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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH NARENDRA MODI
‘I WILL BREAK THE DELHI CABAL OF STATUS QUOISTS’ RS 40 19 M ay 2 0 14
l i f e
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ONE Narendra Modi could be the man to lead India out of distress
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Volume 6 Issue 19 For the week 13—19 May 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers
cover design Anirban Ghosh
2 open
Bal Govind
I do not understand why there is so much hype around Priyanka Gandhi (‘The Intimate Daughter’, 12 May 2014). Yes, she has a few resemblances to her late grandmother, but beyond that, there is no point exaggerating her political potential because she has mostly confined herself to her brother’s and mother’s constituencies as far as campaigning goes. Diehard Congress supporters would believe that Priyanka is the last resort, as Rahul has failed to revive the party and her mother has also taken a backseat (it’s only once she saw his son not There is no point being able to pull up the exaggerating Priyanka’s campaign that she political potential pitched in). But it is still because she has mostly too early to say how Priyanka Gandhi would confined herself to her be able to make any brother’s and mother’s impact on Congress constituencies prospects in the country, more so since her husband has been involved in a controversy. We all know how long it took for the Gandhi family to emerge from Bofors’ shadow. Moreover, there are reports that even Amethi will not be a cakewalk for the Congress, as many people are unhappy with Rahul Gandhi. If Priyanka cannot help keep this seat intact, then we all know what awaits the Gandhi family. letter of the week Beyond Infrastructure
this refers to the book review ‘Let’s Welcome the Autonomy Economy’ (12 May 2014). The question being asked is whether the Gujarat Model can be applied to other states. There is no doubt that Gujarat has surpassed other states in terms of development under the government of Narendra Modi. With no power cuts, lowest unemployment in the country and good growth in per capita income, the Gujarat Model has worked wonders. But it must be remembered that in addition to building infrastructure and helping the business environment, it is necessary to have the cooperation of people—in whichever field they may be working—as
well as an effective corruptionfree machinery, and a willingness among officials and politicians to change things around. Mahe sh Kapasi
‘Publish or Perish’
the article ‘The Comfort of Masks’ (25 May 2014) is a disquieting read. I’m a product of the colonial system of education and so the subtleties of the culture-history-politics cauldron escape me. Alice Boner and Coomaraswamy are strangers to me. But when paeans are sung to Western universities, especially US ones, I do have something to say. Look at American Ivy League admissions. Ninetyfive per cent of all straight ‘A’
students with exemplary extra-curricular credentials are rejected. For those who manage to get in, academic competition has only just begun. Faculties are forever in ‘publish or perish’ mode. Is that an ideal system of education? Is that the way we want our researchers to go? The US system has many pluses—but also an equal number of minuses. harman sachdeva
Kejriwal Matters
the writer has waxed eloquent to denounce Arvind Kejriwal, but his eloquence has failed to find fault with what corruption and black money have done to India (‘The Runaway Messiah’, 12 May 2014). The writer is doing a great disservice to India in his attempt to discredit Arvind Kejriwal’s initiative to challenge this scourge of Independent India. The writer says people must beware the utopian dreams Kejriwal is weaving, but as a common man, I can identify with what he says irrespective of what self-styled intellectuals say or think. Today, Modi is accepted by this writer and many other well-meaning intellectuals not because they have found a statesman, but because they know that the Congress has earned people’s wrath; and in their inability to look beyond the two dominant political forces, they have come to accept Narendra Modi as an alternative leader—notwithstanding the fact that he will never lose the stain of Gujarat’s 2002 riots . s Bharti
19 May 2014
The Curious Case of the Flying Bill tightfisted
Former PM Deve Gowda refuses to pay the Indian Air Force for his use of its aircraft
Even by the stingy
standards of politicians, former PM Deve Gowda’s outstanding dues to the Indian Air Force (IAF) are in a league of their own. It was back in 1996– 97, as PM, that Gowda used IAF planes for unofficial purposes. He was billed for it, but he ignored it. The story took a strange turn when he finally relented—he found that another bill, that of former Union Civil Aviation Minister CM Ibrahim, had been added to his. According to the IAF, Gowda owes it Rs 54 lakh 19 may 2014
plus interest for a period of 17 years. In 2009, Gowda wrote to the IAF to collect the dues from the JD-U headed by Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav because that party had inherited all the assets and liabilities of the undivided Janata Dal. The matter had been in court and when he finally agreed to pay up, he found Ibrahim’s bill for Rs 28.3 lakh appended to his. Ibrahim is a Karnataka Congressman who had joined Gowda’s party and held the Civil Aviation portfolio. He later rejoined the Congress.
Now, Gowda has approached the Delhi High Court stating he is willing to pay only his dues if the IAF opts for mediation. Gowda refused to answer when asked by reporters in Bangalore recently if he was willing to pay the interest as well—the IAF has claimed nearly Rs 2 crore in interest charges. Air Force officers do not want to speak on the record, but say it is up to the Government to collect the dues from political parties and VIPs who used its aircraft for non-official
purposes. They argue that since both politicians had belonged to the same political party then, the total bill was justly sent to Gowda. Apart from Gowda, former PM Chandra Shekhar also owes the IAF Rs 5.91 crore, and former Union Minister VC Shukla, Rs 4.60 lakh. Both of them have passed away. The court has refused to send the case for mediation until the claims raised against Ibrahim are addressed by the Government. It has sent a notice to Ibrahim too. n Anil Budur Lulla
open www.openthemagazine.com 3
express archives
small world
14
contents
cover story
40
Time for change
fashion
open essay
What a new government should do
Romancing the autocrat
8 10
business
Can Flipkart be India’s Alibaba?
18
36 benares despatch
social media
The light of Benares
person of the Week monica Lewinsky
The new political arena
All the President’s Women After 16 years of shunning the limelight, Monica Lewinsky writes about her affair with Bill Clinton and how she survived it Lhendup g Bhutia
M
onica Lewinsky, the world’s
most famous former intern who almost toppled a presidency and started a global conversation on sex and power, is back. Sixteen years after her infamous relationship with Bill Clinton, she has written a tell-all piece for Vanity Fair. Now almost 41, slightly plumper than before, she says she wants to stop tiptoeing around her past. In online excerpts of the piece, she writes under the headline, ‘Shame and Survival’: ‘It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress… I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past.’ So what has Lewinsky been up to? Since her internship at the White House, she’s tried designing handbags, hosting a reality TV show on Fox, and shuffled between London (where she pursued a Master’s at London School of Economics), Los Angeles, New York and Portland. She’s been interviewed for jobs in communications and branding, but, ‘because of what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my ‘history’,’ she writes, ‘I was never ‘quite right’ for the position. In some cases, I was right for all the wrong reasons, as in, ‘Of course, your job would require you to attend our events.’ And, of course, these would be events at which press would be in attendance.’ Lewinsky, you have to agree, got a raw deal. Bill Clinton might have just barely survived an impeachment and jail-time for perjury, arguing famously that his 4 open
reuters
statement under oath “there is not a sexual relationship…” had been truthful because he had used the word ‘is’ in its present tense at a time there was no relationship, and claiming that ‘fellatio’, by legal definition, did not mean ‘sex’. But he is still one of the most popular former presidents. He writes books, makes big money off speaking engagements, and a mere appearance alongside Barack Obama sends the latter’s popularity ratings into a tizzy. Lewinsky, alas, is still
the subject of dirty jokes and worse. The affair itself is most commonly referred to as ‘Monicagate’ and ‘the Monica Lewinsky scandal’. Not ‘Billgate’ or ‘Clinton-Lewinsky scandal’. Despite the relationship being consensual, and of the two, Bill being the much older and more powerful participant, Lewinsky has forever been portrayed as the predator. For instance, the columnist Maureen Dowd, who was almost always nasty towards Lewinsky, once wrote, ‘It is Mr Clinton who behaves more like a teenage girl trying to protect her virginity. … Ms Lewinsky is the one who bristles with testosterone.’ Even this time, as online excerpts emerge, Dowd writes in The New York Times, ‘It was like a Golden Oldie tour of a band you didn’t want to hear in the first place.’ Lewinsky writes, ‘… I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position… [the] Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.’ Lewinsky says she wants to help others in their dark moments of humiliation. The article is, of course, a well thoughtout step to reinvent herself, to perhaps embrace and channelise what has been her most embarrassing moment and to find some meaning in it. Whether that will work or not, one can’t say. The tag of the woman in the most-extensively reported extra-marital affair is unlikely to wash away soon. And that’s a pity, really. n 19 May 2014
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cancer
The rich history of slang
Research ethics on trial
a books
Allan Sealy’s private pagoda
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i’s Da umba
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f o r seeking reservation for the
Maratha community Voting for the Lok Sabha election may have wrapped up in Maharastra, but with an Assembly election due this October, political manoeuvrings in the state are far from over. An unexpected entrant to this arena has been Mumbai’s famed dabbawallahs, whose fans include the likes of Prince Charles and Richard Branson. Recently, it was announced that a rally of
NOT PEOPLE LIKE US
56
Kiran Nadar’s museum project
dabbawallahs would be held on 9 May—to demand affirmative action reservations for the Maratha community in educational institutions and jobs. A spokesperson for their organisation, the Mumbai Jevan Dabbe Vahatuk Mandal, was quoted as saying that their forefathers had been soldiers in Shivaji’s army, but for generations “forced to join the tiffin courier trade since there are no other employment opportunities available”. This demand wouldn’t have been problematic if not for the fact that they are supporting the Shivsangram, an organisation aggressively demanding reservations for Marathas. It is headed by Vinayak Mete, who recently quit the NCP and extended his support to the Shiv Sena-BJP-RPI alliance. Marathas, in reality, are rather powerful politically as a caste group in Maharashtra and are courted by almost all parties. This dabbawallah tack really doesn’t convince anyone. n
63
Bollywood bites
To keep the NDA out, veteran CPI leader AB Bardhan suggested a possible alliance with Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, but then his party immediately ruled it out a ll y f l i p
“I don’t give the BJP more than 165– 170 seats, and... [the NDA] can’t go beyond 210... And [to keep the NDA out], all options including Mamata will be discussed”
‘...as far as Mamata Banerjee is concerned, she is actually helping the BJP by polarising the West Bengal voters on communal lines. Her attack on the BJP is a got-up game’
—CPI leader AB Bardhan on a private news channel on 6 May 2014
—A statement clarifying the party’s official stand, issued by the CPI on 7 May
turn
ple able Peo Unreasotnhe Week of
arts
around
Pawns in a Bigger Game ‘security concerns’ has
prakash singh/afp
19 may 2014
evolved from being just another expression, and is now a euphemism for subversion. By endorsing a No-Modi-rally-inVaranasi stance adopted by the returning officer of this eastern UP district, India’s EC has incurred the wrath of the BJP. The officer in question, meanwhile, had no qualms about permitting a rally by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in the city, the most high-profile Lok Sabha seat this
election, thanks to Narendra Modi’s candidacy. By preventing Modi from campaigning in his own constituency over a ‘newly obtained intelligence tip’ looks frivolous, considering that the candidate has been campaigning zealously in the city for months now. If the returning officer has demonstrated an inexplicable bias, then by backing him, the EC has abandoned its values. “Timid men can dwarf high offices,” says BJP leader Arun Jaitley. It is tough to prove him wrong. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5
angle
A Hurried Man’s Guide
On the Contrary
to the latest Lalit Modi-BCCI row The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) recently suspended the Rajasthan Cricket Association (RCA) after it declared Lalit Modi, the former Indian Premier League (IPL) commissioner who had been banned by the BCCI, its president. Modi had been expelled for life in 2013 after the BCCI had found the former IPL commissioner guilty of misconduct. By then he had already left the country citing security reasons. He had stayed away from Indian cricket until he recently contested the election for RCA president. When Modi participated in the RCA polls in January, the BCCI filed a petition against it in the Supreme Court. The BCCI stated it would withhold financial aid and privileges to the state board should he be named president. Modi is expected According to BCCI regulato run the affairs tions, Modi’s ban, which of the RCA in came into effect last year, exile, till he cannot be revoked for at finds India safe least three years from the to return date-of-issue of the expulsion order.
prabhakar sharma/ht/getty images
Modi contested the RCA polls, despite being banned by the BCCI, claiming that the RCA is governed by the Rajasthan Sports Act. The results of the election were sealed pending judicial proceedings. When the results were
revealed by a SC-appointed observer on 6 May, it was found that Modi had won. Within minutes of the announcement, BCCI suspended the board, stating that an ad-hoc committee will be set up to take care of cricket in Rajasthan. The tussle between Modi and the BCCI is unlikely to be resolved soon, with the former calling the suspension illegal and stating he would challenge the order in court. It is said that Modi owes his rise in Indian cricket administration to Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje. When she lost the state’s Assembly elections in 2008, it also hastened Modi’s fall. Since her return as CM last year, he is thought to have regained his influence in the arena of India’s favourite game. n
Salman and the Agony of Waiting Ill-advised moves to escape the inevitable M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i
I
f there is a movie that Salman
Khan should be watching in his present moment of suffering, then it is Flight. In it, Denzel Washington pulled off one of his great performances as an alcoholic trying to manipulate the system during an enquiry over a plane crash. He even succeeds, but in the end, the only redemption he finds is in owning up to his actions. Two witnesses now say that they saw a drunk Salman get out of the driver’s side of his car after it had run over pavement dwellers in 2002, killing one and injuring four others. A third witness does not remember which door he emerged from, but says he did flee the scene. There are two ways in which most criminal cases get managed in court—by delaying hearings indefinitely and by turning witnesses hostile. In the Salman case, both tactics have run out of power after 12 years. There will still be time to work the appeals in the upper courts, but his conviction seems a strong possibility at the trial court level, at least after the deposition of these witnesses. It is something that Salman must long have been anticipating, given his radical image makeover over the past few years. You suddenly saw a mature temperate superstar replacing an emotionally delinquent man. He increasingly began to highlight his charity Being Human, and he was wont to speak of how he had given up on vices. This was also a period when he became most successful careerwise. All the movies he touched turned to gold. This too was turned into good public relations with claims that all his money went into charity. And yet, if all this was the real deal, then what is one to make of the report that a day before the present witnesses deposed, one of them got a phone call threatening him to take Rs 5 lakh and go away? Whoever did it had just
sabotaged years of reputation management. Salman’s predicament is in some measure a thumbs-up for the Indian legal system. It is overburdened, corrupt and on the verge of collapse, but the very exercise of manipulating it is so agonising that it’s a punishment in itself. After having charges whittled down to ‘death by negligence’, it was unexpectedly again changed to the far more serious one of ‘culpable homicide’ last year. The more it gets postponed, the older Salman becomes if and when he finally has to serve a prison term. And prison is always more endurable for a younger man. An artist, if he goes through such an experience early If Salman’s enough, might indeed guilty, even make some then his best use of it in his art. He can option would continue with have been an unburdened to take the conscience and punishment make more out early enough of life. But these are usually not considerations because the only thing that matters is managing the immediate environment. It is possible to do that in India, but in the long run, there are so many forces at work— from crooked and honest policemen and politicians to activist lawyers to the media—that it is almost impossible for a high-profile case to be scuttled forever. If Salman’s indeed guilty, then his best option would have been to take his punishment as early as possible. There was a long half-a-decade interregnum when all he had to do was plead guilty to the negligence charge and spend a minimum length of time in jail. Instead, it has gone out of his lawyers’ control, and, like Sanjay Dutt before him, the actor faces the agony of uncertainty. n 19 May 2014
business
Will They, Won’t They? ON L I NE RE TAIL million, and a cash infusion of $100-150 market-maker, it has brought over 4,000 Ever since word first million as well; and while Flipkart can sellers under its banner already. Industry leaked of a possible merger between afford to shell out such large sums, how Flipkart and Myntra, pundits of all stripes analysts expect domestic sales under the post-honeymoon phase will pan out Amazon to cross the $1-billion mark by have opined furiously on this corporate shaadi; but the answer to a basic question is 2016. Flipkart, by comparison, took seven remains a riddle. It will not be easy to combine Myntra’s immersive website years to achieve that figure. still frustratingly elusive. experience with Flipkart’s drift away from Flipkart is tiny in comparison with Will they merge, or won’t they? retailing toward marketAnd can Flipkart become india today images making, say analysts. India’s own Alibaba some Nonetheless, Myntra day? Online market remains an attractive watchers want to know. purchase. Not only does it Barring a WSJ interview lead the fashion space last week with Subrata online, it boasts of both Mitra of Accel Partners, a high margins and swarms major shareholder in both of new customers; last Flipkart and Myntra, there December, Myntra’s has been no official news on website clocked in 24 the merger; and Mitra’s million unique visits, way words have only commore than Flipkart’s pounded the confusion. 13.2 million. “We are not sure the deal is Could regulatory going to happen,” he strictures thwart the reportedly told WSJ. merger? Apart from the The world is watching alleged FEMA violations this deal; and for good that Flipkart and Myntra reason too. According to are being investigated for, DIPP data, e-commerce in ROLLING IN IT Sachin and Binny Bansal with the stuff that gave Flipkart its first fillip there is also the India has grown at an Competition Commission annual rate of over 30 per of India (CCI) to watch out for. Brick-andChina’s Alibaba, which has a customer cent for the last three years. The online mortar merchants in Bangalore have market is projected to touch $24 billion by base of 231 million, topline sales of $248 already complained to the CCI that online 2015, a year that Ernst & Young expects the billion, and is set for an IPO in the US. Its retailers undercut their businesses and success is not lost on Flipkart. country to have 38 million e-buyers, up Perhaps sensing Flipkart’s urge for size, threaten their ‘right to survive and grow’. from 11 million in 2011. Merged, Flipkart and Myntra may be even Last June saw the entry of America’s web Myntra is allegedly holding out for a mightier than they fear. n ADITYA WIG behemoth Amazon; positioning itself as a valuation of between $350 and $400
how to MAKe HAY
32
India’s plan to install about 22,000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2022 seems too ambitious without locally-developed and cost-effective solar technology 18.9 17
10.5 6.1
7.2
7 2.5
Germany
Italy
China
Source: Ministry of New and renewable energy compiled by Shailendra Tyagi
8 open
Total
5.1
4.3
USA
Installed capacity {GW} (1 GW=1,000 MW)
9
2.4
Japan
2.2
1
Australia
Spain*
Rooftop
India*
* Rooftop SPV installed capacity data is not available All Figures are till March, 2013, except India which is updated till Jan 2014 19 May 2014
Aatish Taseer a bend in the ganges
The Light of Benares
T
his is the last despatch. On Monday, Benares goes to the polls. The next issue of this magazine will appear with the 14th Prime Minister of India on its cover. And then when there are only certainties, only known knowns, there will be little for me to add. It will be a relief. This election has gone on too long. There is, in Benares at least, a great feeling of fatigue. We peaked early. This last week has been unendurable. The white heat is here; the afternoons burn; in the evening, the river is still and swampy. The climate combined with stray incidents of electoral violence and the heavy presence of commandoes, sniffer Alsatians and intelligence men has given this temple town the air of a Latin American country under curfew. The other night, returning from Yelchiko Bar with some friends, we encountered a street full of policemen and journalists. The electricity had gone and the street was in total darkness, but for the halogen of a TV camera and the revolving blue light of a police jeep, flashing its beam into the smoky night. An AAP worker had been beaten up a few hours before, his face bloodied; he was there to lodge an FIR. The city was tense. And, as Open goes to press, Modi was preparing for a confrontation with an Election Commission that had, for ‘security reasons,’ denied him permission to hold rallies. There was talk of protests and the muted fear of pre-poll violence. It was time to go. I felt I had seen about as much of this election as I wanted to, and now it was time to go. Time to finish up my real work and find a flight out.
T
his election began for me with a Modi rally in Delhi last
September. I was struck at the time by a number of things. These are my impressions from that day: ‘So, yesterday, P— and I went to the Modi rally in Delhi. A hot unpleasant day of barsaat vaali dhoop. We got there far too early. To the Japanese Park in Rohini, a dengue-infested wasteland in West Delhi. We had to sit there for a long time in the press enclosure among mainly cub reporters and Hindi language journalists; there were no senior journalists present and almost no one from the foreign press. And, in the beginning, the crowd felt small too. In fact, it all felt pretty lacklustre: the packaged breakfasts, the oppressive heat, the endless slogans—Bharat Mata ki… Jai!—the campaign videos
10 open
playing on a loop and the young woman with the screechy voice who kept trying to enthuse the crowd. At one point, we even considered leaving. (Not a loo for miles, by the way!) ‘And then, just as P— and I were getting pretty restless, the strangest thing happened. The sky darkened. A cool wind began to blow, and the temperature seemed to drop by several degrees. A long narrow poster of Modi tied to the metal frame of the tent came free and began to blow in the wind. But in such a way that it seemed—because of the little ripple that [ran] through the poster—that Modi was waving at us. In fact, many people from the press corps—you know how India loves a bit of magic!—got up and began to photograph this strange phenomenon. Not just because on this day of ‘chamchamati dhoop’ it was suddenly cooler, and the glare from the sky was gone, but because this apparition of the leader seeming to wave at the press enclosure coincided exactly with Modi’s arrival on stage! And when I stood up on my chair to see the reaction of the crowd, it was not so small. Not small at all, in fact. They had been arriving all the while, and for as far as I could see, down the full length of the long tent and spilling out on all sides, were hundreds and thousands of people. All of a type, by the way. No longer the people who attended the rallies of my childhood, no longer people with leathery skin and yellowing eyes and bad teeth. But all young people, mainly men—all slightly built, but very energetic— in jeans and sneakers, with fashionable haircuts. Don’t get me wrong: they were not, by any means, all middle-class. But it was clear, from their restlessness more than anything else, that they were all certainly planning to be. And when Modi began to speak, after the interminable bugling of a conch and cries of ‘Bharat Mata ki…’, what he seemed really to catch was this feeling, at once full of sorrow and rage, of hopes betrayed, of a kind of wasted promise. It was as if he spoke directly to 19 May 2014
the crowd’s restlessness, and rather than making them feel ashamed of it, he endowed it with a kind of nobility. He made their restlessness and hunger and wish to make something of their lives seem like the noblest impulse a man could possess. He showed them their anger in the light of a government that held their talent and energy and potential in contempt. It was amazing: his belief in that vast crowd’s ability to empower itself was absolute. ‘He began in humour. And this is [rare]. This is not a funny country: there are very few political leaders who can really make people laugh. “The Prime Minister is in America at the moment,” he said, embarking on a cruel impression of the PM. “He is grovelling before Obama. He is telling him that we are a poor country, and that America should help us. “‘We are,’” he went on, in a weak plaintive voice, “‘a nation of 125 crore, but we are poor. Please help us!’” ‘Then, referring to Rahul Gandhi’s comment the other day—and he only ever refers to him as ‘shahzada’—that poverty is “a state of mind”, he said: “Now what I want to know is: Is this poverty that the Prime Minister is asking Obama to alleviate real? Is it the poverty of our streets and neighbourboods? Is it real poverty? Or is this also that state-of-mind poverty?” ‘And for many minutes, this was all that he did. He just made us laugh, at the expense of the discredited PM, and The Madonna with Child. ‘But then—and one could almost not tell when it hap-
pened—all the humour fell away. And he was angry. Full of this emotion that I now think of as distinctly his: this mixture of pain and sadness edged with great anger. It is also in these moments, when he is most rousing—imploring the crowd to tell him how the Prime Minister of Pakistan would dare insult the Prime Minister of India (Nawaz Sharif had likened Manmohan Singh to a ‘dehaati aurat’ in New York)—that Modi is also most frightening. Not Hitler, but there is definitely something of a leader like Erdogan in Turkey or Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka about him. ‘… His victory will decimate the opposition. Not just in terms of numbers, but philosophically too. It will be a long time before the Congress finds its way again. The [pundits in Delhi] will say I’m wrong. How will he find the numbers? they ask. But the numbers will come. This is going to be one of those elections when all the old calculations cease to apply.’
T
hat was September. Much of what was relevant then
is, if anything, more relevant now. At the time I could not have known if the crowd I had seen in Delhi was representative of the electorate at large, or specific to the big cities. It is my feeling now—after many weeks of travel, and seeing Modi in other more rural places—that this is the new electorate. And, if I have sympathy for Modi, if I wish to see him succeed, it is because of my sympathy for the people who support him.
Arvind Yadav/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Modi, if he is to bring profound change, must not go the Erdogan or Rajapaksa route. Because the conditions for the emergence of that kind of leader do exist in India
19 may 2014
open www.openthemagazine.com 11
Paromita Chatterjee/Demotix/Corbis
the pantheon A cutout of Narendra Modi among images of Hindu deities available in a shop at Benares
It is this India—clear-headed, restless, hungry—that has energised this election. It is the India that some of us have been waiting to see come into being. It is also my concern for this India that has prejudiced my view of this election. The reason is that I grew up among a class of Indians—privileged, exclusively English-speaking, intimately connected to power and politics—who loathed this other India. They turned their nose up at their bad English; they complained of their body odour; they described them, while doing an impression before a hooting drawing room of people (I’m thinking now of a large mondaine of Delhi society) as ‘ball-scratchers.’ They hated their beliefs and practices; they held their religion in contempt; they lived in open terror of their rise. Only the Poor were beautiful. The people I grew up among had great reserves of feeling for the rural poor. And through their many schemes and yojanas, their fraudulent plans for empowerment, their concern for tribal art and religion, this crowd of ethnistas and Oxbridge Lefties worked hard to make sure that the Poor never lost the thing that gave them their great charm, namely their poverty. Now while it would be unfair to say that the members of this class supplied leaders exclusively to the Congress party—many of them went on to join other parties, some even to lead large states—it would not be an exaggeration to say that if one party were to be singled out as sharing the beliefs and prejudices of this class, it would be the Congress Party under the leadership of the Gandhi family. But the class the Family represented was a class in decay. That decay, though they were an embodiment of it, was not specific to the Family. The same conditions that had produced them had produced others. Their experience of rootlessness and isolation, the devastating impact of convent and public school education—some wasted time spent in the West— was a general feature of this class. And the decline that was to be observed between Jawaharlal Nehru’s generation and Rajiv Gandhi’s was visible everywhere. No one perhaps expected that it would have brought us so soon to Rahul 12 open
Gandhi; one might be forgiven for thinking an intervening stage was needed; but decline itself was inescapable. It is not possible for a class to remain vital if it cannot draw cultural nourishment from the place it inhabits. That class then will produce people without the means to deal with India; it will produce Coomaraswamy’s intellectual pariah, ‘the nondescript superficial being’ who is neither of the East nor the West. A few among this class, I should say, did try to make a journey back; they tried to undo the effects of their education; but most were content to remain as they were. And why not! It was not so bad a place to be. India did not punish them for the remove at which they stood from her; she rewarded them with her awe. Well, that is, till just the other day. Because the sense I had at that rally in Rohini—then subsequently, in Kanpur, and then again, here, in Benares— was of a country unbound. A country coming free of its historical obeisance to the class the Gandhi family represented. The change was happening not because the new middle classes sensed the danger the elite posed to their own growth. No: it was much more basic than that. It was that the cultural gap had finally grown too wide. And if they turned away from Rahul Gandhi, it was not because they saw him as a threat to their own interests, it was because they couldn’t understand a word he was saying. In the past, this might have produced a feeling of apology in them; it now produced an equal and corresponding feeling of contempt. It was there in the voice of a young priest who came to see me the other day. He was of a grand line of priests belonging to the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir. He wore jeans and a kurta, pink-stemmed rimless glasses; his ringtone was: ‘Yada yada hi dharmasya…’ There were broad streaks of yellow on his forehead, pierced red at the centre, and he wore a ring of Hessonite, for his Rahu was bad. We had not met to discuss politics. But the young priest, after making apologies for being apolitical, as men of God frequently do, could talk of nothing else. Of Modi, he said: “Rahul Gandhi se toh zyaada sincere hain. Kam se kam unko bataana toh nahi padhha ke yeh 19 May 2014
Vishwanath hain. Rahul Gandhi ko bataana padhha ke yeh Vishwanath hain.” Then, as if coming to the heart of the difference between the two men, he said Modi knew how to perform all the rites at the temple. “Rahul Gandhi,” the priest added cruelly, “toh sona-chaandi dekh rahe thhe. Unko toh Vishwanath se koi matlab hi nahi thha.” This was what was new this election. In another time, Rahul Gandhi would not only have been forgiven his deracination; he would have been admired for it. But cultural rootedness came with problems of its own; in fact, it came with the problems of that culture. And, likeable as the priest was, he was an effortless bigot. He lamented the fact that all of India’s Muslims had not been sent to Pakistan in 1947; he spoke of the need, when Modi came to power, for one decisive riot that would show Muslims their place. To hear him speak was to be reminded of how dangerous it was to romanticise one India over another. It was also to be reminded of the man the priest supported this election, the man from whom such a wide range of things were expected. Modi, that day in Rohini, when I first heard him speak, had said a few things that worried me very much. He said that at that same breakfast in New York where our Prime Minister had been insulted, some Indian journalists had been present. Would they, he thundered, those journalists, be answerable to the people of India for why they had been eating Nawaz Sharif’s breakfast while their Prime Minister was being insulted? What he said was worrying not just because no one wants to live in a country where a journalist should ever be answerable to anything as vague as ‘the people of India’. But, more than this: had a journalist, on returning to India, been attacked because of what Modi said, it would have done a lot to change the mood in this country. I had been in places where such a change of mood had occurred, and it was a very ugly thing. No press freedoms would need to be reeled in; the change of air was often threat enough. But, more than all this, what really worried me about what Modi said that day was that it suggested a certain kind of man. Whose principal crime, in my eyes, is not so much that he is a bigot, but a provincial. The provincial is a problem not because you can’t have a glass of wine with him, though that would be nice too. Nor is it simply that he is not a man of the intellect—not a reader, not someone of subtle mind. The provincial is a problem because his plan for Development, on which his entire fame rests, often ends up being too shallow a plan. Too limited in its scope. The provincial invariably fails to recognise that in great countries—let us take Japan as an example—the development of infrastructure and the economy must, if the country is to rise in a meaningful way, and not stumble a few years down the line, be accompanied by an atmosphere in which the human spirit is given free rein. There is no external development—and India, more than any country, should
know this—without a parallel development in the internal life of a country. And for this to happen, for a country to find her voice, a sense of her destiny, as it were, there must exist an environment of complete freedom. Not simply in legal terms, but in mood, in atmosphere. It cannot be impinged upon by a leader speaking the language of treason, or leading witchhunts against journalists and intellectuals. Modi, if he is to bring profound change, must not go the Erdogan or Rajapaksa route. Because the conditions for the emergence of that kind of leader do exist in India. There is the malaise left behind by the previous government; there is a loud majoritarian feeling; there is disgust with the elite; and there are people baying for a strong leader. It is very easy to imagine an India in which Modi, if he delivers on Development, will be forgiven everything else. And anyone with a harsh word to say about him will be driven out of town. It would be terrible if that atmosphere were allowed to grow in India. The trouble would not come in the first five years, when, after the stultifying experience of UPA II, there is nothing but euphoria. It need not even come in the second term. The trouble comes only when that limited kind of Development, restricted only to infrastructure, runs, as it must, into the sands. It is then that the provincial leader, if he has not grown into a statesman, asserts himself in cruder ways, waging cultural or class wars, stifling freedoms.
It is an illusion of our age that Development no longer requires an intellectual component; that it need not engage the Life of the Mind
19 may 2014
I
t is an illusion of our age that
Development no longer requires an intellectual component. True, one kind of Development will come easily—there are companies to do it; people are pleased; they think their work is done. They are wrong. The world can be divided along the blade of a knife into those countries where Development has come in shallow ways—in many, it is possible already to see the ruins of partial modernity—and those in which it has been accompanied by achievements in the Life of the Mind. And Development that is not profound can play dangerous havoc in countries like ours. Modi, if he wins this election, stands not just to be the Prime Minister of India, but the MP from Benares. It is a configuration full of suggestiveness; there is no grander place on earth to be the MP from. All around him, if he looks well, he will see the remains of tremendous intellectual achievement in need of new vitality. Modi must not look away from the spirit of enquiry and freedom that was at the heart of that achievement. He must take as his maxim what one very wise Brahmin here told me it had been his life’s ambition to be: “A Hindu without vengeance, and without apology.” n Aatish Taseer’s new novel, The Way Things Were, will be published at the end of this year. Read his earlier despatches from Benares at www.openthemagazine.com/category/author/ aatish-taseer open www.openthemagazine.com 13
open essay
By priyamvada gopal
LOOK WHO’S ROMANCING THE AUTOCRAT Think before you dismiss those who see the intimations of fascism as alarmists
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19 May 2014
19 May 2014
illustration Anirban Ghosh
L
et’s get a few things out of the way. Criticising an influential political leader is not evidence of disrespect for India and Indians. Since I happen to live and work in the United Kingdom at the moment, I’ve been turned into a ‘desh drohi’ (traitor) at the rePriyamvada Gopal ceiving end of vitriolic denunis a member of the ciations for having voiced grave Faculty of English disquiet that a professed adat the University of herent of Hindutva might lead Cambridge the proudly plural country in which I was born and educated and for which I continue to have great affection. Ironically, much of the hostility—often couched in violent and misogynist terms—has come from other NRIs, keyboard warriors sitting in Salford or San Jose, giving themselves sobriquets such as ‘Atheist Hindu’ or ‘Internet Hindu’ (no actual spiritual concerns appear to trouble them) and pretending that shrill support for Narendra Modi’s candidacy somehow makes them better Indians and truer Hindus than others. Modi campaigners reject criticism as ‘foreign’ but welcome the uncritical support for Modi which has come from NRIs like the British peer, Lord Meghnad Desai, and the American economist, Jagdish Bhagwati. Similarly, dissenting from what is presented as a majority view is not anti-democratic: democracy would be a pretty pointless endeavour if dominant trends were not subjected to robust challenge. India has long been a country of dissenters however much Modi’s adherents might wish it otherwise; to be or remain proudly Indian is surely to not allow oneself to be cowed—or bamboozled—into acquiescence. What should worry us is the prospect of a regime that will create and enforce a culture of such acquiescence to narrow conceptions of India, in both social and economic terms. Such compliance can be ensured through a combination of intimidation, familiar to many in Gujarat already, as the Padmashri-awardee, Ganesh Devy recently noted, and consent produced by an obliging media, happy to purvey disinformation or blithely ignore the unpalatable. Most recently, a critical article containing myth-busting points about Modi was deleted by the website of the newspaper DNA: how much worse will this kind of repressive complicity get should he get the top job? Some have argued that we should separate Modi’s Hindutva ideology and RSS affiliations from his claims to being a man of development and progenitor of the so-called ‘Gujarat Model’ to be launched on a national scale, and focus on the latter. This is to conve-
open www.openthemagazine.com 15
niently separate two integrally connected parts of Modi’s appeal to many, including those who are not religious zealots but eager for strong rule: together, hardcore Hindutva adherent and Vikas Purush hold out the promise of all-encompassing ideological certainty, no room for doubt, diversity or flexibility, razing to the ground whatever stands in its way, regardless of human cost. It makes no sense to think that a neoliberal Hindu extremist will remain extreme on the economy but go soft on his cultural nationalist ideology whatever ‘moderate’ face is currently being put on for electoral consumption. For all the ‘anti-commie’ rhetoric of his most devoted followers, Modi and ‘Modinomics’ are actually in thrall to the Chinese model—capitalism on steroids combined with Stalinist autocracy, no pesky democratic processes, popular protests or sub-nationalisms allowed to get in the way. Democracy is an idol that will be worshipped only to the point where electoral majorities swing in Modi’s direction. After that, any criticism or popular resistance will be managed and contained, dissent turned into sedition. Note the suggestion already made by a Modi ally that his critics, frequently vilified as ‘Hindu-haters’, will need to leave India.
T
his scenario is one that some in
The spectacle and pomp that have accompanied Modi electoral rallies are familiar to a fascist ethos and should elicit deep dismay, not grudging aesthetic admiration
the liberal intelligentsia, such as historian Ramachandra Guha, have dismissed as ‘alarmist’. Like political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, Guha touts the resilience of Indian democratic institutions which will automatically forestall any such repressive scenario. While India’s democratic institutions remain hugely valuable, they are not invariably robust—not everyone at all times has been a beneficiary of impartial administration or justice— and as Indira Gandhi in dictatorial mode proved, they can also be suspended by Emergency powers. Blind faith in their invulnerability will, perversely, undermine them. In days to come, the defence of democratic institutions will require less romanticism and greater courage than some in the Indian commentariat are showing, even as several brave voices continue to speak out against the dangers of simply turning India over to the Hindutva brigade and hoping for the best. It is wrong, too, to suggest that all of Modi’s critics overlook the cronyism and dynastic culture of the Congress and endorse it as ‘the last bulwark against fascism’ (Guha). The venerable anthropologist Andre Beteille has been quoted as saying that because the Congress has become too complacent and caught up with a single family, the BJP, which he doesn’t like, should now come to power; we must live with the choice of ‘unsavoury’ Modi as leader. That pragmatic attitude would be fine if we could somehow overlook not only the autocracy and unrepentant communalism of the man who is being posited as the only alternative in a bad situation, but also Modi’s own cosy relationships with the Adanis, Ambanis and Tatas of the world—the sweet-
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heart deals he struck with them bear a striking resemblance to cronyism. Even a hard-headed magazine like The Economist finally shied away from amoral pragmatism noting that while change is desperately needed—and no one can deny that it is, given the Congress’ abysmal failures— it simply cannot come from someone so unapologetically ‘associated with sectarian hatred’ and resultant violence. The Economist—much to the chagrin of Modibhakts and unusually for such a conservative journal—was bracingly plainspoken. It is the slow death of precisely such vital plain-speaking within a largely acquiescent, indeed fawningly pro-Modi Indian media, that we have to worry about in days to come, the token acknowledgment of dissenting views notwithstanding. Quite apart from the overblown support for a candidate whose claims to exceptional growth in the state of Gujarat are, at best, questionable, we must assess the increasingly evasive nature of criticism of Modi as dissenters prepare to come to terms with a shift in power. The danger to the Indian public sphere may come less from direct repression— though we should certainly not underestimate that possibility, given how it has already been exercised in places like Kashmir and Chhattisgarh—than a quiet accommodation of an ideological status quo. As erstwhile naysayers become emollient, they start legitimising the claims of extremists to having become more moderate overnight, like that leopard which went for zebra stripes, but with no real evidence of such a profound change of heart. Thus we have Swami Agnivesh, stern critic of the 2002 Gujarat massacres, fawningly insist that ‘he can see a new face of Modi ji’. Where? In election campaign ‘speeches and interviews’. Naturally. Then we have true Liberal Guha, ‘a Hindu and a patriot’, as he insists, opine condescendingly that ‘alarmist critics’ worry too much about the advent of Hitler or Mussolini-style Fascism. He goes on to generously concede that such ‘fears are not entirely invalid’ since Modi is, in fact, quite intolerant of dissent and has intimidated artists and writers in Gujarat. We will set aside for now the matter of Haren Pandya, the BJP dissenter who turned up mysteriously, to use a non-alarmist phrase, lacking in vital signs, or the serving police officers now paying the price of whistleblowing. It is worth recalling that many Liberal European commentators in the 1930s also insisted that German democratic institutions would withstand totalitarianism. Just to be clear: no one who evokes Germany or Hitler in the context of Modi and Hindutva—easily sneered at as ‘scare-mongering’ by the terminally complacent—is saying that Modi is a carbon copy of Hitler. We are clearly at a different historical moment and in another cultural context. Those who invoke the dangers of fascism are, however, noting that deeply authoritarian regimes often emerge from perfectly democratic processes in tandem with long years of demonising minorities and 19 May 2014
Anirban Ghosh
valourising both strongmen and growth rates. If these warnings are overdoing it, then those who blithely insist that fascism has no currency in the current context are culpable of wilfully minimising danger signs. However much we wish it were so, India hasn’t been issued a special get-out clause that renders it peculiarly immune to the possibilities of fascism—defined broadly as militarised authoritarian rule in the name of the majority community at the expense of minorities, both religious and political, accompanied by a personality cult. The showmanship and spectacle that have accompanied Modi electoral rallies are entirely familiar to a fascist ethos and should elicit deep dismay, not grudging aesthetic admiration. As the political analyst Dilip Simeon notes in his excellent blog, while it is counter-productive to shout ‘fascism’ at every opportunity, it is also ‘dangerously misleading’ and, frankly, simplistic, to suggest ‘that Fascism may be properly recognised only when it seizes absolute power.’ By that point, it might be too late to abandon the supercilious postures of mild concern. Unlike disarmingly honest internet Modibots who openly insist that a ‘benevolent dictator is better than ignorant democracy’, liberal purveyors of moderation and nuance will only admit blandly that there are ‘troubled communal waters’ or, to use Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s unflappable phrase, there ‘should be no complacency over the communal question’. That suggestion quickly morphs into advice to the BJP to simply ‘act reassuringly’.
S
ince much attention has been paid to the habit of hy-
perbole that ‘alarmists’ are ostensibly given to, let’s assess Liberal moderation or hypo-bole. In a recent op-ed, Mehta deprecates something he calls ‘The Indian Left’ (presumably not just the electoral parties) and seeks to hoist it on its own petard. ‘The Left’, he pronounces damningly, ‘are incapable of dialectical thinking’. By ‘dialectics’, Mehta appears to mean a mishmash of factors that which have gone into the making of Hindu nationalism, including a larger culture of the ‘politi-
19 May 2014
cal construction of identities’ in which other parties have also played the communal game. (Chances are that neither Hegel nor Marx would recognise this version of dialectics, but let that pass). Including an uncertain economic future and various secessionist movements, these ‘dialectics’ can only be overcome by the transcendence provided by ‘a growth narrative that can restore India’s confidence’. Curiously, then, for Mehta, Hindu nationalism can only be defeated by that rather undialectical formula offered by Modi himself: the triumph of the neoliberal economic will. I’m not saying that all this talk about the need for intellectual ‘complexity’ combined with denunciations of ‘alarmism’ is so much sophistry which simply feeds the so-called Modi wave. Or at least, that’s not all I am saying. I am asking what will happen to old-fashioned plain speaking, if throat-clearing and fudging become the order of the day at a time when India faces the very real prospect of rule by a man who is known for an authoritarian style of governance, cosy relations with large powerful corporations, a willingness to run roughshod over whatever comes in his way, be they protesting farmers or dissenting police officers, and a profound commitment to an organisation which is founded on the idea of a Hindu Rashtra, turning India into a Hindu Pakistan. It’s all very well to bang on, as Mehta does, about ‘a complicated country feeling its way through difficult times’, but should such banal observations be allowed to obscure the dawning reality of majoritarian rule? If alarmism is unhelpful (to whom?), who is helped by equivocation and waffling which render authoritarianism, described euphemistically by Guha as ‘a tendency to centralise and self-aggrandise’, a matter of ‘unbecoming’ bad manners rather than a lethal political problem? In a typically palliative manner, Mehta suggests that we must now proceed ‘on a wing and a prayer’. A less romantic if more difficult approach may well lie in disavowing all this obfuscation, embracing honesty, and, as so many already are in the towns and villages of India, putting up some quite outright and courageous resistance. n open www.openthemagazine.com 17
IN AN INDIA IMPATIENT FOR LEADERSHIP
MODI COULD BE THE
ONE s prasannarajan
illustration Anirban Ghosh
THE CHOICE
In volume and volatility, there is noth-
ing else to match it in a democracy. Equally exceptional is the amount of anticipation and anxiety, in equal measure, it has evoked. This election is different, and it is not a sentiment exaggerated by the media ever desperate for a ‘historic moment’. It is the text, a campaigning season marked by the possibilities of tomorrow and the insult of incumbency, and the context, national despondency equalled by a swelling urgency for change, that make this election a breakthrough moment in the evolutionary tale of the Republic. This election, unlike most in the past, ought to be the voice of an India ungoverned—and un-led. The national mood has rarely been angrier, and angry nations behave wisely. Ten years ago, when the UPA was elected, in its size and sweep, the victory of the Congress was lesser than the defeat of the BJP. It took just five years for the Indian Right to squander a mandate that broke the idyll of the Socialist state. It was a classic case of a party living up to that old truism: the management of power is more arduous than the struggle for power. Which also meant the Congress, under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi, didn’t have to struggle so hard to win. The man who struggled the least for being in power, though, was the 13th Prime Minister of India. Manmohan Singh was the Select One, and the closest India got to an apolitical politician. He could have turned what was commonly perceived as an inadequacy into an advantage. He chose to be the moderniser India missed; even as he continued to extend his stay in office, he was far from being in power. The ruler was in denial, and India was passing him by. This election, with such a backdrop, is an exercise in the reclamation of India. The past five years have been a repudiation of the fundamentals of a democracy: accountability, transparency and responsibility. When some of the most brazen instances of State corruption emerged, the attitude of the Government was: stuff happens. The strangest sight, as the Government continued to distance itself from the people, was a Prime Minister behaving as if he was not part of the rot he was presiding over. When India needed answers, there were none, apart from the feeble monosyllables of the Prime Minister and the laboured triangulations of his handlers. Every scandal magnified the worst instincts of politics and economics. India was fast emerging as the perfect example of unregulated government and over-regulated marketplace. The cohabitation of crony capitalism and corrupt politics was inevitable. The saddest part was that it all happened under the watch of a man who was shaped not by the expediencies of politics but by the demands of good economics. Mandate 2014 is about the restoration of an India damaged by ten years of disintegration. The choice is between the certainties of the present and the ideas of tomorrow. The Congress campaign led by Rahul Gandhi has an inbuilt weakness: the legacy of Dr Manmohan Singh. Many times in the past, and infrequently during this campaign, 19 May 2014
Rahul has shown that he is the change Congress can’t do without. That moment is still frozen in national memory: the angry princeling tearing apart his Prime Minister’s corruption-friendly ordinance. For a brief while, he was the representative of a generation that was fed up with the mounting immoralities of this government. His anger was India’s; so was his impatience for change. He was the insider outsider, and there was no one better placed to be the conscience-keeper of India’s oldest political tradition. But this prince was not made to struggle for the crown; power for him, it seemed, was not something to be won after a fight. He meditated on it when the party—and India—wanted a non-Manmohan Singh. What was needed was a New Congress, and only one man could have created it, but Rahul was elsewhere, a man of sporadic aggression out of which no coherent vision of an alternative emerged. He didn’t have a dream to sell. More aptly perhaps, the nightmare of Manmohan Singh didn’t let him. This is the unwritten tragedy of this election: the best intentions of a prince killed by a puppet king. The arena was entirely Narendra Modi’s. It is one of those rare instances in a democracy when one man becomes the argument of a nation, unifying as well as divisive. That said, the best parts of Modi on the stump were not his bestselling lines on the Family or its employee in South Block, though the lampoonery may have provided enough entertainment to the base of the shirtless. He was wise enough to realise that negative campaigns never win elections (a fact not acknowledged by the Congress.) What set him apart was the message. A message that was compatible with the aspirations of an India with 97 million new voters, aged between 18 and 23. His conversations with the future sounded convincing because, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he had shown that good economics and shrewd politics could go together. Modi on the stump was prime ministerial, and his portrait of India was closer to the India most Indians missed in the age of Manmohan Singh. An India where the creation of wealth will be as much a priority as the creation of jobs, where the Government, preferably downsized, will not be the regulator of the marketplace but provider of the right atmospherics for investment. Candidate Modi, the jokes apart, was not a right-wing zealot floating in mythology but a reassuring Conservative, a moderniser rooted in tradition. Discarding the polarising culture argument, Modi sought an easy access to the mass mind through his economic argument. That was smart. Even though the best of Modi is what India wants now, the man is still a work-in-progress, and the rough edges cannot be wished away. He will have to come to terms with his past, which no modern politician can afford to rewrite. It is not that he has to own up the crimes of Gujarat 2002; it is that, as a leader who has mastered a fine vocabulary of the future, which is a sign of statesmanship, he should be able to say sorry for the crimes of others. India, hurt and humiliated, needs more than a no-nonsensical administrator answerable to the people. Power is crass when it is applied by an unsophisticated mind. India is ready for the Great Reconciler. Narendra Modi could still be the one. n open www.openthemagazine.com 19
governance
Time for transformation After a wasted decade India awaits a strong leader PR RAMESH
shome basu
T
o realise the enormity of the mess the next Union Government is destined to inherit, let us return to a summer verdict 10 years ago. In 2004, immediately after it became evident that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), against the run of play, had lost its re-election bid, Indian stock markets went into a nose-dive. Ten years on, with the benefit of hindsight, one can safely say that the bourses were prescient. They knew something that all of us didn’t. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), after 10 years at the Centre, should be glad that it is unlikely to return to power. If it did, it would inherit a legacy that would be a millstone round its neck. This is in sharp contrast to what it had inherited from the previous NDA Government in 2004. Almost every economic indicator has turned adverse. In the 10-year period, growth nearly halved from 8.1 per cent to 4.9 per cent, inflation more than doubled from 3.8 per cent to 9.5 per cent, and food inflation rose nearly 10 times from 1.3 per cent to 12.8 per cent. Job creation while the economy averaged almost 8 per cent was negligible: averaging 2 million jobs a year, even as additions to the working population averaged 12 million annually. Not only were not enough jobs being created to absorb additions to the labour force, the unemployment backlog has reached frightening proportions. It could threaten social chaos. Similarly, the country’s coffers have been virtually cleaned out, adding to the worry of the next Government. The thorough neglect of public finance management over the last 10 years has meant that the country is carrying a huge debt overhang. Not only did it fail to plan for a rainy day, it has also spent wantonly on its misguided entitlement programmes, not to speak of the Rs 60,000 crore pre-election farm loan waiver of 2008-09. If it was a household budget, then the UPA regime would have pushed the country into a classic debt trap. This sorry state of India’s public finances did not stop Finance Minister P Chidambaram from grandstanding during the vote-on-account he presented in February, claiming that he had managed to hold the country’s fiscal deficit (or year’s debt to the uninitiated) to the promised 4.8 per cent of gross domestic product. It was nothing but smoke and mirrors. The balancing of books was managed by postponing accounting for the spending undertaken by the Government in 2013-14. Chidambaram announced a rollover of the fuel subsidy of Rs 35,000 crore to 2014-15 and omitted to mention the actual expenditure under food and fertiliser subsidies, claiming it was what he had budgeted for at the beginning of the year. The actual 22 open
number is anybody’s guess, but it will most certainly add to the fiscal woes of the incoming Finance Minister. For the UPA, this gimmickry is nothing new. Previously, it had floated oil bonds, essentially a book entry, to take the actual subsidy payments off its books and once again claim fiscal correction—more importantly, understating the actual debt burden. Chidambaram may have given good soundbites on his 19 May 2014
Amit Dave/Reuters
impeccable fiscal record, but foreign investors—key stakeholders in the Indian economy—were far from impressed. Moody’s, the global credit rating agency, signalled unambiguously after the presentation of the interim budget this year that it was unimpressed. ‘Moody’s stable outlook on India’s Baa3 sovereign rating incorporates the macro-economic risks posed by the government’s high deficit and debt ratios as well as 19 May 2014
its recent efforts to control the fiscal deficit through ad hoc measures,’ its statement read. Presumably, the UPA overlooked the simple maxim that Abraham Lincoln articulated more than a century ago: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” If its failure to manage India’s macro -economy was open www.openthemagazine.com 23
not enough, the UPA has also come up short in its ability to push policy change. Like a dysfunctional family, it has pulled in different directions, often leading to delays in crucial clearances and in some instances the rejection of key infrastructure projects. Such was the activism of Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh that eventually the Prime Minister had to bow to public pressure and reallocate his portfolio. If this was not enough, the bizarre move to amend tax laws retrospectively and target multinationals like Vodafone and Nokia has singularly damaged India’s ability to draw foriegn investment. Not only has it unsettled business in general, it has become a litmus test for India as an investment destination. Businesses have come to believe that there is no stability in India’s tax policy and that laws can be amended arbitrarily. Things came to a head in the second tenure of the UPA after it was rocked by a series of scandals. Whether it was the 2G spectrum allocation scam or the allocation of captive coal blocks, the infractions were stunning examples of crony capitalism. It shook the Government to its foundations.
growth and private-entrepreneurship driven—has paid off in achieving the goal of poverty alleviation. In their book, they also debunk the myth of the rival ‘Kerala Model’, which for them embodies redistribution and State-driven development. The professors argue that it is actually the Gujarat Model that has delivered on development even in Kerala. Contrary to common claims, Kerala has been a rapidly-growing state in the post-Independence era, which is the reason it ranks fourth among India’s larger states, according to per-capita gross state product (GSP), and first according to per-capita expenditure, they say. Gujarat, which had inherited low scores on social indicators, has shown impressive progress. The state’s literacy rate has risen from 22 per cent in 1951 to 69 per cent in 2001 and 79 per cent in 2011. Its infant mortality rate per thousand has fallen from 144 in 1971 to 60 in 2001 and 41 in 2011. With its relatively high per-capita income as well as a high growth rate, Gujarat continues to generate high and rapidly rising levels of revenue, which, when combined with its good governance, promise sustained, accelerated and
Candidate Modi, like Chief Minister Modi, has given India enough indications that he has a formula for revival It is baffling that the UPA, which was led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—assisted by the ‘dream team’ of Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia that managed the big push for economic reforms in 1991—failed so miserably. Especially since Singh possessed impeccable credentials: he served as chairman of the University Grants Commission, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, advisor to the Prime Minister, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, and also as the Centre’s Chief Economic Advisor.
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he new Government has its job cut out for it:
to revive sentiment even as it focuses on a coherent medium-term agenda that will revive investment in the economy. Candidate Narendra Modi, like CM Modi, has given India enough indications that he has a workable plan for revival. The Gujarat Model of development has already been endorsed by renowned economists such as Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. In their book, India’s Tryst with Destiny, Bhagwati and Panagariya have argued that the ‘Gujarat Model’—shorthand for development that is primarily 24 open
all-around progress. The conventional argument is that the Gujarat Model cannot be replicated across the country. Wrong! Candidate Modi, with his proven record in growthoriented governance, has evoked great expectations. Coping with this national sentiment is going to be a challenge. Just as foreign investors must be reassured, so must the beleaguered domestic constituency reeling under the twin burdens of persistent inflation and joblessness. Compared with the spurt in new jobs from 2000 to 2005, India saw the creation of fewer than 3 million jobs in the five years between 2005 and 2010. This slow pace of job creation is worrisome, say economists, because 12 million people are estimated to join the workforce every year in the country. They are also anxious that the manufacturing sector has failed to ‘absorb’ those moving away from agriculture. This means that without large-scale job creation, India’s demographic dividend would become a burden, or a ‘demographic bulge’, resulting in social unrest and chaos. Clearly, the country needs a strong leadership that can promote, through solid measures, large-scale improvements in manufacturing. Greater investment 19 May 2014
Amit Dave/Reuters
Drawing Tata Motors to Sanand in Gujarat after the company was thrown out of West Bengal was a high point of Modi’s industry-friendly administration
pro-BUSINESS image Narendra Modi, Anil Ambani and Ratan Tata at the Vibrant Gujarat global investor summit in Gandhinagar
in education and skilled labour are also needed in order to avert a demographic crisis—something the UPA has been dilly-dallying on. The choice of Finance Minister would be critical. The temptation to opt for a technocrat would be irresistible. But what India needs is a politically savvy Finance Minister—pushing reform legislations like that for a Goods & Services Tax (GST) needs bipartisan support, and this can be achieved only by a politician who understands the nuances of political economy, someone who can strike a balance between the expediency of politics and the demands of the marketplace. Assuming the right choice is made for India’s next Finance Minister, the immediate effort to attract foreign investors would be two-fold. Insiders say that a tribunal would be set up to address pending tax 19 May 2014
issues—including looking for a way out of the troubling morass of retrospective taxation—within a tight time frame of less than three months. The next Finance Minister is expected to embark on a clear fiscal consolidation plan that is realistic and credible. What he should also do is grant proper autonomy to the Reserve Bank of India, which in the light of the massive debt overhang, has had no option but to progressively raise interest rates—and in the process price out investments in the economy—to squeeze demand and thereby seek to rein in inflation. The high interest rate regime of the past few years has not only taken its toll on overall investment but has also begun to impact retail sales of cars, homes, consumer durables and so on. As a result, the consumer economy, which has been the broader economy’s bulwark for the last few years, has been severely jolted. open www.openthemagazine.com 25
growth gurus Professors Arvind Panagariya and Jagdish Bhagwati
T
Columbia University economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya have argued that the ‘Gujarat Model’ can spur growth and eliminate poverty
hrough his manifesto and stump speeches,
Modi has sent out a message that a dispensation led by him will unlock nearly Rs 10,000 crore worth of infrastructure projects caught up in issues involving clearances, land acquisition or legal disputes. The multiplier effect of such an action would be enormous; restarting cash flows to these projects, enabling promoters to resume servicing their outstanding debt, and therefore relieving the finances of commercial banks by reducing their non-performing assets. In the energy sector, the new Government would do well to make it easier for thermal power plants to access domestic coal resources. At the moment, due to mismanagement of environmental clearances, there is a huge backlog of clearances for coal mining. While that will have to be resolved, something drastic needs to be done to ensure that environmental pollution levels
26 open
are minimised by granting power plants access to cleaner coal. The next regime could also set up a dedicated rail corridor network from coal mines to thermal power plants and other bulk users. The next Government, senior BJP leaders assure Open, will come up with a new policy to ensure an optimal energy mix. In the short term, it will encourage coal-based energy resources, but in the medium-to-long term, a new fiscal incentive package to promote solar, wind and biomass energy may be expected. It has to demonstrate to the rest of the world that India is serious about its commitment to a green world. It will strengthen the hand of the country’s negotiators at the global high table—where, at present, India is considered a laggard and often tagged with China as a major handicap to a global green pact. Similarly, the new Government is expected to leverage India’s new satellite capability, and conclude, 19 May 2014
8.1%INFLATION
FOOD INFLATION
1.3%
LOYED*
1.3% 8.1%
2003-04 2013-142003-04 THE UPA LEGACY GROWTH
458
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INFLATION 4.9%
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EMPLOYED* 4.9%
2003-04 INFLATION (CPI) 2003-04 2013-14
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2013-14 9.5% 3.8%
FOOD INFLATION
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of India’s current FOOD population is 12.8% INFLATION below the 1.3% age of 25
FOOD 2003-04 INFLATION 2013-14
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2003-04
458 2013-14
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458
of2003-04 Indians 2013-14 are 66% below the EMPLOYED* age458of 35 473 2013-14 EMPLOYED* 473
2003-04 EMPLOYED* 458
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2013-14
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2013-14
2013-14
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of2013-14 India’s voters joined the electoral rolls after 2009
2013-14
within three months, a project that would map the message to Ratan Tata, the then chairman of the Tata 2003-04 2013-14 water resources across 650,000 villages in the country. It Group: ‘Welcome to Gujarat’. The rest is history. Despite will immediately highlight of the initial reluctance, Tata soon agreed to shift his already458 the magnitude 473 EMPLOYED* problem of scarce water resources, and thereby help built Nano plant from Singur to Sanand 2,000 km away 1.3% policy planners prepare a blueprint to address the issue. in Gujarat. It was a high point in the trajectory of Modi’s image as an industry and investor-friendly leader. Tata 2003-04 2013-14 EMPLOYED* 2003-04 2013-14 later said that one would be foolish as a businessman ndia of the moment is one of the most misgovnot to invest in Gujarat. Modi sounded self-effacing 458 erned countries 473 in the world, and it adds to the when he accepted the compliment, saying he believed 2003-04 2013-14 urgency for change. Modi has shown that he is an more in governance than government. administrator with an indefatigable can-do spirIt is least surprising, therefore, that the Modi it. When the Tata Group faced insurmountable government in Gujarat has, since 2004, received more odds in West Bengal, forcing Tata Motors to leave the than 285 awards for good governance. Among them are state where it was building a Nano car factory, Modi lost seven Prime Minister’s awards, 82 conferred by various no time inviting the firm to Gujarat. He just sent a text central government departments, and 172 by
I
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2013-14
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2013-14
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2013-142003-04 3.8%
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ATION
2003-04 2013-14 INFLATION 3.8% 4.9% (CPI) GROWTH 1.3%9.5% 8.1% FOOD 2003-04 INFLATION 2013-14 2003-04 2013-14 4.9% INFLATION GROWTH 2003-04(CPI)2013-14 3.8%
12.8%
Mohd Zakir/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Like a dysfunctional family, the UPA has pulled in different directions, leading to delays in clearances and even the rejection of key infrastructure projects well-known national and international agencies for its performance in various development areas. The Gujarat government has won accolades for best water and sanitation management in rural areas, housing development for poor urban people, and for best practices in controlling maternal and infant mortality. Gujarat’s Urban Development and Urban Housing Department has bagged several federal government awards for its public transport initiatives such as the BRTS, solid waste management, and water supply projects. The Modi-led government has also won numerous awards from the UN and other international agencies. 28 open
sop opera Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, AK Antony and Manmohan Singh at a discussion on the Food Security Ordinance
The new Central Government, under Modi, can be expected to evolve an alternative governance structure. For too long India has pursued a top-down approach. The UPA talked a lot about panchayats and empowering them, but followed up with mere token gestures. The Congress, which always believed in the maxim that ‘information is power’, never allowed much transparency in governance. So a starting point for a new governance model would be to set up a committee on governance made up of well-performing collectors from across India. The first task will be to digitise all birth and death records across the country; it is already active in several states. BJP leaders say that this could be 19 May 2014
achieved in the first three months of forming a new government. Once in place, this massive database can be used to generate free birth and death certificates for people. It is a simple gesture, but something that will go a long way in restoring the faith of the people of this country in its administrative machinery.
T
he new Government’s foreign policy may not make any radical shifts, but there could be a new emphasis in the way India relates with the world. In his recent speeches, Modi has sent out clear signals that issues like Indo-Pak relations will not be dictated by members of Wagah’s candlelight brigade or the mushy sentimentalism of seminar rooms. Modi has also indicated that his policy towards Pakistan will be assertive. He has said that the first step in building any meaningful relations with Pakistan has to involve Islamabad taking effective and demonstrable
action against terror networks that operate from its soil. “Once that happens, there will be increased trust between the two neighbours, which will enable us to pursue a policy of dialogue to solve all outstanding issues. We will be frank and forthright in dealing with Pakistan,” he has said. The coming days could also see a key role for state governments in the country’s foreign policy. Modi had suggested using cultural links as an important tool of soft power—something like establishing a fresh connect between Puducherry and France or Goa and Portgual. Experts have been pointing to Modi’s ‘5 Ts’—‘talent, tourism, technology, tradition and trade’—to drive home the point that his government’s focus will be on mutually beneficial relations. Modi has also categorically stated that economic diplomacy will be the backbone of his foreign policy. He has said that he knows only too well that as the world economy gets onto a recovery path, others will be keen to do business with India. Therefore, with him at the helm, the
The 2G spectrum allocation scam and irregularities in the distribution of coal blocks were the best examples of crony capitalism that shook the Government
disgrace 2G-tainted Andimuthu Raja being escorted away from court
ashish sharma
shailendra pandey/tehelka
Without large-scale job creation, India’s demographic dividend would become a DEMOGRAPHIC BURDEN, resulting in social unrest and chaos country can expect major breakthroughs in bilateral trade ties with other countries. The policy can be expected to be blunt and there will be no place for unilateralism, unlike in the time of Manmohan Singh. That the Prime Minister’s writ did not run— Manmohan Singh could not convince India that it was his way that prevailed in government—has been hurting governance in the country. The ‘dual control’ system under the UPA had seen jholaawallas in the National Advisory Council replace the Prime Minister’s Office as the focal point of decision-making. Singh, who meekly accepted a power equation that put the Prime Minister’s authority second to that of the Congress president had opted for a low profile PMO; and the selection of TKA Nair, an official with a mediocre career record as his principal secretary, was just another sign of this. After 16 May, the centre of gravity is expected to shift 32 open
the siege When Young India stormed Raisina Hill
back to the Prime Minister’s Office. “The PMO has to be looked upon with respect. That itself will boost the public image of the Government,” says a BJP leader. This assessment is not off the mark, as a powerful PMO is a reflection of a powerful PM. Indira Gandhi’s secretary PN Haksar guided her to sideline the Congress Syndicate, Rajiv Gandhi’s officials took every key government decision, Narasimha Rao’s principal secretary AN Verma ran the show in the early 1990s, and Brajesh Mishra enjoyed more power than the then Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani in the AB Vajpayee Government. “Remember, all big ticket schemes like national highways and telecom [projects] were steered by the Prime Minister’s Office during the Vajpayee regime. The PMO will once again become an all-powerful office,” says the BJP leader. After a wasted decade, what India needs is a leader who can engage ideas and aspirations of the 21st century. An awakened India awaits active leadership. n 19 May 2014
on the record
“I Will Break the Delhi Cabal of Status Quoists” Narendra Modi’s day begins at 4:30 in the morning. After an hour of yoga and meditation, he pores over pending files. Then it is a short session with aides about the day ahead. Just before setting out from his Gandhinagar residence for a whirlwind tour of eastern Uttar Pradesh, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate finds time for a conversation with Managing Editor PR RAMESH. Excerpts
amit dave
Your party has maintained that its election campaign was run on the plank of good governance. How do you propose to put a new governance paradigm in place?
In all my campaign meetings, I have been emphasising the need for good governance. I believe in minimum government and maximum governance. The country is facing trouble on all fronts because of maximum government. It is interfering with every aspect of life; it is not for changing the lives of people, but to benefit a few rent seekers who think it is their Godordained right to rule. The problems are very similar to what could happen to your computer or iPad. You may have the best machine and best information on its hard disk, but if a virus gets in, it will just collapse. The governance machine in Delhi has collapsed due to the unwholesome acts of those in charge of government.
Your rivals say that the BJP has not spelt out its idea of an ideal government...
Only those who are blind can say this. I have shown in Gujarat that a government should be driven only by policies. An ideal government should be driven by policies. There should be little or no discretion. It is the grey areas that lead to corruption. My idea of governance is a ‘P2G2’ formula—pro-people proactive good governance. In this, those in charge of governance are not fire-fighters as you see in Delhi. We will formulate and guide policies in a transparent manner for the larger public good.
Industry and investors have a lot of expectations of the next government. How do you soothe the frayed nerves of investors? A stable government and stability in policy will drive investment and boost investor confidence. You don’t have to go only by Modi’s speeches. I have a track record to substantiate what I say. There will be no place for vacillation or ad-hocism.
What should be the new government’s priorities?
To be in charge. Currently, no one is in charge. I have been saying that the 19 May 2014
country needs a chowkidar in Delhi—to prevent the loot of public wealth. On the policy front, we will follow what we do in Gujarat. Every policy draft will be put in the public domain; it will be online. We will elicit the views of people. And there will be genuine people participation in policy formulation.
How do you see the political landscape after 16 May? And how...
(Interrupts) Why 16 May? Can’t you see it now? That the Government in Delhi and the party in power have already been rejected by the [country]? The large crowds that attend my rallies demonstrate that a new dispensation is going to be in charge soon.
Will you be able to satisfy people’s growing aspirations?
The new government will work towards addressing the demands of a fastchanging India. The Congress will end up with its worst-ever tally. The country
the ability of its leadership to lead the organisation.
How will a Modi government be different from any other regime?
I fear only the Constitution. Every decision will be taken within the four walls of that sacred book. That was just not happening in Delhi. Every leader and every minister was cutting corners. Many had their hands in the till. And the regime as a whole was subverting institutions. They reduced even constitutional bodies and investigating agencies to their handmaidens.
You admirers say that this is the ‘revenge of an outsider’...
I have humble roots. I was born in a poor family. Now I am the Chief Minister of a prosperous state in India, but my mother takes an auto-rickshaw to the polling booth on the day of voting. There are no hangers-on or durbaris. Look at what’s happening in the
“
I fear only the Constitution. Every decision will be taken within the four walls of that sacred book. That was just not happening in Delhi. An ideal government should be driven by policies. There should be no place for discretion”
is fed up with the family that sees power at the Centre as their entitlement. I saw the anger of the people first-hand in Amethi. That’s why I said that they will not elect someone who has not spoken a word about the problems of the constituency in the past 10 years in the Lok Sabha. Rahul Gandhi is finding the going tough in his own constituency. India has rejected family rule.
What does that mean for the Congress?
Every recent election has shown that the family no longer has [its earlier] vote-catching ability. I see the Congress experiencing a major crisis after the election. There could be doubts about
Capital; Delhi is being controlled by a cabal that has vested interests in the status quo. I will break the status quo. That must be making them uncomfortable and prompting them to level unsubstantiated charges against me.
What will be the focus of your foreign policy? Will the new government look East or look West? I will look at India. What is in her selfinterest will be India’s foreign policy.
What are your plans for Varanasi?
It is the call of Ma Ganga that brought me to Varanasi. My first priority will be the cleaning up of the Ganga. n open www.openthemagazine.com 35
net practice
Narendra Modi on his Lotus selfie
‘Voted! Here is my selfie’
Tweet for Tat This election has seen leaders slug it out on social media like never before. Clever parodists and faceless trolls too were at play SUNAINA KUMAR
36 open
Amit Dave/Reuters
T
here must be moments when
Mitt Romney must ask himself— perhaps while nursing a glass of something—if he lost the 2012 White House election to Obama over an internet meme. His legendary gaffe, “binders full of women” (google it, it’s hilarious) in the second presidential debate led to the most quotable and humorous political meme on social media, parody accounts on Twitter, pages on Facebook and Tumblr, and even commemorative works of art. It is still referenced in popular culture when any mention of women’s rights is made with a touch of irony. Those four words alienated Romney’s women voters and demonstrated the 19 may 2014
power of social media in what is now considered a watershed election. We in India like to think of the current election as a ‘critical turning point’ in Indian electoral history, with the coming of age of social media here as well. We have not shied away from creating memes of our own, some clever and some rather obvious. The tremors started in April 2013, when the #Pappu versus #Feku battle began in the wake of Rahul Gandhi’s CII speech followed by Narendra Modi’s Ficci speech, leading to India’s first popular political memes and setting the tone for this election season. Over the past couple of months, the BJP’s heavily advertised slogan ‘Ab Ki Baar Modi Sarkaar’ has spawned so many jokes and parodies that they could be kept in circulation for the next five years. That social media has played a role in reaching out, engaging and mobilising opinion this election has been obvious all along. Will this great online mobilisation yield electoral dividends? That is best left to post-election analysis. Until then, we do have social media to thank for throwing up new news stories, incubating headlines, and in some cases altering perceptions and popular discourse.
Digvijaya Singh on Amrita Rai
‘I have no hesitation in accepting my relationship with Amrita Rai. She and her husband have already filed a mutual consent divorce case’
S
o, what were the big buzzy madefor-social-media moments of this election? Not surprisingly, most of them originate from the party with the most active social media presence: BJP. Narendra Modi’s selfie after casting his vote was the biggest trending item on Twitter that day; it made international headlines and drew comparisons with Danish Prime Minister Helle ThorningSchmidt’s selfie with Barack Obama and David Cameron at a memorial for Nelson Mandela, where they overlooked the solemnity of the occasion to pose with cheesy grins. Modi’s selfie moment, the smile less cheesy and more self-satisfied, with the lotus firmly displayed in the foreground, soon turned sour when an FIR was lodged against him for flouting the election code. Modi’s love for the selfie is self evident, his earlier selfies with Chetan Bhagat and Poonam Mahajan having already been widely circulated on social media. Around the same time that Modi’s selfie was making news, Congress leader
19 may 2014
Subramanian Swamy on Medha Patkar
‘Meet the Maoist Prima Donna Medha Patekar. The list of her antiindian activities is long, but lets start with what one can take for one day’
Digvijaya Singh was trending on social media after his pictures with news anchor Amrita Rai were leaked. He admitted the relationship on Twitter: ‘I have no hesitation in accepting my relationship with Amrita Rai. She and her husband have already filed a mutual consent divorce case… Once that is decided we would formalise it.’ For good measure, in the face of snide remarks all around, he added that he was ‘not [a] coward like Narendra Modi’. Online trolls still had a field day turning moral police on the man who has always enjoyed playing it himself. The story exemplifies perfectly the kind of hype social media likes to feed on—what Mahima Kaul, an analyst of internet governance and a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, describes as ‘low hanging fruit’. “The bigger story in this whole affair was that someone’s computer was hacked and cyber laws were violated. The woman in question filed a case and the police asked websites to remove the pictures. However, on social media, that was not relevant,” she says. “All the stories that have erupted on social media are not necessarily significant stories… it’s a case of low hanging fruit, the stories that are the easiest to follow. But once they are on social media, they are taken up in mainstream media and end up further polarising an already polarised election.” The one story on social media that political pundits take seriously for its political implications is Rajnath Singh’s Twitter U-turn on the BJP slogan. Just after putting himself and his party at the online campaign’s forefront by asking for a ‘BJP Sarkaar’, the party president had to go in for damage-control by reverting to ‘Modi Sarkaar’. What many had interpreted as a course-correction—a shift away from its personality cult—lasted all of 33 minutes, after which Singh’s tweet was dismissed as an error by the party. “What may seem like one small incident was a revelatory moment. It exposed the faultlines between the celebrity cult and the organisational apparatus within the party. The fact that his message had to be changed is very significant,” says social commentator Santosh Desai. The tenor of this election has been described as acrimonious, vengeful and distasteful. A look-back at all the controveropen www.openthemagazine.com 37
sies that have surfaced online raises a question: has social media given India its rudest election of all time? Social media has set the terms for debate, and, as is the wont of the medium, the debate has been dominated by extreme and fringe opinions. Just the other day, Subramanian Swamy accused Medha Patkar of being a Maoist on Facebook: ‘Meet the Maoist Prima Donna - Medha Patekar. The list of her anti-indian activities is long... She demanded mercy for these terrorists [Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab] on grounds of Human Rights’. Medha Patkar retaliated by accusing him of toeing the line of fundamentalists. Even though small in numbers and limited in reach, social media activists act as a pressure group on politicians, as anonymous pairs of eyes and ears that won’t let them get away with an illjudged remark or faux pas. Everyone on social media is forever addressing nameless and faceless groups of people. In the thick of electoral rhetoric, much gets said that would otherwise not. So much so that ally can turn against ally, as Omar Abdullah recently did on Twitter. The Congress’ decision to probe Snoopgate by setting up a judicial commission was met with disfavour not just by the NCP, but also the National Conference, with Abdullah taking to Twitter to express himself. ‘Was talking to my dad last night and he felt the same way — setting up a commission of inquiry in the dying hours of UPA 2 is just wrong,’ tweeted the CM of Jammu & Kashmir. In trying to disassociate himself from a controversy, Abdullah ended up stirring a new one. It was this same sort of pressure that compelled Sushma Swaraj to voice her dissent against the re-induction of BS Sriramulu, implicated in Karnataka’s mining controversy for his close association with Janardhan Reddy. Swaraj tweeted, ‘I want to make it absolutely clear that B. Sriramulu has been admitted in the party despite my stiff opposition’. Over the past few months, Swaraj’s isolation within her party has played out glaringly on social media. Her spat with BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman over Telangana just before polling began was quickly hushed up, but it exposed fractures in the party’s top leadership. 38 open
Sitharaman had fired the first salvo when she tweeted in February: ‘If only Sushma had stood for Seemandhra in Lok Sabha just like Venkaiah [Naidu] and [Arun] Jaitley did today’. Swaraj fired back: ‘With Spokespersons like @nsitharaman, [you] don’t need enemies’. Sushma Swaraj on B Sriramulu
‘I have conveyed to Shri Raj Nath Singhji in writing that BJP must not permit this’
Rajnath Singh on Modi-BJP
‘Time For change, Time For BJP. Abki Baar, Bhajapa Sarkar’
Omar Abdullah on Snoopgate
‘...setting up a commission of inquiry in the dying hours of UPA 2 is just wrong.’
C
learly, social media has changed the rules of the political sparring game. “It has become an arena for political leaders to vent and respond to everything,” observes Desai, “It’s almost like a parallel muttering under the breath, except it’s the most public form of doing so.” The multiple conversations that social media encourages make room for responses to just about everything. Take, for example, Arun Jaitley’s blogged response to Priyanka Gandhi’s barb on Smriti Irani: ‘Mrs. Vadra’s statement yesterday on Smriti Irani, denying her existence by asking a question ‘who’, displays arrogance at its worst’. The under-the-breath muttering that Desai speaks of is best illustrated by what’s brewing in the Aam Aadmi Party. The party is credited with using social media to engage, crowdsource and gain itself a following large enough to become an overnight political force in India. Now, however, signs of dissonance within the party are visible to all on social media. AAP’s Amethi candidate Kumar Vishwas, who rather revels in controversy, has been busy on Twitter. He ranted against the party’s recruitment of new cadre. His tweet, ‘Agar chadhti nadi mein naale girenge to asthavan snan se bhi darega, achman to bhool hi jao’ (If all kinds of garbage falls into a surging river, devotees will be scared to take a dip, let alone drink that water) was read as a dig at sting journalist Ashish Khetan being given a ticket to run from New Delhi. Another prominent AAP leader, Shazia Ilmi, made use of Twitter to have her way with which constituency she would contest. When her party was trying to pit her directly against Sonia Gandhi, she promptly tweeted her dissent: ‘I am not contesting from Rae Bareli. I never agreed to, nor do I now. I have been denying this for the last two months.’ It was an e-volley fired by someone who understands the influence of the medium. n 19 may 2014
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agenda
FASHION WITHOUT A DESIGN The potential and possibilities of a multi-million industry the next government can’t overlook wendell rodricks
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t a time when India is in flux over the ongoing Lok Sabha
election, the world of fashion mirrors similar emotions of uncertainty. It is not about hemlines and a change of silhouette. Or what’s ‘trending’, as with opinion polls. There are other matters of concern. What, for example, does the future of fashion hold? On the face of it, all is well with India’s fashion industry. It seems to be leading the way. Even the vibrant world of media, where propaganda makes waves and social media pips all others to the post, has taken a page out of fashion’s book. Everything has become a scrapbook of images. As with fashion magazines and blogs, no one reads the text anymore. It’s back to juvenile cartoons or medieval iconography. However, behind the industry’s veneer—all those glossy magazines, slick fashion shows, mushrooming fashion weeks and creative talent—lies a broad reality that affects advertising, finance and retail. It’s a reality that calls for a serious examination of what needs to change for this industry to prosper, that demands a plan put into action for a market of this size. Did I say ‘size’? Let’s start with the sad truth that there is no Indian sizing standard for the fashion industry, even 14 years since the first Lakme India Fashion Week in 2000 (now Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week for a decade). For a country that depended on tailors making custom-made clothes, to exporters dependent on countries they supplied to, there was no need of an Indian Sizing System. Things have changed dramatically since 2000. Small tailors and cloth markets have been ‘malled’ over by US-style department stores as the new altars of fashion retail. High fashion designers came up with their own sizing based on which foreign country they trained in, or which markets they exported their designs to. Hence, we are left with a jumble of US, UK, EU—and often just random— size labels in a country as large as a continent. One designer’s ‘small’ is another’s ‘medium’ is another’s ‘large’. It’s the same with high-street retail. On the surface, this sounds trivial. It is not. It results in consumer frustration instead of quick sales. A wholesale ‘buyer’ buying garments from a designer to retail also buys the
Instead of Spring and Fall, we should have two fashion seasons: Summer and Festive, perhaps a Wedding to go with the latter
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designer’s sizing. When these garments reach stores, customers are faced with racks of different designer sizes. In the process, they are left perplexed about their own size. Adding to the confusion, online fashion stores have no standardisation either, so e-shoppers are of different sizes on each site. One cannot blindly copy EU, UK, Far East or US sizes, since Indians have sizes and shapes that are different. Most Indian women have medium torsos and large hips. Most men have small shoulders and large waists. Go figure! It’s about time the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) sets out an Indian Sizing Standard that the entire country can follow—from designer boutique to city mall, department store to village tailor.
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huge error-of-judgement in the history of modern
Indian fashion has been the direct adoption of seasons from the West. There was a time, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century, that Europe ruled fashion; after World War II, it was the US. But fashion is global. At the FDCI, we should have seen what happened in the markets of South America, Australia or South East Asia. During a European Winter, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere. When French designers realised they would lose emerging markets in the late 70s and early 80s, they introduced Cruise Collections for places like Mexico, Brazil and Australia. Aimed at warmer climes, these capsule collections of clothing were lightweight and included swimsuits, breezy tops, flatter shoes and comfy palazzos. Since the fashionable cities in most of these places were luxury places by the sea, the term ‘Cruise’ came to be replaced by ‘Resort’. India today suffers the same dilemma Europe did. While the country’s north has a winter of sorts, south India stays hot and humid all year. Even in the north, when it gets cool, out come the pullovers and shawls. The concept of a parka or winter coat spilled over to Indian fashion from countries like Iran and Turkey and visuals in Western fashion magazines. Few Indians are ready to adopt a winter coat or parka for comfort. To add chaos to confusion, the Wills India Fashion Week follows an international Western calendar of Spring/ Summer and Autumn/Winter. So while Delhi has an Autumn/Winter show, LFW in Mumbai has Resort. It is high time we implemented what I have been saying for a while now. We have three seasons, primarily. If we ignore the monsoon, since couture does not go with torrential downpours and mud splashes, we are left with Summer and Festive. In addition, a Wedding Season of bridal fashion could 19 May 2014
Naina Redhu
go with the latter. It may sound wonderfully highbrow to use words like ‘spring’ and ‘autumn’, but sorry folks, this is India! And it’s best if we realised we have possibly the best fashion market in the world. What are most countries selling in the name of fashion today? Accessories. Walk into a Chanel store in Paris, London, Milan, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai or Sydney. Clothes get the least space. What these designer shops reserve most space for are bags, shoes, sunglasses, cosmetics—in that order of importance. For clothes, increasingly, people in those markets go to supermarkets or superstores. Carrefour or Monoprix in France. Walmart or Sears in the US. In contrast, clothes occupy centrestage in India while accessories stay on the fringe. Everywhere, from designer boutiques to multi-brand retail stores like Shoppers Stop or Globus, the spotlight is always on clothes. This is just how it should be in a country with a 4,000-year-plus legacy of apparel design.
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alking of a legacy, we need to preserve everything that has
been bequeathed to us, whether it is the fine weaves or specialised dyes that have come down the generations. We need to protect all art forms that make up this vast industry. Indian weavers, for example, need special support in sustaining a tradition that the world cherishes as part of a global heritage. It is vital that designers do not turn India into a Japan or China, where traditional clothes serve only ceremonial purposes. We must respect our heritage even as we incorporate international nuances of practicality and comfort if and when they are needed for the industry to evolve. It is disturbing, for example, to see saris redesigned to such an extent that thousands of years of artistic excellence are sidelined for
19 May 2014
modern glitter and bling. Such trends threaten the Paithani or Kanjeevaram sari. As of now, the Government does not recognise fashion as an ‘industry’. This is despite the millions—from cotton growers to apparel retailers—who depend on it for their livelihood. All of India’s clothing and fashion organisations need to unite in demanding ‘industry’ status, which would make access to bank credit, among other things, easier. It’s our right! Finally, if there’s another fight to be fought, it’s over entertainment tax. Yes, fashion shows are entertaining. And yes, they are often like fine-art performances. But there is a huge difference. Fashion Weeks, at least the WIFW and LFW, are in the business of fashion. The point is to sell clothes. These shows are needed to convey emotions, generate enthusiasm and make sales, not entertain audiences. So while it may be valid to slap entertainment tax on a fashion show that’s part of some other event—say, a car launch—it is ridiculous to club serious fashion weeks, trade fairs and student graduation shows with entertainers such as movies. So, which party or leader is ready to step forth and champion the cause of fashion? Whoever does, gets this multi-million industry’s vote! n
As of now, the Government does not see fashion as an ‘industry’. This is despite the millions who depend on it for their livelihood
Wendell Rodricks is a fashion designer, educationist, writer, author, environmental activist and Padma Shri recipient for Art open www.openthemagazine.com 41
h e a lt h c a r e
Ethics on Trial Three groundbreaking clinical trials on cervical cancer raise uncomfortable questions Lhendup G Bhutia
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ast year, the the findings of what has been called a ‘revolutionary’ study in India were made public. It showed that cervical cancer, that dreaded disease which kills over 70,000 Indian women every year, need not necessarily be screened only by Pap smears or Human Papillomavirus (HPV) tests. Common vinegar could prove almost as effective. All that was required was a simple application of vinegar to the cervix. If the affected region turns white—because acetic acid or vinegar makes cancer and pre-cancerous cells change colour—it indicated the possibility of cancer. The findings were the culmination of a mammoth study that began in 1998 and involved the tracking of a total of 151,538 women from 20 slum clusters in Mumbai. Conducted by researchers from India’s premier cancer institute, Tata Memorial Hospital, and funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the US, the study proved that so-called vinegar testing could reduce deaths by 31 per cent. In India, where access to healthcare is poor and Pap smears and HPV tests are often unaffordable, this study offered much promise. Unsurprisingly, it was widely applauded and fêted, both by the scientific community and the press. Maharashtra is now expected to run a pilot programme on the basis of this study, using vinegar to test the possibility of cervical cancer, in six districts of the state for two years. It now turns out that there are some questionable aspects of the study, and of two other recent studies on cervical can42 open
cer screening that were funded by the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and conducted in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district and Tamil Nadu’s Dindigul district. Some critics argue that the studies were unethical and perhaps even scientifically pointless. n the case of the NCI-funded test, 151,000 women were separated into two groups, one of which was screened by vinegar, also known as ‘visual inspection by acetic acid’ (VIA), while the other had no screening. It is now being claimed that adequate informed consent was not taken from those in the unscreened group; and that, even as the study went on for several years, the researchers continued to stand by and monitor the unscreened group even as some of them started developing cancer and dying of it. Uptill 2013, when the findings were made public, a total of 98 women had died. Another 67 died in the screened group. Similar accusations of inadequate informed consent and not screening those in the control group even as some of them started developing and dying of cervical cancer are also being levied against conductors of the two BMGF-sponsored studies. In the study conducted in Dindigul, also to examine the efficacy of vinegar as a screening agent, of the 30,958 women who did not receive screening, 92 women died between 2000 and 2007, when the study was published. Another 83 died of the 49,311
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women who were screened by VIA in the same timeframe. In the Osmanabad study, designed to examine the efficacy of various screening methods, women were divided into four groups—those that received HPV tests, VIA, Pap smears, and a control group that got no screening. When the findings were published in 2009, they showed that between 2000 and 2007, 64 women in the control group had died. Another 34 had died in the HPV-testing group, 54 in the Pap smear group, and 56 in the VIA group. According to Dr Eric Suba, a San Francisco-based pathologist who ran a Pap smear programme in Vietnam and has been a vociferous critic of the three studies, what he finds troubling is how the researchers tracked a large group of women for cervical cancer but didn’t screen them, instead monitoring how many would develop cervical cancer and die, so their death rates could be compared with those who were being screened. ‘No-screening groups were maintained,’ he says over email, ‘even after the efficacy of screening for reducing cervical cancer death rates had (predictably) been confirmed.’ In a recent article he wrote for Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), he elaborates, ‘It is also unsettling that such measurements were continued among unscreened women in Mumbai and Osmanabad even after the mortality benefit of a single round of VIA screening had been established in Tamil Nadu… the no-screening arms in all three US-funded studies should have been 19 may 2014
photos rafiq maqbool/ap
questionable method Usha Devi (right), who was suffering from cervical cancer, in conversation with health workers from Tata Memorial Hospital in a slum in Mumbai
closed after the demonstration of the mortality benefit of VIA had been documented in 2007.’ In all three studies, women in the control groups were told they would not be screened or treated. They were instead given health-care information and told they could seek screening on their own. All of them signed consent forms. In the case of the NCI study, all participants from the screened and unscreened groups were given ‘health cards’, which enabled them to seek free treatment at Tata Memorial Hospital. According to researchers associated with the study, a small number of women from the unscreened group did seek cervical cancer screening on their own. According to these researchers, after information on the importance of screening was provided, a total of 1,956 women from the unscreened group in Osmanabad got themselves screened with Pap-smears and 951 women from the unscreened group in Dindigul got themselves tested with VIA screening. These women were then excluded from the studies. In 2011, Dr Suba filed a complaint about the three studies with the Office of 19 may 2014
Human Research Protection (OHRP), a body that looks into the unethical use of human subjects in research experiments. The Office did not investigate the two BMGF-funded studies since they had not been funded by the US government. However, in the case of the NIC study, OHRP found that those in the control group had not been adequately informed of how they could seek screening from nearby healthcare facilities. Kristina C Borror, director of the Division of Compliance Oversight at OHRP, wrote in
The researchers tracked a group of women but didn’t screen them, just monitoring how many would develop cervical cancer and die
2012, ‘We have determined that the subjects were not provided, in writing, with information about the possible alternative of seeking breast or cervical cancer screening outside of the research… When such information is only provided verbally, subjects may not recall the information later, or may not fully understand what is told to them orally.’ Apart from VIA, the study is also looking into the efficacy of clinical breast examinations conducted by health workers. According to Dr Surendra Shastri, head of preventive oncology at Tata Memorial Hospital and the lead researcher of this study, Pap smears and mammography—standard screening processes the world over—found no mention in the consent form, although these were explained verbally, because it would be akin “to insulting them”. According to Dr R Sankaranarayanan, the lead researcher of the Osmanabad and Dindigul studies, adequate information on the studies and cervical cancer was provided to all participants in the local language. ‘In addition, women in the control group were advised where to seek cervical screening, diagnosis and treatopen www.openthemagazine.com 43
Maharashtra is now expected to run a pilot programme, using vinegar as a screening agent for cervical cancer test case Shanti Devi Maurya, another victim of cervical cancer, was part of a ‘vinegar test’ study in Mumbai
ment services and were given adequate information to [help them] seek screening [at] their local healthcare facility, including our collaborating institutions,’ he says over email. Since 2012, researchers on the NCIstudy have started offering VIA screening to those in the control group. According to Dr Shastri, this was provided because they had already been able to establish VIA’s efficacy and has nothing to do with OHRP’s findings. Dr R Sankaranarayanan claims VIA screening was provided to the control group between 2007 and 2011 and HPV screening to the control group in Osmanabad since 2010. He also states that those who were diagnosed with cervical cancer in the control group received free treatment. Claiming that study participants are often poor, illiterate and unaware of their rights, Amulya Nidhi, co-convener of the Swasthya Adhikar Manch (SAM), a health rights forum that has filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court (SC) asking for stricter regulation in clinical trials in India, says, “The studies may or may not have been essential to science and India. But the rights of the human subjects are paramount. Absolute informed consent is a must.” The SAM plans to mention the 254 deaths, the women who died in the three control groups, at the next SC hearing. Critics of the three studies question the need to judge the efficacy of a screening agent by forming a control group that receives no screening and then monitoring how many die without it. In 2009, Sujit 44 open
Rathod, an epidemiologist of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, wrote in IJME: ‘It is of particular interest why cervical cancer mortality was a necessary endpoint… A non-mortality endpoint has been found acceptable in another low-resource setting trial... It is questionable, then, whether human experimentation is required to demonstrate a mortality benefit from cervical cancer screening.’ Says Dr Suba over email, ‘The deathrate measurements used by Drs Sankar and Shastri are scientifically unnecessary and scientifically pointless.’ He wrote inIJME, ‘Randomised trials that compare cervical screening to no-screening to confirm that cervical screening prevents cervical cancer are as scientifically pointless as randomised trials that compare smoking to no-smoking to confirm that nosmoking prevents lung cancer.’ Dr Shastri, however, claims that studying mortality over a long period is necessary because it most effectively proves the efficacy of a novel approach. He says in his defence, “The internal review boards of Tata Memorial Hospital and NCI have looked carefully into the ethics of this study. This [study] can immensely benefit the country. Now armchair ethicists with no experience of healthcare in developing countries are trying to find fault with it.” Making a similar argument, Dr Sankaranarayanan claims the most rigorous assessment of a new method calls for measuring cancer-specific mortality reduction. According to Dr Shastri, some Pap-smear advocates are
worried that the efficacy of alternate screening methods may soon be proven. Besides, he argues, the standard care protocol in India for cervical cancer, unlike in the West, involves no screening. ll three studies, however, run afoul of the Declaration of Helsinki’s ethical guidelines on medical research, which state that the benefits, risks, burdens and effectiveness of any new intervention must be compared with those of the best current proven interventions. Pointing this out, Sandhya Srinivasan, consulting editor of IJME, says, “There are at least three proven screening methods—the Pap smear, VIA, and testing for HPV. And the women in the control arms of these trials were denied any proven intervention. They were subjected to the risk of serious and irreversible harm and this clearly violated the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki.” She also points out that the three studies paid scant respect to the principle of clinical equipoise. By this principle, a clinical trial should be undertaken only on the assumption that there is genuine uncertainty over whether a certain intervention is superior to others. “None of these studies would have been permitted in the US, the country of the organisations funding these trials,” she adds. Pointing out that VIA and other methods of cancer detection have been known for several years now, Suba writes in the journal, ‘You can’t let people die to show something you already know.’ n
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books
mindspace Suicide Note for Mr Modi
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O p e n s pa c e
Shahid Kapoor Vidya Balan Kangna Ranaut
62
n p lu
Purani Jeans The Amazing Spider-Man 2
61 Cinema reviews
Nikon D4s Ulysse Nardin Marine Diver Marshall Hanwell
60
Tech & style
Scent and Sensibility Preventing Premature Deaths Global Warming Not Uniform
56
Science
Kiran Nadar’s art collection
a rt s
I Allan Sealy Jug Suraiya on slang
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ashish sharma
the reclusive pagoda builder A conversation with I Allan Sealy on his new book 50
ashish sharma
Books Ever Skyward Irwin Allan Sealy’s strange and marvellous
book, his seventh, is a mysterious but simple tale of how a tower arose in his garden Divya Guha
The Small Wild Goose Pagoda
By Irwin Allan Sealy aleph book company | 304 pages | Rs 595
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n old, now dead, Sanskritist said the Mandukya Upanishad, the shortest of all the Upanishads, offers enough for one to attain salvation. Made up of 12 short stanzas, the scripture talks about ‘Aum’ and its meaning. One might repeat the three-part mystic syllable—in which ‘a’ is a state of wakefulness, ‘u’ a state of dreaming and accessing inward experiences, and ‘m’ a state of deep sleep or nothingness. It’s a nothingness that leads to a fourth state: of sunyata, neither knowing nor unknowing, of freedom from relative experience, its sole essence being the conscious Self—with a capital ‘S’. Mandukya, the name, comes from manduka, sanskrit for ‘frog’, whose pointless metronomic croaking—similar to the meditative repetition of ‘aum’—inspired some ancient sage to name his or her masterwork thus. Irwin Allan Sealy’s seventh book, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, has at its heart a metaphor that is just as esoteric. His books are complex, their many different and connected parts like a symmetrical Chinese traditional architectural complex where the story is incidental, like chi, Chinese for ‘energy’, flowing harmoniously through a network of channels that are not always easy to analyse, his situations infinitely simpler than they seem, having both real and imaginary parts; nature, humans and their endeavours linked like the bonds of a chemical compound. One September, the author sat at his kitchen window eating breakfast, watching a frog that has appeared after the monsoons, but is the first of the season, which to his knowledge is unfroglike:
‘1 September PAGODA MONTH! A little frog, the first of the monsoon. At the monsoon’s end! It hops onto the shingle and sits very still. So it’s still there at the end of breakfast. I go out and see whether it’s not a dead leaf after all, must lean right over it till the morning glitters in its eye. Once frogs were the monsoon. Video, video, they taunted me through nights I sat up writing a celluloid novel, Hero. That great shrill chorus silenced. Saved as a 19 may 2014
ringtone. This from its unfroglike markings could be a young toad. But where is the jewel Pliny put in his forehead?’ And that is the entry for that day—a brief stream-of-consciousness expression of an event in nature observed from his kitchen window, written with Zen minimalism and a canny Latin cross-reference. Nothing obvious follows. Like the frog’s untimely appearance. Indeed, the next day, the author, who is also the protagonist, takes measurements for a skywell he must put in a pagoda he is building in the corner of his 100-sq-yard plot, once a portico where the Old Lady, his 1959 Fiat, was once parked. What does it mean? What can it mean? How does it matter? A pagoda rises, as if to keep time… and time passes: stepmother dies, ‘tochter’ quits architecture, the Old Lady is replaced by a German hatchback, the peach tree has a bumper crop, a mobile tower also crops up, an earthquake rattles underfoot, destroying lives in the mountains nearby, and so it goes. Pagoda reads like the diary of a classic-minded writer, composed yet comical, an eccentric who had come to believe that owning land, a corner of the world—a very small piece of it, chock-a-block with loved objects, trees, bird-life, the odd stray pig, a murdered frangipani, and another rescued one, frogs, and of course earthworms—was a bit like owning a bit of your own self (lower case ‘s’). The book is a novel-length meditation—of an unknown duration—collapsed into 14 months. The names of some characters may have changed, but “no liberty with the characters” is taken as such, he says. And that is as fictional as a lot of fiction gets these days. Sealy claims that he lacks the gift for entirely fictional plots: “Unless you have a huge imagination, of a Gabo—someone of that rank, not a mere mortal like me—you might as well come clean.” What you read is what has gone through the author-protagonist’s mind. It’s a book that may be described as ‘literary narrative non-fiction’, in which the author occasionally puts one person’s words in another’s mouth. This is how the interpretive path in this novel is best charted—as long as you agree that the hauling of bricks, the measuring of iron rods and the handling of putty capture an essence of things, just as literature might. “If I turn to wood, it’s not a rejection of open www.openthemagazine.com 51
the word, it is the recognition of wood,” he says, lifting a of one kind or another: table-mat off a table that hosts coffee sent by a relative in ‘Pagodas are either ideal or real, but seldom both simultaneousAustralia, several patties from Dehradun’s popular Ellora ly, thus the object that bulks behind my eyelid should not be conbakery, and some chocolate cake on a china plate that has on fused with the object that survives when my eye is removed from it a drawing of the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, two eloping lov- the scene, a subset of the unreal is the fruit of a mythical tree, as in ers and a man chasing them with a stick across a bridge. the phrase ‘to shake a pagoda tree’.’ Sealy has several chores lined up for the day, everyday And yes, at times the book’s prose will take a turn for the things that must be done. But his novel somehow remains cuckoo—several turns, in fact—but is all the more delightindependent of the everyday, and exists on a plane far more ful for it, if in a twisted and bizarre way. subtle. Helping along is his verbal magic—the way he writes A few facts about this pagoda. Of three floors, which is a about birds and animals and even inanimate objects such as good odd number, the ideal behind it is spiritual nourishStoneman, the author’s friend. ment. Fittingly, the ground floor is a kitchen, and the flights He poses next to Stoneman for the photographer—a pile of iron-and-marble stairs on either side of the pagoda take of stones along a Dehradun canal, a you to its ‘rain room’, which is set favourite haunt of his when he was with a desk and some books, and younger. He introduces us thus: the skywell, which is a hole in the “This is my friend looking downroof really. The ‘ideal’ here is that wards, a little pensively.” the room’s roof ought to be the sky, If you stare, you see it too: three a conceit—or folly—one can only rocks. A head, the torso and marvel at. stumpy leg. It’s the same with his Like in his debut novel The novel. If you want to go along on Trotternama, the protagonist has this ride, you must believe. italicised monologues in this book, There is anthroposophy apleneven as imaginary dialogues are ty in his daily observations, and he undertaken between the Student, lives by his own therapeutic and the Householder, the Forest creative idiosyncracies that remain Dweller and the Ascetic—purportclose to nature. It’s his chosen way edly based on the Hindu concepto achieve physical and psychic tion of the Life of Man. Each has a peace—not happiness exactly, but separate persona, and they relate to a means to cut through the gloom each other with the verisimilitude sometimes. of real people who are symbolically “Some degree of the book is all actually the author. Confused? fiction,” he says, “such as the Don’t be. sequence of events. But I took no Further, there is an Inquisitor liberty with the characters. That’s who has conversations with ‘Me’, where the truth is. The seat of the the author-narrator. The Home truth in the story could not have Science Student is his wife, and He been got at except by looking, from Who Holds the Reins is the senior beginning to end, at the people Sealy, now 90, who has just come to something of a diary Sketches and scribbles by the author that appear in his book I knew.” live with them from the UK. The beginning—read the extract The people are real alright. There that follows this article—starts you is an endless tedium to their acoff blind, and you gather slowly that the story is set in India. tions, which includes a lot of manual labour as they build In Dehradun. A visit to China, though, changed the direction the pagoda. It’s so banal at times, it just has to be real. As a of the book: reader, you wander off but return when something interest‘The idea for the pagoda came from a recent journey but its oring happens—even though nothing does for long whiles. A igin lay in some childhood afternoon spent poring over a willow bit like some Abbas Kiarostami-style aimlessly long wide-anpattern plate. Was that my first sight of China, that cold English gle shots of Iranian village life. But you know there is a cerfantasy in blue and white? Had I just asked my mother why we tain inner exposition and implied beauty if you can see it—a called the crockery we ate off china? ’ metaphor for writing and reading itself. This is a strange and marvellous book.
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few facts about pagodas. They descend from Buddhist
stupas. They are not in themselves sacred, but may be ceremonial. They are sometimes attached to bigger temples but may also have their own caretaker—and are usually ‘follies’
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ealy’s dehradun home, the home in the book, is hum-
ble and its interiors made up of comfortable though spare furniture from the Raj era with nothing imperial or roy19 May 2014
al about it. There are other homes in this town that might slight this one, but no slight is taken. Seen through the book, though, the place seems immense, the bird-visitors positively regal, and the gardener, mason and labourer a holy pastoral trinity. And most importantly, this book is about work, the plain drudgery of it. “This book was light. It deals with the cold hard facts of workers’ lives who are all emotionally involved in a piece of work. And then, things become more realistic.” His father’s wife dies (as the epigraph of the book warns, ‘Death comes as the house is built’; though one must keep building).
The scenery towards the end of the book changes dramatically, and the mood changes too. His father is ill and I can hear him in another room. A walking stick is propped against a settee nearby in the garden that his father could use until a week ago before he had a stroke. Sealy has had a long and successful career. He has written books that have fans as well as detractors, but remains underrated possibly because he does not like book promotional tours and is averse to the telling of a tale too easily told. He’d much rather make sure the plants are being watered. And watch a family of sunbirds enjoy a birdbath. n
excerpt
Not a Conventional Pagoda
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little past midnight a man comes to the gate of the house hidden by trees and, finding it locked, glances each way, gets a grip on the top of the boundary wall, and hauls himself up in the shadows of the sodium streetlight. His right foot scrabbles on the flat of the wall, finds no hold and pushes in hard, so there’s a moment when he’s hanging out into nothing over the storm-water drain. A stick figure, all bent arms and legs. It’s done in two or three seconds. This spider, now balanced on the top of the wall. Now not there. He lands in a flower bed, on something stalky, his cheek brushed by the cobweb he fell through, a hand patting his back so he turns sharply into the angle of the wall, just a frond, then stumbles backward through a thorn bush out onto grass. The house is in darkness. He crosses the lawn and climbs three steps up into the verandah. Cautiously tries the mesh door. It opens, sticking a little. Unbolted means they’re away. Feels for the padlock and yes it’s there, heavy, bevel-edged, squarish in the hand, brass, not new, not old. Draws out the crowbar that hangs down the inside of his jeans leg, a sword he sometimes thinks, sticks the business end in behind the hasp, and begins to force. The hasp buckles but doesn’t give. He wastes no more time on it. Puts down the crowbar and takes out the small tools of his trade. Time he has. In twenty minutes the lock is laid open, its tines scattered on the floor. He lifts the bent staple and slides back the bolt. Pushes open the door. Pulls it to behind him. In. Stands a moment while his eyes adjust. Always this first survey in the dark, his gaze sweeping a notional horizon. The terrain. Never less than knowable, so open to violation he sometimes walks down the street looking at women and thinking: my, you’re a nice house. It starts with a gate, though you could say it started with a wall. First Habilis showed me how you raise a wall, then he taught me how to lay a beam. Peace, not security, was what I
19 may 2014
was after: that, and a certain effect. Traffic on the road outside had increased, and a high sheer face would, I felt, throw street noise back. And, I wanted a gateway rather than a gate… The idea for the pagoda came from a recent journey but its origin lay in some childhood afternoon spent poring over a willow pattern plate. Was that my first sight of China, that cold English fantasy in blue and white? Had I just asked my mother why we called the crockery we ate off china? Or did the two words come together in my mind as I hung over the strange foreign scene? It was, but how was I to know, the best-known pattern of its time, product of a vogue for things Chinese that seized Europe in the eighteenth century. And the tragic story it told could hardly fail to make an impression on a child. The willow pattern shows a mandarin’s lakeside house and garden with three figures crossing a bridge. According to legend the two figures in front are young lovers caught eloping; the one coming behind, brandishing what appears to be a whip, is the enraged father who drives them into the little pavilion on the other side and sets fire to it. A majestic tree of heaven towers over the ornate pillars and pagoda roof of the rich man’s house. In the sky above, appear two turtle doves facing each other, the released souls of the lovers billing while the willow of the pattern weeps gently below on the bank of the lake, leaning over the bridge to caress the ill-fated pair in life. Some image like this would have been at the heart of my very notion pagoda. Our pagoda is at the end of the old drive, on the former portico. Stand back from the gate of the seasons and you can see it from the main road. It rises from the hidden and longabsorbed portico, its outline visible above the gate beam through the weeping branches of a rosewood tree. The eye is led up a series of crossbeams (the hanging gate beam, the beam over the sunporch beyond, and a further beam on the portico itself) as up a giant flight of white steps to the open deck of the pagoda’s uppermost storey where a glass chimney stands over the skywell. Hints and references apart—the skywell is one—it’s not a conventional pagoda.... n open www.openthemagazine.com 53
Books Who Gave Slang a Bad Name? The rich and
complex history of slang demonstrates how we have always felt the need to express all that is raw, emotive and visceral through a spontaneous counter-language JUG SURAIYA
LANGUAGE! 500 YEARS OF THE VULGAR TONGUE
By Jonathan Green atlantic books | 419 pages | £25
W
hen it was pointed out to him that the reference
he’d made in one of his poems to a ‘nun’s twat’ constituted a gross indelicacy, to say the least, Robert Browning was flabbergasted. He confessed that he had no idea that ‘twat’ meant what in those Victorian times—when legs of pianos could not be mentioned in polite company— might euphemistically be called a woman’s ‘private parts’, adding that he always fancied that the word referred to some sort of ‘headgear’ worn by members of a convent. Poor Browning. He wouldn’t have committed such a solecism had he had the advantage of consulting Jonathan Green’s authoritative work on slang words and other forms of so-called ‘bad language’ which constitute the subtext—or sometimes the super-text—of our everyday communication, both spoken and written. Green is at pains to point out that he is not a linguist but a lexicographer—a collector and tabulator of words—and his book is a picaresque narrative of what he calls the ‘film noir of language’, the visceral words which come from the gut— or the gutter—and which add punch to our expressions. He defines slang as a ‘counter-language’, a language that subverts and says ‘no’ to the conventions of the day; it is the language not of the fashionable salon or elegant drawing room, but the parlance of the streets, the pavement ‘poetry of the poor’. With reference to the subtitle of his book, Green emphasises that his use of the word ‘vulgar’ comes from the Latin ‘vulgus’ for ‘the crowd’, or ‘the people’. Green traces the recorded origins of slang to the Arab world of the 10th century, safely distant from the censorious and ‘limiting obscurities of omnipresent Christianity’. What has come to be called slang began as a criminal argot, a codified trade talk, devised by beggars, vagabonds and petty thieves to avoid detection by eavesdropping authority. This verbal underbelly was constitutionally inclined to coin words and expressions which, both literally and metaphorically, hit below the belt and alluded to sexual organs or acts, or to the evacuation of bodily wastes. For example, ‘fart’ could be both a verb and a noun, referring to an unlikeable or
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‘windy’ person. Similarly ‘arse’ came to mean an unpleasant individual as well as a part of the anatomy. As slang was a secret language, a subaltern lexis, the historian of slang faces the problem that there are few if any archival records relating to its early roots. Indeed, the English word ‘slang’ itself has a conjectural etymology. Green tracks the story of slang to 1758, citing a pamphlet called ‘A Plan for a Hospital for Decayed Thief-takers’ which contains the sentence: ‘The master who teaches them must be well versed in the cant language, commonly called the Slang Patter, in which they should by all means excel.’ The pamphlet attributes the original manuscript to a Jonathan Wild, who was hanged in 1725 in London, apparently for receiving stolen goods, while the printer signs himself ‘Henry Humbug’. Like a stealthy thief in the night, slang masks its narrative with secrecy. Compilers of dictionaries and other word-sleuths have suggested that the story of slang is as old as civilisation itself. Green quotes John Camdem Hotten’s Slang Dictionary, published in 1859, in which the compiler notes: ‘the “fast” men of buried Nineveh... may have cracked Slang jokes on the steps of Sennarcherib’s palace; and the stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks of ... Babylon may, for aught we know, be covered with slang hieroglyphics unknown to modern antiquarians’. Slang’s up-yours attitude to all officialdom earned it more than its fair share of critics and expurgators. Though established writers like Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope used slang terms in their works, as had Shakespeare and Chaucer much earlier, Victor Hugo attacked such usage as ‘an odious phraseology grafted on the general language, like a hideous excrescence… Misfortune is dark and crime is darker still, and it is of these two darknesses put together that argot is composed’. However, Hugo’s compatriot, Emile Zola, turned argot, or ‘langue populaire’—the ‘popular language’ or language of the people—into what Green calls the ‘cornerstone of literary realism’. For his pains, Zola had his works banned in Britain for ‘immorality’, and the publisher of his works in English translation was put behind bars. The war between ribaldry and repression had begun. Green quotes the lexicographer John F Genung who in 1893 wrote ‘slang is to a people’s language what an epidemic disease is to their bodily constitution ... Like a disease, too, it is severest where the sanitary conditions are most 19 May 2014
neglected’. In his book Progressive English (1918), James C Fernold thundered his own broadside against this alternative diction: ‘Slang ... saves the trouble—and the glory—of thinking. The same cheap word or phrase may be used for any one of a hundred ideas ... Slang is the advertisement for mental poverty’. So, is slang in fact the spoken equivalent of a labour-saving device, breeding mental and verbal laziness? Or is it like a Swiss army knife, capable of multi-purpose and inventive usage? It depends on your point of view, or rather, the point you wish to make with your vocabulary. Though Green does not mention it in his book, there is a telling anecdote about Rajneesh, the Indian ‘godman’, who later called himself Osho. When asked by a disciple what he thought of the word ‘fuck’, the self-styled sage of sexuality replied, without batting an id, that it was the most beautiful, expressive and versatile word in the English language. It could be used as a noun, or as a verb, both transitive and intransitive. Suffixed with ‘about’, it meant to play around or dally. Followed by ‘off’, it was an injunction to go away. It could be used as a participial adjective to connote exhaustion. Or as a simple adjective expressing scorn or contempt, or, on the other hand, great approbation. It could be utilised both as an adverb or adjective to denote a superlative, or as an expression indicative of surprise, consternation, delight, wonder, anger, disgust, dismay, elation and discovery. It could also be used as a purely meaningless qualification, merely for the heck of it. What is the genealogy of this most-used four-letter word in the English language? Green tends to disagree with those who have suggested that the word derives from the Italian ‘futuo’, ‘used specifically with a client copulating with a whore’, and suggests instead a derivation from ‘fottuere’, also of Italian origin, which a 16th century Anglo-Italian lexicographer, John Florio, gave as one of his synonyms for the Anglo-Saxon term, the French equivalent being ‘foutre’. Playing it safe, the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary begs the question with a terse ‘Origin unknown’. Despite its long, if obscure, lineage and its common usage in everyday speech, the f-word remained taboo in print, with rare exceptions such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which with its self-consciously pedagogic naming of body parts and their functions reads like a biology textbook for middle-school 19 may 2014
children. As late as 1948, in his Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer had to resort to the three-letter substitute of ‘fug’ for the real four-letter McCoy. But the ramparts of prudery—the bastion of the archetypal censor, Miss Grundy, who would enforce a chastity belt on language to protect its illusory virginity—were rapidly being breached by writers like Henry Miller and William Burroughs who sang the body electric, playing their dark music on the hidden chords of the libido. The 300,000-odd fans who flocked to the open-air music festival at Woodstock, USA, chorused the anthem of the Age of Aquarius when they followed the lead of the singer who urged them to give him an ‘Eff’, a ‘You’, a ‘See’, and a ‘Kay’, and they thundered their response, blowing the socks of Miss Grundy. However, while the f-word has proved to be what might be called Anirban Ghosh one of the ‘hardy perennials’ of slang, weathering many changes of years and seasons, many if not most slang expressions wither away with time, to be replaced by new terms. To be at the cutting edge of language, slang has to constantly reinvent itself. Green traces the evolution of this parallel language through medieval England; the slave plantations of the southern states of America; the two World Wars; the growing politicisation of the American college campus, particularly during the Vietnam War; and Afro-American gangsta rap and Ebonics, which some claim is a distinct language by itself, with a vocabulary totally impenetrable by the uninitiated. But, as Green notes, even when it shrouds itself in secrecy, English slang has always been a promiscuous strumpet. The approximately 125,000 terms and phrases the author has collated on his database can be traced to no fewer than 19 languages, starting with French, Italian and German, and including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Hindi (thanks largely to the British Raj and Kipling), Yoruba and Zulu. Green concludes with the observation: ‘Slang long since took to itself the lexis of humanity’s emotional and social downside. Our less admirable but absolutely unavoidable selves… It has always been needed. It still is. It always will be.’ Slang is spontaneous; it is extempore. Slang is what happens when language breaks into jazz. Green plays an accomplished riff to that catchy rhythm. Which is what makes his book such a fucking good read. Or, for the sake of any residual Grundys still out there, a fugging good read. n open www.openthemagazine.com 55
arts
For the Love of Common People Art collector Kiran Nadar’s museum project aims to break barriers of art appreciation by attracting popular interest Deepa Bhasthi
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A
t times, a story insists upon being placed within the contexts of time and ambience; it isn’t enough to merely start where it begins and with whom. That’s why what surrounds the cream sofa on which I sit to speak with art collector and patron, Kiran Nadar, begs to be described. Each work around us is as much a part of her story as what she will tell me over the next hour or so. A large LN Tallur piece guards the entrance to the section of her plush South Delhi house “where all the art work on 19 May 2014
DISCERNING eye Kiran Nadar in front of MF Husain’s Mahabharata (1990) at her residence
the light streaming in from the French windows close by. Ravindra Reddy’s figurative woman braids her hair on the other side of the room, while a work of Shibu Natesan overlooks smaller artefacts and more candid photos of Nadar collapsing with laughter on her husband’s shoulder, and of daughter Roshni with her mother. That hot Delhi summer afternoon, Kiran Nadar and I sit across from a 30-odd-year-old Rameshwar Broota oilon-canvas, “one of my earliest collections”, she says, as she explains how she turned art collector. “It was more of an accident. We were building a new home and I bought a few pieces to decorate the house,” she says. Those few pieces soon became a lot of pieces of art, and she found her wall space fast filling up. A ‘collection’ began to take shape, dominated by Indian Modernists who she has always been partial to. Nadar’s treasures include many Husains, FN Souzas, Manjit Bawas, Nasreen Mohammedis and other usual suspects among the Moderns. They grace office walls, her homes and a couple of museum spaces.
N
ashish sharma
display is”. Just opposite that are a series of personal photographs perched on a mantle. An FN Souza, an Amrita Sher-Gil—of elephants in a pond— flank the entrance to her office into which we are ushered. We are a tad early, and I use the few minutes we have while waiting to peer around the room. A painting from Shakti Maira’s Within series overlooks a tall standing statue of the Buddha next to a table. In the alcove on the opposite wall is an Anjolie Ela Menon painting, surrounded by books and curios. From Frederick 19 May 2014
Forsyth’s The Fist of God to tomes on Amrita Sher-Gil annotated by nephew Vivan Sundaram, to catalogues and something on alternative healing, the books are an eclectic mix. The shelves also have family photographs: of holidays, candid shots of a much-younger Kiran Nadar with her husband Shiv Nadar and his mother, a sepia-toned college snapshot of the HCL founder from his Tiruchirappalli days. Elsewhere in the house is a very large MF Husain, and his horses look ready to spring up and gallop away in
adar speaks of how she has
refined the way she goes about collecting art. “I still buy something I like, but the overall process has changed. I look at gaps in my collection and try to fill them now.” She has a group of people who help her. Among them is Roobina Karode, chief curator at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), which she set up four years ago. Nadar remains actively involved at the acquisition stage, though. While she is not unduly concerned about the market value of the piece she is considering, she tries to research the artist and his/her practice. Largely, it’s about the art’s intrinsic appeal. “I am a little more instinctive,” she says. Would an art critic’s opinion of an artist influence her decisions? “I go by what I like,” she says, “Though I read a critic’s opinion, I am not influenced by it.” The art market in India has been precarious, of late; the one for contemporary art, especially moody. After the open www.openthemagazine.com 57
slump a few years ago, there has been little recovery, and Nadar wonders briefly if collecting contemporary art through those years might have been a bad idea. “But then, I have never looked at collecting art as an investment. Maybe the contemporary artists I have will appreciate [in value] in the coming years. These days one has to buy intelligently,” she says. Art hasn’t been an ‘investment’ as such, but is ‘brand worthiness’, the big bucks that some artists command, an important factor? Nadar admits she has a reputation of being a big bidder at auctions, an image she’s been trying to play down. “The work is important, not the money part. It is very stressful being at auctions, but I cannot have anyone else bid for me. They will have to check with me over the phone, and that would be more stressful.” Not just her private collection, even KNMA’s permanent collection includes ‘senior contemporary artists’ such as Amar Kanwar, Shilpa Gupta, Ranjani Shettar, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta. She is picky about the younger lot in her collection. She only wants those she thinks show promise. Artists from beyond the Subcontinent don’t get a look-in either, for that’s another league altogether, Nadar says, though she picked up three Richard Mosse photographs recently. “It was a one-off purchase; I’m not looking to build a collection of works of foreign artists.” She won’t name her favourite artist, insisting each work and every artist has a special significance. Is her husband an art enthusiast too? She shakes her head and says all he does is monitor her budget; what works she decides to collect is entirely her decision. The KNMA was started when her walls began to get crowded and she figured it was time to throw her collection open to public viewing. Four years on, drawing people into the museum’s two spaces—on the HCL campus in Noida and the other within a plush mall in Saket—is still her biggest challenge. The art fraternity does come by, with the museum having proven itself an attraction for artists and art buffs, but getting spontaneous drop-ins by people 58 open
at large is not easy—and it is their appreciation that she’s looking to arouse. We discuss art receptiveness in various metros. “In Kolkata and Mumbai, people go to museums and galleries,” she says, “In Delhi, the nature of the city is such that culture isn’t something people do.” To change that, the KNMA periodically organises outreach programmes—talks, seminars, courses—apart from retrospectives and performance art shows. “We have programmes for school and college students to inculcate art appreciation in them,” she says. To widen the museum’s appeal, a bigger independent space is under planning. The Shiv Nadar Foundation,
Kiran Nadar admits she has a reputation of being a big bidder at art auctions, an image she has been trying to play down. “The work is important, not the money part,” she says which sponsors the KNMA, is currently in the process of buying land in Delhi to build a new space for it. “We want to build a ‘destination’, like the Bahai temple, where the structure itself is a destination,” says Nadar, “Museums have to be designed differently from other buildings. We will look for a foreign architect with experience in designing a museum.” That may take three or four years to come up. For now, the KNMA within HCL’s tech park in Noida grants its visitors an intimate acquaintance with art, away from the city lights. The works currently on display here offer a contextual history of Modernism in the country. Graphite-on-paper drawings of Eve, Rain, September reclining/standing from FN Souza’s sketchbook, vignettes from Husain’s
year in Prague, and his Toys, Richard Bartholomew’s study of fellow artists Nasreen Mohammedi, Ram Kumar, Manjit Bawa and VS Gaitonde, and Madan Mahatta’s black-and-white photographs that match the modernist architecture that was shaping a new Delhi, apart from a few works of Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee—all these are on view as part of a show entitled An Unfinished Portrait: Vignettes from the KNMA Collection. The show at the museum’s Saket wing is bigger. Subodh Gupta’s Line of Control, a mushroom cloud of steel utensils—his signature style—occupies the lobby outside. Inside the museum, a Nalini Malani retrospective is on. Alongside, clubbed as Is it what you think?, a show curated by Roobina Karode has works like Shilpa Gupta’s Someone Else : A Library of 100 Books Written Anonymously or Under Pseudonyms, Idris Khan’s The Devil’s Wall, Zarina Hashmi’s meditative work with paper, and other works by Rumanna Hussain, Himmat Shah, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Atul Dodiya and Shirazeh Houshiary among a total of 16 contemporary well-knowns. While going through Sheikh’s concertina format books, I am reminded of how my conversation with Kiran Nadar ended the previous day. I had asked if she sees herself in the role of a patron to contemporary artists. Shaking her head, she said that wasn’t so; she’s not a patron of individual artists. “I see myself as a patron of the arts instead.” A regular attendee of biennales across the world, the Basel Art Fair is her next stop. She squeezes time out for many other interests as well. She is a professional bridge player, and a selfconfessed sports enthusiast, regularly taking in cricket, golf and tennis. During the photo session, I spot a lovely photo of Shiv and Kiran Nadar’s only daughter Roshni with her young son. Does she collect too, I ask just before leaving. “No,” Nadar replies, “She buys art for her house but is not building a collection.” That, I am reminded, was exactly how she’d said she herself had started. n 19 May 2014
up in smoke Chinese women have one of the world’s lowest smoking rates, but Chinese men have one of the highest: 52 per cent of them are smokers and 72 per cent are exposed to second-hand smoke
Scent and Sensibility Humans can sniff masculinity apart from femininity
Preventing Premature Deaths
Hans Neleman/getty images
science
A
ccording to a new study, the smell of active steroid ingredients in men and women influence others’ perceptions of them as either masculine or feminine. The existence of pheromones, or chemical signals secreted by the body that act as sexual cues, is known to exist in many animals. But until now, evidence of human pheromones had been inconclusive. Previous studies have indicated that androstadienone, a chemical compound found in male semen and armpits, gives women a positive mood, but not men. A similar effect has been identified of the compound estratetraenol found in female urine; where men exposed to this chemical were found to have their mood altered positively. For this study, published in Current Biology, researchers of China’s Chinese Academy of Science made men and women—both hetero- and homosexual—watch moving dot figures, also known as point-light walkers (PLWs). These dot figures consist of 15 dots that represent the 12 major joints in the human body, plus the pelvis, thorax and head. Participants were then exposed to either androstadienone, estra60 open
tetraenol or a neutral solution— all of which smelt like cloves to prevent any conscious recognition—and made to judge whether the dot walkers were masculine or feminine. The researchers found that when heterosexual females smelt androstadienone, they saw the figures as masculine. By contrast, heterosexual males perceived the walkers as feminine when they smelt estratetraenol. Interestingly, the researchers found that homosexual males responded to gender pheromones more like heterosexual females did. The researchers report that bisexual or homosexual female responses to the same scents fell somewhere in between those of heterosexual males and females. The researchers write in the journal: ‘The results provide the first direct evidence that the two human steroids communicate opposite gender information that is differentially effective to the two sex groups based on their sexual orientation. Moreover, they demonstrate that human visual gender perception draws on subconscious chemosensory biological cues, an effect that has been hitherto unsuspected.’ n
According to a new study published in The Lancet, reducing or curbing just six modifiable risk factors—tobacco use, harmful alcohol use, salt intake, high blood pressure and blood sugar and obesity—to globally-agreed target levels could prevent more than 37 million premature deaths over 15 years. For, it would mean containing the big four: cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, cancer and diabetes. On tobacco use, the researchers calculate that a more ambitious 50 per cent reduction in smoking by 2025 would reduce men’s risk of dying prematurely by more than 24 per cent, and women’s risk by 20 per cent. n
Global Warming Not Uniform
New research by a team of Florida State University scientists indicates that the world is indeed getting warmer, but historical records of 100 years show that it hasn’t happened everywhere at the same rate. For example, from about 1910 to 1980, while the rest of the world was warming up, some areas south of the equator—near the Andes—were cooling down and then had no change until the mid 1990s. Other areas near and south of the equator didn’t see significant changes in comparison with the rest of the world. The team found that warming first started in the regions circling the Arctic and the subtropical regions of both hemispheres. But the largest accumulated warming so far has been at the northern mid-latitudes. n 19 May 2014
time-lapse photography is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is lower than that used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. This technique is the opposite of high-speed photography or slow motion
tech&style
Nikon D4s At 25,600 ISO, 11 frames per second and continual autofocus, this one is a nocturnal beast gagandeep Singh Sapra
Ulysse Nardin Marine w Diver
Price on request
Rs 419,950
The fully redesigned Marine Diver from Ulysse Nardin showcases all the qualities of a genuine diving watch, with its screw-locked crown, rotating bezel and case that is water-resistant to 300 metres. Powered by the self-winding caliber UUN-26, this timepiece has a power reserve of 42 hours. It is available in steel, mounted on a rubber strap or steel bracelet. There is also a women’s version. n
Marshall Hanwell
T
he D4S is an upgrade of the
Nikon D4, but most of what has been tweaked is inside its magnesium alloy body. A brand new 16 megapixel full-frame CMOS processor, backed by the original Expeed 4 processor, gives you a much higher ISO rating at 25,600 and faster shooting speed of 11 frames per second with a continual autofocus, making this camera a lowlight master. The camera can capture scenes lit just by candlelight, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call it a nocturnal beast. Like the D4, the D4S retains the XQD and the CF card slots, but the D4S has deeper grip, assuring you a better handle on the camera, and the D Pad has been improved, giving you better control and feel. The D4S is great if you like to shoot subjects in motion, as its autofocus system is accurate and fast, and it acquires and tracks subjects with ease. A fifth autofocus mode—Group-Area
19 may 2014
AF—of the D4S automatically focuses at four points above and around your central point of focus, thus giving you a sharp image as well as better auto exposure and autofocus tracking. Nikon has also taken its user feedback seriously, loading a gigabit Ethernet on the camera for faster file transfers to a computer. It also has a small RAW file option that allows faster shoots in burst mode without generating big files. The D4S supports movie recordings of a frame size of 1,920 x 1,080 with a frame rate of 50p or 60p; the picture quality is sharp and clear. Whether it is a home movie you are shooting or a time lapse, its quality will impress you. But then, there are a few downsides too—the D4S cannot record full-length movies, and, while you can adjust its audio level, you cannot do any ‘focus peaking’ while you shoot a film. n
Rs 63,500
A limited edition loudspeaker that embodies Marshall’s legacy of sound, the Hanwell offers a big stage performance in your living room. Unlike most speakers, this one only hooks up over a wire; no Bluetooth in this one. Connect your iPhone or your iPod using a 3.5 mm jack and be blown away by its sound. It uses a pair of 6-inch woofers and dome tweeters to put out 100 Watts of pure sound. The Hanwell will not fill a room like typical stereo speakers do, but its dedicated treble and bass controllers let you adjust the sound to your liking. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in
open www.openthemagazine.com 61
CINEMA
Coming of age Remember Ek Chhotisi Love Story starring Manisha Koirala and a 14-year-old boy in ‘love’ with her? That boy discovering his adolescence was Aditya Seal. Now, 12 years later, Aditya has made a transition from a teenaged Peeping Tom to a rich, charming, fun-loving college dude in Purani Jeans
Purani Jeans A moving meditation on friendship that falls short in the acting department ajit duara
o n scr een
current
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Director Marc Webb cast Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone,
Jamie Foxx
Score ★★★★★
SEAL , RWANI, ADITYA Cast TANUJ VI Bassu JI SHRI CHATTR Director TANU
T
his film is dedicated to Jim
Morrison. It begins with a quote by him on the nature of friendship: “A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.” The film attempts to reflect some of Morrison’s more elegiac lyrics—This is the end/ Beautiful friend/ This is the end/ My only friend, the end—and the film ends with a shot of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where the rock legend is buried. However, the events in the lives of this group of friends don’t quite merit the lofty tenor of the dedication. The film starts in New York where Sid (Tanuj Virwani) is contemplating his return to Kasauli. When he arrives at the small cantonment town, a flood of memories is unleashed. It’s all about eternal friendship and the pretty girl who, unintentionally, turned the bond into something more temporal. That’s what women do, apparently, in Kasauli. Purani Jeans is full of the myths of male bonding, and some of
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the attitudes in the film could be interpreted as sexist; still, there is a naiveté to the film that is charming. Sam (Aditya Seal) is the aristocrat of the town and his best friend is Sid. Both friends are Mummy’s boys, and Sam, who is really into Mummys, even flirts with Sid’s Mom (Rati Agnihotri), besides having an oedipal relationship with his own mother (Sarika). In one scene, Sam dances romantically with her. It is the odd scene like this that makes Purani Jeans a reasonably interesting watch. None of the relationships in the film fit the traditional equations of Hindi cinema. Even the dramatic fight between the men over the woman (Isabelle Leite), has a feminine touch to it. They talk of the breaking of each other’s heart, not head. Had the acting been better—it’s packed with newbies—this film could certainly have had a greater impact on the box office. n
This is a disappointing superhero film that rarely emerges as a living, organic entity from it’s formulaic setting. The first film of this series was refreshing; the ordinariness of Peter Parker’s middle class background, his attachment to the Uncle and Aunt, the NYPD’s fierce initial opposition to his vigilante status and the odd quirky character gave life and substance to the comic book adaptation. This sequel has the same lead actors, but not the same emotional attachments. Throughout the movie, the two play a single tune in one flat note—they keep breaking up, but just can’t stay away from each other. The reasons for this on again/ off again relationship are not convincing at all, and are presented like a long, drawnout side show to the furious action in the film. Secondly, the villains are duds. Villain 1 is a lonely nerd (Jamie Foxx) who falls into a tank full of electric eels and turns into a walking electric generator; and Villain 2 is Peter Parker’s best friend (Dane DeHaan) who thinks that a transfusion of SpiderMan’s blood can save his life. Neither has character enough for a convincing confrontation with him. The skyscrapers of Manhattan are a stunning backdrop for the weaving of Spider-Man’s web. Unfortunately, visuals alone can’t sustain a movie. n AD
19 May 2014
Not People Like Us
R aj e e v M asa n d
The Sticky Ex
What’s with Shahid Kapoor and his tendency to stick close to his exes? The Kaminey star has reportedly bought a plush apartment in the same Juhu building where Vidya Balan lives with her husband, UTV honcho Siddharth Roy Kapur. The sea-facing flat is believed to have burnt a sizeable hole in the actor’s pocket, but sources say he’d been looking to move out of his Yari Road apartment for some time now. His neighbour in that building society, of course, is former flame Priyanka Chopra. Building staff still haven’t stopped gossiping about how the former lovebirds would regularly drop in at each other’s home to spend quality time together when they were dating. While on exes, Shahid bumped into Kareena Kapoor during the recent IIFA Awards weekend in Tampa, Florida, and the couple kept it civil and free of drama. At the big awards show evening, when Kareena was invited on stage to present an award, she made it a point to publicly say ‘Hi’ to Shahid (and his co-host Farhan Akhtar, both of whom were also on stage), who appeared rather surprised by the greeting. Minutes later when she’d left the stage after presenting the trophy, Shahid cheekily asked Farhan aloud, “Did she just say ‘Hi’ to me?” even as the packed hall went into loud cheers.
Back in School Again
Kangana Ranaut is looking forward to taking an entire month off to attend filmmaking classes in New York. The Queen star, who returned from Australia earlier this week where she was declared Best Actress at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne, will put all work on hold in June and rent an apartment in the Big Apple while learning the finer nuances of making movies. “I’m looking forward to not having an entourage hanging around,” Kangana revealed to me in Melbourne, insisting that she doesn’t enjoy being waited upon hand and foot. “I’m quite comfortable doing my own laundry and dishes, going out and buying groceries, and basically just doing things myself,” she added. “I like the idea of living like a student.” This won’t be the actress’ first back-to-
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class adventure. A few years ago she took direction classes in Los Angeles, and even made a short film as part of her course. Kangana doesn’t rule out a switch from acting to film direction in the near future—“If I don’t get exciting roles, I don’t want to hang around doing nonsense parts. I’d rather make movies”—and wants to be fully prepared when she decides to take the jump.
The Sleazy Super Agent
Bollywood can be a hard enough place for newcomers to survive, without the added pressure of predatory vultures. For years now there has been gossip about the head of a leading artiste management agency and his tendency to make young women uncomfortable with his attention. The gentleman (ha!) in question has been rumoured to routinely hit on newcomers and upcoming models and actresses, who often find themselves in no position to complain about or report his advances. He isn’t known to act the same way with any of the leading female stars that his agency represents—it’s unlikely he’d get away with that. His behaviour is reserved exclusively for the up and comers. According to the industry grapevine, the ‘super-agent’ got his just desserts recently when he acted fresh with a new actress who has an important movie set for release later this month. The lady in question got in touch with him after being referred to by a friend, for the purpose of possibly signing up with his agency in the hope of getting film offers and brand endorsements. After a seemingly normal telephone conversation, during which they made an appointment to meet, he reportedly sent her a text message asking her to wear a short skirt to their meeting. Appalled, the actress complained to her fiancé, an established actor who recently won a top award, and who stars opposite her in her forthcoming film. The actor is believed to have called up the super-agent and given him a piece of his mind, warning him to behave appropriately with his lady and other young women. Heated words were exchanged before an apology was tendered. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63
open space
Suicide Note for Mr Modi
by r au l i r a n i
Jahanvi, 8, with her mother Asha at their residence in the Loni area of Ghaziabad. Jahanvi’s father, Om Prakash Tiwari, 35, committed suicide a week ago and left behind a suicide note requesting Narendra Modi to take care of his daughter after his death. The note reads: ‘Dear Narendra Modi ji, you are going to become the Prime Minister of India. I am committing suicide due to financial problem. I request you to take care of my daughter after my death.’ He has also stated in his one-page note that nobody should be held responsible for his death
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19 May 2014
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