OPEN Magazine 20 October 2014

MODI THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGNER

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a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

HOW TO REGAIN THE GANGA

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2 0 O C TO B E R 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

T h e I n ti m a c y o f D e at h And how courage can make endings happier

By Atul Gawande

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Volume 6 Issue 41 For the week 14—20 October 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

The Death of Casagemas by Pablo Picasso (Gallery: Musée Picasso, Paris, France)

cover image

20 october 2014

Bal Govind

This refers to ‘Make it in America’ (13 October 2014).

Even his staunchest supporter wouldn’t have expected that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will announce visa-on-arrival for US citizens considering the ban imposed on him by the US government earlier. It would’ve also taken the US President by surprise.

Indeed, it is a big move by Modi, which will create much confidence among US citizens. With Japan contributing to our ‘smart cities’ goal and Australia supporting our nuclear The Prime Minister power mission with is hitting all the right assured uranium supply, notes when it comes it is essential that we get to promises, it is now assurances from the US to be seen how soon he on other areas of converts these promises cooperation like into reality education, defence, etcetera. The crux of the matter is that all these meetings with America Inc’s CEOs should not be just symbolic but result in some concrete action on the ground. It is also important to instill confidence in NRIs and local investors. If Modi offers a clear road map with no hurdles for investment in India for local investors, it will spur demand by NRIs who are not short of cash but apprehensive about India. The Prime Minister is hitting all the right notes when it comes to promises. It is now to be seen how soon he converts these promises into reality.  letter of the week Make or Break

the protracted seat-sharing squabbles between the BJP and Shiv Sena, given its inner conflicts, ending in a complete break-up was on expected lines (‘End of a Bad Marriage’, 6 October 2014). The BJP and Shiv Sena have more to lose than gain by breaking their 25-year old alliance after coming close to their goal of taking the reins of the state from the Congress-NCP team after 15 years. What is stunning is the Congress and NCP severing their ties after being in power together for three terms. As conflict between short-term interests and long-term goals led the parties to go their separate

ways, the Maharashtra Assembly elections would be thrown wide open, with the MNS in all likelihood playing the opportunist in a post-poll scenario where horse-trading cannot be ruled out.  KR Srinivasan

Fighters and Provocateurs

india has forgotten the freedom fighters who fought the British, went to prison and sacrificed their lives so that their next generation could be free from the shackles of British imperialists, breathe free and choose their own leaders and rulers; and has also forgotten war heroes who lost their lives in WW II, in wars with China and Pakistan, in Sri

Lanka as part of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (‘Thankless India’, 22 September 2014). How can we then expect India to remember and honour those who risked their lives and arrested dangerous terrorists so that we can live in peace? Who remembers Hemant Karkare who was killed in action during the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks? If our political leaders just think for a minute of the days when our forefathers fought the mighty British, and the Chinese after we secured Independence, and how under tragic circumstances they laid their lives down for the country, they will perhaps cease to be dishonest, selfish and corrupt.

Terrorism is raising its ugly head now and then in various parts of the country, and terrorism is not confined to Muslims alone. I feel that a communal agenda is sowing the seeds of terrorism in the country and none is concerned about [what causes this evil phenomenon].  MY SHARIFF

Divine Retribution?

the writer should have made some mention of the arrest of Kanchi’s Acharya Jayendra Saraswathi and his entire Mutt staff, including his successor Vijayendra Saraswathi, on false murder charges ten years ago under the then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s directions (‘The Lone Empress’, 13 October 2014).

The present predicament she is in may be divine punishment for this sacrilege.  SN Hebbar

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

openmagazine to 56070

Padmini Prakash in the studio of Lotus News

Trans Liberation in Tamil Nadu Why it is no surprise that India’s first transgender news anchor works for a Tamil Nadu TV channel Tamil Nadu is known to be a pioneer in advocating the rights of transgenders. This culture of acceptance includes a state-level welfare board for them and the incorporation of the third gender in its electoral rolls. Padmini Prakash, who became India’s first transgender news anchor, is the latest example of the state’s gender revolution. A 31-year-old Bharatanatyam dancer, she first appeared on Coimbatore-based Lotus News at 7 pm on Independence Day.“This is like a dream come 20 october 2014

true. I thoroughly enjoy this job. I am well accepted by my colleagues and nobody shows any kind of discrimination,” she says. “I was very worried in the beginning because this is not something that I had been familiar with. I am very careful not to make mistakes.”

Prakash left home 10 years ago while pursuing her first year BCom and travelled across Tamil Nadu to meet like-minded and like-bodied people, turning into an activist for transgenders. “I know that I have to be very ob-

jective on my job despite being an activist,” she says. Her induction was a well-thought decision by the channel.

“Transgenders... are not given decent jobs and are forced to go for menial occupations and even illegal activities. To show our regard for them, we decided to incorporate transgenders in our channel,” says Dr GKS Selvakumar, chairman of Lotus News.

Padmini was suggested

by Rose Venkatesan, a popular transgender figure in the state. “I had no doubt about

Padmini’s skills.She is diligent and has good screen presence,” says Venkatesan, who is a communication trainer with Wipro. Venkatesan used to do a very popular show on Vijay TV, which was on air for a year. “I don’t know why they wound it up.Probably because I used to ridicule and criticise exorcisms, blind religious practices and superstitions.”

She then turned to movies— acting in a few films and even directing one. “Tamil media is a bit more tolerant of transgenders,” she says. n Shahina KK

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Jackson J

small world

6

10

contents

Nobel Prize for LED inventors

34

open essay

8

hurried man’s guide

22

Regaining the past to flow into the future

locomotif

A bogus Chinese dream

person of the week The offspinner

emoji

Say it with pictures

war on dirt

14

Shiv Visvanathan on Swachh Bharat

politics

Modi on the stump in Maharashtra and Haryana

24

cover story

The intimacy of death

Chucked Out After years of leniency, the ICC has finally launched a crackdown on bowlers with suspicious actions Lhendup g Bhutia

T

he modern offspinner, it

appears, prefers full sleeves even if it is cumbersome to bowl in them on a tiring hot day in the Subcontinent. But almost all offspinners in international cricket have arms fully-clothed on the field. This has nothing to do with style or convenience. Its sole purpose is to camouflage an old affliction that haunted some bowlers in the past, but now seem to be present with every modern offspinner—the bent elbow. For several years, the International Cricket Council (ICC) had looked the other way, as bowlers— especially offspinners—with suspicious actions proliferated and even excelled.

What links offspinners to this condition more than others is the wide variety of deliveries that they now bowl. They do not possess clean classical actions, where the emphasis is on guile and flight. It is now about variety—the stock ball that spins in, the doosra that goes away, the fast ball that hurries the batsman. The argument supporting such bowlers ranges from allowing some evenness to a game that is increasingly in favour of batsmen to how the game would become poorer with the absence of special balls like the doosra.

But now the ICC has launched an unprecedented crackdown on bowlers with suspicious actions. In the last month or so, a number of offspinners, including those at the top of their game, have been banned or reported for chucking. The list includes Saeed Ajmal (Pakistan), the highest wicket-taker across all formats in the last three years; his compatriot, Mohammad Hafeez; Sunil Narine (West

4 open

Indies), one of the best slower bowlers in limited overs’ Cricket; Sachithra Senanayake (Sri Lanka); Kane Williamson (New Zealand); Prosper Utseya (Zimbabwe) and Sohag Gazi (Bangladesh).

A number of other offspinners were also reported in the recent Champions League Twenty20 (CLT20) tournament. This crackdown has resulted in various conspiracy theories. Some suggest that with the World Cup months away, this is a ploy to weaken strong bowling units like Pakistan. Others point out how no player from the three most powerful nations at the ICC—India, Australia and England— KARIM SAHIB/AFP

Saeed Ajmal in Abu Dhabi in 2013

has been reported. Some even point out that Narine was reported just days before the final of the CLT20 tournament, played against the Chennai Super Kings, the franchisee owned by the ICC head N Srinivasan.

Whatever the reason for the timing of the crackdown, a cleanup has been long overdue. The ICC had revamped its old rules—which permitted slow bowlers to straighten their arms from a bent position by five degrees, medium-fast bowlers by seven-and-a-half degrees, and fast bowlers by 10 degrees—in 2004 to allow all bowlers to straighten their arms by up to 15 degrees, suspiciously at the time when the very successful Sri Lankan Muttiah Muralitharan, and especially his doosra delivery, was facing a lot of heat. This decision to allow greater ‘tolerance’ has led to a situation—maybe encouraged, even—where bowlers with suspicious actions abound on every cricket field.

Deliveries like the doosra and bowling actions like Muralitharan’s are hardly rare anymore. Ajmal was found bending his elbow while bowling by up to 43 degrees.

Earlier this year, the Indian offspinner R Ashwin, who does not possess a doosra and always bowls in half sleeves, turned up in a match against Bangladesh in full sleeves. When later asked about it, he said, “I just wanted to see if you can get more revs on the ball, if you can do a little bit with your elbow... You can get a lot of advantage with these things. So why should I lag behind if someone else is getting a competitive edge?” Thankfully, the ICC has now decided to check this. n 20 october 2014

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38 fashion

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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63

Parineeti’s Killjoy

food

52

Bold and blue

Vikas Khanna’s inspiration

p a arts

culture

48

Korean cool

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a om pr

kash c

hauta

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f o r campaigning in elections

while being out on bail for medical reasons This Tuesday, Panchkula in Haryana witnessed a massive traffic jam thanks to an event undertaken by Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) chief Om Prakash Chautala to campaign for his party’s candidate.

Nothing out of the ordinary about it, except that he should have been in jail serving a

10-year sentence awarded in January 2013 for a corruption case. Since May this year Chautala has been out on bail, citing a surgery to implant a pacemaker. After the court got wind of his political activities, it decided to set up a medical board to investigate whether he needed hospitalisation. At that point he promised to surrender and return to prison. He was given time till 17 October to do so but is now using that leeway to continue campaigning for his party.

Following a rap on its knuckles by the Delhi High Court, the CBI is now asking for immediate cancellation of his bail, but what is remarkable is the ease with which Chautala has managed to stay out of prison up to the point that polls are upon us. It is a shame that politicians like him remain unfazed by the law. His grandson, a leader of the party, even told a newspaper that though Chautala cannot be an MLA, nothing prevents him from becoming Chief Minister! n

The Federation of Associations of Private Schools in Tamil Nadu decided to shut schools on 7 October in solidarity with Jayalalithaa, but later reversed it FORESTA L L ED

“We will demand that Jayalalithaa be released from the Karnataka prison for the sake of the people of Tamil Nadu”

‘Taking into account that some schools have scheduled quarterly exams on Tuesday, we have decided to reopen all schools on October 7’

—DC Elangovan, FAPSTN secretary, at a press conference, 5 October

—FAPSTN statement, 6 October

turn

on able Pers n o s a e r n U ek of the We

Shorter and smarter performances

around

When War-War Goes Against Jaw-Jaw U n p r o v o k e d a t t a c k s from across the border by Pakistan highlight that India’s hostile neighbour is in the vicious grip of rogues from Rawalpindi and not mandarins in Islamabad. That Pakistani troops continue to target India’s security outposts along the entire 192-km international border in Jammu and Kashmir proves that calling off foreign secretary-level talks a few months ago—over Pakistani delegates meeting

An Indian house struck by mortar shells Channi Anand/ap

20 october 2014

Kashmiri separatists— was a move in the right direction, thereby drawing a Lakshman rekha for future negotiations.

On 8 October, two women were killed and 15 others injured in heavy mortar shelling by Pakistani troops, taking the death toll to eight in the continued ceasefire violations by Pakistan for more than a week. In retaliation, the Union Home Ministry put on hold a scheduled flag meeting between Pakistan and Indian paramilitary forces to discuss the recent hostilities. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the Physics Nobel Prize for LEDs You would be hard put to find a home in a city that does not have an LED in some form or the other. It could be as a bulb, on clocks, in torches, blinking in the set top box, or in headlamps.

But just how seminal its invention became was highlighted this week when three Japanese scientists won the Physics Nobel Prize for it.

Twenty years ago when the blue LED was invented, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano were both with Nagoya University and Shuji Nakamura worked with Nichia Corporation.

The press release of the Nobel Prize’s LEDs use announcement notes semiconductor that when the three materials and very scientists ‘produced little energy is lost bright blue light beams to heat. The result is from their semi-cona lifespan of about ductors in the early 100 times that of an 1990s, they triggered a incandescent light fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created.’

Bobby Yip/REUTERS

For three decades, that had been a challenge for physicists. But once, after more than a decade of research, the three created the blue LED, it led to a revolution in power savings. Traditional incandescent lights have

A sculpture studded with LED lights dazzles visitors

filaments that burn out after some time. LEDs use semiconductor materials and very little energy is lost to heat. The result is a lifespan of about 100 times that of an incandescent light.

The scientists will split the $1.1 million prize.

The awarding of the Nobel to something that ordinary people can comprehend has been welcomed. As CNET wrote, ‘Baffled by Higgs bosons, quantum mechanics, and the accelerating expansion of the universe? This year’s physics Nobel Prize is for something that’s reassuringly understandable and useful: the blue LEDs used in everything from home lighting and headlights to TV screens and traffic signals.’ n

Death at the Doorstep It is hard to see how India can escape Ebola M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

R

ecently the German

publication Der Spiegel ran an interview with Peter Piot, the man who gave the name Ebola to the virus that is now witnessing its most deadly outbreak ever.

Piot was in the team that first discovered the virus in the mid-70s.

He had been a doctor in a lab in Belgium when a blue thermos came, containing blood samples of a sick nun from a mission hospital in Zaire.

It had been bought to test for Yellow Fever but they soon realised that this was an altogether different killer.

Piot then went to Zaire to further investigate the new virus and found that it had been transmitted widely by the very nuns who were doing medical charity work to help the Africans.

In his words, “In their hospital they regularly gave pregnant women vitamin injections using unsterilised needles. By doing so, they infected many young women in Yambuku with the virus... Clinics that failed to observe this and other rules of hygiene functioned as catalysts in all additional Ebola outbreaks.”

In the interview he also said that he is not worried about Ebola spreading to Europe or the US; they could control its spread. Instead, the country he did worry about was India, because many Indians worked in Africa and “it would only take one of them to become infected, travel to India to visit relatives during the virus’s incubation period, and then, once he becomes sick, go to a public hospital there. Doctors and nurses in India, too, often don’t wear protective gloves. They would immediately become infected and spread the virus.”

Those are ominous and prescient words if you consider what happened just a few days ago when a Japanese tourist in Manipur was suspected to have Ebola. She was in a private

hospital but soon shifted to a better hospital. And then she was slated to be shifted to yet another hospital.

Reason: the earlier two hospitals didn’t have an isolation ward.

One of the most deadliest infectious diseases in modern times had opportunities to spread even after Ebola was suspected. It is possible that this might also be a false scare like others we read about in Mumbai and Delhi, but it takes just one real case for the outbreak to begin.

If Ebola enters India, we are in trouble. It is a virus completely unknown to this region and so Once the Indians enjoy no immunity.

Ebola virus Once the virus reaches a reaches a high-density high-density poorlypoorly-mapped mapped population area like a slum, then population the disaster’s area like a slum, then the scale immediately leaps up disaster’s scale exponentially. immediately Slums in metros are made up of leaps up exponentially migrants who float between cities and villages and soon the virus will spread all over the country.

It is hard to see how we can stop the virus entering India if people with Ebola have managed to fly into the United States without being detected.

The Japanese tourist, who is suspected to have it, came in by road from Myanmar.

In India, it took years after AIDS became an epidemic for public awareness on prevention to take root, but HIV itself takes time to become AIDS and so it was a controlled build-up of fatalities. Ebola, on the other hand, does not even offer the latitude of time. n 20 october 2014

business

Flipside Score: Six up, Half a Dozen Down

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he last time online commerce prices), what is more interesting is the raised such furore, India was hosting impact of this sale on bulk sellers to the Cricket World Cup in 2011. Of Flipkart, not to mention the concerns of course, the numbers were somewhat traditional brick-and-mortar shops. different, as was the context—millions Flipkart, valued at $7 billion, has deep clamouring for the scant 40,000 odd tickets enough pockets to cover large customerto watch the final at Wankhede—but the gaining losses, and while that was no results were educative, at the very least. A doubt a source of confidence while website called Kyazoonga.com registered 10 putting together a pricing strategy, the million hits in the first five minutes of sale, steepness of its discounts—some in the causing it to crash. Every attempt to bring 50-80 per cent range—has unsettled both it back online was thwarted by the tens of manufacturers and other retailers. millions of keyboard warriors frantically Kishore Biyani of Future Group (which refreshing their browsers. Despite the best runs Big Bazaar) claimed that this is efforts of techies, not a single ticket “anti-competitive” behaviour, asking how changed hands that day. Judged by that “someone [can] sell products below its standard, Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale on manufacturing price”. He also alleged that 6 October was an unqualified success. “someone can do such undercutting only Though accurate data is hard to come by, to destroy competition.” The fact that the the estimates are staggering. Perhaps 1 Big Billion sale was followed by a heavily billion ‘hits’ on Flipkart’s website; discounted offering from Myntra (also 1.5 million users who bought at least owned by Flipkart) has also drawn flak. one item; and a claimed $100 million worth of goods sold in the first 10 hours.

While Flipkart’s preparation far surpassed Kyazoonga’s —10,000 standby employees, weeks of preparation culminating in a nightmare week of 12-hour shifts for techies and sales personnel—it seems that online retailers have not got the mix right just yet. Of all the complaints that began to flood Facebook and Twitter during the sale, the most damning were those asking what the point of a day-long sale was if the discounted products would sell out in the first five minutes alone. A follow-up email sent out by Flipkart read: ‘[We] realized that we were not adequately prepared... We didn’t source enough products and deals in advance.... To add to this, the load on our server led to intermittent outages, further impacting your shopping experience.’ The firm’s email also admitted that it ‘ran out of the stock for many products within a few minutes (and in some cases, seconds) of the sale going live’.

While there has already been a great deal of chatter on similar issues (users on Reddit allege that Flipkart’s discounts were applied after it artificially hiked The e-commerce website’s founders Sachin (L) and Binny Bansal

Praveen Khandelwal, national general secretary of the Confederation of All India Traders, wrote to Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman, asking for a regulatory body to be set up for e-commerce.

The consumer electronics industry has been just as voluble in its reaction. The issues raised by companies range from ‘artificially inflating market share and valuation via discounts’, to the threat posed to their brick-and-mortar retail associates. Sanjeev Agarwal, vicepresident of sales at LG Electronics India, was reportedly snippy, saying that “We do not deal with [Flipkart] directly, and they are not our authorised trade partners.”

LG even issued an advisory ‘to safeguard our consumers’, saying that since Flipkart was not an authorised trading partner, the company would retain the right not to honour guarantees on products sold by it online since it could not vouch for their genuineness. Flipkart was less than amused, responding with: ‘We can assure our customers buying LG... that they are genuine. Our customers will continue to enjoy the warranty and services extended to all original LG products as always.’

Sony India was more restrained, with Sunil Nayyar, head of sales, saying that “pricing [has to be] realistic,” and that the company would hold talks with online retailers to ensure that. Reports also suggest that some manufacturers—notably LG—have suspended fresh sales to the online retailer and are considering legal action against its alleged ‘predatory pricing’.

In general, manufacturers appear to be reeling under the fear of losing control of their products’ prices to an interloper that has grabbed access to customers. And Flipkart is not merely a seller, but also a market maker (by virtue of its ability to get buyers and sellers together).

Companies like Motorola have revived their fortunes in India by striking bulk deals with it.

It is the strategies of those resisting its power, however, that would be more interesting to watch. n ADITYA WIG

20 october 2014

Deepak G Pawar/Getty Images

A billion ‘hits’ on Flipkart’s website; 1.5 million users who bought at least one item; $100 million worth of goods sold

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lo co m ot i f

S PRASANNARAJAN

I

A Bogus Chinese Dream

n the history of resistance, certain images

linger. A face, anonymous, but one that has overcome fear. The lone man standing in front of a column of advancing tanks in Tiananmen Square on that morning in June 1989 is one such image.

Over the years, as China leaped forward as an economic power, the ghosts of Tiananmen took refuge in the grey zones of the Asian gulag, beyond the much mythicised marketplace that continues to dazzle the world. ‘The Tank Man’ is still a source of great speculation and mystery, but he lives in faded photographs and memory as an abiding symbol of defiance—of the sacrificial moment of freedom in a country whose revolutionary history is a study in the dispensability of human lives. Tiananmen itself, after all, in the words of Deng Xiaoping, was just an ‘incident’ involving a few wayward students and, to borrow from the lexicon of the Cultural Revolution, other counterrevolutionary bad eggs. Twenty-five years on, the People’s Republic dreads ‘incidents’ that can shatter the idyll of autocracy. And then, another face appears in Hong Kong.

I read about Joshua Wong, 17 years old, in a report from Hong Kong in The New York Times. He is the boy revolutionary of freedom, the most sought-after face by television cameras from Civic Square, the dateline of Free Hong Kong. He tells the paper: “When I heard the national anthem starting to play, I certainly did not feel moved so much as angry. When it tells you, ‘Arise! All those who refuse to be slaves!’—why is our treatment today any different from the slaves?” Wong is the kind of protestor who the keepers of Hong Kong are scared of.

They will not send tanks to crush the so-called umbrella revolutionaries, but they will not let the virus of freedom spread either. But a Wong, who thinks himself a slave in the island of controlled freedom, is a dangerous teenager Beijing can’t afford to ignore. Icons of dissent are not to be allowed at a time when the homogenisation of conscience is a never-ending project in the mainland.

But Wong’s self portrait as a slave in one of the world’s most prosperous places has already exposed the fundamental fallacy of ‘One Country, Two Systems.’

If China wants to control even the selection of candidates for the island’s next administrator, it is nothing but One Country, One Horrific System.

Wong’s acquired slave identity shows up the unviability of the system. When

Boy revolutionary Joshua Wong 8 open

the British handed over the island to China in 1997, it was not supposed to be the beginning of some kind of socialist assimilation. Certainly not. And Wong, by excusing himself from the benevolence of Beijing, becomes the representative of a generation that does not feel at home in the system. He becomes one with his counterparts in mainland China, where one of the world’s most successful market regimes is built on an unadulterated Marxist-Leninist structure, and where questions from those who see themselves as ‘slaves’ are least tolerated. It has always been a totalitarian pretense: I’ll make you happy, be quiet. The rulers, the social capitalists, love the quietness. They call it order. They call it the reward of stateprovided happiness.

It was this quietness that was broken in 1989, when Dengism was at its peak. The system has been consistently banishing the noisemakers of democracy from the streets ever since. Today’s dissidents, denied terrestrial existence, are wangmin, citizens of the internet. (Emily Parker’s Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, written about in this space, is a fine introduction to the online movement for freedom in China and other such closed societies.) As the paranoid Beijing now controls the streets as well as the web, the proxy server is the last weapon of the freedom fighter.

The streets of Hong Kong may go quiet and Wong may vanish from front pages, but the eruption of minds is what frightens autocracies such as China. In the last few years, such uprisings have changed regimes, and sent out a message to rulers who think that their make believe is history proof. China will not go the Soviet way in the near future because it is not an artificially assembled empire. The ideology by which the leaders swear may still be communism but what powers China is nationalism, and democracy is something Western, capable of contaminating the Oriental mind, steeped in historical grievances and injured national pride. It is one of those rare places where Marx, Mao, Confucius and Adam Smith co-exist in perfect harmony—a terrifying symmetry achieved by the bloodlust of a revolution that swept the countryside. But China is busy building what the West had achieved better—everything Western is desirable except the epidemic of democracy. It is this paradoxical system that makes Wong feel a slave.

The paradox is magnified by the new Helmsman Xi Jinping’s slogan of the ‘China Dream’, an obvious American inspiration. This made-in-China Dream is turning into a nightmare for Joshua Wong and his friends. n 20 october 2014

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When the others get caught in the details.

Turn to us for the bigger picture.

All of us know, standing too close to the picture may distort the painting. This is also true when you use words as a medium. Which is why we at OPEN also make sure we keep our eye on the larger picture and give you a deeper perspective on the issues that affect you.

Junk news, like junk food can kill. And so a well-balanced meal for the mind is what we strive towards. From the profound to the plebeian, from arts to the sciences, from the everyday to the exclusive, we mix and match our features to fit a healthy mental fare.

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open essay

By Saraswati Nandini Majumdar

Majority World/UIG/Getty Images

Regaining the past to Flow into the Future

The Ganga is moving away from the ghats.

Can Modi save it?

T

he other evening, as is my

routine whenever I’m in Benares, I took a walk to the Ganga. It was twilight, and Assi ghat was full of people young and old, there just like me to mark the end of a long day and to escape the chaotic city, to take in the open, changing sky, the broad river and the solid stone buildings. Some were sipping tea, Saraswati Nandini others simply sitting and chatting on the Majumdar steps a few feet above the water or high is the author of above the ghat. Some paused at the old Banaras: Walks Hanuman shrine and the Shiva idols Through India’s under the peepal tree where boatmen Sacred City. wait for customers.

Sitting there that evening, I was filled She is associated anew with a sense of awe and happiness with NIRMAN, that I should have such easy access to an NGO this unique and wonderful space—a that works space both communal and private, filled for education with the beauty of both the natural and and the arts the human, so constant, yet constantly (Nirman.info) shifting, responsive at each moment to the subtlest changes in the environment. I was filled also with a sense of awe at a physical space capturing and perpetuating the spirit of a city—in this case, the Benaresi spirit of mauj and masti, or revelry and abandon, and of khulapan or openness, which has bound together its residents for centuries, and for which the city continues to be celebrated the world over.

For Benaresis, the Ganga is not just a goddess to be worshipped, Ma, but she is also a dear friend and constant companion. In winter or summer, night or day, she is there to provide entertainment—kite flying, cricket matches, and picnics—and to calm and inspire with her grandeur and gentility. I have myself experienced everything—swims and boat rides in childhood, meandering walks in adolescence, and times of solitude and camaraderie in adulthood. Just as for thousands of others in Benares, Ganga Ji has been as much a part of my life as the closest companion could be.

Many of the individuals that one sees on the ghat on an average day belong to communities whose livelihoods depend wholly on the river.

These are the nishads or fishermen, the mallahs or boatmen, the doms or cremation pyre workers, and the pandas and purohits, or various kinds of ritual priests. Their homes and mohallas, or neighbourhoods, overlook the ghats and are tucked within the lanes leading to the river, often complete with their own shrines and deities, gymnasiums and communal spaces. There are also the many individuals and families whose smaller and larger businesses thrive all along the river, such as the owners of tea shops, barber shops, guest houses and snack stalls.

If you’re an insider to Benares and you are

asked by someone outside the city about the Ganga and the ghats, it is difficult not to wax poetic or to sound as though you are romanticising reality. But the truth is that there is little in the world (on the three continents I have seen, and I have not been to the Amazon forests or the Cape of Good Hope) to compare with the Ganga and the ghats. Together, they make for a kind of magic difficult to find in the modern world—spaces within spaces of poetry and dreams, and also of real life in its most tangible and sensual, gentle and carnivalesque forms. They constitute ‘heritage’ in the widest and deepest sense, emotional and ethical, economic, environmental, cultural and artistic.

T

he Ganga has always been the life-nerve of Benares, fuelling

its commercial and spiritual vibrancy from the very start.

At the start, in around the eighth century BCE, Benares was a fortified settlement on a high plateau overlooking the Ganga, far north of its current location. This point was an important dock, and the ancient trade route connecting Bengal to the northwest passed through here. The larger area surrounding the city, called ‘Anandvana’ in Puranic texts, was nourished by the Ganga in the form of a series of interconnected streams and ponds. Its lush forests housed the ashrams of the most radical thinkers.

Qutb-ud-din Aibak demolished the fortified city in 1194 and Benares began to shift south along the river to take its present form. As it did so, it continued to thrive as a centre for commerce, religion and culture, with the river Ganga at the heart of all the activity. Ships went up and down the river, loaded high with cargo, including the fine silks and brocade for which Benares was already long famous. Royal families wanted to establish their presence in the city, and so they constructed ghats and riverside complexes complete with a palace, shrines, gymnasiums and resthouses for pilgrims. Pilgrims poured in, and communities from all over India settled down in the city, giving it a cosmopolitan air. Mohallas or gated neighbourhoods developed, with narrow lanes opening out to the river. A rais or elite class formed, consisting mostly of businessmen. They had boat races down the river and sponsored music concerts on the ghats.

The painters of the British Company School captured this vibrant riverfront of Benares. Commerce, religion and culture worked together to build Benares over the centuries, and the Ganga and its ghats were crucial in this collaboration.

In Hindu mythology, the Ganga is a celestial stream that descends from the heavens to earth. The Ganga—each wave of her waters—is a tirtha or ‘crossing place’ from the material world to the far shore of liberation. The ghats were built to provide access to her sacred waters and are thus themselves sacred. They were built on this concept of the tirtha.

Last year, over 5.2 million tourists, Indian and international, visited Benares —more than four times the population of the city. Of these, nearly 5 million were Indian, mostly pilgrims who travelled to

The Ganga and the ghats make for a kind of magic— spaces of poetry and dreams, and also of real life in its most tangible, sensual, gentle and carnivalesque forms

20 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 11

IndiaPictures/UIG/Getty Images

Darbhanga Ghat, Benares

Benares solely to take a dip in the Ganga. Fairs and festivals such as Lolark Chhat and Kartik Purnima, as well as other auspicious days in the Hindu calendar, particularly attract hundreds of individuals from nearby towns and villages. Those from far south, east, west and north, come all year long. For outsiders, the Ganga curving north and the stone façade rising gloriously from the river is iconic of Benares itself, the city’s most celebrated image.

One of the most popular myths of Ganga’s descent to earth tells of how Shiva caught her in his tangled locks to prevent the force of her waters from shattering the earth. As Ganga flowed from the mountains onto the plains, she passed the shining city of Benares. She was so taken that she nearly turned back to stop there. Benares is the only point in her course that she flows south to north. Just as Benaresis are attached to Ganga Ji, so is she to them.

A

ny plan for the revitalisation of the Ganga and the ghats

would ideally have to demonstrate a holistic understanding of the heritage that they together constitute and all the interwoven layers of living, evolving culture that they have given birth to and continue to nourish—rather than focusing on any one aspect of development over another, such as economic or environmental. In order to be truly meaningful and impactful, such a plan should work closely with the needs and desires, 12 open

fears and dreams of the hundreds of individuals whose lives are inseparable from the river. That is, revitalisation and conservation should happen for the people of Benares themselves and for Ganga itself, which have always been interdependent.

The two main governmental efforts at revitalising the Ganga and the ghats have been the Ganga Action Plan and the National Ganga River Basin project. The Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was conceived during Rajiv Gandhi’s term and consisted of three portions of funds allocated to UP, Bihar and West Bengal, aiming to put into place drains, sewers, sewage treatment plants, and electric crematoria, and also to beautify the ghats. For a number of reasons, despite the massive funds allocated and plans drawn up, the GAP was never successfully implemented or seen through to satisfactory results by the state and municipal governments.

The second major effort, the $1.5 billion National Ganga River Basin project, has been undertaken by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, supported by the World Bank since 2011. But, similar to the Ganga Action Plan, the National Ganga River Basin project has also failed to deliver, perhaps in large part because, as Vijay Jagannathan notes, the work has been channelled through the same state engineering agencies that were engaged in the GAP. Today, the Ganga continues to suffer from the pollution of untreated sewage that flows directly into the river at a number of point sources. Water becomes dangerous for drinking or 20 october 2014

bathing when the Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BoD) level exceeds 3 mg/L. The BoD level at Benares is 3.4 mg/L, lower than that at Allahabad or Kanpur, but still exceedingly dangerous for humans, as well as for aquatic life such as the Ganges River Dolphin, now endangered.

Another major concern is that of illegal constructions along the riverfront. Existing laws prohibit construction within 200 metres of the river. However, even the briefest boat ride down the Ganga or walk along the ghats exposes the viewer to the uncontrolled addition of new buildings to older ones, which are demolished or simply unprotected and thus disintegrating, and on the ghat itself—almost all of them eyesores in their ugly design, and also structurally dangerous. This clear violation of the law suggests many decades of complicity on the part of the municipal authorities and a chosen disregard for illegal activity.

In fact, as recently as this past August, the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court on two different occasions questioned the Varanasi administration’s failure to carry out its duties and demanded evidence of action taken to prevent illegal construction on the ghats. The hearings and court order were in response to a PIL filed by a Benares-based NGO called Kautilya Society that has been working for over two decades for the preservation of the ghats and for Benares to be recognised as a World Heritage city. However, as its members will tell you, they have had to face opposition and harassment, rather than cooperation and acknowledgement.

The case of the Darbhanga Palace rather pitifully represents the situation of extreme irresponsibility in Benares. Built in 1915 by the Raja of Darbhanga in present-day Bihar, the Darbhanga Palace on Darbhanga Ghat is an exceptionally beautiful structure, towering and intricate, just one example of the several exquisite palaces that line the riverfront. In 2013, the owners began to demolish the palace and erect a new four-floor structure towards its rear.

The VDA included this new structure in a list of 57 unlawful constructions on the ghats. However, on two different hearings at the Allahabad High Court in response to the PIL filed by Kautilya Society, the VDA submitted clearly contradictory statements: first it stated that the new four-floor building was in violation of the law prohibiting constructions within 200 metres of the river, and later it stated that no illegal construction had taken place in the palace.

The case of the Darbhanga Palace represents the overt and extreme lack of efficiency, transparency and accountability that has characterised all the action taken place thus far towards revitalising the Ganga and the ghats at Benares.

Most recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced plans to revitalise Benares as a heritage city. He has allocated massive funds towards ending sewage pollution and preserving the ghats, in addition to other aims. Panels of experts have met in the city and plans have been drawn up. No work is yet visible

to the average resident of Benares, but Modi’s determination and ambition is in itself a breath of fresh air and a reason to hope. In order to achieve its goals, however, his team will have to address past and continuing governmental failings and successfully eradicate complacency and corruption in their own workings, apart from developing smart and imaginative plans. Only if it can achieve that level of successful management can we also think and talk realistically of achieving anything in the way of imaginative heritage revitalisation and conservation. For holistic revitalisation, not only must efficient management take place, but also a variety of experts, from engineers to architects to anthropologists, must be involved, and most of all the residents of the city themselves.

How the people of Benares can become more active stakeholders in revitalising their river and their own river-based lives is a complex topic for thought and discussion.

Larger projects that address the needs of communities whose livelihoods depend on the river, as understood and expressed by them, need to be developed. Small steps that become a part of everyday life are equally necessary and powerful—steps that encourage Benaresis to develop within themselves a sense of awareness, concern, and activism, and that make even the one-time visitor feel urgently involved. These could include

I imagine the water of the Ganga swimmable again, the steps and embankments clean, the buildings restored and beautified. I imagine rules not just being imposed but being understood

20 october 2014

imaginatively designed signs and boards on the ghats, informative videos, one-time workshops and clean-up campaigns, and a trained and friendly ‘river team’ to ensure discipline and explain rules, answer questions and impart information.

The latent energies and insights of the people of Benares have never been sparked, and who can say once this happens, how much we can achieve?

As a Benaresi, the Ganga is woven into my past and future dreams. It is difficult to resist the temptation to allow my imagination to run free. I imagine the water of the Ganga swimmable again. I imagine the steps and embankments clean, the buildings restored and beautified. I imagine rules not just being imposed but being understood and practiced by the people themselves. I imagine all this at the very least, and much more.

The Ganga turned back as she passed Benares and nearly stayed because she was so charmed by the city. Today, according to one report, she is moving away from the ghats, shifting course mainly because of sewage pollution.

For me it is a personal as well as a political act to win the Ganga back to Benares and to the world. Can we do it? n open www.openthemagazine.com 13

anupam nath/ap

politics

The Permanent Campaigner Modi on the stump Part Two makes the elections in Maharashtra and Haryana a referendum on the Prime Minister

By PR Ramesh with Kumar Anshuman and Haima Deshpande

I

f he were risk-averse, Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have let state-level leaders of Maharashtra and Haryana or the BJP president lead the campaign in these two states going to the polls on 15 October. He could have opted to drop by for a morale boosting rally or two. Instead, he has taken upon himself the task of leading from the front, unmindful of any loss of face if his party were to do badly in these states. That confidence comes from a realisation that he can outwit any rival with words and verve.

In a whirlwind campaign across the two states that account for 378 assembly seats, he has already attended 34 rallies, pulling in record crowds.

“There is something about Modi: he is extremely image-conscious, but is never shy of risking his own image for what he thinks is important,” says a senior BJP leader. Nothing seems to excite Modi more than being on the stump. A survey of his rally speeches reveals that he is many notches above his nearest rival campaigners like Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and mother Sonia, who seem to be missing in action, almost. The Modi campaign also brings to the fore the groundswell of support he enjoys for his various federal schemes. If ‘dynasty’ or ‘development’ was the underlying question in most of his poll rhetoric for this summer’s General Election, he has kept up his connect with the masses with newer ideas as well. The most recent of these is the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (‘Clean India mission’). “The truth is that he has several aces up his sleeve, and the opposition is still talking about the 2002 riots for which he has been cleared by the courts. Repetitive rubbish doesn’t help because you are confronting a formidable opponent who is miles ahead in the race. Our leaders must know this and compete with him on new issues to connect with people. Modi’s the face of this campaign also,” says a senior Congress leader. He adds he has no qualms about praising Modi when he deserves it, and defends the similar stance taken by his party colleague and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor.

Lone Warrior That Modi’s is the sole face of this round of elections—coming as it does after bypoll reverses in Uttar Pradesh and other states where he didn’t campaign—was evident from a visit to a village near Gurgaon, where a villager referred to BJP President Shah as “Modi’s close guy”. In a scenario where even Shah is seen merely as a Modi representative, it is no surprise that ad professionals began their poll blitz in right earnest across Maharashtra with huge banners of Modi and Modi alone. “This has never happened at this scale in politics in recent decades, when one man could steer a poll campaign. His image from the General Election is still intact, thanks also to his great performance in the US and other countries he has visited. He has emerged as Asia’s most powerful leader. How can a party not tap that image of a great leader in an election?” asks advertising hotshot Piyush Pandey, who has created TV, radio and print ads for the Maharashtra polls. Recall that Pandey had also steered the ad campaign of the BJP for the Lok Sabha.

A brief look at the poll campaign as Modi unsheaths his sense of humour and airdashes tirelessly to different locations shows that Modi’s stress on sanitation would likely have far greater 16 open

impact, no matter what the poll outcome is. “It is impact in both the short and long runs,” says the Congress leader, “Other political parties had lost out on that count.” In fact, the CPM in Kerala is the only party that seems to have understood the threat of sanitation as a tool to mobilise mass support. In the wake of Modi’s call to clean India, which has been hailed by people across political and social lines, CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan wrote a lengthy article on the imperative of sanitation through use of new technology and other means.

“I must admit that Modi did capture the imagination of a vast majority of people by employing a political tool that Mahatma Gandhi himself had used once. Like in those times of Gandhi, now too the social revolution that the call to better sanitation can produce is huge. We have been in favour of this all along,” says a CPM Politburo member, betraying the frustrations of a Left agenda being successfully used by a right-wing Prime Minister.

How to Trump Caste Politics Without doubt, Modi’s call for a clean India has elevated the status of men and women who perform this job for a living. Long looked down upon only because they clean the dirt of others, traditional cleaners such as scavengers suddenly got a boost of morale and self esteem. By enlisting support from the rich as well as poor for his sanitation initiative, Modi has neutralised the caste connotations of cleaning jobs. This is indeed a master20 october 2014

ganesh lad/fotocorp

Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray at a rally

“If the BJP comes to power, it will break Mumbai from Maharashtra and take everything away from here to Gujarat” Uddhav Thackeray, Shiv Sena Chief stroke from a person who had been under attack from leftists and political rivals who portrayed him as a danger to India’s social fabric. “On the other hand, he has hijacked the slogans of the Left and the secular parties, and they would, as the CPM Kerala leader’s statement shows, be left with no option but to come up with their own cleaning initiatives,” the Congress leader says.

Making the cleanliness drive a collective social effort is a far cry from the norms that have been in place in India, especially since 1947. It is quite ironic, but the post-Independence architecture of many government apartments in Lutyens’ Delhi had separate, dirty and dingy spiral staircases meant for the exclusive use of scavengers. They were designed to keep these cleaners out of sight and away from ‘civilised’ zones used by the social elite.

“What would so-called leftist intellectuals, who have missed no chance in attacking Modi for each and every statement he has made, do now? They have a strong belief that whatever this man does has to be made fun of or opposed. That frustration is on the rise, as clear from responses while he was on a visit to the US. He was supposed to make India look good abroad. And to say he did 20 october 2014

a good job at that would be an understatement,” says another Congress leader based in Kerala who does not want to be named because his party doesn’t share his views. Several Congressmen, including Tharoor, have been ticked off by party leaders for their pro-Modi comments, especially on social media. Tharoor had shot back at his critics saying they were selectively looking for his praise—rather than criticism—of the Prime Minister.

That a Twitter missive from Modi to Tharoor inviting the latter’s support for his cleanliness cause could create such ripples in the Congress has already aroused plenty of laughter.

A section of Congress leaders concede that the absence of strong party leadership at the Centre has stirred resentment and despair within its ranks. After the Grand Old Party’s resounding poll setback in the Lok Sabha election, many of its leaders across states have privately been airing their bitterness at the inefficiency they see at the top echelons of the party.

The Missing Opponent Rahul Gandhi’s reluctance to roll up his sleeves and campaign extensively this time round, according to many Maharashtra open www.openthemagazine.com 17

Congress leaders, can be explained by his dropping enthusiasm and the poor response his rallies have got.

In the absence of a rival campaign, the overall mood in pollbound states reflects the appeal for Modi post his blockbuster visit to the US. Several foreign-policy experts have highlighted why the visit augured well for bilateral ties between the world’s largest and the oldest democracy. Strategy expert Uday Bhaskar was quoted as saying that “the relations between the two countries were hung. Prime Minister Modi’s visit has rebooted the ties”. For his part, Modi, now in a triumphant mood, has singled out pundits who had opposed the idea of his being Prime Minister before he was named the BJP’s candidate for the country’s top job.

The Gandhi in the picture, such as it is, has been generating goodwill for Modi, whose cleanliness drive was launched in honour of Mahatma Gandhi on his birth anniversary of 2 October. Actor Aamir Khan lauded the idea as visionary. Bill Gates found it revolutionary, especially the idea of talking about the need for toilets. President Pranab Mukherjee joined the chorus in support of Modi, suggesting that “every road, path, office, home, hut, stream and particle of air around us can and must be kept clean”.

Gandhi’s legacy, Modi seems to imply, belongs to no single family in politics. In both Maharashtra and Haryana, Modi dwarfs his rivals with by his high-wattage campaign, where he targets dynasties again. Maharashtra is home to the dynasties of NCP leader Sharad Pawar, the late Shiv Sena supermo Bal Thackeray, while Haryana is home to those of Bhupinder Hooda and Devi Lal. “The Congress government in Haryana is associated with corruption, land scams and loot. A BJP government with a full majority will bring an end to this,” Modi declared on the campaign trail in Haryana. He reminded the multitudes attending his rallies of the various measures his government has taken to combat corruption, especially those aimed at eliminating corruption among lower-rung bureaucrats and other government officials. These include the self-attestation of documents, a great source of corruption in rural India, and of efforts to rid India of archaic laws that hurt entrepreneurs.

“With his huge persona, his rivals seem to have lost their sting,” says the CPM Politburo member, who mixes his grudging admiration with an old Leftist refrain: “I hope he doesn’t use his enormous clout in the Government to drive a wedge between communities.” In this, he seems to echo Modi critics and Left-wing columnists like Pankaj Misra who accuse Modi of peddling clichés and call him a deeply polarising figure.

A BSP leader who asked not to be named tells Open that Modi has had a significant impact on the self esteem of various social communities. Referring to the new-found status that cleaning staff would enjoy, he says, “The BSP loss in UP, where it won not a single Lok Sabha seat, is an eye-opener. It shows that with his Backward credentials and his statements and actions, he has been able to endear himself to those sections who now tend to look up to him as though he is their messiah.” That should put his rivals on their toes, but they seem too lethargic to do anything, as if slapped into inaction by poll debacles.

Elections, the BSP leader admits, cannot be held hostage to 18 open

Manoj Dhaka/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

the whims of caste groups anymore. At the Lok Sabha hustings in Uttar Pradesh, the Modi-led campaign took apart casteparty linkages and caste-based barriers by winning 71 of the 80 seats.

Dynasties Under Fire, Again In Haryana, known for caste crimes, police atrocities, nepotism and the excesses of crony capitalism, Modi has asked the electorate to vote against people who dehumanised and looted them. Modi has also trained his firepower at Sonia Gandhi’s sonin-law Robert Vadra. He asked the Election Commission to take “serious note” of the Haryana government’s decision to clear a land deal between Vadra and real estate firm DLF Ltd. At one venue, Modi received loud applause from the crowd when he said that after the elections, “the son-in-law will not get any clearances for illegal deals. So, in between the election process, they have dared to take such a decision”.

Besides the protection of women, an end to nepotism and 20 october 2014

The mood may be completely different in Rohtak, which owes its rise from a typical north Indian duty town to a city with modern infrastructure to Hooda’s rule. But, despite Congress claims of holding its own here, there are signs that winds of change may be sweeping this area

Sonia Gandhi and Bhupinder Singh Hooda at a rally in Meham village

freedom from caste violence, one of Modi’s key propositions to Haryana voters is the development gains the state could make if the state and Centre were to work together—enabled, of course, by a BJP majority in the Assembly. Consider what the Prime Minister said on 8 October, addressing a mammoth rally in Mahendergarh, Haryana: “Do we need a state government that starts vomiting the moment the Central Government’s name is mentioned? We need a government that loves the Government in Delhi, and at the same time, the Government in Delhi should also love the Haryana government. I want the Prime Minister and Chief Minister to work together. I believe in a Team India under which [they] both join hands.”

That pitch underlines the BJP’s confidence in Haryana, which has habitually voted for the party in power at the Centre. The BJP is in for a three-cornered fight this time between itself, the Congress and INLD. Besides the advantage of Modi’s decisive leadership at the Centre, the party is hoping to convert public anger against caste and regional discrimination into votes.

20 october 2014

Such sentiments are high in villages such as Carterpuri Village, around 5 km from the Kapashera border after one enters Gurgaon from Delhi. The US President Jimmy Carter had visited this Haryana village on 3 January 1978 during his India trip, and in his honour, Chuma Kheragaon was renamed Carterpuri. For a few years, the residents of this village would celebrate 3 January as ‘Carter Diwas’. The celebration was dropped a long time ago. “We had expected that our village would be developed as a model village. But nothing of that sort happened and the respective state governments kept ignoring us,” says 57-year-old Atar Singh Yadav. 32-year-old Chiranjeet Singh Yadav offers a reason: “The government has only invested money in Rohtak, which happens to be the home district of Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.”

Gurgaon, with its appalling civic infrastructure, is part of the ‘Ahirwal’ region, which has 18 Assembly constituencies and a dominant Yadav population. Winning this region is crucial for any political party that wants to gain power in the state. open www.openthemagazine.com 19

Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule (this page); Bhupinder Singh Hooda (facing page)

yashbant negi/india today group/getty images

The BJP is hankering for an absolute majority in the Maharashtra Assembly, while the NCP feels that its former ally, the Congress, is now at its weakest and can be easily defeated “Ahirwal is known for [its role in] the freedom struggle and contribution of soldiers for battles and insurgencies,” notes senior BJP leader Captain Abhimanyu.

The mood may be completely different in Rohtak, which owes its rise from a typical north Indian duty town to a city with modern infrastructure to Hooda’s rule. But, despite Congress claims of holding its own here, there are signs that winds of change may be sweeping this area too.

With dynasties under attack, and with the BJP running a wellorganised campaign with a galaxy of central leaders addressing rallies throughout the state, the going is expected to get tough for regional satraps such as the Chautalas of the Indian National Lok Dal and the Bishnois (Bhajan Lal’s family). Bhajan Lal’s son and Haryana Janhit Congress leader Kuldeep Bishnoi faces his toughest fight yet. Bishnoi is fighting from his father’s traditional seat of Adampur, while his wife Renuka Bishnoi 20 open

is contesting Hansi. Indications are that he is faced with myriad odds.

Dynasty Slayer in Maharashtra as well In this western state, which is witnessing a five-cornered contest with the two main alliances having split after the BJP parted ways with the Shiv Sena and NCP broke up with the Congress, Modi has brought up in his speeches the plight of farmers, fishermen and others who turned suicidal under a decade plus of corrupt NCP-Congress rule. The BJP hopes to make gains in this scenario through tie-ups with smaller outfits such as the Republican Party of India (RPI) and Swabhimani Shetkari. After ending its 25-year-old alliance with the Sena, the BJP has secured the support of parties such as the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh and Shiv Sangram as well.

In the meantime, the Shiv Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray 20 october 2014

Kalpak Pathak/Hindustan Times/ Getty Images

and its breakaway MNS led by Raj Thackeray have both been blaming the BJP for creating a Marathi-Gujarati divide in the state. “If the BJP comes to power, it will break Mumbai from Maharashtra and take everything away from here to Gujarat,” the Shiv Sena chief has been saying at rally after rally.

Clearly, it is a do-or-die battle for him and raking up regional sentiments is a last-ditch effort to retain influence in the state. Says former political journalist and artiste Prakash Bal Joshi: “An absolute majority for either the BJP or Congress will spell the death of regional parties like the NCP and Shiv Sena. If regional identities have to be kept alive, then the regional parties have to do tremendously well. For Raj Thackeray, credibility is a big issue, and if he does not do well, the MNS will be finished.”

Some observers see a similarity in the tactics adopted by the BJP and NCP. According to political commentator Abhay Deshpande, “The NCP withdrew support and pulled down the [state] government. The BJP imposed President’s rule in the state. Both the NCP and BJP wanted Prithviraj Chavan out of the Chief Minister’s chair—and hence the haste in deciding on President’s rule, and that too, at a time when the Prime Minister was out of the country.”

The BJP is hankering for an absolute majority in the 20 october 2014

Maharashtra Assembly, while the NCP feels that its former ally, the Congress, is now at its weakest and can be easily defeated.

“Both the Congress and Shiv Sena have to prove that they continue to have mass support and have not been disconnected from the masses,” says Deshpande.

Social activist Vishambar Chaudhari is of the view that it is Pawar who stands to lose the most in these polls. His forecast is a tad different from common perceptions on the ground.

“Uddhav will benefit the most, Raj will consolidate his position from the last polls, maybe even win one or two seats more from the 13 he already has,” he forecasts. “There is no threat to the regional parties from the BJP as this party has lost its entire cadre to the Shiv Sena in many constituencies. The penetration of the Sena is much more than that of the BJP.” However, the Prime Minister has already made the state elections a continuation of his Lok Sabha campaign. He is betting that this would overshadow regional tugs and pulls to quite some extent at the hustings.

In the end, it is all about Modi on the stump Part Two, after a pause. For India’s Prime Minister, there is no difference between being in power and being in permanent campaign mode for the minds and hearts of India. Maharashtra and Haryana just happen to be the immediate provocation. n open www.openthemagazine.com 21

WAR ON DIRT

a matter out of place

Why dirt and waste are two parallel realms which need to be linked up in Modi’s project on cleaning up India by Shiv Visvanathan

C

leanliness summons the cliché in India. Its claims

to being next to Godliness is far-fetched. In fact, cleanliness is a private virtue, a housewife’s entitlement. Public spaces signal the end of cleanliness. It is a place where India dumps its garbage and pretends to be virtuous. Sociologists can never explain why public spaces are used as dumping yards.

They only know that ‘public’ and ‘garbage’ are synonymous.

So when Narendra Modi started a campaign for cleanliness, I got nostalgic and began looking for precedents.

One remembers that the late Rajiv Gandhi used to be called Mr Clean. Partly it was because he entered politics with an unsullied reputation; but Mr Clean and his career are forgotten footnotes. Decades later, the Aam Aadmi Party followed, immortalising the broom as the dirty city’s doom. The magic worked for a while, but the broom as a political symbol is today a tired one, dulled to the promise of reminding the party to clean itself.

Narendra Modi’s politics of cleanliness is more carefully crafted. It presents cleanliness as a part of a package of civic virtues, the prelude to governance, arguing that efficiency, cleanliness and punctuality go together. One realises the shrewdness of the move. It is not naïve as AAP’s battle against corruption was. It is a move for cleanliness. Cleanliness is about hygiene; corruption demands a deeper moral and political change. The symbolic moves are subtle. Modi presents it as a grateful nation’s gift to Gandhi. In fact, Gandhi’s spectacles in a fluid outline symbolise the mnemonics of the programme. Not to be left behind, Amul has a delightful cartoon of the utterly butterly girl and a benign Modi holding brooms. Modi appears like a benign uncle, an absent-minded academic being asked to clean up for the first time. There is a sense of invented innocence here because the term ‘clean up’ invokes encounters, the idea of murder as hygiene. Even arm chair readers are more inclined to remember Alfred Hitchcock’s book Clean Crimes and Neat Murders, when the idea of cleanliness is invoked. In every office, home, school and city. The Indian diaspora almost treated it as the beginning of a new era when the

regime of sanitation was inaugurated by Modi. One wishes there was benign RK Laxman cartoon with the Common Man wondering about what is going on. Project Clean Up without cartoons seems a bleak beginning. But there is no doubt that there is something official about it.

The first signs of officialdom being asked to clean up were the much publicised raids on government offices. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Law, visited Delhi’s Gol Dak Khana, a post office, and found files wearing the traditional uniform of dust. He ran his finger across a desk and uncovered archaeological layers of dirt while a postal department employee looked on fatalistically. Dirt was the karma of the lower bureaucracy and to remove dirt almost seemed an act of sacrilege.

The English anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her classic little book, Purity and Danger, described dirt as matter out of place. I do not know whether the Prime Minister has read it, but he could make it the Green Book of his regime. The war against dirt would be more historic and more rhetorical than the war against poverty, epidemics, Naxalites and other alien viruses.

Modi and his regime seem to think that the civics of cleanliness must accompany any act of governance. One can imagine the New Year books of governance giving brownie points for governance and Indian states getting a new order of ranking with sanitation as highest priority. There is a touch of naiveté, even science fiction, in this war on dirt. It appears like a Boy Scout fancy being blown up to Stalinist proportions. Yet Modi has caught the imagination of middle-class India, which seems convinced that a swachh India is the beginning of a swadesi India. One envies the enthusiasm, vigour and commitment of the man. Driving today near Mandi House, I saw a wall being cleaned up, as a broom and sprays of water removed layers of imperious poster paper. It was as if dirt and memory went together.

There are parts of the project citizens respond to almost immediately. One project that appeals in an almost primordial sense is the promise to clean up the Ganges.

The Ganges immediately summons the

Dirt summons the virus, the epidemic, but waste summons the citizenship of the scavenger who recycles and adds new life to it

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20 october 2014

illustration by anirban ghosh based on nandalal bose’s bapuji

cosmos, the civics of life. Cleaning up the river is a masterstroke of ecology. One needs new ideas in technology, new rituals of cleanliness to sustain the project. Yet one often sees a standard cliché of a bit of Hinduism combining with a bit of technology as Uma Bharati threatens to link up India’s rivers, an act of sacrilege for which the future may never forgive her.

There is a token of official ritual about many of these programmes. When Modi inaugurated the Swachh Bharat pro20 october 2014

gramme on 2 October, Gandhi’s birth anniversary, one had the sight of ministers sweeping office corridors and gardens.

Unfortunately, for once Congress workers were unbelievably vigilant and captured pictures of employees picking up garbage and ‘littering it artfully’ so the ministers could enact their ritual duties. In fact, 2 October was not a holiday for municipal employees who had to report to clean up India. Yet, for all the hypocrisy, tokenism and cynicism, one wants India to be sparkling clean. Imagine railway bathrooms sparkling clean and smelling of antiseptic fluid. Cleanliness demands faith and even the most wretched devotee of dirt, the ‘Pig-Pen’ that Charles Schulz immortalised, might like a clean India.

Only the inviting touch of the unbelievable will make the everydayness of this project come true.

During his Independence Day speech, Modi promised a clean toilet in every school. Here he touched a deep chord because many a girl child had to drop out of school because of the unavailability of usable toilets. Modi, in fact, proposed this as a CSR project. One has no real objection, but one hopes the public and corporations do not remain short term in perspective. The tragedy is that the projects inaugurated with pomp one day gather dust, dirt and disgust a few months later.

Modi’s project does strike a responsive chord in every Indian citizen. Our piles of dirt often become cities of their own, demanding their own folklore.

The point I wish to make is that dirt and waste have to be linked creatively. Dirt has to be cleaned, but waste has to be creatively utilised. Dirt summons the virus, the germ, the epidemic, but waste summons the citizenship of the scavenger, the kabadiwaala who recycle materials, adding new life to them. Dirt and waste are two parallel realms which need to be linked up in Modi’s project on cleaning up India. I think there is food for thought here because there is deeper challenge to Modi’s catechism of cleanliness.

Modi’s policy diktats have been critical of NREGA and have said little about the informal economy. Governance, I believe, cannot be about official cleanups. Dusting files and municipal offices is a welcome act, but what one needs is a statement on the other side of dirt, the informal and biomass economy, the role of livelihoods built around waste. Modi, as a wag put it, “cannot throw the bathwater of waste in cleaning up the baby of dirt”. This would be the greatest failure of his office because as the scientist CV Seshadri put it ‘waste, is the only resource of our wasted people’. To confuse it with dirt would be democratically disastrous.

At another level, governance needs new rituals, everyday acts of drama the media can report. Operation dirt is a ritual drama. One hopes however that it is more reflective of what cleaning up means in India. Cleanups, as another wag put it, is a dirty, ambiguous business. This, Modi needs to understand as the capital begins to sparkle under the new civics of soap. Governance occasionally does signal a feel-good feeling. n Shiv Visvanathan considers himself a social science nomad open www.openthemagazine.com 23

mortality

I

Socrates and two Athenian generals seek to answer a seemingly simple question: What is courage? The generals, Laches and Nicias, had gone to Socrates to resolve a dispute between them over whether boys undergoing military training should be taught to fight in armor. Nicias thinks they should. Laches thinks they shouldn’t.

Well, what’s the ultimate purpose of the training? Socrates asks.

To instill courage, they decide.

So then, “What is courage?”

Courage, Laches responds, “is a certain endurance of the soul.”

Socrates is skeptical. He points out that there are times when the courageous thing to do is not to persevere but to retreat or even flee. Can there not be foolish endurance?

Laches agrees but tries again. Perhaps courage is “wise endurance.”

This definition seemed more apt. But Socrates questions whether courage is necessarily so tightly joined to wisdom.

Don’t we admire courage in the pursuit of an unwise cause, he asks?

Well, yes, Laches admits.

Now Nicias steps in. Courage, he argues, is simply “knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped, either in war or in anything else.” But Socrates finds fault here, too. For one can have courage without perfect knowledge of the future.

Indeed, one often must.

The generals are stumped. The story ends with them coming to no final definition. But the reader comes to a possible one: Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to 24 open

Stephen Smith/Getty Images

n 380 BC, Plato wrote a dialogue, the Laches, in which

Courage in the Face of Death Certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. A renowned surgeon on how to cope with ageing and sickness

by Atul Gawande

act on the truth we find. The problem is that the wise course is so frequently unclear. For a long while, I thought that this was simply because of uncertainty. When it is hard to know what will happen, it is hard to know what to do. But the challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.

I

had returned to Boston from Ohio, and to my work at the hospital, when I got a late-night page: Jewel Douglass was back, unable to hold food down again.

Her cancer was progressing. She’d made it three and a half months—longer than I’d thought she’d have, but shorter than she’d expected. For a week, the symptoms had mounted: they started with bloating, became waves of crampy abdominal pain, then nausea, and progressed to vomiting. Her oncologist sent her to the hospital. A scan showed her ovarian cancer had multiplied, grown, and partly obstructed her intestine again. Her abdomen had also filled with fluid, a new problem for her. The deposits of tumor had stuffed up her lymphatic system, which serves as a kind of storm drain for the lubricating fluids that the body’s internal linings secrete. When the system is blocked, the fluid has nowhere to go. When that happens above the diaphragm, as it did with Sara Monopoli’s lung cancer, the chest fills up like a ribbed bottle until you have trouble breathing. If the system gets blocked up below the diaphragm, as it did with Douglass, the belly fills up like a rubber ball until you feel as if you will burst.

Walking into Douglass’s hospital room, I’d never have known she was as sick as she was if I hadn’t seen the scan.

“Well, look who’s here!” she said, as if I’d just arrived at a cocktail party.

“How are you, doctor?”

“I think I’m supposed to ask you that,” I said.

She smiled brightly and pointed around the room.

“This is my husband, Arthur, whom you know, and my son, Brett.” She’d got me grinning. Here it was eleven o’clock at night, she couldn’t hold down an ounce of water, and still she had her lipstick on, her silver hair brushed straight, and she was insisting on making introductions. She wasn’t oblivious to her predicament. She just hated being a patient and the grimness of it all.

I talked to her about what the scan showed. She had no unwillingness to face the facts. But what to do about them was another matter. Like my father’s doctors, the oncologist and I had a menu of options. There was a whole range of new chemotherapy regimens that could be tried to shrink the tumor burden. I had a few surgical options for dealing with her situation, as well. With surgery, I told her, I wouldn’t be able to remove the intestinal blockage, but I might be able to bypass it. I’d either connect an obstructed loop to an unobstructed one or I’d disconnect the bowel above the blockage and give her an ileostomy, which she’d have to live with. I’d also put in a couple drainage catheters—permanent spigots that could be 26 open

opened to release the fluids from her blocked-up drainage ducts or intestines when necessary. Surgery risked serious complications—wound breakdown, leakage of bowel into her abdomen, infections—but it offered her the only way she could regain her ability to eat. I also told her that we did not have to do either chemo or surgery. We could provide medications to control her pain and nausea and arrange for hospice at home.

The options overwhelmed her. They all sounded terrifying. She didn’t know what to do. I realized, with shame, that I’d reverted to being Dr. Informative—here are the facts and figures; what do you want to do? So I stepped back and asked the questions I’d asked my father: What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What tradeoffs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not?

Not everyone is able to answer such questions, but she did. She said she wanted to be without pain, nausea, or vomiting. She wanted to eat. Most of all, she wanted to get back on her feet. Her biggest fear was that she wouldn’t be able to live life again and enjoy it—that she wouldn’t be able to return home and be with the people she loved.

As for what trade-offs she was willing to make, what sacrifices she was willing to endure now for the possibility of more time later, “Not a lot,” she said. Her perspective on time was shifting, focusing her on the present and those closest to her. She told me that uppermost in her mind was a wedding that weekend that she was desperate not to miss. “Arthur’s brother is marrying my best friend,” she said. She’d set them up on their first date.

Now the wedding was just two days away, on Saturday at 1:00 p.m. “It’s just the best thing,” she said. Her husband was going to be the ring bearer. She was supposed to be a bridesmaid. She was willing to do anything to be there, she said.

The direction suddenly became clear. Chemotherapy had only a slim chance of improving her current situation and it came at substantial cost to the time she had now. An operation would never let her get to the wedding, either. So we made a plan to see if we could get her there. We’d have her come back afterward to decide on the next steps.

With a long needle, we tapped a liter of tea-colored fluid from her abdomen, which made her feel at least temporarily better. We gave her medication to control her nausea. And she was able to drink enough liquids to stay hydrated. At three o’clock Friday afternoon, we discharged her with instructions to drink nothing thicker than apple juice and return to see me after the wedding.

She didn’t make it. She came back to the hospital that same night. Just the car ride, with all its swaying and bumps, set her vomiting again. The crampy attacks returned. Things only got worse at home. We agreed surgery was the best course now and scheduled her for it the next day. I would focus on restoring her ability to eat and putting drainage tubes in. Afterward, she could decide if she wanted more chemotherapy or to go on hospice. She was as clear as I’ve seen anyone be about her 20 october 2014

When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter

goals and what she wanted to do to achieve them.

Yet still she was in doubt. The following morning, she told me to cancel the operation.

“I’m afraid,” she said. She didn’t think she had the courage to go ahead with the procedure. She’d tossed all night thinking about it. She imagined the pain, the tubes, the indignities of the possible ileostomy, and then there were the incomprehensible horrors of the complications she could face. “I don’t want to take risky chances,” she said.

As we talked, it became clear that her difficulty wasn’t lack of courage to act in the face of risks. Her difficulty was in sorting out how to think about them. Her greatest fear was of suffering, she said. Although we were doing the operation in order to reduce her suffering, couldn’t the procedure make it worse rather than better?

Yes, I said. It could. Surgery offered her the possibility of being able to eat again and a very good likelihood of controlling her nausea, but it carried substantial risk of giving her only pain without improvement or adding yet new miseries. She had, I estimated for her, a 75 per cent chance I’d make her future better, at least for a little while, 20 october 2014

and a 25 percent chance I’d make it worse.

So what then was the right thing for her to do? And why was the choice so agonizing? The choice, I realized, was far more complicated than a risk calculation. For how do you weigh relief from nausea, and the chances of being able to eat again, against the possibilities of pain, of infections, of having to live with stooling into a bag?

The brain gives us two ways to evaluate experiences like suffering— there is how we apprehend such experiences in the moment and how we look at them afterward— and the two ways are deeply contradictory.

The Nobel Prize-winning researcher Daniel Kahneman illuminated what happens in a series of experiments he recounted in his seminal book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In one of them, he and University of Toronto physician Donald Redelmeier studied 287 patients undergoing colonoscopy and kidney stone procedures while awake.

The researchers gave the patients a device that let them rate their pain every sixty seconds on a scale of one (no pain) to ten (intolerable pain), a system that provided a quantifiable measure of their moment-by-moment open www.openthemagazine.com 27

experience of suffering. At the end, the patients were also asked to rate the total amount of pain they experienced during the procedure. The procedures lasted anywhere from four minutes to more than an hour. And the patients typically reported extended periods of low to moderate pain punctuated by moments of significant pain. A third of the colonoscopy patients and a quarter of the kidney stone patients reported a pain score of ten at least once during the procedure.

Our natural assumption is that the final ratings would represent something like the sum of the moment-by-moment ones. We believe that having a longer duration of pain is worse than a shorter duration and that having a greater average level of pain is worse than having a lower average level. But this wasn’t what the patients reported at all. Their final ratings largely ignored the duration of pain. Instead, the ratings were best predicted by what Kahneman termed the “PeakEnd rule”: an average of the pain experienced at just two moments—the single worst moment of the procedure and the pain experienced at the very end.

The gastroenterologists conducting the procedures rated the level of pain they had inflicted very similarly to their patients, according to the level of pain at the moment of greatest intensity and the level at the end, not according to the total amount.

People seemed to have two different selves— an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients’ overall pain ratings even after they’d experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. “That wasn’t so terrible,” they’d reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically.

Studies in numerous settings have confirmed the Peak-End rule and our neglect of duration of suffering. Research has also shown that the phenomenon applies just as readily to the way people rate pleasurable experiences.

Everyone knows the experience of watching sports when a team, having performed beautifully for nearly the entire game, blows it in the end. We Author and surgeon Atul Gawande 28 open

‘It’s possible to your body is not One of the finest contemporary writers on the subject of modern medicine and human life, Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, professor and public health researcher. In three bestselling books—Complications, Better and The Checklist Manifesto— he has immortalised the life of a surgical resident and looked at how to improve our experience of medical treatment. The recipient of the 2014 Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing, two National Magazine Awards and a MacArthur Fellowship, Gawande has been named amongst the hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and Time. Executive director of Ariadne Labs, a centre for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he practices general and endocrine surgery, and co-founder and chairman of Lifebox, which implements systems to reduce surgical deaths, he is also professor in the department of surgery at Harvard Medical School and that of health policy and management at the university’s School of Public Health. The superstar doctor with many vocations, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998, spoke to Rajni George about his much awaited new book on managing mortality, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Excerpts: You ask: ‘Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia or incurable heart failure dying, exactly?’

Do we have a different understanding of disease today than we did fifty or hundred years ago, as we do about dying?

In a way it’s a different understanding of medicine. We’ve had this century when we’ve discovered this incredible ability to reduce suffering for everything; we want this capability.

We have enormous hope that we have knowledge that can help when we have a problem. Yet we have doubts whether we can trust the system or not. Our hopes and difficulties lie in dealing with the limits of medicine. We have such confidence that we almost come to a place where the problems of ageing get treated in a hospital like just another problem.

20 october 2014

have a life worth living even when what it used to be’ You’ve been brutally honest about the shortcomings of medical care.

Has there been any blowback?

I’m making things more difficult at times. This book is about discussing the problems no one wants to discuss. I’m a little bit scared each time, about angry colleagues, but I’m starting to find that colleagues were saying that these are the same problems they were struggling with. All I’ve done is named and voiced difficulties and struggles that all doctors have.

My dad, when he was alive—he was a surgeon—would say to me: your writing is good for patients, I’m not sure it’s good for doctors. We would argue about this.

Are Indians thinking enough about quality of life towards the end of it, the thesis of your book?

My grandfather lived to a 110 and he never wanted for support and help. He was surrounded by family, 13 children, head of the household; when family came to the room we all bowed down at his feet. He couldn’t listen except for this red rubber tube we would shout into, yet he could live to have his choices respected till the end. But it only worked because the young women were enslaved. Their choices were expected to revolve around serving the parents.

The first thing that starts to happen in an economy that is improving is pensions, so the elderly can live with some independence. We are seeing this in Korea, in Japan; the elderly often prefer to live with that independence. The kind of place I was struck by in India was the pay-and-stay home. There are one or two housekeepers who maintain the family, but the elderly feel they have no purpose. They were safe, and they were lonely.

Modern economy comes from giving young people freedom.

It gives them the freedom to work and live and marry where they want, leaves the elderly behind. I’m really struck by the popularity of Chetan Bhagat’s novels, they bring this home: an ambitious young child leaves the family to get an education, works at a call centre and falls in love with a young girl, won’t go home and take care of their parents. The young want freedom but they feel guilty. At the same time, it’s not ‘either or’.

We’re just making better lives for people who are 20, 30, 40.

What would you advise people to do as they plan for old age?

We don’t have the language to ask: what are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not make? Once I understood that the important things to him were still being unable to interact socially, have his pain under control, we decided my father wouldn’t want to live out his last days in the hospital. When the young and the old get separated, it is thought that the hospital will take care of it. The hospital is meant to take care of your health and survival and safety, but we care about more than safety. We want to be in control of our lives.

20 6 october october2014 2014

Do you think hospice care has a future in India?

It’s very much a nascent creation. There are hospitals in the big cities which choose it for that last phase when treatment is only causing suffering, and people want the control of being in their own home. Right now, it is largely used by high income hospitals. The funny thing is it’s less costly than the hospital.

How does writing inform your medical practice?

It’s seamless. I identify problems in my writing which I address in my research, then in my practice. I didn’t know how to get past the idea of subjecting people to treatment that probably wouldn’t do any good. My effort to find a better way ended up influencing how I practised. Then, how I spoke to my father.

Is there a modern ars moriendi (art of dying)?

I’m definitely trying to paint a picture of the new ars moriendi.

Then: you take care of yourself and your family all the way to the end, learn to accept your fate, give yourself to God, ask for forgiveness, and that is a good dying. Now, it is having a conversation with your own family and doctor, letting them know what you would accept or not, being your own priest. That is the art of ageing and dying together. It’s much harder to know now. The art is being able to draw the line, to say: I will not sacrifice this. The goal is not a good death—it’s a good life.

Diana Athill wrote recently that death was basically nothingness, she wasn’t afraid of it. What are your personal ideas about dying?

We all have ideals aside from living long, including loyalties to ideas and commitments larger than yourself. It is possible to have a life worth living even when your body is not what it used to be. I’m clearer now about how to hold on to the things I care about and want to achieve. I’m not as afraid, after writing the book, about my ability to still do things I look forward to.

What are you working on next?

I am writing articles about healthcare, ObamaCare. There is a set of research projects where I’m testing approaches to care; Ariadne Labs tests ways of improving health systems around the world. A large project in Uttar Pradesh with the Gates Foundation, a Community Empowerment Lab, uses coaches to work with nurses who do home deliveries. In South Carolina, US, Eastern Europe, a lot of testing. Operating too, of course.

Would you ever write a novel?

With non-fiction, you have a million ways of shaping something that’s there. In fiction, you have a million possible events, the amount you can invent becomes overwhelming. I like the constraints non-fiction offers. But I may come across a problem I can’t solve by investigating the real world. n open www.openthemagazine.com open www.openthemagazine.com 29 29

feel that the ending ruins the whole experience. Yet there’s a contradiction at the root of that judgment. The experiencing self had whole hours of pleasure and just a moment of displeasure, but the remembering self sees no pleasure at all.

If the remembering self and the experiencing self can come to radically different opinions about the same experience, then the difficult question is which one to listen to. This was Jewel Douglass’s torment at bottom, and to a certain extent mine, if I was to help guide her.

Should we listen to the remembering—or, in this case, anticipating—self that focuses on the worst things she might endure? Or should we listen to the experiencing self, which would likely have a lower average amount of suffering in the time to come if she underwent surgery rather than if she just went home—and might even get to eat for a while again?

In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.

Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty.

A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause.

We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment— your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter.

Yet, we also recognize that the experiencing self should not be ignored. The peak and the ending are not the only things that count. In favoring the moment of intense joy over steady happiness, the remembering self is hardly always wise.

“An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds,” Kahneman observes. “We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory... has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.”

When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.

Jewel Douglass didn’t know if she was willing to face the 30 open

suffering that surgery might inflict on her and feared being left worse off. “I don’t want to take risky chances,” she said, and by that, I realized, she meant that she didn’t want to take a high-stakes gamble on how her story would turn out. On the one hand, there was so much she still hoped for, however seemingly mundane. That very week, she’d gone to church, driven to the store, made family dinner, watched a television show with Arthur, had her grandson come to her for advice, and made wedding plans with dear friends. If she could be allowed to have even a little of that—if she could be freed from what her tumor was doing to her to enjoy just a few more such experiences with the people she loved—she would be willing to endure a lot. On the other hand, she didn’t want to chance a result even worse than the one she already faced with her intestines cinched shut and fluid filling her abdomen like a dripping faucet. It seemed as if there were no way forward. But as we talked that Saturday morning in her hospital room, with her family around her and the operating room standing by downstairs, I came to understand she was telling me everything I needed to know.

We should go to surgery, I told her, but with the directions she’d just spelled out—to do what I could to enable her to return home to her family while not taking risky chances. I’d put in a small laparoscope. I’d look around. And I’d attempt to unblock her intestine only if I saw that I could do it fairly easily. If it looked difficult and risky, then I’d just put in tubes to drain her backed-up pipes. I’d aim to do what might have sounded like a contradiction in terms: a palliative operation, an operation whose overriding priority, whatever the violence and risks inherent, was to do only what was likely to make her feel better immediately.

She remained quiet, thinking.

Her daughter took her hand. “We should do this, Mom,” she said.

“Okay,” Douglass said. “But no risky chances.”

“No risky chances,” I said.

When she was asleep under anesthesia, I made a halfinch incision above her belly button. It let out a gush of thin, blood-tinged fluid. I slipped my gloved finger inside to feel for space to insert the fiberoptic scope. But a hard loop of tumor-caked bowel blocked the entry. I wasn’t even going to be able to put in a camera. I had the resident take the knife and extend the incision upward until it was large enough to see in directly and get a hand inside.

At the bottom of the hole, I saw a free loop of distended bowel—it looked like an overinflated pink inner tube— that I thought we might be able to pull up to the skin and make into an ileostomy so she could eat again. But it remained tethered by tumor, and as we tried to chip it free, it became evident that we were risking creating holes we’d never be able to repair. Leakage inside the abdomen would be a calamity. So we stopped. Her aims for us were clear. No risky chances. We shifted focus and put in two long, plastic drainage tubes. One we inserted directly into her stomach in order to empty the contents backed up there; the other we laid in the open abdominal cavity to 20 october 2014

Our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognise that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer empty the fluid outside her gut. Then we closed up, and we were done.

I told her family we weren’t able to help her eat again, and when Douglass woke up I told her, as well. Her daughter had tears. Her husband thanked us for trying.

Douglass tried to put a brave face on it.

“I was never obsessed with food anyway,” she said.

The tubes relieved her nausea and abdominal pain greatly—“90 percent,” she said. The nurses taught her how to open the gastric tube into a bag when she felt sick and the abdominal tube when her belly felt too tight. We told her she could drink what ever she wanted and even eat soft food for the taste. Three days after surgery she went home with hospice to look after her. Before she left, her oncologist and the oncology nurse practitioner saw her.

Douglass asked them how long they thought she had.

“They both filled up with tears,” she told me. “It was kind of my answer.”

A few days after Douglass left the hospital, she and her family allowed me to stop by her home after work. She 20 october 2014

answered the door herself, wearing a robe because of the tubes and apologizing for it. We sat in her living room, and I asked how she was doing.

She was doing okay, she said. “I think I have a measure that I’m slip, slip, slipping,” but she had been seeing old friends and relatives all day, and she loved it. “It’s my lifeblood, really, so I want to do it.” Her family staggered the visits to keep them from tiring her out.

She said she didn’t like all the contraptions sticking out of her. The tubes were uncomfortable where they poked out of her belly. “I didn’t know that there would be this constant pressure,” she said. But the first time she found that just opening a tube could take away her nausea, “I looked at the tube and said, ‘Thank you for being there.’ ” She was taking just Tylenol for pain. She didn’t like narcotics because they made her drowsy and weak, and that interfered with seeing people. “I’ve probably confused the hospice people because I said at some point, ‘I don’t want any discomfort. Bring it on’ ”—by which she meant the narcotics. “But I’m not there yet.”

Mostly, we talked about memories from her life, and open www.openthemagazine.com 31

they were good ones. She was at peace with God, she said.

I left feeling that, at least this once, we’d learned to do it right. Douglass’s story was not ending the way she ever envisioned, but it was nonetheless ending with her being able to make the choices that meant the most to her.

Two weeks later, her daughter, Susan, sent me a note.

“Mom died on Friday morning. She drifted quietly to sleep and took her last breath. It was very peaceful. My dad was alone by her side with the rest of us in the living room.

This was such a perfect ending and in keeping with the relationship they shared.”

I

am leery of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities.

We have room to act, to shape our stories, though as time goes on it is within narrower and narrower confines. A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.

Inevitably, the question arises of how far those possibilities should extend at the very end—whether the logic of sustaining people’s autonomy and control requires helping them to accelerate their own demise when they wish to. “Assisted suicide” has become the term of art, though advocates prefer the euphemism “death with dignity.” We clearly already recognize some form of this right when we allow people to refuse food or water or medications and treatments, even when the momentum of medicine fights against it. We accelerate a person’s demise every time we remove someone from an artificial respirator or artificial feeding. After some resistance, cardiologists now accept that patients have the right to have their doctors turn off their pacemaker— the artificial pacing of their heart—if they want it. We also recognize the necessity of allowing doses of narcotics and sedatives that reduce pain and discomfort even if they may knowingly speed death. All proponents seek is the ability for suffering people to obtain a prescription for the same kind of medications, only this time to let them hasten the timing of their death. We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop 32 open

the natural, internal processes that do so.

At root, the debate is about what mistakes we fear most—the mistake of prolonging suffering or the mistake of shortening valued life. We stop the healthy from committing suicide because we recognize that their psychic suffering is often temporary. We believe that, with help, the remembering self will later see matters differently than the experiencing self—and indeed, only a minority of people saved from suicide make a repeated attempt; the vast majority eventually report being glad to be alive. But for the terminally ill who face suffering that we know will increase, only the stonehearted can be unsympathetic.

All the same, I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them. Proponents have crafted the authority to be tightly circumscribed to avoid error and misuse. In places that allow physicians to write lethal prescriptions—countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland and states like Oregon, Washington, and Vermont—they can do so only for terminally ill adults who face unbearable suffering, who make repeated requests on separate occasions, who are certified not to be acting out of depression or other mental illness, and who have a second physician confirming they meet the criteria. Nonetheless, the larger culture invariably determines how such authority is employed. In the Netherlands, for instance, the system has existed for de cades, faced no serious opposition, and significantly grown in use. But the fact that, by 2012, one in thirty-five Dutch people sought assisted suicide at their death is not a mea sure of success. It is a measure of failure.

Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill.

Certainly, suffering at the end of life is sometimes unavoidable and unbearable, and helping people end their misery may be necessary. Given the opportunity, I would support laws to provide these kinds of prescriptions to people. About half don’t even use their prescription. They are reassured just to know they have this control if they need it.

But we damage entire societies if we let providing this capability divert us from improving the lives of the ill. Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well. n ©Atul Gawande

Excerpted from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, Penguin Books India 296 pages | Rs 599 20 october 2014

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INNOCEAN-001/12

MESSAGING

? ?

Let Emojis do the talking What happens to conversations when picture letters go wild on smartphones?

by Shreya Sethuraman

The above conversation may well sound like Greek—er, sorry, emoji—to you.

Allow us to translate: ‘Hi! What’s up? Do you want to meet for coffee?’

‘I could actually do with a beer. Let’s meet at eight?’

‘Great! See you soon. Bye.’ ‘Bye!’

T

here was once a time people

used those cute-looking emoticons to depict different emotions while using chat software on their desktops. The colon and closed bracket :) stood for a smile; and should you use an open bracket instead, as in :( , it meant a sad face. The semi-colon and closed bracket ;) meant a wink.

When we had just begun getting used to these simple emoticons, the smartphone era dawned upon us. Every other person had a BlackBerry, and began using yellow-faced emoticons to animate their BBM conversations. And no, the 34 open

yellow faces had nothing to do with The Simpsons, lest you expect Homer Simpson to say, ‘Doh’. They were, however, far better and allowed users to convey a variety of emotions, with some people even resorting to cheat-sheets to discover emotions not listed in their phone’s icon menu. But even that is now passé.

It is the age of the ‘emoji’. The word, which means ‘picture letter’, originated almost two decades ago in Japan, and has begun to take over smartphone communication with little symbols and pictures.

Shigetaka Kurita, the ‘father of emojis’, is said to have been inspired by Japanese manga comics and kanji characters when he created the set that is most popular these days, especially on WhatsApp. It has pictures that depict a dancer ( ), nail paint ( ), an aeroplane ( ), a hospital ( ), saké ( ), and many others that have edged out the abominable lingo of the early days of SMS (remember ‘Hi. Hw ru? Lts mt at 8. K gr8. C u soon’?).

“This concept isn’t new,” says Kavin

Bharti Mittal, head of product and strategy, Hike Messenger, “It’s just better; you’ve probably sent out messages with keyboard characters—emojis or stickers enable you to share characters in graphic form and give you a plethora of options.” Hike Messenger, which made its debut two years ago, is India’s answer to WhatsApp, and has quite an eclectic collection of stickers, as Mittal calls them—such as Rajinikanth ( ), the Doordarshan logo ( ), and the omnipresent nimbu-mirchi ( ).

Emojis, which so far were widely used only in Japan, made their way to India around four years ago. The popularity of the chat software WhatsApp made them ubiquitous, with many people using them without even knowing what they’re called. Take, for instance, Delhibased researcher Shubhi Vijay. “When I first started using them four years ago, I called them ‘emoticons’ and then I realised more people were calling them ‘emojis’. So I adapted,” she says. Speaking of 20 october 2014

their attraction, Mumbai-based Shinmin Bali says, “Having an emoji in addition to text acts as the closest replacement of a change of facial expression or voice modulation while having a conversation. The fact that there are so many of them displaying various moods act as a top-up.”

I

n response to the demands of an au-

dience hungry for new ideas, one that has adopted American style symbols with gusto—the hot dog emoji, for example, or the middle-finger one—there are now social networks and mobile applications such as Emoji.li, Emojicate and Stephen dedicated exclusively to emojis.

For the uninitiated, on Emojicate, an app that made its Apple Store debut in August and will soon be available for Android phones, you can only express yourself through emojis. And you can set the ‘clock’ emoji to a time you prefer, something that the usual emoji menus do not allow. Says Nick Kendal, the app’s originator, in an email interview, ‘With the advent of smartphones and software keyboards, we have seen [emojis] become much more commonplace, especially since the adoption of an international standard with the Unicode consortium.’ Adds Kendal, ‘A user doesn’t have to be literate to use emojis. They can compose messages based on what they’re doing and how they feel without typing a single letter. This opens up huge opportunities for people to compose messages, who may not have done so before.’

Indeed, the classic smiley emoji would be understood by anyone across the globe, regardless of the language he or she speaks. The fun part, however, is that the same emoji can often be interpreted in different ways. As Rajiv Arora, a communications professional who uses emojis frequently, says, “Every emoji can convey a different meaning depending on the context, so they lend flexibility and variety. For example, a smiley can be used to just acknowledge a message or as a replacement for ‘thanks’ or even to politely end a conversation.” He began using emojis around three years ago simply because they were there, and mostly because “the initial confusion on when to use which emoji made conversations quite hilarious”.

20 october 2014

Know What Your Emoji Means The dancing girls emoji: Typically used for something celebratory, it actually symbolises ‘dancing bunnies’, which connotes subservience in Japan The poop emoji: It’s a smiling and not a stinky pile of poop (not a chocolate softy either ). Commonly used in situations that call for laughter Clapping hands emoji: This is used as an expression of apology or gratitude (especially for a meal) in Japanese culture. Commonly used to plead forgiveness, and sometimes to indicate a high five Sleepy face with drool emoji: Not to be confused for a sad, dejected, crying face. It’s used to convey drooling while asleep Sad face emoji: Don’t confuse this with a crying face, as the drop here falls off the brow, depicting sweat under stress. Best used when ‘disappointed but relieved’ Sassy girl emoji: This is actually the ‘information desk’ emoji, as opposed to a girl carrying an invisible tray or a girl throwing back her hair

Source: Emojipedia.org

You would have seen what look like emojis on Google’s Hangout app, Facebook’s messenger app and on Viber.

Purists, however, would scoff that these are mere ‘stickers’. The difference between emojis and stickers, in their view, is that the former are essentially textsized images whereas the ones on Viber and Facebook are, as Kendal says, ‘larger illustrated images which can be inserted into messages, which are typically referred to as ‘ stickers’ rather than emojis.’

So you have a crying dog sticker, a fat cat sticker, Pink Panther stickers and those that commemorate special occasions, such as Diwali and Christmas.

For Ankit Pandey, co-founder and executive director of Bold Kiln, a full spectrum end-to-end solutions provider for startups, the emojis on Hike and WhatsApp are funny, deliver a quick and crisp message, and are easy to use.

However, when asked if emoji-exclusive social networks will ever work in India, he says, “An Emojli or an Emojicate might work for the youth in the West, but unless you deep dive in to the habits, notions and thought process of the Indian youth, you wouldn’t know if this would work or not.” He feels such ‘fun’ things might lose steam once something better comes up. “Pop culture fades every month.”

On the other hand, when asked about his take on such social networks, Mittal says, “As a platform, we believe in offering our users the freedom to express [themselves] through text, emoticons, stickers and a lot more. If users wish to converse only with stickers, we’ll simply enable that. Of the 10 billion plus monthly messaging volume, stickers contribute to close to 30 per cent of the traffic, accounting for 3 billion sticker shares.”

Should you count yourself among those who take pride in calling themselves ‘emojiks’ (an ‘emoji geek’, that is), there’s a real-time emoji tracker available too (Emojitracker.com). This website tracks the emojis most commonly used on Twitter, in real-time. The popular ones include: the smiling face, the cool dude, face blowing a kiss, the victory hand, and, of course, the heart. Among the least used are the floppy disk, pager and card index.

Oh, and the love for emojis doesn’t end here. It would help to take more than just a cursory look at your smartphone’s emoji menu. Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick, has been translated into emoji by data engineer Fred Benenson; Kate Perry’s song Roar was recently translated; and Community actor Gillian Jacobs took up the emoji movie challenge, where she had to guess iconic Hollywood movies via emojis. And there are people who sing emoji karaoke as well! Good luck translating our Bollywood songs into emoji, though. Anybody up for it? n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

fashion

&

Bold

The colour, connoisseurs and trend-breakers at the fashion week by chinki sinha

B

lue overlaps another shade of itself. Like mountains, and sea. All combined in one. A landscape of blue, and there it is. Cobalt, which is what she will present to an audience, and in those few minutes as the models walk down the ramp, she will hope that onlookers get it. The rawness, coarseness and complexities that then become so simple that it often forgets its own journey.

There’s a blue shirt. That, she says, is her boldest piece. There’s the opening outfit. A blue dress. No ornamentation, no desire to make a saleable piece. It is expression.

Uninhibited expression. That’s what fashion weeks are for. For retracing that journey of trying to be bold, and expressive. Because the ramp, they say, is a different space. You don’t want normal. You want dramatic. You want narratives.

Mrinalini Gupta says she has no design philosophy. She says she stays away from those because they collapse to give way to new things. She interned with Rajesh Pratap Singh, and says he was a huge influence. He helped shape her design sensibility, made it minimal, and in that neatness, she says, lies her boldness. It’s a move away from the bling and kitsch that is everywhere. But she isn’t judging anyone. Look at what Manish Arora did with it, she says. He made it universally sought after.

That’s how an artist works.

There will be a lot of blue showcased at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) that will unveil the trends for Spring/ Summer 2015. Like Rajesh Pratap Singh, who says he has worked

For him, forecasts don’t mean much. They are for the masses, and he has never let that decide the course of his collection. It is what he sees, and what he is ready for. As for fashion weeks, he says they organise the industry, and that’s good for fashion Rajesh Pratap Singh, Designer Works with hand-woven textiles

Abhishek khandelwal

20 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 39

with indigo, and will be showing what he calls “wearable garments” this season.

For Rajesh Pratap Singh, who works with minimalism and hand-woven textiles, the forecasts don’t mean much. They are for the masses, and he has never let that decide the course of his collection. It is what he sees, and what he is ready for, he says. As for fashion weeks, he says, they organise the industry, and that’s good for fashion. But again, designers are people who work in isolation, and develop concepts over a period of time, and when they are ready, they unveil it.

“Hand spun, hank dyed, natural indigo, hand woven, bespoke, hand stitched.” That’s how it starts. The video of the making of Rajesh Pratap Singh denim. He calls it Rare Pure Freedom.

But the video starts with flags that flutter, and cotton that flows like rice.

There’s imagery of so many things and of so many places in Rajesh Pratap Singh’s collection this season. There are women working the looms, and the machines, and a small instance where the camera pans on a red chunni associated with a goddess. A man mixes colour, and dips the yarn in what seems like waves of green, and purple and blue. That then becomes indigo.

That’s how freedom is attained. With synchrony, and with hands. That’s what he will showcase. The rarity of freedom from everything industrial. Of being minimal, and simple, of red and blue, and people, and their hands, and their smiles.

Last season, Gupta’s collection, inspired by Kashmir, earned her rave reviews for her play with colours and silhouettes. There were olives, and browns, and whites and grey. The landscape, and the conflict merged in the narrative on the ramp with models walking to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s beats dressed in capes and bandaged salwars. Kashmir, with all its complexities, the military and the people, and the winters, and the mountains, was there for the audience to take note of. She dyed bandages in shades of olive and brown and pasted them on fabrics to recreate the experience of conflict and casualty and injury, and made her own experiences in Kashmir speak through the detailing.

Because she is a traveller, there is no 40 open

denying the sea, and the mountains, and the people, and the love, or the melancholy. She is in and out. There’s nature, and she says she seeks purity.

She is one of the few designers who are trying to do things their way. “Because once you are touched by it, you can’t return. When you meet simpler people in places like these and share their outlook, it tends to declutter a lot in your life. You begin to relate to simple things.

Kashmir happened because I travelled there. Mountains are in my system. They are non-conformist and so am I.” “I haven’t been to [the] Alps, and it is Indian in a way that I have been in the Himalayas, and that’s what my fashion is. Indian, and yet stubborn,” she says.

Cobalt, which is what her collection is called, is just one of the shades of blue.

Just when the fashion industry is going the handloom way, Gupta says she kept it simple by introducing tatters on her textiles. Fashion is strictly just that. There is no saving of the world here.

“I didn’t force myself to be inspired. I have become raw. I want to translate that rawness and I was overwhelmed by gloss and the manufactured appeal of fashion weeks. I am choosing to make my point that it is really okay to be Indian. It is something I am evolving into and there is a lot to get deeper. Yet, I would like to keep simplicity alive,” she says.

Cobalt has kaftans, and boxy shirts, and capes. She says the garments are so simple that it evokes the whole imagery of going to a government office. It is simple old school vagueness that she finds charming. “I flowed from one piece to another. Bold to me is ridiculously simple. It is pretty complex to be that simple,” she says. But designers are a lot of people in one. Like Gupta, who says “I am fashion and I am farmer. I am that dichotomy.”

Raakesh Agarvwal says he has done a denim line which is unusual in the sense that it is tattered, and the feel is like you returned from a wild party on the beach or in the jungle. He is one of the few designers that can straddle glamour and simplicity, and the combination is often interesting with both forces working together, and not at war or in conflict with each other. “It is very interesting this time. And it is not the usual indigo 20 october 2014

“The ramp is a dramatic place, your hidden fantasy world... I don’t wear lace, but I know you must break your own boundaries, and let love take over. It is the beginning of romance” Rina Singh, Designer Works with linen and khadi

denim but more than that,” he says.

It is for the first time designer Raakesh Agarvwal is veering away from glamour that has been his trademark to launch a denim line at the WIFW, and the inspiration has come from the rave parties of the 70s. “We have done edgy this time,” he says. “It is not your usual denim but couture denim. The whole world is returning to the 70s on a nostalgia ship, and I wanted to do denim.”

He speaks about a rave festival called Ozora in Hungary, and pictures a muse going to that party. That’s how the story progresses. These go on for days, and the people there wear what they have, and dance until dawn, and until dusk. Dawn and dusk come together, and that makes for the poetry of the collection. There’s blue, and there are tatters, and colours as if they sprayed these in a party.

“You know that feeling of the dawn and the dusk. It starts with distressed 20 october 2014

denim. Nobody carries clothes with them. If they get torn, they stitch them up,” he says. “The idea is movement and freedom, and party. It is the story of the party as it progresses.”

The movement is shown in fabric, he says, where he has used 60 or 70 metres to create the freedom and beauty of movement. The show will end with a palazzo pant and a jacket.

T

he WIFW Spring-Summer 2015 start-

ed on 8 October. The business of fashion, as the Fashion Design Council of India, an apex body, keeps saying, is serious.

Besides the blue, there is lace, and vintage, and a whole invocation of the 60s and 70s, and the recalling of structures and drapes that were in vogue back then. But fashion, if it comes from the subconscious, is also nostalgic. The

nostalgia could be for things that weren’t, or which you didn’t experience personally but were transferred to you.

For Rina Singh, who has been showcasing her label Ekà in Paris and New York, it is a chance she must take now after 14 years of being away from the ramp. Her work is well known for its simple silhouettes and a minimal approach to drapes and colours. She works with linen and khadi, and for the fashion week, she has gonebacktosimplestories.Itislove,andthe beginnings of it, with flowers and smiles, that inspired her collection.

She has combined the outfits with lace negligees worn by models underneath for a little drama.

“The ramp is a dramatic place, your hidden fantasy world,” she says. “I don’t wear lace, but I know you must break your own boundaries, and let love take over. It is like twisting the story. It is the beginning of romance when it is still about flowers.”

Of course, there are others who would depict the abyss of love’s melancholic state when abandonment happens. But for Singh, it was keeping things simple because the story has just started.

She isn’t nervous, but says the ramp is a challenge in terms of depicting a story with a beginning and an end.

Hers are delicate silhouettes with small pretty flowers on linen and khaki. A happy collection for spring, because they say love happens when seasons change.

But who wants a clinical decoding of the chemical reactions in the brain? Love is pretty, she says, and so are her clothes.

With her brand Ekà showcasing in the US and France, and she never felt the need to be at a fashion week, but when buyers wanted fresh stories, she thought it was time. Her show in Delhi, she says, brought it all together. There is a cookbook with sketches in crayons of flowers, and flowing garments. Everything is fresh.

Everything is beautiful. Like love at first sight. “I like the imagination to take over,” says Rina Singh, speaking in general of what moves her.

“This season, it’s love. Next could be war inspired. Who knows?”

While Indian fashion weeks offer a platform for designers to showcase their work, it is a costly affair and restrictive open www.openthemagazine.com 41

“I didn’t force myself to be inspired. I have become raw. I want to translate that rawness and I was overwhelmed by gloss and the manufactured appeal of fashion weeks” Mrinalini Gupta, Designer Works with colours and textiles

in terms of what they can do with lights and set design, so not everybody is keen on this platform. Yet, it is all they have. To tell stories without props is a challenge.

Yet, some of them have come through, and fashion weeks are getting better, with designers innovating with clothes and accessories to convey their idea or create a narrative.

Among the others who will showcase their collections are Aneeth Arora of Péro, Nachiket Barve, Wendell Rodricks, and Rohit Bal, who will do the grand finale.

A few designers have stayed away, as two fashion weeks in a year are hectic, and the creative process takes time.

Like David Abraham of the label A&T, who has done an interesting collection 42 open

with dhotis as a nucleus.

Indian fashion, while aiming to break shackles all around, is in a state of churn.

Designers are trying to embrace what Indian culture offers, and not mix it with Western sensibilities dictated by Paris and London. They are trying to create their own language with what they have—and it is both interesting and getting better. At one point, culture was confused with ornamentation, and that is going through a transformation. India may be about decorative things, like furniture and interiors, and our design elements have always reflected that. For some time, there was much emphasis on flashy aspects. Now, young designers are discovering that Indian culture is a

repository of plenty that holds deep meaning. Like Aneeth Arora, who did a polka dot story in one of her collections, a narrative of the little dot and how it has been a statement across the country. She has also used textiles from everywhere— like khand from Maharashtra—as a canvas for her styling and designs.

David Abraham says the decorative is what needs to be embraced. There’s interesting work going on here, he adds.

It’s not just the big names of fashion, even the younger ones are not shying away from making leaps of faith, and telling stories of simplicity. Some of it stands out as bold for now. But over time, hopefully, Indian minimalism will come into its own. n 20 october 2014

c u lt u r e

mindspace

raul irani

Kamsahamnida Korean culture in India 44

It’s a dump, it’s a sewer... it’s a beach!

63

o p e n s pa c e

Hrithik Roshan Parineeti Chopra

62

n p lu

Haider Bang Bang

61

cinema review

GoPro Hero 4 Black Frederique Constant Slimline Moonphase Brother ADS-1100W

60

tech & style

Can a Baby Look like the Mother’s Ex? Curiosity Enhances Learning Impact of a mini-stroke

58

science

Bauji goes bonkers

54

roug h cu t

The Booker shortlist Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

52

books

Vikas Khanna’s ode to Amritsar

48

food

Short and tweet performances

a rt s

The Korean cool

44 64

Diners at the Korean eatery Gung: The Palace in Delhi

culture

Hello Hallyu, and Kamsahamnida! The Korean cool, from popular culture

to food, travels from the Northeast to the rest of India. ritesh uttamchandani

(Left to right) Korean fans Jeet, Nishi and Sonal

T

LHENDUP G BHUTIA

wo years ago, I travelled to a remote village in Mizoram.

After having taken two different flights to get to Aizawl airport, followed by a 12 hour-long journey in a jeep, a night’s rest in an abandoned circuit house, and another journey of two hours across a river, I reached a settlement of about 150 homes. This was Theiva, a village of the Mara tribe, in the southernmost tip of Mizoram, connected to the rest of the state and country through a narrow paved road. Around the village were thick forests, and on the other side, Myanmar.

Several years ago, a girl had gotten lost in the jungle as a fouryear-old. She had now been found 38 years later, feral and somewhat autistic in nature, on the fringes of the forest. I had come to write an article about the woman, Ng Chhaidy, and her return to Theiva. Here in this edge of India, the electricity was erratic, people hung the entrails of animals for consumption, and nobody spoke any language other than Mara and Mizo. They lived harsh lives, but never complained. Chhaidy’s parents, just like the other villagers were warm and hospitable, but as the evening descended, I found them increasingly less inviting. They did not seem to want to talk and preferred watching TV instead. As I sat in this green wooden house with aluminium sheets that served as walls and a roof and began to consider what might have suddenly dawned upon my hosts, I absent-mindedly began to follow the proceedings on TV. The characters were pale-skinned. The setting seemed to be urban and foreign. And then it occurred to me. “But…” I stood up, unable to contain myself. “This is not Mizo.” The characters were speaking in a dubbed Mizo voice. One of the two individuals who was accompanying me from a nearby town to help out as a translator, and who was also watching the show with Chhaidy’s parents, said, “It’s Korean. Didn’t you know?”

That’s when I stumbled upon something I had always heard of, but never observed firsthand—the Korean wave or hallyu, the gamut of TV dramas and films and K-Pop from that country sweeping through the Northeast. It was not just Chhaidy’s parents. All the villagers, like the rest of the state, watched Korean films and dramas that were being telecast on TV by local cable operators. On my return to Aizawl, this phenomenon was even more noticeable. The largest collection in all the shops that sold CDs was those of Korean film and TV dramas. Outside on the roads, young boys walked in elaborately moussed and gelled hair, some of them even having dyed their hair blond. The girls wore hot pants or short skirts, with large leather boots. Exactly like how many members of Korean boy and girl bands did.

But now it appears, the K-wave is not restricted just to the Northeast. Gradually, a nascent wave is also building up with youngsters in other Indian locations.

In the 1990s, South Korean culture began flourishing in other east Asian countries. South Korea became the Hollywood of East Asia. Actively promoted by the government, their dramas and films, with its contemporary settings and the espousal of a traditional value system around the importance of family and friendopen www.openthemagazine.com 45

FINDLAY KEMBER/AFP/Getty Images

ships found a large fan following. They did not contain the violence and overflowing sexuality portrayed in other mainstream media. The pop songs, with a blend of Eastern and Western sounds, had catchy and repetitive choruses and synchronised dance routines. Boy and girl bands that began to disappear in other music industries became popular here. The media began to refer to this wave as hallyu. The release of Psy’s Gangnam Style only raised the global profile of the K-wave.

It is said that it first began in Manipur, where after separatist groups banned Hindi films, TV shows and music, the youths started taking to Korean fare. This quickly spread to other parts of the Northeast, where the youths did not just consume these products, they also began to dress and style themselves like South Korean actors and musicians.

N

ow it is picking up in other parts of the country. There

are fan clubs devoted to certain Korean actors and musicians on Facebook, groups of youngsters catch up in coffee shops and each other’s homes to discuss the fad, and conversations are peppered with Korean phrases like annyeong haseyo (‘hello’), kamsahamnida (‘thank you’) and sarang haeyo (‘I love you’). Some memorise and sing Korean songs without understanding their lyrics. And some are even learning the Korean language to better appreciate the culture.

Jeet Dasgupta, a Mumbai-based assistant brand manager in the marketing department of Bajaj Corp Ltd, was introduced to the Korean wave through films. Then followed a deep passion for K-Pop, and since last year, he has also started publically performing Korean songs, although he does

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not understand the language. So far, he has performed at a Mumbai mall, in an event organised last year by the Korean consulate in Mumbai, and at the K-Pop Festival in Delhi this year, an event organised annually by the Delhi-based Korean Culture Centre and whose winner is sent to South Korea to compete at the K-Pop World Festival. Dasgupta emerged the winner of the Mumbai round of the festival, and third at the national competition. “I write the Korean songs out in English and memorise them,” he says. “I used to be very afraid of getting the diction wrong. But I listen to the songs as much as possible and learn the meaning of the songs to get the pronunciations and the sentiments right.” Dasgupta organises Korean movie nights at his house every few weeks where he screens movies for friends who also enjoy Korean films, and uses his karaoke system, which contains a few Korean songs, to sing with his friends. He is currently preparing a duet for an event later this year that will be organised by the India Korea Friends Mumbai, a fan club devoted to the Korean Wave in the city. “Usually, all of us Indians who sing Korean songs are so involved in getting the diction right that we don’t dance while we sing. Hopefully I’ll be able to do so this time. Also this song (Now by the group Trouble Maker) contains some rap elements, which will be tricky,” he says.

According to Orlinda Fernandes, a fashion designer who is a co-founder of the fan group, India Korea Friends Mumbai, which has around 260 people, the reason that the K-wave is gradually finding resonance with some Indians is because the content is different and refreshing. “There is a sameness to the music and films produced in India and the US. K-Pop or Korean films and dramas are not just new; they are as slick 20 october 2014

Schoolgirl Akshaya Longjam watches a South Korean film on her laptop in Imphal; Korean Kimchee, a delicacy

and well-produced as any top American show or music video. Plus, almost all the artistes, whether singers or actors, are by a rule good-looking.”

The nascent K-wave in India is being promoted by the Korean embassy. The Korean Culture Centre (KCC), which is supported by the South Korean embassy, organises Korean film screenings, classes in Korean language and taekwondo and cultural exhibitions, apart from organising events like the K-Pop Festival. Earlier this year, the KCC signed an Memorandum of Understanding with JU Entertainment, a top South Korean record label, to help promote K-Pop in India and to bring K-Pop artistes to India. While shows from the Korean channel Arirang TV are already being telecast on Doordarshan, and the channel itself is available on some Indian DTH networks like Videocon. Doordarshan and Arirang TV earlier this year signed an MoU to further exchange more content from each other’s channels.

What is further propelling this wave is the presence of a large South Korean population in the country. There are around 600 South Korean companies like Samsung, Hyundai and LG Electronics in India, and along with the factories have come South Korean employees. According to statistics by the Export-Import Bank of Korea, by the end of 2013, South Koreans had invested around $3.25 billion in the country. There are at least around 8,000 South Koreans living in India, according to the Korean Association in India.

The largest population is in the National Capital Region and Chennai regions, where most of the companies are located, each of which has at least 3,000 South Koreans.

“Most Koreans stay for a few years in India. They bring their 20 october 2014

families and their children study in Indian schools and colleges, further introducing Korean culture to their Indian neighbours and classmates,” says Ritesh Sharma, the Delhibased general manager of the Korean Association in India.

A number of Korean restaurants now cater to not just South Korean patrons in Chennai and Delhi, but also to Indians. The popular Korean eatery Gung: The Palace in Delhi, started in 2007, did so well with the Indian patrons that it has now three more establishments. According to Jin Bum Kim, the proprietor of Gung, Indian customers make up for at least 60 per cent of the four Gung’s clientele. Indians, according to Kim, also actively participate in Korean karaoke nights and in a Korean drinking game they call the Hurricane Bomb. In the game, the wet paper napkin that covers a glass of a mixture of Soju, a Korean wine, and beer, is flung on the wall before every drink is consumed.

Each drink is to be glugged down at one go, and people are to leave only once the wall is covered with napkins. “People used to think a Korean eatery won’t work in India because Korean cuisine incorporates a lot of different types of meat.

But it has. There is a lot of similarity in the two cuisines, because of the reliance on spices, which many seem to have not noticed,” Kim says. He came to Delhi when his father, a diplomat, was transferred to the South Korean embassy, and pursued economics in Ramjas College. “When I first came to Delhi, I used to feel quite odd here. There were very few Koreans and everything, from the people to the culture, was new to me. But now you see a lot more Koreans and K-Pop is slowly getting an audience here too,” he adds.

O

tojit Kshetrimayum, a sociologist from Manipur who is based in Delhi, authored an academic paper about the Korean wave in Manipur in 2007. According to the paper, the ban on Hindi movies and songs in Manipur, along with the cultural similarity between Korea and Manipur, both in terms of racial appearance and the presence of clan communities, led to the boom of Korean films and songs in the state.

Kshetrimayum, who is currently an associate fellow at VV Giri National Labour Institute, says over the phone, “I used to be surprised by the trend when I used to visit Manipur. Youngsters were using Korean phrases, imitating Korean mannerisms, and even using chopsticks, when otherwise there is no culture of using chopsticks here.” He adds, “But with Korean content available on the internet and Korean shows on Indian TV, one can see this wave coming to other Indian places too.”

Nishi Mhapankar, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Bhayandar in Mumbai, says she scours the internet every day for the latest updates on K-Pop. Her favourite musicians are SHINee, a boy band of five members. Because there are no Korean language classes available in Mumbai, she has been learning the language online for the past six months. “I want to understand the language and the culture better. Next year, I will travel to Seoul to see for myself what Korea is like,” she says. According to her, if her interest in the Korean language continues, she might even consider a career as a translator for Korean firms. And at the end of our conversation, she says, “Kamsahamnida”— Korean for ‘thank you’. n open www.openthemagazine.com 47

arts

Dinesh Khanna

Less Is Cool Time shrinks on stage as performances get shorter and smarter Akhila Krishnamurthy

L

ast month, at Paris’ Opera Bastille, the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company presented an eight-minute—yes, you read that right—excerpt from Timeless, a group contemporary work, inspired by Kathak.

In its original form, Timeless is an hour and seven minutes long. Timeless, in its short and tweet avatar, evolved over time, literally, following an invitation from one of the reputed French newspaper houses that was celebrating its 70th anniversary. “The organisers were very particular about what they wanted us to present,” Aditi Mangaldas says, over a phone call from Delhi, “They had seen and heard about Timeless and were keen for us to present that work.”

Only, the time allotted to them, to present it, was a mere eight minutes.

“I was baffled,” Mangaldas says, “But after a round of conversation with the organisers, I understood they had performances by groups from across the world, and if each one was to perform for half an hour, the celebration would last a day.” Mangaldas pragmatically converted that opportunity to an advantage: “It allowed me to relook the work, stand back a little, detach myself, look at it with my third eye.” The result 48 open

was a taut and tight version. “I’m not saying that’s the norm,” Mangaldas clarifies, referring specifically to the notion of time in the context of a performance, “But this is the world we live in; and we cannot remain isolated from what is happening around us.”

On 1 October, in Chennai’s Museum Theatre, the Prakriti Foundation, a Chennai-based cultural organisation, showcased ‘An Evening of Short Plays’.

Eight ten-minute plays in Tamil that were part of the Short + Sweet Theatre Festival (held in August), presented a series of sketches—political satire, fantasy, human drama and desire, all in short capsules. “The ten-minute play,” says Mathivanan Rajendran, Chennaibased theatre actor, and founder of Stray Factory Entertainment, a standalone theatre company, “feels like a gateway drug to the stage; it’s an opportunity to expand one’s mind and craft for short-term gratification.”

Until recently, the performing arts were shaped by languorous servings of elaborate experiences, but now it is not unusual to hear of short-term gratification. Things are changing, and fast. In the dynamic world of the performing arts in India, ‘Time’ is the new character. Across genres—theatre, dance, music—and both in classical and contemporary, duration and length are becoming integral components, subtly—and often not—finding mention in programme notes or acting as a lure in publicity material.

Let’s look at a performance a couple of months ago at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Bengaluru. The performance titled The Padme Project,

by Anita Ratnam’s Arangham Trust, was billed simply and straightforwardly as ‘an evening of contemporary music and dance’. The curtains came up sharp at 6.30 pm, to the opening segment, titled ‘Float’, a 20-minute piano rendering by classical-contemporary pianist, Anil Srinivasan. Musical pieces from Western and Indian classical genres were interspersed, weaving together a

singular, seamless fabric of melody. Less than two minutes after the piano vanished, seven dancers (six girls and a young man) filled the stage, and for the next 30 minutes presented a contemporary work—choreographed by the Netherlands-based dancer and choreographer, Kalpana Raghuraman—that attempts to explore the role of ‘religion and spirituality’ in the world we live in.

At 7.25 pm, exactly, well before a mobile could break the rhythm of the work’s soundscape, or audience members could begin checking their email or WhatsApp messages, or demonstrating classic and acceptable signs of urban restlessness, the curtains came down. A big round of applause followed and the audience trickled out looking perceptibly pleased.

Call it the twitter effect on the performing arts, but urban patrons— restless, impatient, easily bored, fidgety and finicky—seem to prefer portions over productions, excerpts over extensiveness, experiments in form and content over engagements that are slow and languorous. As a result, the paucity of time is what defines the context of the arts both for the creator and the consumer.

“Look at the horrendous traffic in our cities,” says Ratnam, “Free time, you see, is sacrosanct.” Having embarked on The Padme Project this year with an intent to mentor young dancers, Ratnam believes the space now is “not to merely create interesting content using time but to create space where there is more relevant and meaningful sharing and exchange of creative content and process among the dance community and with those who consume it. Adaptability and flexibility are the key to this.”

Across India, classical dancers too are feeling the pressure of time. Fortunately, they aren’t allowing it to bog them down, and are, instead, creating work that sparkles with brevity. In the early 2000s, when SMS was finding more popularity, Ananda Shankar Jayant, remembers performing a Padam (an 20 october 2014

A still from Ananda Shankar Jayant’s production Dancing Tales: Panchatantra; (facing page) Kathak artiste Aditi Mangaldas

Hari Krishnan

Veena Basavarajaiah’s dance piece Mooki

item in the Bharatanatyam repertoire) wherein she, the heroine, begged, and rebegged a kili (a parrot), to carry a message to her lover, from another land.

For a full ten minutes, elaborately, Jayant remembers, “I did abhinaya (expression) for a scene where an imaginary bird refused to take my message and kept fluttering back onto my shoulders.”

After the performance, back-stage, an old Mami (aunty in Tamil) met Jayant, and referred to that scene, in particular, and said jokingly, in Tamil, “Ye ma ivalavu kashtapatte (why did you suffer so much, ma?); Pesame oru SMS annappa vendidu daane (you could have just sent off an SMS, no?).” The Hyderabad-based classical dancer, choreographer and administrator, still remembers that episode. “There is meaning in being crisp. Plus, we have to leave a lot to the imagination of the audience,”says Jayant. As a thumb-rule, her productions—solo and group—have not exceeded the hour-long mark from “curtain up to curtain down”.

The new formulation in the performing arts is simple: short is sweet and less is cool. Look at the success of the Short + Sweet Theatre Festival (in Chennai, in particular), which concluded its fourth edition this August, and has been enjoying patronage from the small but significantly growing theatre community in the city. As many as 50 plays 50 open

premiered this edition and nearly 30 among the 50 writers were first-timers.

Ranvir Shah, cultural activist based in Chennai, and whose Prakriti Foundation presents the festival, argues against the assumption that Short+ Sweet’s success is a reflection of dwindling attention span among the audience. “I think it’s the quality of work that merits and determines attention span. I have, as an audience member enjoyed watching a series of ten-minute plays as much as I have watching the Mahabharata for nine hours, straight.”

Lynne Fernandez, managing trustee, Nrityagram, a residential school for Odissi and other classical dances, based in Hesaraghatta (on the outskirts of Bangalore) agrees with Shah: “All performances need an audience; all performances are ultimately aimed at transforming the viewer, and taking the viewer on a journey into another realm. The health of a performance tradition is a reflection of the above.”

F

rom a creator’s standpoint, TM

Krishna, a Chennai-based classical musician, writer, author, wonders if this shortening is the “result of a kind of a corporatisation of the arts; where the idea is to create entertainment. Why, for instance,” he adds, “should someone be thinking of something in the context of the arts, from the point of view of time?

Time should be determined by the work, the production and should not emanate from the idea of what is saleable.

Artistically, I find that very problematic.”

We ask Anil Srinivasan what he thought of being allotted a mere 20 minutes for ‘Float’. Was he able to do justice to the work? “You see, we play different roles in different productions,” he explains, “It’s like being a character in a play and adhering to the script. I cannot forcibly fit my performance aesthetic on to someone else’s craft, right?”

Equally important is the relationship between the audience and the artiste.

“Currently,” says Veena Basavarajaiah, Bangalore-based classical and contemporary dancer, “the nature of the audience is that of a ‘consumer’ and artistes are largely producers of ‘art-works’ or ‘pieces’. In such a commercial context, artistes are creating works

that largely entertain and are saleable.”

Basavarajaiah is conscious that the “length of the work does not necessarily reflect upon the quality of work or the intensity of the performance.” Her own repertoire is a reflection of that. Maya, a 20-minute work she created at the Gati Residency in Delhi, took her three months to create. Another ensemble piece, Mooki, took more than a year to evolve into a 40-minute piece. “There are some works that question the nature and the purpose of the performance itself. Duration is not really an indicator of the work and how effective it is.”

Fortunately though, for those who like the idea of lingering and leisure in the arts, this shrinking of form and format, is primarily an urban phenomenon. Just last week, a small village in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram district, played host to its annual all-nighter— from 7 pm to 7 am; a Koothu festival that had the village gather around and witness the unfolding of traditional theatre. A handful of urbanites milled around, too, in an attempt to show solidarity for what is a dying tradition.

“I think it’s unfair to generalise this Twitter effect in the performing arts,” says Kolkata-based Kathak and contemporary dancer, Vikram Iyengar, who is readying to premiere his new work at Spaces, in Chennai, in the second week of October, “But having said that, we live in a culture that has in general lost its ability to savour something leisurely. Festivals and its organisers are constructing their itineraries around the idea of time; you are given a slot to perform, and that has certainly had an effect on dancers.”

Most importantly, Iyengar wonders if this trend has its roots in “artistes and their own insecurity of how they perceive their own art. If you look at audiences merely as customers, then all you want to do is to please them. I think it’s imperative to consider them as partners, stakeholders and to demand something of them. That mindset used to be there; somewhere it has gone away.” Hopefully, it will return, given some time. n Akhila Krishnamurthy is a freelance journalist based in Chennai. She is also the editor of a bimonthly performing arts magazine, Aalaap 20 october 2014

food

Punjabi Confidential Star chef Vikas Khanna on why he writes books and how he gets his recipe ideas SHREYA SETHURAMAN

H

e’s the boy from the land of the

Golden Temple. And he has a golden touch too, for whatever he cooks is said to be delicious and exquisite. His visa interview earlier in the morning at the UK Embassy in Delhi was nothing unusual. “They asked me how to make chicken and bhindi in a different way,” he complains.

Even at his US green card interview, he was asked different ways to cook lamb. Clearly, this is something he’s used to. “I told them I’ll send them my book,” he laughs.

I’m here to meet Vikas Khanna, easily the darling of many kitchens and as many hearts, who’s on a rollercoaster ride (a multi-city tour in India) to promote his latest and sixteenth book, Amritsar: Flavours of the Golden City, based on his birth place. When you ask him why he came out with the book right now, he says he feels the time was right, as it’s important to tell people stories about how someone from a small town can also make it big. The book is interesting in that it’s a ready primer for anyone who knows nothing about Amritsar and its tempting food—right from the city’s historical importance, to its culture, lifestyle and of course its recipes. “This book has only 86 recipes, I can write an entire thesis on Amritsar,” he says with conviction.

Khanna dedicates the book to the one lady who is perhaps the reason he has reached where he has—his Biji (paternal grandmother). When he left for the US, his Biji had told him, “Parivaar da naam raushan kar” (Do your family proud).

And you can see that he’s made quite a name for himself when in the middle of our shoot at a roadside dhaba, two young girls and a middle-aged man request a photo with him. The young girls watch

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his TV show (Twist of Taste on Fox Life India) and are big fans, while the middle-aged man confesses that his plan of opening his own restaurant has been inspired by Khanna.

Khanna loves the attention and has worked hard for it. Over the last few years, he has transplanted his celebrity from America to India, and from the kitchen to various other spaces, including television and book shops. It’s easy to see why. Resist if you might, it’s tough not to be charmed by this star chef’s demeanour. He greets you with a firm handshake and an infectious smile that reaches his eyes, Khanna’s first question (perhaps habitual) is, “Kya lenge aap, chai ya coffee (What will you have, tea or coffee)?” Settling for a cup of lukewarm, saccharine tea, our conversation moves from Punjab to New York to Lahore and back to Punjab—of course, with a lot of food interspersed.

If you’ve seen the Helen Mirren and Om Puri starrer The 100 Foot Journey, you can’t help but notice the similarity between the lead character Hassan Kadam (played by the endearing American actor Manish Dayal) and Khanna. Both come from a small town, started out in their home kitchens, become star chefs in an alien country, and are inspired by a woman. While for Hassan it was his mother, Khanna says he owes it all to his grandmother.

Talking about the movie, he says, “[Dayal] trained in our kitchen. Those vegetables that he chopped and the omelette he flipped, he learnt all of it here.” While Khanna doesn’t quite relate to Hassan, he does admit to relate to the movie Ratatouille. His Twitter bio quotes Anton Ego, the acerbic food critic from the movie: ‘Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist

can come from anywhere’. Khanna claims to live by this philosophy.

Prod him further and he says that’s how the idea of Amritsar also came to be, a book that took around three years to write. He talks lovingly of how his Biji was present for every shoot of his, her eyes just following him wherever he went. “I wish she was alive for the release of the book,” he laments. One can also see the micromanager in the chef when he says he personally looks after the design of every book he writes and also takes some of the pictures that you see in them.

Khanna’s main passion is Junoon, his New York restaurant that has had the honour of a Michelin star rating for four years running. “I didn’t know how to react. I just cried, while my staff was celebrating.” The phones wouldn’t stop ringing. “People were booking tables for a year in advance. It was something else.”

He’s known to isolate himself while experimenting in the kitchen. For a restaurant that changes its menu every season, the chef and his team have to reinvent dishes all the time. Being by himself is the only way he can do it.

Khanna uses New York’s lean summer period to get cracking on new recipes.

“People now expect something different every time they walk in,” he adds.

Contrast this with his initial experience at Junoon, where people refused to even look at the menu and walked out on being told that they wouldn’t be served the usual Punjabi fare of ‘butter-chickensaag-naan’. “But we didn’t budge.”

And you know he’s a bit eccentric in the kitchen when he talks about things like ‘garlic kheer’ and caramel strands that are three feet tall. And he goes out looking for novelty. He speaks of the ‘meetha seekh’ he had at a roadside 20 october 2014

restaurant in Lahore. “The beef is boiled in four different flavours, from salty to sweet to cardamomy. This is done to eliminate any smell of the meat. Post the boiling, the meat is mashed with sugar and made into seekh, which is then stuffed with khoya,” he says.

Khanna says he just wants to spread the Punjabi love of food. “Ask any 20 october 2014

Punjabi where he’s coming from and you’d hear, ‘Bas abhi khaana khaake aaya hoon’ (I’ve just had my meal); ask them where they’re going, ‘Bas lassi peene vaaste ja raha hoon’ (I’m about to have a lassi)… All our conversations revolve around food, always.”

He began his first restaurant when he was just 17. He struggled for 21 years in

raul irani

ar. People were st lin he ic M a on w rant act when my restau re to w ho ow kn ’t else” VIKAS KHANNA ng “I didn hi et m so as w It e. year in advanc booking tables for a an unfamiliar place to get his first Michelin star (the equivalent of an Oscar for an actor). He also hosts MasterChef India, a vastly popular TV show. People recognise him everywhere he goes. What’s the best part about this fame? “The best part is that I can enter any kitchen and nobody can refuse me,” he laughs. n

open www.openthemagazine.com 53

Books

The BOOKER SHORTList

Moveable Feast An art adventure; the American cynic; dystopian love; the What makes a book prize-worthy?

How well it is written, the risks it takes, its heft, verisimilitude, proportion? How can we all possibly concur on one book?

Every Booker prize race has its frontrunners—and disgruntled readers. Here are the final six vying for the 46-year-old, £50,000 prize, which will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Guildhall on 14 October—with a first line to sample from each.

‘C

onsider this moral conundrum for a moment.’ The conceit of Ali Smith’s eleventh novel How to be both (Hamish Hamilton, 384 pages): the grief of a teenager who loses her cool, internet vigilante mother overlaps with the tragedy of a 15th century Italian painter in twin narratives. (In fact, two published versions alternate between lead narratives.) Constantly punning George is unmoored and in love with her new best friend Helena.

‘Damage has already been done,’ she tells her father when he warns her against a pornographic film she witnesses daily in memory of the subject’s mistreatment; poisonous injustice and the weird omnipresence of art, also borne out in the life of Francesco del Cossa, both man and woman, genius and unknown, at the mercy of patrons.

Though the thwarted narratives and forced chiaroscuro irk, Smith’s book is ambitious, full of Latin, Italian and learned fun. If George’s voice, too bent on being cute, was less trite, her half might work as well as Francesco’s surprisingly manages to. The Scottish author, shortlisted in 2005, is a favourite to win.

‘M

ornings weren’t good for either of them.’ The futuristic world of howard jacobson ’s j (Jonathan Cape, 336 pages) is a post-post-lapsarian society, wherein Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen meet in an orchestrated manner, after WHAT HAPPENED IF IT HAPPENED. Society in Port Reuben still erupts in violence regularly; together with the habit Kevern has of covering his mouth when he uses the letter ‘j’, it’s all pretty ominous.

Jacobson, usually great in comic scenes which don’t quite succeed in this sombre dystopian account, lacks his Finkler Question edge. His fans are rooting, of course.

‘T

he mouth is a weird place.’ Joshua FerriS, that prophet of tragicomic American whinging, is not-so-funny-haha in his third novel, To Rise Again At A Decent Hour (Viking, 352 pages). Depressive Park Avenue dentist Paul O Rourke worships only the Boston Red Sox at his TV shrine and is repeatedly ‘cunt gripped’ by women whose large religious families he longs to make his own—without having to go to church, that ‘dark bus station of the soul’.

When an impostor creates a website in his name, it leads him to the (dis)believers who will have him: Ulms, an ancient faction of marginalised atheists. The parody is Onion-worthy, but the sorrow at the joke’s core is real; Paul, weaned on the charms of Pottery Barn and TGIF swag, can’t sleep since his dad blew his head off, and is losing employee and ex-girlfriend Connie. Ferris is obnoxiously exacting as he looks in the mouth of America and finds all its cancers, but ultimately the storyline slumps; the book is less than the sum of some of its parts, in Ferris speak, though he might gain from the opening up of the prize to his countrymen.

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20 october 2014

Burma Death Railway; a very Bengali tale; and a monkey girl

rajni george

‘T

hose who know me now will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child.’ Karen Joy Fowler is the surprise this year, in her uncannily profound We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Profile Books, 336 pages). Narrator Rosemary’s lovely, tart voice and this novel’s great big heart set it apart. The daughter of a psychologist, Rosemary has been raised alongside a chimp, till beloved ‘sister’ Fern is sent away; when the experiment falters.

Brother Lowell has also left, inspired to rescue Fern and avenge other animals mistreated through human research. ‘Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?’ Rosemary wonders. The idea that we are judged most where we fail, no matter how we triumph (one of the lessons she takes to heart), is certainly the repeating sin of her pedantic father, who cannot tell the truth about where he sent Fern. The odd enmity of siblings and family crackle in this unlikely and heartbreaking novel, Fowler’s seventh, which spins out marvellously despite a slight preachiness. An unusual choice, but a worthy one for an adventurous jury.

‘A

third of the way through the half-mile walk from the landlord’s house to his hut, Nitai Das’ feet begin to sway.’

Neel Mukherjee ’s THE LIVES OF OTHERs (Random House, 528 pages), a venerable Calcutta novel, has divided opinion. Its paper mill patriarch Prafullanath Ghosh and his four sons, daughter and grandchildren persist as their fortunes wax and mostly wane through the 20th century. Longwinded and dull at times, like an afternoon in Calcutta, the novel shines in typically decadent Bengali characters like eldest son Adinath, ‘on his favourite planter’s long-sleever in the seldom-used drawing room on the ground floor’, Wills Filter aloft as he ‘nervously contemplates the edgy story that the slim sheaf of papers left at a careless angle on the cane-andglass coffee table is trying to tell him’. The charm is undeniable, but our reviewer (‘Family Matters’, 23 May) warns of the perils of ‘checklist fiction’, saying the British Indian’s third novel is for outsiders. This may well be proven in the final verdict.

20 october 2014

‘W

hy at the beginning of things is there always light?’ The quietest contender might be Richard Flanagan’s traditional tale, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus, 480 pages), about Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans and his experience of a Japanese POW camp on the infamous Burma Death Railway, in 1943. At 77, a war hero, Dorrigo looks back, remembering the extremes of starvation, cholera and violence— and an illicit love affair with his uncle’s young wife, Amy, unmatched in his feelings for fiancée Ella. The romance is the source of some mishandled, torrid scenes, wherein a woman is always stroking Dorrigo’s thigh. The details of the battle triumph, however, in intense, often lyrical prose. Flanagan’s father, one of the 60,000 Allied prisoners of war, died the day his son finished the book, and his legacy is bound in it.

Hailed as one of Australia’s leading novelists, this relative unknown has drawn big praise from critics.

For more on each book and the runup to the prize this year, please see our web special

open www.openthemagazine.com 55

books Planet of the Potentates A compelling treatise by a seer-savant studies what the ascendancy of Homo sapiens has made of our world Ambarish Satwik sapiens: a brief history of humankind

Yuval Noah Harari random house | 456 pages | Rs 699

T

he clairvoyant (certified captain crankypants)

Maharashtrian surgeon PV Vartak, who claims to have undertaken his first experiment of astral travel in Samadhi to the planet Mars on 10 August 1975, spent his post-retirement years consummating two major projects: the first a treatise to prove Christ was actually a Hindu Tamil Brahmin, the second an astronomical dating of Valmiki’s Ramayana. According to Vartak the various tithis in the text establish a particular arrangement of celestial bodies, occurring singularly once in many thousands of years, to prove 4 December 7323 BCE as Rama’s date of birth.

The Ramayana occurred over 9,300 years ago; unfortunately, for Vartak, this does open violence to Hindu theology and plays directly into the hands of Romila Thapar and her description of the Ramayana as a sort of exaltation ‘of the local conflicts between the agriculturists of the Ganges Valley and the more primitive hunting and food-gathering societies of the Vindhyan region’. A Neolithic, inter-tribal abduction. Well, happy Dusshera to you as well.

It could have been worse. A Neolithic inter-species abduction, if things had gone differently for the New Stone Age: ‘Until about 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time to several human species. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes, bears and pigs. The earth a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multispecies past, that is peculiar – and perhaps incriminating.’

Yuval Noah Harari’s wonderful new book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in direct antagonism to all that we hold dear, raises this right at the beginning and lets it hang in our minds like a grim family secret. But first, what is a species? Animals are said to belong to the same species if they can copulate with each other to produce fertile offspring. It has nothing to do with the commonalities of features and physical attributes. A bulldog and a spaniel may look quite different, but they’re from the same species and therefore perfectly capable of boinking each other (will-

ingness is another matter). The fruit of their loins will have what it takes to carry their genealogical line forward. A horse and a donkey, on the other hand, despite much of a muchness physically, might be induced to boink, but their offspring, the mule, will be sterile. The first chapter of Harari’s retelling of the story of mankind sizzles with the testicularity of just one species of humans: ours. Homo sapiens. There were at least six others that lapsed under the firmament. What happened to them? If Harari is to be believed, what transpired steadily but surely over the Mesolithic period was the first and most significant ethnic cleansing campaign in history. (If Vartak’s calculations are erroneous, and Treta Yug happened earlier, might the exertions reported and romanticised in Yuddha Kaand have had something to do with such a campaign?)

The first chapter ends with the most audacious what if: ‘Imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans (or the other human species) survived alongside Homo sapiens. What kind of cultures, societies, political structures would have emerged in a world where several different human species co-existed? Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descended from Adam and Eve? Would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur’an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species? Would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman legions or in the sprawling bureaucracy of imperial China? Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal? Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite?’

Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s department of Humanities, is a first rate sherpa for a story like the magic mountain. A story about the ability of sapiens to create fictions and believe in them collectively, like Gods and Demons and Nations and Money and Limited Liability companies and Human Rights, all figments of our high-yielding imaginations. We’re the story-telling mammal. More correctly, story-believing is the physiology of our species: ‘You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.’

And a story that starts off with the sociopolitical world of the foragers and the first wave of colonisation of Australia and America (between approximately 12,000 and 9,000 BCE), one of the biggest

If Harari is to be believed, what transpired over the Mesolithic period was the first and most significant ethnic cleansing campaign in history

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20 october 2014

and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Homo sapiens drove to extinction half of the planet’s big beasts (ie elephant birds and giant lemurs) long before they invented the wheel, writing or iron tools. From the continuities they were able to set in motion, we are given the first revolution—around 9,500 to 8,500 BCE—in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant: the manipulation of the lives of a few animals and plant species.

History’s biggest fraud—the agricultural revolution. Fraud because the average farmers worked harder than the average foragers and got a worse diet in return. It was an insignificant grass that ended up manipulating us to its advantage, making us break our backs clearing fields and lugging water from streams, nursing it with animal faeces and making us settle permanently next to it: wheat. Even today, more than 90 per cent of our calories come from the handful of plants our ancestors domesticated between 9,500 and 3,500 BCE— wheat, rice, maize, potatoes and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.

In Harari’s proportionate view of history, an astonishing number of pages are spent on imagined orders, ie, how myths can sustain communities, nations and empires. He does rather more than a voiceover here. One might legitimately surmise this is a manifesto. Sample this bravura passage where he (as Yuval Noah Harari

biologist-knight errant) translates the most famous line of the American Declaration of Independence, saying: ‘According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. There is no such thing as liberty as well in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and pursuit of pleasure.’

There will be plenty of eye-rolling and head-shaking over such a tract, particularly by liberal humanists. So that’s the reason we aggrandise the American Declaration of Independence? Would such a defence be valid for the execrable bylaws of Manusmriti? Or Hammurabi’s code? The sort of argument Harari exults in.

This is a book that carries within it multiple, smaller meta treatises: how contradictions created culture; why polytheists, even when they conquered huge empires, never proselytised; how Buddhism is so uncannily proximate to Marxist dialectics; how liberalism and communism undermine Darwinian natural selection; why in the early sociopolitical systems of China, India and the Muslim world merchants and mercantile thinking was despised; how middle class Europeans in the eighteenth century looking for a good investment created the slave trade to America.

Harari’s impossible scheme of hoisting these polemics on the history of money, religion, empire and capitalism is what makes it such a fine work of potted ontology in 400 pages. Sapiens is the work of a seer and a savant who has written it lying face down in the kitchen midden. As we come to the end, we are all clear-eyed about the speciation of the modern Homo sapiens, the biological prime mover.

The long view is that everything in the affairs of the human animal is connected. To each other and to the midden. Deepika’s cleavage, Modi’s MSG speech, labour law reforms, Twitter nationalism, the ISIS, Ebola: all exegeses on the human condition are found in that dogged connectedness. n Ambarish Satwik is a vascular surgeon and the author of Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire

20 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 57

rough cut

Bauji Goes Bonkers Why Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi is the most underrated Hindi film of 2014 Mayank Shekhar

I

am sorry, but crowdfunding, a popular term in film

financing lately, is just a more civilised word for beggary.

Of course, there is charity involved. But so far as noble causes go, passing on my hard-earned money to a filmmaker would figure far lower than flood victims of Kashmir. And yet, that is the only way some films can get made.

The Free Market is less likely to support pictures without massive budgets and a vast landscape with a handsome hero at the centre of it all. Those with more realistic artistic ambitions could bank on the generosity of film buffs looking only for their name on the credit roll in return.

The first crowdfunded Indian film I can remember was Raghu Romeo, about a restaurant waiter (Vijay Raaz) deeply in love with a TV soap character (Maria Goretti). This was around 2002, much before Facebook, Twitter, Kickstarter and other avenues to make an appeal for public donations. The film’s writer-director, Rajat Kapoor, an FTII graduate, had sent out a mass email with the film’s synopsis. Many replied with the promise of a cheque. This is how Rajat, best known then as Preity Zinta’s uncle from Dil Chahta Hai, pulled off his first theatrical release; and Raghu Romeo picked up a National Award in 2004.

Subsequently, Rajat Kapoor directed few similarly entertaining features— minimalist in approach, quirky in tone.

Mixed Doubles (2006) touched upon spouse-swapping. Mithya (2008) was a wacky adaptation of Chandra Barot’s Don (1978). Working on the industry’s periphery, he also attracted a band of loyalist actors. Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak and Saurabh Shukla were among his regulars. It was almost like a drama company that had spawned something of a sub-genre of its own.

None of those films were masterpieces. But given the nature of the film business, they also didn’t get noticed much.

A football quote I once read goes, ‘You have to be at the right place at the right time all the time. Sometimes, the ball comes to you.’ Rajat Kapoor surpassed all expectations, finally scoring a goal this year with his film Ankhon Dekhi.

The film is dedicated to his mentor-directors Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul. One of the movies Rajat Kapoor told me he was inspired by was Basu Chatterjee’s directorial debut Saara Akash (1969), which incidentally also had Mani Kaul

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in the cast. Saara Akash, an early Indian ‘new wave’ film, was based on Rajendra Yadav’s debut novel. It’s an avowedly antimarriage movie and a fine social artefact of the late 60s India.

It’s hard to tell the connection between Ankhon Dekhi and Saara Akash, apart from the fact that they both look closely at a lower middle-class joint family and the old-world family values that define them. The way Rajat Kapoor brings to life the charm of Chandni Chowk in Delhi, you can tell, he has filmed what he knows best. It is a thoroughly amusing movie that moves you with its lead character Bauji, an old man who wakes up one morning to swear that he will henceforth only believe in facts that he has verified with his own eyes.

The film uses music (by Sagar Desai) and cameos of street life exquisitely to tell its story. Over time, ironically, Bauji develops a fan following that reposes its blind faith in his beliefs instead. The film questions the basis of sycophancy, opinion, gossip, religion, journalism, and to a fair extent, what we know of life itself.

If there were proper (rather than popular) awards for Hindi films, Sanjay Mishra (Bauji) would be forerunner for the best actor’s trophy, as would Seema Pahwa (Bauji’s wife). I watched the film recently with students of Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College before a panel discussion with the director. It was heartening to sense how the movie had enthused a young crowd that we often assume prefers lowbrow entertainment. Many of them expressed misgivings about the film’s ending, by which they meant the last scene, rather than its second half. What surprised me is they hadn’t heard of Ankhon Dekhi before this, although it had released in regular theatres. Its DVD has only just come out.

I’ve seen the film thrice. The last movie that made me go back to it was Anand Gandhi’s profoundly lyrical Ship of Theseus (SoT), the best film of 2013 to my mind. Incidentally, SoT was produced by one of its actors (Sohum Shah), a real estate developer from Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan. For those who don’t take spam in their inbox seriously, Ankhon Dekhi was sponsored by a film buff and businessman from Nigeria (Manish Mundhra) who got in touch with Rajat Kapoor over Twitter. n Mayank Shekhar runs the pop culture website TheW14.com 20 october 2014

tia A Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA), like stroke, is caused by restricted blood supply to the brain. A TIA is temporary and often lasts less than five minutes, without causing permanent brain damage

Can a Baby Look like the Mother’s Ex? The offspring of fruit flies exhibit such a phenomenon

Curiosity Enhances Learning

Laura Beach/Corbis

Getty Images

science

A

favourite pastime among

new parents is the discussion over which of their baby’s various facial features resemble theirs and those of other close relatives. But is it possible that the baby could also exhibit the physical traits of his mother’s previous sexual partner?

The concept of telegony, where a child inherits the traits of the mother’s pervious mate, has in the past been hypothesised by scholars like Aristotle. But with scientific advancement, this theory had been junked.

Yet, now a new study, conducted on fruit flies, proves that such a scenario is not implausible.

The study, published in Ecology Letters, was conducted by researchers from University of New South Wales.

They carried out a series of mating experiments with female flies when their eggs were immature. They mated the immature females with either a large or small male. And once the females had matured, they were mated again with either a big or small male. Those originally mated with a larger male continued to produce larger offspring even when mated with a small male. Genetically, the young flies were the offspring 60 open

of the second, smaller male, but physically, they resembled the larger male. When the experiments were repeated with a group of male flies whose genitalia were glued down so they could not pass on any semen during their sexual encounters, their size did not have an effect on the offspring of the female with her second mate. According to the researchers, the offspring was taking the physical traits of the mother’s previous mate because the molecules in the semen of the first mate were being absorbed by the female’s immature eggs, thus influencing future offspring.

The researchers write in the journal, ‘Newly discovered non-genetic mechanisms break the link between genes and inheritance, thereby also raising the possibility that previous mating partners could influence traits in offspring sired by subsequent males that mate with the same female (‘telegony’)… Our results reveal a novel type of transgenerational effect with potential implications for the evolution of reproductive strategies.’ While there is no scientific evidence that something like this can occur in human beings, the researchers do not rule out the possibility. n

According to a new study published in Neuron, when people are highly curious to find out the answer to a question, they are better at learning that information. More surprising, however, was that once their curiosity is aroused, they show better learning of entirely unrelated information that they encounter but are not necessarily curious about. People are also better able to retain information learnt during a curious state across a 24-hour delay. “Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it,” says lead author Dr Matthias Gruber of University of California at Davis. n

Impact of a Mini-stroke

A Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) or ‘ministroke’ may increase the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to new study published in Stroke.

After examining data from 108 TIA patients with no prior history of stroke and reviewing participants’ answers to a set of questionnaires that evaluated their mental state, researchers found: about 30 per cent of patients with TIA disclosed symptoms of PTSD. About 14 per cent showed significantly reduced mental quality of life and 6.5 per cent had reduced physical quality of life.

Patients’ fear of having a stroke and poor coping behaviours after a TIA may be partially to blame for their PTSD. n 20 october 2014

water resistance Increasingly higher acceptable depths, normally indicated in metres, usually indicate higher levels of water resistance.

Watch manufacturers also use other terms to measure water resistance: A.T.M. (atmosphere), where 1 A.T.M. equals 10 metres. Bar, where 1 bar equals 10 metres

tech&style

GoPro Hero 4 Black This versatile camera is as good as having a film crew at hand gagandeep Singh Sapra $499.99

A

brand new image sensor inside

the GoPro Hero 4 Black edition makes it twice as fast than its previous avatar. The new sensor also allows functions that one would get only in high-end DSLR cameras or movie cameras, thus allowing you to capture the moments as if you have a professional film crew on hand to do this. The new edition, which is small and portable, also features full 4K video capture at 30 frames per second to full HD videos at 120 frames per second.

An improved audio system now increases the dynamic range, and the built-in analog to digital convertor and compatibility with various microphones will ensure that the sound captured is to your liking.

The Hero 4 Black edition also addresses one of the major issues we have had with cameras: a single button not only turns it on, but also starts recording the moment you press it, ensuring that you don’t miss a moment. In addition to a quick start, the Black edition can capture still images at 12 megapixels at 30 20 october 2014

frames per second speed.

It does not stop here. The Hero 4 Black edition now has the capability to adjust from a dark scene to a bright scene automatically, and the improved sensor handles low-light situations so amazingly well that you can even use it to capture the night sky and the Milky Way. The Black edition unit comes with the camera, as also a standard housing unit, a rechargeable battery, curved and flat adhesive mounts, plus a 3-way pivot arm. You will need to buy a high-speed microSD card separately, though. Its bilt-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth feature allow you to use your smartphone as a trigger, or use a Bluetooth remote control. If you like having a screen on top of the camera, the LCD comes at an additional $79.99.

The huge range of mounting accessories that are available for the GoPro allow you to take it anywhere and mount the camera on almost anything—on a pole, on the dashboard of your car, or on your headgear—to capture all your outdoor moments. n

Frederique Constant w Slimline Moonphase Ladies Collection

Price on request

The 2014 Slimline Moonphase Ladies Collection from Frederique Constant features no fewer than six brand new models.

Every model in the range is powered by the FC-206 quartz caliber five-jewel movement. The 30 mm steel case is ultra-feminine in appearance. The dial itself is mother of pearl, protected by diamond-hard sapphire crystal, and the hour indexes include no less than eight hand applied diamonds (0.02 ct). In spite of their petite appearance, every watch in the range is water resistant to three atmospheres. n

Brother ADS-1100W

Rs 20,990

With a 16-page per minute capacity, duplex scanning capability and a 20-page automatic document feeder, the ADS-1100W portable scanner is a workhorse. The unit scans at a 600x600 dpi resolution, ensuring sharp images, and with its built-in USB port you can hook it up to a laptop, or use its built-in Wi-Fi to transfer what you scan to an iPad, iPhone, Android or Windows devices. It can also scan directly to an SD card or a USB flash drive.

The scanner comes with a 128 Mb of storage, and can handle various paper sizes. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

pithy and powerful Narendra Jha has a brief cameo in Haider where he plays Shahid Kapoor’s father, Dr Hilaal Meer. But his short appearance has packed quite a punch, with viewers raving about his performance. Seen on TV shows like Havan and Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, Jha seems a stellar find

Haider Wrought with great intellectual and technical finesse, this film is pure poetry in motion ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Bang Bang Director Siddharth Anand cast Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif,

Ron Smoorenburg Score ★★★★★

khan or, tabu, irrfan Cast shahid kapo j wa rd bha l Director visha

“D

enmark’s a prison,” says Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, “a goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.”

This is probably the most overt political statement in the play Hamlet, and it is adapted to Haider as its central theme—the idea that Kashmir, in the turmoil of insurgency, has turned into a prison for Kashmiris.

Beginning with claustrophobia in the mind of one man, the confinement turns into an infection and spreads.

Haider (Shahid Kapoor) has just come back to Srinagar from university at Aligarh and finds his house blown up by the Indian Army and his father arrested, missing, and presumed dead. His uncle, Khurram (Kay Kay Menon), is already courting his mother and Haider is seen by the State as the son of a militant and a potential threat. While still mourning the loss of his father, now confirmed as dead, he is put under surveillance.

As Haider’s world collapses around

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him, so do the lives of his antagonists, and this process of disintegration—a psychological one for Shakespeare, a social and cultural one for director Vishal Bhardwaj—is the essence of this adaptation. It is an exercise that requires high intellectual, aesthetic and technical skills, and this film may well be one of the most original productions. It does not dwell excessively on the philosophical ruminations of the troubled Prince, but ignites the political undercurrents of the play—with passion and poetry— like no other adaptation you will see.

With the Ghost (Irrfan Khan) whispering into his ear, with his mother, Ghazala (Tabu), attaching herself to his cerebral cortex, with his lover, Arshia (Shraddha Kapoor), in irreconcilable grief, Haider visits the graveyard. The surreal choreography of the grave diggers’ ditty sets the tone for the end of this tragedy in Kashmir. With Maqbool (2003), Bhardwaj raised the bar in Hindi cinema. It has taken him 11 years to raise it again in Haider. n

In this remake of Knight and Day, the makers do prove that the skills of Indian film technicians and film laboratories have improved in the last decade, but little else. Bang Bang is a fast paced escapist fare, with plenty of action and exotic locations. However, it has no content, no originality whatsoever, and very little of the humour seen in the Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz movie.

Only one scene is amusing, though.

This is when Harleen (Katrina Kaif), a lonely bank receptionist in Shimla, registers herself on a dating site called Truelove.com and is scheduled to meet a man called Vicky at a restaurant. When she arrives, the slick fellow at the reception desk knows all about her date, because, apparently, his establishment has a ‘tie-up’ with Truelove.com. This corporatisation of romance gets a few laughs.

Well, Vicky is late and when the handsome Rajveer (Hrithik Roshan) turns up instead, she thinks it is him. From here on, she is trapped in his bang-bang world.

The rest of the movie looks like another Hollywood audition for Hrithik. He tried it with Kites and it didn’t get him there, but he could aspire to be the next 007 (when there is a vacancy).

Bang Bang can be entertaining, but you wouldn’t be missing anything if you were to miss it. n AD

20 october 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Breaking up Is Hard to Do

Hrithik Roshan, who separated from his wife Sussanne earlier this year, appears to be finally getting comfortable acknowledging and talking about his single status in the media. During a television interview I did with Hrithik and his Bang Bang! co-star Katrina Kaif last week, the actor admitted with a wry grin that he hadn’t ever used a pick-up line before, but added cheekily that “I need to”. Posing on the cover of Stardust magazine’s latest issue, he’s been quoted as saying, “I’m single… It’s a good life.”

The actor’s inner circle reveals that it wasn’t easy for Hrithik to get here. Reportedly, he took the break-up very badly initially, “and made every effort to broach a reconciliation with Sussanne before finally accepting that it wasn’t going to happen”. He wasn’t comfortable with the fact that the tabloids were following the story closely, and even less equipped to deal with questions about the break-up.

During an interview to promote his film Krrish 3 last year, he famously flew into a rage when a TV reporter in Singapore asked him to comment on rumours that his marriage was in trouble.

“Today he can handle questions because he’s come to terms with the split,” a source close to Hrithik explains.

Sussanne, meanwhile, is said to have moved into a fancy apartment in Versova with her two sons, and has apparently retired from public life. According to a friend of hers, “She’s slowly cutting off her connections with people in the film industry because she finds that relationships here are completely fake.”

Focused on raising her sons while continuing with her interiors venture The Charcoal Project, Sussanne apparently doesn’t accept invitations to attend parties thrown by her former filmi friends. “She’s in a good place, but it isn’t easy,” her friend reveals.

From Kill Dil to Killjoy Parineeti Chopra has a hole the size of a football field in her date diary. The actress, coming off the dud that was Daawat-e-Ishq, will next get busy promoting Shaad Ali’s Kill Dil, which releases in November. But she does not have any film lined up right after.

20 october 2014

It wasn’t meant to be this way, of course. She’d signed Dinesh Vijan’s love story opposite Saif Ali Khan, but the actor—following his split with Dinesh, his friend and former producing partner—recently left the project, throwing Parineeti’s plans up in the air.

She’s been wanting to make a movie with Saif for a while now, she’d said, and was thrilled when Dinesh offered her his film. But now she’s reportedly miffed that Saif didn’t so much as make a call to her to inform her of his decision.

Instead, she had to find out from the press that the movie wasn’t happening anymore after Saif had walked out of it.

Lucky Displacement

Turns out that one of the year’s biggest hits, a bona fide blockbuster that was praised for its music and its performances in particular, might have been a very different film if the makers had gone ahead with their original casting plans.

Apparently the producer had cast a second generation filmi kid to play the central protagonist, but then replaced him with another youngster on the recommendation (and insistence, reportedly) of the producer’s close friend and a leading producer in his own right.

An influential insider within the studio that produced the film reveals that it was embarrassing and awkward to drop the actor (who was their original choice) after he’d been signed for the film, “for no fault of his”, but that “things turned out for the best in the end” when the film opened wondrously at the box office.

The source explains that the film’s hot-shot director wasn’t convinced about the last-minute casting change either, “but our hands were tied”. The replacement, after all, was an unproven actor and one who came with the baggage of being a former model. “But we got very lucky.

And to be fair, he worked very hard to make sure that he wasn’t going to be dismissed as just another pretty face.”n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

It’s a Dump, It’s a Sewer... It’s a Beach!

by r i t e s h u t ta m c h a n da n i

A candyfloss seller negotiates trash scattered across a filthy patch of Mumbai’s Dadar Beach. Once a major recreation spot, the beach has had an additional pollutant in the past few decades: the Mithi River, which has been reduced from a fresh water stream to a giant black sewer, flows into the Arabian Sea at Mahim Creek near its northern end

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20 october 2014

AN ICON JUST GOT LARGER

THE NEW NAVITIMER 46 mm