minutes, and he appears as an apparition, taunting the actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui for refusing a role in a film because of its short length. n 17 november 2014
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teens
Apps and adolescence
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NOT PEOPLE LIKE US
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Bleak house
Hat trick man
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Audacious auteur Ranjith
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slim rh mu aliga sity ■ r e univ
f o r blocking access to social
media on campus because it can allegedly be a cause of distraction Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has banned the use of social media on campus. According to media reports, its denial of access to Facebook and Twitter between 9 am and 5 pm was a move made in the interests of students and teachers, who were getting distracted by them. While whether such a
ban is enforceable is debatable, it smacks of ignorance of the broader benefits of social media. Facebook and Twitter have long ceased to be just tools of entertainment. They are now aggregators of news and information, as vital and more immediate than newspapers and news sites. Users, especially students, use these tools to interact and collaborate on projects. Besides, one can easily bypass such bans by accessing them through proxy websites. It is likely that there is more to this decision than keeping distraction levels low. Earlier this year, an AMU professor, Nadeem Rezavi, was suspended after he spoke against its Vice Chancellor, Lieutenant General Zameeruddin Shah. Last November, AMU tried to ban Facebook, claiming that misleading information of a religious nature was being circulated. Such moves embarass the modernist ideals of its famous founder Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. n
An advocate for the MEA reportedly said that unwed mothers applying for a child’s passport must declare if they were raped; the Ministry later said it was not needed B ACKTRACK
‘Advocate Purnima Bhatia, appearing [before the Bombay High Court], said an unwed mother must file an affidavit stating “how she has conceived” and “if she was raped”’
‘[If] your report is correct, it is absolutely contrary to what [we] stand for. We don’t stand for gender discrimination [or] countenance [such] insensitivity’
—Times of India report, 31 October
—MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin, 1 November
turn
tion le Institu b a n o s a e Unr of the Week
Shraddha Kapoor: a new girl is born
around
Obama: The Lamest Duck SAUL LOEB/AFP/GettyImages
R e p u bl i c a n s h a v e t a k e n over the US Congress in the just-held mid-term election, altering the political dynamics in Washington DC. The electoral rebuff is certain to lead to a legislative gridlock, making President Barack Obama the lamest of all ducks. The election, accompanied by a collapse in President Obama’s approval ratings, is partly a reflection of the US electorate’s unease with his Democratic party’s handling of the threat from jihadists who want the establishment of 17 november 2014
an Islamic Caliphate. America’s problem of stagnancy, no doubt, played a role too. That the Obama magic has lost its sheen is now more than evident, as his party has not been able to convince the electorate that it can steer the economy back to its former form and strengthen the security apparatus. Declining unemployment and cheaper oil prices did not come to the aid of the White House. The defeat is also a personal setback for Obama. He now bears the ignominy of being a president with the most mid-term defeats. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5
WELCOME TO OUR WORLD
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A Hurried Man’s Guide
On the Contrary
to the re-opening of New York’s World Trade Center More than 13 years after the Twin Towers were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, New York’s World Trade Center has reopened for business. Spread over 16 acres, where the twin skyscrapers once stood, the new complex includes the new One World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), three high-rise buildings, a museum, a memorial and a transportation hub similar to the Grand Central Terminal, a commuters’ stop and train station in New York. One World Trade Center, said to be One World Trade much stronger than Center, said to the Twin Towers be much stronger thanks to its steel and than the Twin concrete structure, Towers , opened opened for business on for business on 3 November. Designed 3 November by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it is the tallest tower in the US and the world’s tallest all-office building with 104 floors, or, the fourth-tallest skyscraper in the world. It includes a three-floor observatory which is due to open this spring. The $3.8 billion structure took eight years to build.
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
Sixty per cent of the building has been leased. Last Tuesday, Condé Nast, a large publishing company, moved with 175 employees into 25
One World Trade Center, New York
leased floors. By early 2015, more than 3,000 employees are expected to work at the building. The destruction of the Twin Towers set off an epoch of wars against terror which the US is still dealing with. That the new building has opened for business is a symbol of resilience for American Inc. The Wall Street Journal reported a security guard there saying: “10 years from now, my son or my daughter will ask me, and I will be like, I was there when the building opened [and] my job was to protect [it].” The construction of Two World Trade Center has been put on hold until new tenants can be found, but is expected to be up by 2020. n
The Rescue Trap On the absurdity of Shweta Basu spending two months in a rehabilitation home M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i
T
he word ‘Kafkaesque’
is a much abused cliché, but in the case of Shweta Basu Prasad it might well apply. Last week, she was released from a rescue home after being arrested for prostitution, and is currently trying to salvage her reputation by courageously appearing before the media to put forth her side of things. One element in it is to deny a statement that she purportedly gave after the arrest admitting that she turned to prostitution for money because she had to support her family. She now says they are not hard up and that the statement was cooked up. In interviews after her release, she has talked about teaching children in the remand home and living through it by thinking of herself as playing the character of a school teacher. On the question of the case itself, she does not comment. There is no reason to believe or disbelieve her because it is irrelevant. Even if we assume that she had been a sex worker, what she has gone through is surreal. Shweta has spent close to two months being ‘rehabilitated’ in a rescue home. She had been sent there for six months but was fortunately given some reprieve. How exactly the Hyderabad Police caught her is not very clear but there have been newspaper reports which suggest it was entrapment. Only her name was outed—none of her clients have been identified and humiliated in public. If she was being rescued from evil men, then it should have been the other way around— they should have been shamed, and her identity kept private. There is also the absolute lack of comprehension of the concept of freedom of choice by those who have been persecuting her. She is 23 years old, and, at an age when people are
free to choose what they do with their bodies. There are red light areas where women are kidnapped, put in cages and forced to solicit. These are fit cases to be rescued and rehabilitated. For any woman or man who gets into sex work out of their own volition, the only thing the State should do is create the conditions for them to work without harassment from their clients, pimps or the police. Just as it is no business of the police to put a man who has consensual sex with a woman in jail but to do so with a man who Only her rapes a woman, name was similarly, it outed—none should rescue of her clients those women have been who are forced identified and into prostitution and leave alone humiliated those who in public. If get into the she was being profession rescued, it knowing what they are getting should have been the other into. The reason the police way around don’t make that distinction is that they think prostitution is an evil by itself and also, in cases like this, where there is glamour and the film industry involved, they get enormous publicity. Given that a majority in this country share their blinkered morality, they also know that it is a safe thing to do. A government rescue home when there is no rescuing to be done is not something anyone should endure. Or, at the very least, such rescues should be done of personnel in professions known to do more evil than prostitution—the police, for instance. n 17 november 2014
insider Pick It up from Piketty French economist Thomas Piketty would find
this intriguing. The economist, whose book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, has been flying off the book shelves worldwide, is a hot favourite among the ruling BJP’s top political leaders. The book, a defining work on the dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital and the long-term evolution of inequality, is something that not too long ago would have been an adda favourite among the Left-leaning. Top leaders of the CPM are this season locked in a debate over the political-tactical line adopted by the party in the 1978 Jalandhar Congress. By pulling the carpet from under the CPM’s leadership with great timing, the saffron party has at last managed to appropriate the former’s key agenda. As one leader put it, “The Left has finally left. Shut the door behind them, someone.”
Doctor tourism
Still the Unwanted Another BJP leader in Delhi shopping
desperately for a job, home and hearth is the man whose name was once being mentioned as possible Chief Minister for the capital. Those, indeed, were the days. VK Malhotra managed to wrest a poll ticket for his son from the oh-so-Punjabi ‘uppah class’ Greater Kailash seat. But after that fell flat and the world around him moved on to focus on the new phenomenon of Arvind Kejriwal, the not-so-VijayKumar Malhotra has yet to find his feet in the newly rearranged political framework. Word has it that Malhotra has been looking for a gubernatorial post. Something that would come with a large government bungalow attached. Sadly, the BJP’s powers that be didn’t seem very entertained by his shenanigans on that count, conveying that his services had been adequately compensated in the past.
The 1964-born Parvez Dewan had been appointed tourism secretary in 2012 and was to retire end October. So, when Dr Lalit Panwar popped into the PM’s office to brief him on an unrelated issue, Modi, impressed by the lucid briefing, asked the good doctor whether he was a medicine man by profession. Panwar replied that he had a doctoral degree. “What in?” shot back the PM. “Tourism,” came the pat reply from the man. Modi, famed as a doer, had shot off instructions in a short while, and the good doctor saheb was launched on an new mission: Tourism secretary. It was just days before that Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram was shunted aside and named as Dewan’s replacement. Call it Russian roulette.
Homeless in Delhi One BJP leader out of housing quarters and
no longer flying high is the once-upon-a-time Civil Aviation Minister Shahnawaz Hussain. The pint-sized minority-
Sugar Rush and Modi Policy meetings chaired by the PM, which show little sign of easing up in the coming months, start precisely on time and carry right on through lunch, with no let up for the diabetic. Modi, known in a lighter vein among party and government leaders as the man ‘who won’t eat and won’t let others eat,’ recently hosted one such lengthy meeting where the assigned lunch break went ignored. Leader after leader droned on with no let up. As the lunch hour was about to end, Minister for Power Piyush Goyal, the man assigned to speak next, got up to start his address. But the diabetic dozen had had enough. A senior minister could take it no more and virtually snarled at Goyal, directing him to zip up. Lunch break was finally declared. That brought the real sugar rush to the afflicted. 17 november 2014
community poster-boy of the BJP is finding himself homeless in Lutyens’ Delhi, suddenly. Hussain is believed to have sought the help of Venkaiah Naidu to send out feelers to Modi, suggesting that he was an apt candidate to head the National Parliamentary Forum. NaMo seems to have different plans. He has decided to keep the man grounded. It wasn’t just a house that Hussain lost this year. He lost his seat, Bhagalpur, in the polls to an RJD candidate, at a time when every lamp post was raking in votes at the hustings in the name of Modi.
lo co m ot i f
S PRASANNARAJAN
I
1989: Between His
f THE Iron Curtain was a metaphor, very
Churchillian in its resonance and effectiveness to capture a world divided by the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was very real, and as granite as Communism. On 9 November twenty-five years ago, after nearly three decades of its existence as a monument to the perversion of an ideology, it fell. It was coming, but a goof-up by an apparatchik of the erstwhile GDR made it sudden—a spontaneous night breach, an emotional reunion between East and West Berlin, a carnival on the ruins of a lie. A few months later, the two Germanys would be re-united, with Chancellor Helmut Kohl as the curator of Europe’s biggest show of freedom. Günter Grass protested against the emergence of an anti-socialist behemoth, its Wagnerian grandeur, and then, the author of The Tin Drum was fast becoming a German version of the post-exile Solzhenitsyn: the metamorphosis of a great writer into a false prophet. But history was unstoppable, and soon the Russian who refused to send tanks to the vassal states of Eastern Europe would fall by the wayside. Gorbachev was then, as captured by an Oliphant cartoon, Mikhailangelo. As he sculpted freedom elsewhere, the cracks were on him. The last general secretary of the Soviet Union was swept aside by the forces unleashed by him. It was all made possible by the spirit of 1989, rightfully the annus mirabilis of Europe. It was the year Communism unravelled, when the street won the argument over freedom. As a project in dreaming, Communism was more ambitious than Christianity: wasn’t it heaven-on-earth? As an ideology and later as a faith imposed by the jackboot, with the promise of a better tomorrow in exchange for a frozen conscience, it was perhaps Christianity without the cross. In retrospect, it was an artificial faith; or it was one ghost story that kept a vast section of humanity hooked—and haunted. Or maybe it was just a comforting superstition. In the year of 1989, it looked fragile, perishable, from Berlin to Prague, from Budapest to Bucharest, from Warsaw to Sofia. Prague was perhaps the most romantic dateline: the site of the Velvet Revolution. One man took out a key chain and rotated it on his finger, and instantly, the act would be copied by thousands, creating a metallic symphony of freedom never heard before in what was then known as Czechoslovakia. And it was from a
theatre called Magic Lantern in Prague that a chain-smoking playwright, Václav Havel, scripted the first draft of the Velvet Revolution, which would eventually make him the philosopher king of post-communism. The Velvet Revolution was an amateurs’ ball; playwrights and novelists, rock singers and other dreamers were in the vanguard. It was not all that velvety elsewhere. In Bucharest on Christmas day in 1989, it was said that 120 bullets were fired at the Ceausescus, portrayed as communism’s evil couple. Still, retribution was not the theme of 1989. It was the year that, among other miracles, Clementis regained his cap posthumously. In the opening page of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, when the communist leader Klement Gottwald stood on the balcony of a Boroque palace in Prague in 1948 to address the people, ‘there were snow flurries, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded.’ The comrade who was standing next to him, Clementis, ‘took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald’s head.’ Kundera writes: The party propaganda section put out hundreds of thousands of copies of a photograph of that balcony with Gottwald, a fur cap on his head and comrades at his side, speaking to the nation. On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks, and museums. Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head. Beneath the velvet romance of 1989 lay stories of defiance and death, of purges and tanks from the Soviet Union. The hero of the crushed Prague Spring of 1968, Alexander Dubcek, was there to witness the freedom day two decades later. He even shared a stage with Havel. For Hungary, the year that mattered before 1989 was 1956, when Imre Nagy was executed for his deviation from the path. 1989, in its poignancy and spontaneity, was homage to all those writers and filmmakers who lived up to Borges’ motto: censorship is the mother of metaphor. It was a clash between the truth of the living and the lies of the ruling. And the dissenting mind, as Havel wrote, was all
As an ideology and later as a faith imposed by the jackboot, Communism was perhaps Christianity without the cross
10 open
17 november 2014
tory and Memory
AP/Sipa
The Berlin Wall being torn down in November 1989
about ‘living in truth’, which itself was a variation of ‘antipolitical politics’. Five years before 1989, Havel wrote from unfreedom: “Yes, ‘anti-political politics’ is possible. Politics ‘from below.’ Politics of man, not of the apparatus. Politics growing from the heart, not from a thesis. It is not an accident that this hopeful experience has to be lived just here, on this grim battlement. Under the ‘rule of everydayness’ we have to descend to the very bottom of a well before we can see the stars.” 1989 was the end of suffering. The Day After was not all romance. In power, some revolutionaries looked out of place, and some even began to mime their erstwhile tormentors. Lech Walesa in Warsaw, for instance, was a study in how the management of power was as equally responsible an endeavour as the struggle for freedom. But it was three extraordinary men who played background music to the passion play of history: Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. The Pope’s visit to the shipyard of Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, was an audacious rejoinder to the Godforsaken part of Europe. In Moscow, Gorbachev undermined the artificial empire he was presiding over with concepts like perestroika and glasnost. As streets erupted in Eastern Europe, he refused to send tanks. 17 november 2014
The threat today is no longer from the comic strip communism of Pyongyang. It is the ex-communist as an aggrieved nationalist, or the pinstriped communist as a Confucian capitalist, who challenges the world
He initiated the funeral rites of the Soviet empire, and sadly, also his own redundancy as freedom dawned. In Washington, Reagan fought the Cold War with Manichean passion; “Tear down that Wall,” he said with Hollywood bravado from Berlin. Communism was destined to collapse, because it denied its people the fundamentals of humanity. These three brave men hastened the disintegration. They were leaders. Leaders are what the world misses most today, leaders who can not only read the instincts of history but shape it as well. When Tahrir Square in Cairo was the headquarters of what the media called the ‘Arab Spring’, the evocation of the spirit of 1989 was a bit overstretched. There was no intellectual or (a)political leadership. In Washington and elsewhere, the leader was a triangulating wimp, too cautious to be caught in the whirl of freedom. The leader has not changed, though the world did. The threat today is no longer from, say, the comic strip communism of Pyongyang. It is the ex-communist as an aggrieved nationalist, or the pinstriped communist as a Confucian capitalist, who challenges the world with domestic paranoia and extraterritorial stunts. Still, there is no effective counterpoint to Vladimir Putin, and we are all busy appreciating the Chinese model. Freedom is still an endangered idea, and so is the leader who can save it. n open www.openthemagazine.com 11
open essay
By Tufail Ahmad
THE ANOMALOUS IMAM
Why the hereditary power of the Shahi Imamate of Delhi is both anti-democratic and anti-Quranic
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t appears that the sole qualification needed to become the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid is the privilege of geneology. This disqualifies more than 180 million Indian Muslims from becoming the imam of the historic mosque in Old Delhi. The tenets of Islam are irrelevant here; only ancestry matters. It is also an asTufail Ahmad sault on the principles of democracy, is a former modern civilisation’s antidote to the journalist with the role of heredity in political life. BBC Urdu Service On 30 October, it emerged that and Director of the Jama Masjid’s Shahi Imam Syed Ahmed Bukhari had invited about 1,000 South Asia Studies Islamic leaders from across the world to Project at the a ceremony scheduled on 22 November Middle East Media in Delhi to anoint his son Syed Shaban Research Institute, Bukhari, 19, as the Naib Imam, or Washington DC deputy, who will assume the title of Shahi Imam one day. This is a lineage that can be traced to the mid-17th century when the Jama Masjid was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who in search of purity could not find an imam in India and imported Syed Abdul Ghafoor Shah Bukhari from Bukhara in presentday Uzbekistan. Indian Muslim groups are furious about being seen to be subjugated to this hereditary imamate that has no sanction in Islam. Opinions have been aired on how few Muslims in the country accept the Shahi Imam’s authority to speak for them. Yet, he leads prayers for thousands of Delhi’s Muslims, who offer namaaz behind him five times a day, and he has a large enough following to exercise an outsize influence on India’s political and spiritual life. Throughout history, imams have legitimised the coronation of kings, and they are sought for exactly the same purpose in modern times, most recently by Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Sometimes, imams also undermine the authority of rulers, notably in the case of Razia Sultan, the woman who ascended the Sultanate of Delhi in 1236 CE. So the imamate’s tradition of hereditary succession deserves close scrutiny. In the Qur’an, the Arabic word for sperm, nutfa, occurs a dozen times. According to the Qur’anic verses 53: 45-46, Allah creates two mates—the male and the female— from a single drop of fluid. In the Qur’anic meaning, nutfa is a non-gendered concept. The Bukhari family also has daughters. Assuming that the Shahi Imam would have brought them up with Islamic piety, it would have been a revolutionary act to anoint a daughter as the next Shahi Imam. Given that Delhi’s Jama Masjid is the country’s most prominent mosque and holds historical symbolism throughout the Islamic world, such an act would be in tune with the evolving ethos of Indian democracy. As understood by the Bukharis
ever since Syed Abdul Ghafoor Shah Bukhari became the first Shahi Imam on 24 July 1656, however, a successor must always be male. Geneology can assume a political role, as it has done throughout history. Numerous individuals have acquired power on its basis, sometimes even absolute power—as in Saudi Arabia or North Korea, for example. Back in the 7th century CE, Prophet Muhammad, whose sons died in childhood, is understood to have nominated his daughter Fatima’s husband Ali ibn Abi Talib as the Maula of Muslims, but the leadership succession was denied to him by politicians of the era led by Abu Bakr, who became the first caliph after the Prophet’s demise by outmanoeuvring his relatives, an event that heralded centuries of Shia-Sunni bloodshed that continues to torment Muslims in the Arab world and in Pakistan, where Shia Muslims—in favour of Ali’s succession—suffer persecution on a routine basis.
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s part of the anointment ceremony, the Shahi Imam has
planned a series of dinners: one for about 3,000 namaazis (those who offer prayers) in Delhi; a second one for hundreds of invited religious leaders; and then an exclusive banquet on 29 November for diplomats and politicians from India and abroad, mainly from the Islamic world. If this money were to be spent on cleaning up the surroundings of the Jama Masjid, it could help the country’s Swachh Bharat campaign. But the Shahi Imam has bigger things on his ideological mind; he has extended an invitation to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and pointedly left India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi off the invitation list, thus deliberately stirring a political controversy over the event, one that is particularly provocative since the latter was elected to power with a historic mandate. “I have invited several Indian and foreign political leaders for attending the anointment ceremony of my son. Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has also been invited, but I have not sent invitation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as Muslims have not forgiven him for the Gujarat riots,” the Shahi Imam roared, regardless of the fact that the Supreme Court of India has not found anything to implicate Modi for the same and that Indian Muslims are embracing him. Not only has the Shahi Imam taken it upon himself to speak for millions of Indian Muslims, deeming their consent unnecessary, he has also made a spectacle of insulting India’s Prime Minister. Modi, a former chaiwalla who has more or less buried hereditary political parties in India and is on his way to turn his Bharatiya Janata Party into the country’s most diverse political party, would anyway have been the last person to attend the Bukhari ceremony. Modi has better things to do: clean our streets, improve the lives of millions of our poor and perhaps attend the wedding ceremony of Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan’s sister. Bukhari’s invitation to Nawaz Sharif gives traction to the argument that secularism in India is viewed too often as
Indian Muslim groups are furious about being seen to be subjugated to Syed Ahmed Bukhari’s hereditary imamate, one that has no sanction in Islam
17 november 2014
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PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images
Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the current Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid
a function of the country’s kinship with Pakistan. The Shahi Imamate is a relic from the Mughal era; and as an anti-national force, has blatantly chosen to harm Hindu-Muslim relations and the cohesion of India. This is anti-people. For Indian Muslims, the Shahi Imamate is now worrying. Husain Dalwai, a member of Indian Parliament, has criticised the Shahi Imam, saying there is “no succession act in Islam” and it is “not necessary” that the son of a king should succeed him. Social activist Gyas Qureshi has made a categorical demand: “End the title Shahi Imam as the country is now a democracy, not a Mughal domain.” There are examples of monarchies being reformed in accordance with the changing times. Britain, for instance, rewrote its succession rules recently to ensure that even a first-born girl child could ascend the throne. In April 2013, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II signed the Succession to the Crown Act, ending a 300-year-old practice of the first-born male being the royal heir. Syed Shaban Bukhari, a student of a politically meaningful subject like Social Work at Amity University who will succeed his father to be the 14th Shahi Imam, was born in an India free of colonial rule. Assuming that he reads newspapers and comprehends how modern democracies work, he has a historic opportunity thrown his way: he could renounce the imamate and become a social reformer, perhaps one of the greatest Muslim modernisers since Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898). In 1936, Edward VIII of England, also the Emperor of India, renounced his throne and the claims of his descendants in order to marry his love. Likewise, a conscientious act by Syed Shaban Bukhari to end the imamate could
hold lasting significance for the Islamic world, even set off a wave of modern thinking. Given that most Muslim organisations outside the city of Old Delhi are opposed to this relic of the Mughal era, the Indian Government would gain support across the country if it were to throw its weight against a hereditary imamate. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which loves to earn social opprobrium for raising divisive issues, could uphold this as a cause that enjoys Muslim approval in large numbers, and demand that Indian Muslims be relieved of the power of nutfa. In the Qur’anic meaning, nutfa has an additional connotation: Adam, the first man, was also the first prophet. In that sense, every human being on earth is a prophet with the power to use one’s thoughts and actions as tools of human liberty and social progress. This is a lesson every Muslim youth must learn. Some, like Benazir Suraiya of Bhopal who turned out to campaign for a vegetarian Eid Al-Adha, are already agents of change in India. Indian Muslims are fortunate to live in a flourishing democracy, but they need to embrace it more wholeheartedly. They need to free their lives of archaic social, legal and historical norms and institutions—such as the Shahi Imamate. As per a 2005 High Court order, the Jama Masjid is the property of the Delhi Waqf Board and the Shahi Imam is its employee; he should be fired from his job for transferring his job as imam purely on the basis of nutfa. As the institutions of Indian democracy strengthen, the need of the hour is to dislodge the Bukhari family from the pulpit and reclaim the Jama Masjid, a historical monument of global importance, for the Indian masses. n
Social activist Gyas Qureshi has made a categorical demand: “End the title of the Shahi Imam as the country is now a democracy, not a Mughal domain”
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How Jaya
ashish sharma
power
The Invisible Empress of Surrealistan
lalithaa still rules Tamil Nadu By V Shoba in Chennai
R
ain-smudged posters proclaiming the invincibility of J Jayalalithaa still dot Chennai over a month after she was sentenced to four years in prison by a special court in Bangalore in an 18-year-old, Rs 66.5 crore disproportionate assets case. In many of these exhortations, she is a creature of myth: a blazing phoenix, a Tamil lioness, a peerless white dove, a goddess of revolution. She is anything but a jailbird accused of corruption. Because in the corrosive political tradition of the state, the vast support base of the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), fattened on a diet of ‘Amma’ freebies, will quickly jump ship. But thanks to swift and desperate propaganda by a party on the precipice of power, Tamil Nadu has slipped into a state of fugue. When I broke the news of Jayalalithaa’s rustication from politics to 36-year-old R Anbarasi over the phone, she went so quiet I thought she had hung up on me. There was a stunned silence, followed by furious denial. Anbarasi is a farm worker and a mother of three from a village in Andipatti, an AIADMK stronghold in southern Tamil Nadu’s Theni district, represented in the 1984 Assembly by party founder and Dravidian icon MG Ramachandran, and later, in 2002 and 2006, by his political heir Jayalalithaa. “But my children and I ate at an Amma Unavagam (canteen) in Madurai just three days ago; we ate five idlis for Rs 5. How can I believe that Amma is gone, that she won’t be Chief Minister for 10 years to come?” a crestfallen Anbarasi asked me. If you only tuned into a certain Tamil news channel or lived someplace where AIADMK workers plastered public walls with poetic e pithets hailing Jayalalithaa as ‘the people’s chief minister’ and a ‘goddess beyond punishment’, you may be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed in Tamil Nadu. Indeed, at first glance, not much has. The state’s new Chief Minister, with the ascetic humility of Bharata carrying out Rama’s royal mandate of watching over Ayodhya in his absence, has positioned himself as the instrument of a god he prostrates before. He has even left undisturbed the chamber she occupied as Chief Minister, preferring the anonymity of his old office. O Panneerselvam is an important footnote in Tamil Nadu’s history, a vicar herding Amma’s flock for the second time. “He is a presence by his absence. No photos of him feature in government advertisements. Even his name appears in small print,” says Gnani Sankaran, a Tamil writer, journalist and political commentator. “There is no AIADMK beyond Jayalalithaa. She is their mascot, omnipotent and omnipresent. The party has to keep her brand name alive if it must stay relevant in the 2016 Assembly elections.” Exile is a terrifying prospect, especially for the officious chieftain of a party hitched to a waning ideology. With the elections 18 months away, can the three-time Chief 18 open
Minister, toppled at her peak and forced to direct the show from behind the curtains of her Poes Garden residence, pull off an MGR? In the 1967 elections in Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) coasted to victory after the matinee idol took a bullet to his left ear. In 1984, an ailing MG Ramachandran on his hospital bed would once again serve as a plank to catapult his party—this time, his 1972 breakaway, the AIADMK—to power. Decades later, his followers are now casting Jayalalithaa’s conviction as a dastardly act of revenge by the opposition and exhorting people to reject this ‘injustice’. “It is a purchased judgment. The party is garnering more support than ever because people believe the charges were foisted on Amma in a case of political vendetta,” says party spokesperson and former minister C Ponnaiyan.
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he party head office in Royapettah, Chennai, tells
a different story. Resembling an abandoned fortress, with a golden statue of MGR flashing a victory sign from another time, it is a picture of unrelieved gloom. Empty corridors lead to locked doors assigned to district-level office bearers. An Audi and other MUVs are parked in the compound, apparently to ferry any communication to Jayalalithaa’s residence. “Amma is still actively leading the party,” Ponnaiyan claims. But the verdict, which peeled a layer off the myth of her infallibility, lingers in the party’s psyche like a metallic aftertaste. “Following the conviction, though party workers have been going about their routine jobs, they aren’t nearly as enthused as before,” says Ezhil KA Ezhumalai, a longtime AIADMK member who also sells party merchandise—MGR and Amma posters straddling their politico-cinematic lives, party flags and shirts with black and red stripes—from a stall facing the three-storeyed, white building. His business has hit an all-time low. “When Amma was Chief Minister, sales could cross Rs 20,000 in a day. Even when she was opposition leader, there was a healthy demand. Now, I stand to make no more than Rs 1,000,” Ezhumalai says. 17 november 2014
the times of india
J Jayalalithaa and O Panneerselvam, the new Chief Minister
An 80s photo of Jayalalithaa swathed in a floral pink sari, and seated on a couch talking into a vintage phone, is displayed prominently at Ezhumalai’s stall, but it is not his best-selling product. Her latest portrait, as a matronly figure in plain blue, represents how far she has come from her first term as Chief Minister between 1991 and 1996, when she was a babe in the political woods, brazenly flaunting her wealth. “Hailed as ‘Puratchi Selvi’—revolutionary maiden—in her early years, Jayalalithaa came to be known as ‘Puratchi Thalaivi’ (leader). Eventually the revolutionary bit fell off and she became simply ‘Amma’. This rise from maidenhood to motherhood was very fast,” says Sadanand Menon, a journalist, cultural commentator and professor. The first incumbent Chief Minister to be dethroned and disqualified from contesting an election for six years from the end of her prison sentence, Jayalalithaa in absentia still jealously guards her empire, remote-controlling the 17 november 2014
Tamil Nadu government’s day-to-day workings and policy making. “In her regime, the Cabinet is powerless and only two or three top bureaucrats—notably, former chief secretary and current advisor Sheela Balakrishnan— have access to her,” says a former senior bureaucrat familiar with her ways, requesting anonymity. Given Jayalalithaa’s poor and often whimsical history of clearing files, it usually fell upon Balakrishnan to speed up important clearances, he points out. And now, she may well be the conduit between Panneerselvam and Jayalalithaa, directing the administration and pushing necessary—if unpopular—decisions like the recent milk and liquor price hikes and a 5-per cent Value Added Tax on sugar. “This arrangement can last a few months, but in the eventuality of a largely absent Jayalalithaa, there could be tension,” says the former bureaucrat. For now, though, officers weary of evading Jayalalithaa’s tremendous tentacles and cowering under the quirks of her autocracy open www.openthemagazine.com 19
will mostly be glad to be able to breathe easy. The Chief Minister who dubbed the Colonial-era ban on dhotis in Chennai’s social clubs an act of ‘sartorial despotism’ was a despot herself. At quarterly meetings, bureaucrats forced to wear business suits sat sweating in the Chennai heat—or perhaps it was the stress of delivering the perfect power point presentation. In annual reports, Jayalalithaa is said to have consistently ranked most of her bureaucracy as average or belowaverage. “When she is around, there is a pervasive atmosphere of fear. She insists on impeccable English— one misplaced conjunction is enough to invite the wrath of Jayalalithaa, who takes great pride in her convent education,” the ex-bureaucrat says. When it came to her people, she metamorphosed into a verisimilar deity, taking MGR’s populist seduction to its pinnacle with Amma canteens, water, rice and laptops. An estimated 250,000-300,000 people—daily-wage labourers, BPL families and the homeless—eat every day
at the 294 Amma canteens in Tamil Nadu’s urban centres. “The idea of a benevolent ruler has percolated to the masses and captured the minds and the imagination of the electorate, especially women,” Menon says. “This is why she may be able to pull off another electoral victory.” If the AIADMK wins the Assembly elections in 2016, it will mark half a century of uninterrupted Dravidian rule in the state, Menon points out. The irony is, the AIADMK chief has long since sacrificed the mantle of Dravidian rationalism and Tamil pride. Unlike the Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray, who manipulated the Marathi consciousness from behind the walls of Matoshree, Jayalalithaa cannot prop herself up on the crutch of ideology. “In the past, the sympathy wave generated by MGR’s physical absence from the political arena had an ideological grounding. The message given was the threat to Tamil identity, and the need to secure a Dravidian future. Decades later, it is a different ballgame. Dravidian ideology is on the decline and religious identities are emerging,” Menon says.
The BJP pitched its tent amidst the ruins of the Dravidian movement by appointing Tamilisai Soundararajan, the daughter of a former state Congress president, to lead it to prominence
Tamilisai Soundararajan 20 open
J
ayalalithaa’s indictment has
flung open a window of opportunity for the DMK, which must now redeem itself as a contemporary party while engineering watertight alliances with smaller Dravidian parties like Vaiko’s MDMK. While DMK treasurer and de facto leader MK Stalin is trying to reinvent himself as a young, tech-savvy political icon, he has many crosses to bear: a special court recently framed charges against the party’s former Union Telecom Minister A Raja, DMK MP Kanimozhi, Karunanidhi’s wife Dayalu Ammal, and 16 other individuals and companies in the 2G spectrum allocation scam. It is alleged that the accused accepted a Rs 200-crore ‘bribe’ for granting telecom licences. The string of numbers etched in the electorate’s memory, however, is much longer. It corresponds to the presumptive loss to the Government of Rs 1.76 lakh crore—a grotesque sum even in a country where corruption is endemic. “In the present political scenario, the DMK, despite its problems, cannot be written off,” argues Gnani Sankaran. “As long as Stalin can hold the party together, and stays untainted even if the second line of command is mired in scandal, the DMK can emerge as a plausible alternative to an AIADMK without Jayalalithaa.” For AIADMK sympathisers, the question really is this: can a party that orbits around its only leader survive her conviction and exile? Or will a new script emerge in the bilateral politics of Tamil Nadu? R Selvam, a 42-year-old cab driver in Chennai who has voted for Amma all his life, says he would rather vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) if it strengthened its position in the state than back the AIADMK’s “dummy Chief Minister”. “O Panneerselvam is a simple and knowledgeable man, a man of many virtues. He doesn’t believe in pomp and he 17 november 2014
photos nathan g
An AIADMK hoarding on a Chennai street
is extremely capable,” says Ponnaiyan. But he has big shoes to fill. “There is a big vacuum,” says writer and political commentator S Murari. “And it represents a golden opportunity for the BJP. BJP sympathisers, who had been voting for Jayalalithaa, could now turn to Modi.” In April, the national party, a dark horse that had been skulking in the shadows, pitched its tent amid the ruins of the Dravidian movement by appointing Tamilisai Soundararajan, a fiery orator and the daughter of a former state Congress president, to lead it to prominence in the state. “In Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi are mountains. But I believe that a beautiful river like the BJP can flow between them,” says Soundararajan, back home in Saligramam in west Chennai at the end of a long day on the road. “There is a slight change in people’s mindset, especially after the Modi wave. We are now the only corruption-free alternative in the state.” A doctor by training, Soundararajan is a tenacious campaigner who has her eyes set on thrusting the party into the electoral reckoning in 2016. In the bypolls to local bodies in Tamil Nadu held earlier this year, when most other parties kept away, fearing a sweep by the AIADMK, the BJP went out on a limb and fielded candidates, forcing Jayalalithaa to sit up and take notice. As expected, the ruling party won by a wide margin, but Soundararajan felt validated after a battle well fought. Hope kindled is a dangerous thing. Soon, Tamil magazines were featuring cartoons pitting Amma against Akka (sister), signalling Soundararajan’s arrival in the 17 november 2014
inhospitable arena of Tamil Nadu politics. It is not a level playing field, and it may never be. “It is impossible to counter the enduring legacies of MGR and Anna immediately, so the BJP is focusing its energies on attracting the youth and the upper middle class before reaching out to the masses,” says Soundararajan, echoing the Aam Aadmi Party’s suburban pitch in the 2014 General Election. “I am not targeting the blind followers of Jayalalithaa. I speak for the youngsters who expect a TASMAC- and corruption-free Tamil Nadu,” she says. There is an undeniable wave of support for Jayalalithaa on Twitter, says Suryah SG, a lawyer from Coimbatore who is part of the BJP’s social media team. “Even BJP loyalists have spoken up for her.” To curry favour with this modern breed of voter, the state BJP president is ramping up her online presence. She knows she must strike when the iron is hot. With the sword of 2G hanging over the DMK, the decline in vote shares of the smaller Dravidian parties and the split in the Congress, the AIADMK and the BJP appear poised to ride an advantage. “Because of the Modi wave, people are finally ready to contest elections for the BJP in Tamil Nadu,” Suryah says. “But there is also a sense of disconnect from the national leadership and this must be urgently addressed.” As party president in a state ostensibly obsessed with and possessed by its Tamil identity, Soundararajan’s role is that of a DJ who must constantly balance the bass and treble of a complex music. But every so often, there is a jarring note in the form of four hours of compulsory Hindi open www.openthemagazine.com 21
photos nathan g
The deserted AIADMK office at Royapettah, Chennai (above); A street vendor sells AIADMK memorabilia opposite the building (facing page)
programming on All India Radio or a circular from the event. “When the queen is in jeopardy, the pawns must Centre asking universities to teach Hindi as a primary do something or prepare to be sacrificed.” The DMK, language in undergraduate courses. “I am focused on which reportedly arm-twisted filmmakers into selling TV Tamil sentiments. Every time there was an outcry, I rights to its media empire for a pittance during its reign, responded immediately and requested the national lead- remains unpopular with the industry. “Amma’s rule was ership to iron out the creases,” Soundararajan says. The kinder. But it was the perceived threat of having its releasBJP’s pro-Hindi stance may prove to be its Achilles heel, es stalled that forced the industry to take to the streets in but Soundararajan’s strong suit is Tamil, contained in her her support,” says the distributor. The hypocrisy of film very name. Even though the party lost a potential supporter in Rajinikanth, her handling of the The AIADMK head office in Chennai tells a different Hindi issue has won her the respect story. Resembling an abandoned fortress, with a of actor Kamal Haasan and lyricist golden statue of MGR flashing a victory sign from Vairamuthu. She insists they are not political allies. “For now, Modi is the another era, it is a picture of unrelieved gloom lone star the Tamil Nadu BJP needs,” says Soundararajan. The other stars in the sky seem to have aligned with personalities who had backed Anna Hazare’s campaign Jayalalithaa anyway. Three days after the verdict, the for a strong Lokpal Bill only to readily forgive Jayalalithaa Tamil film fraternity, including reigning actors like her perjury today has gone largely unnoticed. So is the sympathy wave for Jayalalithaa an elaborate Surya, went on a hunger strike, seemingly to express solidarity, and passed a resolution reinstating Jayalalithaa parlour trick? We now know that many who wept in the as Chief Minister in the popular imagination. Observers wrenching tableau flashed on TV after her conviction say this ‘protest’ is another of the monarch’s machina- were performing to a crowd. “I recognised some faces in tions. It wouldn’t be the first time fan clubs are rallied to the crowd. They were junior artistes. I had hired them for swing an election in Tamil Nadu. “This is nothing more my films at Rs 750 a head,” says a noted Tamil litterateur than a game of chess,” says a distributor who attended the and screenplay writer, pleading anonymity. In Tamil 22 open
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Nadu, you cannot be blamed for walking on eggshells. Empathy can be a stage-managed farce in a state where exchanging currency notes for votes is shrugged off as a pleasantry. “An estimated six lakh men and women occupy positions of power in the vast AIADMK machinery—councilors, panchayat leaders, district-level party workers—and when they take to the streets, it looks like there is a real sympathy wave,” says A Soundararajan, the CPM MLA from Chennai’s Perambur constituency. “The truth is, public personalities and the middle-class are afraid to speak up against Amma and her henchmen.” Tamil writer RN Joe D’Cruz isn’t. Ahead of the 2014 General Election, he courted controversy with his Facebook post in support of Narendra Modi and lost out on a publishing contract. Now, he once again throws caution to the wind to peep into the mind of Amma the magician. To understand how Jayalalithaa rules, says D’Cruz, one must first understand the shifting scope of her ambition. “Hers has always been a government by Jayalalithaa, of Jayalalithaa and for Jayalalithaa. It is the last bit that has undergone a shift. ‘For Jayalalithaa’ earlier meant jewellery, saris and footwear. Today, it is her overarching desire to rule the state forever. Even her populist measures and good governance stem from this hunger for power,” he says. “Especially after her prime ministerial aspirations failed to take off, she wants to live and die a queen of Tamil Nadu rather than as Amma.” 17 november 2014
There is a reason Jayalalithaa, hidden from public view by the thin veneer of a prison sentence, still commands a formidable army of power-drunk fanatics. She is the only AIADMK leader to have ever had the guts to contest a Lok Sabha election alone. On her 66th birthday, in February 2014, she had sought from her people a very special birthday present: all of Tamil Nadu’s 39 Lok Sabha seats. She won 37. “This is the only verdict that will ever matter to her followers. No court can rob her of the people’s seal of approval,” says K Jayamarimuthu, an AIADMK functionary. In Tamil Nadu, the more things change, the more they remain the same. By consensus or by authority, Jayalalithaa is an inexorable force impelling the state towards crisis. An eerie calm has now fallen into place, with industry going about its business as usual and the government burying its fears in the mundane realities of administration. Only the occasional tinny noise made by a political wannabe enlivens this surreal space. But the worst is yet to come, says D’Cruz. A fallen Icarus, Amma could bring the sky crashing down with her. “When a ruler as self-obsessed as Jayalalithaa no longer has a vested interest in running a welfare state—she won’t allow Panneerselvam to best her record—it is a worrying turn of affairs,” says D’Cruz. You could worry. Or you could simply bite into a soft idli and believe in the soft power of Amma. n open www.openthemagazine.com 23
despatch
The Terror
The madrassa in Simulia, Burdwan, where dozens of young women were given arms training by Bangladeshi jihadists
The investigation into a bomb blast in the town of Burdwan in West Bengal last month put the spotlight on a wider network of terror modules stretching beyond the border to Bangladesh. A report from the new dateline of terror. Text and Photographs By ULLEKH NP
Fields of Bengal
S
haksar Ali looks at you menacingly, his countenance typical of a stern American immigration officer threatened by the prospect of a potential troublemaker entering the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Here in Simulia, a village in West Bengal’s impoverished Burdwan district, where some 30-40 people used a madrassa for four years to offer young women—who made up most of its students—arms training, Ali doesn’t look pleased to see outsiders. “I am a local Trinamool Congress leader,” he announces, perched on a tractor that has some 30 other passengers in a trailer cart. He doesn’t step down, but speaks in Hindi and Bengali, pausing periodically for someone to translate his Bengali rhetoric to Hindi. The thrust of his defence against any effort to taint this beautiful hamlet’s reputation is that nobody knew a thing about what happened in the madrassa because “people respected the privacy of women, all of whom were burkha clad”.
The interior of a room at the Simulia madrassa where police found air-gun pellets, numerous wires, sharp-edged weapons and jihadi literature
On 2 October this year, within hours of an accidental explosion of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in a twostoreyed building 40 km away, in the Khagragarh locality of Burdwan town, all the students and other residents— including some men—of the so-called ‘madrassa’ disappeared, leaving no trace so far. “None of us saw them leave,” says 26 open
Iman ul-Haq, parroting his leader Ali. Like Ali, Haq and Nasser and Mohammed, scores of other villagers, aver that they saw nothing wrong about a group of supposed do-gooders running an academic institution for young girls. Quizzed further, they insist that this adamant ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ stance wasn’t fed to them by religious leaders at
the local mosque. Then comes anger, emotional outbursts and lengthy animated chats on why they are being wronged. “Because we belong to the minority community, we are being defamed. The English media is to blame. The NIA (National Investigation Agency) is to blame,” says Ali, still atop the passenger seat of the tractor. Then he is gone, along with his 30-odd men. Inmates of the madrassa at Simulia, where Muslims account for half the population of 6,000, weren’t the only ones who got away after a blast killed two people in a wrung-out neighbourhood in Burdwan town. While Shakeel Ahmed and Subhan Mandal were killed in the explosion, Abdul Hakim survived and is now in NIA custody after recovering from his wounds in a Burdwan hospital. It soon emerged that these three were members of the dreaded Jamaat-ulMujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), an AlQaeda-linked outfit banned in Bangladesh, which has over the years set up bomb-making units across several districts of West Bengal, including Murshidabad, Nadia, North 24 Parganas, Dakshin Dinajpur and Malda besides Burdwan itself, reportedly with the connivance of political parties in power. Others who fled following the acciden17 november 2014
The grey building in Khagragarh, Burdwan, where an explosion occurred on 2 October, killing two suspected Bangladeshi terrorists who made IEDs in the guise of running a burkha-making unit
tal blast include 40-year-old Sajid, a suspected Bangladeshi national who was residing near the Lalgola madrassa in Murshidabad district; Nasirullah, a bomb-making expert and a suspected Bangladeshi national living in a flat in Beldanga in the same district where terror suspect Shakeel Ahmed had stayed earlier; Kauser, again a suspected Bangladeshi, whom investigators say routinely transported IEDs to Bangladesh and helped Shakeel find accommodation on rent; 28-year-old Talha Sheikh, a skilled weapons trainer who lived in Nadia; and 27-year-old Yusuf Shiekh, the reported kingpin of various terror modules that the JMB runs across West Bengal —he also set up the Simulia madrassa. The list of absconders is, in fact, longer. Police are also scouring the land for 26-year-old Amjad Ali Seikh from Kirnahar in Birbhum; Abdul Kalam, a close friend of the dead Shakeel Ahmed who was a regular at the burkha-tailoring unit that was used as a bomb-making facility; Burhan Sheikh, whom Simulia villagers say sold land for setting up the madrassa more than four years ago; Rez ul Karim, who lived in a house near the site of the Burdwan blast (the police have recovered 40 IEDs from his home); Habibur Rahman Sheikh, Kauser’s room17 november 2014
mate; Jahirul Sheikh and Shahnur Alam. “Burhan Sheikh fled probably because he was scared to death that the police would indict him in the case,” Shaksar Ali offers. Iman ul-Haq sees no reason that he should have offered himself for questioning by the police. What really surprises the NIA and the state police is the unity in denial among villagers, especially those in Simulia where Hindus don’t dare venture into the ‘Muslim area’ just 100 metres away, referred to it as “out there”. That nearly 40 people could carry on with such nefarious activities for four years without the knowledge of the villagers defies logic. Given the close-knit structure of society here, nothing of this magnitude could have gone unnoticed. “It is tough to give them the benefit of doubt,” says a senior government official. State versus Centre Syed Hussain Meerza, the burly, amiable superintendent of police of Burdwan district, talks about similar distrust of the “Indian policing system” that Shobhan Mandal had harboured. Mandal, who succumbed to his injuries in the blast, said he wouldn’t reveal much because he didn’t trust the Indian police and would never expect justice from India. He also
insisted that he was the son of a Biplov Mandal, but the police are convinced that this was not his real name. While he bears a Hindu name, a post-mortem report confirms that he was circumcised according to Muslim tradition, and that the IED exploded while he was trying to either carry it or work on it. He was bending forward with his hands on the explosive device when it went off, Meerza says. The police officer, whose transfer has been sought by the opposition CPM, reels out details of investigations carried out by his department that led to the collection of evidence. “Whatever evidence we have of these modules is thanks to the state police,” he says. Then what explains the controversy over the state government not cooperating with Central agencies? Another senior state government official offers an explanation: “It could be that the Mamata Banerjee government had initially shown reluctance to work in tandem with Central agencies, but that doesn’t take away the credit from the state police, who are familiar with the state and have provided enough evidence on the terror modules that have sprouted across the state. I am sure even National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was appreciative of the efforts of the state open www.openthemagazine.com 27
police who offered critical evidence to probe the case further.” On his smartphone, Meerza has saved pictures of the dead suspected JMB operatives and various business cards that the likes of Abdul Hakim used. He found the cards used by Hakim, Kauser and Amjad Ali Sheikh to be very similar. They were printed in black-and-white, in the same font, and two of them had the same phone numbers. By their business cards, they appeared to work for a medicalproducts factory located in Kolkata’s Shakespeare Sarani. Meerza notes that such business cards help people procure chemicals like ammonium nitrate and nitric acid, typically used for IEDs and bombs. The state police had also established links between Shakeel Ahmed and Yousef Sheikh and between Hakim and Karim. “Hakim, as soon as he regained consciousness, tried to rub off a phone number on his hand, but the police overpowered him and matched that number to the last call his wife [Amina Bibi, who is now in police custody along with Shakeel Ahmed’s wife, Rajira Bibi] made. Karim, who came to know of the blast, escaped,” says Meerza. What leaves the Government at the Centre anxious isn’t just the ease with which terrorists infiltrate India from Bangladesh. What is more worrying is the proliferation of terror modules in all border districts and beyond. Burdwan, also called Bhardaman, is not close to the border. India and Bangladesh share a 4,098-km border, the longest that either country shares with any other. Unlike India’s well-sealed borders with Pakistan and China, this one is highly porous. “Out there along the Indo-Bangladesh border, it is an industry, this migration business. You don’t pay in thousands of rupees, but in hundreds of rupees. It is Indian officials who offer fake documents to illegal Bangladeshi migrants,” claims refugee expert and Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor Sanjay Bhardwaj. The second West Bengal government official admits that this is true, and hastens to add that very often Bangladeshi citizens first cross over to India, marry an Indian, and then acquire their father-in-law’s surname in an effort to “erase their past”. Though he didn’t change his surname, the deceased Shakeel Ahmed, who came to India and married the cousin of a maul28 open
Shaksar Ali, a local Trinamool Congress leader, insists that he “speaks for the entire village”. No villager knew of the arms training at the Simulia madrassa that had been on for the past four years, he declares
vi he had befriended in Nadia, Rafiqul Islam, had falsely identified his father-inlaw as his father to acquire a ration card. “They often manage to do much more than that,” the official says, laughing. Past Wounds, New Rifts Meerza says he finds “many of those pious looking” people “with a beard and no moustache” to be deceptive. In particular, he is referring to Sheikh Yousef, an Indian thought to be the spiritual guide of various JMB-led terror modules, who has lived in various border districts before he set up the Simulia madrassa. The police have got hold of his photograph, and are sure that he hasn’t yet crossed over to Bangladesh where his outlawed organisation, founded in 1998, is waging a war to overthrow the democratically elected government of Sheikh Hasina, a friend of India’s, and establish sharia rule. “We have made some progress,” he says, adding that the NIA and the state police are working closely to nab him. The JMB has made several attempts to assassinate Hasina, who has been Prime Minister since 2009. She had to live in exile in India after the assassination of her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president of Bangladesh, and is hated by radical elements in Bangladesh for being pro-India. The JMB was forced to shift its operations outside of the country ever since it was banned in 2005 and
thanks to intense scrutiny by the Hasina government. In 2005, the JMB had detonated 500 bombs in 300 locations across Bangladesh. Professor Bhardwaj says that in Bengal, Muslims and Hindus shared cultural affinities for a long time until 16 August 1946 when a hartal, also called Direct Action Day, called by the MA Jinnah-led Muslim League resulted in widespread riots and manslaughter in the city. The hartal was called to demand the creation of Pakistan. Muslim mobs attacked Hindu homes and the two communities fought for almost a week in riots that came to be known as the Great Calcutta Killings. Also referred to as the ‘week of the long knives’, it spawned violence in several other parts of the country. Many historians have suggested that the unfortunate event reinforced the belief among the people of Bengal that the creation of two separate nations based on religion was inevitable. The migration of Bengalis from both sides of the border in the 1980s to Gulf countries contributed further to Islamisation, especially in Bangladesh, says Professor Bhardwaj. “It is petro dollars that continue to fund renewed radicalisation among Muslims in the region,” he says. According to him, cultural affinities between Hindus and Muslims survived the 1946 riots for many decades—until Bangladeshi and Bengali 17 november 2014
Hindus in Simulia rarely venture into the ‘Muslim part’ of the village barely 100 metres away. They usually refer to the Muslim neighbourhood as “out there”
Muslims began working as labourers in the Middle East. He believes that Bangladeshis who migrate for work to the Arab world are now under the influence of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence as opposed to the Hanafi one, which held sway among them earlier. The professor posits that Hanafism allowed for greater cooperation among diverse religious communities; in contrast, the Hanbali reading, associated closely with Wahhabism—which demands a puritanical adherence to textual Islam—tends to justify jihadism and hostilities with kaafirs or non-believers. For his part, Tufail Ahmad, an expert on jihadist movements of South Asia and director of South Asia Studies Project at the Washington DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute, rues that Indian authorities have been lax for long about Bangladeshi immigrants. Much like how Britain tolerated today’s jihadist forces on its soil while championing anti-colonial politics during the pre-9/11 years, he explains, Bangladeshi jihadists find a liberal, secular and hospitable environment in West Bengal to hide, survive and prosper. Says Ahmad, “The anti-Muslim violence in Assam and Myanmar in recent years and the Hasina government’s crackdown on jihadist organisations in Bangladesh should have alerted the authorities in West Bengal. However, it appears that hundreds of 17 november 2014
Bangladeshi terrorists are hiding in the state and it is easy for them to disappear into the immigrant populations there.” Ahmad wants the Modi Government to fulfil promises made in the run-up to the General Election. India, he says, should stay aware that jihadists are advocating Hijra (migration) as a strategy to radicalise Muslim youth. “In the Muslim imagination, Hijra is an important event when Prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Madina to establish the first Islamic state. And in West Bengal, migration is a serious issue and a well thought-out policy is needed,” he says, adding that “the Bangla-language literature seized by security officials in West Bengal indicates that jihadists are planning a mini caliphate incorporating Bangladesh and neighbouring districts of West Bengal”. This, Ahmad argues, is a cause of concern because the stated objective of the newly established Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) is to erase international borders. “It is more worrying that the militants in Burdwan were allegedly working to assassinate Sheikh Hasina, which is fundamentally a Pakistani plan to have such an assassination executed from Indian soil,” he says. So hardened are the terrorists, exclaims an official, that even women recruits undergo extensive training in guerilla warfare and torture resistance.
Rajira Bibi and Amina Bibi, wives of Shakeel Ahmed and Hakim, slowed the police down briefly by threatening to open fire when they landed at their doorstep within hours of the blast. In the meantime the two women managed to destroy most documents and SIM cards in the house. Besides them, the police have in custody Hassan Mollah, a Burdwan-based shoe trader and an associate of Shakeel. A Case of Connivance Roads to rural Bengal are smoother and wider now than when the Left was in power, yet lawlessness prevails. For all its idyllic beauty, violence lurks on the roads that traipse through the lush green paddy fields of eastern Bengal. At various locations in interior Murshidabad and Birbhum, dozens of youths with Trinamool Congress (TMC) flags stop cars demanding money to celebrate a particular community festival. Some of them are drunk, others furiously smoking away at beedis, still others are carrying sticks, and all of them are intimidating. “Rural West Bengal is known for such lawlessness, and much more now than ever before,” a police officer had forewarned. The Marxists who had ruled the state for 34 years had presided over the destiny of the state’s people, especially in the countryside. The TMC, which has taken open www.openthemagazine.com 29
DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images
Mamata Banerjee is under attack for serious lapses in the probe into the Burdwan blasts
power from the CPM, is following in the former’s footsteps, letting its cadres take the law into their hands and exercise brute force.“The rule of law cannot be seen much in these villages, it is ‘party as mafia’, and this has been the case for decades. The situation has only got worse over the past few years,” says the police officer. Under pressure from the Centre, which sprung into action demanding that the state cooperate with Central agencies rightaway to rid the state of terror modules, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee initially conceded that there were lapses on the part of her government in fast-tracking enquiries to nab the culprits on the run, especially Sheikh Yousef and Kauser who had reportedly managed to send hundreds of IEDs to Bangladesh. They’d been active in the state since 2011. Much to Banerjee’s embarrassment, the building used by terror suspects in Khagragarh is owned by a TMC leader, Nurul Hasan Chowdhury, who lived in the building facing that of his tenants. But within weeks, Banerjee appealed to her party leaders to launch a counter-offensive against what she called ‘malicious rumours’ suggesting that her party knew all along what was going on but looked the other way. “A campaign of canards and misinformation is being carried out against us in a planned way,” she said, and hit out at the Centre for failing to curb infiltration from Bangladesh. Revenge of History The Centre’s interest in West Bengal politics isn’t just political, officials say. “Of course, the BJP would want to capture the non-Trinamool space in the state, a space that has been left vacant by the near-deci30 open
mation of the CPM across rural Bengal,” says a Union Government official who has watched the eastern state for decades. He says that goons of Bangladeshi origin have routinely been hired by both the CPM and Congress, and later the TMC, to carry out killings. The identity of the killer gangs, which vanish back to Bangladesh or into immigrant settlements, stays masked. According to the 2001 Census, India was then home to more than 3 million people of Bangladeshi origin, a vast number of them in Assam. Some argue that the figure is far higher. Statistician Samir Guha Roy, though, says that the number is much lower. There exists no reliable data on this. Whatever the numbers, illegal migration has drastically altered the politics of Assam. The state saw large-scale riots in 2012 between Bangladeshi-origin residents and northeasterners. The expansion of fundamentalist outfits among Muslims had assured these immigrants local help within India. Central agencies had accused the Popular Front of India (PFI) of sending the bulk SMS threat that led to the exodus of northeasterners from Bangalore soon after the Assam violence. Meanwhile, a former CPM leader says that the party in West Bengal had also “meticulously employed” Bangladeshi nationals in country bomb-making units, effectively putting in place an infrastructure for terror activities in the state. “The CPM used to raid Congress villagers in the past with their help. And now the TMC has monopolised them to the extent that it is impossible for Mamata Banerjee to act against them. They are her strongest vote bank. Any crackdown on illegal migrants will cost her dearly,” he says. The JMB, flushed out
of Bangladesh, found this large pool of migrants a boon, says the first state government official. “They have a huge network already in place in most districts of West Bengal. The radicalisation of Muslims that you have seen over the past many years has also helped them establish a strong foothold. Thanks to intermarriages, Bangladeshis have gone through a phase of cultural assimilation in the state, which is seeing fast growth of Islamism. This gives them an edge,” he says. Various Islamist groups have distributed videos and pamphlets expressing solidarity with Islamists in Chechnya and other countries. There were also numerous bomb-making manuals downloaded from the internet. The likes of Ali in Simulia—a typical, seemingly tranquil eastern Bengal village where goat kids wander aimlessly through the streets—prefer to argue that Muslims are being targeted because the BJP has electoral designs on West Bengal. “That is a silly argument,” counters police officer Meerza. Such arguments are reflective, though, of the state government’s ostrich-like position taken to avoid facing reality, reasons the second government official. “Which is why it makes more sense for the NIA to investigate the case (which it is doing notwithstanding opposition from the state government). But support from the state police who know the lay of the land is crucial.” A senior police officer agrees and refutes charges that the Central agencies, steered by a Hindu nationalist party, are biased against Muslims. “How can someone dismiss it as an anti-minority stance when you discover that a burkha-making unit was in fact a bombmaking factory and that a madrassa was where young girls were given training in dry firing (of firearms without ammunition)?” he asks. For the time being, those IEDs and guns are directed at Bangladesh, and India remains a mere hub for arms production and a haven for terrorist training. But thanks to the close links that Islamists enjoy within the country, it is pretty sure that India, too, will soon be a target. It is a tragedy that behind the serenity of paddy fields, West Bengal’s countryside is riddled with plots of the most dangerous kind. Beneath the pastoral idyll lies the swirling reality of terror. n 17 november 2014
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INNOCEAN-001/12
nagendra kumar singh
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The silent elder
Mahendra Prasad is now in his 34th year as a member of Parliament. He has not spoken in the House even once By Kumar Anshuman
I
n Lutyens’ Delhi, the nameplate at 4 Safdarjung Lane reads ‘Dr Mahendra Prasad, MP’. Several bungalows surround it, including one diagonally opposite that is occupied by former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda. But of all of them, Prasad’s bungalow is the most imposing. It looks like a fortress with white towering boundary walls topped with barbed wire. Inside, the house has the appearance of a French villa with a spacious porch. Prasad has spent more than 25 years here, having stayed at this address even as he shuffled parties through the decades. Prasad is a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar on a Janata Dal-United (JD-U) ticket, serving a sixth consecutive term in the Rajya Sabha. Since 1985, when the Congress first gave him a seat, he has been sent there twice by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and twice by the JD-U, his current party. Prasad’s fortunes remain unaffected no matter who rules the Centre or Bihar. His enormous wealth is one possible reason for it; the other is his prescience on which way political winds might blow. On paper, Prasad runs a number of pharmaceutical companies with business spread across several continents. That may explain his nickname: King Mahendra. His Parliament records show a good attendance of 82 per cent, but, he really does rather little there. He has not spoken in Parliament in all his 33-plus years. He has asked only one question over the past five years and never participated in any debate. His declared assets of Rs 683 crore make him one of the richest members of the House, and his pharma empire is estimated to be worth some Rs 5,000 crore, though no verifiable figure is available. In the years he has been in public life, the politics of Bihar has undergone many a change, seeing all kinds of caste and dynastic dispensations. Only 74-year-old Prasad has been a constant.
H
e was born in a land-owning Bhumihar family in Govindpur, a village in Bihar’s district of Jehanabad. No one in his village is sure how he became a pharma baron. “He had gone to Mumbai to work in the 70s. Since then every time he came back we only heard stories of his rise,” says an elderly person
17 november 2014
from his village. In 1980, Prasad fought the Lok Sabha election on a Congress ticket from Jehanabad. The district, comprising mainly farmers, was a Left bastion but Prasad managed to defeat the CPI candidate by 28,000 votes. He went about building his base among the region’s dominant Bhumihars, offering jobs to the community’s youngsters at his pharma companies and doing humanitarian work. But it was not enough to get him re-elected. In 1984, when the Congress registered its largest ever win with 414 seats, Prasad lost Jehanabad. The Rajya Sabha, he soon realised, was an easier route to Parliament. By then he had developed ties with such Congress leaders as Makhan Lal Fotedar, Rajiv Gandhi’s political advisor
Prasad is one of the richest members of the House, and his pharma empire is estimated to be worth some Rs 5,000 crore who guarded access to him. In 1985, Prasad was nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the President of India on Fotedar’s recommendation. In September that year, he was picked as a poll observer of the party for the Amritsar Lok Sabha election. Terrorism was rampant in Punjab at the time, and he narrowly escaped a a blast that blew up his car in the Batala area, where he had gone to meet Congress workers. In July 1986, he was elected to the Upper House on a Congress nomination, but with the party’s decline in the wake of VP Singh’s rebellion, Prasad decided it was time to switch allegiance to the National Front. Over in Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav had emerged as the leader of Backward Classes and he rode that wave after 1989 when VP Singh became Prime Minister. Old caste equations were changing: the Naxal movement was gaining strength
and Bihar was in violent ferment. As several caste-based militias emerged to fight the Naxals, Prasad’s Ghosi block stronghold in Jehanabad was one of the worst affected. He reportedly funded the Ranveer Sena, an armed group of young men of ‘upper castes’ such as Bhumihars. Meanwhile, the Mandal Commission agitation had added to the state’s turmoil. With VP Singh and Lalu’s Janata Dal playing the politics of empowering Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Bhumihars opposed them tooth and nail. Yet, in 1993, when Prasad’s term as an MP was about to end, he got a Rajya Sabha nomination from the Janata Dal. “He has only one thing in abundance, money, and that is needed the most by political parties. His association with Lalu was only based on monetary support he offered,” says a BJP MP from Bihar who has once been with the Janata Dal. Prasad’s strategy was to remain aloof from party affairs and maintain a low profile—not trying to gain a position of any major standing in the Janata Dal, nor appearing on public forums. In 1997, when Lalu broke up the party to form the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Prasad joined him. Around three years later, he was rewarded by Lalu with yet another Rajya Sabha term. Later in 2000, after Lalu was forced out of Bihar’s chief-ministership because of corruption charges against him (and his wife Rabri Devi took over as his proxy), Prasad sensed that the RJD was weakening. The NDA, with the JD-U in league with the BJP, was on the ascent. It was time for another switch. In 2005, the NDA chose Nitish Kumar to lead the alliance into the Assembly poll arena. But his rising stature within the JD-U was posing a threat to other party leaders like George Fernandes and Sharad Yadav. When Fernandes refused him party funds for the polls, Nitish turned to Prasad via Lalan Singh, his right hand man and currently a cabinet minister in Bihar. Lalan was entrusted with getting Prasad on board because they were friends. It took only two meetings for Prasad to switch over to Nitish’s campaign. (Calls to Lalan Singh by Open for comment went unanswered). Nitish became the Chief Minister of Bihar, and Prasad made it to the Rajya Sabha as a JD-U nominee in 2005. In April open www.openthemagazine.com 33
ashish sharma
Mahendra Prasad’s official residence at 4 Safdarjung Lane, New Delhi
2012, he was re-nominated for a sixth consecutive term. “Had there been only one seat vacant, I would still have been nominated,” said Prasad at the time. He won unopposed.
F
or Prasad, a Rajya Sabha nom-
ination has become routine. He maintains his low profile, not interacting with others in the party and rarely attending party functions. “He doesn’t interact with anyone except exchanging customary greetings,” says senior Bihar Congress leader Akhilesh Prasad Singh, also from Ghosi. “As a result, people also don’t know much about him or expect any kind of camaraderie. He is a businessman who lives his own life.” “I don’t want publicity,” says Prasad. “That’s why I don’t interact with the media. I do my own work and mind my business and that’s about it.” He is close to a few leaders in Bihar such as Abhiram Sharma, the JD-U MLA from Jehanabad, but even they find it hard to get across to him. “It’s very difficult to reach him. He is a big man and keeps on travelling from one place to another,” says Sharma. “I call him when I want to meet him and if he is available, he asks me to come. I never ask him where is he. I know he has lot more things to do.” Prasad’s main pharma company Aristo 34 open
Pharmaceuticals has a corporate office in Andheri, Mumbai, with branches in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh and across Africa and Eurasia. He also owns Mapra Laboratories, headquartered in Lower Parel, Mumbai; Indchemie Health Specialties headquartered in Worli, Mumbai; and several other companies across India. He has factories in places like Baddi in Himachal Pradesh, Hyderabad, Sikkim and Daman. Prasad divides his time between India—mainly Mumbai and Delhi—and abroad. Those who know him say his lifestyle is simple: he wears only khadi ordered from a factory in Gujarat, and is a teetotaler who likes home-cooked food. In party circles, Nitish often speaks about Prasad’s passion for travel. Between April
Like any good politician, Prasad takes care of his followers. He employs thousands of young Biharis in his companies
2002 and April 2003, Prasad visited 84 countries—an average of seven countries a month. Last year, when Nitish called him, he was about to take a flight to Somalia. Nitish requested him not to go, and he returned from the airport. Prasad also loves reading, gardening and, unusually for a senior citizen: deepsea diving. He got the title, ‘Atlantis Submariner’ in August 2002 from the Atlantis Submarine, a tourism firm, for diving to a depth of 173 feet in the Caribbean Sea. He also won the top prize for the best house garden in Lutyens’ Delhi for 16 years from 1982 to 1997. Like any good politician, Prasad takes care of his followers. He employs thousands of young people, mostly Biharis, in his companies. When he is in Jehanabad, people queue up with job requests and he tries not to dishearten them. He also has educational institutes in the district. But public life means he doesn’t have much time for his family. “I am like any other person to him and he is as good as a stranger to me,” says Tarun Sharma, his son-in-law. One of the key factors that has ensured Prasad’s survival is an ability to keep everyone happy. Of course, money helps. As an NDA Lok Sabha MP from Bihar says, “He has mastered the art of using his wealth to fulfil his desire to be in power.” n 17 november 2014
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RELIGION
Glasnost at the altar The scientific temperament of Pope Francis is being felt across the reform-oriented Catholic church in India By Lhendup G Bhutia
A
fter working for several years
with the Roman Catholic Church in India, closely interacting with bishops and observing the intricacies of the Church’s functioning, Virginia Saldanha, a Mumbai-based theologian, relinquished her job with bitter feelings. She had risen up the ranks. From working for the Diocesan Women’s Desk in Mumbai at the beginning, she had gone on to hold the posts of executive secretary of the Commission for Women in the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) and the Office of Laity, Family and Women’s Desk at the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC). But she often faced difficulty in getting the support of Church authorities to organise meetings between female theologians and bishops. She noticed how bishops were often pleased to have only a few women participate in conferences, not allowing executive secretaries like her to speak except to present reports of their offices and answer queries on them. Of one such conference, the Asia Bishops’ Federation held in Manila in 2009, she told the 36 open
National Catholic Reporter, a US-based newspaper that covers the Catholic Church: “I was told that the bishops were very happy that this meeting was among themselves; they felt comfortable. It seems like they want a church where they are comfortable, the old boys’ club, not a church of the people of God where they exercise servant leadership!” She later added, “I thought that the purpose of having a Women’s Desk in a bishops’ structure would be to help the bishops understand the problems of women so that they can carry out their pastoral ministry to women better. But since the bishops felt they had to tell me what to do and how to do it, I felt it is no use wasting my time in the structure…” Saldanha, a leading voice in India’s community of Catholic Christians, is a founder-member of the Indian Women Theologians Forum, a group involved in theologising from a women’s perspective, apart from working and writing about gender issues. She feels differently about the Church’s attitudes now. “There is still a lot to be achieved,” she says, “But it is different now. The rigidity and conserva-
tism of the previous years is missing. The attitude of the Church, whether in India or elsewhere, to issues facing them isn’t one of indifference like before.”
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ver since he stepped into office, Pope Francis has assumed a sort of saintly celebrityhood. Many think that unlike his predecessors, he is more concerned about alleviating poverty and suffering than getting tied down by the Church’s dogma. They also think that he will transform the Church and liberalise its doctrine on marriage, the family, and homosexuality. In the first 18 months of his papacy, he has proven every bit inclined to do so. He sent out a questionnaire last year, asking the world’s overone-billion Catholics for their opinions on contentious issues like contraception and abortion, same-sex marriage, cohabitation by unwed couples, and the place of divorced and remarried people in the Church. He held an Extraordinary Synod last month and put these issues to vote and made the vote tally for each issue public, even those rejected, so that 17 november 2014
photos Sushil Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
people could continue discussing them. He has said he does not have the authority to judge homosexuals. And recently, he emphasised the reality of evolution and the Big Bang theory, saying God isn’t a magician with a magic wand. While the Extraordinary Synod did not result in a change of Church doctrine or teaching, many believe it will lay the groundwork for a major upheaval sometime later. Another synod on these issues will take place next year. In India, Pope Francis’ actions are reinvigorating reform-oriented Catholic organisations. The clergy and laity are gradually questioning previous rigid stances and moving towards a greater understanding and openness about unconventional family situations. Allan de Noronha, president of the Kanpur Catholic Association and a former president of the All India Catholic Union, says, “The irony is that Francis is attracting so much attention for doing what is basic Christianity; because most of us who profess to be Christians have, in fact, ignored the basics and gone for the superficial, like participation in various pious devotional practices, with which the clergy feel most comfortable.” Last year, when the Vatican sent its questionnaire on family issues to India, the Church here did not pass it down to members of the Catholic community. When members of the laity inquired,
role in distributing the questionnaire among the laity, claims that the Church in India often tries to keep the laity in the dark. “The Catholic family in India,” he says, “is more like a domesticated fowl that is expected to make appropriate clucking noises and produce more eggs (increase the Catholic population) as some bishops in Kerala have been advocating.” Saldanha, who was also part of the group that simplified and distributed the questionnaire, reveals, “While most of the respondents in India did not find an issue with the Church’s policy on homosexuals, most people claimed that the ban on contraception was wrong and impractical.”
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oronha and others then organised a National Consultation on Catholic Families (NCCF) in Pune that was attended by lay leaders from across the country. At the end of the two-day conference, an ‘Agenda For Change’ was drafted and a group called the Indian Catholic Forum was formed to push these demands in Rome. The demands range from the adoption of an inclusive approach toward people of various sexual orientations, to doing away with the ban on ‘artificial’ contraception and the condemnation of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). The Church in India is getting less rigid itself in its stance on such issues.
“The Pope seems to want to bring about changes. The conservative in the clergy may resist this, but we will have to ensure that this doesn’t happen” George Joseph President, KCRM they learnt that a report on the questionnaire had already been sent to Rome with little or no contribution from them. However, rather than letting the matter rest, some individuals took it upon themselves to simplify and distribute the questionnaire among Catholics in India. Aided by the Catholic Church Reform International, an international group devoted to reforms within the Catholic faith, the answers were then sent directly to the Vatican. Noronha, who played an instrumental 38 open
In Kerala, when there was talk in 2009 of the Centre attempting to decriminalise homosexuality by having Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code ‘read down’, the Syro-Malabar Church had come out against such a move. Its spokesperson, Father Paul Thelakkattu, had then told The Indian Express, “Gay marriages and sexual relation between persons of the same gender could not be allowed... the Church had always been sympathetic towards homosexuals and [said] that they should be nursed back to normalcy
through proper treatment and counselling… the government move would mean giving a licence to the sexual perversions of a section of society.” Speaking about the conclusions of the synod held recently, and its implications, Father Thelakkattu’s tone has changed. He says in an email interview, ‘If you read the resolutions of the Synod you will immediately note a very inclusive language used there. The change of language is very important. Any change happens first in language. There is surely an honest attempt to understand the world situations and conflicts the marital life involves. The church there uses a more inclusive language meaning the church is for not only saints but sinners also. The church is becoming more a home which does not want to use a judgmental language of sin and punishment but a language of understanding and mercy to all.’ Last year, during a sermon at St Thomas Church in Mumbai, a priest created a furore among the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community when he opposed same-sex marriage, calling homosexuality ‘a great sin’. During the same time period, Pope Francis had famously said, in an interview to the Jesuit journal, La Civilta Cattolica, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” About a month later, the Archbishop of Bombay, Cardinal Oswald Gracias,
17 november 2014
Franco Origlia/Getty Images
wrote a letter to the LGBT activists who were upset, claiming the priest who had delivered the sermon was incorrect and that he would advise priests to be more sensitive in their homilies. Father Nigel Barrett, spokesperson of the Archdiocese of Bombay, says, “The Archbishop said that while homosexual marriages aren’t permitted in the faith, the concerned priest made inappropriate remarks. The Church does not accept gay marriage. But to say that those with other sexual orientations are sinners is wrong. This is reflective of the stand the Pope himself has taken.” According to Barrett, since that incident there have been discussions within the clergy in Mumbai about these issues and Cardinal Gracias has requested individual parishes and their priests to be more sensitive and compassionate while addressing the public. An issue that is of peculiar concern to the Church in India is the matter of annulments. Since divorce and remarriage are not accepted within the Catholic faith, the Church allows couples who want to separate to seek an annulment of their marriage, which unlike a legal divorce, is a declaration by the Church that there was no real marriage between the two. This matter is however decided by a tribunal set up by the diocese of the area, and its decision has to be ratified by a tribunal of another diocese. If the two tribunals differ, the matter has to be decided by Vatican. But in India, where the clergy required for such matters is woefully short in numbers, an annulment can take extremely long. Many are known to legally divorce and remarry before getting an annulment, which could result in their being barred from the Communion and their children from next marriages not being baptised. According to Sister Teena Jose, a member of the Congregation of Mother of Carmel (CMC) sisters in Ernakulum, Kerala, the Church in India delays granting annulments on purpose so that fewer marriages are annulled. “I know of women who have been waiting for 10 years to get their annulments. This is done so [that] fewer people approach the clergy for annulments and the sanctity of the institution of marriage, in the eyes of the clergy, remains.” According to Barrett, there just aren’t enough priests. He claims the Church in India is now considering lay individuals
Pope Francis had famously said in an interview: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” trained in canon law to help clear the backlog. This is also a matter Noronha is working on. “We’ve been asking the Church to sympathetically consider the cases of those who have gotten legal divorces without an annulment and want to be a part of the Church,” he says. Saldanha says, “There was a time when the women’s movement was being blamed in India for marriage breakups. No one then spoke about how earlier women were quietly bearing violence in their homes. This isn’t the case anymore. Change will take time as the Church has to carry everyone along with it. But it will occur.” In Kerala, groups like the Kerala Catholic Reformation Movement (KCRM), an organisation that wants reform within the Catholic faith and protests against the Church’s influence out-
side the realm of spirituality, has now begun to hold monthly workshops and seminars to convince people about issues that need to be redressed. In its last discussion, the KCRM held a seminar in Kottayam on how priests who had given up their vows are often ill-treated by their family and other members of society. The group is currently planning to collect funds to build a shelter home for them. In the past, it has dealt with issues concerning sexuality and how the Church looks at any form of sexual activity, including masturbation, as a sin. Says George Joseph, president of the KCRM, “After several years, we are seeing something positive in the Vatican. The Pope seems to want to bring about changes. The conservative in the clergy may resist this, but we will have to ensure that this doesn’t happen.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 39
UNDERWORLD
When the don drew blood
One of Bollywood’s big nemeses has been the Mumbai mafia—and one of the most terrifying faces of that threat is Abu Salem, the freewheeling former aide of Dawood Ibrahim. He was convicted for the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts and the murder of music baron Gulshan Kumar. He has also attempted hits on film directors Rajiv Rai and Rakesh Roshan, among others. His relationship with actress Monica Bedi brought to the fore the complex nexus between Bollywood and the Underworld. After a sensational fallout with his mentor, Salem was caught by the Indian Police in a dramatic operation in Lisbon, Portugal. He is currently languishing in Mumbai’s Arthur Jail. S HUSSAIN ZAIDI, arguably the best chronicler of the Mumbai Underworld, tells the story of how Salem plotted the murder of Gulshan Kumar
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ack in the 1990s, Bollywood was nothing like the sanitized, studio-controlled, corporate-financed industry it is today. Tinsel town had its moguls and its mandarins who, along with Mumbai’s realty players, controlled incredible sums of black money. So it was only natural that when Salem decided to go beyond the construction business, it would be to the veritable gold mine of Bollywood. The first target would be Subhash Ghai, one of the reigning maharajas of superstardom. Ghai’s cash registers had been ringing and coffers overflowing ever since his 1993 box office superhit Khalnayak, starring Salem’s now-on, now-off friend Sanjay Dutt. The director’s stocks had soared so much that he could even sign Shah Rukh Khan for a film. This, Salem believed, was the perfect time to send Bollywood a message. And the target would be Ghai. Salem deputed five youths from Azamgarh to deliver this ‘hit’. But the deputy commissioner of police, Zone VII, Satyapal Singh, received intelligence about the hit squad. He immediately assigned the task of foiling the attack to his special squad, led by Assistant Inspector Pradeep Sharma. The police team laid a trap and 40 open
arrested the quintet of would-be killers. Salem, on his part, continues to maintain that he had never intended to kill the director. All he wanted was to send out a message to him. And that missive was: ‘Pay up now or be prepared to face dire consequences.’ Later, Ghai said in an interview that Salem had called him and spoken to him quite politely. Salem wanted the foreign rights for his movie Pardes and when Ghai told him that it had already been signed away, Salem asked for a print of the movie so that he could make pirated copies and sell them. Salem also reportedly told Ghai that he was a big fan of his work. Salem’s other target in Bollywood was director Rajiv Rai, who had seen major commercial success with Tridev (starring Naseeruddin Shah and Sunny Deol), Mohra (starring Akshay Kumar and Raveena Tandon) and Gupt (starring Bobby Deol and Kajol). As it turned out, Rai was a far easier man to convince than Ghai. One day, Salem received an annoying phone call from a news reporter who worked with the Indian Express. Audaciously, the reporter asked Salem if his men were so incompetent that they 17 november 2014
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Abu Salem outside the CBI court in Hyderabad
india today images
Gulshan Kumar’s body at the morgue (above); Paramilitary officers search for survivors after the explosion at the Bombay Stock Exchange in 1993 (facing page)
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ot once did Salem imagine that Gulshan would display outright defiance. He was incredulous, and told Gulshan that he would have to have him killed. The latter didn’t seem to care
couldn’t even deliver on a single death threat. The gangster said simply that it had never really been his intention to kill either Ghai or Rai. He added that the following week would see someone killed. The next week came along and, sure enough, the gangster delivered on his word. Gulshan Kumar was brutally killed in public. The killing would also become Salem’s big ticket into the heart of Bollywood. After the Gulshan Kumar murder, the Indian Express reporter called Salem again. ‘Was this the murder you were talking about?’ But this time, the bluster was missing on the other end of the line. The Indian government was furious about this high-profile murder and the mafiosi was getting jittery. The whole of the Dawood gang was running scared, tails between their legs. Salem hesitated for a moment and when he did speak, it was to say, ‘Yeh murder Lal Krishna Advani ne karvaya hai, why don’t you call and ask him?’ So, Salem did not own up to the Gulshan Kumar murder; nevertheless, he had managed to generate a deep-rooted fear psychosis in the film industry. Filmwallahs had a simple logic: If this man could make someone like Ghai cower and could bump off a big fish like Gulshan Kumar, no one was safe. Salem had begun to use a code name when he called film personalities: Captain. The Mumbai Police had begun tapping phones, and since these conversations were considered to be 42 open
culpable evidence, Salem decided to use the code name. The industry was soon abuzz about calls from the Captain. Salem also appointed a small army of spies and scouts in the industry, people who were keeping tabs on a wide range of industry insiders. The most famous among them was a producer called Bobby. This man could walk into any Bollywood office, meet any star and demand a commitment. ‘At one point of time, some thirty top film stars had signed contracts with Bobby. They had promised chunks of dates to Bobby and there was no hassle about the remuneration,’ recalls a top film director. Even some top stars who routinely played hookey after committing dates with reputed banners and haggled endlessly over their signing amount and fee would heed hastily when that one call came from the Captain, followed sometimes by a polite threat from Bobby. Suddenly, they would all be available, usually gratis. Soon, all of Bollywood’s biggest names were inhabitants of Salem’s cell phone book. And whenever they flew to a European destination to shoot a scene or a song, they would invariably fly into Dubai to pay obeisance to him in person. Without exception. But none of them met anyone called Salem. The mafia boss’s modus operandi was to meet Bollywood’s who’s who as Arsalan (a fictional assistant to Abu Salem). This man was a suave and elegant person with a sophisticated, polite and urbane manner, while the reputation of Abu Salem was that of a ferocious, bloodthirsty don whose language was littered with more profanity than Mumbai’s roads are filled with potholes. For, Salem’s relationship with Bollywood was no one-way street. In addition to making his influence felt, he too was deeply influenced by Bollywood, its megalomania, its larger-than-life plots, its drama. He was fascinated by the idea of a dual identity. He relished posing as Arsalan and would even go so far as to look at his cell phone every now and then and claim he had received a missed call from Salem bhai. He’d sometimes have imaginary conversations with this caller, even as the stars he 17 november 2014
was spending time with shuddered in fear. Around this time, Salem had entered into a relationship with an attractive starlet who occupied the fringes of Bollywood. For a while, he used his second identity with her as well, before finally introducing himself as the dreaded Abu Salem. Taking advantage of her gullible nature, the gangster decided to put his moll to ‘better use’. Salem’s experience told him that the one common thing among producers, directors and actors was that they were all a bunch of liars. The starlet helped keep him in touch with these people’s lives, their financial condition and their upcoming projects and so on. The dreaded call from the Captain soon came to follow a set pattern. A typical scenario would entail the producer or director getting a call from the Captain. It’s not hard to imagine the scene at the producer’s end, the fumbling over the phone, the desperate search for ideas to outwit Salem. ‘H-h-hello bhai,’ the victim would manage to mumble. Salem would make some small talk, just to break the ice. And then would ask if everything was all right. ‘Sab aapki kripa se, bhai,’ the hapless producer or director would reply, the ultimate choice of words for a desperate sycophant. And then, his tale of woe would begin. ‘Family mein death hui thi. Toh pichhle chaar–paanch hafton se koi kaam nahin kiya. Paisa bhi kam hai.’ The call done, Salem would then ask his lady-on-the-inside to call the producer and check what was actually happening at his end. Salem’s spy and lover would often come back with a contrasting report. While the producer had grovelled in front of Salem, he was back to playing a big shot as soon as he had finished the call. After getting the inside information on many such people, Salem would then respond with more threatening phone calls, warning his victim not to take him for a ride. Inevitably, they would succumb and pay up. Salem got his lady friend to infiltrate the Bollywood network, even gaining access to the likes of Aamir Khan, J.P. Dutta and Rakesh Roshan. Whenever Salem received word that these people were about to disobey him or were unwilling to do his bidding, he’d send a subtle message like those sent to Ghai and Rai, and they’d fall right back in line. In short, the whole of Bollywood was now in Salem’s back pocket. Or so Salem thought. *****
Conspiracy in Dubai 12 June 1997 It was pegged as the glitziest party in all of Dubai, ever. Everyone who was anyone was going to be there. The entire Bollywood industry as well as all the movers and shakers of Mumbai and Dubai. Anis Ibrahim personally issued instructions to Abu Salem to round up Bollywood’s top stars to show up at the party. After all, this was the launch of Vicky Goswami’s Empire chain of hotels. Goswami, a notorious drug lord based in South Africa, whose friends and cronies included sheikhs, industrialists and assorted moneybags, was launching a chain of hotels across the world with the apparent objective of laundering some serious money. Two of his most influential friends were Dawood and Anis Ibrahim. When Salem first moved to Mumbai, film stars were citizens 17 november 2014
of an entirely different world from the one he inhabited. How things had changed in a matter of a few years—now this glittering galaxy of stars were constantly at his beck and call. The contrast between the way they were depicted interacting with people onscreen and the way they behaved with Salem was an unending source of amusement for him. He wondered if the grovelling, weeping person on the other end of the line was really the same guy he saw beating up thirty people single-handedly or saving a school bus full of children and even catching a bullet with his bare hands on-screen, and with enough spare time to romance a pretty woman. Sometimes two. Salem was briefed by Anis about this major bash. Anis explained in no uncertain terms that this was as big as it got and told Salem to ensure that Chunky Pandey, Jackie Shroff, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the usual gaggle of names from the film fraternity were all present. Of course, no star-studded gala like this one would be considered even remotely complete without the women of Bollywood. Goswami’s parties were, in fact, not only always extremely lavish affairs but they were also attended by the most jaw-
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droppingly ravishing women. The sideshow activities would have once blown the mind of a young kid straight out of Pathan Tola in Sarai Mir village of Azamgarh. But Salem had been around the circuit long enough to have seen it all. This was nothing new to him. Coked-up, spaced out and sloshed starlets, who had previously never even tasted a sip of beer but nursed a burning desire to be seen at the ‘right’ parties were de rigueur at these soirées. Needless to say, these young women were always willing to dress in a manner that flaunted the advantages of a D-cup, and would gladly go the ‘extra mile’ for a role in a film or two. Salem would initially gawk at these women who he had previously seen dancing gracefully on the big screen or playing an ideal housewife; they were now stumbling around in an intoxicated state, willing to go that ‘extra mile’. But he got used to it soon enough. Salem set about contacting everyone on his list. His intention was not to merely invite them to the party, but to inform them
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hai said that Salem had called him, asking for the foreign rights to Pardes. They had already been signed away, so Salem asked for a print of the movie to make pirated copies
that if their personal health and safety was of any importance to them, then they would do well to attend the party. Who could argue with that? And so, hordes of actors and actresses descended upon Dubai. Tickets had been sent in advance. Now it was only a matter of picking each one up and bringing them to Royal Empire Hotel. As expected, none of the stars had the impudence to ditch the party. It was a gala affair, with top stars having a whale of a time. Or at least giving the impression that they were enjoying themselves. The music was pumping, the liquor flowing and the food plentiful. Acres of smooth skin were on show, and heaving cleavages and slender waists cast a spell on the sheikhs and stars. A loud and drunken cheer went up as the state-of-the-art sound system emitted the opening strains of a song that had been topping the Hindi music charts for weeks. Salem unfortunately was on duty that night. As he was taking care of the party, a glum-looking man approached him. It was the music composer Nadeem, part of the successful Nadeem–Shravan duo. Nadeem got straight to the point— which was to settle the matter of Gulshan. Nadeem’s problems with music baron Gulshan Kumar were no secret. Wanting to keep matters as discreet as possible, Salem took Nadeem over to a corner and made him sit down comfortably and asked him if he wanted something to eat or drink. A shake of his head and a wave of his hand sent the waiter away and Nadeem began spilling the beans on his woes. He related his tale of how Gulshan had made his life absolutely miserable and pleaded with Salem to find a solution to his problem. The more he spoke, the more agitated he became. 44 open
Salem tried to convince him that things weren’t as bad as he made them seem. After all, it was Gulshan who had given him and his partner Shravan Rathod their first big break by letting them compose the music for the 1990 Rahul Roy–Anu Agarwal starrer Aashiqui. But Nadeem was beyond reason. At one point, he stood up in anger and had to be taken by the arm and coerced gently back into his seat. Salem told him that perhaps he would be able to help. A token payment of Rs 25 lakh from Nadeem would ensure that Gulshan would be ‘taken care of’. Nadeem seemed relieved and went home from the party satisfied. Salem realized that while Nadeem may well have set the ball rolling, it would be himself who would stand to gain the most from this. If he caused the death of one of the brightest stars of the music industry, he would become one of the most feared members of the underworld. For the next few days, Salem set about planning the final chapter of Gulshan Kumar’s life. The shooter, the location, the time of day, escape routes and other such variables had to be charted out with total precision. Once he was totally satisfied with the plan, he would decide whether Gulshan should be given a hint of the doom that awaited him. If he wanted to play ball, Salem would allow him to pay up, but if he chose not to comply with Salem’s diktat, then everything would have been planned already. Meanwhile, Nadeem began to lose patience and got more desperate. He had already been told that the cost of ‘dealing with’ Gulshan was Rs 25 lakh. On 28 July 1997, at the Natural Ice Cream store in Juhu, Nadeem’s men handed the amount in cold hard cash to three men sent by the gangster. Nadeem called Salem that evening and asked if he’d received the money. The music director implored the don again, the police would later claim. Salem, on his part, said he would deliver on his end of the bargain, and then decided to fine-tune the big plan. He gathered all the information he could about Gulshan’s daily routine. On 9 August, when everything was in place, Salem gave the T-Series chief a call and told him gently that he was working on Nadeem’s behalf and had to protect his interests. And if he had any concern for his safety and well-being, Salem explained to Gulshan slowly, he would have to pay up. Salem had expected the T-Series man to stand his ground for a little while and then eventually succumb to the demands as had other Bollywood supremos, Subhash Ghai and Rajiv Rai. Not once did he imagine that Gulshan would display outright defiance. He was incredulous that someone could think of opposing his will. The gangster told Gulshan that he would have to have him killed. The latter didn’t seem to care. It hardly mattered to Salem. He had already decided that Gulshan’s days were numbered. n
Excerpted from My Name Is Abu Salem By S Hussain Zaidi, Penguin India; 270 pages; Rs 350. Hussain Zaidi is a former investigative journalist. His other books include From Dongri to Dubai, Mafia Queens of Mumbai and Byculla to Bangkok 17 november 2014
illustration anirban ghosh
adolescence
Teens, sex and technology Social media apps make romance easier for India’s high-schoolers, posing a culture shock to parents By Aekta Kapoor
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ehak and Ishaan met on Instagram, when, following the hashtag #happy, Ishaan came upon Mehak’s selfie of herself wearing a white and black striped T-shirt, with a sleepy pout on her face. He left a generous comment—‘Cute’—which set her all aflutter. They had a mutual ‘follower’ they were both vaguely acquainted with and so they began to follow one another too without qualms, clicking on the heart symbol to ‘like’ each other’s photos. This went on almost daily for over a year. It turned out that Mehak, 15, and Ishaan, 17, were both based in Delhi just a few kilometres apart, though they went to different schools. With Instagram providing a daily chronicle of each other’s lives, they felt close enough to initiate a Kik chat and then a WhatsApp conversation a year later. (“WhatsApp is about giving your mobile number, which is not something I’d do with any random stranger, duh?” says Mehak, using an expression best described as condescending when asked to explain the difference between the two chat apps.) In a few months, by when Ishaan was old enough to drive, the teenagers progressed to Facebook, thus crossing another frontier of intimacy, sharing their daily lives, families and opinions with one another. This led to phone calls and, finally, to their first meeting in person when Ishaan drove his Maruti Wagon R, picked Mehak from the main road a few discreet steps away from her south Delhi home, and went with her to a coffee shop in a mall. They fell in love, and other apps fed the flame: Snapchat, by which they could send messages and videos that would self-destruct after a preset length of time; Hike, which let them ‘hide’ messages from their folks; Twitter, on which they followed one another’s parents out of general curiosity; Viber, to make phone calls late into the night without a corresponding rise
in phone bills; and Skype, for video chats when they went on family holidays where the usual phone roaming didn’t work. They continued to meet once a month in public places, going as far as “second base” in the privacy of Ishaan’s car. The modern-day fairy tale fell apart when Mehak entered class 12. By then, the pressure of studies (for her) combined with newfound college freedom that brought with it prettier shores (for him) led to bitter quarrels, insecurity and heartache. They officially broke up through WhatsApp (“Why would anyone want to break up on the phone?” asks Mehak), and deleted each other from Facebook but were forced to be part of each other’s lives through other apps that did not allow such clean breaks. They could not, in Toni Braxton’s words, ‘un-break their hearts’. And so they did what any normal teenager would do: they promptly fell in love with someone else, and flaunted their new and improved partners on Instagram, passionately hoping their ex would notice. “Technology has made romance harder, not easier, for teens,” says Sujata Chatterjee, a Delhi-based clinical psychologist who has worked with Mehak in the past. “A lot of the qualities of the interaction are often imagined, especially when people meet online and not in person. Often our deepest needs are searched for and found in the image of the person we create for ourselves. When that is not confirmed in reality, there are a lot of disappointments to survive.” She points out that recent decades have seen an earlier onset of puberty (now at the age of 8–12 for girls and 10–13 for boys), but stable relationships are achieved and marriages happen later and later, leading to an extended adolescence with its tumultuous stretch of love and longing. “With smartphone messengers that allow you to see when the other person has read your message and gauge the rate of response, these teens are on tenterhooks all the time. There’s no intuitive ‘knowing in open www.openthemagazine.com 47
(Left to right) Sanaya and Aishwarya with their mother Raksha Bharadia
your heart’ that comes from face-to-face boy-girl contact that people would have to wait for... Today, the waiting of minutes is just unbearable. It’s a huge burden on the relationship,” says Chatterjee, adding that educated urban parents are at a crossroads. “Different people respond differently. Some just blame peers if something goes wrong—‘she got into the wrong company,’ they say. But that makes a victim of your child. If you take away choice, you take away responsibility. The key is how you negotiate your way through the needs of the situation as a parent. Blanket bans only drive teen romance undercover—and total permissiveness doesn’t work either; children need to learn to think through a course of action and its consequences while discovering real-life boundaries through their own experiences of hurt and happiness,” she says.
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he rules have changed, the battleground has moved, the allies and foes are interchangeable. Conservative values and sex-shy family communication are clashing with overtly sexual media messages wherever you turn, from Bollywood songs to Western TV shows to newspapers. One can forgive today’s urban parents for pulling their hair out in bewilderment at just where to draw the line when it comes to 48 open
the thorny maze called adolescence. The infamous MMS scandal of over a decade ago—when a class 11 student of Delhi Public School, RK Puram, shared with his buddies a video of his half-naked girlfriend performing oral sex on him, which led to the MMS clip going viral, the boy being expelled, the girl reportedly being ‘exiled’ abroad by her family, and a 2009 Bollywood movie Dev D made of it—only let the cat of teen sex out of the bag, but didn’t bring with it any guidebook on how to deal with it. With the advent of the internet, lusty young hormones have much to get them buzzing. With the coming of the smartphone, the devil is in your pocket. With apps and social media available to all generations and social groups, the average teenager’s parents are damned if they clamp down and damned if they don’t. Meenakkshi Jaiin, a feng shui consultant who has two daughters, admits to being among a minority of parents who are open-minded when it comes to teen relationships. “I think the present generation of teens is less hypocritical than ours. There are fewer double standards, unlike the older generation who did the same things in secret when they were teenagers themselves,” she observes. When her younger daughter, age 15, had to make a heartbreaking choice in love, Jaiin advised her to relax: “Nothing is the end of life. Go with the decision that feels
‘light’—that’s a good benchmark for every major decision.” She says she would rather make home an open space for her daughters to return to than a prison full of rules. “We talk about sex; they tell me what happens in class, who is having sex and who isn’t. It is all very light-hearted. There’s no stress attached to these discussions. It’s more important for them to make good choices when it comes to friends—that’s where they get the maximum support from.” She’s right. A study of 78 American middle-school students published in Child Development found that teens who picked healthier partners were mentally and socially healthier a year later. A more extensive 2007 study done jointly by Cornell University, University of Rochester, the New York State Center for School Safety and Cornell Cooperative Extension of New York City found that romantic relationships are central to social life during middle to late adolescence (age 15–19). The study found that threefourths of American teens, age 16–18, had dated or ‘hooked up’, with over half of these having been in a serious relationship—figures for urban online Indians may not differ too vastly. Most of the youth spent more time with their romantic partners than their family and friends, which in turn played a role in such developmental milestones as forming a sense of identity, refining personal values 17 november 2014
‘‘
What these kids need is intervention from a neutral source; otherwise, television is messing them up. They demand the independence of the Western youth they see on screen, but not their responsibilities such as earning their way through college” Raksha Bharadia parenting expert
‘‘
It’s not love. It’s a status symbol. If a girl has a boyfriend, other boys will be afraid to approach her. And having a girlfriend helps boys keep creepy girls away” Oorja Gonepavaram Class 10 student
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and interpersonal skills, providing emotional support and achieving self resilience. This was even more significant in the case of sexual minority youngsters compelled by social norms to keep their orientation a secret—their romantic partners were the only people with whom they could feel comfortable and safe sharing thoughts and feelings. In India, it appears boys face greater stress in relationships. In a study of adolescents in the age group of 16–22 years from Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, Hisar, Haryana, it was found that boys had higher self-esteem and larger egos than girls, which made them more sensitive to ‘loss of respect’ by others. They also got angrier if their girlfriend did not pay enough attention to them—a possible outcome of old social codes that require girls to be quiet and less expressive about sexuality and deep feelings. Sex education could address some of these problems. This is something that Lakshmi Kumar, director of Orchid School in Pune, has been working towards. One of the pioneers in implementing the Life Skills Orientation Course in middle school, her school is remarkably progressive in teaching adolescents about sexual choices, consequences and responsibilities, including the hazards of underage pregnancy. “No one talks to them about sex—about power, consent, equality, pleasure, respect. Parents are extremely uncomfortable talking about it, so teens have nowhere else to go but social media, other young adults, peer groups or even porn sites, which give them a completely wrong [impression],” she says. According to a 2010 National Youth Readership Survey (NYRS) published by National Book Trust India in association with National Council of Applied Economic Research, the internet is accessed by over 35 million urban Indian youth (age 13–35), with about threefourths of users ‘expressing confidence’ in it as a reliable source of information. It is imperative that schools and educationists step in and demystify sexuality, says Kumar. Though she believes that knowledge of gadgets and social media can be an asset, it can also be a bane if teens aren’t taught the impact and outcome of their online behaviour. “Parents and teens can collaborate beautifully; the teens teach us
the grassroots of technology; parents can contribute with the value dimension.” Kumar rues that teen romance these days appears to have an overwhelming material element, an artificial sense of control, and is often patriarchal with the boy expected to pick up the cheque, drive the girl around and even decide what she wears. The boundaries between romance and sex, between feelings and experimentation, have blurred, she adds. Parents would once be scandalised when their ninth-grade kids came home and said they’d learnt about condoms in school. “We can’t assume these kids will have sex only after marriage. We have to equip them in emotional, social, cultural and physiological ways for every possibility,” says Kumar, who had to hold orientation sessions for parents to explain what the school was up to. “They were relieved but also embarrassed. It was a heavy silence zone.” Oorja Gonepavaram, a class 10 student in Kumar’s Pune school who admits she is “hopeless at romance”, says that Tumblr and 9gag are still the most common websites used by the kids in her class—all very innocent when compared with high-school kids in Delhi and Mumbai. “Facebook totally disrupts studies, and we’re slightly afraid of WhatsApp because it reveals our profiles. Our school has taught us all about online privacy and cyberbullying,” she says. According to her, there are two kinds of students: those who are in a relationship and those who are desperate to be in one. And most of their parents don’t know. “It’s not love. It’s a status symbol. If a girl has a boyfriend, other boys will be afraid to approach her. And having a girlfriend helps boys keep creepy girls away— there’s nothing worse for a boy’s reputation than having a creepy girl fan,” she adds, sagely. Her words echo the findings of a paper called ‘Early, middle, and late adolescents’ views on dating and factors influencing partner selection’, by Roscoe, Diana and Brooks, which reports that teen relationships are highly egocentric, and are motivated by immediate gratification, recreation and status attainment. For urban, English-educated Indian youth, there’s another problem: the popularity of American TV shows. Parenting expert and the Ahmedabadbased author of Roots and Wings, Raksha open www.openthemagazine.com 49
F
Uday Foundation’s newly launched internet de-addiction centre in New Delhi
Bharadia found paradoxical worlds while sifting through thousands of entries for two books for the Chicken Soup series on Indian teenagers that she edited. “There’s this big physical world of Indian traditions and rituals that these kids inhabit, and then there’s the world of social media and TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Gossip Girls and Two Broke Girls, all of which influence their attitudes towards relationships and sexuality. But it’s not our world, and so there’s this whole lot of guilt and confusion,” she says. The teens in Bharadia’s books relate stories of the enormous amounts of peer pressure to be in a relationship, drink alcohol, explore drugs, have sex, and of an overarching need for secrecy. “What these kids need is intervention from a neutral source; otherwise, television is messing them up. They demand the independence of the Western youth they see on screen, but not their responsibilities (such as earning their way through college). They want the benefits and comforts of Indian social structures as well,” says Bharadia, who is a mother of two teenage daughters herself. It is a typical problem that also confronts Dr Kushal Jain, senior consultant psychologist at VIMHANS hospital, Delhi, who finds that technology has boosted both availability and impulsivity in teen romance while adding a dimension of information overload without enough time to process the pros and cons. Tech-savvy teenagers—many of whom are now having sex as early as 13—base their infatuation on text messages and ‘pro-pics’ (profile photos), not on knowledge of past actions, facial expressions, 50 open
body language and the sheer effort of oldworld romance, such as exchanging poetic letters in one’s own handwriting. “This generation makes and breaks relationships very quickly. It’s like twominute noodles,” says Dr Jain, adding that the issue has a clear class divide, with affluent parents far more accepting of teen romance than those who live in relatively conservative social setups. Having met plenty of kids who break down, get into drug use or attempt suicide, he isn’t a big fan of technology and social media. “I think it has only made things worse. Relationships are shallower. There’s tremendous pressure to update your status at all times, to project a certain image of yourself. Everyone is a celebrity online; it creates a false sense of selfimportance,” he says. But parental silence isn’t helping either. “Mothers sometimes talk to daughters, but boys are a neglected lot. Their knowledge of sex and romance is completely based on hearsay and other unsuitable sources.” A part of the problem is being tackled by groups such as the Centre for Children in Internet and Technology Distress, an internet de-addiction centre launched by a non-governmental organisation called Uday Foundation this July. Helping adolescents regain self-control over computer use and encouraging them to play other indoor and outdoor games, the Centre organises weekends for children and their parents filled with group activities like yoga, meditation, games and storytelling. Kids are advised to use landlines instead of mobile phones, make calls instead of texting, switch off gadgets by 7 pm, and avoid social media and gaming while downloading homework.
amily-taught values, however,
remain the key to healthy teenage relationships and the balanced use of technology. Apps and websites that appeal to baser instincts will always be around, but how a child uses them could depend on which way he or she is nudged. Take for example Ask.fm, a Latvia-based website that offers a platform for anyone to ask anonymous questions. It has a user base of over 130 million, people who post millions of questions and answers every day in 49 languages. Hugely popular with Indian teenagers, it is a space for people to meet, criticise, joke, and generally ask questions they cannot in person. A typical question on a teenager’s feed would be ‘Who’s your crush?’ or ‘Would you go out with so-and-so?’ But, as with any other social media tool, Ask.fm has a dark side. An article published in Time this summer told tales of at least seven teenagers who had committed suicide, unable to face the nasty comments left by anonymous acquaintances on the site. Other critics have also sought to blame the website for enabling cyberbullying without questioning the mindset that leads to such behaviour in the first place. “Yes, there is bullying on Ask.fm,” my 15-year-old daughter tells me, “but that happens in the classroom too. You find a way to deal with it and you move on. Those who commit suicide because of something someone said on Ask.fm, or those who bully others on Ask.fm, would do it in any other circumstance too.” Accepting that we live in difficult times, Raksha Bharadia recommends that parents enlist the support of schools or counsellors to address teen issues related to sex, technology and romance if they aren’t able to bring up the subject themselves. Lakshmi Kumar agrees. “Just because we are not comfortable talking to our teenagers about it doesn’t mean we can brush these issues away. Instead of prescriptive, the discourse needs to be constructive, designed keeping the learner’s needs in mind,” she says. “It’s time to open the curtain.” n Aekta Kapoor is a Delhi-based writer and a bemused mother of two social media-savvy teenagers she calls her ‘iKids’. Some students’ names in this report have been changed on their request 17 november 2014
CINEMA
Ambidextrous Tejasvi
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o p en s pace
Rani Mukerji Ranveer Singh
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n p lu
Fury Gone Girl
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cinema r e v ie w
Canon EOS 7D Mark II HYT H1 Iceberg Nokia Lumia 930
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t ec h & s t y l e
The genetics of violence The neural basis of political opinions The Mediterranean diet and kidney health
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s cience
Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Primal Woman
books
TP Rajeevan on Ranjith’s Njan Shraddha Kapoor on her Bollywood trajectory
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mindspace
A NEW GIRL IS BORN Shraddha Kapoor on her career after the success of Haider 56
CINEMA
Filmmaker Ranjith
Auteur Audacious The Malayalam film Njan (Myself) by Ranjith is one of this year’s most original films in which the past and the present, the social and the political, the personal and the public merge in a narrative that breaks new ground in visual storytelling. Here, the novelist on whose work the film is based pays his tribute to the genius of his friend and collaborator Ranjith Thachom Poyil Rajeevan
W
hen Malayalam's most social-
ly provocative and artistically audacious filmmaker Ranjith approached me with the proposal of making a movie based on my novel KTN Kottoor: Ezhuthum Jeevithavum (KTN Kottoor: His Life and Works), I didn’t have to think twice about giving him my consent, though there were warnings against its feasibility from expected quarters. Their main concern was: To what extent can a director, however talented, be ‘faithful’ to a novel, the milieu of which is the national freedom movement and its ideological fermentation, and the characters of which are mainly uninteresting political activists and drab villagers, all incapable of providing entertainment? The knowledgeable among them, either directly or through social media, even quoted the likes of Susan Sontag and Buddhadeb Dasgupta to substantiate their fears. Sontag, some wrote, in her 1983 essay ‘Novel into Film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz’ had said: Directors of the 1930s and 1940s like Wyler, Stevens, Lean and Autant-Lara were particularly drawn to goodnovel-into-movie projects, as have been, more recently, Visconti, Losey, and Schlöndorff. But the failure rate has been so spectacular that by the 1960s the venture was considered suspect in certain quarters. Godard, Resnais, and Truffaut declared their preference for sub-literary genres—crime and adventure novels, science fiction. And Buddhadeb writes in Literature, Cinema and the Language of the Scenario: A non imaginative director on the contrary, might not succeed in making an unusual movie in spite of having a bright theme or story. It may
17 november 2014
end in ignominious results and turn out to be a fiasco because of the incompetent handling. So, our— Ranjith’s as the director and mine as the original story-writer—challenge became two-fold: to make a film that disproves the worrywarts’ warnings against ‘novel-into-movie projects’ and to uphold the reliability of the original text. However, the naysayers couldn’t deter us from proceeding with the project. There were many reasons behind it. Primarily, Malayalam cinema has a long history of meaningful coexistence of writers and filmmakers that dates back to the 1940s— the formative years of the state’s film industry. Ever since, many important works of fiction in the language have got screen adaptations, many talented writers have become scenarists and poets have turned into lyricists too.
I
n those days, making a commer-
cially viable movie based on a socially relevant theme was not an unlikely proposition. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s Chemmeen, MT Vasudevan Nair’s Nirmalyam, Uroob’s Neelakkuyil, Parappurath’s Aranazhikaneram, Kesavadev’s Odayil Ninnu, and Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s Bhargavi Nilayam and Mathilukal are some of the outstanding literary works which were made into movies, successful both commercially and artistically. These movies and the literary works they were sourced from haven’t lost their charm in influencing viewers and readers, even though decades have passed. It’s this practice of cultural and generic reciprocation that became a memory of the past with the emergence of a new generation of film-
makers in the 1980s for whom cinema is a medium for whimsical expressions. And once they began to concoct stories that verged on the farcical to suit their particular need, the divorce between cinema and literature became absolute. Also, technical excellence and thematic relevance, it seems, are in inverse proportion in popular Malayalam cinema of recent times. A film, though conceived and made with exceptional technical perfection—say, a flawless screenplay, excellent cinematography, brilliant performances by the actors, superb background score and the executions of all these faculties with directorial mastery—need not always appeal to a refined viewer for its shallow approach to human life and society, or for its flimsy treatment of the medium. If one approaches them as artistic works of the period, most of the hyped contemporary movies, despite their box-office success, are disappointing. Ranjith is an exception. He has already proved himself a successful and socially and politically aware scenarist, director and producer. His career graph is full of unpredictable twists and turns. A graduate who specialised in acting at Calicut University’s School of Drama, he first took up films as a scriptwriter for parallel cinema. He later became a writer and director of blockbusters. But, before long, he forsook and denounced the glamour and money the world of commercial movies provided someone like him, saying, “My aim is meaningful cinema.” His later movies, such as Thirakkadha (Screenplay), Indian Rupee, Pranchiyettan and the Saint and Spirit, proved exactly what he had meant. One can find the critical eye of an avid open www.openthemagazine.com 53
A still from the Malayalam movie Njan
social observer in these movies which address some of the crucial issues of today’s Malayalee middle class: craze for fame (Pranchiyettan and the Saint), craving for money (Indian Rupee), addiction to alcohol (Spirit) and ruthless personal betrayals in human relations (Thirakkadha). Also, my association with Ranjith began with his 2002 movie Paleri Manickyam: Oru Pathirakolapathakathinte Katha, which was based on the Malayalam translation of my novel Undying Echoes of Silence. This novel is about ‘the onerous journey into the past undertaken by a crime investigator to uncover the mysteries shrouding the death of an innocent, young woman in a nondescript village in the 1950s. Set in the period of the first Communist government in the state, it is also an attempt at unravelling nefarious nexus between the police, the criminal elements and the political establishment.’ Hence, a director of his calibre finding it worth adapting to a movie in the present-day Indian context of escalating violence against women would have been natural.
B
ut, KTN Kottoor: Ezhuthum
Jeevithavum, I thought, has few or none of the ingredients that may interest a director or a producer of our time. Mixing history and fiction indistinguishably, the novel aims at chronicling the trials and tribulations in the life of a writer who lived in the Malabar region of Kerala in the first half of the twentieth century. Apart from being a writer, he was also a social and political activist who championed the cause of freedom and egalitarianism. A crusader against untouchability and 54 open
discrimination on the grounds of caste, religion and sex. KTN Kottoor, the protagonist of the novel, is a libertarian who freely and fearlessly ventures in the realms of history, culture and politics without being partisan or prejudicial. Kottoor, his provenance, is a fortified Malabar village in a valley of the Western Ghats, with hills on four sides. This highland vista not only veils the life of the people but keeps them closeted from anything new. It is in this antiquated feudal hamlet that KTN Kottoor aka Koiloth Thazhe Narayanan was born in the latter half of the 1920s. Singleness and solitude put the young KTN in the domain of creative thinking and reasoning, which imperceptibly propels him to the position of an uncompromising writer of the period. The stature he has attained is that of a futuristic and unconventional poet of avant-garde eminence. His writings have promethean innovations of high gravity that rocks conventionalism. Parallel to his writerly life, KTN leads an agrarian uprising influenced by socialist ideology in tandem with the struggle for independence. Here, the man who dreams up positive creative visions comes up against the realistic restraints of the social scenario; the political confronts the personal. But he doesn’t compromise with any anarchist resolutions on bodily desires, including subversive carnal appetites. The novel begins with KTN Kottoor, then a boy of nine or 10, accompanying his father, Koiloth Thazhe Kunjappa Nair, when the latter led the villagers in a procession to a nearby hill-top to hoist the tricolour flag and take an oath of independence on 26 January 1930, following the de-
cision taken at the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress. KTN Kottoor on that day is witness not only to an awakening of people to their right to freedom, but his father’s last moments as Kunjappa Nair collapses and dies immediately after hoisting the flag. And the novel ends with KTN Kottoor, looking thin and worn and mentally deranged, in rags, standing a silent spectator to the people’s patriotic frenzy when India’s first Independence Day is celebrated on Marina Beach of Madras city on 15 August 1947. As part of juxtaposing the historical with the fictional, many historical personalities such as EMS Namboodiripad, K Kelappan, AK Gopalan, P Krishna Pillai and KA Keraleeyan make their appearances time and again in the novel. Perhaps the major obstacle to adapting a novel to film is its length. Hence, to do justice to a work of fiction, a director either has to abandon the existing length conventions of a film or leave out organic parts of the literary text. Or he requires eclectic taste to creatively mediate between these two extremities and come up with an authentic and engaging filmic interpretation of the literary text. Filmmaking, in this context, becomes an act of deconstruction that demands extraordinary freedom as an artist. I think this is what Ranjith, extensively borrowing from theatre and social media, and inventing new characters to emphasise his reading of the text, has done in Njan (Myself). n Thachom Poyil Rajeevan is a bilingual novelist and cultural commentator based in Calicut, Kerala 17 november 2014
cinema
This is just the beginning. I have a long way to go. Fortunes change every few months here � Shraddha Kapoor 56 open
17 november 2014
No Longer the Girl Next Door Shraddha Kapoor wants to be known as more than the likeable actress-daughter of one of Bollywood’s controversial actors. A new girl is born post-Haider Priyanka Pereira
“E
very day I feel different. I
may be sounding crazy right now, but hell yeah, I feel different,” says Shraddha Kapoor. Looking at my baffled face, her smile widens. “What I mean to say is one day when I wake up I am happy, another day I am sad, some days I feel lost, some days super confident and on some other days super confused about what I should be feeling.” The day we meet is a day she’s feeling elated. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider has released and compliments have been pouring in for her fresh-faced performance. She has already started shooting for her next, Remo D’Souza’s ABCD 2, a dance-based film, where she is matching steps with Varun Dhawan. “I have already torn a ligament,” she says, pointing to her foot. The meeting place for the interview is her plush family apartment in Juhu. A large window overlooks the Arabian Sea. The house is intricately done up, with murals, paintings, high-backed chairs and upholstery, but something here is a little reminiscent of a Bollywood villain’s den. Photographs of Shraddha adorn one corner of the wall, while her father Shakti Kapoor’s pictures find space in various corners of the room. There are photographs of her maternal aunt, yesteryear actress Padmini Kolhapure, in the living room as well. However, Shraddha is in sharp juxtaposition to her manicured surroundings. She is simple and likable, dressed in an all-black attire sans makeup, hair loose and a perpetual smile on her face. As she settles down for the interview, her little pooch Shylo comes sauntering in. “I have always grown up with pedigreed dogs. But this time I wanted to adopt and we found him as his owners wanted to give him up. He is now a Marathi dog,” she states, planting a kiss on his face. Even before I can start with
17 november 2014
my interview, she enthusiastically asks, “Have you seen Haider? You loved it?” she says, pronouncing the word ‘loved’ the way she does in the film. Clearly thrilled about being a part of this film, she points out that her role was not as lengthy as her previous two films—Aashiqui 2 and Ek Villain—but that doesn’t matter. Shraddha admits that she was the one who approached filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj for the role. “Shahid (Kapoor) and I have been friends for many years. When he told me that he is doing a film with Vishal sir, I asked him if he had already cast a girl for it. Shahid told me that he hadn’t yet and if I am keen I should go and meet Vishal sir for it.” She was asked to audition for the role. “I was alright with giving an audition. It is a rare opportunity to be a part of a film like this.’’ Bhardwaj liked her audition and soon she was sent the script of the film. She is honest enough to admit that there were portions in the script she didn’t understand at all. “I knew nothing about the Kashmir insurgency. My political awareness was zilch. This movie enriched my limited knowledge.” Shraddha prefers to stick to tried and tested responses during interviews. She pauses often to gather her thoughts and then says them out in a rehearsed manner. This guarded attitude and political correctness stems from her upbringing in a film family, under the shadow of a father who has often faced flak from both the industry and the public. Her father Shakti Kapoor has been known for his notorious ways in the industry. His ‘casting couch’ indiscretions even earned him a temporary ban from the film industry. It was only after he apologised to all and sundry that the ban was revoked. Shraddha, was a teenager then and it couldn’t have been easy being the daughter of the industry’s most infamous villain. However, she seems open www.openthemagazine.com 57
calm, collected and far removed from this episode. Over the years, she may have learnt that public memory is short-lived and that it is possible to carve a name for herself by the work she does individually. But this does not mean she rejects her identity as her father’s daughter. “He has been a very successful actor and it is rather inspiring to have someone like him guide your career path when you need it,” she says, calmly. It is a question which by now she must be used to answering. What is it like to be the daughter of Shakti Kapoor? The world may wonder that, but Shraddha is matter-of-fact in her love for her father. Her mother Shivangi Kapoor, she says, has been her backbone and her soundA still from Haider
industry dynamics, once written off, it takes a lot to get back. Shraddha smiles and quotes a line from her film Ek Villain. “Andhere ko andhera nahi sirf roshni mita sakti hai. Nafrat ko nafrat nahin sirf pyaar mita sakta hai (Only light can cure darkness, and love can cure hatred). After my first film flopped, I was hiding in my room, covering my head with a bed sheet, when my mom asked me what the hell I was doing.” She was ordered to put on her running shoes and hit the gym and then to head for dance classes. “She had faith in me.” Even after her second film failed to live up to expectations, her parents did not let her lose hope. “I still remember them telling me that everyone doesn’t become a star with their first film. Each of us have different journeys charted out for us. And I have my journey too.” But the trouble was not over yet. Shraddha who had previously signed on a three-film deal with Yash Raj Films (YRF) was now asked to be a part of Aurangzeb. At the same time, Aashiqui 2 was offered to her. As industry sources reveal, the young actress took a big risk that eventually paid off. She chose content over a frivolous role, even though that meant
pursue higher studies. She dropped out of Boston University after eight months to return to acting. Shraddha has come into the industry at a time when she has stiff competition from many young actresses, like Alia Bhatt and Parineeti Chopra. A trade analyst who requests anonymity says, “Shraddha is extremely beautiful but as an actor she has a lot of catching up to do with Alia and Parineeti. She is yet to prove herself as a versatile actress.” Her strength is perhaps her girl-next-door image, which she has exploited well so far. But she is now keen that she be seen as a serious actor. “I have achieved a bit of it with Haider. There will be a lot of box-office hits, but the thrill of doing a good film where people take you seriously is something else.” While the will to improvise as an actor is a never-ending one, Shraddha wants to hone another talent which has found many takers: singing. Her maternal side is a family of singers. Her grandfather Pandharinath Kolhapure is a classical singer and also a cousin of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle. Her mother, she says, is an accomplished singer. “I trained a bit with my grand-
Shraddha is extremely beautiful but as an actor she has a lot of catching up to do with Alia and Parineeti. She is yet to prove herself as a versatile actress” a tRADE ANALYST ing board. She has kept her firmly grounded and this shows: despite the success she has found this year, with Ek Villain and Haider, Shraddha does not seem overtly excited. After three successful films in a row, she looks better prepared, but the celebrations are on hold. “This is just the beginning. I have a long way to go. Fortunes change every few months here,” she says, pondering her career for a wee bit. There was a time when she had completely been written off. She had put three years of her life in the making of her debut film Teen Patti, which was dubbed a train wreck of a movie by critics. She tried again to impress the audience by opting for a popular and younger role in Luv Ka The End. A failure is a failure in this industry. And going by 58 open
saying ‘no’ to a big studio like YRF. This angered Aditya Chopra, but she stood her ground, let go of the YRF contract, and moved on. She does not speak about it, but from all accounts it was a bitter parting, one where the doors of YRF will forever be shut for her. However, as luck would have it, Aashiqui 2 became one of the biggest hits of 2013 and Shraddha hasn’t had to look back. “My life changed completely after Aashiqui 2... for once I did not have to give auditions.” Siddhant Kapoor, Shraddha’s younger brother, recalls that as kids Shraddha and he both wanted to be part of the industry and were both influenced by their father. Siddhant chose to be an assistant director before his debut as an actor in Sanjay Gupta’s Shootout at Wadala. Shraddha moved to Boston to
father when I was really young, but I regret not training with him more.” Mohit Suri was the first to use her talent when he asked her to sing Teri galliyan in Ek Villain. “I wasn’t sure then. Also, I had a bad cold and flu that day. Perhaps that’s why it sounded good,” she laughs. Bhardwaj then asked her to sing a Kashmiri folk song for Haider. “I want to sing more in all my films now. I am becoming greedy,” she smiles. Shraddha wants more from the audience as well. She is always keen on genuine feedback from her fans and loves the attention she is showered with when she heads out. “I have worked for this. I love posing for selfies with my fans and signing autographs for them. It would really bother me if they did not recognise me.” n 17 november 2014
books Bleak House A collection of translated short stories by the late Sunil Gangopadhyay reveals his preoccupation with man’s inhumanity SHOUGAT DASGUPTA PRIMAL WOMAN
Sunil Gangopadhyay Harper Collins | 305 pages | Rs 399
S
unil Gangopadhyay is a literary institution. An
atheist, a radical, co-opted by the establishment. Happily co-opted, it must be said, and by the end a pillar of that establishment—Poet Sunil, as Ginsberg called him in September on Jessore Road, turned president of the Sahitya Akademi. This is literary life (or perhaps just life): at one time, you’re the firebrand, dismissing Tagore as soft and sentimental, founding experimental literary journals, inveighing against the status quo; and then, before you know it, you’re ‘the man’, an abuser of power, rapacious, venal; a toad squatting balefully atop ‘Literature’. Luckily, whatever your personal foibles and peccadilloes, what is left behind as representative of ‘you’ is the work. And Sunil Gangopadhyay has left behind a lot of work, some of it memorable—‘a considerable prose writer,’ Amit Chaudhuri wrote in eulogy in the The Telegraph, ‘and, at his best, an extraordinary and incomparable poet’—some of it less so. Primal Woman, a collection of short stories compiled and translated by Aruna Chakravarti, is relatively minor work. But the stories, ragged as they are, contain Gangopadhyay’s signature themes: of human nature under stress, of man’s inhumanity to man, as Robert Burns put it. In these stories, life is a Hobbesian affair, nasty, brutish but not necessarily short. These are people at war with each other, over ever more scarce resources. Bearing the brunt are the poor, subject to the whims of those higher up the economic ladder. And at the receiving end of poor, humiliated men are their families. Nibaran, in ‘Hot Rice—Or Just A Ghost Story?’, is starving, returning home in the driving rain that has washed away his budding cauliflowers and his chances of some daily wage construction labour; he surveys his starving, pregnant wife, children and ancient father: ‘He felt like kicking them all, hard on their bellies, and throwing them out of the shack.... He was the one who needed food... If he lived they would all live. But did anyone understand this simple logic? He was surrounded by monsters with slavering jaws wide as the gates of hell.’ Women, and children of course, are particularly vulnerable. Typical of the
women in these stories is Tinni, from ‘A Peacock Feather’: ‘In all her twenty-three years the only kind man Tinni had known was Shibkumar... Her mother had died in her childhood. Her father came home drunk every evening and beat his children mercilessly... They had an aunt living with them who had hated Tinni from the very beginning... Tinni had put up with her aunt’s cruelty but her son Bhaba’s repeated attempts to rape her was the final straw.’ In ‘The Great World’, 16-yearold Kushi is beaten without pause by both her parents. Her solace is both her indomitable spirit and the heavenly promise of a large Qantas advertisement. ‘Kushi craned her neck to look at the hoarding each time a car passed. And wave after wave of ecstasy, a sensation she had never known before, passed over her.’ Gangopadhyay, slyly, leaves you wondering about that ecstasy: the product of the illusions of advertising, or those provided by a groping lover whispering lies about the future? Even the first woman on the planet, in the title story, is subject to the same demands and expectations that men have of contemporary women. Drawing on Jewish mythology, Ganguly writes not of Eve as the first woman but of Lilith, created like Adam from dust, who draws the ire of Adam and three interfering angels for wanting equality, for wanting her opinions and desires to be taken into account. But what could have been a bracing feminist revision ends in puerile fashion, with ‘hell hath no fury as a woman scorned’ clichés and Lilith as a succubus. Gangopadhyay’s vision is not relentlessly bleak. There is defiance and anger and, so, the spark of life in even the most downtrodden. In ‘Crossing’, a strange little story about an unknown man for unknown reasons being made to walk blindfolded across a narrow, rickety bridge, the raging Teesta below, the narrator reflects: ‘Like everyone else, I too wanted to live. But was simply being alive enough? Even worms and insects lived. Human beings were different. Their lives had to have a certain quality. Self-worth and self-respect were part of it.’ This is why we cannot cling to the desire of Gangopadhyay’s characters to live in comfort, however scant. The plain, discomfiting truth is that we have enabled a society in which ‘bhaatuas’ —bonded labourers, working in exchange for boiled rice—are a fact of life in the Indian hinterlands. Poverty forces people to make terrible compromises and do terrible things; but what is more frightening, as the behaviour of even those unencumbered by poverty proves, is that we don’t need poverty to make us do terrible things. That is Gangopadhyay’s bleakest insight. n
Gangopadhyay’s vision is not relentlessly bleak. There is defiance and anger and, so, the spark of life in even the most downtrodden
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open www.openthemagazine.com 59
science
mediterranean diet It includes higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes, and heart-healthy fats, while minimising red meats, processed foods and sweets
The Genetics of Violence Researchers have discovered two human genes that are linked to extremely violent behaviour
‘Politically Correct’ Reactions
W
hy do some humans commit
unspeakable acts of violence? Are society and the manner in which these individuals are brought up to blame? Serial killers, for instance, are often found to have had childhoods full of abuse and hardship. Or can terrifyingly inhumane acts of violence and evil be all too human, encoded in an individual’s DNA? A new study, looking at the genetic makeup of 895 criminals in Finland, has discovered a pair of genes linked with extreme violent behaviour. The study, published in Molecular Pyschiatry, compared the genes of a group of non-violent offenders with a group of 78 individuals convicted of violent crimes. This group of violent criminals had committed a total of 1,154 murders, manslaughters, attempted homicides or batteries. According to the study, five to 10 per cent of all serious crime in Finland can be traced to individuals with this genotype. Individuals who possessed these genes were found to be 13 times more likely to have a history of chronic violent behaviour. Criminals who committed the most serious crimes, such as murder,
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were found to exhibit variants of either of the two genes—monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and cadherin 13 (CDH13)—to a greater degree than others. MAOA is linked to dopamine levels, a chemical which makes people feel happy, while CDH13 is linked to impulse control. According to the researchers, low dopamine levels associated with the MAOA gene could make its carriers more aggressive when drunk or on drugs. The MAOA gene, sometimes known as the ‘warrior gene’, is associated with higher levels of aggression in response to provocation, while CDH13 has been associated with substance abusers and low impulse control. The researchers write in the journal: ‘No substantial signal was observed for either MAOA or CDH13 among non-violent offenders, indicating that findings were specific for violent offending, and not largely attributable to substance abuse or antisocial personality disorder.’ The genes, however, can’t be used to screen criminals as many more genes may be involved in violent behaviour and environmental factors are known to play a fundamental role. n
According to a study published in Current Biology, the way a person’s brain responds to a single disgusting image is enough to reliably predict whether s/he identifies politically as liberal or conservative. Researchers, using functional magnetic resonance images of the brain, found that the mutilated body of an animal, generated neural responses that were highly predictive of political orientation. “The results do not provide a simple bromide, but they do suggest that important foundational parts of political attitudes ride on top of preestablished neural responses that may have served to defend our forebears against environmental threats,” says the lead author. n
The Mediterranean Diet Effect
Adhering to a Mediterranean-style diet may significantly reduce the risk of developing chronic kidney disease, according to a study in Clinical Journal. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center examined the associations of varying degrees of this diet on long-term kidney function. In their analysis of 900 participants who were followed for nearly seven years, every single point higher on a Mediterranean diet score, indicating better adherence to the diet, was associated with a 17 per cent lower likelihood of developing chronic kidney disease. Dietary patterns that closely resembled the Mediterranean diet were linked with a 50 per cent lower risk of developing chronic kidney disease and a 42 per cent lower risk of experiencing rapid kidney function decline. n
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CMOS It stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. It is an on-board semiconductor chip powered by a CMOS battery within a computer that stores information such as the system time and date and the system hardware settings for your computer
tech&style
Canon EOS 7D Mark II This camera boasts a great build, amazing speed and snappy auto focus gagandeep Singh Sapra
HYT w H1 Iceberg
Price on request
$1,799
Hydro-mechanical horologist brand HYT has just unveiled a new blue and white version of its H1. Limited to 50 pieces, the H1 Iceberg features a titanium case, and a blue fluid hour indicator. The calibre has two distinct sections: a conventional mechanical movement with a 65 hour power reserve, plus a fluid display module with twin bellows that drive the liquid for the hour display. n
Nokia Lumia 930
T
his avatar of the groundbreak-
ing Canon EOS 7D now features a 20 megapixel sensor that has been upgraded to a dual pixel CMOS, enabling a smooth and consistent autofocus. The new sensor has a native ISO capability of 16,000, thus letting you take pictures even when it is literally pitch dark. The 7D Mark II features a 65-point cross type auto focus, and to make sure you can easily toggle between all its different Auto Focus modes, Canon adds an AF Area Selection lever. The 7D Mark II can also shoot at 10 frames per second at its full resolution of 20.2 megapixels. The camera uses a 150,000 pixels RBG + IR metering system to ensure that your settings are accurate. The 7D Mark II comes with GPS on board, so that all your images are geo-tagged. The camera also has a built-in compass, so it will let you know your bearings and direction of focus, apart from the location
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of your photos. The weather sealed magnesium alloy body is dust and water resistant. There is no on-board wireless, but Canon has accessories that let you transfer files wirelessly. The camera takes a CF card and SD card at the same time. You can configure the cards to be a replica, or a spillover, or save RAW images on one and JPEG images on the other. The battery of the 7D Mark II has been improved and now you can take over 600 shots on a single charge. There is a provision for connecting an external microphone and an external headphone to monitor the sound that’s getting recorded. The 7D Mark II is not a full-frame camera, but with its amazing speed of 10 frames per second at full resolution, and the native ISO of 16,000, this camera is a great buy if you need a camera that is fast, can be taken anywhere you want, and takes some seriously good shots. n
Rs 38,649
The Nokia Lumia 930 can easily be confused for a camera. With its 20 megapixel sensor, Zeiss optics and advanced recording capability, the Lumia 930 is a great device for those who like to take pictures with a mobile phone. The 930 runs on a 2.2 GHz Quadcore Snapdragon processor supported by 2 gigabytes of memory. Its 5-inch full high definition display puts out crisp images and text, and a huge battery allows it to run for up to 18 hours on a single charge. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in
open www.openthemagazine.com 61
CINEMA
in the limelight Gone Girl has turned out to be the breakout film for the talented English actress Rosamund Pike, whose other prominent but underrated appearances include her feature debut Die Another Day, where she played the mysterious Miranda Frost, and Pride and Prejudice (2005), where she played Jane Bennet
Fury Well-acted and cleverly visualised, this important film shows the naked truth of war ajit duara
current
o n scr een
Gone Girl Director David Fincher cast Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike,
Neil Patrick Harris Score ★★★★★
Shia LaBeouf Cast Brad Pitt, Ayer vid Da r Directo
T
his is a World War II movie that shows how war brutalises soldiers. Saving Private Ryan (1998) was probably the last important Hollywood movie in this genre. That was largely about the infantry division as it was mowed down on Omaha Beach. Fury is about a tank commander and his crew, right in the heart of Germany, as the US Army is fighting tooth and nail to capture each town and village from the Germans who are ready to die for their fatherland. This is not General Patton’s panoramic sweep to Berlin. It is about the American working class drafted into a horrifying war that is capable of turning otherwise funny laidback guys into ruthless survivors. Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt) is the veteran commander—he started off in North Africa and he wants to end it here in the Nazi homeland. The other guys in the tank follow him with devotion, because he keeps them safe with his brilliant manoeuvres. Like the moves on a chessboard, a
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tank leader’s planning and strategy keeps the tank rolling, capable of protecting the infantry behind and marking out new territory to capture. The best scenes in the film are shot from a combination of two angles—the perspective of the gunner inside the vehicle, and of the Commander when he sticks his head out. Getting the lumbering armoured machine, nicknamed Fury, into an ideal position for a target is the key, and director David Ayer visualises this for you very cleverly. The other good scene in the film is when a new recruit (Logan Lerman) is assigned to the tank. He is a typist—60 words a minute, he claims—not a soldier. ‘Wardaddy’ has to initiate him into murder and romance, when they encounter two German girls. Not once do we see the German war perspective, but then, according to the Allied Forces, they didn’t have one worth recording. Winners take it all in this brutal movie about the institutionalised mass murder that war is. n
This movie is good at demonstrating the surreal interface between a murder investigation and its media coverage, and how hilariously unreal trial-by-television can be. But as a study of marriage—or rather, the changing equations between men and women within the institution—it is a complete disaster. Writer Gillian Flynn subverts feminism, turning it from a thoughtful ideology to some sort of a bat-out-of-hell definition of a woman asserting herself. ‘Heav’n has no Rage like love to hatred turn’d, / Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d,’ wrote William Congreve in The Mourning Bride, and this just about sums up the plot of Gone Girl. Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) have been married for five years before it all unravels, and this rapid disintegration of a relationship is turned into a thriller by director David Fincher. Admittedly, it is a well paced and entertaining film, but what you are left with is tremendous sympathy for a lazy, untalented, cheating husband. On the other hand, nothing is more fun, for both men and women, than a batshit crazy wife doing her thing. The greatest disservice done to the dignity of women, it appears, is by women in the entertainment business. n AD
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Not People Like Us
R aj e e v M asa n d
The Out-of-Work Queen Bee
Rani Mukerji, or the new Mrs Aditya Chopra if you like, is reportedly keeping herself busy, in between sporadic acting projects, by attending to business at the Yash Raj Films studio in Andheri. Word within the corridors has it that Rani has redesigned the seating arrangement of many of the studio staff as per vaastu recommendations, and that those displaced from their original spots are not thrilled. Apparently the general feeling within the studio is one of suspicion, given the actress’ increasing interest in “fixing things”. Old hands at YRF are saying Rani may have been further emboldened by the success of Mardaani, a film many within the ranks had openly written off even before its release. Few are aware that an early screening of the film inspired little confidence among those who were privy to it. But the actress herself pushed for a reshoot of the climax and other key portions, and was instrumental in reshaping the final cut. The film’s success, under those circumstances, is believed to have empowered Rani to take tough calls “wherever necessary”, including in areas she has little or no expertise. With no acting job lined up in the immediate future—and repeated denials that a baby is on the way— Rani is a frequent visitor at the studio, apparently keen to fulfil the duties that fall under her new ‘Creative Director’ title. While she’s certainly found a loyal band of supporters in her husband’s closest allies, there are many who don’t know just what to make of all her sudden enthusiasm.
Guess Who Wants a Hat Trick Ranveer Singh isn’t allowed to take his hat off in public. It’s a diktat passed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali himself, for whose new film Bajirao Mastani the star has tonsured his head. Sporting everything from pea-caps and fedoras to berets and woolly monkey caps to hide his baldness during media promotions for his latest film Kill Dil, Ranveer has been politely dodging requests from pesky journos for a glimpse of his shiny pate on camera. The ‘naked upstairs’ look is one that the actor will sport until October next year when he wraps Bajirao. Neither can he shoot any other film until Bhansali is done with his services. Which means it’ll be back to hats and other nifty tricks to hide his baldness when he’s promoting Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do next 17 november 2014
summer before that film’s June release. His co-star Deepika Padukone has it a little easier, apparently. She doesn’t show up at the Bajirao sets until March—the director will film war scenes with Ranveer, and portions with his leading man and Priyanka Chopra until then—and will likely wrap Shoojit Sircar’s Piku and Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha before she submits herself to Bhansali’s gruelling schedules. Speaking of Bhansali, Ranveer does a spot-on impersonation of his Ram-Leela director if you really coax it out of him. It’s something he’s done in front of Bhansali too, and the famously eccentric filmmaker was reportedly amused.
Harried and Luckless in B-Town
There’s a disgruntled director somewhere, poking pins in the doll of his hotshot producer. This first-time director, who’d been handpicked a few years ago to helm an ‘unusual rom-com’ for two rival studios that were producing the project together, is still to shoot a single frame of film and it’s already been close to five years of waiting. The director tells of how his film fell apart when one of the two producers put the project on hold after the leading man they’d signed for it saw his star waning in the wake of back-to-back flops. At least three prospective heroines attached and then released themselves from the project after the hero’s career went south. The debutant was then asked by the producer to find a promising female newcomer to cast in the film, but after months of auditions the girl he’d chosen was unceremoniously rejected for not being ‘charismatic enough’ to topline the movie. Even as he began looking for a more suitable replacement, the director learnt that the same producer had gone ahead and signed the young female hopeful in a three-film contract with his company. This, after unceremoniously dumping her from his project! More or less convinced now that his film may never be made within this set-up, the poor guy is reportedly hawking his script at other studios. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63
open space
Ambidextrous Tejasvi
by r au l i r a n i
Eleven-year-old Tejasvi Tyagi of Meerut, studying in class 6, can write with both hands simultaneously. She has been doing this since she first learnt how to write, her father says. What she writes with two pens together is usually the same thing, but she can also draft a mirror image of her left hand’s writing with her right hand
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17 november 2014