OPEN Magazine 24 March 2014

MODI IN THE TIME OF OBAMA

RS 35 24 m a r c h 2 0 14

inside THE ART OF KAMILA SHAMSIE l i f e

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t i m e s .

e v e r y

w e e k

S RAMADORAI ON SKILLS SURESH PRABHU ON POWER AMITABH KANT ON CITIES RIYAS KOMU ON ART PRAVIN KRISHNA ON REFORMS DHIRAJ NAYYAR ON SPEED CHITRA JHA ON HAPPINESS AND MORE…

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

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Volume 6 Issue 11 For the week 18—24 March 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

2 open

Santosh Samuel

The media has been playing up this story [Sanjay Dutt’s paroles] for quite a while (‘The Unwitting Reformer’, 10 March 2014). Should Dutt be inside jail if a court has sentenced him? Yes. Can the system be bent by those in power and those with resources? Yes. Should we get agitated when it happens? I suppose so.

Should we also get equally agitated about numerous cases of miscarriage of justice, detention without trial, arbitrary arrests, judicial delays, etcetera? Our moral outrage over the Dutt case only makes sense if the answer is ‘yes’. Personally, I would like the law to be applied without fear or I really don’t care if favour, but I really don’t care if Sanjay Dutt stays Sanjay Dutt stays in or in or out of jail, but I do out of jail, but I do object object that the system is that the system is so so skewed against those skewed against those without resources (the without resources list of such cases is far too long), and I do object that the media leads us on to bark up the wrong tree. Preventing a Sanjay Dutt from avoiding jail time—or selling some idea along those lines—makes for a story that sells, but it’s not such a shakeup for justice.  letter of the week The Cultural Agenda

swapan Dasgupta says that the Indian Right [should] prioritise the economy over culture (‘Stirrings of a Right Revolution’, 17 March 2014).

Pray, then, what will be the difference between the Congress and BJP? Both are pro-market (despite the National Advisory Council’s trying to act as a lightning rod for grievances of the poor) and there is a consensus between them on almost all economic policies. India, like the US, will have a consensual bi-partisan economic programme, while parties will focus on cultural agendas to distinguish themselves. The agitated Hindu activist has not been discarded by Narendra Modi (as the writer likes to see it); the agitated activist will come to the foreground once the BJP doesn’t have the incumbent

UPA to crib about. For the BJP to stay in power, it needs a culturally muscular Hindu agenda. And isn’t it insidious on the part of the author to end the article with a threat that if Modi doesn’t win this time, there will be more displays of ‘Hindu victimhood’ like Ayodhya or 2002?  Kalo’smi

Putin’s Power Play

in a world of collaboration, we have to look at Vladimir Putin along with his nostalgia and his dripping narcissism (‘Return of the Great Terror’, 17 March 2014). The Russian president has finally shown that he was a wolf in the hide of a fox and it is Russian domination and ‘powercracy’ that he actually wants to wield over the world. I found this article, one of the best ruminations on the political

power plays that dominate the world despite all the talk of peace and withdrawal from war.  Uma Nair

Prudes on Television

this refers to ‘Her Spiritual Crisis’ (17 March, 2014). As per recent reports, the Supreme Court has rightly decided that a picture of a nude woman per se is not obscene. I also remember, in the past, a court has held that topless pictures of women are not obscene. I wonder why Indian TV channels blur bare breasts.

Many people feel a woman in undergarments is just like a nude woman. I recall Padma Lakshmi’s views on nudity that she aired after a nude photo shoot. “A woman’s body is one of the most beautiful things in the world and you can still make a nude shot look classic and elegant,” she said, “And there are some women who look cheap even when dressed.”  M Kumar

Birth of Hope

this is a nicely written article (‘Betrayed in the City’, 3 March 2014). I hope the formation of new states generate new employment avenues, new projects, and that basic problems in the Telangana region like water scarcity and power shortage get sorted out, and the two states behave like friendly brothers. This perhaps is wishful thinking, but I also hope that corruption and netagiri will come to an end. It is a long way to go but definitely a good start.  Mekalav

24 March 2014

The Liberation of Gender-Bender Fashion androgyny

Why male designer Dhruv Kapur wore a tight-fitting gown at Mumbai’s Lakme Fashion Week

when a male designer walks the ramp in an off-shoulder tight-fit gown at the end of his fashion show. In India, it may have never been done before.

Designer Kallol Datta does saunter out after his show in one of his distinctive oversized creations, but Dhruv Kapur made a different kind of statement on Wednesday at Mumbai’s Lakme Fashion Week as he walked the ramp in a lady’s gown cinched high at his chest and with a high hem at the back. Last year

It is unusual

24 March 2014

too, the Delhi-based designer, known for his label DRVV, had made an appearance in a black shift with a slit.

Kapur says he wore a gown this time as a reflection of his collection’s ‘duplicity and duality’. His website says that he seeks to transpose those two traits ‘onto clothes that lie to the onlooker or serve a dual purpose’: ‘We all lead lives that are dual—one for society and one for ourselves.

I want to say that you should love and live life the way you want to,’ he writes on the site.

Largely composed of unisex garments, like pants and tunics, his collection is full of muted colours such as black and grey. Singer Anushka Manchanda, who attended the fashion show, tweeted a picture of a black shift that she saw on the ramp—worn by a male model—as an item on her ‘I want’ list.

Kapur, who attended London School of Economics for his higher education and had never wanted to study fashion, has now come to be known as a designer who

excels in minimalism and straight chic lines.

Basking in the attention he got after his ramp appearance, he smiled on being asked what he wanted the audience to take away from his genderbender of a show. He said, “In the beginning, you should be awed and surprised, but at the end of it, you should feel utter and complete liberation.”

Kapur promises to make his next collection even more dramatic. It’s going to be about “the animal inside all of us”. n Aastha Atray Banan

open www.openthemagazine.com 3

ritesh uttamchandani

small world

10

20

contents

business

22

12

Lies, damned lies and advertising

reforms

An end to xeno phobia

locomotif

Guess who’s in search of the Führer?

32 28 high speed trains

Smart travel

Luxury

Let’s dress up the shirtless too

40 Happiness

Smile and move on please

a grow th guide for the next government

terrorists of the Week maoists

M

Desperate and Deadly The latest Naxal attack in Chhattisgarh that left 16 dead speaks of the growing frustration of Maoists and of the Centre’s continuing ineptitude in tackling the issue

aoists have enough reason to hate elections: they reject the Indian Constitution as a bourgeois idea and democracy as a sham.

But there is more to wanton killings, especially ahead of polls—like this week’s ambush in Sukma killing cops—than mere ideology. Arundhati Roy’s ‘Gandhians by consumption and lifestyle’ are a frustrated lot with their strength dwindling amid difficulty in recruiting new cadres, especially because many Tribals are getting exposed to the world outside and want to lead normal lives.

Not all Tribals want to die merciless deaths for no reason.

Lately, things are getting tougher for these ‘Gandhians’ with India’s forces having made deep inroads into traditional Maoist strongholds such as Chintagufa (Sukma), Bijapur, Kanker and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh. The gun-slinging ‘greats’ are angry and desperate.

The wrath that smacks of desperation was never more evident than in the attack on a Congress convoy on 25 May last year.

Traditionally known for surgical strikes, members of the CPI(Maoist), which was part of this ambush were young and confused, and couldn’t even identify their chief target, Mahendra Karma, Congress leader and founder of the disbanded militia, the Salwa Judum. They asked other Congress leaders for Karma till he stepped forward and identified himself.

Many months later, a senior leader of Naxalites, Ramanna said that the strike— which happened in the same area where this week’s ambush took place—had no blessings of the political wing of the 4 open

organisation. The Naxal leader said the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA), the armed wing of the outfit that led the offensive, were in haste and took a wrong decision. Twenty-seven people, including Congress state unit president Nand Kumar Patel and his son Dinesh, died in the attack. Naxalites had earlier said the Bastar attack was revenge for the atrocities committed by Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt against Naxalites.

Thanks to huge deployment of forces—100,000 additional personnel—in the Bastar region late last year ahead of the Assembly election, Maoists decided not to launch strikes. ishan tankha

This latest attack took place when a joint team of the CRPF and the police—of around 50 people—was moving from Tongpal village to Jeeram Ghati.

A few Maoist watchers attribute the recent violence to a lull in anti-Maoist combing operations at a national level, ever since P Chidambaram left the Home Ministry. The Centre has been caught napping on several counts. Despite the Union Cabinet approving the setting aside of Rs 3,000 crore for extending ‘connectivity’ to far-flung areas such as Bastar and other Maoist-affected regions spread across Odisha, Bihar, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has been sitting on the project for more than a year.

Lack of communication facilities has been cited as one of the reasons for not being able to track the movement of Maoists across states through dense forests.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been accused of offering mere lip service to the menace, which he once called India’s ‘biggest internal security threat’.

Even interventions by the PMO failed to speed up the ‘connectivity’ project, conceptualised after the 2010 Dantewada massacre where 76 CRPF personnel were killed. Several conflict management experts have also suggested formation of an elite force such as the Green Berets in the US (every third Green Beret is a medic) whose job would be to integrate with the local community help people with health care and education.

The Centre will have to do much more, and quicker. After all, extreme ailments need extreme methods of cure. n 24 March 2014

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afghanistan

Will history too retreat?

p

b books

53

Adil Jussawala’s despair

r true life

rough cut

Waiting for her 20th surgery

58

Theories of stardom

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DMK

■

f o r giving A Raja a Lok Sabha

ticket despite corruption charges against him A Raja has undoubtedly been the most disastrous minister of the UPA Government. The 2G scam starts at his doorstep and the loss to the exchequer, according to one estimate by the Comptroller and Auditor General, amounts to a whopping Rs 1,76,645 crore. After

years of complete disdain for public outrage as the magnitude of the scam became more and more apparent, the law finally caught up with Raja. He was arrested by the CBI on 2 February 2011 and was in the investigation agency’s custody till 17 February 2011. After this, he had to spend 15 months in jail as an undertrial. Notwithstanding these dubious distinctions, the DMK has decided to field him once again this Lok Sabha election. The consideration is purely political, given that Raja is an important Dalit leader and has won Lok Sabha elections four times. But he is also probably being rewarded for keeping his mouth shut and not naming anyone else who partook in the spoils of the 2G scam. n

63

Kareena’s Request

In a tweet, NDTV reported that Sushma Swaraj had questioned Modi’s decision to contest from UP. Within an hour, the channel retracted the tweet o o p s , s h e d i d n ’ t s ay i t

‘‘If there is a Modi wave in India, why is he looking for a safe seat in UP?’ tweets senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj’

—NDTV tweet, 8 March

turn

y able Part Unreastohne Week of

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

‘We apologise for incorrectly attributing a tweet earlier to Sushma Swaraj. The information has been corrected and updated’

—NDTV tweet, a few minutes later

around

Premier Shame T h e p r e v i o u s General Election of 2009 forced the governing council of the Indian Premier League (IPL) to shift the venue of the tournament to South Africa because its dates clashed with those of the election. The Centre had said it could not provide security to cricketers.History repeats itself as the country goes into poll mode again. IPL officials have decided to hold the first phase of the seventh edition in the UAE. Sixteen matches will be held from 16 24 March 2014

April to 30 April in the Gulf country.

The third and final phases are expected to be held in India, the final is scheduled for 1 June in Mumbai. The second phase—from 1 May to 12 May—may be held in India if the Centre gives its nod.

IPL officials have kept Bangladesh as a standby for the second phase because the polls won’t be over until 13 May. That cash-rich tournaments such as this one are shifted away from India in the name of democracy is a shame. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to Election Symbols

Two new election symbols have been released by the Election Commission—a pen nib with seven rays and a chappal (slipper), at the behest of some Andhra Pradesh parties. These symbols join 84 other free symbols released by the EC for this General Election. An Independent candidate or a political party looking for a logo has a wide range to choose from.

Many of them are seemingly bizarre, like a tent, a table lamp and even a plate stand.

Some of these symbols date back as far as 19511952 and that is the reason they may seem out of whack with the times. The EC does not come up these symbols, but merely approves and standardises them. It says that the reason for these seemingly absurd symbols may be traced to the Two parties fact that the masses must can share the easily be able to relate to same symbol, them. Plus, they need to be provided that non-provocative and must they are not not hurt anybody’s religious contesting sentiments. AAP’s broom against each was picked from this very list other (and not a Harry Potter book as some suspect).

Despite the wide variety to choose from, some political parties share symbols. According to the Election Symbol Reservations and Allotment order, 1968, it is the EC’s job to allot ‘different symbols to different contesting

candidates’ within the same constituency. This does not, however, rule out the same symbol being allotted to more than one party if they are not contesting against each other. For example, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Asom Gana Parishad both have an elephant as their symbol but since their constituencies do not overlap, this does not really matter. But on the occasion of a clash, the EC may freeze a symbol.

Election symbols play a primary role in India.

To those who cannot read, a party’s symbol serves as its identity. n

Next Time, Try Rush Hour Tokenism and the pointlessness of Arvind Kejriwal’s train journey in Mumbai M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

J

oe Biden, the vice-president of the United States, took the train to work for 35 years when he was in the Senate. His first wife and child dying in a car accident had something to do with it.

But transplant the same man with the same ethic into Mumbai and he wouldn’t do it. No one in his right mind would take a Mumbai local if he has an alternative because it means being packed daily like fleeing refugees and deprived of dignity and energy by the time you make it home.

It is a misery that is inevitable for millions in Mumbai.

Consider then Arvind Kejriwal stepping out of Mumbai airport on 12 March, a Wednesday, and attempting to align his experience with the aam aadmi’s. In a city that sees a daily war between middle-class folk and auto rickshaw drivers over the latter’s refusal to ply on demand, Kejriwal gets a lift in a waiting auto to Andheri railway station and gets a window seat effortlessly in the 11.26 local to Churchgate. His party workers take up an entire compartment and later create chaos at Churchgate station, overturning a few metal detectors. No commuter has ever heard those metal detectors beep, so maybe that is not a bad thing. But everything else about Kejriwal’s railway moment is staggeringly at dissonance with what he is trying to project of himself.

Start with the fact that the rambunctiousness of his supporters is only reserved for roads and trains.

Inside an airport or aboard a flight, everything is orderly around Kejriwal.

What then can you infer? That the Aam Aadmi Party thinks it is okay to have a free-for-all in public spaces that the aam aadmi frequents, but in cloistered environments reserved for the upper classes, they will behave themselves. The least they could do is create a melee inside an airport.

Then there is the fact of Kejriwal

getting a window seat without earning it. In Mumbai’s general compartment commuter universe, that is Business Class, the only seated space where you get some cool air against your face. But no one can buy his way into it; it has to be fought for.

Some commuters jump in even before the train stops at the risk of their lives to get themselves window seats.

Also, if indeed it’s daily commuters who Kejriwal wanted to impress, then the gimmick was going to fail even before he started. Like how Rahul Gandhi failed in 2010 when he took a local train. Any politician who wants respect from train travellers in Mumbai will get it only if he Then, there samples and survives peak is the fact hour. Otherwise, of Kejriwal he is a just yet getting a another irritant window who has no clue seat without of their sufferings. If earning it Kejriwal or Gandhi had tried taking a train during peak hour, chances are they wouldn’t even be able to get into a compartment. Nor would it have been possible to get a ‘reservation’. If party volunteers had tried to take over a compartment between 8 to 10 in the morning, they would have a riot on their hands.

When Kejriwal took over as Delhi Chief Minister, he told his party workers to be cautious about not becoming a part of the system they were trying to change. He might still be adhering to it when it comes to corruption, but the system is more than that. Tokenism, or vacuous displays intended to make a statement of personal character, is just another career politician’s tool. The more Kejriwal does it, the more he steadily becomes part of all that he claims to stand against. n 24 March 2014

real

india

It Happens

Going Dotty Over Indelible Ink India’s only company that makes voters’ ink safeguards its chemical formula as a ‘State secret’ even though it’s easy to erase A n i l B u d u r L u l l a will step out of polling booths keen to show off their index finger, marked with the black ink of democracy. What they probably won’t know is that the ink used to mark balloters comes from a factory close to them in Mysore. The Karnataka governmentowned Mysore Paints and Varnish exclusively manufactures indelible ink used in all elections held in this country.

To meet demand for the 2014 General Election and the simultaneous Assembly polls in three states this April-May, it will produce nearly 2.3 million bottles of ink, in accordance with an order placed by the Election Commission (EC). Each bottle contains 10 ml of indelible ink. “The contents of the bottle or the chemical formula used in its manufacture is a State secret. Otherwise, people will start making efforts to wipe the ink away and subvert the democratic process,’’ says Hara Kumar, managing director, marketing, of the company.

The firm’s Mysore unit is the only facility in the country that makes and supplies indelible ink for every civic body, assembly or parliamentary election in the country. With the country adding millions of first-time voters to the electoral rolls every election, and with turnouts going up, the demand for this ink has been rising voluminously. Five years ago, the unit dispatched 1.9 million bottles to the EC. In 2014, the demand is up by almost 20 per cent. “Around 70 per cent of the total order has already been transported to various state capitals while the rest is being manufactured using a single shift,” says Kumar.

In the last financial year, the company’s turnover was Rs 18.92 crore with a net profit of Rs 2.29 crore; 50-70 per cent of its total sales can be attributed to indelible ink. Moreover, the company earns foreign exchange too. It exports indelible ink to 28 countries in Asia and Africa, including Turkey, Bhutan, Malaysia, Nepal, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Papua NewGuinea and Canada. It also supplies voters’ ink to the United Nations.

This company was started by the 8 open

Krishnendu Halder/Reuters

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ome Election Day, proud voters

the colour of universal suffrage Election Commission officials reportedly train volunteers to mark voters with a blotch—rather than a thin line—of this ink so that it is harder to erase

Mysore Royal family in 1937 and was once called Mysore Lac and Paint Works Ltd. At the time, the company also made special paints for application on war tanks. It was in 1962 that the company was granted an exclusive licence to manufacture and supply indelible ink to the EC by the National Research Development Corporation, Delhi.

“Indelible ink was used for the first time in the 1962 election. From then on, all the voters who have exercised their franchise in India have been marked with indelible ink manufactured by our company,’’ says Kumar. In 1989, the firm’s name was

The Karnataka governmentowned Mysore Paints and Varnish exclusively manufactures indelible ink used in all elections held in this country. It also supplies voters’ ink to the United Nations

changed to Mysore Paints and Varnish Ltd, as the firm had stopped making lac.

Kumar says that over the years, the company has changed the composition of the ink to address complaints that it can be easily rubbed off. “Technically, once applied it will stay bright for more than ten days and start fading only afterward.

There is no chance that a person can rub it off immediately and go to another booth to cast a second vote,’’ he says. A teacher who has done election duty reveals that during training they were instructed by EC officials to use the ink as a blotch instead of a thin line on the index finger’s nail and skin—to prevent malpractice.

Regardless of what Kumar or the teacher say, booth-level political workers admit that the ink can indeed be erased.

Assorted cleaning agents may be used for the job: anything from toothpaste, hand sanitisers, nail polish removers to dish washing liquids and alcohol. And if those don’t work all that well, there are several YouTube videos that demonstrate how to unmark your finger. n 24 March 2014

business

Lies, Damned Lies... and Advertising a dv e r t isin g It’s in the air. It’s on the air. It’s everywhere. Like life’s two big Twainist certainties—the second of which pollsters appear keen to modify— it’s usually worth no more than a shrug.

Usually, but not always. It’s the game of gaining mass influence, and it goes on with ever greater gusto day after day, animated by a sense few players were familiar with 20 years ago: a sense of competition.

Ever since India opened up to the idea of commercial competition as an economic stimulus, the star performers of this sport have mostly been brands vying fiercely with one another for the consumer’s favour. These are not just brands, they are advertisers, and they sure know how to

the past two decades or so is the field of politics, and while appeals for electoral favour are anything but sexy—unless one counts Meghna Patel’s American Beauty poster that was disowned by the party in whose aid it appeared—the sound and fury of next month’s election is already loud enough to draw eyes and ears away from the most influential of mass-market brands. An obvious strategic response to this threat would be to join the electoral hurly-burly with a message of one’s own.

A few brands Of the brands that have joined the have yielded to that electoral temptation, Center hurly-burly Fresh is clearly the with messages most cheeky. With its of their own

sense appeal Tata Tea urges us to wake up

turn on the charm. Just last weekend, a Mumbai agency called CreativeLand Asia won a grand award at Adfest 2014 held in Pattaya, a blow-ego festival that has a cool headstart over India’s own Goafest in portraying itself as Asia’s Cannes. The hotshop won the festival’s sole Gold Lotus in ‘film craft’ for a Frooti commercial crafted to counter Slice’s ‘Aam Sutra’ appeal: it features a gang of footballers drooling like little kids at the sight of Shah Rukh Khan gulping his aam juice like there’s no tomorrow. What slurped up the honours was its soundtrack, a lovesong sung in a strange tongue with only four discernible syllables of Hindi: ‘peele pilaa.’ Hmmm...

No less evidently, another arena that has been convulsed by competition over 10 open

spoof on all the bilge in the air, the brand sells its audience a dream of having all peddlers of ‘Yeh Waala’ this or that gagged with its chewing gum. The brand’s promise: ‘Zabaan pe rakhe lagaam.’

Inspired by a similar concern for one’s strained ability to take nonsense but rather artless in execution is a telecom brand, Idea. With ‘No ullu banaoing’ as its latest usage idea, it promotes handset videos as a great way to expose braggarts

for what they are. Its message is admirable enough. Nobody wants to be made a fool of. Except that its character choices offend egalitarian sensibilities: why does the adfilm’s hero, played by Abhishek Bachchan, look so determinedly different from its ‘paani’ promising politician? It reminds me of an appalling Indian Railways depiction of a fair hand nabbing a dark one for a chain-pulling offence.

Arguably, the most impressive adfilm on air is the ‘Power of 49’ spot for Tata Tea, the latest part of its ‘Jaago Re’ campaign.

Set in a swish beauty salon, it opens to some idle chatter on the wonders of pepper spray among a bunch of snoots, one of whom patronisingly advises her pedicurist—in Hindi—to arm herself against creeps too.

Oh, for that, replies the pedicurist, she’d rather rely on her ‘kaala teeka’—an utterance that evokes tsk-tsks in dismissal of what’s taken as an illiterate attempt to ward of an evil eye.

“Superstition, yaar,” sneers one snob, “That’s very sad.”

“Education problem guys,” goes another, “Chhodo.”

An exchange of sighs.

“Actually madam, educated logon ko bhi kaala teeka lagaana chahiye,” says the pedicurist, explaining why even they ought to take her cue, as she holds up a finger—to their shame and her triumph—inked with the black dot of a vote cast.

It’s one cracker of a campaign.

Speaking of political naivete and misinterpreted dots, though, one of the world’s most haunting ads is an adfilm called ‘Join the Dots’ run by a Latin American newspaper to illustrate a point of perspective. It uses a series of dots that appear one by one in close-up for each datapoint of cheerful news. One for rapid industrial output, another for some other heavy-duty statistic, and so on and so forth in a frenzied fury of dot proliferation… until the screen zooms out to reveal a dotmatrix outline of the Führer’s face. Aired a long time ago, the point it made is still vivid. Or is it? n ARESH SHIRALI 24 March 2014

lo co m ot i f

S PRASANNARAJAN

D

GUESS WHO’S IN SEARCH OF THE FÜHRER

o I get a whiff of Weimar from the rustle of morning pages? Am I one of the last few who are missing the fact that the resemblance of this country to Germany of the 1930s is frighteningly obvious? Am I not secular enough to see the true nature of the man who is playing with the mind of a people whose plight is worse than the volk steeped in the Depression of another era? In place of the ‘little corporal’ who came from nowhere and talked his way into the mind of a nation on the edge of a nervous breakdown, do we have a big, barrelchested sorceror of mass hysteria all set to rule India? Am I history-proof, floating in my make-believe, unaware of the Evil swirling around me? Morning headlines bring me down to the reality of Weimar India.

And this one, reported as blandly and badly as any news agency would, was come-to-your-senses at its plainest: “There are two kinds of leaders. The first type like Gandhi belongs to those who go among people, have some ideology and believe in the knowledge of people…The thinking of this kind of leader is that it is the people who are a repository of knowledge. Such a leader wants to understand people and has no pride…

Then there is another kind of leader, whose best example is perhaps Hitler.

Hitler thought there was no need to go to people. He believed the entire knowledge of the world is only in his mind.

That kind of leader only talks that he did this and that. That leader does not need to go to people…” This is an excerpt from Rahul Gandhi’s stump speech in Balasinor, Gujarat, where the little Gandhi said he would emulate Mahatma Gandhi. He sold the image of a Führer on the Sabarmati to the crowd.

That sales pitch of Rahul was very un-Rahul. He is capable of better stuff. Forget the naivete (by the way, Hitler became Hitler through popular mandate), he too was indulging in the favourite Indian pastime of trivialising history—or reducing it to the size of the speaker’s mind. There was a time when Rahul was a different Gandhi with a different vocabulary. The language he spoke—widely, and often uncharitably, rubbished as the confused soliloquy of

the entitled—came from a man whose experience of India was permanent astonishment. There was a freshness about it, especially at a time when everyone else in the fray sounded so certain about what India wants. They were all men without doubt. Such men are dangerous, and Rahul, by choosing to be the one who has not abandoned the wonderment of being an Indian in search of his ideal India, was not one of them. His idea of the “beehive nation”—I loved the sound of it—was a good example of a politician least embarrassed about being an eternal apprentice. India’s— and the party’s—incomprehension of Rahul was as deep as his own of India. It was as if the most privileged insider in Congress enjoyed playing the dissenting outsider.

Then it happened, his Hitler punch, which usually comes from desperate socialists who want to show off their secular masculinity. It has never been Rahul’s habit. It was very Nitish Kumar. Then the Bihar Chief Minister had to be the last defender of secularism because it was easier than defending Bihar itself. He needed a convenient Hitler to highlight his humanism, no matter his secularism was negotiable, always. When Gujarat burned in 2002, the secularist’s conscience was elsewhere; the then Railways Minister Nitish Kumar did not either ask for Modi’s resignation or resign from the Vajpayee Cabinet. Today, the socialist in secularism’s tattered clothes has placed himself in a corner of the allies bazaar, available for the highest bidder. Crying Hitler is his existential wail.

That said, Rahul’s invocation of Hitler is in tune with the lazy intellectual tradition of India’s undergraduate radicals and peanut socialists, still lost in their private Bolivia. In their universe, the conflagration round the corner is either ‘genocide’ or ‘Holocaust’; and your average hate-monger is a fascist. These exaggerations are more than a trivialisation of history; they are a trivialisation of an unspeakable suffering. Some from the left side of the argument still need a historical context to match their redundant text. They need a Hitler. Rahul Gandhi could have managed without one. n

Rahul’s Hitler invocation is in tune with the lazy intellectual tradition of our undergraduate radicals and peanut socialists

12 open

24 march 2014

open essay

BY Tunku Varadarajan

MODI IN THE TIME OF OBAMA Why President Obama will find Prime Minister Modi very disconcerting

B

arack Hussein Obama and Narendra Damodardas

Modi. The two politicians have little in common physically: One is lean, long-sleeved, clean-shaven, the other hirsute, stocky, bare-armed. Theatrically, both men are vaunted as orators, although neither is entirely as good as he believes he is. The jobs they have (in Mr Obama’s case), or aspire to (in Mr Modi’s), are daunting: Mr Obama runs the world’s greatest, most powerful democracy; if he wins in May, Mr Modi will govern the world’s most ungovernable democracy, and also its largest.

In one other respect, the two men are similar: they are each great dividers of their nation. Mr Obama did not set out to be divisive. He offered himself to America (and, indeed, to the world) as a uniter, but he has, through a combination of personal hubris, political overreach domestically and under-reach abroad, and an emphatic conservative backlash, ensured that America today is as viciously at war with itself as it was under George W Bush. Just as Mr Bush was, at the more pungent extremes of partisan hostility, a ‘moron’ and a ‘frat boy’, Mr Obama is anathema in a number of lurid ways— crypto-Muslim, communist, and non-American (as distinct from un-American, which, to be sure, is also a frequent accusation).

Mr Modi, for his part, has never sought to be a uniter of India’s citizens; instead, he is an energiser of the country’s Hindus, essentially a ‘tribal’ leader on a gigantic scale, incapable of offering any concession—no, not even that of the occasional token apology, or even the good-natured wearing of a Muslim skull-cap while on the campaign trail—to those not of his tribe. In his view of India, those not ‘with him’ are incorrigible, and carry with them the stench of this observation made by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power: ‘It is always the enemy who started it; even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.’ (This last line sums up the early calamity, and the carnage, of Modi’s Gujarat.)

Should Mr Modi become the next Prime Minister of India—and there is every indication that he will, whether progressives like it or not—his relationship with Mr Obama will offer up some complex chemistry. The American president would never say so in public, but one can be sure that he finds Mr Modi very disconcerting: He cannot possibly care for his religious fervour, and his hyper-nationalism. The cosmopolitan Mr Obama’s father was Muslim: However Christian the American president may be in his own religious observance, how can the fact of his own descent from Muslims not give him pause as he studies Mr Modi—the man for whom Muslims, in spite of everything his apologists say, are not quite first-class citizens of India, excluded (by definition) from Hindutva, his guiding tribal philosophy.

There is also the fact that Mr Modi, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, was denied a visa to enter the United States in 2005.

As Prime Minister, he will surely be able to visit the US without ‘let or hindrance’, to use the quaint English found on the pages of passports. Should he come to America, there will be crowds that dog him wherever he goes, chanting protestors who unfurl banners, noisy (even obnoxious) bands who shriek at him the American equivalents of ‘hai-hai’ and ‘murdabad’. They will be on television offering sound bites, using words that make Americans recoil, like ‘genocide’ and ‘pogrom’. There will be op-eds, fulmination in The New York Times. Mayor de Blasio of New York could well boycott a reception in town.

America isn’t India, where embarrassing protestors are banished from sight when foreign pashas visit. There will be no rounding up of people in Washington before a visit of an Indian prime minister as there is of Tibetans in craven Delhi every time a Chinese dignitary swings by. And when he does visit Mr Obama in Washington—as he will and must—Mr Modi will need to prepare himself for a public display of rapport that never rises higher than perfectly-pitched cordiality. Mr Obama is not a bonhomous man by instinct, and he isn’t going to make himself so for an Indian politician who has a reputation in American liberal circles (prime Obama turf) as a ‘fascist’.

Mr Obama has had frosty relations with foreign leaders who have much, much more in common with him than the bearded torchbearer of Hindutva. Why would he go to bat for Mr Modi?

All of which points to an inevitable delay in any visit to Washington by a Prime Minister Modi, or another visit to India by President Obama. As the embarrassing Khobragade episode has demonstrated, India is no longer the first-rank friend of the United States that it was under President Bush. India’s economic stagnation is to blame, as is Mr Obama’s obvious rejection of a place that was Bush Country (and before that, Clinton Country). From conversations with people in Mr Modi’s inner circle, I understand that the latter’s first foray abroad as pradhan mantri will almost certainly be to Japan, another land with a feisty, nationalist prime minister, one who has a major bone to pick with Obama’s America.

Although one does not readily associate Mr Modi with ‘tip-toeing’, that is precisely the sort of footwork we should expect from him and Mr Obama for at least the first year of a Modi government, by which time Mr Obama will be mired in lame-duck territory, with America just months away from its next presidential election.

After that, I wager that Narendra Damodardas Modi and Hillary Rodham Clinton will hit it off. Pragmatically.

Unfussily. Big time. n

As the embarrassing Khobragade episode has shown, India is no longer the first-rank friend of the US that it was under President Bush

24 March 2014

Tunku Varadarajan, Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is a columnist for the Daily Beast and a former editor of Newsweek magazine. He is working on a book on the impact on Indian politics of the Shah Bano case open www.openthemagazine.com 15

fault lines

SULK and Never learning from history: Can the

PR Ramesh

I

t began with a bang but promises to end in a whimper, even as ticket distribution and alliances for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls get going under Narendra Modi’s baton. Last week, disgruntlement among senior BJP leaders over allocation of parliamentary seats threatened to show up the faultlines within. Sulk Central’s protagonist appeared to be party patriarch LK Advani himself, with others including Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, veteran party leader and former president and Union minister Murli Manohar Joshi, besides UP veteran Lalji Tandon, all following suit with murmurs of dissent, prompting sections of the media to dub the BJP a ‘divided house’.

But as swiftly as they rose to a reported crescendo, the voices of discord petered down to a whimper. Such a quiescence should not surprise observers of the party’s internal affairs. Signposts to that effect had been put up months ago by the BJP’s fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Thereby hangs a tale that promises to change the BJP’s electoral face fundamentally, give the party a revised national-political worldview, and make it more responsive to the country’s changing demographics.

Interestingly, a GenNext plan to facil-

muffled dissent (L-R) Sushma Swaraj, LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi 16 open

be damned disgruntled trio be party poopers of BJP?

always by himself Modi is not new to manoeuvres by party colleagues

Tsering Topgyal/AP

itate the entry of young candidates to the Lok Sabha, even while forcing several party veterans to opt for the Rajya Sabha route to Parliament, was drawn up as far back as a year ago by the RSS. This plan had outlined a path to ease the party’s senior citizens (aged 75-plus years) out of seats in the Lower House and move them gradually to the House of Elders instead.

The RSS had conveyed as much to the party’s top brass, including BJP President Rajnath Singh and PM nominee Narendra Modi.

According to party insiders, what was considered a sealed decision had, however, been re-opened by Advani’s insistence that he was keen on contesting Gandhinagar’s Lok Sabha seat yet again in the 2014 polls. The octogenarian leader still heads the NDA, and his public assertion scotched rumours that the party had explicitly suggested that he take the Rajya Sabha route to Parliament.

“The RSS directive was evident when the decision on Rajya Sabha nominees from Gujarat was kept in abeyance this January end,” points out a senior BJP leader, “On 25 January, the party announced its candidates for Madhya Pradesh and Chhattigarh, but did not take any decision on Gujarat. It was kept on hold only to allow Modi to take that call himself. It was only out of sheer respect for Advani that no one pressured him to take the Rajya Sabha route.”

Two days later, Advani said that the issue of his not contesting a Lok Sabha seat was not brought up by anyone in the party: “Nobody has suggested to me that I consider the Rajya Sabha. If they had, I may have considered it. But no one had suggested this to me.” This remark triggered off speculation that Team Modi 18 open

All considered, says a BJP leader, there is no doubt that Modi is the RSS’s choice and that it rejected outright all objections raised by other leaders, including Advani was keen on shunting out the party’s old guard, of which Advani is a prominent member, as the BJP faces an election in which it hopes to unseat the Congress 10 years after it lost power at the Centre.

To make a point of contrast, insiders offer the example of former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, who, despite not being from the RSS ranks, decided unprompted to step aside and let his son Jayant Sinha contest his Hazaribagh seat in Jharkhand.

Like Advani, Joshi is from the RSS ranks, and he too has shown reluctance to quit the Lok Sabha. He has already embarked on electioneering, but signs that he may relent came at a kisan lunch recently, where he said that he was willing to give up his Varanasi seat for Narendra Modi. “I just wanted the party to clarify its position at the earliest,” Joshi told mediapersons.

T

he controversy that broke out last week, however, came despite the RSS directive on Lok Sabha seats,

and had Advani at its centre. The veteran leader is believed to have maintained an uncharacteristic silence at several recent party meetings, especially after his gambit last year to thwart Modi’s early elevation as the BJP’s top candidate went astray. Advani had chosen to stay away from the party’s Goa summit where Rajnath Singh declared that Gujarat’s Chief Minister was the party’s choice for the post of India’s Prime Minister.

The downsizing of Advani’s stature that followed in tandem with Modi’s rise was clear to every watcher of the BJP’s power equations. The change may have been all the more galling for the party’s former PM-in-waiting—a label he could never shake off—once he found he had to await the party’s nod before he could file nomination papers to contest a Lok Sabha seat he has considered his own for a long time.

There was a time that Advani wielded enormous clout within the BJP. He had attained seer stature within the party after his Rath Yatra of the 90s that stirred up saffron sentiments across the country, and his authority—particularly with the party rank and file—went virtually unquestioned for a long time after that. Even though it was Atal Behari Vajpayee who become the party’s first ever Prime Minister, everyone credited Advani with the BJP’s emergence as a challenger to Congress politics. Given this record, his gradual marginalisation in the wake of Modi’s surge to the top is a phenomenon that he perhaps cannot come to terms with easily. “The problem is that Advani and some elders in the party are finding it difficult to accept the paradigm shift in power equations within the party and take the situation gracefully,” says the senior party leader, “It is not a great idea to make disgruntlement and sulking your only identity if you are a senior party leader; that only shows how little your writ runs within the party and how badly you have been relegated to the margins.”

Among the other members of the BJP’s Scowl Secretariat was Sushma Swaraj, who objected to Modi’s elevation at first but later accepted the inevitable. Her detractors point out that Swaraj has not just been in a sulk, she has also been shopping for contrarian issues lately to rake up within the party to reinforce her relevance. Earlier last week, Swaraj, an avid 24 March 2014

and well-followed tweeter, made clear her opposition to the BJP’s alliance with the Haryana Janhit Party if it were to enroll Vinod Sharma, the Congress leader and former Union minister whose son Manu Sharma was found guilty of murder.

Those in Swaraj’s camp have also tactically conveyed to sections of the media that she had shot off an angry letter to Rajnath Singh expressing dismay at the impending merger of the BSR Congress—of which the mine scam tainted Reddy brothers of Bellary are a part—with the BJP. In her missive, reportedly, she pointed out that allowing ‘tainted’ leaders like B Sreeramulu (two years after he quit the party) and the Reddy brothers into the BJP fold could cost the party its credibility as a serious anti-graft force in the country. The BJP is said to have an eye on the BSR Congress’ voteshare of over 3 per cent in Karnataka, a state it hopes to win a large numbers of seats from. The irony of Swaraj’s protest letter is that she herself was once considered close to the Reddy brothers.

At a meeting held afterwards of senior party leaders to consider election strategy, Swaraj campers maintain, she firmly registered her dismay at the decision to let ‘scam tainted’ leaders into the party and even ‘stormed out’ of the deliberations. One BJP leader, however, offers this succinct summary of that evening’s developments: “She placed her viewpoint on the table and had to leave early to catch a flight; there were no fireworks as is being claimed.” Bellary is a ‘critical seat’ for the BJP in Karnataka, adds the leader. “The party has to marry several viewpoints and take a considered decision on alliances and ticket distribution aimed at maximising our seat count in 2014. That is priority and everyone in the

BJP, most of all Sushmaji, who even contested against Sonia Gandhi in that state, is well aware of that.”

W

hat seems to have emboldened a section of the media to paint the BJP as a ‘divided house’ isn’t just the odd twitter-rant and selective leak of information to the media on internal discontent, but also RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat’s comment that his organisation does not bother much with BJP politics. This professed aloofness of the RSS is not new at all. It is a posture it has maintained for decades (it calls itself a ‘cultural organisation’), and while it plays mentor and holds sway over all outfits that form the larger Sangh Parivar, this allows it to form selective alignments with other political forces too— as a BJP leader contends—as it did in the 1980s by rendering the Congress its support. All considered, says the BJP leader, there is no doubt that Modi is the RSS’s choice and that it rejected outright all objections raised by other leaders, including Advani.

What is heartening for the Modi camp, in spite of what a leader close to the Gujarat CM calls “a few irritants within”, is that apart from the party’s alliances already in place, many leaders from across political parties are showing signs of “warming up” to Modi in the hope of being on the winning side after the hustings.

In Bihar, the BJP has netted Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), and has successfully wooed important leaders of the ‘Backward’ Keori and Yadav communities. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party has decided to go for an alliance with the BJP. In Assam, a sizeable chunk of the Ahom Gana Parishad

(AGP) has crossed over to the BJP after the RSS expressed its opposition to a tie-up with a spent force such as the AGP. In Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala of the Indian National Lok Dal is keen on a pact with the saffron party. Many other regional parties such as the AIADMK and others may opt for post-poll pacts with the party if it manages to score well in the General Election.

It is in this context that Madhu Kishwar, a feminist Modi-backer, senses a conspiracy on part of a ‘clique of party leaders’ trying to subvert the Gujarat CM’s prospects.

She calls this group of saboteurs the ‘160 club’, implying that Modi’s chances of becoming the country’s PM hinge on his party winning at least 180-200 seats in the Lok Sabha. By Kishwar’s analysis, if the party were to score less—say, 160, as she suggests some party members secretly hope—then this would make space for ‘disgruntled’ leaders to stake a claim for the Prime Minister’s post on the strength of their ‘greater abilities’ (than Modi’s) to put together an alliance that commands a majority in Parliament (272 seats).

This is a familiar problem for the BJP, unlike the dynasty-run Congress. Even Vajpayee, they recall, faced it back in 1996 over portfolio allocation during his 13day stint as PM in 1996—in the form of jabs from the BJP’s lone Muslim face back then, Sikandar Bakht.

Modi himself is not new to such manoeuvres by colleagues: in the aftermath of the Gujarat violence of 2002, questions of his leadership and adherence to raj dharma were put up for open debate instead of being discussed in confidential party forums. But none of this could stop his rise to the party’s top. His camp hopes that his rise to the country’s top will prove just as unstoppable. n

OPENOMICS

IDEAS for 10%

At a time when India is struggling to register an economic growth rate of 5 per cent per annum, it would seem a trifle too ambitious to even contemplate 10 per cent. A complacent India has got a rude reality check these past two years, but that is no reason to scale down on ambition. If India wants to become a poverty-free, middle-income country in the next 20 years—and that would only mean attaining the level of prosperity China already has—its economy needs to grow in double digits.

There are several factors that could renew India’s growth story. Some of the measures that can be taken to restore the economy to an 8 per cent trajectory, the trend India witnessed between 2004 and 2008, are obvious. The Government needs to rein its spending in.

It needs to restrain its impulse to delay clearances given to private sector projects. It needs to revive the faith of the investor—both domestic and foreign—in India’s economic potential. All this would require the Indian State to revisit its basic instincts. But it’s not impossible.

By themselves, none of those measures may be enough to achieve 10 per cent growth. For that, the Government would need to think big—and out-of-the-box. It will need to stride purposefully into the realm of what seems impossible but isn’t. Starting next month, Indians will vote for a new government. Every election opens up the prospect of change, not merely in personnel but also by way of policy. India has been in a slump, and to break out of stagnancy, it’s time to consider some radical ideas that could transform the country’s future.

In this edition of Openomics, we feature ten such radical ideas. This is by no means an exhaustive list of what India needs, but indicative of the kind of policy thinking that is necessary. India cannot afford to lose any more time, not when it so desperately needs a 10 per cent decade.

idea 1

reforms

an end to xenophobia Pravin Krishna

T

he fast strides taken by the Indian economy in its

post-reform years have now slowed. The GDP growth rate has fallen from an annual average of 8 per cent in the last decade to less than 5 per cent in the last two years.

As we approach the next General Election, it seems an appropriate time to ask what the future government might do to reinvigorate the Indian economy and revive its flagging fortunes.

I have been asked to focus on the prospects for manufacturing sector growth. Let us consider some basics.

First, India possesses an abundance of low-skill workers, the vast majority of who are employed (and very likely underemployed) in the agricultural sector. Indeed, more than half the Indian labour force is engaged in the agricultural sector (by contrast, China, Korea and the US stand at around 30 per cent, 7 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively).

Second, the expected trajectory for the evolution of the Indian economy, subsequent to the 1991 reforms, involved the steady movement of rural workers out of the agricultural sector and into manufacturing. This was the path taken by many low-skill, labour-abundant countries along Nigel Roddis/REUTERS

their growth path, China being the most notable recent example. Instead, the Indian manufacturing sector has not grown—its share in the economy has stagnated at about 15 per cent of GDP over the past two decades. Surprisingly, the economy has seen an expansion of the services sector, including that of high-tech services (a development that some might see as perverse, as this sector uses India’s scare resources, high-skill labour, rather than capitalising on its abundantly available low-skill labour).

Third, while the impressive growth of the high-tech services sector has been justly celebrated, it must also be recognised that expansion of services does not, in itself, offer a reasonable path for Indian growth—the vast majority of workers in the agricultural sector do not have the skills necessary for employment in the services sector. Even if they did, there wouldn’t be quite enough domestic or international demand for these services. An expansion of the manufacturing sector is necessary.

Why haven’t rural workers moved to the manufacturing sector? What might incentivise the expansion of this vital sector? While a number of impediments to manufacturing

growth might be identified, I have been asked to focus here on two major factors: the ability of the Indian economy to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on a large scale and the role played by restrictiveness of Indian labour regulations.

Why FDI? Given suitable supporting policies and a basic level of development, a number of studies have shown that FDI generates employment, generates technology transfer, improves the quality and quantity of the country’s capital stock, assists human capital development, contributes to international trade integration, and often enhances enterprise development and helps create a more competitive business environment. All of these factors contribute to higher economic growth.

What has been India’s record on FDI inflows? First, India started its post-reform years with surprisingly low levels of FDI. Inflows stood at a mere $2 billion of FDI a year. By comparison, China was attracting more than 10 times as much FDI in those years, averaging annual inflows of around $40 billion between 1991 and 2000. The picture for India has improved in the decade from 2000 to 2010, with FDI inflows rising to as much as $43 billion a year (in 2008).

Nevertheless, China’s stock of FDI today is about four times that of India’s.

A joint survey of Indian firms conducted by the World Bank and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) analysed by scholars Yasheng Huang (of MIT) and Heiwai Tang (of Johns Hopkins University) offers pointers to the reasons for India’s modest success in attracting FDI, especially in comparison with China. Foreign-invested firms (FIFs) in India perceive constraints (and with greater intensity than domestic firms) on a variety of issues. In addition to the long-standing infrastructural weaknesses, these firms cite corruption, uncertainty in economic and regulatory policy, sluggishness in the legal system, delays in achieving conflict resolution, unpredictability in customs and trade regulations, and arbitrariness in business licensing and operation practices. The next government would do well to prioritise issues on the basis of business needs and think creatively on how to overcome the political and bureaucratic obstacles in the way of investors.

Turning to labour markets, it is clear that Indian regulations are in urgent need of reform. From the perspective of the firms, the particular regulations that are considered especially burdensome include Chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) and Section 9A of the IDA and the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act. The IDA requires firms employing more than 50–100 workers to obtain permission of the Government in order to retrench or lay off workers. Since this permission is not easily forthcoming, it raises the effective cost of labour usage in production and induces distortions in labour hiring. The Industrial Employment Act regulates the terms and conditions of work and applies to manufacturing firms employing over 10 workers (and 20 if the production process does not use electricity).

While no one would argue that Indian law does not need worker protection measures, most would agree that Indian 24 March 2014

labour regulations, as they stand, often work against the interests of labour itself. For instance, if you make it difficult or impossible to fire workers, firms become reluctant to hire them, especially for formal jobs. This implies that we have a larger pool of informal ‘contract’ workers who don’t enjoy the legal protections and job security that the law intended for them in the first place. Restrictive labour regulations can also induce firms to operate less than optimally, for example, by hiring fewer workers than they ideally need or by shifting to capital intensive manufacturing techniques even if this is costly to do.

In an interesting research study using survey data on Indian firms, Rana Hassan and Karl Jandoc of Asian Development Bank show that the size distribution of Indian firms is alarmingly out of line with outcomes in comparable economies. For instance, about 85 per cent of the manufacturing labour force is employed in firms with fewer than 50 workers, a greater proportion than in other Asian countries and much higher than in China, where less than 25 per cent of the manufacturing force is employed in small-scale firms. In the apparel sector, the comparison is even more dramatic: while more than 85 per cent of workers in the Indian apparel sector work in firms with fewer than eight workers, only around 0.5 per cent of Chinese workers are employed in firms of this size.

Hassan and Jandoc also find that Indian states with more flexible labour market institutions also have larger firms. This suggests that restrictive regulations have stood in the way of the optimal operation of firms, preventing firms from achieving productivity gains associated with a larger scale and workers from earning the higher wages and other benefits associated with working with larger and more productive firms.

Reforming labour regulations is going to be extremely challenging. Whether a future government will be ushered in with a sufficiently strong popular mandate and whether it will then summon the will to implement the necessary changes, while balancing these changes with the need to provide reasonable labour protections, is yet to seen.

It is on such efforts that the future path of the Indian economy depends. To assume instead that past growth will automatically continue without a deepening of reforms— on the back, perhaps, of some intrinsic merits of the Indian system—will be a fatal conceit. n

To assume that India’s past economic growth will automatically continue in the years ahead without a deepening of reforms will be a fatal conceit

Pravin Krishna is Chung Ju Yung Distinguished Professor of International Economics and Business at Johns Hopkins University, USA open www.openthemagazine.com 23

idea 2

smart cities

The art of the megalopolis Amitabh Kant

R

ecent studies project that India will face unprec-

edented urbanisation over the next few decades—350 million Indians will move to cities by 2030. This number is likely to double to 700 million by 2050. This is 2.5 times the size of the current US population and will be the largest urban movement in the world. This implies that every minute during the next 20 years, 30 Indians will leave rural India to settle in urban areas. The late management guru CK Prahalad had emphasised the urgent need for India to create 500 new cities to accommodate and offer its urban settlers higher quality lives. Otherwise, every existing city will be-

Neleman/WIN-Initiative/Getty Images

come a slum by the time India turns 75 in 2022.

This is a unique opportunity to plan, develop and build a new India that is ecologically and economically sustainable.

Historically, urbanisation has propelled the growth of national economies. Almost 75 per cent of global economic production takes place in cities. In several emerging economies, urbanisation has helped lift vast segments of the population above the poverty line. However, urbanisation is accompanied by a voracious consumption of natural resources. Cities occupy 3 per cent of the earth’s land surface, house half the human population, use 75 per cent of the resources and account for two-thirds of all energy and greenhouse gas emissions. If developing countries emulate the model of developed countries, a resource base as large as four planet Earths would be necessary to support their growth. Alas, we have only one planet Earth. We therefore require a paradigm shift towards sustainable urbanisation. This necessitates innovative thinking and planning.

Cities are centres of growth, innovation and creativity. In today’s world, it is not countries but cities that compete for resources and investment. The GDPs of New York and Tokyo are at par with India’s.

Not a single Indian city figures in the top 100 cities of the world. Mumbai ranks 114th and Delhi a dismal 214th. The future of India’s growth lies in the dynamism and vibrancy of its cities. In India, farming accounts for more than 58 per cent of its workforce but for only 14.2 per cent of GDP. Agriculture can sustain a growth rate of 3 per cent while the Indian economy must grow at 9-10 per cent to lift vast segments of its population above the poverty line. No country in the world has grown on a sustained basis for long periods on the back of its agricultural sector. It is therefore inevitable that people will migrate from rural India to towns and cities.

Like China, India has been a reluctant urbaniser.

India’s freedom movement and Gandhian worldview were rural development oriented, with the village seen as a self-sustained economic unit. China’s peasantry-led revolution was similar. In the early 1870s, China realised that its economic growth and employment creation could not be achieved 24 March 2014

through the agricultural sector. It recognised urbanisation as an essential feature of economic development and a major component of industrialisation and modernisation.

For China, economic development was, in essence, about shifting people from sustenance farming to manufacturing, and urbanisation was the spatial manifestation of this shift.

As a policy, it adopted rapid planned urbanisation with manufacturing as the key locomotive. The development of new cities and expansion of existing ones has been a dominant feature of China’s growth in the last three decades. Starting with the development of a planned city in Suzhou in partnership with Singapore, China has gone ahead to develop a large number of new cities through a successful business model that monetises land value. In fact, mayors have been competing with one another to create new cities and successful mayors have gone on to rise rapidly in the Communist Party hierarchy.

In contrast, Chandigarh and Gandhinagar are India’s only post-independence cities. The only major urban scheme India has launched in its entire planning process is the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission. By 2020, according to a recent report, India will face a housing shortage of 30 million dwelling units, even as 200 million water connections will be required, 350 million people will need sewage facilities, 160 GW of power generation capacity will have to be added, and the number of vehicles on roads will increase fivefold. There is an overriding need to set up greenfield cities and revitalise India’s existing urban agglomerations.

Failure on this front would seriously retard India’s growth.

While India is a late starter, it has significant advantages of being able to use technology to leapfrog a few stages of development and learn from good practices in other parts of the world. When cities were made in America, gas and water were cheaply available; vertical utilities were created and cities were made for cars and not people. India needs cities that are compact, dense and vertical, have efficient mass transit systems and invite people to cycle and walk.

Today, digital technology enables us to create intelligent and smart cities with a central command room, horizontally managing power, water, transportation and public safety.

A smart city integrates technology with critical infrastructure components and services to make urban development more intelligent, better inter-connected and highly efficient. In essence, a smart city is an improvement on today’s city both functionally and structurally, using information and communication technology as infrastructure.

The key opportunity is the deployment of digital technology for urban planning and execution as well as routine operations of the city. This entails digitisation of all city systems and the installation of relevant instruments to measure and monitor a set of indicators in real time. Interconnectivity allows different parts of a core system to ‘speak’ to one another and thus turn data into information.

Analytics then translates this into real knowledge that offers a kind of control panel for well-informed decisions to be taken. Thus, smart cities are about connecting people, processes, data, etcetera, to improve the livability of cities.

While the concept of smart cities has evolved, its essence 24 March 2014

has remained constant: the use of information and communication technology to address urban challenges.

Smart city concepts have been executed across several sectors worldwide. The city of New York has launched City 24/7, an interactive platform that integrates information from open government programmes, local businesses and citizens to provide meaningful and powerful knowledge anytime, anywhere, on any device. City 24/7 delivers the information people need, where and when it helps them most.

The city of Amsterdam has worked on public lighting as a transition from analog to digital, from fluorescent light bulbs to solid state lighting—all connected to an energy grid through a variety of last mile access technologies. It is estimated that a switch to LED technology can generate energy savings of about $170.5 billion, a sum equivalent to the elimination of 640 medium-sized power stations globally.

The city of Bussan in South Korea recognised the economic potential in deploying modern technologies to connect citizens, educational institutions, government agencies and industry, and boasts a sustainable urban development model that offers citizens easy access to services. Today, an internet cloud links the Bussan Metropolitan Government, Bussan Mobile application centre and five local universities.

Using public data, developers are creating innovative applications that help improve city operations, quality of life and citizen access to services. Similar initiatives have been undertaken in Rio de Janeiro, Tianjin and Songdo.

The new Industrial Cities being developed along the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor have integrated smart city planning with the geographical planning process.

These cities are using technology as an enabler and for infrastructure integration. This convergence of smart technologies across urban planning and engineering will be replicated in industrial cities in other corridors such as ChennaiBengaluru, Bengaluru-Mumbai and Amritsar-Kolkata as they evolve and expand. A similar approach needs to be taken across existing municipal zones as an integral component of the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission.

As India urbanises, it will face severe challenges. But there are huge opportunities in developing new Smart Cities and converting existing urban settlements into Smart, Intelligent and Connected Cities. Not only will this place the economy on a trajectory of sustainable growth, it will make a dramatic impact on the quality-of-life of the country’s urban citizens in the decades ahead. n

Amitabh Kant is secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. These are his personal views

India, though a late starter, can use technology to leapfrog a few stages of development and learn from good practices in other parts of the world

open www.openthemagazine.com 25

idea 3

Energy

go with the wind sumant sinha

I

As far as pricing is concerned, wind and solar power are expansion of electricity supply to rural regions, as well already cheaper than diesel-generated power. Wind powas an increase in GDP, which would be accompanied by er has already achieved grid parity and solar power is exan increased demand for energy. At present, the country pected to achieve such parity in the next couple of years. faces an energy deficit of approximately 10 per cent. This is Smart and sustainable energy sources have a bracing imaggravated by lower Plant Load Factors in thermal genera- pact on job creation and securing investment. It’s estimattion stations on account of the unavailability of coal. The ed that clean energy sources have led to the creation of country’s increased reliance on importing coal has led to 391,000 direct jobs and 1.2 million indirect jobs in India. an additional burden on India’s forex outflow. In such a Further, it is estimated that 4.5 million direct jobs would be scenario, the rise of renewables in the power sector helps created by 2030 in the off-grid renewable energy sector. drive the transformation from a predominantly coal-based We must boost clean energy investments, by private economy to a clean energy based economy. businesses and investors, with the help of a new set of Emerging grid parity with conventional power and the enabling policies and regulations to facilitate the scaling short gestation periods for setting up these capacities are up of the sector. The new government needs to adopt a twomaking renewables a more realisable option. Smart ener- pronged approach to tackle issues in the near-and-medium term and in the long term. gy has an impact on five key The near-and-medium term areas, namely energy security, approach requires action on imenergy access, energy pricing, mediate issues to incentivise inclimate change and its stimuvestments in the smart energy lating impact on job creation sector, which has seen a slowand securing investment. down in the past couple of With respect to energy security, it must be highlighted that years. Some action points are there is a power deficit in the creating demand for sustainable energy power by enforcing country in spite of the fact that per capita consumption of elecregulatory provisions, enabling tricity (879 units per year) is sigrenewable-deficient states to nificantly lower than that of contribute toward the national Steven Hunt/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images agenda in promoting renewChina (2,500 units) and of the US (12,500 units). The shortage is likely to increase in the ables, incentivising inter-state transfer of sustainable encoming years. The solution lies in ramping up power ergy generated power, providing soft loans or hedging costs capacity based on renewable energy. Our existing smart for sustainable energy projects, institutionalising centralenergy capacity of approximately 30GW saves us forex ised forecasting for wind and solar power generation, supworth almost $4 billion a year, calculated on the basis of the port for solar roof tops on residential segments, etcetera. cost of importing coal.

The long-term approach requires a focus on strategic deIn terms of energy access, the country has about 300 velopments, such as growth in offshore wind power (which million people with no access to electricity. Renewable has huge potential), creation of energy storage options for energy sources are abundant, and their reach is wide, espe- smart energy power, growth of hybrid installations (of cially solar power. wind and solar) for optimum utilisation of combined India is vulnerable to climate change on account of the renewable energy resources at suitable sites.

All this would require concerted action and support from strong correlation between temperature and agricultural output. The country must work towards reducing carbon all stakeholders. n emissions. Our existing renewable energy capacity saves Sumant Sinha is chairman and CEO, ReNew Power about 55 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum. ndia has ambitious goals for development, involving

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24 March 2014

idea 4

Speed Trains

Let a new corporation challenge indian railways Dhiraj Nayyar

I

t takes just four hours and 48 min-

utes to travel the 1,318-km distance between China’s political capital Beijing and financial capital Shanghai on a ‘high-speed’ bullet train. The distance between India’s capital and its financial hub— 1,384 km—is almost the same. The fastest train between Delhi and Mumbai, the Rajdhani Express, covers the distance in 16 long hours, clocking an average speed of 90 kmph, a third of the near 300 kmph speed of China’s high-speed trains.

A high-speed rail corridor between Delhi and Mumbai wouldn’t simply slash the time of travel. It would also cut costs. It would make rail travel a near perfect substitute for air travel. Think of the benefits of avoiding the time-consuming hassle of airports. For those still determined to travel by air, it would bring down the cost of a ticket as airlines cut fares to stay in business. There is plenty of evidence in support of that from China. A high-speed railway network could also save India precious foreign exchange on imported jet fuel as more people travel by rail than by air. It could ease the pressure of rapid urbanisation on India’s metropolitan cities by spurring the growth of satellite cities within a 100-150 km radius.

China has already built 10,000 km of dedicated high28 open

speed railway tracks. It has planned a 4+4 high-speed rail network with four separate corridors connecting the North and South of the country and four corridors linking the East and West. India still believes that high-speed trains are a luxury and waste of money.

Sure, high-speed trains are not going to be affordable for many Indians—most cannot even afford the Railways’ Rajdhani or Shatabdi services. But then, neither is air travel ‘affordable’. In fact, the Government treated aviation as a luxury until the 1990s and only a tiny minority of Indians would travel by air—ironically enough, aboard a Stateowned airline. After the 1990s, by investing in aviation— that is, by building more airports, better airports, and by opening the skies to more carriers—the Government has made air travel affordable for millions of more Indians.

Therefore, whether a service is affordable for everyone is a poor basis to make investment decisions.

24 March 2014

India needs to choose once and for all: does it want to keep wallowing in poverty or invest in a wealthy future?

The country will only invest in high-speed trains if it adopts the maxim of the Chinese reformist Deng Xiaoping: ‘To be rich is glorious.’ After all, what seems like a luxury in 2014 may become a necessity in 2034 as India grows rapidly and moves from being a poor country to a middle-income one.

The biggest challenge with infrastructure is to think in advance: India can’t wait to become rich before it invests in world-class infrastructure, including high speed trains. If anything, building that infrastructure now will speed up the transition to prosperity.

High-speed trains aren’t only about faster travel from Delhi to Mumbai. Superfast rail links over shorter distances may actually have significant positive spillover effects that are greater. Consider what might happen if it became possible to travel to a metropolis like Delhi or Mumbai or Bangalore in, say, half an hour from a place 120 km away.

Let’s face it: the prospects of getting a good, well-paying job are still highest in a metropolitan city. But the financial costs of living in a big city (especially housing) and the relatively intangible costs of traffic, pollution and crowds extract a heavy toll. What a high-speed rail link with satellite cities in a radius of 100-150 km could do is enable officegoers to move out of crowded and expensive big cities to smaller towns where real estate would be much less expensive, traffic more manageable and pollution far easier to survive. In sum, you could have a superior quality of life if your job in Delhi or Mumbai were linked by high-speed rail to an urban centre a safe distance away.

Apart from benefits to individuals, such quick mobility would also ease the pressure of urbanisation on big cities by spurring the growth of satellite towns. It will also create jobs in satellite towns as services come up to meet the demands of a new residential population. It’s a win-win situation for all. It would make eminent sense to initiate a set of pilot projects for a high-speed rail system to cover short distances. The costs would be lower, there would be learnings for bigger projects to follow, and the economic benefits would be huge.

The real question is how India must go about setting off a high-speed revolution in a railways system where trains run slower than they did in Germany of the 30s or America of the 50s, or where the new rolling stock that emerges from rail coach factories is of 1980s’ vintage. It will certainly not happen in the labyrinthine corridors of the massive—and usually inert—bureaucracy of the Indian Railways.

So the first step is to keep the Indian Railways out of the high-speed rail project. In any case, it would need separate infrastructure. Special tracks, for example, would have to be laid for such trains. The entire network would have to be access-controlled. You cannot have people or animals straying on to the tracks if safety and on-time efficiency are not to be compromised. Inevitably, there will be a need for new stations as well.

If there has been one public sector undertaking that has served as a role model in recent times, it is the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), which has done an excellent and 24 March 2014

time-bound job of constructing the Delhi Metro, a complicated exercise. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a High Speed Rail Corporation must ape the DMRC in every way.

What it does mean is that the entity that is tasked with constructing the network should be a corporate entity, entirely autonomous in its functioning from the Government, even if the Centre provides most or all of its funds. What it also means is that the head of the corporation, the CEO, should be selected on merit and given a clear mandate to execute the project. By way of accountability, let that be directly to the Prime Minister’s Office and not to the Ministry of Railways. Like the Delhi Metro, the new High Speed Rail Corporation should not hesitate to use the best available technology (incidentally, bullet train technology is not new; it was first used in Japan in the 1960s), even if it means importing it from China, which is the only emerging economy to have built a high-speed rail network so far.

The quantum of money required for a high-speed rail network is much more than for several city Metro projects put together. Where the High Speed Rail Corporation may have to be different from the DMRC is in involving private investors, including foreign investors. But given the risks involved, and the uncertainty of returns, most of the seed money will have to come from the Government. But given the Centre’s precarious fiscal situation, that may take some years to address. The new High Speed Rail Corporation may have to look for innovative means to raise money.

One way could be for the Government to underwrite an offer of bonds to the general public. Why not let the aam investor also partake in this project of national importance?

The prospect of a new corporation challenging the supremacy of the Indian Railways may finally spur the lethargic bureaucracy of Delhi’s Rail Bhavan into action. While high-speed railway travel is important, it need not be restricted to the 300 kmph category. There is a desperate need to upgrade the Rajdhani and Shatabdi Express trains from their current 90 kmph average speed to at least 150 kmph.

This can be done with the existing track infrastructure and current rolling stock and rail engine capacities, provided more technology is deployed to improve safety. Much relief could be provided to travellers with this upgradation.

It is possible to travel between Delhi and Mumbai in 10 hours with minor changes in the existing infrastructure.

It isn’t impossible. All it requires is the mindset of India’s next Government to be on a fast track. n

Dhiraj Nayyar is CEO of Think India Foundation

You could have a superior quality of life if your job in Delhi or Mumbai were linked by high-speed rail to an urban centre a safe distance away

open www.openthemagazine.com 29

idea 5

power

let there be light, always Suresh Prabhu

D

espite all the hype However, micro-mini models alone won’t work in a large country about electrification in relike India. We do need a central cent years, most villages in power grid, but to meet rapidly-risthe country do not have access to ing demand, India needs to generpower supply. To get rid of probate much more power. The current lems plaguing the power sector in capacity of 227,000 MW is too little.

India and ensure uninterrupted The main raw fuel that powers power supply to all, the country India is coal, but domestic supply should stop giving electricity to villages and instead focus on offeris inadequate. Soon, the country ing power supply to villagers. The will be importing 200 million Partha Pal/stock byte/getty images two are not the same. Providing tonnes of coal; imports on this power to each household, not village, should be the target scale put pressure on India’s foreign exchange resources. of the State’s policy. This will set in motion a paradigm shift The country must increase the output of its own coal in the way India looks at electrification. mines. For this, the country must first find a way to share The next big challenge is to offer ‘assured electricity’, or the proceeds of coal mining with locals to avoid the kind of power 24/7. The third aspect to look at is how to provide social unrest we see in Maoist-affected areas. The new govquality electricity: its stability of voltage, its frequency. ernment should also get contractors with access to topUnfortunately, India is one of the world’s few countries notch technology. Coal mines should be awarded to hi-tech where appliances still need voltage stabilisers because of companies that use eco-friendly technologies, yet coal ownership must remain with the Government. quality glitches caused by systemic inefficiencies.

The fourth and the most important aspect is affordabiliAnother fuel that holds potential is gas. To boost gas outty. Electricity should be neither too expensive nor entirely put, policy intervention and technical assistance would be free. Power generation and supply is a business, and those in order. On the whole, energy security must be given top in any business must make a profit. The fifth aspect is how priority by the new government. to generate electricity that does not create other problems.

The Government also needs to examine the ‘plant load For example, coal-generated electricity causes environ- factor’ of each power unit and enhance capacity utilisation. mental hazards, apart from social and political problems. Power distribution also needs a review; much of it remains The above is a five-point agenda that the next power min- commercially unviable. Transmission losses must be istry must pursue to help the country forge ahead. Some of slashed. Commercial viability is crucial all along the supthe steps will yield short-term results while the others will ply chain; all distribution transformers need to act as profshow only long-term impact. it centres. Discipline in monitoring power theft and payTo give electricity to households instead of a region, the ment defaults is of critical importance, too. Besides, power country must overhaul the way it thinks of power produc- sector regulation is key. Regulators at the Centre as well as tion, supply and distribution. India should focus on tap- in the country’s 28 states must fix power tariffs. ping locally-available natural resources, which means loFinally, a framework for most of the required reforms in calised power projects catering to a village or group of the electricity sector is already in place. So the new governvillages—these could be mini hydropower projects, bio- ment should not waste time on new legislation to achieve the aim of round-the-clock power supply. Instead, it should mass, wind-based or solar electricity set-ups.

Such projects have some inherent advantages. You could focus on implementation. bypass the usual obstacles such as land acquisition hassles, ‘Just do it’ should be the policy mantra. n while cutting down on losses, defaults, power theft and related woes. Small projects also allow for a smarter distribuSuresh Prabhu is a member of the Shiv Sena and was India’s tion model, which could slash costs, pilferage and wastage.

Union Power Minister under the NDA Government 30 open

24 March 2014

idea 6

luxury

let’s dress up the shirtless too Ullekh NP

Colin Anderson/photographer’s choice/getty images

O

n her last visit to New Delhi, Annick Jordi had

lunch at Hauz Khas village, an area she loves for its “Boho vibe”. The 41-year-old Swiss entrepreneur and jewellery designer was on a routine business visit to the country of yoga and Lord Krishna, her favourite Hindu deity. An Indophile and businesswoman, Jordi has over the past decade hunted out top-quality gems in Jaipur which she uses in her fine jewellery. She also sources cashmere from Srinagar. In addition, with the help of Indian artisans, Jordi has developed a technique for digital printing on fine silk, which she then combines with pashmina to create one-of-a-kind shawls for sale in Europe. Her jewel32 open

lery pieces and scarves are designed for European buyers and sold mostly through her company’s website and trade shows in Las Vegas and Hong Kong.

“We love the way Indian craftsmen make gold jewellery look rich and ethnic,” affirms Jordi, co-owner of Genevabased Bahina Sarl. She is planning to scale up operations in Kashmir, while continuing with her jewellery manufacturing in Rajasthan and Delhi.

Jordi’s enterprise involves local talent in no small measure, and could be what EMS Natchiappan, Union minister of state for commerce and industry, was referring to in his address as chief guest at the Second India Luxury 24 March 2014

Summit 2014, held last month in Delhi, when he said, “We have got a huge number of artisans who can adapt to any situation and bring out any type of designs, with respect to various patterns of different countries, owing to their inherent capabilities,” adding that all that was required was international exposure.

The luxury industry is growing 30 per cent annually in India, says a KPMG report. With India’s fast-rising count of High Networth Individuals (HNIs)—the country’s dollar billionaires grew from nine in 2004 to 55 in 2013—the luxury industry has shown no sign of a slowdown. Currently pegged at $8.5 billion, India’s luxury market is expected to touch $14 billion in just two years, driven by increased spending on high-end apparel, fashion accessories, jewellery, fine dining, home decor, spas, concierge services, hotels and assets such as yachts, art and private jets. This last segment grew 25 per cent in 2012, despite an overall slump of 10 per cent in car sales across India.

According to the KPMG report, it is not just the super-rich who make high-value purchases; the growing number of urban ‘upper-middle-class aspirers’, who see luxury goods as symbols of having ‘arrived’, will soon form the bulk of the consumer base. So, in 2013, when BMW launched a new entry-level automobile at Rs 21 lakh and Moet Hennessy launched its first Indian-made wine, it was these buyers they had in mind.

The rapid emergence of this customer group also accounts for an uptrend in footfalls recorded by luxury malls such as Palladium in Mumbai, DLF Emporio in Delhi and UB City in Bengaluru, even as more such malls come up in Ludhiana and Chennai.

It’s not only the big names in Indian fashion such as Ritu Kumar, JJ Valaya, Rohit Bal and Sabyasachi Mukherjee who stand to gain. Bag-maker Judith Leiber— who makes the glittering little metal clutches seen in the hands of US First Ladies on Inauguration Day—had a field day in Indore where a trunk show sold over a record 60 pieces in a day, with average prices well over Rs 1 lakh.

So it is perhaps not surprising that the number of global luxury brands coming to India has grown exponentially over the past few years. Last week, a delegation of senior executives from American luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue arrived in India for talks with the Aditya Birla Group, which owns the Collective chain of multi-brand luxury stores that have recently begun retailing the work of fashion doyenne Vivienne Westwood and Savile-Row suit-makers Hardy Amies, among others. Other multi-brand retail chains include Kitsch, owned by TSG’s Charu Sachdev who retails Alexander McQueen and Diane von Furstenberg; Genesis Luxury, which retails Jimmy Choo and Armani; and Ethos Group, which retails the world’s top watch brands such as Breguet, Carl F Bucherer and Jaeger leCoultre across India.

All the consumer frenzy translates to increased employment in the sector. Brands need trained staff for retail services, concierges, marketing, brand management and customer care; luxury consultancy firm Luxury Connect has estimated that this segment alone will need roughly 1.76 million employees by 2022. To tap this ‘people market’, the firm has an education wing that conducts programmes on luxury brand management, luxury retail operations and luxury visual merchandising in collaboration with the SDA Bocconi School of Management, based in Italy.

Tourism, too, stands to benefit substantially. Luxury hotel majors such as ITC, Taj, Oberoi, Leela and the Lalit Group have been expanding operations across the country, and foreign chains such as JW Marriott, Lebua, Dusit Devrana and Ritz-Carlton too have made Indian forays in the past few years. The Luxury Trains, a consolidated entity that serves as the general sales agent for Palace on Wheels and Deccan Odyssey trains, among others, has also recently gone tied up with Rocky Mountaineer in Canada and set up sales offices in the US and Switzerland besides India to cater to foreign tourists looking for authentic Indian luxury.

Yoga and spa retreats are also going luxe—besides Ananda in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand, Bengaluru offers several such getaways for wellbeing tourism—Dr Mathai’s Soukya, Jindal’s Naturecure and the Shreyas retreat being a few high-end examples.

With greater consumer focus on personal grooming, Indian entrepreneurs have also spotted opportunity in the luxury beauty segment, coming up with brands like Kama Ayurveda and Forest Essentials, both of which retail only at upmarket malls and markets.

The wedding industry is another burgeoning space for entrepreneurs; from event décor, photographers, florists to banquet facilities, and even magazines, the wedding market—expected to grow at over 25 per cent per year—has plenty of room for new talent and revenue generation. An important part of this industry, jewellery is also on a roll. According to an AT Kearney study last year, the domestic gems and jewellery industry is likely to double by 2018 due to growing demand, outperforming the growth in textiles and apparel production.

The importance of an industry that is unaffected by downturns in the rest of the economy cannot be overstated. By luring investors, it keeps commerce humming in assorted ancilliary industries and service sectors; even as other sectors suffer a payroll crunch, job opportunities in the luxury industry continue to expand.

Marie Antoinette may not have foreseen any such ripple effect when she made her “let them eat cake” remark, but in India at this point in history, sweet indulgences spell quick bucks for all—from the flour supplier and baker to the packager and delivery boy. Bon appétit. n

All the consumer frenzy translates to increased employment in the sector. Brands need trained staff for retail services, concierges, marketing, et al

24 March 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 33

idea 7

skills

the kinetic force of whizkids S Ramadorai

I

n today’s world, the job market is increasingly being redefined by specific skills to suit the global market. It is estimated that 75 per cent of new job opportunities created in India will be skill-based. In a country where more than 90 per cent of the workforce is in the informal sector, this task is immense. There is an urgency to cultivate India’s human capital into a skilled and productive workforce that can match international standards of quality and productivity. The enormous size of India’s working population has heightened this urgency. By 2026 around 64 per cent of India’s population is expected to be in the age bracket of 15-59 years with only 13 per cent of the total aged above 60 years. This rise in number of workers relative to dependents is set to provide India with a window of opportunity to increase domestic production and savings.

The Government is responding by improving and expanding access to vocational education and training opportunities. Addressing the legacies of the past is a challenge, but can be overcome provided everybody is aligned to a single vision—catalysing the creation of jobs and increasing the pool of skilled people who will get quality jobs at higher wages. The current effort, therefore, is to define the vision, create the enablers, identify and connect the dots and align them in a manner where every effort is maximised and duplication avoided at all costs.

To achieve this vision the Government must play the role of enabler especially in bringing stakeholders together.

Rather than being ‘inputs’ oriented the shift being made today is towards being ‘output’ oriented. The language has shifted from ‘training’ to ‘employability’. Government schemes are adding a 70 per cent placement clause in their partnerships with training providers. Supply and Demand side issues are being addressed too.

From the Supply side perspective, vocational education has acquired a negative connotation; it is seen as the second option by youth. However, making it an attractive pathway to career progression is imperative for India’s growth. Several parallel efforts are being made to address this issue. A national advocacy campaign is to be launched soon by National Skill Development Corp (NSDC). Reward and recognition measures such as participation in the World Skills Competition and launch of the STAR scheme 34 open

are drawing youth attention. Community Colleges are being piloted to integrate Vocational education into mainstream education. Addressing the heart of the problem is the launch of the National Skills Qualification Framework, which will create an equivalence mechanism between vocational education and academic education.

On the Demand side, it is imperative for Industry to take a lead in training potential employees. The formation of the Sector Skill Councils is enabling practitioners from industry determine curricula for training and develop occupation standards for all-India adoption. Assessments and certification processes are being streamlined, the empanelment of agencies is being scrutinised and a digital database is being created by NSDC. One big challenge is lack of trained faculty. Here again Industry must take the lead in encouraging their serving and retired employees to lead capacity development of faculty. Preliminary efforts are being made in this direction. Similarly faculty from educational institutions must be allowed sabbaticals which allow them to work with enterprises and experience real world problems so that they bring in these into classroom teaching.

Technology needs to be leveraged. NSDC, through its SSCs, is developing a sector-specific focus linked to a national Learning Management Information System, which will serve as a one-stop shop for all information available on the Indian labour market. It will have the ability to collect, process, analyse and disseminate labour market information.

As is evident, India’s skill development landscape is witnessing momentous changes. An institutional framework has been laid at a national level, and the private isector must participate. Skill Development Missions are being created at state government level and 17 Central ministries have taken on skill initiatives. Much will depend on effective implementation of schemes at the grassroots level.

Collaboration between the Government, private sector, educational institutions and NGOs is necessary if India is to use its large labour pool to propel the country forward. n S Ramadorai, vice-chairman of TCS, is chairman of the National Skill Development Agency, and a former advisor to the PM as a member of the National Council on Skill Development 24 March 2014

idea 8

defence

armed at home Robert S Metzger

S

ince 2010, India has been the world’s largest arms im-

porter. Between 2007 and 2012, it accounted for 12 per cent of the world’s arms purchases. In 2013, the country spent half of its defence procurement budget of $13.4 billion on purchases of military equipment from foreign sellers. The results of this spending are disappointing. The first purpose of defence spending is to reinforce the nation’s military capabilities. Here, far less has been achieved than desired or needed. Each of India’s military services remains under-equipped and modernisation remains more an aspiration than an accomplishment. This is troubling because India’s security challenge is daunting.

India has not accomplished much in reducing its dependence on foreign suppliers either. Even domestically produced equipment relies on a high proportion of foreign content. Its newly-inducted Tejas light combat aircraft—30 years in gestation—could not be brought into service with the indigenous Kaveri engine as planned. Instead, the initial version uses the F404 powerplant bought from the USbased General Electric and the planned more-capable version of the Tejas will use an updated GE F414 engine.

India’s domestic defence manufacturing base remains dominated by eight public sector undertakings, 40 ordnance factories and 50 national laboratories. Largely shielded from market pressures, these units are beset with chronic inefficiencies that drain public resources. The country’s ‘offset policy’ requires foreign sellers to purchase (from an Indian firm) or re-invest 30 per cent (in India) of the price it pays for equipment they sell. There is unquestionably a price premium paid for articles subject to the offset requirement. And while its Ministry of Defence reports 23 offset contracts worth more than $4.5 billion, only a small fraction has resulted in productive activity in India so far.

What India needs is a vibrant and competitive defence industrial base. For this, a new government must: Attract foreign investment: India can secure foreign technology with the lure of an estimated $150 billion defence system market over the next five years. But worldclass foreign companies need to be confident of returns on investment. Today’s effective limit of 26 per cent on FDI in the sector should be raised to at least 49 per cent.

End corruption: If India is to attract reputable international companies to build an indigenous defence industry, 36 open

it will need to minimise their legal and reputational risks.

Public scandals also have a paralytic impact on defence purchases as well as equipment maintenance.

Formulate a long-term military-industrial strategy: Better coordination among military services and between them and the Ministry are key here. The strategy should focus less on high-end systems and more on supply chain competencies of high global standards.

Privatise public sector units: India has failed to put these under competitive pressure from private firms. This being the case, the Government should look at their privatisation as a way to raise their performance levels.

Facilitate private sector initiatives: It is too difficult for new defence industries to get up and running in India. The permits regime is opaque if not contradictory, bureaucratic delays are a given, getting land is difficult, and the power and infrastructure back-up is unreliable. Fix these.

Rework the Defence Procurement Policy: despite India’s avowed objective of achieving transparency, its approach to military purchases is rule-bound and a source of frustration to all parties. Civil service rules should change to improve the training and expertise of the acquisition work force, and the procurement process should reward innovation, quality and performance. India should abandon the antiquated notion that selection of sources for complex articles should turn on the lowest bid price, opting for ‘best value’ over a product lifecycle instead. The offset policy must liberalise its restrictive rules on qualifying supplies and eligible services to discharge offset requirements.

Clarify and rationalise licensing and tax decisions: India must relieve new ventures of unpredictable or indecipherable licensing rules and uncertain taxes.

Given the skills of India’s workforce, it is a conundrum that its indigenous defence industry is so badly off. Given the determination, India can reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers and build a defence industrial base that will employ many and contribute to its economic growth. n Robert S Metzger is a lawyer with Rogers Joseph O’Donnell, PC, based in Washington DC. He advises US and international companies on aerospace and defence matters, is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, and also a guest lecturer at George Washington University Law School 24 March 2014

idea 9

ART

Project 88 and raqs media collective

opening up to art Waiting, 2013 Raqs Media Collective LED lights, ACP, crystals, acrylic, word and electricity 47 x 17 x 5 inches

a MUSEUM FOR THE TASTE OF THE NATION Riyas Komu

I

n a country reeling under multiple crises, it is not sur-

prising that art has been relegated to an afterthought in the larger scheme of things. Yet, art offers a chance to unify a country and revitalise its economy in a way few can imagine. This a call-to-action for the future.

As an artist, one of my concerns is the way the Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA) is being run. In his inaugural speech, India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had said, “The Akademi must work to preserve the glorious traditions of the past and enrich them by the work of our modern artists. It must also seek to improve standards and refine public taste...”

The ideas of India’s early leaders who dreamt of a unified nation were supported by several artists, writers and musicians. Red-tapism and political interference have narrowed the LKA’s imagination and stultified its mission. The Indian 38 open

Triennial, started in 1968, was among the world’s first international art projects, but was soon buried thanks to the ineptitude of the LKA. Such exhibition models must be revived. “I feel I am an Indian only when I travel with my work to be part of a national exhibition in Delhi,” an LKA member from Dimapur told me when I was on a visit to Kohima, Nagaland. Like Nehru and Azad believed, art can instill national pride and generate feelings of inclusiveness.

Other good ideas have been ignored too. In 1972, the Union Ministry of Works & Housing issued a memorandum asking for works of art to be installed in all public buildings, with a budget of up to of 2 per cent of the construction cost. It was not implemented.

If India were to accord art the importance it deserves, it would inspire new modes of thinking, expand imaginations, and make India far more innovative than it is.

24 March 2014

Art education is crucial. Schools must lay emphasis on art as a visual language, and avenues for those with higher education need to be wider. Fine art students in India spend five-seven years in art institutions; yet, most end up in applied disciplines on the payrolls of advertising agencies, animation studios and other ‘asylums’ as I call them. Only about 5 per cent of our fine-art students continue doing what they want, but this is a huge risk with no potential payoff. India needs institutions, artist studios, residencies and other spaces for artists to come together, work and engage with other professionals. One of India’s good artist residency models is to be found at Khoj International. The Department of Culture should support such initiatives.

Museums need attention, too. State-run museums shy away from the responsibility of being ‘archivers of time, history and heritage’, and this makes it harder to preserve the country’s artistic heritage. While Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) is good, it needs reform: a new model in appointing its director, with curators and art historians appointed at different centres, and a talent nurturing programme. In offering contemporary art education, lessons may be taken from Mumbai’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, which is doing a fine job.

To generate funds for all those revival initiatives, perhaps the Government should impose a tax on sales of artworks that would be used for the purpose.

Until then, a heartening phenomenon is the rise and relevance of private museums—the Devi Art Foundation, Kiran Nader Museum of Art and the Coimbatore Centre for Contemporary Arts, to name a few that must be acknowledged for their support of art.

Today, art in India survives thanks to galleries. Any gallerist in India would tell you that the country needs to encourage collectors, institutions and museums to make better decisions and investments. Rules and regulations need reform as well. Recently, at the India Art Fair in Delhi, I heard a foreign gallerist say, “I will never come back to India to show the art I deal with.” I am told this is the general sentiment among most participating foreign gallerists.

It is a question of the Government’s attitude towards art.

Many countries in the Middle East zealously buy and promote art as a means to promote their culture, while India seems apathetic to its own treasures.

Can art make a difference? If history is any precedent, then the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’ These examples go beyond art for art’s sake. It’s art for our sake. For the sake of future generations that are at risk of living lives without a grounding in India’s own history, culture and heritage.

The effects of an art revival on the country’s creativity may take time to show, but there are some results that may be counted upon in the short-term. Take the ‘Bilbao Effect’: this is the story of how a city’s vision of building a museum changed the entire cultural and economic dynamics of the city. Architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, built in 1997, did more than revitalise this Spanish city; it spawned an entire tourism and cultural subculture. Now Bilbao is among the most visited places in Spain.

In India, how Agra’s local economy is sustained by the 24 March 2014

Taj Mahal is also a subject worth studying. For a recent effort, take the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, whose energy and verve has done the local economy of Kochi a favour.

Though not comparable to the ‘Bilbao Effect’, by granting artists an independent experimental space, the biennale has put this ‘sleepy town’ in Kerala on the world’s art map, with knock-on effects visible in its commercial life.

What will count for most, however, is in the realm of thoughts. Artists are forever on the lookout for alternate models. Recently, a new ‘travelling project’ by Raqs Media Collective titled Insert, which was shown at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Arts and Culture in Delhi, refocused attention on the idea of the ‘artist as a generator of ideas who questions things the world takes for granted’. At a time when the capital city was held hostage by ‘protest politics’, such projects take art back into the realm of radical ideas for societal change. They also reflect the inadequacies of today’s ‘reactionary politics’ by posing a multi-pronged attack on one’s sensibilities. While projects like Insert should be supported and seen as a celebration of what political art can do in India, they ought to adopt a coherent and well-defined exhibition approach, in better spaces, to ensure that these ideas aren’t lost and that idea generation stays at the heart of the exercise.

And I believe it is the collective responsibility of artists, writers, thinkers, museums, biennales and triennials to offer fundamental art education on where we stand. But to realise this potential, the country needs to deepen its understanding of how art impacts values; for it is these that shape the way we look at and understand the world. It is the frame through which we construct the stories that are important to us, and create things that are motivated by more than profit.

It is important to break the notion that art is about money. We need to develop better forums to discuss relevant projects on prominent issues. India has great knowledge and ideas floating around but needs to channelise them to encourage better conversations, exhibitions and experimental possibilities. It’s important to understand the diverse character of the country and work accordingly to develop new models.

One of the main problems this country faces is that most people see art only as ‘something different’. Art is a continuum in which we all participate, with which we all engage.

Art is as much a unifier of societies as economies are. n

The country needs to deepen its understanding of how art impacts values; for it is these that shape the way we look at and understand the world

Riyas Komu is a Mumbai-based artist. He is co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s first international art biennale open www.openthemagazine.com 39

idea 10

HAPPINESS

smile and move on please Chitra Jha Olena Chernenko/vetta/getty images

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n 1972, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, sovereign ruler of the

Himalayan kingdom Bhutan, declared his intent to increase his country’s ‘Gross National Happiness’. This was in accordance with Bhutan’s original governance code of 1729, which categorically proclaimed: ‘If a government cannot create happiness for its people, there is no purpose for the government to exist.’

A lot of water (and happiness) has flown since from the mighty Himalayan peaks. In the past four decades, tiny Bhutan has proved what its focus on the happiness of its citizens is worth; so much so that the world’s most powerful and economically sound nations are beginning to look at the economics of happiness. Many world forums have instituted various surveys to assess and capture it: the ‘Gross Happiness Index’, ‘Global Happiness Ranking’, ‘Annual World Happiness Report’, ‘Happy Planet Index’, etcetera. Each of these surveys follows a different methodology that measures different parameters of happiness. As a result, the published lists do not always show the same rank for a particular country. However, India invariably finds itself at or near the bottom of most such lists.

40 open

Not that I need a list to tell me how happy we Indians are, collectively, but seeing this sad truth in black-and-white hurts my sensibilities (and happiness). I feel disturbed about my country’s image in the eyes of citizens of other countries, and fear their reflected judgment heaped upon me as an Indian.

As a holistic healer and life coach, I understand that happiness is an ‘inside job’. No one can make me happy or unhappy. It is only my ‘perception’ of how something is that causes me to be happy or unhappy. Having said that, I also understand that there are some triggers that press my happiness or unhappiness buttons; and there are a lot of such triggers in my beloved country.

I often wonder if it is fair to put the onus of my happiness on my country’s government, and the answer is always ambiguous: I dilly-dally between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’. If I can’t even ensure my own personal happiness at all times, how can a government ensure the happiness of one billion people plus? It seems like a herculean task.

The task is herculean because successive governments have neglected common citizens (and their happiness) for 24 March 2014

centuries. Whatever hope we had of our own brethren in exalted offices of power, too, has been shattered time and again. In 2014, we find ourselves in a space where unhappiness triggers weigh upon every aspect of our lives.

I do not wish to dwell on what has got us to this sad state of affairs. The optimist and activist in me would like to focus on how we cannot go any lower than this, with India scoring so poorly on happiness, and so how the only way forth is upwards.

What makes me so optimistic? Well, there are several reasons. But the foremost of them is the present political environment, which has been shaken to the core by some players. India’s General Election of 2014 will change the face of this country’s polity. Of this, there is little doubt.

What (unasked for) advice would a person like me offer the country’s new government? Well, I would invite it to take a look at all the triggers of unhappiness and happiness, and decide for itself how it could minimise the former and maximise the latter.

Let me list my triggers. These may not be exhaustive but are indicative enough: Triggers for Unhappiness n Fear: in any form, this is a big trigger. In fact, happiness cannot co-exist with fear. As a nation, we live with fear for our women, men and children. We are fearful that if we voice our disapproval, we will be labelled, ostracised, or even killed. We fear that the hard-earned money we pay in taxes will be looted or wasted. We fear that justice will be either delayed or denied. n Lack of basic amenities and poor infrastructure n Biases of race, caste, sex, class, age and disability, resulting in social and economic inequities n Illness n Lack of opportunity n Natural or manmade disasters n Uncertainties and anxieties Triggers for Happiness

n Perceived freedom to make life choices: we need the per

sonal space to be who we are and do what we love to do.

The loss of this freedom generates negative emotions. n Safety and security n Fulfillment of basic needs: a function of our perceived well-being and comfort n Health n Opportunities for growth n Love for fellow beings/ environment/ nature/nation n Self-respect and mutual respect n Pride in one’s work n Social equity n Value system n Courtesy in interactions n Helpful attitudes n Support of fellow beings n Supportive systems n Generosity n Gratefulness 24 March 2014

n Forgiveness n Festivity

n Purposefulness in life n Freedom from debt

The role of governance in ensuring happiness has a broader context as well. As an old dictum has it, ‘Yatha raja, tatha praja’ (as the king, so the people). So the country’s rulers, even as they act on their mandate as the people’s elected representatives, must lead by personal examples of honesty, empathy and transparency, in addition to honouring the above-listed happiness triggers in their own lives, interactions and fields of influence. They will have to let go of coteries, corruption, sycophancy, nepotism and the politics of self-interest and entitlement. Existing systems need to be overhauled, laws need to be simplified, speedy justice needs to be delivered, the environment needs to be protected, and lives need to be respected. It can be done. As the Father of our Nation said, “There is enough in this world for everyone’s need but not enough for even one man’s greed.”

The new government will have to find innovative ways to shift the balance of triggers. To set the process in motion, it must encourage self- introspection at large. Introducing meditation or silent contemplation, in every area and at every level, could work as a transformative tool.

How will this help economic growth? It is very simple. You don’t need to be an economist to understand that happy people are more productive, receptive, cooperative and energetic. Every economy is dependent on the exchange of what human energy produces, and expands in direct proportion to the energy, ideas and desires of human beings. The happiness of a country’s citizens, thus, can uplift an economy.

Bhutan has already set an example. The current economic thought process tells us that we have to be wealthier and gain better access to goods and services to be happy, but the truth is that when we are happy abundance follows in its wake. Let us not put the cart before the bullock. Let us make happiness a valuable driver of the economy.

That is how India can become a Sone Ki Chidiya once again, as envisioned by Rajendra Krishan’s lyrics of this song from the 1940 film Sikander-e-Azam: ‘Jahan daal daal par sone ki chidiya karti hai basera, woh Bharat desh hai mera; Jahan Satya, Ahimsa, aur Dharam ka pag pag lagta dera, Woh Bharat desh hai mera’n

The new government must encourage selfintrospection at large.

Introducing meditation or silent contemplation at all levels could work as a transformative tool

Chitra Jha is an author, holistic healer, relationship educator and self-transformation coach open www.openthemagazine.com 41

Erik De Castro/REUTERS

foreign correspondent | Jason Burke

WILL HISTORY TOO RETREAT? Warning as American Troops Withdraw: Modernise Afghanistan at Your Own Peril

homeward bound US soldiers wait to catch a flight back home from Afghanistan

T

he attack came at night, and so

swiftly that many of the defenders died in their beds. Twenty one soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA) were killed and several more taken prisoner. Then the insurgents disappeared, leaving the base and melting back into the steep forested hills of the northeastern province of Kunar. The strike was one of the deadliest in recent years on the Afghan military.

A day later, Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security said it had warned provincial security forces and local administrators that an assault on military outposts in the area was being planned.

According to the BBC, intercepts of

24 March 2014

phone conversations between soldiers and militants earlier in February indicated that attackers had been assisted by sympathisers inside the ANA. Then, almost inevitably, came the charge of crossborder assistance from within Pakistan. Ghazibad, the district where the attack took place, lies on the frontier. Northeast Afghanistan has long been a base for groups with support networks in the neighbouring state.

The nature of the attack, the apparent strength of the insurgents, the possibility of crossborder links all reinforced the argument of pessimists in the ongoing debate on the future of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of international

forces later this year. Many analysts point out how similar the current situation in Afghanistan is to the time of the Soviet withdrawal 25 years ago. Then Moscow withdrew its forces after ten years of bloody efforts to bolster the regime of its choice in the fragmented, rugged country. The fragile set-up they left behind lasted only a few years as the country descended into violent chaos.

The consequences are well-known: massive destruction, exodus and loss of life, the rise of the Taliban, the creation of a haven for the Al Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. The question the attack in Kunar posed once again is: are we now watching history repeat itself?

The Soviets spent huge sums, raised a local army (which did much of the fighting against the mujahideen) and built up local figures to safeguard their interests before they were forced, through war weariness and an economy crisis, to withdraw.

Their impact was massive, at least in the cities. In ten years, their intervention wrought huge social changes— bringing miniskirts to Kabul as part of a new and relatively liberal urban culture, reinforcing a process of the creation of Westernised bureaucratic cadres, creating a new technocratic class too, as well as a war economy, and even collective farms. Out in the rural areas, the war led to massive destruction, the collapse of the traditional tribal system and accompanying social hierarchies as well as the spread of new Islamist ideologies and identities in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. Many of these legacies—though not the miniskirts— remain. The armoured personnel carriers which littered the gorges between Jalalabad and Kabul when I used to drive in from Peshawar were simply the more obvious relics of a conflict that had left many scars.

Some parallels with the situation now are obvious. President Hamid Karzai owed his accession to power, and his longevity as president, largely to open www.openthemagazine.com 43

Washington. Mohammed Najibullah owed his to Moscow, though, like Karzai, he did not always do his paymasters’ bidding. Karzai’s successor will be determined by an election which may or may not be free or fair, and will also rely on international (that is, largely US) support to run the country. Any Afghan leader will be mindful of Najibullah’s eventual fate, hanged from a lamp post in central Kabul.

Like that of the Soviets, the US intervention has had a huge impact, and also one that has been much greater in the cities than rural areas. Washington has spent more than $90 billion on reconstruction and relief in Afghanistan.

There are some notable achievements: the vast bulk of refugees forced overseas by the civil war have returned, there has been a surge in the number of children enrolled for school and a sharp decline in the rates of infant or maternal mortality, and the country’s economy, albeit from a tiny base and fuelled by a boom based on overseas aid, expenditure and cash from narcotics, has grown rapidly. Travelling through Taliban-run Afghanistan in the late 1990s might have been relatively safe but it was also extremely depressing: there was almost no economic activity, whole regions were effectively depopulated, non-Pashtun ethnic minorities were persecuted, healthcare was largely non-existent, and there was no hope of a better life. Now, perhaps paradoxically, there is a more general lack of security, but more optimism.

governments and aid organisations will have to find new ways of making the large sums of cash they have become used to. The US Congress just decided to give ‘only’ $1.1 billion in assistance to Afghanistan, a substantial enough sum but still only half the amount sought by the Obama administration. There is one significant difference with 1989, however. Then the Afghan economy was in dire condition. Now it has enjoyed years of boom and is connected to that of the Gulf, the Middle East more generally, Central Asia and elsewhere.

Others worry about internal politics.

Even if the presidential election sched-

I

uled on 5 April goes relatively well, Afghanistan’s institutions remain weak, corrupt and over-centralised. It is far from certain that they can sustain the pressures that will come as factions, communities and rapacious powerbrokers fight for influence. Najibullah was able to exploit tensions among his enemies, though failed to build himself a solid powerbase. Karzai’s successor will also have to divide and rule, all while containing centrifugal forces that have so often caused so many problems and reinvigorating a process aimed at drawing as many insurgents away from violence through ‘reconciliation’.

The biggest concern for most, inside and outside Afghanistan alike, is the se-

s that optimism justified? Most ana-

lysts outline three scenarios—a nightmare of chaotic violence as rival groups return to all-out civil war, incremental progress towards stability and prosperity, or, finally, a mixture of the first two scenarios with chaotic violence and islands of relative calm coexisting.

The Afghan economy worries some most. Perhaps only 10 per cent of the vast international spend is ‘sustainable’, studies have concluded, so the impact of the drawdown will be very heavy. The inflated property prices in Kabul will decline further, the new shopping centres will be suddenly deserted. All those whose income depended on licit and illicit businesses linked to foreign militaries, 44 open

curity situation—the ongoing civil war.

Some raise the prospect of the Taliban, like the mujahideen in the 1990s, successfully ousting a central government within five years of the international withdrawal. They point out that civilian casualties are on the rise—2,959 deaths and 5,656 injured in 2013—as is the military death toll which may be as high as 400 per month. They see no reason why there should be any improvement once tens of thousands of heavily-armed, wellfunded, well-fed, well-trained US troops have gone. Others dismiss this as nonsense, arguing that it was the presence of those foreign troops which led to much

Omar Sobhani/REUTERS

A brittle situation An Afghanistan National Army soldier looks through the broken windshield of a car in Kunar. Twenty one soldiers died in a Taliban attack in this town on 23 February

of the insurgency, that most local warlords and insurgents are effectively local mafia bosses who are primarily interested in protecting their local interests, that though fighting has been bloody in recent months, the government has retaken any lost ground and that ANA troops now fight because in most places there are no international soldiers around to do all the heavy lifting.

Taliban commanders, says one international security official who spends six months a year in Afghanistan, have a life expectancy of around nine months; this alone is a significant disincentive to recruits. Nor, say the optimists, has substantial involvement of elements within the Pakistani security establishment brought 24 March 2014

an end to endemic factional infighting, nor assured tactical success on the battlefields. Continuing technical innovations in areas such as bomb-making, where advice from Pakistan-based groups appears to have been instrumental in increasing the lethality of devices customarily deployed by the insurgents, has brought little benefit to the insurgents, and suicide bombing continues to alienate the broader population. Even the significant funds possessed by the Taliban— their operations in Helmand alone are estimated to gain them at least $150 million yearly of their total income approaching half a billion dollars—has not led to victory. The Taliban remain almost exclusively Pashtun, unlike the multiethnic mujahideen of the 1980s and are thus limited to more or less the areas they now dominate or contest: the south, east and some of the north. The chances of insurgents taking Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad or Mazar-e-Sharif, analysts say, are slim.

Some mention the bloody failure of the attempt by the combined forces of several mujahideen factions, bolstered by Arab volunteers, to capture Jalalabad in 1989 as an example of what happens when irregular fighters attempt a conventional operation. A ‘soft’ or ‘informal’ takeover of Kandahar is more likely however, they admit, though much depends on the exact number of troops the US leaves behind under a Bilateral Security Agreement that Karzai’s successor will almost certainly sign.

But what optimists and pessimists agree on is that, if the Afghan National Army can just about hold the line against the insurgents now, they cannot if their funding from the US is cut off. And this does indeed look very much like the postSoviet scenario. The pessimists emphasise that Najibullah’s fall came once Moscow’s subsidies, which allowed him to pay for his troops and pay off some of the mujahideen factions, stopped coming.

But, say the optimists, there are again huge differences. Not only is the US in 2014 very different from the USSR in 1991 in economic terms, there are many other powers locally who might step in.

Russia, as the expenditure on the Sochi Olympics showed, can find funds when necessary. India is both more wealthy and prepared to make commitments overseas that would have seemed incon24 March 2014

ceivable in the early 1990s.

B

ut if historical parallels are often

misleading, historic lessons may still be useful. One is that attempts to ‘modernise’ Afghanistan and centralise power will always provoke significant resistance, some of which will be violent.

Women’s education and ‘rights’ will continue to be important flashpoints—as they were in the 1920s, when rebellions led to the fall of King Amanullah, and in the late 1970s when brutal attempts to impose a radical Marxist-Leninist model including schooling for girls and land reforms sparked the unrest which eventually led to the Soviet invasion to bolster the crumbling Communist regime in Afghanistan. The grassroots resistance to the US-led international effort

President Hamid Karzai owed his accession to power and his longevity as president largely to Washington. Mohammed Najibullah owed his to Moscow and Karzai’s rule from conservative rural areas may have been primarily from Pashtun tribes, but this does not indicate any great liberalism on such touchstone cultural issues on the part of other ethnic communities, at least outside urban areas. One important lesson from the last decade is that individuals and communities fight for many reasons, but ranking high among them is the sense that they are defending a traditional, customary way of life. Western strategists who insisted that development and employment alone would undermine the insurgency missed this crucial point.

The crucial question of funding the military reveals another of the few certain elements in the current scenario.

Since British rule made it impossible for Afghan rulers to cross the mountains and

raid the fertile zones of the Indus, Punjab and, more rarely, the Indo-Gangetic plains, successive Afghan rulers—the ‘Iron Emir’ Abdur Rahman, Zahir Shah, Daoud, Najibullah, Karzai—have exploited their country’s greatest resource—its strategic position—to extract the material support from competing powers they need to run their patronage networks. The hardline conservatives and violent Islamist extremists have used the country’s importance as a battleground in the supposed cosmic battle between good and evil, right and wrong, faith and unbelief, the Islamic world and the ‘Crusader-Zionist-Hindu’ alliance to draw in resources from another international community that sees Afghanistan as having huge strategic significance.

This strategy continues to dominate. The British may be gone, but raids on the lowlands are still difficult to envisage for even the most excitable local decisionmaker. Afghanistan is still to develop a significant indigeneous source of revenue beyond narcotics. Nor is it likely to for many decades. This means that any future ruler—the winner of the April election and his successors—will continue to play the centuries-old game of playing off rival neighbours, regional powers and international players against one another.

In 2006, while on patrol with a British unit, I stopped to talk with an old man in a lane in the town of Lashkar Gah. In broken Urdu, he listed the different armies he had seen on the streets: Royal Afghan, Communist Afghan, Soviet, Afghan auxiliaries operating with the Soviets, different mujahideen groups, US and British. A few hours later, I was talking to Taliban commanders in a mechanic shop near the bazaar. The British are now on their way out of ‘Lash’, as the soldiers call it.

Afghans of all factions will now contest control of the battered concrete bazaar, the mud-walled homes, the orchards and fields, the desert wastes around. A final historical lesson must surely be that it is unlikely that no other army will find itself on the old man’s list—or perhaps his son’s or even grandson’s—in the years and decades to come. n Jason Burke is the South Asia correspondent of the Guardian, the author of The 9/11 Wars and On the Road to Kandahar, and has been reporting on Afghanistan since 1998 open www.openthemagazine.com 45

2014

Money

Outlook

WATCH YOUR MONEY

I

t is time again for hard choices. It is time again to sit back, take a deep breath and ask ourselves this question: how idle are our savings? Is our money well invested? Or

is our money in lazy hands because of our neglect?

Plain bank savings have been a losing proposition these past few years, with

Av e n u e s inflation rates running higher than interest rates paid on deposits. Even a fixed deposit earning an annual 8% leaves you effectively with just the same money if retail inflation runs at the same rate. Other fixed-income instruments such as bonds and debentures have suffered the same problem: you get back money that has barely kept pace with the rise in price levels. However, change is in the air. Now that the Reserve Bank of India has signalled a clear intent to fight inflation as its top priority, and if the next government at the Centre endorses the RBI’s anti-inflation stance, it will make good sense to return to the safety of debt as an investment option: not just FDs and so on, but also other bonds that are highly rated on safety.

What everyone needs is a balance of safety and return, of debt and equity. While debt could soon be viable again as an option, one should not miss out on the opportunities of multiplying one’s money faster with equity investments. Stockmarkets are on a roll these days, and foreign institutional investors (FIIs) are reported to be especially active in this rally—in expectation of a positive shift in India’s business and economic outlook after the upcoming General Election. This is therefore a speculative rally and short-term gains are available to all participants willing to ‘time’ themselves to the rally’s rhythm and bear the risk of expectations being belied.

For those who do not have the nerve to make gains off a speculative rally, equity is still a good long term bet—at least in the stocks of well chosen companies that deliver dividends even as they gain in market value on the strength of superior performance. To identify these, do not get carried away by

short-term swings, for this may represent speculative interest and nothing more. Keep track of your target companies’ performance in their actual field of business, assess their expansion prospects, and then see if their shares we priced appropriately (in a rally, many quickly get overpriced). To check what the share costs, an absolute rupee price is meaningless. Look instead at its price-earnings or P/E ratio. The lower the ratio, in general, the cheaper the stock.

A ratio of above 19 is usually seen as too high a price to pay, unless the company is growing furiously. If you want to hold on to this company’s stock for a share of its profits year after year (without selling your holdings off), you must also look at the company’s dividend yield.

The higher, the better.

Any yield above 2% is good. So long as your chosen companies are faring well, this formula can serve you well on a ten- or 20year horizon.

Making your own choices can sometimes be taxing. It takes effort, energy and vigilance: you must keep track of all news available that could affect your portfolio. If you are too busy, you may need to delegate the task to financial experts whose job is to make your money multiply. There are mutual funds and retirement plans offered by insurers that can do this for you. Needless to say, even these demand that you make choices with due care. What is safe and what is too risky is something only you can decide, and since most of these deals have a lock-in period, it is best to pay diligent attention to past records and current expertise. Better information can make the hardest of choices easier if not easy. n

Av e n u e s

LIC Nomura: Systematic Investment Plan W

e all have dreams and financial goals for which we work day in and day out. But the fact is that we have to plan well in advance and save money to make these dreams a reality. Investing in Mutual Funds can help achieve your goals. Mutual Funds offer various schemes based on the investment objective and risk appetite of the investor. Further, an SIP or Systematic Investment Plan offers

the opportunity to save and invest regularly.

SIP is an investment technique that allows the investor to invest a fixed sum at regular intervals at a set date and over a set tenure.

Most of us have or have had a recurring account with a bank, where we regularly deposit money to meet certain financial requirements or future goals. An SIP investment works on the same principal of regular investment. It is the simplest and most convenient way of

investing small amounts periodically in the capital market through mutual funds.

Advantages of SIP

l Disciplined investment practice: It inculcates the habit of regular investment to achieve financial goals with small amounts. l Financial goals: Assists in reaching your financial goals, such as providing for your children’s education, marriage, buying a house or meeting short term goals of buying a car or vacation. l Convenience: You can invest through ECS or auto debits via your bank account. l Rupee Cost Averaging: This is the most important advantage of SIP. It spreads the risk over a period of time and eliminates the risk of timing the market. You buy more units at a lower price and buy less at a higher price and thus keep the average price low. l Power of Compounding: Long term investment and the compounding effect can deliver spectacular results.

Note that all Mutual Fund investments are subject to market risks; read all scheme related documents carefully. n

Asha Kiran: Celebrating Womanhood N

ew India Assurance Co Ltd, founded Sir Dorabji Tata in 1919, operates in 22 countries worldwide. To celebrate International Women’s Day, NIA has introduced its all new Asha Kiran Policy.

This policy has been specially incorporated for the benefit of the women.

The Asha Kiran Policy provides health insurance protection to families with girl children; it also gives a 50% waiver on the health insurance premium for a girl child. The personal insurance cover (for parents only) takes care of accidental deaths or permanent disablements by offering the full sum insured in case of a single parent, and in case of both parents, 200% of the sum insured would be paid.

There are multiple benefits under the policy

like: a floater sum of Rs 2 lakh upto Rs 8 lakh is available. The coverage includes the spouse as well as dependant daughters.

As an additional benefit, critical care benefit upto 10%, ayush treatment upto 25% and ambulance charges upto 1% of the sum insured are taken care of. It also takes care of more than 74 day care procedures.

The policy also takes care of post treatment check ups upto 15 days, pre-hospitalization charges upto 30 days, Plus,Post-hospitalisation care upto 60 days, cashless hospitalization in network hospitals, and there is no loading for adverse claim experiences. It also has attractive zone wise premium and tax benefits under section 80D of the Income Tax Act. n

true life

mindspace Old Man Hercules

63

O p e n s pa c e

Kareena Kapoor Sanjay Leela Bhansali Katrina Kaif

62

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Queen Gulaab Gang

61 Cinema reviews

Nikon Df Patravi TravelTec FourX Limited Edition Miele Rotary Iron B990E

60

Tech & style

American Bias Risks of a High-Protein Diet Europe May Feel the Heat

58

Science

Why is Nawaz an actor and John a star?

53

roug h cu t

Adil Jussawala Kamila Shamsie

Books

Her 20th Surgery

50 64

ashish sharma

‘a bit of a nerd’ Kamila Shamsie channels her love for history and eye for detail into a novel set in Peshawar 56

true life

Waiting for the 20th Surgery ruhani kaur

A 12-year-old girl was gang-raped so brutally in Jaipur in August 2012 that her vagina tore and merged with her rectum. After 19 surgeries, her condition remains heartrending, and Rajasthan government officials can’t wait to get her off their hands Aanchal Bansal

N

ew at work, Ram Niwas Singh had just settled in with his tea and Parle G biscuits. It is a warm February afternoon in Delhi when the light winter sun renders a kind of lazy stupor. The tea might help him pull off the day-shift that is to last another few hours, he says, while looking for the visitors’ register surrounded by a pile of mail and pamphlets.

It’s been three weeks since he joined work as a security guard at Rajasthan House, the state guest house nestled in the upmarket and leafy part of central Delhi and he is yet to organise himself properly, he says apologetically.

The new Chief Minister is yet to make a visit, and things have been slow at work so far. As he begins to enter the details of my visit in the register, he stops at the mention of ‘purpose of visit’. “I have only seen her being taken in and out of the building in a taxi last week,” he says. “You had a Nirbhaya case in Delhi, she is like the Nirbhaya of Rajasthan,” he says, with an eerie sense of pride.

As he fills out the details in the register, he gives me directions to the girl’s room, located behind the guest house in the servants’ quarters. His voice softens a little. “Do tell me how she is now. She has had over 15 surgeries already,” he says.

The girl has been living with her family in room No 9 in the quarters behind the building since she was transported in an ambulance overnight from Jaipur’s JK Lone Hospital on 13 February 2013. The shift a decision taken by the state government ‘inspired’ by the decision of the Central Government to ‘airlift’ the Delhi gang-rape victim to Singapore before she died in a hospital there around the same time. The girl, about 12 years old now, was gangraped, allegedly by six people, in Sikar on 20 August 2012 on her way back from a movie. Though she survived the assault, her pelvic region has been horribly disfigured and left a mash of damaged organs. She has had to undergo 19 procedures so far; 15 of which were conducted in Jaipur, the remaining four at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The procedures in-

24 march 2014

clude two major and four minor vaginal reconstructive surgeries.

Unlike Ram Niwas, the domestic and medical staff on duty know who the girl is—they see her struggling everyday to walk in the balcony to ensure her muscles do not waste away. She lies in bed practically all day. One of them goes up the stairs twice a day to hand over the lunch and dinner provided to the family by the canteen downstairs. They have all witnessed her being lifted and taken in an ambulance to AIIMS for check-ups. As workers scrub every bit of the white marble floor in the main hallway, in anticipation of an impending visit by the new Chief Minister, the supervising staff point to a door on the first floor of the quarters in the backyard, marked by a maroon shawl hanging by the railing. “You should see how well we have kept the girl, the media needs to know these things instead of blaming the Rajasthan government all the time,” says a woman clad in a green-and-red sari, almost condescendingly.

I

t is the air, thick with a nauseat-

ing stink, that you notice first in the room. There are four beds lined up, all covered in stained sheets, leaving almost no room to move around the room. The girl is lying on the first bed, covered in a dark grey blanket, and stoically watching an episode of Chota Bheem on television.

As her elder sister and mother come in grumbling after a spat with the girl's supervising doctor at the dispensary downstairs over her medicines, a woman comes in from the kitchen with a tray carrying three cups of sugary tea flavoured with ginger. “Opening the windows will not help. This is the stink of sickness that we all have to bear,” says the girl’s mother, when I suggest this.

After the assault, her vagina was so badly torn that it had merged with her rectum. While doctors in Jaipur had to create a passage through her stomach for her stools to pass adequately, damaged veins and muscles in the area were treated with procedures involv-

ing a vaginoplasty and an eddo-rectopasty. As the girl removes her blanket, to change the cotton gauze around the mouth of the temporary passage, the stench of dried blood and faeces is intolerable. Humiliated and helpless, the girl pulls her salwar up and starts crying. Minutes later, exhausted, she is back to her stoic self, pulls her blanket up and goes back to sleep.

Together with her four daughters and two grandchildren, the mother has been living in this room for the past year grappling with uncertainty, hostility and fear. With 19 surgical procedures completed and the twentieth (hopefully the last) delayed due to infections and other complications, more uncertainty looms over the family. They were summarily transported from Jaipur and put up in a guesthouse in central Delhi. The staff and officials here are hostile; they see the family as free-loaders living on State money. The fact that it is a family of migrant labourers from Bihar, and not original inhabitants of Rajasthan, worsens this hostility.

“Who told her to go for an evening show in the evening in a place like Sikar?” asks Vijay Kumar, resident commissioner at Bikaner House, who has been keeping track of the expenditure incurred on the girl’s stay and treatment. According to Kumar, the state government had sanctioned Rs 2.25 lakh for the girl, of which Rs 59,000 has been spent on the family's food and stay, the rest on her medication. With a new government in place and Bihar losing interest in funding her treatment as Lok Sabha polls near, Kumar is hurriedly hoping to get all the bills cleared. “Do you think they could have earned that much in their lifetime?” he asks.

Originally from Darbhanga district in Bihar, the mother worked as a vegetable vendor while her husband was a painter, earning daily wages, before he died of a cardiac failure while at work early in 2012. Of their seven children, three daughters are married and the son lives with his in-laws in Darbhanga. The girl is their youngest. After the death of her open www.openthemagazine.com 51

husband, the mother moved to Sikar in search of a job, and lived with her elder daughter and her husband. The daughter worked in an aluminium plant and the mother found a job in a gum factory. The girl and her two sisters worked as domestic help, and found a friend in Munni who is also from Darbhanga.

On 20 August 2012, on the occasion of Eid, the girls decided to go for a show of the Salman Khan film Ek Tha Tiger.

“We’d never been to a theatre and were missing home, so we decided to watch a movie to cheer up,” says the sister.

Since the movie was a 6-9 pm show, the girls worried about getting late and left the theatre before the film ended.

According to the sister, the accused were also watching the movie in the same theatre, just a 10-minute walk from their then house. “We didn’t know they were following us. They grabbed Munni by her dupatta but she managed to run away. They then grabbed my sister and pulled her into their car through the window,” she recalls.

“We ran after the vehicle screaming but they sped away. We rushed to the police station but they refused to file an FIR. We described the vehicle to them, gave its number and also told them the direction in which they had gone, but they refused to file an FIR,” she says. The next day, the entire neighbourhood, led by local school teacher Saroj, started a protest in front of the police station. “It was only then that they lodged an FIR. By 4 pm, they found my sister lying unconscious on a highway,” she says.

“The girl told me that the two men had blindfolded her with Munni’s duppata and tied her hands and legs with her clothes,” says Naseema Khatoon, who works with an NGO in Sikar and helped file the case. According to Gaurav Srivastav, then superintendent of police who was investigating the case, the accused Suresh Jat (25) and Ramesh Sharma (26) were arrested two days later.“Some reports say six of them were involved, but it was only Ramesh and Suresh who raped the child,” he says.

The two allegedly raped her in a secluded area in Sikar. The police identi52 open

fied the accused through their vehicle and calls made from their cellphones.

Two of their accomplices, Girdhari Lal and Yograj, gave the accused a change of clothes and Rs 500. The girl’s earrings and bangles were recovered from their vehicle. She was found by a man the next afternoon in a daze on the highway.

Soon after, Girdhari Lal and Yog Raj got bail from the High Court; Ramesh and Suresh are in jail. The Rajasthan

“We ran after the vehicle screaming but they

sped away.

We rushed to the police station but they

refused to file an FIR. We described the vehicle to them,

gave its number and also told them the direction in which they had gone but they refused to f ile an FIR,” recalls the sister

police are yet to begin proceedings against the accused, as the girl, who recently went through her last psychiatric examination, is still deemed too unfit to attend an identification parade. “She still wakes up late at night, screaming. How will she recognise them?” the mother asks.

Jk Lone Hospital admitted six more cases of gangrape reported in 2012 af-

ter this case. Following the furore over the Delhi gang-rape and an uncanny similarity between the two incidents, the case came to be known as Sikar Ki Damini. “The public furore and media pressure led them to transport the girl to Delhi. It was for the better, as the state civil hospital was not equipped to handle the complexities of the case,” says Khatoon. “The girl was repeatedly facing infections,” she adds.

A

s her sisters and mother fret over the delay, quarreling with the cops on duty and the doctor in charge at Rajasthan House over the delay in treatment and medicines, hostility and distrust battle it out in the balcony every day, possibly getting the better of the girl who stoically plays Temple Run on a cellphone bought by her brother-in-law, if not watching Chota Bheem on TV. There has been no psychiatric counseling for her, apart from the examinations done by the police to check her mental state for recording a statement. Both times, she was deemed unfit for this task.

“We saw a five year-old-girl, also gangraped, die in the hospital in Jaipur.

The press says that they deliberately let her die,” says the sister. “They have put us here in Delhi. No one understands our language and they all despise us.

Who is to say that they don't want us to die?” she asks, expressing her frustration over the delay in the last surgery, which was slated for January. Her doctors say the delay has been caused by a complication brought on by the previous surgeries. “Since her rectum was completely damaged, the doctors had made a passage through her stomach. So her anal passage has shrunk as it has not been in use for a period of one-and-a-half years. We have to wait for her to recover from this condition called ‘anal stenosis’,” explains Dr Shweta Meena, the doctor supervising her progress.

“We want her to go now, but what can we do, the treatment has to be carried through while the entire family has parked itself on our property,” says a visibly frustrated Kumar. n 24 march 2014

Books Lamentations of a Debonair Poet The life of Adil Jussawala and the despair of poetry in India Madhavankutty Pillai

Maps For A Mortal Moon: Essays and entertainments

Adil Jussawala Aleph Book Company | 340 pages | rs 495

T

hree writers go to a nursing

home to visit an ageing unwell poet. They find him jumping from subject to subject and exhibiting signs of delusion—sometimes he thinks he is in the offices of PEN, the writers’ organisation of which he used to be secretary, and there is a lecture going on nearby. However, they also find him kind and considerate, especially towards his roommate, a giant of a man who keeps coming in and out.

One of the three writes about the encounter in a column.

The poet Nissim Ezekiel, who would die of Alzheimer’s in 2004, is an important figure for Adil Jussawala, but ‘Notes Towards A Portrait of Nissim Ezekiel’, which was published in the Sunday Observer in 1999, is an unusual sketch. For a subject that expects commiseration, there is instead a mild deadpan humour at their own discomfort at Ezekiel’s incomprehension of who they are—‘Are all of you together?’ ‘Are the three of you from the same place?’

But in between such a narrative, the use of Ezekiel’s poetry serves as punctuation: ‘I see how wrong I was / Not to foresee precisely this: / Outside the miracles of mind, / The figure in the carpet blazing, / Ebb-flow of sex and the seasons, / The ordinariness of most events.’ And to end the piece, after they have stepped out, unsure of how to take the experience in, the only note which brings the sadness together, a line as Jussawala looks

24 March 2014

around him: ‘The kohl starts running, the buildings start breaking up.’

‘N

otes Towards a Portrait of

Nissim Ezekiel’ is one of the articles featured in Maps for a Mortal Moon, a collection of Jussawala’s selected prose, edited and introduced by Jerry Pinto. The anthology includes essays and columns spanning four decades. In his introduction, Pinto says he ‘knew Jussawala had done an enormous amount of writing… That has been the heartbreak of editing this book: how much has had to be dropped. My selection came up to 300,000 words. My second, after a month of ruthless chop-

Sharmistha Mohanty feels that poets of Jussawala’s generation lived a kind of writers’ integrity. “They were not their own project like so many writers and poets one sees today” ping, weighed in at 280,000. Finally, I had to submit it to Jussawala the surgeon, and he helped. We’ve got it down to this size.’

Jussawala has many imprints on Indian literature—publisher, academic, essayist, columnist, literary editor of Indian Express and Times of India, editor of Debonair (in an age when it printed poetry of value), a port of call for aspiring writers, someone intricately involved in every debate around Indian writing in English. But his principal identity is as a poet, and the irony is that his poetry, unlike his prolific prose, is spaced across decades. His

first collection, Land’s End, was published in 1962; Missing Person, considered seminal, came after 14 years, and then it took 35 years for the next book of poetry, Trying to Say Goodbye.

We are sitting in Jussawala’s 18th floor apartment in Cuffe Parade and it is one of the questions I ask him. He says the prose was a job with the pressure of deadlines—you just had to do it, whether you were happy with it or not. Poetry did not have such urgent claims, but that is not the only reason. “I haven’t been very good with setting myself deadlines, when someone is not really waiting at the other end. If a publisher had said, ‘I am giving you two years for your next book, you do it,’ it may have helped. I am just saying ‘may’. I also like my drafts of poems to stand for a while. Now I have 30 or 40 new poems, but each time I go back to them after a space of time, I am not happy and I change things. And I feel they are getting better. They are closer to what I want to say. The words are speaking for themselves instead of an idea speaking through the words.

That is one way of looking at it. I could flagellate myself and just say that I am a very lazy person when it comes to my own writing. I do feel that writing a poem is not the be all and end all of my life. If one has to be saved and if the people one loves have to be saved in a religious spiritual sense, then poetry is not enough.”

Trying to Say Goodbye was published

by Sharmistha Mohanty, founder and editor of the literary magazine Almost Island. Mohanty says the long gap is an indication of the state of publishing itself. “Adil has been writing over all these years. It is simply that no one has probably asked him about publishing his work—I mean, truly asked open www.openthemagazine.com 53

him, with the respect that he deserves.

Publishers here don’t actively look for talent, or bring back those who are known to be accomplished. I’ve heard mainstream publishers say they missed their chance with Trying to Say Goodbye, and my response to that is:

you know where he lives, don’t you?”

Mohanty knew that Jussawala had two new manuscripts. She solicited and published a few poems in Almost Island. She also organised a reading at the arts centre Jnanapravaha in Mumbai. “The hall was full, people

were standing at the back, and Adil got a standing ovation even before he began. It was beautiful. After that I asked him whether Trying to Say Goodbye could be the very first book Almost Island would publish. He said he’d think it over and thanked me. I told him that if he wanted to go to a mainstream publisher I would understand. He came back to me quite soon, maybe a couple of weeks, and said he’d give it to us. He said he had much more faith in independent publishing; after all, that’s how poetry in English had survived here,” she says.

Mohanty says she has rarely seen a man of Jussawala’s integrity, in his life and work: “When we were working on the manuscript for Trying to Say Goodbye, I will never forget how closely he listened to our comments, criticisms. It was an incredibly equal dialogue, again rare in this country.”

In Maps for a Mortal Moon, the absence of publishers and readers is considered in the first essay, ‘Six Authors in Search of a Reader’, written in 1981.

In it, Jussawala speaks about how writers had to locate their readers in India’s literary environment and often could only do this by becoming publishers themselves. This was why, in the 1970s, he came together with three other poets—Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel and Arvind Mehrotra—to form Clearing House, which published many of their own works and those of other important writers of the time.

“Contrary to what people believe of poets being impractical, we always had to be very practical about how to get our work visible. It seemed to be a very logical thing. One of the unique [aspects] of Clearing House was we were so fortunate in having both a poet and designer of genius in Arun Kolatkar.

And there was no question of charging one another for our services. So he did all his wonderful work for free, so did the others in the group. We decided to try and reach those parts other publishers don’t reach. We tried to do that by mail order. We saw that there

The placid poet Jussawala at home on the 18th floor of a Cuffe Parade high-rise in Mumbai ritesh uttamchandani

24 March 2014

were people in smaller towns outside Bombay who were interested in reading our book,” he says.

I ask Jussawala about paying to get his first collection Land’s End published in 1962 after his first return from England as a student. He says that is common even now if poets want to get published. “I don’t know if poets are willing to admit that upfront, but many pay for their books to be published. I don’t know why people are so shy of mentioning it. Maybe because they are afraid they will lose the patronage of big publishers. A publisher will tell you privately that poetry does not sell, which is bullshit, because poetry sells over the years. If a publisher prints only 500 copies, if the work is any good, within five years it will be sold out. The problem is that it is too long a time for publishers to hold on to copies, that’s all. They also don’t have the staff to be able to judge manuscripts properly.”

W

hen he was Book Reviews Editor of The Indian Express in the early 80s, Jussawala gave two broadsheet pages to a review by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. This is not something that had a precedent or has been repeated in a mainline paper since. He says he got away with it, but wouldn’t be able to do that now. “It wasn’t two pages in one issue. It was a two-part review. What I had at my disposal was one full page without ads. And Arvind sent such a massive review. He said ‘I don’t see how I can cut this’. I just went ahead and did it. I don’t even know if anyone approved. I didn’t do much of that. Mostly the reviews I used were of the normal length,” he says.

A writer tells me that the era when Jussawala was the editor of Debonair towards the end of the same decade was extraordinary—nude photos were, in a sense, paying for poetry. Jussawala says he was just part of a continuum that began when Vinod Mehta became editor and modelled the magazine on Illustrated Weekly. “Debonair was really trying to do the same thing. All the editors—Vinod, Anil [Dharker]—had both some very good literature, [and] some

24 March 2014

very good poems, because of Imtiaz Dharker editing the poetry page.”

The editors didn’t have anything to do with the centrespreads themselves.

“No one ever attended a photo shoot; that was left to the photographer. He had to deal with the models and the payment,” he says. The only time editors would get involved was if a model got cold feet at the last minute and didn’t want the photographs published after she had been shot.

One instance of his time at Debonair comes up in Maps for a Mortal Moon in ‘Remembering Sudhir’, an obituary of the writer Sudhir Sonalkar, who had a drinking problem. In the obituary, Jussawala recounts turning Sonalkar down when he called asking for a job in the magazine. Jussawala writes: ‘‘Then fuck off!’ he snapped and disconnected. Just as well. If the conversation continued I wouldn’t have been

“A publisher will tell you that poetry does not sell, which is bullshit... If the work is any good, within five years it will be sold out. The problem is that is too long for publishers to hold on to copies” able to tell him why I’d turned him down; that I sometimes overdid my drinks too, that I had recently taken on the magazine a writer who turned out to have a drinking problem greater than any I’d seen, that taking Sudhir on board would have meant capsizing the raft altogether.’

Jussawala tells me there were two things that led him to drink: “One is to try and shut out the pain of living— it was a kind of anaesthetic. The other was that, being a somewhat silent and reticent person, at least in a group of people, it opened me up. People would say, ‘You keep tossing them back, but you get clearer and clearer as you talk.’

Until a time is reached when one more drink or sip and all the happiness goes very suddenly. Part of that comes into that two part essay ‘Shikast’.” In 1999, Jussawala stopped drinking. A book

suggested that he approach it as a conversion from a faith called drinking to one called non-drinking. A few days later, he went into one of his regular bars and came back after drinking only a bottle of Limca. “This attitude has worked [for] me in other major decisions of my life, leaving architecture when I was just 18 to try and write a play. It was an act of faith, that’s all I can say, and it works for me.”

S

harmistha Mohanty believes

that another reason for Jussawala’s long silence, when it came to poetry, was a fundamental struggle within the self. On the evolution of his poetry, she notes that Missing Person is “the work of someone more angry, disturbed, in chaos, than the person who wrote Trying to Say Goodbye. Maybe in this one it is a more tranquil man, with more tranquil forms. The anger is more compressed under that tranquillity, and deep inside, that tendency of looking at the rawness of things without denying beauty remains: ‘the sea a massive bolt, shot across.’ Only, the poet perhaps now holds himself a little further away from what he writes.”

She feels that poets of his generation lived a kind of writers’ integrity.

“They were not their own project like so many writers and poets one sees today, where production of work becomes overwhelmingly important,” she says. This integrity is evident in the fact that Jussawala never became a novelist, though he did begin one in the mid-70s.

The novel was meant to be about one man’s political education, told through diary entries. The man, a photographer living in England, is commissioned to do a book on the Indian monsoon, but that is the year the monsoon fails and there is drought. “He is torn. He says, ‘How can I do a book on the monsoon when what I see is drought?’ It’s a question of his becoming politicised.

I couldn’t tell that story using a diary format. It didnt work, so I just abandoned it,” he says.

I ask him whether it was difficult.

“Not really. I have not found it hard to abandon things.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

Books ‘It’s All in the Soil’ Kamila Shamsie’s new novel animates history with textures of fruit, blood and stone DEVIKA BAKSHI

a god in every stone

By Kamila Shamsie bloomsbury india | 310 pages | rs 499

B

ritish-Pakistani writer

Kamila Shamsie is worried she may have invented a swimming pool. “Was there a swimming pool at the Peshawar Club in 1915?” her mother had wondered while reading her new novel. “It seems rather early.” The novel is so confident in its conversation with history, this seems an odd point to stick on. But it bothers her “that I put a swimming pool where there might not really have been [one].”

“Where there are historical details to be found, I want to go out and find them,” Shamsie says. “But the truth may be that I’m a bit of a nerd. I love history, and I love the research… I want to find out what happened and then weave a story around it.” The achievement of A God in Every Stone is that those two things are never separate.

The novel resists summarising, but here are the bare bones: Vivian Rose Spencer is a young Englishwoman brought to Peshawar—first in 1915 and again in 1930—by her quest for the fabled silver circlet of Scylax, longsought by a man she has come to love.

While in Peshawar in 1915, she adopts as her student a Pashtun boy named Najeeb Gul, and bequeaths to him her passion for history and her fascination for the circlet. Najeeb’s brother Qayyum Gul, honourably discharged after serving with British troops in the First World War, returns adrift, but eventually finds a sense of himself among the Khudai Khidmatgar, and their resistance against the Empire.

History and story are inseparable in 56 open

Shamsie’s novel. The story emerges from history, and grows to fill the spaces between it. We don’t know whether there was a swimming pool, and who cares—so long as we can understand why the stones and light and figs at an Ancient Greek site at the edge of the Ottoman Empire are so transformative to a young Englishwoman.

The invention of detail is a small matter compared to the excavation of texture. History is as much about experience as it is about fact; it ought to be touchable.

“You know, it drives me crazy in museums,” says Shamsie. “You go to museums and you see these artefacts and you just want to touch.” Perhaps this is

The invention of detail is a small matter compared to the excavation of texture.

History is as much about experience as it is about fact; it ought to be touchable why her novel is full of people touching things—a white block of stone on a hillside in Caria, a carved hand once part of a Stupa, the fingertips of a stucco Buddha at Shahji-ki-Dheri.

It is clear that, to Shamsie, history is first and foremost material—something made, something tangible and sensory, never fixed and perhaps nonsensical at a remove. Her novel treats history almost as a puzzle, its pieces infinite and scattered everywhere, waiting to be dug up and put together.

Reading the novel, an apparition of the author emerges: a curious, imaginative being roving the globe forging unforeseen connections between plac-

es, artefacts, histories. But Shamsie’s approach is rather more rooted: “The thing that you need to do is not look at the globe but look at one patch of land.”

The patch of land she looks at is Peshawar. In her hands, to the uninitiated reader, the city reveals itself to be a magnificent palimpsest, a layer-cake of histories, a confluence of overlapping empires.

“If you just walk around the Peshawar or Taxila museum, you see— there’s a Persian flower, there’s a Greek god, there’s a Buddha, there’s Hariti the demon goddess, there’s Vishnu— there’s all these things, and sometimes they’ll be in one stupa… and at the base, there’s Atlas, and Atlas is holding up the Buddha. That’s right there.

It’s not that I had to look around the world and make connections. I looked at that one stupa and I said, they were all here… History gives you the answer.

History says these guys were all here.

The Chinese were there… the Brits were there and the Mughals were there and it was the great centre of Buddhism; the Huns were there, burning things down, before the Taliban. It has all been there, it’s all in the soil, it’s all in that one location, and all you really need to do is acknowledge it. That’s all I did.”

Shamsie’s Peshawar of 1915 and 1930 is at times a sort of living version of this history. The novel’s early descriptions of it as a diverse idyll are even somewhat jarring, inviting scepticism. But old photographs of Peshawar’s Qissa Khawani bazaar—Shamsie’s ‘Street of Storytellers’—bolster her portrayal, at least if one is inclined to draw reassurance from multilingual street signs.

In conversation, Shamsie reveals a preoccupation with “shared history” and her novel is utterly persuasive in its demonstration of this sharedness— 24 March 2014

palimpsest A 1934 photograph of Peshawar’s Qissa Khawani bazaar bolsters Shamsie’s portrayal of the city as a confluence of histories and empires

Fox Photos/Getty Images

Peshawar comes alive as a middle of everywhere, a site of global confluence.

This gives lie not only to curated national histories, but to the notion of separate histories of East and West.

This is especially significant considering the place Shamsie is writing about, and it is no accident. The novel was born as much from her interest in Peshawar’s ancient history as her bewilderment at her own sense of remove from present-day Swat valley. Shamsie is aware of writing against a certain narrative of the region, and her insistence on digging up Peshawar’s plural history and laying it all out for people to see is overtly political.

“So much of this novel is also about place, and what lies in Peshawar’s soil.

Which, of course, is an important question because one of the things that people like the Taliban would like to do 24 March 2014

is erase those ancient histories. They don’t talk about it because it doesn’t fall within their idea of Islamic history. But the idea that in this soil, all this happened; that there were these Buddhas around; the feel of the stone, and that literal, physical connection to 5,000 years of history, I think, is an astonishing thing.”

What is preserved and recorded in Peshawar’s soil is also significant because of what is not. This contrast is built into the structure of the novel, the second half of which is a layered narrative of the massacre of Congress and Khudai Khidmatgar men in the Qissa Khawani bazaar on 23 April 1930—a seminal moment in the North West’s non-violent resistance against the Raj that Shamsie says is “largely forgotten”.

Written in narrowing concentric

circles around the event, this second act draws much of its tension from the disappearance of the bodies of those killed in that massacre. The first act’s simmering preoccupation with stones reveals its function here: all this talk of excavating stones and finding circlets thousands of years old, and suddenly bodies are being disappeared and blood washed away. Instead of being allowed to become part of Peshawar’s storied soil, history is being erased even as it unfolds. A history of blood, invisible between the stones.

Talking about the novel in such bald terms does its complexity a disservice.

History is simply one strand in a novel that is itself a puzzle of big ideas— though not nearly as pedantic as that makes it sound. Rather than make pronouncements, it suggests questions.

How might displacement fit with selfrealisation, for instance? Discovery with romance? What is the relationship between loyalty and identity?

Gender and empire? What is the role of history in a sense of place? Why does place matter at all?

The more serious threat of such a pigheaded focus on solving the novel’s idea-puzzle is that it misses the beauty of the writing. The author has clearly taken to heart the warning of her longtime teacher and mentor, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali: “The fact that you’re writing something that’s politically engaged is no excuse for a bad sentence.” And there are some great ones.

Particularly beautiful is Shamsie’s use of fruit imagery: a Pashtun soldier biting into an orange at war in France; the devastating scent of apples on a wounded sandy-haired soldier’s breath, disabling Vivian’s participation in the War; the juice of ripe plums harvested in Peshawar’s orchards, wiped off on sleeves or boiled to stain the garments of the Khudai Khidmatgar; the silverpurple figs of Caria that fix themselves in Vivian’s imagination, and propel her out of the natural course of her life.

If the novel were only about stones— facts and researched details—it would not be half what it is. The unrecorded flesh in between—the split figs and bland oranges and smashed plums— are just as important. n open www.openthemagazine.com 57

rough cut

Mayank Shekhar

P

Why is John a star but Nawaz an actor?

Decoding ‘stardom’ in Bollywood

ontificating on what’s common to all actors who

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

turned out to be Hollywood’s top stars, the late Roger Ebert—arguably the world’s greatest chronicler of films—said he had a theory that he had been pelting for years but no one would ever take him seriously. His observation was that all stars, without exception, had unusually big faces and large heads, that’s it. This automatically made them stand out from everyone else on the screen. Simple as that sounds, for all you know it’s probably empirically true.

In the Indian context, the qualification is probably even simpler. We associate actors with stardom if we have watched them dance and lip-sync to a song. This occurred to me only recently while watching the extremely entertaining musical Jhumroo at Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon.

The show’s hero is an average looker, having a hard time wooing the girl he fancies, and can’t sing. Kishore Kumar’s voice enters his body, and he begins to lip-sync and dance.

Almost immediately, not just the girl he’s wooing but even

the audience begins to find him incredibly attractive—a star, as we know it.

Songs survive. Films rarely do. When you hear a Kishore Kumar number, chances are the image that will come to your mind is Rajesh Khanna’s, undoubtedly the biggest Bollywood star we’ve had, even if only for a brief while.

Farhan Akhtar says the toughest thing he’s attempted as an actor wasn’t the training he underwent for two years to look and run like the athlete Milkha Singh for Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. His most nerve-wracking experience was the first time he had to dance while directly facing the camera for the song Baawre from Luck By Chance. He landed up on set and told the choreographer he just wouldn’t be able to do it. Hrithik Roshan, who also appears in the same song, told Akhtar to look toward the camera but imagine a large crowd behind it. The sequence somehow finally got filmed.

Akhtar is a star. So is John Abraham, hero of the super-hit track Tu Mera Hero, though he is hardly an actor.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who is probably a better performer than both, will never, in the eyes of Bollywood, be a star.

In strictly business terms, Bollywood defines a star as someone who can ensure millions of bums on seats on the Friday of the film’s release. The star is inevitably male. This could be because the overwhelming majority of audiences in theatres are male, and they project their aspirations primarily on to the movie’s main man. Although top female leads are quite popular as well—they are most searched on Google—I am told they still don’t guarantee an ‘opening’, or footfalls on the first day. They possibly command mobs on streets no less than most male leads.

We throng to gawk at movie stars in real life because they are tourist attractions. Their faces get reproduced on hoardings, television, trailers, magazine covers, newsprint, and films of course. Grabbing a glimpse of them is like finally

Actors become stars when they dance and lip-sync to a song. John Abraham, hero of the superhit track Tu Mera Hero, is a star, though hardly an actor. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, probably a better performer, will never, in the eyes of Bollywood, be a star 24 March 2014

getting to see the Taj Mahal. That sight of recognition is visibly exciting. Unlike the marvelous Taj, most people who see a movie star, more often than not, are left disappointed.

They find them to be pale and puny, for one, which is obvious. The giant screen reduces us to the size of the star’s nostril. They are made to look as larger-than-life as can fit a 70 mm screen. This is part of cinema’s charm. It also makes it easier for us to look up to them. The inherently feudal Indian gene helps too. A nation of over 33 million mythological deities bestows titles like Shehenshah, King, Thalaivar (Boss) etcetera on cinema’s seemingly enormous celestial beings. It’s no different with cricket, where Sachin was God—the rest of the team, presumably, his subjects.

Pedigree often helps justify idol worship. This is why a star’s kid usually gets to take the first shot at stardom.

Whether they make it or not is altogether another matter.

While looking up for the first time, what the audience instantly wants to know is, “Who is he? Why does he think he’s a star?” That question gets suitably answered. Politics works similarly. Several parties in India are run by second-generation dynasts. The public probably finds it easier to relate to a known surname. The Pathan ‘Khan’ and the Punjabi ‘Kapoor’ are by far the most popular movie-star last names—attaching ‘Kumar’ to hide one’s family name is passé now.

The other thing that connects show-business stardom and politics is they rely heavily on public image, something that must be aggressively pushed by publicists and spin-doctors through social media and the press. It’s a 24/7 job. While many aspects of this are rapidly changing, traditionally, most of Bollywood’s top stars haven’t been known by characters they’ve played in a film. They are major characters by themselves in public life. Their life is the running story.

How the masses perceive them counts as much as the pictures they do, and, of course, the two are inter-related.

Initially Shah Rukh Khan was considered a sissy among hardcore male audiences. He had a massive female following—still does—for the soft romantic films he starred in, and a fairly large middle-class fan base for being an inspiringly self-made family man from Delhi, with a tony sea-facing bungalow in Bombay. Him jhaaping director Shirish Kunder at a Juhu bar or getting into a drunken quarrel at Wankhede stadium could have actually earned him new fans from a different set. He also does action films now.

Salman Khan is the frontbencher’s ideal dude: the ‘bhai’.

His brashness during public appearances, caddish bachelor lifestyle, and string of hot girlfriends add to his machismo.

Like several journalists, I too was in Vivek Oberoi’s packed drawing room on 1 April 2003, when the actor complained on national television of receiving threats on the phone from Salman. Without quite realising it, Oberoi had played a Fools’ Day joke on himself. His career nosedived thereafter, despite a phenomenal start with Company and Saathiya. Nobody wants to see a whuss for a movie hero.

His dad Suresh Oberoi, who was out of town at the time, blasted the hell out of him when he got back home the next day. Oberoi Senior was a much less popular actor. He must 24 March 2014

Kaushik Roy/India Today Group/Getty Images

have pinned his dreams on his son, which is as essential as encouragement, given that the odds are completely stacked against success.

Maybe it takes two generations to make it—who knows.

Amitabh Bachchan’s mother Teji used to be a stage actor, though I am not sure if she considered a career in films.

Shah Rukh Khan’s dad Taj Mohammed had auditioned for a part in Mughal-e-Azam. Salman Khan’s father Salim was a failed star, as was Hrithik Roshan’s dad Rakesh. Aamir Khan’s father Tahir Hussain was a relatively unsuccessful producer. This isn’t true for sons of major matinee idols Rajendra Kumar (Kumar Gaurav), Dev Anand (Sunil), Raaj Kumar (Puru), Mithun Chakraborty (Mimoh).

But of course these are just theories. If anyone knew what it takes to be a star, rather than an actor, there wouldn’t be thousands of broad-faced jocks sipping cappuccino all day at Costa Coffee in Lokhandwala, after passing on their portfolio shots at producers’ offices each morning, and dancing like Prabhudheva before a wall full of mirrors at cheap discos in Andheri every night. The passion must be somewhat frustrating though. n Mayank Shekhar runs the pop-culture website TheW14.com open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

paleo diet Some proponents of this diet say one should derive about 56–65 per cent of one’s food energy from animal foods. They recommend a diet high in protein and low in carbohydrates

American Bias Children as young as seven and 10 empathise with and feel differently towards ‘other’ kids

Risks of a High-Protein Diet

A

2012 study in PLoS One found that American adults, both Blacks and Whites, believe that Black people feel less pain than White people do. The researchers of that study had found that the people being studied sweated more when they saw a White man experiencing physical pain in comparison with a Black man.

Psychologists argue that such a strong bias possibly occurs because people assume that Blacks have been through more hardship and are thus tougher than Whites.

But how and when does such a bias come to be formed? A new US study has now found that such a bias forms as early as childhood.

The study, published in BPS British Journal of Developmental Psychology and conducted by psychologists from University of Virginia, Charlottesville, surveyed a sample of mostly White children at ages five, seven and 10. The children were asked to rate the severity of pain they thought would be felt by children in different pictorial scenarios: for example, shutting their hand in a door or bumping their head. When they were shown photos of Black 60 open

children, the seven and ten-year-olds rated the level of pain as less severe than that being sustained by White youngsters.

The researchers write in the journal, ‘Five-, 7-, and 10-year-olds first rated the amount of pain they themselves would feel in 10 situations such as biting their tongue or hitting their head. They then rated the amount of pain they believed two other children—a Black child and a White child, matched to the child’s gender—would feel in response to the same events. We found that by age 7, children show a weak racial bias and that by age 10, they show a strong and reliable racial bias.

Consistent with research on adults, this bias was not moderated by racerelated attitudes or interracial contact. This finding is important because knowing the age of emergence can inform the timing of interventions to prevent this bias.’ In a written statement made available to the press, the study’s lead researcher Rebecca Dore, said, ‘If we want to prevent this bias from developing, it needs to be done by age seven, or age 10 at the latest.’ n

According to a new report in Cell Metabolism, being on a diet rich in animal proteins during middle age makes you four times more likely to die of cancer than someone with a lowprotein diet—a mortality risk factor comparable to smoking. Researchers who tracked a large sample of adults for nearly 20 years, have found that not only is excessive protein intake linked to a dramatic rise in cancer mortality, but middle-aged people who eat lots of proteins from animal sources are also more susceptible to early death in general.

Protein-lovers were 74 per cent more likely to die of any cause than their more low-protein counterparts. However, moderate protein intake is good for you after 65. n

Europe May Feel the Heat

Most of Europe will experience higher warming than the global average if earth surface temperatures rise 2° C above preindustrial levels, according to a new study in Environmental Research Letters. Under such a scenario, temperatures greater than the 2° C global average will be experienced in Northern and Eastern Europe in winter and Southern Europe in summer. The study also shows that in summer, daily maximum temperatures could increase by 3-4° C over SouthEastern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula and rise well above 40° C in regions that already experience some of the highest temperatures in Europe, such as Spain, Portugal and France. The increase will cause evaporation and drought. n

24 March 2014

tech&style

Nikon Df The lightest, smallest and fastest camera available in the FX format

fx format A full-frame digital SLR is a digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) fitted with an image sensor that is the same size as a 35 mm (36x24 mm) film frame. Nikon calls its full frame cameras ‘FX format’ devices

Patravi TravelTec w FourX Limited Edition

Price on request

gagandeep Singh Sapra Rs 199,950

In the Patravi TravelTec FourX Limited Edition model, the watchmakers at Carl F Bucherer bring together not only different time zones but also different materials —fine 18 K rose gold, extra-hard high-tech ceramic, high-quality titanium and highly resistant rubber. Unlike other ‘world time watches’, the Patravi TravelTec is suitable both for frequent fliers and for those who communicate with people all over the world. n

Miele Rotary Iron B990E

T

he first thing you notice about Nikon’s Df, which combines a full frame sensor with a light body, is its rich array of controls. Everything is manual and is up there for you to select, but if you are not used to manual controls, the Df will take some time getting used to.

The Large viewfinder is great in framing, and the body is beautifully curved with its controls at the right place, which helps you hold the camera in a solid grip. The Df has a small ‘Manual’, ‘Aperture’, ‘Shutter’ and ‘Portrait’ mode button on top, and huge shutter setting, exposure compensation as well as ISO setting buttons, so at a glance you know what is set. The camera comes with a 1.8G lens. Nikon claims the Df has an image sensor that is equivalent to the one available in its flagship camera, the Nikon D4.

At 16.2 megapixels, those who are finicky about megapixels may shy away, but if you look at the quality of 24 March 2014

images taken under very poor light conditions, you will fall in love with this camera. It can be called the lightest, smallest and fastest camera on sale in the FX format.

Its weight of 710 gm is easy to handle, and in a matter of just under 0.14 seconds, the camera is ready to shoot.

With a shutter release lag time of under 0.052 seconds, the camera is superfast.

The battery that Nikon uses on the Df is slightly smaller than the one on the D600, D800 or D4, but manages to give you 300 plus shots on a single full charge.

At the back of the camera is a 3.2inch 912,000 pixels LCD monitor that is sharp and bright, but sadly in bright sunny outdoors, the only way to review your images is via its viewfinder. I also miss the fact there is no tilt screen on the camera, and that there is no on-board Wi-Fi. The other downside is that the Df has only one memory card slot. n

Rs 174,990

If you are someone who would not hand over your expensive clothes for ironing to a service provider, this rotary iron from Miele helps you get those creases out in a jiffy. This easy-to-use appliance has a wide roller that allows you to press everything from shirts and pants to bed linen, all with a professional finish. The electronically controlled roller speed can be adjusted to suit the type of laundry being pressed, and your own working speed. It is operated through the use of a foot pedal, allowing you to sit while you iron. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

shared history Queen actresses Kangana Ranaut and Lisa Haydon were both in the 2011 David Dhawan comedy Rascals, starring Ajay Devgn and Sanjay Dutt

Queen Queen is held together by a delightful performance by Kangana Ranaut that you shouldn’t miss ajit duara

o n screen

current

Gulaab Gang Director Soumik Sen cast Madhuri Dixit, Juhi Chawla,

Tannishtha Chatterjee, Priyanka Bose Score ★★★★★

a Haydon a Ranaut, Lis Cast Kangan bahl Director vkas

R

ani is the daughter of a Halwai from Delhi’s Rajouri Gardens, but she makes it clear that her reference point for postmodern culture is Lajpat Nagar. On her honeymoon in Paris, minus the fiance who dumped her, she is shocked by a lot of things she sees, and declares, virtuously, that such things would not be allowed in Lajpat Nagar.

Transporting this sweet and simpleminded personality to Europe is director Vikas Bahl’s trump card in Queen.

Her heart broken by Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), the man who changes his mind about marrying her at the eleventh hour, Rani translates her name into English (‘Queen’) for the benefit of the eclectic bunch of friends she makes on her sojourn in Paris and Amsterdam.

The friends—an Indo-European bombshell (Lisa Haydon), a Russian, a Frenchman, a Japanese and an Italian—are cute, but the whole movie is built around Kangana Ranaut’s take on the character she is given.

‘Deconstructing Rani’ is what Queen is

62 open

about and, significantly, the moment Ranaut is off screen, the movie wilts.

This happens in Delhi for the first 20 minutes of the movie. Here, we go through the usual ‘Punjaban’ pre-wedding routine that makes the movie look quite ordinary. Later, in Paris and Amsterdam, the antics of her international friends look a little too pat, and, without the social context that Rani brings to the melange, would certainly fall flat. But the director is clever, and never lets her out of the frame.

So there is no story to speak of, only a unique character, and Ranaut carries it off with a masterful observation of middle-class North Indian sensibility and an insightful take on this society’s conservative views on the role of women. While playing Rani with conviction, she also looks at Rani with irony, from outside, from a cosmopolitan perspective, and that is why the movie is so funny.

It is a delightful performance that you shouldn’t miss. n

Gulaab Gang is a fictionalised tale of the real-life ‘gulabi gang’ headed by Sampat Pal Devi—a group of women who react with retaliatory violence against the abuse of women in Uttar Pradesh. But the movie is a melodramatic interpretation that ends up turning the activist and her group into something akin to a Japanese Samurai clan. The women stride around with ‘dandas’ and scythes and charge like warriors into groups of men, mowing them down ruthlessly, bringing order into a lawless feudal society.

The film makes a languid and indirect effort to connect the activities of this women’s gang to the widespread unrest after the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and the subsequent formation of women’s groups to protect themselves against assault and abuse by men. It doesn’t work.

By casting a movie star like Madhuri Dixit in the lead role, an actress not known for social activism of any kind, the film triggers cynicism instead of inspiration. Though Dixit delivers a fair performance, her image as a star precedes her, and this negates rather than enhances the impact of the film.

The same could be said about Juhi Chawla, who plays a sly politician bent on undermining the Dixit character and re-inforcing feudalism and patriarchy within the body politic. What you see is an attractive and laughing actress, not a dirty manipulator n AD

24 March 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Bebo Begs Bhansali

Actress Kareena Kapoor and director Sanjay Leela Bhansali have long expressed interest in making a movie together, but when Bhansali chose his Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam leading lady Aishwarya Rai to play Paro in his Devdas, Kareena famously fell out with him. He approached her again for RamLeela, and for a while it seemed they’d finally found a project to work on together. But then Kareena revealed to Bhansali that she wanted to take substantial time off work after her wedding, and asked him to delay the film. The director balked, his elaborate sets already in advanced stages of construction, and replaced her with Deepika Padukone.

Now, sources close to the director reveal that Kareena has been furiously reaching out to him, urging him to cast her in his passion project Bajirao Mastani. This period love story— between Peshwa Baji Rao, an early 18th century Indian general, and Mastani, the brave, beautiful woman who would go on to become his second wife—has long been in development, and everyone from Aishwarya and Kareena to model Shivani Kapur has been attached at some point. But Bhansali is now keen to cast Deepika as his Mastani, after their successful collaboration on Ram-Leela. The director has made it more or less clear to Kareena that it’s unlikely she’ll be Mastani, but he’s open to offering her the supporting role of Kashibai, Bajirao’s first and older wife. For Kareena, it’s Mastani or nothing.

But Bhansali has more pressing matters at hand than pacifying Kareena. Like casting a male lead. Salman Khan, who the director would’ve liked to cast years ago opposite Aishwarya, is no longer being considered. Shah Rukh Khan, too, was keenly pursued by the director, with no success. Hrithik Roshan has expressed interest, Ajay Devgn’s name has cropped up, and his Ram-Leela leading man Ranveer Singh has told Bhansali he expects to be cast. If Hrithik does say ‘yes’, as Bhansali’s desperately hoping he will, it’ll be Deepika playing Mastani, and possibly Priyanka Chopra in the role of Kashibai. PC, after all, owes Bhansali one for giving her the Mary Kom biopic and that item number in Ram-Leela.

All Worth It

The Cannes Film Festival in May could get very chilly this year, especially around the L’Oreal lounge in the Martinez Hotel. The cosmetics brand had better have a solid plan 24 March 2014

for its Indian ambassadors. Aishwarya Rai, Freida Pinto, and Sonam Kapoor are expected to attend again, of course, but the big question is: will the brand’s latest spokeswoman Katrina Kaif also show up at the Croisette this year?

Aishwarya, who’s been associated with the brand for well over a decade, famously avoids scheduling her appearances in Cannes while Freida and Sonam are still in town. She’ll cleverly commit only to those events that are taking place either before or after the other two have come and left. But with a third rival this year, it may be hard for Ash to completely avoid shared appearances. Apparently, when it was decided that Katrina will be the latest face for the brand, Ash insisted on ‘welcoming’ the actress to the L’Oreal family in the press release that was sent out, so as to avoid any speculation that she was either unaware or unhappy about Katrina being added to the brand’s roster. One Bollywood actress suspects that Kat will not be asked to Cannes this year, just as Sonam wasn’t in her first year with the brand. But then again, ask Sonam why she wasn’t at the Festival that year, and she has an entirely different story to tell.

Pushing Sympathy

The industry has a soft spot for this star kid because of his tragic back-story, but his loopy behaviour and less-than-impressive recent performances aren’t doing him any favours. An impulsive romantic gesture for a girlfriend backfired miserably when they broke up only months into the relationship, and now there are stories of tantrums at an awards function.

The actor was committed to present the gongs during the regional awards segment at a major film awards ceremony recently, but turned around to head home moments before reaching the venue. Turns out he hadn’t bothered to hire his own hair-stylist and make-up person to spruce him up before arriving on the red carpet. So he called the organisers minutes before he got there, demanding that in-house staff be sent to the car to “fix him” before he stepped out in front of the shutterbugs.

Too bad for him, the organisers didn’t have hair and make-up people on standby and conveyed this to the actor, who reportedly huffed and puffed, exchanged a few angry words, and U-turned in the direction of his home, leaving the organisers without a presenter for the segment. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Old Man Hercules

by R au l i r a n i

Manohar Aich is 102 years old. He won the Mr Universe title in 1952.

According to Associated Press, Aich continued to lift weights till the age of 99. However, the old man has been rather quiet of late. His family says he last spoke at length in an interview a few months ago, to the BBC. During the interview, he expressed his lasting regret at not having met five-time Mr Universe winer Arnold Schwarzenegger. n 64 open

24 March 2014

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