OPEN Magazine 24 February 2014

Who’s Afraid of Wendy Doniger?

RS 35 24 f e b r u a r y 2 0 14

inside Allah’s Rock Stars l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

e xc lu s i v e

THE

5/9

Conspiracy and how Narendra Modi survived it

w e e k

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editors Rajesh Jha, PR Ramesh Deputy Editor Aresh Shirali Features and Sports Editor Akshay

Sawai

Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai associate editors Dhirendra Kumar Jha, Rahul Pandita assistant editors

Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Aastha Atray Banan, Mihir Srivastava, Chinki Sinha, Sohini Chattopadhyay Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra Assistant Art Directors Tarun Sehgal, Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNER Anup Banerjee photo editor Ruhani Kaur assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani Editorial Researcher Shailendra Tyagi asst Editor (web) Arindam Mukherjee staff writer Devika Bakshi Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Rajeev Marwaha (North

and East), Karl Mistry (West), Krishnanand Nair (South)

Manager—Marketing Raghav

Chandrasekhar

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

(South), Melvin George (West), Basab Ghosh (East) Head—production Maneesh Tyagi pre-press manager Sharad Tailang cfo Anil Bisht hEAD—it Hamendra Singh publisher

R Rajmohan

All rights reserved throughout the world.

Reproduction in any manner is prohibited.

Printed and published by R Rajmohan on behalf of the owner, Open Media Network Pvt Ltd. Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd., 18-35 Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad—121007, (Haryana).

Published at 4, DDA Commercial Complex, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017.

Ph: (011) 30934199; Fax: (011) 30934162 To subscribe, sms ‘openmagazine’ to 56070 or log on to www.openthemagazine.com Or call our Toll Free Number 1800 300 22 000 or email at: subscription@openmedianetwork.in For corporate sales, email ajay@openmedianetwork.in For marketing alliances, email alliances@openmedianetwork.in For advertising, email advt@openmedianetwork.in

Volume 6 Issue 7 For the week 18—24 February 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover photo

Amit Dave

Amrit Bakhshy

Kalpish Ratna have expressed their genuine concerns about the Advance Directive Provision in the Mental Health Care Bill 2013 in an innovative literary style.

We know the Ulysses Clause, but their Meera story is a novel way of explaining the dilemma (‘My Care, My Way’, 17 February 2014). The team which drafted the Bill had a difficult task at hand. India having signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), The UNCRPD was it was necessary to make written keeping in mind the Bill UNCRPD the physically disabled. compliant. Human Many of its provisions rights activists were also were not conducive blowing down their to caring for the neck. At the same time, mentally disabled and there were practical the Convention could issues to be taken care be adopted mutatis of. The UNCRPD was mutandis in their case written keeping in mind the physically disabled.

Many of its provisions were not conducive to caring of the mentally disabled, and the Convention could be adopted mutatis mutandis in their case. That is what the drafting team did. It was a tightrope walk. The salutary provisions in the Bill far outweigh a few concerns that some of us may have. In any case, it is not possible for any legislation to fully satisfy all stakeholders. Also, based on experience, all stakeholders can seek changes in the Act in due course of time. At this stage, the most important thing is the passage of the Bill in the current session of Parliament.  letter of the week Politicians Are Worse

this definitely is an interesting read (‘Whores and Lovers’, 3 February 2014). These sex workers may seem to be cheap, and the people in general may like to convince themselves that these people do not exist, but they are better than our current set of Congress and BJP politicians who will be ready to sell their own parents if the price is right.  Edwin Sequeira

it is nice to see how journalists go out of their way for these stories. These stories help us 24 february 2014

sympathise and empathise with these women. I only wish such articles help bring some change to their lives.  Sai Sharad

Lofty Ideals, Wrong Move

dr satyapal Singh, former Commissioner of Police, has outpoured his noble thoughts and lofty ideals on communal harmony, improvement of the quality of education, employment, nation building and saving our heritage, among other things, which is praiseworthy (‘Hinduism is misunderstood. I have no

Hindu agenda. I am secular’, 17 February 2014). He has stated that he has no Hindu agenda and that he is secular. But he is a square peg [in the round hole of] politics. He has joined the BJP, whose avowed agenda is constructing a Ram Temple, abolishing of Article 370 and enforcing a common civil code. Sooner or later, Dr Singh will realise that he had chosen a wrong path. He could deliver his best by joining any other party that is secular and has an inclusive agenda. Hinduism is the oldest and one of the best religions of the world, but some of its followers are presenting a distorted version of it. Same is the case with Islam and other religions.  MY SHARIFF

Good Question

i enjoyed reading the article ‘Books Do Matter. Or Do They?’

(3 February 2014). It conveyed a true sense of what the Jaipur Literature Festival this year was like. I appreciate that you lingered on ‘important writers’ as well as equally compelling but lesser known ones. There has been so little reportage on these ‘other’, nonmainstream sessions, unlike the star-powered panels that most other commentators seem to have covered.  annie paul

Corrigendum

the article titled ‘Women in Our Ads’ (10 February 2014) carried a statement misattributing the ‘Daag Achche Hain’ campaign to Ariel. This is factually incorrect. The campaign was run by Surf Excel. The error is regretted.

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

openmagazine to 56070

The Unknown Dandi Marchers project

How a team of researchers traced the eighty freedom fighters who accompanied Gandhi

O n 1 2 M a r c h 1930, Mohandas Gandhi led a group of 80 individuals from the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat on a 24-day walk to reach Dandi where they broke India’s then salt laws. The Dandi March has an iconic status in the history of modern India but apart from Gandhi, very little is known about who the other marchers were.

A project currently underway in IIT Bombay is seeking to identify and commemorate the other marches.

Drawing upon over two years of research, 46 artists have 24 february 2014

finished preparing life-size sculptures of the 80 marchers. This Ministry of Culturebacked project titled Dandi Salt Satyagraha Memorial will also feature a 15-foot statue of Gandhi and 24 murals depicting important scenes from the march. Once complete, the memorial will be shifted to Dandi.

Professor Kirti K Trivedi, convener of the memorial, along with students from IIT’s Industrial Design Centre and the staff of consultancy firm Design & People, pored over books and periodicals of that time, sought help from

research institutes, went through video footage of the march, and visited the places where the marchers were supposed to hail from. They interviewed as many surviving family members and friends they could find. Sethu Das of Design & People describes how difficult it was to locate a picture of a man listed as Raghavan in a periodical. “I just couldn’t find any picture of his. One day I went to visit an old schoolteacher at Thrissur who I had heard possessed a charkha used

by Gandhiji. It turned out he was a friend of Raghavan and

possessed a portrait of his,” Das says.

The was also confusion about the exact number of participants in the march. Many records said there were 78 marchers, but the researchers discovered two more—Kharag Bahadur Singh Giri from Nepal and Satish Kalelkar from Maharashtra.

Trivedi says, “Here was this all-important moment in history and almost no one can even recall its participants.

Perhaps this memorial will help change that.” n Lhendup G Bhutia

open www.openthemagazine.com 3

ritesh uttamchandani

small world

contents

14

30 social media

12

8

Shopping for Facebook likes

locomotif

Who’s afraid of Wendy Doniger?

36

24

real india

northeast

Free food for the faithful

cover story

pleasure

A brief history of the other

Sex toys that sell online

The 5/9 Conspiracy

q&A Praful Patel

P

‘My personal relationship with Modi has no place in politics’ Nationalist Congress Party leader Praful Patel insists the NCP’s loyalties lie with the Congress alliance and that party chief Sharad Pawar has no ambitions of Prime Ministership haima deshpande

raful patel is a well known face of

the Nationalist Congress Party and represents the Bhandara-Gondia Lok Sabha constituency. A close associate of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, the savvy, erudite Patel is considered Pawar’s alter ego. A gentleman politician, he speaks his mind.

His comments are considered the party line.Prior to becoming Union Minister for Heavy Industries, Patel was Minister for Civil Aviation. It was during his tenure that Air India and Indian Airlines merged.

Patel also runs the Ceejay Group, the largest bidi maker in the western region of the country, earning him the sobriquet ‘Bidi King of India’.

How has the NCP-Congress relationship been since 2009?

The relationship is good, although it could have been better... Our cooperation in the state and Centre could have been better utilised [to get] more output from our efforts.

Isn’t there too much aggression between the leaders of both parties?

It is not aggression. There is a strain sometimes, but it is due to the issue of equality. Just 4 open

because you have the chief ministership does not mean you have the so-called upper hand. It is a question of understanding priorities... of respect.

Due to the controversies surrounding NCP ministries in Maharashtra, few see the party faring well in the elections...

It is still a perception. The fact will be different. Besides, all these imaginary scams have not been proven.

Will Congress leaders be vote catchers in Maharashtra?

The past is a witness. How they deliver is something they have to figure out.

How do you view the Third Front?

We do not give much credence to it.

There cannot be an alternate government without parties that are anchored. The Third Front is a feeble attempt at cobbling last minute alliances. These do not work.

Was the recent meeting between Pawar and Modi a message to the Congress?

Mr Pawar is a Union Minister... As a Union Minister, you meet heads of state and various others across the political spectrum.

Therefore the meeting between Mr Pawar and Mr Modi cannot be construed as a political meeting.

The NCP is in a coalition with the [Congress] and that is something

we stand by. So the question of sending messages does not arise.

Did the NCP almost have a tie up with the BJP? It is just speculation.

BJP’s Gopinath Munde has said so. According to him, the tie up did not happen because the state BJP unit was opposed to it.

Let Gopinath Munde first attend to his scores with Nitin Gadkari first.

Despite your alliance with the UPA, is it not true that the NCP is keeping its options open?

All political parties have to keep their options open... The NCP entered an alliance with the Congress months after our party was formed.

You have said that after the court ruling, the Congress should not raise the issue of Modi’s connection with the 2002 riots. Why?

Perceptions and facts of both the 1984 and 2002 riots are different. Contrary to the ruling, the facts and perceptions are completely different.

Both you and Sharad Pawar enjoy a good equation with Narendra Modi. Do you think his aggression is needed to run this country?

The personal relationship has no place in our political process and equation.

These elections are being talked of as a last chance for Sharad Pawar to be the PM.

Mr Pawar has never aspired to Prime Ministership. He is very practical. He knows the NCP [has] small numbers. He is certainly not day dreaming about it. n 24 february 2014

48

40 rebellion

Allah’s rock stars

b books

52

p

Wendy Doniger and the trolls

l

true life

Bh

gh Ho

o

58

Hot cars at the Auto Expo

■

f o r equating Khap Panchayats

with non-governmental organisations and resident welfare associations Whatever the faults of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), they really don’t sanction honour killings. But that has not deterred Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda from making an analogy between them and Khap Panchayats. At a press

conference in Chandigarh recently, he said, “I have stated many times [of] the Khap Panchayats that these are NGOs... like you go to Gurgaon, where RWAs (Resident Welfare Associations) have been formed.” Khap Panchayats in Haryana have often ordered violence against couples who marry within the same gotra. They have also made excuses for rapes and incidents of violence.

The reason politicians like Hooda refuse to speak against such a regressive institution is clear—because they fear alienating Jat voters. With elections around the corner, it is no suprise Hooda is being soft on these Khaps. But is it too much to ask that he do it in a slightly more elegant manner? n

After making a seemingly political statement on the pressure to charge Amit Shah in the Ishrat Jahan case, CBI Director Ranjit Sinha said he’d been misquoted bI T tON G UE

“There were political expectations... The UPA government would have been happy if we had charged Amit Shah...

But we went strictly by evidence and found there was no prosecutable evidence against him” —Ranjit Sinha to The Economic Times, 7 February 2014

turn

■

er Sin upind

63

Padmashri Vidya Balan luxury

Love in the time of HIV

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of da

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

“We conducted a fair probe. There was no pressure on the CBI”

— Ranjit Sinha to CNN-IBN, 8 February 2014

around

Pepper Spray in Parliament In what seemed to be final confirmation that the UPA Government has lost the ability to persuade Members of Parliament that their way was likely to be the prevailing way, the Opposition and even some of the UPA’s own members have declared that they will not play ball with the Government on its plans to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh and create a separate state of Telangana.

hullabaloo

24 february 2014

Rowdy protests inside Parliament and the ‘tabling’ of the bill in the Lok Sabha on Thursday virtually closed the window of negotiations with those inclined to back the bill and parties resisting the formation of Telangana.

An expelled Congress member resorted to firing pepper spray against those demanding the division of Andhra Pradesh, his colleague from the Telugu Desam Party brandished a knife, and a

votary of United Andhra popped a pill—all on the floor of Parliament—demonstrating the sharp divisions in the state’s political landscape over Telangana and the difficulties in making any political capital over the issue.

The UPA’s constituents acknowledged that the way the issue was handled was a big manifestation of the Government’s ad-hocism and rudderless approach to decision making. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

A Hurried Man’s Guide to the IPL betting report

It was just last year that senior officials of the BCCI were in revolt against their president N Srinivasan following allegations of betting against his son-in-law Gurunath Meiyappan.

Srinivasan’s resignation seemed almost foregone then. And yet here he is now, still president in title, plus overlord of the ICC and his brother elected the head of the Indian Olympic Association. But, at this moment of triumph, Meiyappan has struck again.

A three-member enquiry commission to look into spot fixing and betting allegations in the Indian Premier League, led by retired justice Mukul Mudgal and two other eminent jurists, has said that Meiyappan was involved in betting and that there would need to be further investigation Betting by of the fixing charges.

Meiyappan is tantamount to, say, insider trading on the stock market

Betting by an ordinary citizen would not have been as serious, but Meiyappan belongs to the family that owns the company India Cements, which owns the Chennai Super Kings, one of the IPL teams. Betting by him would therefore be tantamount to, say, insider trading on the stock market. And passing on information is another charge that the Mudgal report makes against him.

Meiyappan’s strategy was to dissociate himself from the team and say that he was not an owner because he was not a shareholder of

Indian Cements. The report, however, is categorical and, according to ESPNCricinfo.com, says, ‘The Committee is of the view that Mr Meiyappan was accredited/authorised (though implicit at times) by the Franchise Owner, ie India Cements, to participate and be present when various crucial decisions were taken in relation to CSK.” This also makes Srinivasan and CSK captain MS Dhoni party to the cover up. Both of them had told the committee that Meiyappan had no role in the team. Already, there is a sense of déjà vu with headlines that say that Srinivasan won’t resign. Judging by his past record, he will almost certainly not give up his fight. n

angle

On the Contrary

Success Crazy The strange brouhaha over co-opting Satya Nadella’s achievement M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

A

somewhat curious

fallout of Satya Nadella’s appointment as CEO of Microsoft is the glee it has evoked among some because the man is not from an IIT. For example, a headline on NDTV.com on 10 February read: ‘An IIT-Manipal ‘Twitter war’ over Satya Nadella’. The report reproduced tweets in which Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) students jeered at IITians and wrung their 140-characters in glee because Nadella was from MIT. One believed the appointment would be good for MIT’s brand, implying students would now feel they could be another Nadella by going to the institution.

Does MIT have a reason to exult? It values merit and does not have a capitation fee system now, but in the mid-80s when Nadella graduated, MIT was an institution known mainly for catering to rich fathers who wanted to make their not-sobright sons engineers. Nadella, a meritorious student, was more an exception to the rule of the times.

Also, for that one rare Nadella from MIT, the list of present and past CEOs with IIT degrees could fill pages.

But it has little to do with education itself. It is the difficulty of entering its gates that makes an IIT such a reservoir of corporate leaders.

For 9,000 seats, half a million take the test. The Joint Entrance Exam for admission to the IITs is so tough that only the most brilliant students have any chance of getting through in the general category. High IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition; they also need to be hard workers to get selected. An IITian comes with the fundamental attributes of achievers even before he is admitted. Once in, students soon decide whether they want to be in ‘core’ or ‘non core’. The former are those who will go on to further studies and a career in their chosen engineering stream; the latter will join banks or management institutes like

IIMs. Whatever they choose, the best companies will wait patiently to co-opt and groom them because they are a readymade outstanding human resource pool.

But what all this doesn’t change is that if students as gifted and toiling exist outside IITs, they will also make it big. They might not get the initial push of an IIT, but eventually, extraordinary ability and drive will always be met with demand. That is what Nadella symbolises.

The reaction to his appointment in India, however, reveals a greed to co-opt his achievement when we really had no part in it. Consider that Nadella’s Masters degree in computer science is from a university in the US. His bio on the Microsoft website says he was interested in the subject in India, but it was unavailable at Gifted, toiling his university so students who he was forced to didn’t go to IIT take electrical will also make engineering.

Nadella’s MBA is it big. Extrafrom the US; his ordinary drive career has been shaped at Sun and ability Microsystems are always in and Microsoft. demand Nothing about his present achievement can be traced back to his country of birth. He might be Indian by origin, but his success is hardly the result of that.

Take an IITian like Arun Sarin, who became CEO of Vodafone. He studied metallurgy before moving to the US and doing his Masters and MBA. It is hard to see how his eventual success had anything to do with his IIT education except for making it easy to go abroad. Nadella’s appointment excites us because of our obsession with achievement; our belief that, in some circuitous way, it rubs off on us.

It doesn’t—there is no substance in misplaced pride. n 24 february 2014

real

india

It Happens

Food Coupons for the Faithful Devotees at Hyderabad’s Dargah Yousufain distribute these to the poor who get a hot meal in a hotel there Anil Budur Lulla

8 open

Harsha Vadlamani

S

yed Nizamuddin, a 20-something, is hunched on his knees in front of a busy eatery in Nampally, a crowded locality on the periphery of the old city in Hyderabad. He is part of a dozen other men squatting in similar fashion in front of the Yousufain Shehzad Hotel, a brightly-lit joint in the bylanes around the Hazrat Yousufain Dargah. Nizamuddin, a daily-wage labourer, is here because he hasn’t found work today. He is depending on the kindness of a devotee to feed him.

His prayers are answered quickly enough. Mohammed Khaled, the 36-year-old affable hotel owner, gestures towards five of them to come in and take their seats. A devotee has just paid to feed five people but what is interesting is the manner of this charity. “[Devotees] buy coupons from our hotel to feed the poor.

Coupons of Rs 12, 16, 20 and 30 denomination are always bought in odd numbers like three, five, 11, 21, 51 or 101. It’s a matter of faith, a tradition dating back over 50 years with those visiting the Hazrat Yousufain Dargah,’’ says Khaled.

Nizamuddin grabs a wooden chair gratefully and is served naan, salan (pieces of meat in a watery gravy) and rice.

Other paying customers share his square marble-topped table. “There is no discrimination as these people are not beggars. They are poor and hungry,” says Khaled.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a retired policeman, is one of those who feeds people regularly. “I have been coming here since 1992, and now pay the hotel a monthly sum of Rs 250 to serve food to the needy,” he says. Even as he speaks, more people join the queue outside. Narasing Rao, a 40-year-old daily wage earner who is originally from Aurangabad, is also among them. Rao says he knows where to get a hot meal on a day when he doesn’t get to earn his living. The smell of freshlycooked food wafts through the narrow congested bylanes.

A hotel worker says that from 7 am to 11 pm, these coupons can be exchanged for naan, roti, salan, rice, sabzi, biryani, even a badushah, a melt-in-the mouth sweet

where there are free lunches People wait to be fed outside this restaurant in Nampally in Hyderabad

delicacy. The coupons have no expiry date and can be made use of any time.

Khaled recalls his father, who started this hotel on the dargah premises 70 years ago, saying that this feeding of the needy began half a century ago. “I have myself seen it for 30 years; the tokens were then worth Rs 2, 3 and 5. We do manage in these times of price rise to still offer a decent meal to satisfy a soul,” he says.

Yousufain Dargah or Yousuf Baba Sharif Baba Dargah is where two Muslim Sufi saints, Hazrat Syed Shah Yousufuddin aka Yousufain and Syed Shah Sharifuddin lie buried. They are said to be Aurangzeb’s

A hotel worker says that from 7 am to 11 pm, these coupons can be exchanged for naan, roti, salan, rice, sabzi, biryani, even a badushah, a melt-in-the mouth sweet delicacy. The coupons have no expiry date and can be made use of any time

army commanders who helped him conquer the Kingdom of Golconda. They stayed back in Hyderabad after the conquest and turned to spiritualism.

Devotees of all communities believe that praying here cleanses the soul. After prayers, they invariably troop to Yousufain Shehzad Hotel. The busiest days are Thursdays and Fridays. As many as 500 devotees buy tokens then, and there is a lengthy queue of people waiting for their turn to have a meal.

Asked how he manages, Khaled says the hotel pays lower rent than the market rate in the area. This is because it is located on the dargah’s property. The dargah does not run a kitchen, and, in a sense, the act of feeding the poor has been outsourced to the hotel. There are some who buy the coupons and distribute them to those waiting outside; others only pay for coupons and let hotel staffers call in those waiting. Yet others are like Ibrahim who maintain a monthly account with the hotel. His is account No 333 in the Shehzad Hotel register. He turns up whenever he detects an ‘inner calling’ and pays his dues, religiously. n 24 february 2014

Now just tap to OPEN

OPEN Magazine is now available on your iPad

You can now read your favourite OPEN magazine on your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad. Or if it is an Android device you prefer, just go to openthemagazine.com/digitalmagazine

INNOCEAN-001/12

business

p ol i c y t we ak Statistics that one may trust have an autistic relationship with reality. Neither can soften the other.

And there is no reason to suspect that the Central Statistics Office has fiddled its figures in saying that India’s economy has expanded at a rate of less than 5 per cent for a second successive year. Signs of a slump have been popping up all around.

Nor should it surprise anyone that manufacturing may have shrunk as a sector for the first time since Liberalisation began. One could almost hear it grind down over the past few years. No less audible has been the mass misery of inflation running ahead of the economy’s pace of expansion. Extra earnings mean nothing if that extra money can’t even buy the same set of goods and services.

All in all, this stagflationary crisis has drawn high-level attention to suggestions made by the Urjit Patel Committee on how the RBI’s monetary policy could be better run. Of all the things that this panel would have our central bank do, what most Indians care most about is how it wants inflation nailed. This ought to be made the RBI’s goal, Patel says, with the bank going all out to hit a pre-set target.

Pardon those who roar in laughter at the idea of having retail prices play policy anchor. Some say it simply can’t be done, not in a land of dodgy data and a million myths. Some doubt that the RBI has much sway over prices anyway, let alone precision power. Others think it’s absurd to start apeing America. All this while, the

Rajanish Kakade/ap

The Reserve Bank’s Six Per Cent Challenge

self proclaimed owl Governor Rajan says he is neither an inflation hawk nor dove, just a vigilant biped

RBI has been going after a tangle of targets in a lagbhag sort of way—with observers left guessing what it’s up to—even as it holds itself responsible Can Governor for overall economic Raghuram stability. Now, after the Rajan crush Great Recession, this retail inflation wide-but-vague to 6 per cent in approach has begun to 22 months? wow policy wonks in the West who want some of this ‘macroprudential regulation’ for their own economies.

Yet, Patel and gang do have a point. With

‘people power’ all the rage, the RBI can hardly afford the luxury of letting inflation slip out of control for the sake of other objectives. Moreover, a stable rate of low inflation is essential to the cause of economic expansion in the long term. And if India can manage to ‘glide’ towards a retail inflation target of under 6 per cent by January 2016, as the Patel Committee wants, it must surely be worth a try.

Can Governor Raghuram Rajan do it?

Lower CPI inflation, at about 8.8 per cent now, by 2.8 percentage points in 22 months? Let’s watch. n ARE SH SHIRALI

India’s Inflation Woes While wholesale prices have traditionally guided Indian monetary policy, analysts expect a switchover to the consumer price index to serve the economy better Some signs of moderation in Wholesale and Consumer price inflation (%) 12.0

WPI Inflation

CPI Inflation

10.5

Janet L Yellen, chief of the US Federal

9.9

9.0

8.8

7.5 6.0

6.2

Source: Source: Office of Economic Adviser, Mospi, Angel Research; compiled by Shailendra Tyagi

10 open

Jan-14

Dec-13

Oct-13

Nov-13

Sep-13

Jul-13

Aug-13

Jun-13

Apr-13

May-13

Mar-13

Jan-13

Feb-13

Dec-12

Oct-12

Nov-12

Sep-12

Aug-12

Jun-12 Jul-12

Apr-12

May-12

4.5 3.0

“I am committed to achieving both parts of our dual mandate: helping the economy return to full employment and returning inflation to 2 per cent while ensuring that it does not run persistently above or below that level” Reserve, assuring American lawmakers that she intends to uphold the central bank’s mandate, while making it clear that its extraordinary easy-money policy will not be withdrawn in a hurry

lo co m ot i f

Who’s Afraid Of Wendy Doniger?

G

S PRASANNARAJAN

od’s custodians are a dangerous legion. They live in permanent fear of the usurper who lurks beyond the magnetic field of belief. They wait in the shadows for the intruder, the blasphemer who puts books against the Book. They are the last vigilantes of the sacred, and they badly need aggrieved gods and endangered scriptures to justify their own existence, to guard their moribund kingdoms, to save their revolutions, to postpone their own mortality. They cannot afford to sleep, for enemies of the Only Truth are masters of masquerade. So beware the storyteller who imagines an alternative reality that challenges, lampoons, and questions the certainties of the divine. Beware the historian who ventures into the archival sites of holy lands, for history is a beguiling deception.

Beware the scientist who is beholden to subatomic magic that goes against the original spark of the creator. Beware the cartoonist, the Devil’s Artist, who makes the gullible laugh, for laughter is subversion. God’s custodians are a tireless legion.

So the war on Wendy Doniger, author of the pulped The Hindus: An Alternative History, was inevitable. It happened in a place where gods continue to manage polling booths. Where blasphemy is the slogan of the desperate politician who harvests the anger of religious ghettos. Where superannuated leaders shop in the black markets of mythology to buy lifeenhancing wares. Where banning the book is the bad habit of a state that abhors arguments.

Where ‘religious sentiment’ is as elastic and convenient as ‘liberal sentiment’. Where certain religions need to be more protected than others, and where certain blasphemies are insensitive and intentional than others. India, after all, was quicker than Ayatollah Khomeini to banish Salman Rushdie, and that too, to appease a Muslim politician who didn’t even have to read the damn book to realise its worthlessness, its incendiary worthlessness. It was on a Valentine’s Day more than two decades ago that Rushdie, with a price tag attached to his head, lost his freedom. He was a necessary blasphemer for a dying revolution; and we were made to believe that the original religion of submission was so fragile that it was in danger of collapsing under the weight of 457 pages of godlessness. So the Book-keepers of religion ordered the assassination of imagination. And 12 open

India joined the book burners club.

Things have changed since then. Rushdie has regained his freedom. In India, freedom is still a disputed item; it is negotiable; and its arbiters are mullahs, mahants, and politicians. The socalled Hindu group enraged by Doniger’s alternative history of Hindus—and easily appeased by her publishers—only shows how effortless it is in India to gag the ‘offensive’. The Hindu adjective to the God-defenders makes it all the more strange. There is no Book here to defend; there is no church here to set moral parameters; and there is no Supreme Custodian of the Highest Truth to claim complete copyright over the mind of the faithful. As Doniger herself, a renowned Sanskrit scholar and philologist at University of Chicago, writes in the beginning of her book, ‘There is no single founder or institution to enforce any single construction of the tradition, to rule on what is or is not a Hindu idea or to draw the line when someone finally goes too far and transgresses the unspoken boundaries of reinterpretation.’ What we have is the self-styled defender —a fringe sadhu or a bad reader, an aggrieved believer still swayed by the Vedic glory or the desperate Hindu nationalist. These codifiers of a least codified tradition thrive because India has institutionalised intolerance.

It has also institutionalised the culture of misreading, the oldest trick in the repertoire of zealots. They have certainly misread Doniger, whose scholarship is matched by her storytelling flourish. She provokes because she has an argument that shatters many dead certainties of faith. The subtitle of her book itself is a provocation: An Alternative History.

It assumes that there is an official history—a canonical, unalterable history. There is none.

But there are traditions, there are stories and a whirling multiplicity travelling back in centuries. Doniger writes, ‘Part of my agenda in writing an alternative history is to show how much the groups that conventional wisdom says were oppressed and silenced and played no part in the development of the tradition— women, Pariahs (oppressed castes, sometimes called Untouchables)—did actually contribute to Hinduism.’ What she wants is to break the Brahminical supremacy in storytelling; she wants to redeem the story of the Hindu from its inherent elitism. She wants to bring those who lie orphaned outside the narrative, the 24 February 2014

outcasts, to the mainstream. The protagonist of Doniger’s Hindu lore is not the wise Brahmin male. There is no protagonist, but there are lots interesting women and, yes, animals. She has a particular fascination for the ‘glorious’ horse.

For Doniger, Hinduism is not a linear, exclusivist religion but a tradition enriched by a polyphony of ideas distant and near. It is this inherent Hindu pluralism that makes her a severe critic of those who are desperate to put this religion without a code of conduct in a straitjacket. ‘The boast that Hinduism is tolerant and inclusive has become not only a part of Hindu law but a truism repeated by many Hindus today, yet this does not mean that it is false; it is a true truism, however contradicted it may be by recurrent epidemics of intolerance and exclusion,’ she writes. She is bothered by such epidemics, and she is not at all defensive about her aversion to Hindu fundamentalists: ‘Hindus nowadays are diverse in their attitude to their own diversity, which inspires pride in some, anxiety in others… It provokes anxiety in those Hindus who are sometimes called Hindu nationalists, or the Hindu right… or, more approximately, Hindu fundamentalists; they are against Muslims, Christians, and the Wrong Sort of Hindus.’ Her book, in her own words, is also ‘the alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell’.

The truth is that, if India had listened to the history they tell, this country would have been a different place. They have been telling stories of vandalised civilisation and misplaced gods for a while. The stories must have worked for some time in an India where the Left-Liberal mind was conditioned by State-imposed secularism. Isms are born out of good ideas undone by the pathologies of power. In retrospect, the Nehruvian New Man—of secular reflexes and scientific temperament—was as artificial a project as the original Communist New Man, and both were bound to be waylaid by the force of history. The word ‘Hinduism’ itself is the Western description of a way of life in the East; this ism does not have an official hierarchy. And most rewardingly, Hinduism is not in power, as Islam is in certain parts of the world. In the last century, it was the ideology in power that exiled—or banished—the writer whose imagination was incompatible with the lies of the State. So we got a Mandelstam. We got a Solzhenitsyn, and many more. Questions were 24 February 2014

blasphemies then. In the post-Wall world, the worst instincts of ideology were incorporated into the profanities of faith. Rushdie apart, there were other stories of paranoia and persecution from elsewhere in the Islamic world. The principle was the same. It is still the same: every revolution needs an enemy. If there is none, one will be manufactured by the hallucination of the revolutionary.

In India, faith may not be in power but the faithful is empowered by the State that is not committed to freedom. This state is sustained by those who have abandoned arguments and categorised freedom. In such a state, a Wendy Doniger is a saboteur who shatters the idyll.

The wonderful thing about any religion is the story it tells. Stories are freedom, not bondage.

Those who have taken control over those stories, in the name of god, make the world less happy—and a bit more dark. Beauty shall save the world, said Dostoevsky, and by beauty, he meant imagination. The tormentors of Wendy Doniger tell us how we are all collaborators in this project of unfreedom. n

Turn to page 52 for ‘Tyranny of the Troll Reviewer’

by Indrajit Hazra open www.openthemagazine.com 13

In India, faith may not be in power but the faithful is empowered by the State that is not committed to freedom

exclusive

OUT OF THE How Modi Survived the 5/9 Conspiracy PR Ramesh

WOODS

Indian Photo Agency

I

t was just past 6 pm on 5 September last year. The Thursday evening traffic in this part of Lutyens’ Delhi was hellish but not enough to slow down the three men, three important totems of the Capital, who drove towards the historic Teen Murti Bhawan. They travelled separately from the Parliament House that had passed the Land Acquisition Bill a few minutes ago, and their destination was a modest building near what was once the residence of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

They were three determined men.

Two of them were senior Cabinet members in the UPA Government. The third man was a reclusive

At the meeting, the dark artists of the Congress desperately wanted to strike Modi’s most trusted lieutenant Amit Shah. In his mentor’s scheme of things, Shah plays a key role—strategising his political journey, tackling hurdles in his way, and now managing his affairs in Delhi.

The conspirators knew that a blow to Shah would paralyse his master. They argued over whether a statement of one of the accused police officers—DH Goswami, deputy superintendent of police in Gujarat’s Crime Branch— before an additional judicial magistrate was enough to target Shah and Modi. In his testimony, Goswami had said that he and another police official GL Singhal went to the

K Asif/India Today Group/Getty Images

the september plan (from left) Modi’s right-hand man Amit Shah was targetted by the Congress conspiracy; Ishrat Jahan’s mother and sister at a protest in Delhi

Congressman whose closeness to the House of Gandhis is legendary. They would soon be joined by two officials from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the agency’s director Ranjit Sinha and special director Saleem Ali. The agenda on the table: how to contain Narendra Modi by getting him irredeemably entangled in the infamous nine-year-old Ishrat Jahan encounter case. It was for the CBI to carry out the dirty job.

After all, the UPA coalition was hoping that Gujarat’s Chief Minister, whose singular campaign had already energised the saffron base and the middle-class in equal measure, would somehow be waylaid by the killing of Ishrat Jahan, an ‘innocent’ 19-year-old girl who had died along with her friend Javed Sheikh and two Pakistani terrorists Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar in a police encounter while allegedly in custody of the Gujarat Police.

16 open

Shahibaug office of the Crime Branch in Ahmedabad on 12 June 2004, two days before the encounter in which Ishrat and three other alleged LeT operatives were killed.

According to his account, Additional Director General of Police PP Pandey, DG Vanzara and IB official Rajinder Singh were present in that office. Goswami also made a sensational revelation: he had heard the three talking about an LeT operation and Kumar asking Vanzara to speak to the Chief Minister about it. Vanzara said that he would talk to Safed Dadhi (white beard) and Kaali Dhadi (black beard), alleged code names for Modi and Shah.

T

he BJP and sections of the country’s security establishment have been contesting the view that Ishrat Jahan was an ‘innocent victim’. The arguments made to 24 February 2014

buttress this have been many. For one, why did her family in Mumbai’s Mumbra area not file a missing person’s FIR when she did not come home for days (during which her mother alleged she was in illegal custody)? If she was indeed innocent, why did the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) website and its mouthpiece Ghazwa Times hail her as a martyr?

Why did David Headley, who surveyed the 26/11 targets of the LeT, flag her jihadi links during his interrogation?

But details did not distract the vulpine Congressmen huddled together in the Lutyens bungalow on that balmy September evening. They were not even bothered by the possibility that their plan could bring the CBI into direct

to go along with the Congress plot. He felt the CBI had sufficient evidence to proceed against Modi and Shah on the basis of Goswami’s statement that the encounter was green-signalled by Kaali Dadhi and Safed Dadhi.

Much to the politicians’ discomfort, Sinha was quiet.

He had reasons to doubt the feasibility of the plot. One, it would be legally untenable to move against an accused in the Ishrat Jahan case on the basis of a statement by a co-accused in the same case. Second, it would be exceedingly flimsy to reach conclusions on the basis of references to facial hair. With no firm assurance forthcoming from the CBI chief, the Congress leaders decided to meet again.

raul irani

PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images

the man who didn’t play along Manmohan Singh with CBI Director Ranjit Sinha. Sinha did not cooperate with the Congress on the plot

conflict with the IB, the agency that was part of the alleged counter-terror operation in Gujarat. Their strategy seemed taken from the fable in which the parrot that holds the demon’s heart must be captured first in order to decimate him.

The plotters at the meeting even prepared a roadmap to proceed against Gujarat’s top political leadership: phone call data records had shown that IB official Rajinder Kumar was in constant touch with political heads, particularly Shah. The counter argument that Kumar needed to be in touch with the state government for seamless coordination and timely intelligence sharing, voiced by officials in the home ministry, had no takers. “Get Shah!” was the message the politicians conveyed to top officials of the CBI. According to people in the know, Ali seemed inclined 24 February 2014

Around this time, Modi was facing stiff opposition from within his party over his prime ministerial candidacy. LK Advani concealed his own ambition in the argument that making Gujarat’s Chief Minister the BJP campaign’s face would give the UPA Government an opportunity to deflect attention from inflation and corruption by targeting Modi. Advani’s argument was that Modi was too controversial to be projected as the party’s man to occupy 7 Race Course Road. His protégés, particularly Sushma Swaraj, joined the internal opposition to Modi’s candidacy. According to BJP insiders, Swaraj argued that the party’s candidate announcement should wait till Assembly polls in five states were over in December. Some of her supporters went to the extent of claiming that the so-called ‘Muslim factor’—only two constituencies in Madhya Pradesh have a decisive share open www.openthemagazine.com 17

Retirement Benefits That the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) ends up being a tool in the hands of ruling governments hoping to hobble the opposition surprises none. No wonder then that CBI chiefs who play ball are often rewarded for their loyalty.

Former CBI director and 1973 batch IPS officer Ashwini Kumar closely monitored the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case which involved the underworld don’s death in Gujarat. A section in the Congress had alleged that the killing was orchestrated by senior police officers in BJP-ruled Gujarat at the behest of senior ministers. Kumar was later made a governor. Now the governor of Nagaland, he briefly served as governor of Manipur last year. He was CBI director from August 2008 to November 2010 AP Singh was at the helm of the CBI when high-profile cases such as the 2G and CWG scams were under the media radar. Within months of his retirement last year, the 1974 batch IPS of the Jharkhand cadre was made a member of the Union Public Service Commission

Investing in the Future The opposition BJP had vehemently opposed his nomination as CBI director, terming it ‘favouritism’. It had also attacked him for converting the CBI into a ‘Congress Bureau of Investigation’.

Ironically, it is Sinha who has now refused to give in to the Government’s pressure to target BJP leaders such as Modi. Though the BJP continues to attack him in public, the party may be glad that he is defiant and not kowtowing to his political bosses 18 open

of minority votes—could damage Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s electoral prospects.

Nitin Gadkari, the man who had lost the party presidency but not his influence, too, tilted towards his one-time critic Advani. He was giving Advani the impression that the tussle over the party’s future leader was far from settled. He suggested that a formal decision be made only in the presence of Advani, which would be preceded by deliberations by the BJP Parliamentary Board. But party chief Rajnath Singh had already made up his mind. Singh told Gadkari that he could not promise Advani that a decision on Modi would be taken only by the Board and with his prior consent.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the plot against Modi thickened. The protagonists of the 5/9 Conspiracy met for the second time three days later, on 8 September, in the backdrop of the power struggle within the BJP. This time round, they wanted the CBI to proceed against Modi and Shah. If the Gujarat Chief Minister, fast emerging as the BJP’s only choice for the Prime Minister’s post, were to seek legal recourse and embroil himself in a judicial rigmarole, all the better. By the time he extricated himself from it, the Congress would have fired its political missile at Modi and gained electoral mileage in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls due in April-May this year.

The outline of the strategy was already known to the plotters, and this meeting was just to fill in the details.

As the evening wore on, the ministers began to fret as a crucial chair in the room was still empty, as those privy to these events tell me. Ranjit Sinha, the special invitee, the man who was supposed to lead the operation, was nowhere to be seen. Sinha did turn up finally, but conveniently too late for details of the plot to be discussed at length that evening. CBI insiders say Ali and the Congress bosses realised that Sinha would not play ball.

Sensing the CBI dither, the BJP decided to raise the ante.

It quickly alleged that the Government had indulged in ‘dealmaking’ and that the investigative process of the Ishrat Jahan case had been politically calibrated by senior ministers at the Centre. Gujarat officials who were willing join the plot were let off the hook, at least temporarily—formal charges were not filed within 90 days, for instance—so that they could get the benefit of default bail.

Again, names of the accused were struck off the first and second chargesheets in the case.

The BJP also alleged that a quid pro quo had been involved in the plot to frame party leaders in Gujarat. The BJP pointed out that the Human Resource Development Ministry had offered CBI Special Director Ali the vicechancellorship of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia.

In the end, Congress pressure on the CBI to nail Modi boomeranged, with Sinha turning rebel and putting a spoke in the plot’s wheels. Sinha recently grabbed eyeballs in political circles when he suggested that the UPA Government would have been pleased if the agency had actually implicated Shah in the Ishrat case. Sinha was 24 February 2014

playing smart and safe: he’d calculated he would get an extra year as director after the General Election.

Last September, two UPA ministers and a reclusive Congressman, legendary for his closeness to the Gandhis, met CBI Director Ranjit Sinha and special officer Salim Ali. The agenda on the table: how to contain Narendra Modi by getting him tangled in the nineyear-old Ishrat Jahan case

T

he Congress was in no mood to give up, however, even though its first attempt fell apart. On 27 December, Modi’s antagonists got a rude shock when an Ahmedabad metropolitan court rejected a petition to prosecute the Chief Minister for conspiracy in the 2002 post-Godhra riots. The court upheld the Supreme Courtappointed Special Investigation Team’s 2012 clean chit to him. The magistrate ruled that there was no sufficient evidence to prosecute the Chief Minister.

Hours before the court passed the order, the Union Government swung into action to push Modi into another tight corner. It appointed a commission of inquiry under Section 31(b) of the Commissions of Inquiry Act to probe allegations of ‘snoopgate’: a young woman architect from Ahmedabad being placed under surveillance on instructions of the Chief Minister. The allegations came from an IAS officer, Pradeep Sharma.

In this case too, the Congress found it hard to trap Modi.

The Centre has yet to appoint a judge to head that Commission. Government sources say that three judges—Justice Aftab Alam, Justice HS Bedi and Justice Deepak Verma—have turned down the Government’s offer to head this commission.

Even if the Government finds a judge now, it may not be able to table the commission’s findings in Parliament before the Lok Sabha polls for a variety of reasons. Mainly, the Centre has set a deadline of three months for the investigation’s completion. Even if it funds a judge in the next two or three weeks, it will finalise its report only by May. By then, the Lok Sabha would have been dissolved and new members elected to it.

If the Government goes ahead with its plans to appoint a commission, it will also have six months to submit the report to Parliament. This will have to be along with an ‘action taken report’. But the real motive of the ruling party in this case may be different: the timeframe for the report’s submission suggests that the Union Cabinet is only interested in keeping the ‘Snoopgate’ controversy alive.

In that, it succeeded at least for a few days during which Sharma gave a spate of television interviews and got the backing of Modi’s political rivals.

I

n the meantime, efforts to corner Modi in the Ishrat Jahan case have strained the once-cordial relationship between the CBI and the IB. A significant section of the latter now backs Rajinder Kumar’s charge that the CBI had fomented mischief and indulged in foul play in this case although he was merely doing his duty to counter the threat of terror in India.

Sections within the IB now contend that even if the encounter was fake, its intelligence inputs were certainly

24 February 2014

not. If individual officers are hounded for having generated an input acted upon by the state police, it would have highly adverse consequences. Officers would turn wary of supplying specific inputs. Security experts emphasise that this has the potential to throw the agency out of gear and negatively affect its operational capability.

S

inha is now highly assertive and far more defiant

in his dealings with the regime at the Centre. The CBI Director’s post has only recently been equated with that of a Government of India secretary (an IAS rank), which has meant he need not buckle under every whim of the regime.

Sinha tested his leeway soon enough by pitching for Archana Ramasundaram, a 1980 batch IPS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, as a special director in the agency once that post fell vacant. A tug-of-war with a five-member selection board saw Sinha repeatedly turn down the Centre’s choice for the job, Ranjit Kumar Pachnanda, former police commissioner of Kolkata. Among those who pitched for him were the Chief Vigilance Commissioner, two central vigilance commissioners and the Union Home and Personnel secretaries. A newly empowered Sinha, though, managed to rebuff the board and ensure the appointment of Ramasundaram, the CBI’s first ever woman special director.

Clearly, the CBI director is looking beyond the summer, by when Delhi is likely to witness a dramatic shift in power. He is hoping to be the Robert Gates of the next government (whose indispensability saw him serve as the US defense secretary under George W Bush as well as his successor Barack Obama). Who knows, the man who survived the 5/9 Conspiracy may soon have an ally in the officer who refused to play ball with the conspirators. n open www.openthemagazine.com 19

Reliance Industries/Handout/REUTERS

controversial rig Reliance’s KG-D6 gas facility in Andhra Pradesh

mess

It Isn’t Gas: If You Fix The Price, You Pay a Price D

elhi Chief Minister Arvind

Kejriwal is crying conspiracy, once again. He claims to have smelt something odorous in the pricing of natural gas. He wants to prosecute Union Petroleum Minister Veerappa Moily, his predecessor Murli Deora, former Director General of Hydrocarbons VK Sibal and Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani for ‘fixing’ the price of gas. Kejriwal is on to something, except 20 open

that his conspiratorial mind and desperation to grab headlines clouds his ability to identify the real problem.

The real problem is that the Government, whether Moily or Deora or anyone else, has no business setting the price of gas or of any other commodity. But the Congress-led UPA has insisted on doing precisely that in a gamut of crucial sectors, be it gas, diesel, spectrum, coal mines, land and agriculture. It is this

How the UPA’s muddled economic policies have made it a soft target for Kejriwal & Co Dhiraj Nayyar penchant for fixing prices by administrative fiat that has saddled the Congress and its allies with twin issues that could cost them the next General Election: corruption and inflation.

Economics is an imprecise, dismal science. Still, it holds out some wisdom for the world. It tells us, for instance, that market mechanisms are far superior at discovering prices than bureaucrats or ministers are. Those who have defied this 24 February 2014

elementary truth have paid dearly: the Soviet Union found itself bankrupt and quite literally broken after decades of price-fixing by sundry administrators.

India too paid a heavy price for the Government’s dabbling in price-setting all the way up to 1991. If there was one thing Liberalisation achieved, it was ridding us of the notion that bureaucrats knew best. Until that point, even steel prices were set by Delhi’s Udyog Bhavan.

How ironic it is that the man who presided over the dismantling of several price controls in 1991, Manmohan Singh, is the same man who has presided over the fixing of so many prices some 20 years after Liberalisation. It is his successors in the Congress, led by Rahul Gandhi, who will now pay the price for fixing prices.

T

ake the case of gas. In 2009, the

UPA decided that Reliance would sell the gas from its KG Basin fields at the rate of $4.2 per unit. In 2013, it was decided that this price would be doubled to $8.4 per unit from 1 April 2014 onwards.

It is this doubling that Kejriwal is furious about. The point, however, is this: how does Kejriwal or anyone else know if this is the right or wrong price? In Kejriwal’s worldview, his administrative fiat is better than that of the Congress or BJP because he is not corrupt. Histrionics aside, that is hogwash.

For one, contrary to Kejriwal’s claims, the UPA raised the price of gas based on a formula proposed by C Rangarajan, Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Council of Economic Advisors, and not on ministerial whim. But Rangarajan is not the market. The right price of gas can only be determined by the forces of demand and supply, not just in India, but at a global level. That may mean that Reliance would earn a price greater than $8.4 per unit or less than $8.4 per unit, depending on global factors—which change every hour, unlike bureaucratic decisions which change every five years.

Sure, natural gas is a national resource and the Government must get a share of its profits. The right way to do this is to charge royalties based on the market price of gas. There may be a case to subsidise end consumers (say, of power based on gas) when international market prices are high. Again, the way to address this

24 February 2014

is to target a subsidy at those consumers who need it, not control prices.

There are other ways to ensure that prices remain moderate. The best way is to ensure competition. Again, the way to do this is to encourage more private sector and foreign investors in the gas sector, something the Government has been loath to do. And if a firm tries to overprice gas, there should be an independent regulatory mechanism, not the captive (to ministerial whim) Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board, which should play referee. The UPA has invested in none of these propositions. It has just fiddled with prices, waiting to be burned. Kejrwal certainly wasn’t going

$4.2 $8.4

per unit of gas, a price set to be revised to

per unit from 1 April 2014 in accordance with the Rangarajan Formula

to miss an opportunity.

It is incredible that the UPA did not learn its lesson on transparent pricing mechanisms despite the damage it incurred over its 2G spectrum allocations.

It was in January 2008 that then Telecom Minister A Raja overruled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s request for an auction of 2G spectrum and doled out 122 licences based on a whimsical version of a first-come-first-serve policy, whimsical because procedures were manipulated at the last minute to ensure than even the first-come-first-served principle was brutally violated.

Even in the 2G scam, it is important to distinguish the conspiracy from the arbitrary fixing of prices. The conspiracy involves procedural violations and money trails that suggest a quid pro quo. The fixing of the licence fee at a rate determined

fit by the Government is not a conspiracy in itself. It is just old-fashioned socialist planning of the bureaucratknows-best kind.

Much was made of the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), which in 2010 declared that the exchequer may have incurred a loss of up to Rs 1.76 lakh crore by not auctioning 2G spectrum. Some were outraged at Raja.

He lost his job. Others were outraged at the CAG; how on Earth had he calculated such a huge figure? The truth is that the CAG, like Raja, would have no precise idea on the right price of spectrum. Only a free, competitive market can discover that price, not a bureaucracy, not an accountant. But the UPA had only itself to blame for facing the brunt of the CAG’s report. If it had reposed its faith in the market pricing mechanism, there would have been no scandal.

Incredibly, exactly the same thing was permitted in the allocation of coal mines in 2009, several months after the 2G scam had already raised its ugly head in media reports. Once again, Liberalisation’s father Manmohan Singh initially asked for auctions in the allocation of these mines, only to back off in favour of administrative allotments. Again, giving out coal mines free may or may not point to corruption. The Government may deliberately want to provide cheap inputs to power-producing companies. But in an atmosphere where the Government is distrusted and crony capitalism is rampant, it is a folly to rely on an administrative rather than free-market mechanism for such an allocation of resources.

Again, it is impossible to say whether the CAG was right in estimating the losses from Coalgate at Rs 1.8 lakh crore. A free market mechanism may not have yielded the same figure had the mines been openly auctioned. But the UPA had only itself to blame for subverting the market.

Together, Coalgate and 2G destroyed the UPA’s credibility. They led to an unprecedented policy paralysis, which crippled the economy and saw economic growth fall from 8.5 to 4.5 per cent in a period of three years. It gave the opposition plenty of fodder to attack the UPA on corruption and its economic record. It gave Kejriwal the opportunity to attack the UPA on Reliance and gas pricing just two months before a General Election. And open www.openthemagazine.com 21

Adnan Abidi/REUTERS

angry young man Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at a press conference where he said he had asked for a legal case to be filed against Reliance

all of that because the UPA forgot that one golden rule of economics: let prices be determined by demand and supply.

I

f corruption—or at least percep-

tions of it—is the UPA’s black stain, then inflation (very real, no perception) is its Achilles Heel. The unabated price rise of UPA’s second term in office can directly be traced to food items, particularly vegetables, fruits, milks and protein that are produced by the country’s vast agriculture sector. The UPA has put forward a simple explanation for the persistent, usually double-digit rate of food inflation. It says that inflation is the price being paid for prosperity as a rise in incomes (particularly rural incomes courtesy the UPA’s welfare programmes) has outstripped the supply of agricultural commodities. In this explanation, the UPA is apparently embracing conventional economics: prices rise when demand exceeds supply.

Unfortunately, the UPA is peddling a half-truth. It says nothing about the supply side, even though it spends a lot of time and money fiddling with the market mechanism (particularly prices), which ultimately determines that supply.

The UPA’s favourite instrument in agriculture is the Minimum Support Price (MSP), a floor price the Government offers rice and wheat farmers to procure their produce. The aim of the MSP is noble, to guarantee farmers a good price, but its side effects are devastating. First, the MSP is unidirectional; year after year, it is only raised, not reduced even in times of 22 open

a bumper crop. This affects inflationary expectations in the rest of the economy.

Second, since the MSP is available only to producers of cereals, there is a perverse incentive for all farmers to grow rice and wheat at the expense of fruits and vegetables, which do not have any guaranteed price and are prone to high rates of damage. This creates a supply shortage in pre-

2G spectrum for telecom allotted in 2008 for Rs

12,386

crore. Auction bids this year have crossed Rs

60,000 crore

Note: The quantity of airwaves are not strictly equivalent; the difference is indicative cisely those commodities that are growing fastest in demand (demand for cereals tends to grow much slower compared to vegetables and proteins as incomes rise).

The fact is that the Government’s MSP policy is fuelling food inflation.

Unfortunately, the Government’s price intervention in agriculture does not end with the MSP. The UPA, more than any other Government, has used ex-

port bans of key agricultural commodities (such as onions and cotton) in desperate attempts to control domestic prices.

These have been counter-productive. It kills the incentive for a farmer to produce more of a commodity if he is denied its global best price. This creates a vicious cycle of shortages. Ideally, the Government ought to loosen imports at times of shortage, but the mandarins of the UPA are addicted to playing havoc with proper price signals. It’s for the same reason that the temptation to ban futures trading in agricultural goods surfaces from time to time. All that a ban does is deny farmers a useful market price signal and the agricultural economy an automatic correction mechanism.

If prices are high today, farmers will produce more, forcing prices down in the future. This is elementary economics, but it has been totally lost on the UPA. It is too late for the UPA to course correct at this stage. Even the determined P Chidambaram can do little to reverse this cavalier rejection of the free market price mechanism as he rises to present his Government’s final (interim) Budget on the morning of 17 February.

The extent of systemic damage is so great that even a bonafide government decision is now viewed with suspicion. It will take more than a Budget for the next Finance Minister and Prime Minister to fix the system. It would help, though, if they made one concession, not to business, but to economics: let prices be determined by the market. It will bestow upon governance the credibility that this important business needs. n 24 February 2014

open essay

BY Rahul Pandita

A Brief History of the Other Attitudes of Indians towards the Northeast are influenced by those of the State

I

N May 2012, there was a brief debate in Parliament after birth anniversary of Netaji, as Bose was called. two students from India’s Northeast died under mysteI wondered then if the man had ever travelled to other parts rious circumstances, one in Bangalore and the other in of India, and if not, would his patriotism withstand the trial of Gurgaon. Responding to BJP’s Arun Jaitley, the then Union jeers and taunts and racial slurs he may have to suffer? Maybe Home Minister P Chidambaram dismissed the treatment it would, I think now. Because even as we spoke, a tragedy meted out to Northeasterns in Delhi and elsewhere as “subcalled Malom had occurred less than six months earlier. tle discrimination”. He said the same had been experienced by Malom is a town one has to pass through on the way to other communities at other times.

Moirang. It is here on 2 November 2000 that 10 civilians were One of the dead boys, Richard Loitam, was from Manipur. killed in cold blood by Assam Rifles personnel in retaliation to But no one from Manipur could watch this debate on an attack on their convoy by insurgents. The victims, who television because the state was reeling under a power cut. were waiting at a bus stop, included Sinam Chandramani, a That is something people in Manipur are used to. There is 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner. Till date, the hardly any electricity in this northeastern state. Even bank victims’ families have got no justice. Chandramani’s mother ATMs work for only a few hours every day. told the journalist Anubha Bhonsle some time ago that she Chidambaram, of course, did not still receives letters from the Indian mention that. Nor did he make any Council for Child Welfare, enquiring rahul pandita reference to how, two months about whether her son is doing well. earlier, the police in Delhi had When I spoke to that man in the telerounded up many people from the graph office, Irom Sharmila Devi’s fast Northeast, mistaking them for against the Armed Forces Special Tibetan refugees, who they feared Powers Act was a few months old. Her might create trouble during the protest fast is in its fourteenth year BRICS summit attended by now. The rubber tube down her nose Chinese President Hu Jintao. Some has failed to move anyone in the among them were asked for their Indian establishment. Nor have the passports. Chidambaram has since naked, wrinkled bodies of old women moved on to the Union Finance who in July 2004 held a banner of Ministry. So he is no longer protest against the rape and killing of a answerable for the not-so-subtle local woman by paramilitary soldiers discrimination that led to the tragic made India rethink its attitudes. death of Nido Tania in a middleIn 2011, when Prime Minister class market of South Delhi.

Manmohan Singh and UPA But it was not a shopkeeper and Chairperson Sonia Gandhi visited his friends who killed Tania. He Manipur, a 121-long economic nonentity A still unknown Irom Sharmila emerges from an was killed by the pyromania that blockade had just been lifted. But the Imphal court in April 2001, a few months into her hunger strike the Indian State has subjected the two leaders barely mentioned it.

Northeast to over the decades.

Singh said, like he says after every Tania is dead because the State, in its egotism and vanity, has terror attack, that he hoped that no repeat (of the blockade) failed to resist impulses to act like the Machiavellian would be seen. However, as this piece is being written, a tribal Prince—as one who is interested only in gaining and students union has called for another protracted economic maintaining power without any regard for moral value. blockade in the state. The last episode had paralysed life in the The truth is, right from the beginning, India has failed its state. While rest of India was oblivious, boxing champion Northeast.

Mary Kom, who later won a medal for India in the 2012 London Olympics, was cutting firewood in her backyard during the blockade to cook food for her children. LPG n April 2001, I was in Manipur on an assignment. At the cylinders were sold in the black market for Rs 2,000 while the Telegraph Office in Imphal, I met an elderly man. We got cost of petrol went up to Rs 200 a litre. Hospitals in Manipur talking and I mentioned to him that I was travelling the next faced a severe shortage of medicines and life-saving supday to Moirang. No sooner had I said this than the man got up, plies—of oxygen cylinders, for example. While ordinary clicked his legs together to attention, and uttered: “Netaji!”

Manipuris were denied basic amenities, the politico-militant It took me a moment to figure out why he had done that. It nexus thrived in the state. From a few, the insurgent groups in was in Moirang, 45 km from Imphal, that Colonel Saukat the state grew to over two dozen.

Hayat Malik of Subash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army had, on the evening of 14 April 1944, hoisted the Indian ut it is not only Manipur. It is about how India has nevtricolour with a springing tiger as its emblem. This was the first er fully opened its arms to the Northeast. In our nationinstance of the Indian flag being hoisted in an area liberated al consciousness, its people were always ‘the other’. It was from the British Empire. People gather every year at an INA as if they were separated from us by some beastly fault line. memorial in Moirang on 24 January to commemorate the

I

B

24 February 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 25

ahead of time (Above) A 1951 beauty pageant in Manipur; (right) a 2004 protest outside the Assam Rifles HQ in Manipur against the rape and killing of a woman

Consider what Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru in a letter dated 7 November 1950: ‘Our northern and north-eastern approaches consist of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling and the tribal areas in Assam. From the point of view of communication, there are weak spots…. The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India. Even Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices.’

During the 1962 Indo-China war, when the Chinese army overran the Indian forces and came sweeping down the Brahmaputra valley, Nehru said in a speech on All India Radio that his heart went out to the people of Assam. After hearing these words from their Prime Minister, people from Tezpur in Assam began to flee. Four years later, in 1966, India used its Air Force fighter aircraft to strafe and bomb Aizawl to crush the Mizo insurgency there. In March 1966, hundreds of bombs dropped by the Air Force ravaged Aizawl. Thousands of people found their homes destroyed and were later forced to move out of their villages into security camps where they could be monitored by the Indian State. This was done under the military concept of ‘strategic hamleting’ devised by British General Harold Briggs for use against Communists in Malaya.

While we expected the British to apologise for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, we never thought of extending the same to our countrymen in Mizoram. Forget apology, the Mizo bombing is one episode in history that New Delhi has never even acknowledged.

It is this otherness that has stayed. It is this otherness with which New Delhi approaches the Northeast, as if it is engaged in nation-building there to underpin its geographical authority. And this is reflected in people’s attitudes towards those who come from the Northeast. That is why a Congress MLA in Punjab in 2012 thought it was fine—and worse, witty—to suggest that stray dogs be sent to the Northeast for “whatever they do to them” as an extermination plan.

This reeks of a stereotypping no better than that of an Indian Air Force pilot Anand Singha held hostage by Naga rebels in the 26 open

60s who told the journalist Gavin Young: “When we climbed out of the aircraft we didn’t know how we would be received. I believed we might be eaten.” Successive governments in New Delhi have done nothing to change such perceptions.

S

omeone should be telling the owners of Café Coffee

Day and Barista that young men and women from the Northeast are capable of much more than an ability to speak English and dress smartly. They should be told that much before Indians heard of Reita Faria, a beauty pageant was held in Manipur in 1951 in which the winner was offered a 24 February 2014

Stringer DB/TW/REUTERS

sack of rice. The babu who long ago in a government directory clubbed the ‘seven sisters’ of Northeast along with Nepal should visit the website of the Shillong Chamber Choir and hear what song plays on cue once it opens. Those of a jingoist bent in the Indian heartland should be told of the Naga battalion that was the first to be sent to fight Pakistani intruders during the Kargil War of 1999.

It is Assam that has been sending Manmohan Singh to the Rajya Sabha for the last 23 years. But he has clearly failed its people. The BJP’s Narendra Modi went to the Northeast recently and could see hope only in ancient traditions of health and wellness. “According to Vastu Shastra, if the 24 February 2014

northeast of your house is good, then you will prosper,” he said in one of his speeches. Somebody ought to remind him that the dosha lies in New Delhi, not the country’s Northeast.

As for Arvind Kejriwal of AAP, nothing changes by a visit to the site of a protest in Delhi against Nido Tania’s death. The opening up of a local party chapter for electoral gains does not suffice either. The real gesture would be to go and visit Irom Sharmila Devi and make an earnest attempt to get that rubber tube out of her body. That would be real Swaraj. n

Web Extra: A Day in the Life of a Manipuri Girl in Delhi by Gunjeet Sra on Openthemagazine.com open www.openthemagazine.com 27

s p ec tac l e

Once Again to the Cricket Carnival Cases against Lalit Modi and N Srinivasan remain unresolved as the IPL kicks off another season with a colourful auction AKSHAY SAWAI

LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI/AFP/GettyImages

A

s he conducted the IPL 2014

auction in Bangalore on 12 February, the auctioneer Richard Madley seemed to be standing in an outsized Pepsi can. The image reminded you of a performance by a man the cola company recently unfriended from its payrolls—Amitabh Bachchan in a giant egg in My Name is Anthony Gonsalves. The can, however, was a microphone stand.

Madley wore, as promised in an inter28 open

view in the days preceding the auction, a silk handkerchief in his coat pocket. Also as promised, he wore a tie, though it wasn’t “bright and jolly” as he had threatened. And in his left hand he carried the most important tool of his trade—a small wooden gavel, the rise and fall of which is watched breathlessly by cricketers desperate to dunk themselves in the gold river of the IPL. Hearts break when players go unsold.

In these times of live coverage on not just television but also social media, the ignominy is instant and public. Conversely, chests swell when players are bought for a high price. It is possible that for a day or two after the auction the chests of Yuvraj Singh, Dinesh Karthik and Jaydev Unadkat puffed to about a hundred inches. Hopefully, the usually surly Yuvraj also smiled a bit.

Madley is an auctioneer of some re24 February 2014

nown. One of his claims to fame is being the last man to hold an auction in Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. He also holds the distinction, if it can be called that, of conducting every IPL auction. Every single trade in IPL history has been announced by the thud of his gavel. This time too the sound echoed periodically at the ITC Gardenia, drowning out the drumbeat surrounding the findings of the Supreme Court appointed Mukul Mudgal Report.

The Mudgal Report confirmed that Gurunath Meiyappan was involved in betting and leaking confidential information pertaining to the Chennai SuperKings (CSK). Meiyappan is the son-in-law of N Srinivasan, the Indian cricket board President, and an official of CSK, though Srinivasan would have us believe otherwise.

The Mudgal report was hot news for a day. But the IPL auction overshadowed it.

It was the IPL that dragged Srinivasan into serious problems last year due to revelations about his son-in-law. And it is the IPL that, with its auction, helped him divert attention away from the Mudgal Report, albeit temporarily. Such is the irony and fickleness of Indian cricket.

The IPL auction progressed as if nothing was wrong with Indian cricket, and once more reminded us of the power not just of some cricket officials but also of the game’s popularity.

It is time, perhaps, that the Board gets itself a new name. A powerful body. So much money and clout. Never guilty of anything. And what is it called? Board of Control for Cricket in India. It conjures up images of an office with a lot of old files.

Call yourself the Bada Bing Club, guys.

Nevertheless, the auction made for compelling viewing for a variety of reasons, about a hundred of which had to do with Juhi Chawla. Age has not diluted the woman’s charm. She is a song, unlike some others in the room with faces mangled by indulgence and plastic surgery.

They are at best item numbers.

It was also interesting to see the teams adopt poker table body language, unwilling to reveal their hand. In a piece on Starsports.com, Aakash Chopra provided an insight into buyers’ strategy: ‘Show no interest at the beginning and just when the player is going unsold, raise a reluc24 February 2014

tant hand. That’s the best way to strike a good bargain,’ Chopra wrote. This ruse was evident when Mumbai allrounder Abhishek Nayar went on sale. For a moment or two Nayar, a colourful man who often works out with tyres, seemed stuck at his base price of Rs 30 lakh. Suddenly hands went up for him, the bids rose exponentially, and within seconds he was sold for a crore to the Rajasthan Royals.

Yuvraj Singh, of course, took home 14 times more, thanks to Vijay Mallya’s largesse. Who cares about the pending dues of Kingfisher staffers?

A

s the auction aired on television, someone said, “Ped lagaaya Modi ne, aam koi aur kha rahaa hai (Modi planted the tree, someone else is eating the mangoes).” Lalit Modi, the IPL’s exiled former boss and Srinivasan’s bitter adversary, is miles away in London. When Open asked Modi about Srinivasan and the secret of his power, the focus changed from mangoes to melons. In an email inter-

The BCCI needs a new name. A powerful body.

So much money and clout.

Never guilty of anything.

Why not call yourself the Bada Bing Club, guys? view, Modi said: ‘There is an old saying, ‘Friends (in this case, I mean friends and allies within the BCCI) are like melons.

You may try fifty before you find a good one’. And that is exactly what Srinivasan has done by ensuring that his supporters get plum postings within the BCCI, thus reducing the BCCI to a bunch of silly yes men. Even as the probe is on in the betting scandal of the IPL, he is continuing as if nothing happened. At the ICC level, he has simply used the commercial muscle that India holds in the world game to bulldoze people into seeing things his way. By keeping the ECB and CA happy, he has been able to persuade and split the world cricket body, which is not good for the game.’

Modi says he has moved on and doesn’t have to be a part of the BCCI to fulfil his new ambitions, but surely a part of him

is plotting a return to Indian cricket administration. It won’t be easy, however.

Srinivasan’s phlegmatic manner and dead-fish stare belie his fierce fighting spirit. Besides, Modi is among those BCCI officials under investigation by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for foreign exchange violations. His Indian passport too has been revoked.

Modi, however, has got three quick wickets, as it were, that might just open a window for him. One is his expected victory in the Rajasthan Cricket Association elections. Two, the Bombay High Court has set aside the opinion formed by the ED to hold adjudication proceedings against Modi. Three, the Mudgal Committee Report has gone against Srinivasan’s interests. A sense of vindication marked Modi’s statement on the findings of the probe. ‘Glad to see that the Justice Mudgal report confirms just what I had been saying,’ Modi said. ‘Life ban on all connected is a must. So I guess Srini’s two-day victory as future warlord of cricket was shortlived.’

But what about the charges against him, the nine cases of foreign exchange violations? And wasn’t he liable to get arrested if he came to India? ‘The Enforcement Directorate is investigating various FEMA violations by the BCCI. For your information, I did not have any cheque signing authority nor power in the BCCI,’ Modi told Open. ‘All foreign exchange compliances as per division of work in the BCCI had to be done by the Honourable Secretary and Treasurer.

Incidentally, the then Secretary was Mr. N Srinivasan and he was handling all FEMA matters. I have been issued notices only for being the IPL Commissioner and Chairman.’

Modi emphasised that his security cover and passport were withdrawn following his tweets that led to the disclosure that the late Sunanda Pushkar held sweat equity in the now defunct Kochi Tuskers IPL franchise, whose bid was backed by Shashi Tharoor, then India’s External Affairs Minister. He has challenged the passport revocation in the Delhi High Court.

Cases of various factions in court, allegations of match-fixing, and ostentatious displays of wealth—the source of which remains opaque. Meanwhile, the team continues to flounder overseas. All in all, a normal season in Indian cricket. n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

photo illustration tarun sehgal

popularity

Like itor Not, You Can Buy It

Shopping in the black market of social media Lhendup G Bhutia

J

ust like the real world, we crave

attention online. Some want less, some want more, but we all want it to a certain degree. We want people to follow us on social networking websites, to ‘like’ our photos and share our thoughts, and our witticisms and observations to reverberate through the internet. I have to admit I am no different. I have spent plenty of time in my five-odd years of existence on Twitter, in front of a flickering blue page on either my desktop or cellphone, composing seemingly complex thoughts in 140 characters, participating in silly games that occasionally trend (like #filmtitlesthatcouldbepornos), hashtagging commonplace occurrences, frequently changing my Twitter bio with pompous declarations ( ‘caffeine-drinker, reader and traveller; not in that order’) or hipster-speak (‘social ninja’), tweeting people I would never engage in a real world conversation—all of it for some attention. And, I fear, somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, there is this thought that what the real world had so far failed to notice would somehow be magically discovered on Twitter. That with a mug shot and few tweets under my name, people will finally recognise me and flock to follow and hear me. Perhaps this occurs in other minds too. But then reality hits you like always, even online.

I sat down in front of my Twitter page a few weeks ago to take stock. My singleminded five-year-long endeavour on Twitter had yielded a measly 209 followers. No one had ever ‘favourited’ or even

retweeted me. It was as if no one even knew I existed here. Thankfully, I had been judicious in following only 195 individuals—a respectable followers-tofollowing ratio, you might agree.

Now I have over 5,000 Twitter followers. I purchased them. I went online, made an order, wired Rs 2,000 and went to sleep. Two days later, I woke up to the sound of my cellphone chirping with emails notifying me that some 5,000 individuals were following me.

I went through my list of followers; they were a mixed lot. They hail from all parts of the globe, from Juliaca in Peru to Puebla in Mexico. There are Latin Americans, Filipinos, Whites and Blacks.

But they also have some similarities.

Many have no display pictures, some bear images of cats and aphorisms. The women whose pictures are displayed are invariably good looking and often with little clothes on. All of them follow thousands of Twitter profiles, but very rarely does anyone else follow them. I wrote to some of them, but no one replied. They just sit there mute and inactive, occasionally coming alive to tweet and promote a product or service. I realised that what I

My singleminded five year long endeavour on Twitter had yielded me a measly 209 followers.

Now I have over

5,000 Twitter followers.

I purchased them

had heard was true. These were not real people. They were bots—fake profiles, controlled not by individuals manning their individual accounts, but by algorithms whose purpose is to spam and inflate follower counts.

T

here is a large and growing black

market for fake ‘likes’ and followers on social networking websites on the internet. Here, a person can buy—in a variety of packages and plans—anything one could possibly want of a networking website, be it Facebook ‘likes’ and followers, Twitter followers and retweets, YouTube page views and ‘likes’, or even LinkedIn connections and endorsements. Most of these sellers promise to gather genuine followers, but they are almost always bots.

A number of individuals have in the past been accused of buying fake ‘likes’ and followers on networking sites.

Rajasthan’s Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot found himself in such a storm recently after rivals alleged that he had bought Facebook ‘likes’. Apparently, his Facebook saw a sudden jump on this count in a span of weeks from 169,077 to 214,639, most of them originating from profiles set up in Turkey. During the last US presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney was also accused of buying followers on Twitter.

Fake profiles are nothing but simple pieces of code written by individuals with programming knowledge. In the case of Twitter, their creators use Twitter’s API (application programming interface)—an interface that other programs like Facebook use to interact with Twitter. Here, fraudsters are able to do such things as copy images and text from existing profiles and tweets, reshape them a bit, and use this pool of information to generate thousands of fake profiles in a matter of minutes.

Kamlesh Deokar, a professional who offers social media solutions to various companies, explains, “Previously, every fake profile developer sat down and manually created fake profiles. They started developing programs to create these profiles soon. But with the likes of Facebook and Twitter cracking down on fake profiles, the bots try to disguise themselves and appear more human.” Hence, most bots now come with bios, usually gleaned from existing user profiles, and have photographs as display pictures instead of the default image. They are then dispersed on Twitter by getting them to follow actual people with large followers in the hope that some will follow the bots, thus giving them alibis. A dead giveaway for bots are accounts that follow thousands of individuals but have no (or very few) followers themselves.

To show how efficient and advanced bots can be, one simply needs to look at some of the creative bots on Twitter that have been programmed not to follow and spam others, but to perform tasks. For instance, a twitter handle called @everyword, also a bot, tweets a word from an English dictionary every 30 minutes.

This task was programmed in 2008 and the handle is expected to send its last tweet this year. Another interesting bot, @Pentametron, retweets any rhyming tweet it can find on Twitter twice every hour. Reading @Pentametron’s retweets is a hilarious experience. Try this random sample: ‘I love the move Father of the bride.’ ‘My stomach is committing suicide.’ ‘Defend, defend, defend, defend, defend.’ ‘I absolutely need an English friend.’

I

ndia is considered one of the world’s

hubs for such fake profile creation.

Foreign nationals and companies often approach developers here to provide them with followers and ‘likes’ because the job in this country costs a lot less than in the West. I approached several such creators. Most of them have websites but rarely do they disclose contact numbers. A Delhi-based social media planner whose website claimed to sell fake Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers suddenly denies selling fake accounts once I identify myself as a journalist. He says that he has two political

32 open

leaders and a few doctors as clients, but his job is to help them generate genuine ‘likes’ on Facebook. “We always get some leader or another,” he says of politicians.

“They don’t understand social media, but because their top bosses are on these websites, they too want to be on them.

They want us to create fake ‘likes’ and followers, but I refuse to get them fake ‘likes’,” he says. Another Mumbai-based social media planner, who only offers Facebook popularity, charges one rupee for every fake Indian Facebook follower.

He quotes the same price for ‘likes’ too.

A Gurgaon-based social media planner who goes by the name of Social King has created over

50,000 fake Twitter accounts and an equal number of Facebook profiles.

Whenever a client wants new followers or ‘likes’, he deploys this army of fakes to perform the task

The most forthcoming is a Gurgaonbased social media planner who goes by the name of Social King. He has created over 50,000 fake Twitter accounts and an equal number of Facebook profiles.

Whenever a client wants new followers or ‘likes’, he employs these accounts to perform the task. He charges Rs 2,000 for 5,000 fake non-Indian Twitter followers and Rs 15,000 for 5,000 fake Indian Twitter followers. For an Indian, having fake Indian Twitter followers evokes less suspicion and is thus more expensive.

For a few extra thousands, he says he can make the bots retweet and promote my tweets. He charges Rs 1,300 for 500 Facebook ‘likes’ and Rs 7,200 for 50,000 of those. As many as 10,000 YouTube views

are available for Rs 600 and 100,000 of these for Rs 4,500.

After a few conversations, he reveals that he is a college student who does this to make himself some money part-time.

“I don’t know about ethics,” he says, “but the way I look at it, we are only providing a service.”

Payments are to be made online through payment gateways like Paypal or PayUMoney. Minutes after speaking with Social King, I receive a bill of Rs 2,000 for a canvas handbag with polka dots (as the bag’s image shows me) via PayUMoney. This bill is to act as a cover for my purchase of Twitter followers, since such purchases cannot officially be made through payment gateways.

W

hile buying fake ‘likes’ and followers is not unlawful, it breaches the service terms of the websites in question. Both Twitter and Facebook, which run a credibility risk because of this black market, have actively started monitoring their websites for bots to deactivate. Last October, before Twitter held its famous Initial Public Offer and had its stock listed for trading, the company admitted that at least 5 per cent of its profiles were fake. Just last week, while presenting its fourth-quarter earnings report, Facebook Inc revealed that, by its estimates, between 5.5 per cent and 11.2 per cent of its users in 2013 were fake.

YouTube wiped out billions of music industry video views in December last year after auditors found that some clips had exaggerated their numbers vastly.

Some days ago, YouTube announced a crackdown on ‘fraudulent views’, stating that its video views will henceforth be ‘audited’ and if any fraud is detected, the offender’s view count will be revised to reflect reality or the video clip deleted altogether.

Gaurav Bhaskar, global communications and public affairs manager at Google, explains the company’s policy on fraud in India. “We have a team in India that monitors videos and their view counts, looking for any suspicious activity,” he says, “So far, we’ve not found anything to be worried about. But as internet penetration increases and more businesses rely on online activity, the scope of abuse in India becomes larger.”

24 February 2014

Says a Mumbai-based social media analyst, requesting anonymity because many in the online advertising fraternity know him: “Everyone is doing it. After an online advertising campaign is concluded and the client wants to see results, what does the agency do? They approach a fake ‘likes’ seller to create ‘likes’ and followers for them. How do so many music or advertising videos go viral? They initially buy a number of views. Once the video, because it seems to have generated so many views, is tagged as ‘popular’ and featured on YouTube’s homepage, it starts getting genuine views and thus sometimes goes viral.” He adds, “If one tries to go about acquiring ‘likes’ and followers in an organic or ethical manner, you can at most get 1 per cent growth, which for many clients is just not good enough.”

Dale Bhagwagar, a film publicist, admits that two of his clients, both upcoming actresses, bought themselves Twitter followers about two years ago. “One of them bought some 22,000 followers and another about 5,000 followers on Twitter.

I was surprised, but who was I to say anything? The two of them were very happy.

Since then, I have noticed that this has become common practice in the industry,” he says. According to him, it is crucial nowadays for every upcoming actor or singer to be on Twitter. “But barring a few top stars, why would people be interested in following them? Everyone, thus, buys a large number of fake followers to inflate their follower lists,” he says.

However, many claim that shopping for fake popularity, far from helping a brand, makes things worse. A few months ago, a digital and social media ad agency named Buzzinga Digital in Mumbai was awarded the Facebook account of a springwater brand to promote.

This brand, available only in Mumbai and Goan five-star hotels, sells at Rs 50 for a 750-ml bottle. Since the product is niche, it has rather few followers on Facebook. But the previous agency handling the website started buying fake ‘likes’ to demonstrate how popular it had made the page. “From about 800 page likes, many of whom actively engaged with content on the page and personally know the owner of the water brand, suddenly there were over 11,000 page likes from people in Jalandhar and 24 February 2014

Chandigarh, places where this brand is not even available. Many of these accounts turned out to be fake, while some had unknowingly been lured into liking the page,” says Tarun Durga, one of the founders of the current agency. Many of those who had been tricked into displaying appreciation of the page complained to the agency via emails. “The worse thing is [that Facebook] only allows 5 per cent of all followers to [simultaneously] view content that is put up. Now with a majority of the water brand page’s followers being fake, it is likely that very few genuine followers even get to see the

With the credibility of their counts at stake, both Twitter and Facebook now actively monitor their websites looking for bots to deactivate. Facebook admits that more than

5 per cent of its profiles are fake

content,” he sighs unhappily.

According to Durga, most social media agencies should focus on ‘who is talking about the brand’ on the Facebook page, instead of the number of ‘likes’, both of which appear adjacent to each other as figures on Facebook pages. “But very rarely do clients even notice this segment.

And many agencies are happy to exploit this,” he says.

F

ake likes and followers, however, can be caught. There are online tools such as Fake Follower Check that claim to detect fraud. This they do with the use of metrics like the number of tweets a follower issues or the count of people following this follower (in turn). According to data crunched by Fake Follower

Check, the BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi, who had nearly 3.4 million followers on Twitter at the time of the assessment, has 82 per cent ‘fake’ followers, 16 per cent ‘inactive’ followers and 2 per cent ‘good’ or genuine followers. The figures reported by that fraud detection tool for actor Shah Rukh Khan, who had 6.7 million followers at the time, are roughly the same.

It’s a standard pattern, it seems. Before I purchased my followers, 2 per cent of all I had following me were inactive while the rest were good. After the purchase, I was found to have 80 per cent fake followers, 18 per cent inactive, and 2 per cent good.

Now, those with large follower bases may not necessarily have bought them.

They may have got lumped with fakes for no fault of theirs. Bots, after all, are designed to gain fake credibility by following famous people on Twitter, and so people who are already popular could end up with vastly exaggerated figures.

I

n the week since I bought my new fol-

lowers, something strange has happened every day. My follower count has been on a rollercoaster. From 5,350 followers, my all-time high, the figure crashed before it stabilised at 5,200 the other day. Social King tells me this is normal and he will ensure that I always have the 5,000 I paid for. Deokar says that this occurs because bots are programmed to spot certain keywords. If, for instance, they follow and spam individuals who tweet these words, they sometimes also unfollow those who do not.

As I write this, my follower count stands at 5,259. Last night, it fell to 5,195.

I always thought these followers would never go away. And even if they did, since none of them really exists, I would be fine with their disappearance. But after every precipitous fall and rise, I realise that I am left poorer by at least 20 followers.

I find myself checking my Twitter page every morning, going through my list of followers, trying to figure out who left me overnight. When I complain to Social King, he says in his familiar reassuring voice, “Fikar mat keejiye (Don’t worry).

They will not leave you. Ek-doh naya bana doon aapke liye? (Should I make one or two new ones for you?)” n open www.openthemagazine.com 33

pleasure

X

On The Lips and Other Arousing Wares

The secret bazaar of sex toys Akshay Sawai

S

amir Saraiya mimics the conspiratorial approach of a typical peddler of prurience found at Mumbai’s Manish Market or Delhi’s Palika Bazaar.

“Maal chahiye”? (Want stuff?) A jocular 41-year-old, Saraiya left a cushy job as business development head at Microsoft Singapore to set up Thatspersonal.com, one of India’s few organised adult product websites. He knows a bit about Palika Bazaar and Manish Market. These slea24 February 2014

zy dens were his stomping grounds for market research. After all, that is where customers would go for sex toys (okay, ‘adult wellness products’ in brochure lingo). Getting pleasure tools from abroad was an option. But that involved the risk of explaining things to beady-eyed hawks at Customs. And making such purchases even abroad was never easy.

There was always a chance of bumping into someone you knew (“Uh, hello Professor Banerjee.”)

Now, thanks to e-retailers like Thatspersonal.com and Imbesharam.com, Indians no longer have to endure embarrassment. World class adult goods can be acquired in complete privacy. The order is delivered in discreet packaging at an address of your choice. There are a few other websites too, but they are still small players.

Thatspersonal.com and Imbesharam.com, on the other hand, are ambitious—and legitimate—operations owned and run by serious businessmen.

The investment in Thatspersonal.com is $500,000 (about Rs 3.1 crore), and in Imbesharam.com, $700,000 (about Rs 4.4 crore). The future promises more such enterprises. This is because India’s adult products market, valued at Rs 1,200-1,500 crore in terms of annual sales, is expected to double in just two years.

We are sitting in Saraiya’s cabin at the office of Digital E-Life Pvt Ltd, which owns Thatspersonal.com, in Chembur, Mumbai. Half an hour into the conversation, he gets up and says, “Come, let me show you our range.” He opens a door marked ‘Store room. Entry restricted.’ It is a medium-sized room with a wooden floor and metallic grey shelves heaving with products. Their variety and quality is astonishing. From the brand Shunga, inspired by Japanese traditions of romance and lovemaking, comes a G-spot arousal cream, among other things.

There are diamond-studded handcuffs by Calexotics, a lubricant for couples called Wet Together that also warms and cools and tingles, edible bodypaint in flavours ranging from tiramisu to Cointreau.

The ‘role play’ category is especially popular among Indians, Saraiya says, pointing to uniforms of airhostesses, nurses and policewomen. Also in demand is X On The Lips, a tingling lip balm that electrifies users’ kissing experience.

Made in the US, the balm sells for Rs 999.

24 February 2014

“You can use it, what, a hundred times?

That’s just Rs 10 for a great kiss,” Saraiya says. In addition, there are various kinds of innerwear and adult games. With the right company, you could spend the rest of your life in that store room.

The unique thing about the company, and a sign of India’s increasing openness towards sex, is the profile of the people behind it. They are all quintessential suits who in the past would have rather embraced Marx than sell adult products.

Three of the firm’s key people are from Microsoft (a gift hamper might just be on its way to Satya Nadella). The first is Saraiya. The other is Jaspreet Bindra, Digital E-Life advisor. Bindra earlier headed the Microsoft Entertainment &

The ‘role play’ category is especially popular among Indians.

Uniforms of airhostesses, nurses and policewomen are available online

Devices Division in India. Neville Taraporewala, another advisor, is part of Microsoft India’s leadership team. Also on board are: Lekhesh Dholakia, a corporate attorney who specialises in internetand telecom-related laws in India; Monali Shah, a seasoned retail industry professional; and Vikram Varma, an advertising and digital industry veteran who looks after Thatspersonal.com’s brand strategy and communication.

Abhay Bhalerao, an alumnus of Veermata Jijabai Technology Institute and Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, looks after technology operations and infrastructure for Digital E-Life and the website.

Thatspersonal.com’s offer basket is more sensual than raunchy. In contrast, Imbesharam.com, as the name suggests, is

somewhat in-your-face with its rather more risqué range. For one, it sells fleshlights, those special friend of lonely men.

A fleshlight is a handy cylindrical object with soft rubber folds and an orifice that simulates a vagina. Imbesharam.com also has subtle variations (so that they pass legal muster) of dildos. Some of these items can’t be found on Thatspersonal.com.

Rubber dolls, though, are unavailable on either site.

Imbesharam.com also has a brand ambassador: Sunny Leone. And if Thatspersonal.com boasts of corporate heavyweights, Imbesharam.com is high on flamboyance. One of its founders calls himself Raj Armani (asked about his curious last name, he replies in an email, ‘Save that for another interview ’). The language of this site is youthful and conversational, if at times collegial. In its ‘About Team Besharam’ section, one of its founders, Salim, writes, ‘So here’s my motto... Life is a sport... Chicks dig scars... the pain goes away... but the glory well the glory lasts forever... Always be yourself and believe in yourself... Welcome to the world of BESHARAM. Besharam hum, You know you R too.’

U

nder the Indian Penal Code, any

display of obscenity in public is illegal. Sex toys, therefore, are unquestionably illegal. Manufacturers of sex toys, however, get around this with a simple trick. They don’t call their products ‘sex toys’. Imbesharam.com has a YouTube page on which some of these questions are tackled. One FAQ goes: ‘Is it legal to shop for sex toys on Imbesharam.com? Are these products allowed to be imported in India?’ A blonde model, acting all coy, has this answer to offer, “First, let us address the fact that we do not sell any sex toys,” she says, “What we sell is a classy collection of products that can be used by adults for pleasure and relief. A bunch of products that we carry in the adult category section are merely household electronics that can be used by adults for various functions like neck massage, head massage, ear massage, feet massage, back massage and hand massage.” (It hasn’t struck the company that it refers to its own products as ‘sex toys’ while posing the frequently asked question.)

Asked to clarify Indian law on sex toys, open www.openthemagazine.com 37

ritesh uttamchandani

bed business Samir Saraiya left his job as business development head at Microsoft in Singapore to set up Thatspersonal.com

advocate Tarak Sayed says, “As per Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, they are illegal without doubt. However, items such as edible paint, gels or underwear are technically not illegal. In the case of more graphic products, I would say at least prima facie there is enough reason to register a complaint.”

Armani explains how his company ensured it did not flout any law. ‘Initially [the rules] seemed to be our biggest challenge,’ he responds over email. ‘But as we spent six months in research and meeting with [Certified Public Accountants], attorneys, customs consultants and excommissioners and other e-commerce pioneers, we came to realise... a huge misinterpretation [of the difference] between what restricted products are and what not-restricted products are, so we built our collections while staying under those domains as we want to build a brand that can be synonymous with a pleasurable adult lifestyle. Once the domain was clearly identified, all that was needed was to hire the team, sign the contracts with reputable and reliable shippers and go for the first test run.’

Since the company that runs Thatspersonal.com is based in India, it was 38 open

at greater risk of running afoul of the law.

Saraiya agrees he faced “challenges”, but he also had some amusing experiences.

Sitting in his office in an untucked white shirt, jeans and grey Nikes, he narrates some in his pally, college-buddy manner.

Refreshingly, he bears no trace of the snobbery one may expect of someone with a blue-chip corporate resume, schooling at Mumbai’s Cathedral and a South Bombay home.

“For edible body paint, the Customs guys called me and asked, ‘Boss, what are you up to, yaar?’ I said, ‘Boss, this is edible body paint.’ They were like ‘Okay’. They knew it was legal. I think it was more amusing for them to see the guy who was doing this [business]. They said, ‘What is the end use of the product?’ What do I say? The end use is fun, yaar.”

Saraiya says, “And then we went to the Food Ministry once. We said, ‘This is edible body paint; do I need a food licence from you?’ So the guy says, ‘No, the funny part is, for this product you don’t need a licence because the way we have defined food is [by its delivery of] nutrition.

People don’t consume this for nutrition.”

Asked how many permits he needed, Saraiya says, “Less than ten. But a lot of

people are trying to copy us and I don’t want to reveal how we did everything.

But it was challenging and took time. We were fortunate we dealt with a good set of officials, rather than people who are only out to fleece businessmen.”

Moreover, as Sayed says, some products are perfectly legal. “If you want to make crotchless underwear, you are allowed to,” says Saraiya. “Lubricants… there was just Johnson & Johnson’s KY Jelly in the market. Today, I have 51 lubricants—silicon based, water-based, tingling, flavoured. That’s all legal.”

There are a couple of other players in the Indian adult products market, like 24funtoys.com and masalatoys.com. These are not in the same league as Thatspersonal.com or Imbesharam.com.

Nonetheless, interactions with them reveal something about the industry.

When I ring up 24funtoys.com, the man who answers the phone is evasive.

Speaking in Hindi, he says the firm is based in Rajasthan, and for more information, I would have to speak to his boss.

It goes without saying that this boss is not available and unlikely to be. At Bangalore-based Masalatoys.com, the phone is answered by Amit Sharma, one 24 February 2014

of its owner-partners, with a hopeful “Yes, how can I help you?” To his credit, Sharma is disarmingly forthcoming. His partner, he reveals, is one Mr Isaac. After a couple of failed experiments, they started Masalatoys.com “by default” around 2007. But business has been slow, he admits. “We’ve spent about Rs 6 lakh so far,” says Sharma, “and made just about a lakh-and-a-half—of which much is spent on operations.” If someone wanders over to the site and actually orders something, the firm sources the product from places like Palika Bazar. “We are out of energy levels,” says Sharma, “I may shut down this business very soon.” He blames it on the stringency of regulation. “Unless the Government does something to liberalise policies on selling and manufacturing adult goods, it’s going to be difficult.

There are benefits for everyone if the rules are relaxed. The Government will earn money. Prices of products will go down eight times. You will see happy faces around.”

Signing off, Sharma makes an impassioned plea, asking me to spread the word about the need for safe sexual outlets.

“I’m in no way interested in promotion,” he says. “But just make the point that these products are pro-society. They can bring down child abuse, prostitution and HIV. We all have sex. We were made [out of] sex,” he says, concluding with a “God bless you.”

Digital E-Life for about a year. She’d worked with Yahoo, Rediff and Indiatimes earlier. “I personally was very excited about working here,” she says.

“The business was promising. Everybody wants these things, it’s just that they were not available. My husband had no problems either. But my parents and inlaws are conservative. It took some time for them to come around.” What bothers her is the hypocrisy some people display.

“Somebody actually said to me ‘Please take this off your CV.’ People have weird, conflicting views. [Sex] is a part of life.

Why deny it?”

Rohan Indapure, who works on the merchandising aspect of the business, smiles at the memory of losing a marriage proposal on account of the nature of his work. “I went to see a girl, but they didn’t follow up once they found out what I did for a living.”

Things have been tougher for Salauddin Kazi, who handles operations and customer service. His marrying a Gujarati had already tested his orthodox family’s patience; asked if she has been accepted in his home, he says, “Kind of.

Can’t say yes, can’t say no.” For his folks to also accept his career, he figures, would be asking for too much. “So I tell them we

I

t is also fascinating to speak to foot soldiers of this business. These are regular folk working at jobs they enjoy doing, jobs that are often met with disapproval at home. Their workplaces, though, are free of any awkwardness, since everyone is accustomed to dealing with such items as vibrators and gay underwear. Thatspersonal.com’s could be any contemporary office with an MTV or ad agency vibe. The staff, most of them in their twenties or thirties, are casually dressed. There is a table-tennis table on the ground floor and a carom board on the way up. But yes, some of them have had to lie a little at home, or at least face spells of unease as their families came to terms with their line of work.

Blossom Menezes Joshi, who looks after product development and the site’s user experience, has been working at

24 February 2014

“These products are pro-society. They can bring down child abuse, prostitution and HIV. We all have sex. We were made out of sex,” says Amit Sharma

sell bath and body products.” He often takes samples home. The company’s name, Digital E-life, helps. “It is exciting to be part of a start-up,” he says. “But no one knows in my family—not my inlaws, not my parents, nor close relatives.

Only my wife and close friends know. It’s difficult to make people understand the importance of what we are doing.”

C

onsumers, however, are almost

unanimously pleased and need no convincing of the value of such products.

Sales are robust. Imbesharam’s Armani says, “We are currently doing Rs 40-50 lakh in [monthly] sales, and they are growing by at least 20 per cent every month.” The company expects to break even by the end of the year. Saraiya says the site has had over 10,000 customers since its launch a year ago, 31 per cent of them women. Delhi tops the list in terms of orders. Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune follow.

He adds that 20 per cent of the firm’s orders are from smaller towns and cities.

But value-wise, these orders are much larger as they buy an average 2.9 items per order. “We have got orders from all over the country,” says Saraiya, “including Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh and Nanded in Maharashtra.” He had expected that the 40-plus age group, with their high disposable incomes and stagnant marriages, would be his main target audience. To his surprise, the 24-30 age bracket has been equally enthusiastic about his wares.

Dr Mahinder Watsa, a popular sex advisor who writes a column in Mumbai Mirror, however, considers the frequent use of sex toys best only for the older lot. “[The product category] has its own place, like porn. But there is a danger they can be misused, where people overdo it and get used to it, instead of enjoying sex the natural way. I would recommend them largely for people over 40, who need excitement in their marriages.”

Thousands follow Dr Watsa’s humorously doled out advice in the tabloid everyday. But it is unlikely they’d agree with him on this matter. As Saraiya says, “In the feedback that I get, there will be the odd mail that says we are corrupting India or India doesn’t need this. But nine out of ten are for it.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 39

defiance

Allah’s Rock stars Strains of rock music have begun to waft across the gullies of Nizamuddin that usually reverberate with qawwaalis chinki sinha photographs by ruhani kaur

the new sufi Zuby Ali of the band Painfull Rockstars with his groupies at Delhi’s Nizamuddin dargah

listening to qawwali at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciple Amir Khusro, the poet. They have also been witness to a growing number of Tablighis who throng its streets and cafes.

The Tablighi Jamaat is a proselytising movement that started in Mewat in 1926.

The diktat is simple: become believers and revert to the Five Pillars of Islam.

Revive the faith, they say. The world headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat is only a few metres from the shrine in Nizamuddin—religion and its defiance in the same space.

They are believers, too. But they also believe in the virtue of forgiveness. God and religion are mostly misunderstood.

Music, they have been told, creates arousal, and passion. Hearts should not be moved with desire. Stretching, raising, and softening the voice could lead to sins of passion. But Khusro’s beloved was God. Reveal your face, sing the qawwals.

“Come, I am forlorn without you,” sings Zuhaib Ali of the Painfull Rockstars, a two-member band from the slums of Nizamuddin.

While men rush into the austere space of the Markaz to reaffirm their religion by not listening to music, strains of qawwali can be heard coming from the shrine on Thursday nights. Growing up here, the young rock singers of Nizamuddin know they can do this and that. The rebellion started centuries ago. Sufis were blessed, too.

T

T

hey will sing their way out of this,

the slum life, they say. In fact, they repeat it so many times that they almost believe it.

But before they sing, they touch their ears, fold hands, and ask for forgiveness.

In Islam, the religion they follow, music—‘useless entertainment’—is forbidden for it leads away from the path of spirituality, they say.

In Nizamuddin, they have grown up

24 February 2014

heirs is the kind of sadness where

there is hope. In fact, they like to be sad. It is deeper than other emotions, they say. Growing up in the Nizamuddin basti was tough. They could have gone the other way—become addicts, indulge in petty thefts and end up in prison like some of their friends—or they could be good.

Nadeem Arshi, Sahil Siddiqui, Zoheb Sheikh and the rest are always singing.

Love songs that become sad. Again and again. As if by the act of singing, plugging the cord into the amplifier, switching on the bird lights in the barren room of the Nizamuddin Community Centre, they will be transported elsewhere.

These young men sing together. They sing each others’ songs. They have their groups—Painfull Rockstars, Dynamic Star, ZR, LUV, and so on. They record songs, upload them on YouTube and ReverbNation, and help each other out with lyrics.

But they also betray each other. Living in a slum teaches you that. Look out for yourself. There’s only so much space.

You fight to be. Desperation and ambition co-exist.

Nothing is absolute here. There’s a church in these parts, and shrines dedicated to Hindu deities. Smells of kebabs mix with the heady fragrance of rose petals, and women walk in hijabs. There are bakeries, and old walls that lead into the houses of generational shrine keepers who claim to be descendents of the saint.

The saint never married. The saint stressed love. The singers know of love.

The saint was against class barriers. He said sama was the means to unity with God. In fact, Khusro created the qawwali.

Conflict is a flavour here. Vendors blast sermons—do this, don’t do that, lower your gaze when you see a woman—fatwas against un-Islamic things, and dark tales about hell in case of deviance. But in the same space, in the narrow alleys that lead to the dargah, others sell CDs of qawwalis by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Sabri Brothers and Abida Parveen.

Nadeem used to sing qawwalis. That’s how he learn to raise and lower his voice.

At the shrine, only those from the families of traditional qawwals can sing. But everyone can hear them.

T

hey were all there when a part of the film Rockstar starring Ranbir Kapoor was shot at the shrine. That was 2011. In many ways, they located their stories in the film’s narrative. Ranbir Kapoor’s character lost his love and came to the shrine, and that’s where he started to sing. This is where they are. They want to be rock stars.

They are waiting for someone to notice them. They invest what they have in recording. Only one of them—Zuhaib Ali alias Zuby—has been able to make a video so far. That cost him Rs 65,000.

He later fell in love with the girl he cast in the video—a beautician from Okhla named Nagma. open www.openthemagazine.com 41

The rest of them wait. They know what they will do when they make it. Nadeem wants to send his parents on Hajj. Sahil wants to support his divorced elder sister, and Zuby wants to help the poor.

They are believers—in the benevolence of Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, whose shrine defines this locality.

There is the other context. Of wealth.

In Nizamuddin West and across the street in the East, the real estate is worth crores. The nouveau riche have come in.

There are Audis and BMWs, boutiques and coffee shops.

And then, there is them. They come from poor families, except 22-year-old Zoheb, whose father, the former drug lord of the basti, is in jail.

They are known in these parts. Women stop and ask them if they are still singing.

They are not seen as deviants. They are the basti’s heroes.

Nigar Parween, perched high up on a makeshift roof of tin and asbestos, looks down on Nadeem and Mir Ali singing and nods.

“In this neighbourhood, it is a great thing. It keeps them off drugs. We play their songs. I pray that they go places with this. They were born here. They will make us proud,” she says.

Under the small patch of evening sky in between the corrugated iron roofs and tarpaulin sheets, the two continue to sing.

“Woh jo maanga thha Khuda se...”

Around them, with their backs against sooty walls, other children from the basti have congregated. They sing along.

Songs of love, and betrayal. Songs of hope, and fear. Songs of faith, and of defiance.

A

song was lost, stolen, or whatever. But the fact of the matter is that over tea and bheja fry one night at Zaki restaurant in Nizamuddin basti, Nadeem Arshi, 27, said his opening lines had been taken by this other friend, a flamboyant bandana and stud-wearing young man who has inspired many to look like him.

Like a star. That’s what he is. With a loyal fan following. The rest of them fade out when he walks in. He is always in focus.

He knows this.

Nadeem stopped sporting a similar hairstyle. That night, he would say more.

42 open

“That’s what a song is mostly,” he said.

“The opening sets the tone for the song.

You return to those lines, and they hold the song in place. He took that and never gave the track back.”

Sahil Siddiqui was nodding. He didn’t condone it. The two belong to two different groups from Nizamuddin basti— Dynamic and Painfull, suffixed with ‘Rockstars’ for effect. Like those fauxleather jackets, and those boots with buckles and metal straps. Enablers, image building, whatever. Those are ‘rockstar’ things. The world might have moved on to other things. But here, that word must matter somehow. It is another story that they mostly sing love songs composed on free tunes.

However, Nadeem, who wears skinny pants, and silver chains around his neck, and silver studs in his ears, said it hurt him. He won’t confront his friend anymore. There would be more songs. Either way, among men, there exists no true friendship. A game of chess is not just a game. There’s more to it. Always.

Zoheb, 22, the eager son of a former druglord, says they once wrote a song about friendship. A friend’s friend had died. They all knew him.

“Listen, there are feelings,” he says.

“There will always be feelings.”

He is naïve.

N

adeem speaks with a slight lisp. But

sings without inhibition.

The night I first heard him sing, it was at Zaki Hotel. It was past midnight when he walked in and ordered tea and bread pakoras. In the dark corner of the upstairs part of this old eatery, a few men were smoking ganja. The smell wafted into the room. They were unperturbed. Drugs are everywhere in this area. In the eyes of men and in its newfound wealth.

Straight, thin buildings are coming up.

They are all lined with tiles. Ugly to the more sophisticated, but to them, a mark of their upward mobility.

Nadeem was with another young man, and a girl. He began to sing. I asked him if it was a Bollywood song.

“It is my song,” he said. “I have a band.

It is called Dynamic Star.”

“Dynamic?”

“Because we are unusual,” he said.

I asked for his number.

We forget. Songs, and other encounters.

Only for so long.

A

t the back of the community centre

in Nizamuddin basti, there is a room with two beds and an amplifier. On pink chart paper, Nadeem has scribbled his name, drawn a mic, an amplifier and earphones. They have hung bird lights. Blue, red and yellow. The tube lights, ones that remind you of sanitised spaces like hospitals or asylums, were too harsh for songs of love and heartbreak. There are no curtains on the windows. Outside, there are stark walls. They block most of the view. This could be a room anywhere.

Only, this one is in a slum. A turn, a few steps, and you are out there—face to face with deprivation and heaps of garbage.

In the distance, men in rags are sniffing whitener or smoking ganja. On the left, beyond locked gates, the infamous park lies. After the Commonwealth Games, it was cleared and lights installed. But it has a reputation. Of crime, and rapes, and other such netherworld things. The night shelter, with its own horror tales, is next to it. Straight up, there is another gate, and it opens into an open space where drunk men are playing cards, and women are picking out lice from children’s hair. Urchins run around.

Then, there is a narrow alley. This isn’t a place for miracles. There are more narrow alleys that are like rivulets, and you enter a dark space. Eyes must get used to this. Then a turn, and yet another, and at the end, there is a small room no bigger than the size of two double beds. It is a windowless space. Without the bulb, it would be impossible to see anything here. A mother is preparing dinner.

This is where Nadeem lives with his family. Four siblings and a crippled father. When he was much younger, he would feel guilty seeing his father sell chai outside the Nizamuddin Baoli gate.

So he dropped out of school, and apprenticed at a workshop for Rs 5 per day. Now, he works as a fabricator in Nehru Nagar, and makes Rs 7,500 per month.

He spends his evenings and nights in the room at the community centre, which has been given to his father who now works as a chowkidar. But Nadeem feels it may not be safe for his father to spend nights there. This is where he 24 February 2014

car jam Zuby Ali (front seat) and Sahil Siddiqui of the band Painfull Rockstars jam in their car near the Nizaumddin flyover. The car is their studio, they compose music here

writes his lyrics and sings. In fact, at his workplace, they refer to him as a singer.

He wants to release an album. Perhaps, be like Sonu Nigam.

“Maybe a little less,” he says.

He is in love. Unrequited love. The girl still calls him. But she asks him to sing songs by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. He says she listens to his compositions on her mobile, and cries.

She is his muse. Pain is what they are most familiar with. Look around, and there it is. In the daily drudgery of their lives. Nadeem says they would sometimes drink water with flour to keep hunger at bay.

They have an old guitar. Someone else’s. They strum it. But none of them are trained. Not vocals, not anything else.

“If you sing forever, you will have the voice,” Nadeem says. “It is the saint’s blessings.”

What is pain, then?

It is when you can’t help the situation, when you know you can do it, but there’s nobody to give you that push; it is when you must cut aluminium, and see your time go by, he says.

He has been doing khidmat at the shrine of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya every Thursday for the last seven years, waking up at 6 am, then pushing water carts, feeding the poor and collecting refuse. Last year, he tried calling numbers advertised over text messages, 24 February 2014

mostly spam, and was told he would have to pay Rs 2.5 lakh to get into Indian Idol.

He even tried to go to an audition.

But nothing worked out.

There’s an unmarried sister. She used to attend school but had to drop out.

Neighbours would spread stories, and the father would beat up the girl, and then they decided she should stay in, and they would try to get her married. The younger brother likes dancing. Moin, Nadeem’s uncle’s son, spends most of his time in their company. He is their errands boy. Unlike others, his hair is cut short, and oiled. But he says it is because his school won’t allow such flights of fancy in terms of hairstyle. But once he is done with school, he says, he will not look so ambiguous or commonplace.

Nadeem says they all have sad stories.

It is important to suffer so you can create.

Their lyrics, on scraps of paper, are testimony to their love and loss.

Almost all of them are in love. They deny it at first. Then Zoheb says he is too deep in it to turn back. Zoheb’s mother, Sharafat Ali’s second wife, has been in Tihar for the past seven years as an undertrial. The young man lives with his aunt, and wants to be a singer. He has formed his own band called ZR. Raheel, his partner, is a lanky young man who mans a grocery store in the alley, and claims he can rap faster than any rapper alive.

When he goes to see his mother in

prison, he sings to her. She made him sing when he was a child. He hopes she can get out soon.

Zoheb says he didn’t even know what his father did. That he was some kind of a Robin Hood figure, he knows. He helped the poor. When he would visit Bombay, he would meet film stars.

Important men would visit their mansion in the basti, he says. He points to a palatial mansion that stands out in the basti environs. The Delhi government has sealed it like other properties that belonged to the druglord.

He was kidnapped in Okhla a couple of years ago. But he doesn’t complain about his 10 months in captivity in a village in UP. His girlfriend wants him to study, so he has enrolled in a distance education programme. For her birthday last year in May, he took Zuby Ali to a hookah bar in Lajpat Nagar so he could sing for her.

When he was with a band called LUV, they didn’t give him any credit. He would pay for recordings, and, over time, realised he was being taken for a ride.

Zoheb, with his light eyes and eager personality, wants to impress everyone.

Most of all, Zuby Ali. Because Zuby Ali sets the mood here. He has made singing a respectable thing here, Zoheb says.

Zuby is in the room, and they are all in awe of him. Later, they will speak about his failings, but not now. Because Zuby Ali has arrived with an entourage, and open www.openthemagazine.com 43

most of his men sport the same hairstyle as he does. Straight hair, cut in layers. The 27-year-old talks about his fans in the Nizamuddin Basti and says it is only because he can sing universal songs.

T

he narratives of their lives run

parallel to each other. Difficult childhoods, and heartbreaks. Poverty, and the struggle to defy the prescribed life of a slum kid. Try to study, then drop out.

Take up a job anywhere, and survive.

Mostly, it is all about making it from one day to the next.

Zuby doesn’t reveal everything at once.

He is a charming man who seems to know the plot. Nagma doesn’t say much, only giggles. That night, she came to the basti dressed in skinny denims, kneehigh boots and a cream coat, holding a bunch of red roses for Zuby. Friday was Rose Day. He looked at her, stretched out his hands, and sang. He is good with theatrics. A group on young and old men, and a few young girls gather around.

“Allah isse kaamyaabi de (Allah grant him success),” a young man says. They have known each other for a long time.

Later, Zuby says he married Nagma five months after they met. He had cast her in his first video, and they had an affair. She says she fell in love with him when she saw him. He had lost his mother, and was in mourning. They don’t live together yet. When he is successful, he will bring her home. Until then, they must live apart. In love, and in agony, he says. “She is part of Painfull Rockstars,” he adds.

But he won’t cast her anymore. Because he doesn’t want others to desire her after they see her. She bats her eyelashes, pumped with mascara, and smiles again, and her lips almost dyed pink. She looks misplaced here. Her hair is almost blonde. It falls over her face in a 90s way.

Zuby is articulate. He knows the narrative well. There might be some truth in it, but it is narrated to maximise the broken heart complex. He says his life is a story of losses. He lost his father to another woman when he was young, and then his brothers. But the loss that did him in was his mother’s. On the Hyundai Sonata always parked outside the chai stalls and new hotels near the Baoli gate, a sticker reads ‘Maa Ki Dua’. And on the left top corner: ‘Painfull Rockstars’.

44 open

the dynamic dropout Nadeem at his home in Delhi’s Nizamuddin basti. He has a band called Dynamic Star. He dropped out of school because he felt guilty watching his crippled father sell chai

Expletives and abuses are thrown at whoever comes in the way while he is driving. He says they write their songs in the car on a busy street. In that chaos, he feels, music comes best to him. The car is his zone. It is a gift from Nagma.

Zuby is not emaciated like the rest of them. There is a way the poor look different from the rich. You can tell from their sunken cheeks and their frames. Nadeem and Sahil and the rest are poor boys from the slums. Zuby is different. He doesn’t need to work.

N

ineteen-year-old Sahil Siddiqui

was the one who started it all last year when he first recorded his song Kyun Iss Tarah. Sahil gave them all this dream, Nadeem says.

Sahil gets up to sing.

He recorded that first song at Sai Milan Studio in Lajpat Nagar in March last year.

Then, he formed the band. That was a fashionable thing to do. And suddenly, everyone was trying to compose, write and record. Zuby met him one evening and asked to be included. Zuby had already been singing at Comesum, a chain fast food joint near Delhi’s Nizamuddin Station, and he was Sahil’s brother’s friend.

Sahil finishes singing. There’s silence.

“I have a love story to sing about,” Zoheb says.

“Mine is a sad story,” Nadeem interrupts.

“Actually, I start with love, and then it gets sad,” Zoheb replies.

Zoheb sings the cover of an old Bollywood song: Humein Tumse Pyar Kitna. He has added his own lyrics.

There’s also some rap, and he wants to record it soon so he can send it to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. “Ladki toh nahi mili, lekin ek career toh mil 24 February 2014

gaya (I didn’t get the girl, but I got a career),” Sahil says, and he begins to talk about his tryst with love.

He plays the voice of a girl crying on his mobile. It is too much. Given my own fascination with love, I was curious. But the grieving, amplified, is too much.

They shut it, and Sahil says he will never love again. The girl betrayed him, and now she wants to come back, but he has decided he will never give her that power again.

“I used my pain,” he says. “I will use it always.”

His father Mohammad Zafir Nizami came to Delhi from Bhagalpur district in Bihar in 1976 before Sahil was born. He owns a flower shop at the shrine in Nizamuddin. He used to tell Sahil to focus on other things. Singing would need more than just a good voice. His elder son had tried—he gave up and started working at the Aga Khan Trust. But Sahil is obstinate. Such things aren’t for the poor, his father would say.

“My father said, ‘Once you have started on the path, don’t turn back’. I won’t. I am still pursuing education, and help out at the shop, but this is what my life is going to be about,” he says.

They didn’t own a sound system.

When he recorded his first song, he played it on his mobile phone to his parents. It was a surprise, and they were happy. He had figured out everything on his own through the internet. He met others, from other neighbourhoods, who had come to the recording studio. They were all trying to make it. You’d pray for all of them, he says.

“When the heart breaks, the sound is from there. You can’t fake it,” he says.

Zuby and Sahil have recorded a few songs together. He says that they get along fine.

“We will be together. If Sahil gets an offer, he will take me along. If I get one, he is there by my side. I said to him long ago, ‘We are in it together.’ If one falls behind, the other needs to turn back. All I want is one label,” Zuby says.

Z

uby says he smokes too much. That he is a drifter, and has never known anchors in life. Those he loved left him.

Like his elder brother who took poison one day many years ago because he

24 February 2014

couldn’t deal with heartbreak. Another sibling died in a freak accident four years ago, and his ailing mother, who he remembers as always holding prayer beads and muttering blessings, passed away two years later.

He roams around with men who he refers to as his friends, but you know they are there to protect him. They don’t interfere with his narrative, and don’t correct him or add their bits. They hang around, and watch over him.

In his case, sadness and melancholy are irrevocable conditions. Young love destroys you, he says. Love could happen later. But who knows, he says.

In between, you write and compose in a car on a busy road. You smoke inces-

In many ways, they located their stories in Rockstar’s narrative.

Ranbir Kapoor lost his love, and came to the shrine, and that’s where he started to sing. This is where they are. They want to be rock stars santly, and you drink numerous cups of chai.

Young boys tell him how they have found his songs so relevant.

“Bhai, aapke gaane sun ke humko lagta hai hamari zindagi ke upar likha hai (Brother, listening to your songs, we feel they were written about our lives),” they say to him.

He pats them on the shoulder, and smiles.

Zuby remembers in all its detail his mother’s life. He dropped out of school when his brother died and took care of his mother. He remembers how they returned to their maternal grandmother’s house in Nizamuddin basti when he was very young, and lived in a room that was too small for the six of them. It used to leak during the rains.

They started building their house then.

Now, it is a five-storey building. He got lucky with his mobile repair business, and his brothers earned well enough.

But the house wasn’t this tall when his mother was alive. Some people just go away without a moment of respite in their lives, he says.

He sold his first car, a Maruti Suzuki Zen, for his mother’s eye operation. She had cried.

In 2003, he fell in love with a girl he met at a wedding in the neighbourhood. It lasted a year. But it left him damaged, he says. That’s when he wrote his song.

Aaja tujhe vaasta... the lyrics go.

The video features him and Nagma.

The plot revolves around love. In the end, the guy in love hangs himself, and the girl falls on her knees and wails.

There is no way out of love, he says.

Money is an issue, an impediment. But the hope is that people will find them on the internet; that someone will notice them, and launch them.

T

hey are all eating together at Zaki

restaurant. The usual fare—bheja fry, and rotis, and chai. They list the things they will do if they become successful.

Nadeem says he wants to buy his father pigeons. His father used to fly pigeons as a hobby. “I don’t know how much money is good enough. I also want to get them a house,” he says. “I was blessed to have such parents.”

Zuby says he always wanted to sing on a stage in front of his mother. If he ever makes it, he will cry. Loudly and freely.

Sahil looks away. Nadeem goes on sipping his tea.

Zoheb interjects.

“I will go on singing. Whether it gets me anything or not. And Zuby bhai, I am good. I represented my school in a gurbaani competition. I am proud of myself,” he says. “Nadeem bhai sings better than I do. His sur (pitch) is better. I only respect him.”

Zoheb has finally said it.

And then, the call of the muezzin. And talk of Urs, the celebrations at the shrine, that begin on 17 February. There will be roses, and genda (marigold) flowers, and dancing fakirs, and sama. Music will assert itself. They will be here. Doing khidmat, and praying their songs be heard. n open www.openthemagazine.com 45

KEEP YOUR MIND OPEN

365 DAYS IBE TO R C S B SU

INE & MAGAZ TO P SAVE U N 48% O R PRICE E V O C THE

To subscribe SMS ‘openmagazine’ to 56070 or log on to openthemagazine.com/subscribe or call our toll free number 1800-300-22-000 Discount 153

` 5355/-

` 2790/-

` 2565/-

48%

51

` 1785/-

` 990/-

` 795/-

45%

`

Signature Please fill in this order form and mail it with your remittance to

Date Terms and Conditions: 1. This is a limited period subscription offer from Open Media Network Pvt .Ltd.(OMN), which is valid for interested subscribers in India. 2. Payments for subscribing to the magazine can be made only through Credit Cards or Cheque payable at New Delhi. Cash payments will not be accepted. 3. Allow 4-6 weeks for processing of your subscription. Subscription would be processed only after realization of the payments. 4. This offer cannot be clubbed with any other offer. 5. OMN reserves the right to terminate or extend this offer or any part thereof at any time, or to accept or reject any or all forms received at their absolute discretion without assigning any reason thereof 6. OMN will not be responsible for postal delays, transit losses or mutilation of the subscription form. 7. All disputes are subject to the laws of India and exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only. 8. *Conditions Apply INNOCEAN-021/12

true life

mindspace Delhi’s Comic Con Act

63

O p e n s pa c e

Anushka Sharma Vidya Balan

62

n p lu

Hasee Toh Phasee Saving Mr Banks

61 Cinema reviews

New Kindle Paperwhite Longines Column-Wheel Single Push-Piece Chronograph Motorola Blink 1 Baby Monitor

60

Tech & style

Fidelity and Testicle Size Pacific Salmon’s Magnetic Sense Yogurt and Type 2 Diabetes

58

Science

Weekend at the Motorshow

52

lu x u ry

Wendy Doniger and The Hindus Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet Rana Dasgupta and Capital

Books

Love in the Time of HIV

48 64

ruhani kaur

love story When Najaraus, HIV-negative, met Maitri, HIV-positive 48

true life

Love in the Time of HIV When Najaraus met Maitri, she was an HIV-positive widow, and he an AIDS awareness worker. Nine years later, with a little grit and a little fib, they are married, living together, still in love—and Najaraus is still HIV-negative Sohini Chattopadhyay

I

t is the second real day of win-

ter by the almanac of the sun, the day after the winter solstice. But it has been sweater cold for several days now, the pushcarts of smoky peanuts and sticky peanut candy have rolled out into the smog-laden evening for at least three weeks, and we have been rubbing our sleeping hands for warmth for at least a week.

This is why the nauseating, uninterrupted filth around transformer number 12 in Sangam Vihar does not smell as stomach-turningly bad as it would have even a month back. The strange thing is, the sight of open sewers on both sides leaking out on the kilometre or so of unpaved road, the mottled grey pigs squelching about, the snaking trails of lurid polythene packets all around are enough to make me heave even though I am breathing, unwisely, through my mouth. It is not smell or taste; sight alone can make the body convulse. My eyes water. I sound muffled when I greet Najaraus Lakra, who has come to pick me up.

Najaraus and Maitri’s two-room home is fragrant with the smell of boiling rice and preparations for a Sunday afternoon visitor. It is dark here, lit by the earnest white of a tubelight; the 48 open

apartment is wisely windowless so as to blank out the filth of the alleys. Yo Yo Honey Singh is on the radio while Maitri hurries over the cooking, the dark cement floor has been mopped clean, a mosquito repellent device is kept ready to be plugged in. Remember when we rushed to finish everything to watch movies on Doordarshan? This is something like that: I have been invited to listen to a love story.

W

hen Najaraus met Maitri, she had just started her ART (anti-retroviral treatment) therapy to keep her HIV in check. Her CD4 count—the number of infection-fighting white blood cells per micro-litre of blood— had fallen quite low to 140, close to the threshold limit at which ART is recommended. The Government of India had started free ART for the HIV-positive in 2004; this was in 2005.

Maitri nudges Najaraus, who squints about the date but says he remembers all the important and unimportant stories of the time they fell for each other. “She was not as beautiful then; she was so thin,” he says of his wife, who now has the slim, hipless frame of a 12-year-old. “No make-up, no

a glorious fib When Najaraus took Maitri home to stay with his parents, he told them it was he who was HIV-positive, and that he was lucky to find a woman who loved him

ruhani kaur

jewellery, but I was impressed with the way she spoke. She was so thoughtful.

I knew then that she knew of life and its insensitivities,” he says, smiling at the music system.

Najaraus was working for the NGO Population Concern International India then, part of 60-odd people assigned to participate in an all-India AIDS awareness walking tour. It was a heady time for the mostly male contingent—the adventure of a nomadic lifestyle but backed by a salary and the high of a heroes’ welcome in every state they visited. They were all falling in love a lot those days; the days were for walking and campaigning and the evenings for chatting, singing, dining with new friends. It was a time of intense conversations, no TV, no distractions of family. In Bengal, the PCI team was met by a delegation of the Bengal Network of People Living with HIV/ AIDS (BNPL). They were all women, all widows. Maitri was assigned singing and translation work. They had been warned not to flirt with boys who were unfamiliar.

“Fourteen or 15 of us fell in love in Bengal,” says Najaraus. “I took away her pen the first day. Mine was not working; I exchanged it with her,” he chuckles. “She followed me around all day.”

The walk through Bengal with the PCI team was Maitri’s first paid job, as she sees it, though she had been paid a stipend of Rs 400 for making tea and cleaning the BNPL office for a few months before this. It was only enough to cover the cost of travelling to the BNPL office from Domjur district, where she lived in a hovel she had built herself with bamboo and tin plates her father helped her buy. She got the land with the help of a cousin, a CPM worker with contacts in the Gram Panchayat. She strung up a wire to steal electricity from nearby homes.

Her husband’s family had made it clear she was not welcome to stay with them. Her husband, who worked as a jewellery artisan in Bombay, had died in a Bengal district hospital in 2004, leaving her with two sons and no savings. She had been married to him after her Class 10 board exams, so 50 open

suddenly that she was too stunned to protest. She had no choice but to stay home. “He did not even let me speak to people on the corridor of our building,” she says.

She had found out she was HIVpositive in 2000, when her husband had to be hospitalised with bone tuberculosis and was diagnosed with AIDS. “The counselling in the hospital was terrifying; I thought all I could do was wait to die. I didn’t realise there was

Maitri’s siblings think she is

shameless to marry again, especially with her ‘disease’. “My family thinks of me as diseased.

My mother is scared of catching the disease from me. I work as an HIV/AIDS educator, and

my own family ostracises me" such a vast difference between AIDS and being HIV-positive.” She didn’t want to go back to her own family, where her aunts and uncles and sistersin-law refuse to eat with her. Only her parents and grandma eat with her, but it means a closed-door, highly restricted existence for them with her at home.

Maitri’s main interest in the BNPL gig was the opportunity to learn about the condition, and to talk. She listened

while she swept the floor and washed the cups and boiled the tea. She soon started functioning as the receptionist at the office. When the PCI project came along, Maitri was chosen to be part of the delegation to work with the walking team in Bengal: her monthly salary was Rs 3,000.

“It was my first job. I was very serious. From the first day, he kept teasing me, and I was annoyed. One time, he stopped me from falling while we were walking with banners by grabbing me around the waist. I was very angry with him for this public gesture,” says Maitri. The memory of the moment makes them turn towards each other with broad grins.

“Besides, we had been warned not to flirt with the boys from outside, we were widows and we were all positive.

But the attention was nice. I had had no love in my first marriage, no affection. There was not much to do in the evenings; we found corners of quietness. Some 14 or 15 couples grew quite close,” says Maitri. “Only the two of us are still together,” says Najaraus, proudly. He also met Maitri’s younger son during the Bengal assignment; she brought him along to meet her colleagues when the walking rally passed close to her home.

They kept in touch over the phone for the next two years. She came to Delhi once on assignment with the BNPL. She had started working regularly by then. She brought him a gift: Rs 2,000 to buy a mobile phone so they could speak at leisure. He used to call from a landline. Another time, she saved up money to visit him in Delhi, and to check if he was serious about their relationship. They spoke only on the phone. She hadn’t met his folks.

Her family was against the match: how could she marry again? And how is it that a young, attractive, HIV-negative boy wanted to marry an HIV-positive widow with two sons?

Yet he did, and Najaraus is surprised to be asked why. “I fell in love. I am not one looking only for a good time.

I have a sense of responsibility. I told you how 14 or 15 of us fell in love during the rally in Bengal; we are the only 24 February 2014

ones who are together. A family makes you responsible,” he says. There is a sweet earnestness about him in spite of his tendency to clown around. He speaks then of his father, who fell into the habit of drinking heavily when Najaraus was in his teens and lost his job with State Bank of India.

Najaraus started working to support his mother and siblings, and failed his Class 10 exams. He didn’t have the heart to try again.

In 2007, Maitri found a job for Najaraus as a manager at an acquaintance’s factory in Purulia where she was working at the time. It was for Rs 2,500, a lot less than the Rs 4,000 he would have earned in Delhi. They got married in a temple soon after. There were no guests at the wedding. Najaraus’ family didn’t know. Maitri’s family was not happy but she didn’t care. Her boys, however, were happy. The younger boy, Subhashish, treats Najaraus like an elder brother or a beloved uncle. The boy, all shy grins and jumps, speaks to Najaraus with the assurance of the indulged.

“I was so so happy I could be with him without worry or censure,” says Maitri. “Everyone kept remarking about how lucky I was to find such a love, how handsome he was, how generous. He didn’t like the job at the factory, so he took up a job as a security guard for Rs 1,200 near my office. Imagine.

After my parents, John”—her name for her husband—“is the only one who has loved me so wholeheartedly.”

By 2009, they had decided to live in Delhi. The decision was two-fold: Najaraus had better job prospects in Delhi, and Maitri was keen to meet his folks. In her family, her father is fond of her husband but her siblings think she is shameless to marry again, especially with her ‘disease’. “My family thinks of me as diseased. My mother is scared of catching the disease from me.

I work as an HIV/AIDS educator, and my own family ostracises me.”

Najaraus took her home to stay with his folks; the family was surprised, his mother peeved, that he invited a woman to stay home with them. He had a fully-rounded fib: he told his mother 24 February 2014

that he was HIV-positive, that he was lucky to find a woman who loved him and wanted to be his wife. “I could not tell her she is HIV-positive; she is not educated, she would not understand.

I told her the boys are Maitri’s sister’s children, and we have adopted them.

My HIV-status and the adopted children mean I can’t be pressured to have children,” grins Najaraus.

“What? You have to do these things,” he shrugs, at what must be my transparent admiration. Did his mother never wonder how he contracted his condition? “Well, she was surprised because I am the good responsible elder son of the house, but she hasn’t said anything,” says Najaraus.

Maitri’s mother-in-law lives a few doors away from them. Najaraus’ brother and sister have asked Maitri about her ART medicines. “I tell them that I live with your brother, there must be consequences I have to bear.

I keep dropping hints that I am HIVpositive. I think they know I am HIVpositive, but they have not brought it up before his mother,” says Maitri. “I am grateful for this. I am uncomfortable with his mother. She hasn’t accepted me; she tolerates me as the wife of her son. She keeps asking him whether we will have children.”

“T

here is no data on sero-discor-

dant couplings (where one partner is HIV-positive and the other not) in India. They are uncommon, but not rare,” says Vikas Ahuja, a member of the Delhi Network of Positive People who works with the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC), which calls itself a communitybased movement for people living with HIV. Such couplings are more common among drug users. Also, people sometimes discover they contracted the virus after they got married; their partners might not be infected yet. “Cases like Maitri and Najaraus, when a couple marries with the knowledge that one partner carries the virus—those are very rare indeed.”

“It’s good to see cases where sero-discordant couples are getting married in

spite of knowledge of the spouse’s status,” says Vinay Chandran, executive director of Swabhava Trust, which offers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and others support services in Bangalore. “Especially when the husband has ‘negative’ status, I would assume—although I don’t have data on this—that it is typically the wife who has the ‘negative’ status and gets/ stays married to positive husbands to care for them.”

T

hings have been good since the

move to Delhi. Najaraus found a job making tea at a stall inside a mall, and Maitri is a counsellor with the Delhi Network of Positive People. More recently, Najaraus found a job with the quality inspection department of the hotel Leela Palace in New Delhi, with a “very good salary”: Rs 9,000. It has enabled them to move into their “two-room set” and get the younger boy to stay with them. For now, there is everything, Maitri says. Her death wish is that Najaraus cremates her in the wedding finery she did not wear at her two weddings.

On my nose-clipped walk back, I cautiously ask Najaraus what he makes of the difference between his filthy neighbourhood and his office, reputed to be the most expensive hotel in the country. He shrugs—it is a nonissue for him, what I imagine is a dramatic contrast. “I want to get a better job in a year or so. This is a very good job, but the boy staying here is a big expense.” Does he not want children of his own? “Well, you can’t have everything. I have this lovely family to come home to.”

We are nearly at the main road where I will find an auto, but there is one difficult question: what if Maitri dies? “I don’t think like that. She has been living with HIV for 14 years; she is still only on the first line of ART.” There are 3-4 lines of ART treatment.

“Yes, that fear is always there in the background, but you must learn to live too. You can’t live like that. Or love like that,” he says, this philosopher of shrugs and winks and glorious fibs. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Books Tyranny of the Troll Reviewer The withdrawal of Wendy Doniger’s book reflects the increasing influence of the hyper-critic who reads not for pleasure or knowledge, but to spot offensiveness Indrajit Hazra

52 open

Rick Friedman/Corbis

T

his isn’t about history. It rarely is. It’s about a perceived threat to some good old self-fashioning.

And it’s also about extreme book reviewing.

There’s a particular sensibility that we very rarely encounter in contemporary book reviews. Unlike in movie reviews where a perfectly respectable critic will pan a film for its depiction of, say, nudity or violence, you don’t find a book review trash a book for being offensive any more.

A negative review can be critical of the author’s style, of the way he has laid out the book’s contents through faulty aesthetics, and if it is dealing with a work of non-fiction, through incorrect facts or shoddy reasoning. But apart from a few cases, usually dealing with politics—say, when historical biases are perceived to portray a certain community or a public figure in critical light—the reviewer usually does not have ‘being offended’ as one of the arrows in his quiver.

But there’s another kind of critic who has been plying his trade as a group activity. This is not a sophisticated responder to flaws or virtues of texts, but someone who takes notice of things broadly, stripped of everything but its utilitarian features and its effects on what he believes to be that particularly defenceless creature that constantly needs defending: society, and its even more vulnerable sister, culture.

This breed of hyper-critic not only finds offensive material in a book or in an artwork or in a movie—the last two forms being relatively easy to quickly gauge and judge—but wants the work to be removed from the face of the earth. Unlike the mainstream reviewer, this second-variety of critic is very rarely a reader—in the sense of ‘a person who reads’ rather than ‘a person

who can read’—never mind an expert reader. And if he writes, it’s only when filing complaints in courts seeking the book’s destruction.

His relationship with a text is that of a neighbourhood resident with a park or a structure. If he encounters it, he chooses to either take its utilitarian val-

ue for granted, or finds it ‘offensive’ and wants it razed. If you didn’t expect from this citizen-reviewer just a blistering architectural critique of an early 16th century mosque or of a pair of 6th century Buddhist statues, don’t expect him to restrict himself to dissuading people from reading what he considers a bad 24 february 2014

book. If he finds it ‘offensive’, he wants the book obliterated.

Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History has been faulted on a few counts. Even as I, a lay reader, discovered much precious information and a coherent argument in the philologist-historian’s book, I also found Doniger’s style a bit too glib. With lines such as, ‘The [Sanskrit] medium is not always the message’ and ‘For such a person, moksha is just another word for nothing left to lose’ accompanying the footnotes, ‘To invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase’ and ‘To paraphrase Janis Joplin’ respectively, the book has this running nudgenudge wink-wink thing going that I found more than a bit ‘undergraduate’.

But did I find The Hindus offensive?

Like, say, public urination or an inedible meal? No, I didn’t. But then, I don’t count as a critical reader as the offensiveness of the book lies elsewhere, outside the confines of the text.

Clearly, Dina Nath Batra, the convenor of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan, along with five other worthies who filed criminal and civil cases against Doniger and the publishers Penguin USA and Penguin India in 2011, did find The Hindus vile enough to demand its permanent disappearance. Batra had stated that this was a book ‘written with a Christian Missionary Zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light’.

Doniger’s crime seems to have been her investigations and descriptions of the beliefs and practices of people who broadly became known as Hindus over the centuries who don’t fall in the mainstream hegemonic category of ‘high-caste and male Hindu’. This, to my mind, isn’t dissimilar to someone writing an alternative history of Indian cinema and focusing on the considerable history of non-Hindi and/or nonBollywood movies.

But we know that Batra is essentially what in internet jargon is a troll— someone who submits a deliberately provocative posting to an online message board with the aim of inciting an angry response. Except that the angry response is elicited from others like him who, invested with lobbying pow24 february 2014

ers that the courts strangely attest to, are on a mission to save a ‘religion’, ‘culture’ and ‘nation’ in distress. Critiquing alone will not do for hyper-critics. Even burning the book is leaving matters dangerously incomplete. To continue the online metaphor, Batra and his ilk wanted the ‘web page’ and ‘links’ removed. This, the court has duly allowed.

N

ot many of us like reassuring nar-

ratives about a Golden Age to be tampered with. Doniger uses textual material, which she translated herself from Sanskrit, as well as oral records to portray what is announced as the subtitle of her book on the cover, ‘An alternative history’.

As she writes in the introduction: ‘The Brahmins did produce a great literature, after all, but they did not com-

Doniger is being painted a sex maniac and CIA agent, injected into publishing to stop India from becoming a veritable Ram Rajya at a particularly interesting pre-election juncture pose it in a vacuum. They did not have complete authority or control the minds of everyone in India. They drew upon, on the one hand, the people who ran the country, political actors (generally Brahmins and kings, but also merchants) and, on the other hand, the non-literate classes. Because of the presence of oral and folk traditions in Sanskrit texts, as well as non-Hindu traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism, Dog Cookers [‘Shva-Pakas’] do speak, not always in voices recorded on a page but in signs that we can read if we try.’

And it’s Doniger’s readings of these voices, which she shares with the reader, that infuriated the troll-reviewers.

Especially, as always, when pertaining to matters of sex.

One can sense the horror of the complainants when they ran their fingers over her lines:

‘The Sanskrit texts [cited in Doniger’s lecture on 12 November 2003 in London where a man threw an egg at her after she had cited from Valmiki’s Ramayana in which Sita accuses Lakshmana of wanting her for himself] were written at a time of glorious sexual openness and insight, and I have often focused on precisely those parts of the texts... The irony is that I have praised these texts and translated them in such a way that many people outside the Hindu tradition—people who would otherwise go on thinking that Hinduism is nothing but a caste system that mistreats Untouchables—have come to learn about it and to admire the beauty, complexity and wisdom of Hindu texts.’

Clearly, those who’ve managed to force Doniger’s book into exile don’t like the idea of sexual openness being part of the history of their cultural tradition.

One of the charges against Doniger had been that the author’s approach ‘has been jaundiced, [her] approach is that of a woman hungry [for] sex’.

More outrage follows when Doniger writes about the Shiv linga in Freudianiconographical terms. In fact, she presages the attack against her while investigating the 3rd century BCE Gudimallam linga in Andhra Pradesh in a passage: ‘...some Hindus who see the linga as an abstract symbol therefore object to the interpretation of those who view it anthropomorphically; their Christian counterparts would be people who refuse to acknowledge that the cross ever referred to the passion of Christ... We need to be aware of both the literal and symbolic levels simultaneously...”

To this view, the hyper-reviewers have no counter-argument based on any specialised knowledge of Hindu religious iconography or anthropological history. They are uninterested in this whole line of thinking, summing it up in their petition: ‘[Doniger] should be aware that in Hinduism, the linga is an abstract symbol of God with no sexual connotations’ and that the author ‘emphasizes only those texts which portray [the] linga as [an] erect male sexual organ... This shows your shallow open www.openthemagazine.com 53

knowledge of the Great Hindu religion and also your perverse mindset.’

The complainants also had a grievous problem with the cover of the book. It depicts Nari Aswa (WomanHorse), which, as the Indiamart.com website selling prints from a gallery in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, informs us, is a contemporary decorative mural from Odisha based on traditional paintings showing ‘frolicsome gopis, in order to bemuse their divine lover, Sri Krishna, form a human horse and become lost in their game and intoxicating music from the flute of Love’.

But once this colourful art work adorns an American (Christian) historian’s book, it becomes, as recorded in the court complaint: ‘Lord Krishna... shown sitting on [the] buttocks of a naked woman surrounded by other naked women’.

That itself must have sounded suitably dodgy for the Saket district court, which ordered Doniger’s publisher to make the book vanish within six months from the country.

What has all this to do with history again? Nothing.

A website carrying a news feature based on the removal of The Hindus ‘from everyone’s sight’ had a reader leave the following comment: ‘Currently Indians are not nationalists like the developed countries like US, Germany, Japan, etc, where people are really patriotic. Only a nation with patriotic people can become a developed one. So to stop India becoming a superpower, one of the methods is to defame the Indian/Hindu culture by printing completely misinterpreted facts, so that the Indian masses are ashamed of themselves and not proud of their country and still remain underdeveloped and given an opportunity will get out of the country. There is an author’s lobby in US trying to do this.’

So not only is Doniger a sex maniac flipping pages of ancient Hindu texts the way teenagers hunt for dirty words in the dictionary, but she is also a CIA agent injected into the academic and publishing system to stop India from becoming a veritable Ram Rajya at a particularly interesting pre-election juncture.

54 open

D

oniger has pointed out that for the destruction of The Hindus in India, there is specifically one law to blame: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs’.

I’m not so sure about that. While the thrust of the legal complaint was indeed ‘offending Hindu sentiments’, other laws, such as Section 292 of the IPC dealing with ‘obscenity’ that can ‘tend to deprave and corrupt people who are likely... to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in [a book],’ can be corralled for the same purpose.

And making books disappear is hardly the monopoly of politically motivated right-wing Hindu brand-building.

In 1988, fearing Muslim outrage after excerpts of the book were carried in a

Whether it is religious groups or powerful individuals, making books disappear is about controlling the narrative and about covering a brand with protective latex news magazine, the Finance Ministry of the Congress Government under Rajiv Gandhi prohibited the import of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses under Section 11 of the Customs Act. The import ban applied to the publisher Penguin India; it could not ‘bring’ the text of the novel from the UK. Luckily for us, the novel is available on Kindle.

More recently, former Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel successfully threatened Bloomsbury India with libel and made the publisher withdraw The Descent of Air India by former Air India Executive Director Jitender Bhargava from the market. Sahara India chief Subroto Roy has gone one step beyond by slapping a Rs 200 crore defamation suit against Tamal Bandyopadhyay, whose Sahara: The Untold Story remains untold, thanks to an additional high court order that disallows Jaico from publishing the book.

Back in 1988, Hamish McDonald wrote The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani, which HarperCollins India acquired rights to publish. But the Ambanis threatened legal action and the book is now only available in India at Mumbai traffic crossings in a poorly printed pirated form.

So whether it is religious groups or powerful individuals, making books disappear is about controlling the narrative and covering a brand with protective latex. Why liberal Indians allow such a trend to continue is simple: because they don’t really think it’s worth their while to defend a book that is seen to upset this balance of power. After the initial liberal outrage, the ‘What’s the need to upset anyone?’, reasoning sets in.

I

n July last year, Fox News conduct-

ed an interview with the writer and scholar of religions Reza Aslan. The anchor’s infamous line of questioning on why Aslan, an Iranian-American Muslim, wrote Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, a book about a Jew who founded the Christian faith, left people not only fuming but also guffawing. I, for one, picked up the book and was gratified by my decision to learn about Christ as one of many other competing radical figures in Judaea in the context of the politics of the Roman Empire of his time.

I had then mentioned how ridiculous it was for the Fox journalist to keep asking Aslan why he, a Muslim, wrote the book. (His answer throughout the interview was “Because I am a scholar who is interested in this subject.”)

‘It’s like a news anchor here demanding to know why Wendy Doniger, an American Christian scholar, wrote The Hindus: An Alternative History,’ I had quipped.

Now that I’ve been reminded again of the power that the troll-reviewer out there has over our lib-leg-lit (liberallegal-literary) establishment, I’m not chuckling any more. n Indrajit Hazra is a writer and journalist.

His latest book is Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata 24 february 2014

Books The Eternal Poet A new biography of Sahir Ludhianvi brings to life the poet who changed the idiom of Hindi cinema lyrics Rahul Pandita

Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet

By Akshay Manwani harpercollins | 320 pages | Rs 399

I

am a Sahir fan. And I understand Akshay Manwani’s sentiment when, in his introduction to Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet, he explains why he chose to write a book about the poet: ‘I felt compelled to repay my debts to a man who, through his songs... has given me innumerable moments of joy.’ That joy reflects in Manwani’s book. In it, he is able to bring out both Sahir the lyricist and the person, which is important because, as Manwani says, it is impossible to reach out to one without the other.

Born Abdul Hayee on 8 March 1921 in Ludhiana, Punjab, the young poet adopted his pen name ‘Sahir’ from a poem by Iqbal on another great poet of the late nineteenth century, Daag Dehalvi. Throughout his work as a poet and lyricist, Abdul Hayee lived up to his pen-name, which means ‘magician’.

Sahir had a rough childhood. His mother, the eleventh wife of a decadent landlord, was forced to leave her husband, fleeing his dissolute ways.

She was very protective of her son as his father threatened to snatch him away from her several times. As a result, Sahir’s childhood, Manwani writes, was marked with fear and anxiety and ‘the uncertainty of those years remained bitter memories Sahir carried within himself all his life.’

These experiences brought forth some immortal lines from Sahir’s pen: ‘Duniya ne tajurubaat-o-havaadis ki shakl mein / Jo kuch mujhe diya hai, lauta raha hun main.’ (Whatever the world has

24 february 2014

given me by way of experience and accident, I return it now.)

Manwani’s book is full of anecdotes about Sahir’s life and traces the poet’s journey from a bitter child to one of Hindi Cinema’s greatest lyricists. Through other resource material, available mostly in Urdu, and through interviews with Sahir’s friends, both from cinema and noncinema backgrounds, Manwani is able to create a powerful sketch of the poet who gave Hindi cinema some of its most memorable songs.

After all, who else had the gumption to write Tajmahal, a poem in which, Manwani writes, ‘Sahir decries the vanity of an emperor in using the wealth at his disposal to create a structure that will forever mock the love of ordinary people’? ‘Ek shahenshah ne daulat ka sahaara lekar / Hum gareebon ki mohabbat ka udaaya hai mazaak.’ (An emperor, using his wealth, has mocked the love of us impoverished souls.)

Sahir came to Bombay in early 1946.

The city had by then become a major centre of progressive writers, most of whom, as Manwani points out, had established links with the film industry or journalism. It was here that Sahir came in touch with writers and poets like Jan Nisar Akhtar, Krishan Chander, Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri and others.

Sahir arrived in Bombay at a time when the country was going through tough times. The shadow of Partition loomed large. Sahir and his friends mobilised themselves to put up a fight against communalism. But the division of the country was inevitable. And it brought with it a cycle of bloodshed.

Circumstances forced Sahir to shift to Lahore, which had become a part of Pakistan. But, Manwani quotes Sahir’s

friend Prakash Pandit, ‘He was unable to bear the separation of friends who belonged to the Hindu and Sikh communities and among whom he had spent all his life.’

Sahir returned to Delhi and then to his final destination, Bombay, where the film industry gave him a hard time for a while and then accepted him wholeheartedly.

It is through his lyrics that he finally gave vent to the anguish he had experienced during Partition: ‘Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega / Insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega.’

(You will become neither a Hindu nor a Muslim / You are the child of a humans; you will become human.)

What is impressive about Manwani’s book is that he is able to divide Sahir’s life into compartments, some of which are essential milestones in the poet’s journey. He writes about how Sahir was able to meet the legendary music director SD Burman and how his poetry changed the language of film songs. There is a chapter on the film Pyaasa, which immortalised Sahir as a people’s poet. The book also evocatively tells the story of Sahir’s and Amrita Pritam’s ‘silent’ love story.

In all, Manwani’s book captures Sahir’s life in its essence, and tells the story of how a poet changed the idiom of Hindi cinema and forced the Hindi film industry to accept, in Gulzar’s words, that a lyricist could succeed entirely on his own.

In Kabhie, Kabhie, Sahir writes: ‘Mein har ik pal ka shayar hun, har ik pal meri kahaani hai / Har ik pal meri hasti hai, har ik pal meri jawani hai.’ (I am the eternal poet, my story is eternal / I am in every moment, my youth is in every moment.) That, to me, sums up the life of the magician. n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

Books The Rich and the Dead Rana Dasgupta’s non-fiction work Capital mixes emotion with economics, sentimentality with sense, and is serrated with the scars of living in an aggressive, unequal city divya guha Was it I who spoke? Was I not also a listener?

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

S

uccessful fashion designer

Manish Arora, who appears in Rana Dasgupta’s first non-fiction work Capital, would like to change the way the author dresses. That’s unfair because Dasgupta, 42, from what one notices of him, commands a fair bit of sartorial taste and style; he also speaks languages with Latin and Germanic roots, plays piano, has very good art scattered around his house, and speaks in English with the lady who brings us endless refills of espresso prepared in an Italian 6-cup stove-top cafetière.

Dasgupta was born to an English mother and an immigrant Indian dad who look more Mod than Hippy in photos and met in the 1960s in London when The Beatles were invading America. They fell in love when they were perchance seated across each other at a restaurant table, at a time when interracial relationships in Britain were considered very odd indeed.

Dasgupta, who likes well-ironed shirts and wears the bottoms of his trousers fashionably rolled, is what they call ‘mixed-race’, and highly cosmopolitan.

Articulate and oozing confidence, he smiles little and laughs only if the repartee is better than mediocre. This can be intimidating at times, especially as his angular jaw and small head project a slight lemon juice pout that comes topped with tiny but serious, intense dark eyes that stare at you unblinkingly with what seems like pathological— or writerly—curiosity when you speak to him. His bed head this morning, unlike his otherwise well-coiffed hair, also gives him a look of interesting disrepair. I wonder if he knows this, or will like it, but something resembling childlikeness betrays him from

56 open

time to time as we speak.

Capital is an angry book. The title, of course, implies Delhi, India’s capital, but also puns an allusion to Marx’s noble preoccupations of class divisions and the bourgeoisie’s creativity in trying to either feudalise or break away from the feudal, as the case may be.

And although the book is non-fictional, it employs symbols. The author mentions walls and water often, and their appearances and disappearances through the 450-page book chart this ‘aggressive’ city’s unique and ravaged psychogeography.

Dasgupta’s macro perspective—a city divided up among groups of those who have power and those who do not—is first a materialist one, where the amount of wealth you own determines who you are. Purportedly though, Capital is only about the elite, where wealth and means are a proxy for power. But Dasgupta chooses to steer clear of politicians and administrators, those whom Lutyen’s Delhi was really built for by the ruling British, whose Indian bureaucratic descendants are actually the ones who command real, not illusory, control.

Capital starts on one pretty day in March with a chapter called ‘Landscape’. We are introduced to a ‘landscape’ from the leeward side of an industrialist’s farmhouse. Frangipanis and security guards stand sentinel against a picturesque glass mansion and vast grounds decorated with channels of gravel and whatnot. Delhi’s rich elite—educated, English-speaking and living lives of luxurious immunity from the poor—are galling, strange, sad and pitiable, but in the end mostly forgivable in an existential and abstract if not practicable way.

The opening is comic. A wall made of clean, non-reflective glass appears at the mansion’s entrance, breaking

Dasgupta’s confident stride into the rich man’s property, and nearly his nose. Through this incident, he communicates the difficulty an ‘outsider’ faces if he is to breach the boundaries that separate him from his subjects.

That this book appears to be full of anger might be misconstrued as the author’s moral contempt for individuals whom he interviews, but it is not. “I wrote as an outsider who is able to listen to everybody in the same register,” he says.

The book contains long, seemingly unedited passages consisting of striking elocutionary quirks, bursts of unexpected swearing and grammatical Indianisms, without ever descending into cheap laughter. The city, he says, offers a range of stereotypes whom we presume to know without ever listening to, and these uninterrupted monologues are intended so we listen, or just hear people the way the author did.

Though he may have been quiet as he listened, while writing Dasgupta becomes his astute evocative self, conjuring visions in delightful language: ‘For middle-class people, the spectacle of the city is seen through car windows. If a painter were to paint the middle-class view, as, for instance, so many nineteenth century painters tried to paint Paris from the perspective of its new, cosmopolitan boulevards, it would not accordingly be smooth or intimate. There would be no dwelling, like the Impressionists, on details of costume and gesture, no slow rendition of cafe light falling on pedestrian faces, no capturing of the almost unnoticeable interactions that happen between strangers in a public place. No, it would be a strobe-lit succession of unrelated glimpses: the covers of Vogue and Autocar flashing in front of the window as a magazine seller rushes between vehicles stopped at a traffic light, the wind-rushed hair of a woman and her child on the back of a speeding motorbike, 24 february 2014

ashish sharma

at home Rana Dasgupta makes a distinction between being ‘invested’ in a city and feeling ‘at home’ in it

the one eye of a stray dog caught in the headlights, the glinting instruments of a wedding band—and the whirl of the dancing procession, and the improbable white of the groom’s horse—the lipstick of a cluster of eunuchs pressing their faces to the window, the slump of a human form under a blanket on the highway’s cenral divide, a face in another car momentarily stripelit—and a host of impressions of other, unformed characters, animal and human, whose identity it is difficult to discern.’

The author’s expression is sharp and analytical, written in language that flows easily. There is also his rather English wry-though-not-unaffectionate mocking: ‘In a city of euphemisms, this place is called a ‘farmhouse’.

Nothing is farmed here, of course. But when, in the 1970s, the Delhi elite began 24 february 2014

seizing swathes of land to the south of the city to build private estates. The entire belt was reserved, according to the regulations, for agriculture—and with a pang of propriety that touched the names of things even if it could not touch the things themselves, they called their new mansions ‘farmhouses’.’

But compared to, say, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, Dasgupta feels more ‘invested’ in the city: “When writing Djinns, Willie [Dalrymple] was a young man, and also an outsider, very much in love with his new wife.

They thread bougainvillaea through trellises and everything remains sardonic and humorous because he is never quite ‘invested’ in the city. For example, he was not thinking about bringing up children here.”

This sense of feeling ‘invested’ is dif-

ferent from feeling ‘at home’, he adds: “The city doesn’t exactly shower you with love and gentleness, but then no city experience is completely harmonious.” And ‘invested’ taken a step further, he explains, creates a feeling of being ‘entrenched’, and this book, says Dasgupta, is “middle-aged and entrenched”.

The author maintains he harbours no contempt for his rich subjects and that such anger is facile. Or maybe people become difficult to diss after getting to know them the way Dasgupta did, which is never a problem for a journalist. The fact that some of the elite come across as a bunch of insecure thieves (in the Marxist sense, of course) may be blamed on our own entrenched ideologies.

The idea, dear reader, is only to listen. n open www.openthemagazine.com 57

luxury

Fast and Fabulous Innovative supercar ideas at India’s best ever Auto Expo HORMAZD SORABJEE

T

his might have been the 12th

edition of the biennial Auto Expo, but it’s safe to say the 2014 event was India’s first international level motorshow. The new venue at Greater Noida, infrastructure and general high standards of organisation have seriously turned things around.

What that means is visitors—over 300,000 at last count—had a fantastic opportunity to get up close to some really wild concepts and mad supercars, of which there were many. Leading the charge, quite literally, was the BMW i8 supercar, which looks like it belongs to the future and makes use of some really advanced technology too. It’s made primarily of lightweight aluminium and carbon fibre, and features a 96 kW electric motor that drives the front wheels and a 228 bhp, 1.5 turbo petrol that powers the rear ones.

Also at the BMW stand was the slightly more conventional but equally exciting M6 Gran Coupe. Beautiful as it is, it’s also got plenty of firepower thanks to its 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 petrol motor. The M6’s natural rival, the RS7, was also on display not too far away at Audi’s pavilion. As if the standard A7 wasn’t striking enough, the RS7 with its larger wheels and sportier kit looks utterly desirable. Oh and it’s got a 560 bhp, 4-litre twin-turbo petrol.

Audi also deserves a round of applause for bringing in two very special cars, the first being the R18 e-tron Quattro. Why is it special? Well, it happened to win a very special endurance race at a famous race track in France.

Yup, it’s a Le Mans winner. The other special car at the Audi exhibit was the spiritual successor to a hugely famous model—the Sport Quattro concept.

Audi wanted to divert our attention to its laser headlights but it was a bit hard to peel our eyes away from the car in its entirety—it’s that gorgeous.

Another car that draws inspiration from the past (and drew a lot of eyeballs at the Auto Expo) was the Jaguar

58 open

Project 7. An ode to the Le Manswinning D-type of 1956-57, the Project 7 is unique for its lowered windscreen, carbon-fibre splitter and a fairing behind the driver’s seat.

The ‘standard’ F-Type Coupe also made its India debut at the 2014 Auto Expo. It’s even better looking than the convertible already on sale. Enough said. Sportscars are very Jaguar, crossovers aren’t. Or so you’d think. Jaguar’s C-X17 sport crossover concept was also there and it did look rather special in the flesh.

Speaking of crossovers, any Auto Expo stars list would be incomplete without a mention of the MercedesBenz GLA. It’s got cuts and creases at all

Renault showed off its quirky side with the unique KWID concept that looks more like a lunar buggy than something that will make production... Just don’t expect the final version to have centrally-mounted steering or gull-wing doors the right places, and, more importantly, is coming to a Mercedes showroom near you. The other Merc of note was the CLA45 AMG. Curvaceous it may be, but the primary reason to buy one would have to be its 355-bhp, twin-turbo 2-litre bruiser of an engine.

Some of the ‘larger-hearted’ Auto Expo stars were at the General Motors display where a Camaro ZL1 shared the limelight with a C7 Corvette Stingray. I just wish the good folks at Chevrolet had fired up their mighty 6.2-litre V8s. Wouldn’t that have made for a spectacular sound show?

Another car that made a big impact at the Auto Expo was the all-electric Mahindra Halo sportscar. Diminutive

and light, it looks like the Lotus’ of old.

Claimed performance? 0-100 kmph in eight seconds and a top speed of 160 kmph! Let’s hope they make this one.

Honda didn’t disappoint enthusiasts

either with the NSX Concept, which truly looks worthy of the legendary NSX name. It goes into production next year and will feature a mid-mounted V6 petrol and a pair of electric motors. Who said green can’t be mean?

Honda’s Japanese compatriot Toyota also wowed visitors with the GT86 in TRD trim. The GT86 features a 2-litre boxer motor and is known to perform drifts at will. Nice.

A welcome addition to Hyundai’s display of level-headed family cars was the HND-9 concept coupe. Sleek, long and low-slung, the HND-9 got a double thumbs up from nearly everyone who walked through Hyundai’s vast display.

Finally, what’s a motorshow without a crazy concept or two? As always, Renault showed off its quirky side with the unique KWID concept that looks more like a lunar buggy than

something that will make production.

However, the KWID does preview a small SUV that Renault is working on.

Just don’t expect the final version to have the KWID’s centrally-mounted steering or gull-wing doors.

As you can tell, there was lots to see at the 2014 Auto Expo. And these sportscars and concept were just the tip of the iceberg. So was this the best Auto Expo ever? You bet! n

wild concept The BMW i8 supercar features a 96 kW electric motor that drives the front wheels and a 228 bhp, 1.5 turbo petrol that powers the rear ones ashish sharma

science

epic journey Chinook and sockeye salmon from central Idaho are known to swim over 1,400 km upstream and climb nearly 7,000 feet from the Pacific Ocean as part of their spawning cycle

Size Matters The strange correlation between female infidelity and the size of her partner’s testicles

Pacific Salmon’s Magnetic Sense

W

hy do some animals have large testicles in comparison with other animals? Why does, for instance, a bonobo have much larger testicles than a gorilla, a fellow primate? According to a new study, the answer lies in the mating habits of the female species.

The research was conducted by a team from University of Oslo, and its findings were published in The Telegraph recently. Petter Bøckman, who led the study, is quoted as saying: “We can determine the degree of fidelity in the female by looking at the size of the male’s testicles. The less faithful the female, the larger the male’s testicles.” According to the researchers, if the female has few sexual partners, the male does not require large testicles, as it will have sufficient sperm to reach and fertilise the egg. But if competition is intense and the females of the species are known to mate a number of males, then the male members tend to have larger testicles. Bøckman told the newspaper, “If the female mates on the side, it is smart to have as many cars as possible in the race.

Then, the male must have testicles

60 open

that are as large as possible.”

The researchers found that bonobos have particularly large testicles because they mate in large groups.

Gorillas, in comparison, have tiny testicles as they are known to have fewer partners. The researchers say that lions also have large testicles because lionesses are known to have sex with multiple partners when in heat.

Humans in comparison have testicles that are at least one-and-ahalf times larger than those of gorillas. Bøckman argues that this indicates that humans are an inherently unfaithful species. A previous study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, found that the size of a man’s testicles has a correlation with his parenting abilities. Fathers were probed on details of their parenting and MRI scans were used to see how their brains’ reward centres reacted on being shown pictures of their children. Men with smaller testicles were found to be better parents. The researchers argued that this was the result of an evolutionary trade off—to focus either on mating or parenting. n

A study suggests that Pacific salmon are born with an in-built ‘magnetic map’ that helps them migrate. In a series of experiments at Oregon Hatchery Research Center in the Alsea River basin, hundreds of juvenile Chinook salmon were exposed to magnetic fields that exist at the latitudinal extremes of their oceanic range. Fish responded to these ‘simulated magnetic displacements’ by swimming in the direction that would bring them toward the centre of their marine feeding grounds.

Fish presented with a magnetic field characteristic of the northern limits were more likely to swim south, while fish encountering a far southern field tended to swim north. In essence, fish possess a ‘map sense’ determining where they are and which way to swim based on the magnetic fields they encounter. n

Yogurt and Type 2 Diabetes

According to a new study published in Diabetologia, the consumption of yoghurt can reduce the risk of new-onset type 2 diabetes by 28 per cent. Scientists at University of Cambridge found that, in fact, higher consumption of low-fat fermented dairy products, which include all yoghurt varieties and some low-fat cheeses, also reduced the relative risk of diabetes by 24 per cent overall. This risk reduction was observed among individuals who consumed an average of four-and-ahalf standard 125 gm pots of yoghurt per week. The same applies to other low-fat fermented dairy products such as unripened cheeses including low-fat cottage cheese. n

24 february 2014

tech&style

New Kindle Paperwhite With its new ebook reader, Amazon retains its lead in the e-reader market gagandeep Singh Sapra

Wi-Fi Since the 2.4 GHz band is narrower and more crowded than the 5 GHz band, the latter is a much better choice for ensuring top speed in a wireless network. Of course, this requires devices that support 5 GHz 802.11n networking, which are less common than 2.4 GHz devices

Longines Columnw Wheel Single PushPiece Chronograph

Price on request

Rs 10,999

These Heritage Collection models from Longines come in three versions, all with a 40 mm diameter. These models house the L788 calibre, a monopusher movement developed by ETA exclusively for Longines. All chronograph functions can be controlled by simply pressing the single push-piece.

Two versions, one in steel and the other in rose gold, feature Arabic numerals, and a third version in steel has Roman numerals. n

Motorola Blink 1Baby Monitor

T

his new Kindle Paperwhite fea-

tures a brand new display technology that allows for a much higher contrast and brilliant reflectivity, making reading very easy on the eyes. It uses a next generation builtin light that gives it a much smoother glow on the surface of the display that serves to reduce eye strain. I liked using this light even in the day time to get a better contrast and a much better reading experience, never mind the advantage of having a consistent light for all those late-night and aircraft cabin readings when all lights are switched off.

A new processor now opens the ebook faster, and page turns are quicker than previous avatars of Kindle.

In all, it means a nearly 25 per cent boost in speed.

The new Kindle also incorporates some great features: the first is its integration with Goodreads that lets you discover book recommendations from a global community. There is

24 february 2014

even a new vocabulary builder that compiles the words you look up in the dictionary into an easy-to-access list, making learning new words more intuitive. A new Smart Lookup integrates full dictionary definitions, and in-line footnotes can now be added via a single tap.

Despite all its upgraded software, the Amazon Kindle still manages to offer an 8-week long battery life on a single charge, and weighs only 206 gm. There is even a 3G version available at Rs 13,999 that allows you to access your books anywhere in the world. The 3G version also allows you to share your markups with friends and family via Twitter and Facebook.

But not all is well in this edition of Kindle Paperwhite. I understand that we all like to ‘touch’ and we flip pages in real life, but I did miss the earlier avatars’ hardware buttons for page flips. Perhaps, this is just a matter of getting used to. n

Rs 15,990

This baby monitor works with your smartphone, tablet and even your computer. It has a motion detector built in, a microphone and even a room temperature sensor. It is easy to set up; just connect the camera to a power source, hook it to your home Wi-Fi, download the app on your Android or iOS device, and now you can not only see what your baby is doing in the room, but hear him/her too. You can pan, tilt and zoom the camera via your remote device. The Blink 1 system can handle up to four cameras. It also has night vision capability. It works on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

Thomp son on Thatcher Emma Thompson, who plays PL Travers in Saving Mr Banks, has said that her character reminded her “of Margaret Thatcher—who I always wanted to punch from the moment that she came into power to the moment she left—partially because of that voice and the very, very patronising way in which she would talk to people who she clearly felt were idiots”

Hasee Toh Phasee Changing the personality of a lead character midway, this film crashes after a delightful start ajit duara

current

o n scr een

Saving Mr. Banks Director John Lee Hancock cast Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson,

Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell Score ★★★★★

opra , Cast Parineeti ch ra sidharth Malhot tthew Director vinil Ma

T

he Achilles’ heel of Hindi movie writing brings Hasee Toh Phasee crashing down from a delightful start.

You can fiddle with the story, but you can’t change the behaviour and personality of the lead character midway through the film just to conform to the expectations of a romantic comedy.

Till one hour into the film, Meeta (Parineeti Chopra) has facial tics indicating serious psychological problems.

Though she is a supersmart science graduate doing a PhD at a University in China and an inventor to boot, she has been rejected by her family and is on anti-depressants. She makes decidedly anti-social faces at people and does the Dustin Hoffman Rain Man routine of an autistic person who lacks social engagement but has an instant, almost computerised recall of information.

Nikhil (Sidharth Malhotra) then turns up—a good looking business entrepreneur perpetually on the verge of a major deal that somehow never comes through. Nikhil is engaged to Karishma (Adah Sharma), Meeta’s

62 open

elder sister, and is given charge of hiding the embarrassing younger sister and black sheep of the family. But in the process of shielding Meeta, he turns protective of her. Love blossoms.

Hey presto, Meeta’s behaviour alters dramatically. Almost instantly, she abandons all her tics, all her social awkwardness, and becomes an endearing friend and soulmate to Nikhil.

Hasee Toh Phasee turns into an unbelievable fairy tale.There is no further mention of Meeta’s psychiatric problems in the rest of the film.

A script writer cannot change human behaviour, let alone personality, and be taken seriously. An actress playing an autistic character one moment and a smart, cute, marriageable girl the next should have some conflict about her role that she voices to the writer and director. Especially in a film co-produced by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, votaries of some realism in cinema.

Clearly, the more things change, the more they stay the same. n

This is an in-house film by Walt Disney Productions about the making of its own 1964 classic, Mary Poppins. And since one of the two central characters in the movie is Mr Disney himself, you can’t expect too much objectivity on Walt’s character and his pivotal role in the making of Mary Poppins.

Sure enough, the founding father of this lucrative production company is left with his image virtually intact. He is the charming persuader to PL Travers’ crotchety writer, the woman who refused the rights of her beloved book to him for 20 years until she finally went broke and signed on the dotted line—but not before she came to Los Angeles and drove the scriptwriter and music composers crazy with her obduracy.

The film is a sad story about a lonely woman left with nothing but memories of the enchanting father who taught her that life was an unpleasant illusion you could write about. The woman, PL Travers, turned her father into Mr Banks in Mary Poppins and would not let him go.

Miraculously, with all the sugary additives, the film works. Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, merely with their presence in fairly stereotyped roles, bring a script full of cliches and boring flashbacks to life. It is an actor’s movie. n AD 24 february 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

A Problematic Pout

Poor Anushka Sharma—so disturbed by all the jibes and ‘before & after’ pictures posted on Facebook and Twitter after her appearance on Koffee With Karan last week—had no option but to issue a statement clarifying that she hasn’t undergone cosmetic surgery: ‘For a short while now I have been using a temporary lip enhancing tool and that along with make up techniques (I have learnt over the years) is the reason why there might be a change in the appearance of my lips.’

To hand it to her, Anushka sportingly took all the Heath Ledger ‘Joker’ references in her stride: ‘Some of the ‘joker’ jokes/memes doing the rounds though a bit mean did bring a smile to my lips ;)’ The actress has clarified that this experiment is part of her look in Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet, ‘where I play a jazz singer in the 1960s-70s.’

Nice of her to respond to all the gossip, but like one rival of hers pointed out, “Anushka makes an unconvincing argument, and she should be careful because everyone’s going to be looking at her other films to see if indeed it’s a look she’s sporting only for one movie, [or] a condition that’ll affect her look in all her films.” With Rajkumar Hirani’s P.K. arriving in December, and Bombay Velvet lined up not long after, all eyes will be on Anushka’s lips.

Padmashrimati Vidya

Vidya Balan says she’s naturally overwhelmed at having been announced the recipient of the prestigious Padmashri honour, but reveals that her friends haven’t stopped teasing her about it. Her Shaadi Ke Side Effects co-star Farhan Akhtar will drop whatever he’s doing and stand up when she enters the room, only to get a laugh out of her. Others are more creative. “I have friends who now refer to me as Padmashri Vidya, and they’ll call Siddharth”—her husband, UTV head honcho Siddharth Roy Kapur—“Padma-shrimaan,” she says amid giggles.

Having swept awards ceremonies four years in a row—she won Filmfare awards for Paa (2009), Ishqiya (2010), The Dirty Picture (2011) and Kahaani (2012)—Vidya’s lucky streak came to a screeching halt with last year’s critical and commercial dud Ghanchakkar, even if she was the best thing about the film. While she may have gone home empty handed after the recent Filmfare, Screen and 24 february 2014

Star Guild Award ceremonies, she will soon be making a trip to the Rashtrapati Bhavan to collect her Padmashri, a coup her rivals can only envy. The irony isn’t lost on her: “It really felt surreal when I got the call. It took some time to sink in,” she says of being bestowed with the national honour.

But there’s a good chance she’ll be an awards-race contender again next year after she’s done filming Kahaani director Sujoy Ghosh’s next, a thriller in which she co-stars with fellow awards-magnet Irrfan Khan.

A Worldly Friendship

Whoever said young ’uns have all the fun? There’s gossip doing the rounds about two senior actors who’ve reportedly got ‘very friendly’ while shooting at an outdoor location recently. The movie in question is a Hollywood production being filmed in India, the sequel of an international hit that was also shot here a few years ago.

If sources from the unit are to be believed, a fairly well known Indian character actress, who reprises her role from the earlier film, has charmed a Hollywood A-lister who’s recently been added to the new film. This silver fox, a hugely popular American star, has been to India often in the past on spiritual and philanthropic missions, but is filming locally for the first time.

Everyone from the crew to their co-actors have noticed that the pair share warm vibes, and rarely miss an opportunity to drive back to their hotel together in the same car when pack-up is announced. It’s not unusual for one to be holed up in the other’s vanity van or make-up room in between shots, and one source describes their friendship as “extremely touchy-feely”.

The actress, well-known for her raspy, gravelly voice, is married and a mother, and is well known in social circles outside Bollywood too.

She’s starred in both blockbusters and indies, often taking mum parts, and has had considerable success in roles with comic undertones.

Among those who’ve heard the rumours, there are a few who suspect there may be nothing more than a Platonic friendship between the two. “She’s a great talker, and she’s an even better listener. There’s a good chance she’s the only person on that set who has a worldview outside of films, and that’s probably what he’s drawn to,” a friend of hers offers. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Delhi’s Comic Con Act

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

A three day festival that came to India four years ago, bringing together mega comic book creators and their fans while also trying to popularise comic culture, has now become serious business for big and small time publishers who struggle to sell their comics through the rest of the year. The fourth annual Comic Con India was bigger and better than its previous avatars. For the first time, the festival featured not only crowd-drawing Indian comics like Amar Chitra Katha, but also popular Japanese Manga comics, which have a huge fan base in India. The Cosplay contest at the end of the festival stole the show with its showcase of crazy costumes and makeup. Who knew Delhi was home to so many nerds?

64 open

24 february 2014