Final pdf for web 9th sep13 by Open Media Network

Breakfast with Shashi Tharoor

A killer disease returns to Mumbai

RS 35 9 September 2013

INSIDE The psychology of rape l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

w e e k

What Modi wants in UP Development â&#x153;&#x201C; Hindutva

...and what his voters want Good governance 81% Ram temple 15%

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Volume 5 Issue 35 For the week 3—9 September 2013 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers cover photo Raul Irani

9 september 2013

Seshank

I can’t stand Manish Tewari, but I did watch the video and I think he was only trying to suggest that the media better raise its standards, albeit with a clumsy Bar Council example (‘A Licence to Enter Politics’, 2 September 2013). I’m not sure if there’s any introspection in the Indian media because I don’t see evidence of any. The sad truth is that the media and mediapersons in particular have now become a joke. And the absence of media credibility is a huge reason for the absence of political accountability. This revolting ‘Breaking News’ culture The absence of media drives not just TV credibility is a huge channels but the entire reason for the absence of food chain. Some political accountability channel breaks a news item, plays it endlessly the whole day, people fight over it like dogs on Twitter, Facebook and in TV studios; followed by blogs and op-eds the next day. Then what? No one gives a damn about the story. Maybe the TV channel format doesn’t give them a Page-2, but why doesn’t the print or internet media take the story forward? No one expects investigative journalism on a daily basis, but one sees zero appetite to pursue a story to its logical conclusion. I don’t agree with Mr Tewari’s remedy, but I can’t fault the sentiment behind it. Regardless of the fact that it was voiced by a politician of dubious credibility, Indian news media is cacophonous and pointless. The sooner you get your act together, the better..  letter of the week Rationalist Minority

in the piece, ‘Up Against Godmen’ (2 September 2013), the writer says: ‘It wasn’t surprising to see an otherwise sought after Salgaonkar fade away silently.’ I beg to differ. Without doubt, Narendra Dabholkar’s death is a tremendous loss to the Rationalist Movement. But let’s be honest here, astrologer Jayant Salgaonkar’s death did not receive as much media coverage simply because he died of natural causes. A murder will always get more media coverage than such a death. I am certain that had the tables been turned, the media would have rushed

to cover Mr Salgaonkar’s death and Mr Dabholkar would have remained an unsung hero. There are simply not enough rationalists among us who care.  Jaideep Bhide

We Are Like This Only

this experiment [iTunes selling music in India] would probably reveal what is to be expected, that Indians are not going to pay for music (‘Cash for Notes’, 2 September 2013). A lot of Indians are living overseas, who zealously download/stream movies/ music illegally all the time. Almost all recent Indian movies, which they prefer by a

fair margin, are available on some shady website pretty much on the date of their theatrical release. For some reason, Indians desist from downloading movies as much. Music, in comparison, is considered totally ‘fair’ to download illegally. We are like this only, but would never flinch pointing fingers at corrupt politicians.  Prakash Iyer

What If?

while i agree with the humour set forth in this write-up, I would like to point out the significance of using a grammar correction plug-in (‘Let’s Share the Cock’, 2 September 2012). I appreciate the feminine perspective portrayed in this, but apart from the sarcasm, I wouldn’t appreciate the insensitivity in second-guessing what the ‘groom’ was thinking. What if, in all those instances (except for the mothers and fathers doing the snooping), the ‘groom’ was looking for a way out of getting hitched?  Sharath

Mad About Marriage

marriage is the most unnatural state that a human being can be in, and yet it is projected as the epitome of happiness and stability (‘Surviving the Scramble’, 26 August 2013). After the initial enthusiasm for effort-free sex goes down, all that a couple is left with is one or two rug rats, EMIs, flabby bodies, and a thousand annoying habits of each other that one once ‘adored’.  Vikas Sehrawat

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The Rupeenomics of Recession Travel tourism

The struggling rupee has clipped the wings of Indian travellers but has boosted inbound tourism

An estimated 14 million Indians travel abroad every year. But as the rupee slides, many who were headed to Europe or the United States are instead travelling to cheaper destinations like South-east Asia or Australia. Since late April, the Indian rupee has lost a fifth of its dollar value. Travel agents say that countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia have become popular destinations for short holidays. “People are switching from long-haul holidays in Europe and the US to short-

new delhi

9 september 2013

haul ones in these countries,” says Vinay Gupta, who heads the Northern Division of the Travel Agents Association of India. Philippines is an emerging choice for Indians looking for honeymoon or family holiday destinations. “It is a critical period for us till the rupee stabilises,” he says. However, there are travellers who, instead of cancelling their trips to the West, plan to shorten itineraries and scale back on accommodation. “We have noted some postponement in travel plans but not cancellations,” says Rajesh

Magow, co-founder and CEO of Makemytrip.com. “Most of the bookings were made in advance [when the dollar was not so expensive] and so not much has been affected yet.” Kanjilal Gour, President of the Indian Association of Tour Operators, says the sliding rupee has a positive side too. “Many foreign tourists have been extending their trips to other cities like Udaipur, Gwalior, Mumbai and even Orissa. These aren’t on the regular tourist map for foreign travellers,” he says. “Shopping is an added attraction now.”

Gour sees this as an opportunity to increase travel within India, but the positive impact will only be visible next year. “India is an exotic destination, so foreign travellers plan in advance. The upcoming season (between October and February) looks promising,” he says. Magow feels there is a market for short-haul trips, activity-based holidays and off-beat destinations in India. “When it’s not possible to go around the world in $8 like Raj Kapoor, it makes sense to go around India in a little more,” he says. n Aanchal Bansal

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manish swarup/ap

small world

contents

cover story

What Modi wants in UP

Battle

rape

Two women against sand-mining

The psychology of it

6 angle

A tale of TRPs

32 news reEL

The digitisation and dumbing down of news

Interview

Shashi Tharoor

While Chidambaram had earlier blamed the rupee’s crash on global factors, he now admits that domestic failings played a role as well swerve

“All emerging markets have been impacted by forex volatility”

“There are not just external factors. We recognise that there are domestic factors”

—Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram, as quoted in The Indian Express 22 August 2013

—Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram, as quoted in The Indian Express 27 August 2013

When NYT Dropped the F Bomb Dissident Gardens, which opens: ‘Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist party.’ Salon later added a correction to the piece, acknowledging that—as several tweeters and a piece on Slate had already pointed out—the NYT had, in fact, printed the word once before. This was in 1998, when the paper reproduced the entire text of the Starr Report—an investigative report on then US President Bill Clinton. The word ‘fuck’ had then been printed as part of a quote from Monica Lewinsky in the report. n

Affleck’s v e t o When Ben Affleck was named as the choice to play the next Batman, there was a furore online. Fans beseiged the studio heads to change their decision. Many had been unable to forgive his first portrayal of a superhero in the film Daredevil. Last time we checked, a Change.org petition was doing the rounds of the internet, asking that the decision to cast Affleck be reconsidered. The 4 open

turn

The New York Times, that paragon of enduring virtue in the grim world of contemporary newspaper journalism, which tolerates no expletives or profanities in its copy, recently dropped its first ‘F’ bomb.The website Salon reported Monday that this was the first ever instance of the paper printing the word ‘fuck’. As part of a feature on the rooms where writers work, the 25 August 2013 issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine carried the opening lines of four new books, among which was Jonathan Lethem’s new novel

Philology

around

Dark Night petition’s creator, John Roden mentions in his letter that he respects Affleck’s work but feels he is ‘inappropriate for the role’. So far, 75,000 people have supported the petition. Affleck was cast in the role after Christian Bale declined to star in another Batman film. The as-yetuntitled film, scheduled for a 17 July 2015 release, will also star Henry Cavill as Superman. n 9 September 2013

44 Pop

b books

The return of the boy band

Punjab: a history of shared interest

c cinema

true life

The Kannada film industry

The body of a terrorist

the tim

es o

f india

9 September 2013

Photo illustrations tarun sehgal

On 24 August , the second day after news broke that five men had raped a young photojournalist in Mumbai, The Times of India’s Mumbai edition devoted four pages to the incident. The reporters of a story titled ‘Neighbours in the dark, colleagues can’t believe it’ saw fit to visit the young woman’s residence and speak to watchmen, neighbours and others about her assault, despite acknowledging that those they spoke to had been ‘oblivious’ to the event. If this weren’t sufficient evidence of the paper’s callous indifference to the woman’s privacy, let alone professional ethics, The Hoot points out that TOI also revealed unverified medical details, the names and faces of the five accused, and the head of the religious community to which the woman belongs. For all their grandstanding about replacing the word ‘victim’ with ‘survivor’, TOI appears to have no clue of how rape should or should not be reported. n

Katrina’s problem with stealth

After 50 years as the film critic for The Observer, around his 80th birthday, Philip French is about to retire. In a wide-ranging interview to The Guardian, which also covered his favourite films, French spoke in glowing terms about Satyajit Ray’s films. Asked which eight reels he’d take on a deserted island, he replied, “It changes all the time, but I would definitely take Singin’ in the Rain (directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly), Stagecoach by John Ford, either Hitchcock’s North by Northwest or The Lady Vanishes, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and at least one of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy—he’s one of my great heroes, Ray, and one of the most impressive directors or men that I’ve ever met.” n

fa n - f o l l o w i n g

F o r violating the privacy of the

young woman raped in Mumbai last week in its race for a ‘scoop’

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

Tribute to Ray

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of ■ ■

Kopicats The world’s most expensive coffee, which costs between $150 and $230 a pound, is Kopi Luwak. For this coffee, instead of picking berries from trees, farmers pick berries that have been consumed and excreted by the Asian palm civet. Civets are known to eat the best ripe coffee berries, and their digestive tracts strip the fruit from the beans. The beans that are excreted are then picked, washed, fermented and roasted, creating a unique flavour. However,

per colation

a large quantity of fake Kopi Luwak has recently been plaguing the market. A group of Japanese and Indonesian researchers have now come up with a way to chemically distinguish regular coffee from Kopi Luwak. According to their research, recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, digested coffee beans have significantly different levels of certain acids than non-digested beans. They surmise that gastric juices and microbes in the civet’s digestive system probably give the beans a distinctive acid profile. The researchers say coffee experts can now use their research to separate real Kopi Luwak from its crappy copies. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

On the Contrary

A Tale of Two Exclusives What studio discussions on the Mumbai rape revealed about NDTV and Times Now M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

day after the rape in

Mumbai, between indignation and fulmination, between Times Now and NDTV, there was also this—Raj Thackeray on his two-state theory about crime, and Amitabh Bachchan on the horror of the incident. On any given day, Thackeray is calculated spite and rhetoric to the point that no one is surprised or offended anymore. In his interview with Arnab Goswami, he blamed crime in Mumbai entirely on migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but with the caveat that he was not talking specifically about the rape case. The rider was a deliberate one in the event that the rapists were not from those states. He asked to be put in charge of Maharashtra in order to control ‘them’ while again issuing a caveat that he was not demanding this as an election spiel. It was a strange sort of interview. Goswami, who usually has 40 exclamations and expostulations for every comment from his guests, was meek as a mouse and mewed like a cat face-to-face with a bigger bully. What became clear is that since the interview, as decided by Thackeray, would not be about the rape in specific, all it was doing was allowing him to foment the xenophobia that runs the blood in his party’s veins. Now we read that all the rapists were born in Mumbai and Thackeray had been astute in giving himself that escape clause. But Goswami will probably not question him on that. Bachchan was on NDTV with Barkha Dutt a day after the rape too. Bachchan’s interview in her special edition of The Buck Stops Here started after 45 minutes of rage and anguish by Dutt and her panel over the rape. As Bachchan came on screen, you noticed that almost all of Dutt’s questions in the beginning were laced with the word ‘satyagraha’. That happens to be the name of Bachchan’s forthcoming movie. These are parts of some of those questions put to him: “Amitabh Bachchan, as the central protagonist of this movie, you are...” “You spoke about how satyagraha can deliver change in the context of the Delhi gangrape. Here you are in your city, where

6 open

pankaj nangia/bloomberg/getty images

bhaskar paul/india today group/getty images

making compromises Barkha Dutt (left) and Arnab Goswami: two of India’s most seen faces

a 22-year-old gets gangraped. She’s out on assignment, and here you see people angry, continuing with their satyagraha so to speak. Do you see a resonance on what you were conveying in cinema to what happened in Mumbai just last night…” ‘‘Do you see this anger of the ordinary person out on the streets that your new film also explores? Do you see it as healthy or anarchist in nature…” The promotion of a movie is a marketing exercise designed to increase box office collections. So what has happened is the clubbing of profit for Satyagraha’s makers with the rape coverage. Once you see through that, what seems a normal interview suddenly becomes distasteful. It is probable that Goswami and Dutt thought these were legitimate editorial

What happened is the clubbing of profit for Satyagraha’s makers with the rape coverage. Once you see through that, what sounds like a normal interview suddenly becomes distasteful

calls. Any other day it might have been. Thackeray is hard to get for an English news channel to interview, and whatever he says will make news. Likewise, superstars are only available when one of their films is releasing. Both these personalities will only come if some private purpose is served. All that would be understandable if not for the fact that these two journalists had throughout those post-rape days been railing about society, values and morality. They were serving righteousness by the minute, which suddenly took a backseat when it came to self-interest and the promise of an exclusive. It’s not just news anchors who stand on lofty pedestals in emotionally surcharged atmospheres like the present one. How can you comprehend your own failings when everything else is flawed under the shadow of shock, anguish and outrage? If you are the voice of outrage, then promoting a movie under the garb of a discussion on rape is a low point as much as anything else. Or maybe not. Letting a politician get away with criminal profiling of migrant communities might be below that. n 9 september 2013

india

A Hurried Man’s Guide to England’s Urination Scandal

England won the Ashes series against Australia 3-0. This was their fourth win in the last five engagements against their bitter rival. England also drew level with Australia in their overall head-to-head record. Both teams have now won 31 Ashes series each. After the presentation and other formalities were completed, England players started celebrating their win by sitting on the pitch and drinking beer. Nothing wrong with that. What better way to savour a big win than at the very scene of the triumph, that too with lager in your hand, teammates by your side and the smell of grass in the air. But according to media reports, this is where the story gets messy.

glyn kirk/afp

With no toilet nearby, and no doubt with judgment clouded by When even drink and euphoria, Kevin Shane Warne Pietersen, James Anderson wags a finger in and (of course) Stuart disapproval, Broad relieved themyou must have selves on the Oval pitch, done something cheered on by teammates. truly naughty Australian journalists still working in the press box witnessed this and reported the incident. If true, then it is indeed shameful. Granted that athletes are still kids in the big picture and that boys will be boys, but there is no doubt that

drinks on the house England after their Ashes win

urinating on a field is in poor taste. Generally Australia are considered the worst behaved athletes but England outdid them. When even Shane Warne wags a finger in disapproval, you must have done something truly naughty. “Unfortunately the way people are judged these days, it’s best to celebrate within the confines of the dressing room,” Warne said. “Stay in there as long as you like, get as drunk as you like if that is what you want to do and enjoy your [time with] team-mates and the moment. But to go and disrespect something as ancient as the Oval pitch in such an unnecessary and crass way is a pretty ordinary and arrogant thing to do.” n

It Happens

Who Needs an ATM Card? Hooded thieves carry off entire ATM machines in Bangalore Anil Budur Lulla

n the night of 10 August in Bangalore, a couple of state electricity distribution company employees on night duty tried to sleep in their mosquito-infested office. Their compromised rest was further disturbed by some noise from next door—that of a heavy metal object being pushed. Curious, one of them popped his head out and saw to his shock that four men, their faces covered in hoods, were trying to push an ATM machine into a getaway jeep that had drawn parallel to the kiosk. Shouts of the electricity company employees alerted the thieves, who started their jeep. As the vehicle swerved, the ATM machine fell on the asphalt. This was the fifth such attempt this month in Bangalore and the eighteenth robbery attempted on an ATM this year in the city. Like in the earlier cases, the culprits have not been found. The methods of robbers trying to violate ATMs have been ingenious. They have tried cutting through the walls or cables of the ATM with portable gas cutters. They have assaulted security personnel. And they have tried moving the mountain itself. There was Rs 25 lakh in the last machine they tried to steal. Police claim to have clues about the robbers, but haven’t traced them yet. They are blaming banks for not employing security guards at kiosks, especially those in the suburbs, and for not installing powerful CCTV cameras. Vijay Kumar, a chest manager at a public sector bank, says attempts to carry off ATMs have been made even in the heart of the city. Merely appointing more guards or CCTVs is

not the answer to the crisis. A Crime Branch officer says, “In earlier cases, we arrested seven people. They were inside jobs by those who worked as securitymen for cash-filling agencies. Thieves who carry away ATMs seem to be professionals as they cover their heads and do not care about the CCTV cameras.’’ Bangalore Police Joint

There were 18 attempted robberies on ATMs in Bangalore this year

paulo buchinho/getty images

real

Commissioner (Crime) PK Mohanty says these thieves target ATMs that are not bolted to the ground. “They cut cables connecting the machine and push it out of the door. If the machine is bolted to the ground, they use gas cutters to cut the bolts or cut the machine skin [at the spot] where cash is located.’’ n 9 september 2013

business

when india decided to open crisis its economy to the rest of the world a little over two decades ago, few would have imagined that Indians would have to listen so closely to every utterance of a foreign central bank. But with Indian assets and the rupee falling so sharply in direct response to how and when the US Federal Reserve withdraws its policy of ‘quantitative easing’—QE3, that is, a monthly injection of $85 billion of cheap money into the world economy—that is exactly what is happening. That India was particularly vulnerable to a Fed drawdown, since it was dependent on global investment inflows to finance its current account deficit, was well known. What has shocked many observers is how badly the country has been rocked by a reversal of capital inflows. What it means is that hyper-speculation has been what drew the dollars in, while the going looked good, and that is what has seen the money flee. The fundamentals of the economy have been of only minor consequence. It is also why the ongoing panic, seen in the rupee’s 20 per cent crash since end-April, exaggerates India’s woes. “This seems to be a classic case of some bears outstripping the bulls,” says Raghvendra Nath, managing director of Ladderup Wealth Management Pvt Ltd, “and creating a panic that the emerging world would come to an end after QE3.” The only silver lining to this, he says, is that “Countries would at least learn to live with the new reality.” This demands a balanced analysis. If the US Fed withdraws its

REUTERS

The Imperative of Economic Expansion

sand castle The Indian rupee remains particularly vulnerable to overwhelming waves of US-fed global liquidity

stimulus, in place since the Great Recession began in late 2008, it would not vacuum the world of all the money already spun out. All it would mean is that further dollar dispersal would stop. All else being the same, analysts calculate that this would result in a 5-10 per cent drop in inflows. It does not justify a rupee collapse. Capital restrictions, as Finance Minister P Chidambaram has clarified, shall not be imposed on foreign investors—so even that fear of global investors is unfounded. India is not about to shut itself off. Eventually, the attractiveness of Indian assets ought to be determined by the

returns they are able to generate, which in turn is about the state of the domestic economy. From a foreign viewpoint, it is dollar returns that matter, and this requires India to achieve stability on its ‘current account’ gap between the dollars it earns and what it spends. Import substitution, often sneered at, may well be what’s needed right now. At the end, structural reforms are essential. Economic expansion is imperative. n SHAILENDRA TYAGI The ongoing crisis of the economy demands clarity and not howls and shrieks

The Internet’s Internationalisation 9% middle east-africa

9% latin america

13.5% Rest of apac

9.6% southeast asia

11.4% japan

11.5% india

41% Asia Pacific

14% north america 27% europe

Distribution of Worldwide Internet Audience

54% china

India’s share in Asia Pacific grows

India has the world’s third largest number of internet users: just under 74 million. Taken as a proportion of the country’s population, however, that’s very poor—even with a rapid net adoption rate Source: comScore, Inc. compiled by shailendra tyagi

Infographic by Tarun sehgal

9 September 2013

“[Sonia Gandhi] is responsible, more than anyone else, for singlehandedly destroying India’s economy. That is her legacy… There have been many populist spenders, but she takes the first prize for irresponsible populism” Surjit singh Bhalla, chairman, Oxus Investments, on Sonia Gandhi’s leadership

news

reel

breaking news

Digitisation and Dumbing Down Why the Indian broadcast news industry is staring at an abyss Sandeep Bhushan

of 300-odd employees by the TV18 Group has again triggered panic in India’s TV broadcast industry. The fear being: ‘What next?’ And ‘Will it be me?’ From cameramen and video editors to producers (in charge of both news features and shows) and journalists, all have been shown the door by the media behemoth. Those in the know say they saw it coming. A senior editor who protested against the presence of certain names on the retrenchment list was asked to either lump it or leave. At least two prominent primetime anchors have saved their jobs by settling for a 30-40 per cent salary cut. A senior cameraman tasked with forwarding a list of people to be retrenched chose to step down instead of succumbing to the whims of an axe-wielding management. This is not the first time it has happened. In 2009, an identical number of people had been sacked in the wake of the crippling blow of the financial meltdown. The significance this time round is that ‘load shedding’ has come close on the heels of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group ploughing nearly Rs 4,800 crore into the beleaguered company. The move to downsize was initiated by Reliance, and Ernst & Young was appointed to advise the company on restructuring itself. But the TV18 group is not alone. NDTV, which has been intermittently chopping and changing its staff over the past few years, went through a similar exercise last year when nearly 50 of its Mumbai bureau employees were laid off. Around the same time, the India Today Group also retrenched a large number of people in Mail Today and Headlines Today. In the former, there were a large number of sackings, right from the editor downwards. In the latter, virtually all senior desk hands and reporters were fired—some of whom had served the channel since its inception. The carnage in this industry, which has been underway in fits and starts since 2009, is explained broadly by two factors. Its existence at the cutting edge of an emerging—digital—technology, coupled with the continuing aftershocks of the

The recent sacking

18 open

the ‘breaking news’ phenomenon), even while maintaining tight editorial control over content, 24x7. More critically, it simplifies tasks. Which means everyone can do the same job. For example, reporters of most news channels are expected to know how to edit raw video footage (done earlier by a specialised video editor) and wield a camera. Their core job of news gathering has been reduced to shooting soundbites and uplinking them, something that even a cameraman can do. This process of integration begins with the physical sharing of work space, especially within channels that are bilingual or have multiple media interests like CNBC-TV18 or the India Today Group, ‘Integrated Newsroom’ The latest elephant in the TV newsroom is by large groups of workers. It ends up with reporters and editors simultaneously the ‘integrated newsroom’, a concept delivering content for several platforms: from the immediate news platforms (print or electronic) to the digital edition to even The carnage in this industry mobiles, iPhones and sundry other is explained broadly by two gadgets like tablets. For instance, reporters factors. Its existence at the of NDTV nowadays file reports even for its cutting edge of emerging digital web edition because this will count in their annual appraisals. technology, coupled with the As the process evolves, newsroom continuing aftershocks of the integration in both the print and electronic media is likely to get structured around global meltdown separate ‘hubs’, each serving a specific platform that requires tailormade content. For instance, recently, Britain’s The which is in an advanced stage of implementation in Europe and the US. In India, Guardian reported the growing popularity of ‘listicles’, basically news articles it is still taking baby steps. As Ashish structured like a list (pointwise, that is) Pherwani of Ernst & Young told The designed for mobile digital platforms. Economic Times on the TV18 Group’s These are seen as ‘news snacks’ that are downsizing measures, “There will be a common newsroom to make the processes easy to digest ‘during short sharp bursts of more efficient. Focus will be on increasing attention’, as the report puts it. In India, the impact of digitisation is still the width of news coverage.” at a very early stage in our news industry, What an ‘integrated newsroom’ does is but standardisation of job skills has flatten the newsroom hierarchy by created conditions that render everyone putting every single operation online, dispensable. Especially technical hands which in turn makes it possible to and journalists on ‘softer’ beats such as measure output per head, and reorder education, health, the environment and work flow in a manner that vastly boosts development in general. Most retrenchthe ability of the editor/promoter (often the same) to closely monitor news content ments over the past few years, including those by TV18, have seen this lot lose their even sitting at home. The larger aim is to make news delivery quick (which explains jobs (its environment and foreign affairs global meltdown, both feeding each other. While the latter forces companies to ‘shed flab’, the former is making it happen. In a classic replay of Luddism, people watch in horror as technology replaces labour— though it is a far cry from the sweep already experienced by the Western media. However, unlike that nineteenth century phase of technology adoption, which ushered in superior technology and productivity in its wake, today’s digitisation at best remains a mixed blessing for the news industry since almost everybody concurs that ‘news’ is simply not just another product.

9 september 2013

manpreet romana/afp

aftershock The layoffs at TV18 are only a foretaste of what lies ahead as newsrooms are pared down across the industry

editor has been shown the door). The ‘beat’ system has been diluted with reporters often expected to fill in for colleagues as well as handle several issues simultaneously. Needless to say, news gathering operations are heavily compromised this way. Also, bureaus located in ‘marginal India’ (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, the Northeast) have been disbanded and replaced by stringers. The buzzword now is ‘multi-tasking’, a direct outgrowth of skill devaluation. As Aroon Purie, India’s original media baron, recently stated: “What I look forward to is to create a news turbine that will then grow on to multiple platforms. We would hire specialists who are domain experts. They can then generate content across media, whether it is an article or a TV story or an internet one. There will be one floor with only 450 journalists (though we have a total of 1,200). There will be a synergy in the way we generate content, in advertising, in our approach to events.” Not exactly comforting for his thousand plus employees, is it? Hollowing out News: The US Experience Since there are virtually no resource repositories that map the impact of digital 9 september 2013

media in India, the US experience can give us an idea of which way the Indian media is headed, though the experience is unlikely to be identical. But broadly, the growth of digital media and platforms is a double-edged sword. While it empowers the ordinary citizen (blogs, social networking sites and so on) and creates a surfeit of information at the click of a mouse, its gains for the newsgathering industry are in serious doubt. One need go no further than a report compiled by the American media regulatory body, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), two years ago. The results are ominous, in fact chilling. The FCC report, while lauding the digitisation of media space, warns, ‘Newspapers are innovating rapidly and reaching new audiences through digital platforms but most are operating with smaller reporting staffs. And as a result are often offering less in-depth coverage of critical topics such as health, education and local government.’ In the US, there has been a spending cut of $1.6 billion per year on reporting operations between 2006 and 2009, which has led to a situation where ‘there are about as many journalists working today

as there were before Watergate.’ Investigative stories have suffered a precipitous decline. According to the report, between 1984 and 2010, submissions for the Pulitzer Prize ‘public service’ category (mainly investigating reporting) dropped by 43 per cent. The report also notes that ‘a minority are exhibiting alarming tendencies to allow advertisers to dictate content’. Meanwhile, a Pew research study has concluded that ‘as news is posted faster often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important’. Nearly ‘63 per cent of the stories were initiated by government officials,’ it adds. This has ended up strengthening the government’s version of events. There is also an alarming increase, almost to the tune of 60 per cent, in what the FCC calls, ‘One-man Bands’ in the television news business. That is, journalists who do it all: ‘conduct interviews, shoot video and edit their own stories’. Needless to say, this has adversely impacted the quality of news. By the time we realise that the impact in India is likely to be similar, it will probably be too late to do anything about it. n open www.openthemagazine.com 19

rajesh kumar singh/ap

m o d i ’s u p l a b

Back to Rama for Rajya The return of the party’s Ayodhya agenda Jatin Gandhi

onday, 26 August, was an important day in the life of the Lok Sabha in more ways than one. Known best for the increasing number of disruptions over the past few years, the 15th Lok Sabha functioned for nearly 12 hours at a stretch—after a gap of almost three years. With the debate extending late into the night, Indian Parliament passed the UPA-II’s showpiece Food Security Bill, which aims to provide staples of diet nearly free to over two-thirds of India’s population. The Congress hopes that its enactment will see it cobble together and lead a UPA-III coalition after the 2014 General Election. Congress President Sonia Gandhi made a speech in the House on the Bill—again, a first for her on a bill under the UPA-II regime—making it amply clear that the ruling party was ready to ditch the middle-class and India’s economic story of growth and fall back on its core constituency, India’s poor, that it has held on to since Indira Gandhi’s early days in politics. But, as a pointer to what one may expect in the 2014 Lok 20 open

Sabha polls from the opposition camp, a seemingly less significant development cannot escape notice: the Bharatiya Janata Party, too, decided to address its core constituency with its intervention on the floor of the House. The party decided to throw its weight behind the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s rekindling of the Ram Temple issue and its proposed 20-day march for the construction of this temple at Ayodhya. The party’s Gorakhpur MP, the saffron-clad priest-politician Yogi Adityanath, let loose a tirade during Zero Hour in Parliament against the Uttar Pradesh government led by Akhilesh Yadav, accusing it of “sheltering Muslim jihadi terrorists while humiliating Hindus and their saints.” Adityanath demanded that the Centre dismiss the Samajwadi Party government in UP even as the SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav listened and several BJP MPs in the house applauded by thumping their tables in agreement. “By banning the [chauraasi kosi] parikrama, the [state] government has affected 10 crore people in Uttar 9 September 2013

Pradesh and humiliated them,” he went on to say, “This government has no right to stay in power, it should be dismissed.” If there was any doubt left that the BJP was supporting the VHP’s shrill cry for building the temple, the party cleared it by fielding Adityanath in the Lok Sabha that day to speak on the matter and later address the party’s official media briefing in the Parliament Complex. The Gorakhpur MP went on to demand legislation supporting the temple’s construction. In his address to the House, Adityanath said: “I want to remind all parties in the country which run their politics in the name of secularism that the Congress-led government had submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court in 1994. It was stated in this affidavit that if it is established that the disputed structure in Ayodhya was built by demolishing a Hindu temple or monument then the action that follows will be in keeping with Hindu sentiments.” “At last,” he said, citing dubious ‘evidence’, “it has been proved... In the 30 September 2010 judgment of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad HC, all three judges have ruled in agreement that the disputed site [at Ayodhya] is actually the birthplace of Ram. When the disputed land is indeed Ramjanmabhoomi, then the congress of saints has been demanding a law for the construction of a Ram temple. That is no sin. We are demanding our right. We are simply demanding that a grand temple be built at the Ramjanmabhoomi. This government should make a law because the affidavit in the Supreme Court was [filed] by the Congress-led government at that time.” Adityanath’s address was a reiteration of the claims and demands made by VHP chief Ashok Singhal in the run-up to the proposed march. From the time the SP disallowed the padyatra (march on foot) and imposed a ban on any public assembly in and around Ayodhya, BJP leaders had been issuing statements critical of the SP government for trying to thwart the VHP- organised march of Hindu sadhus. On the eve of the march, on 24 August, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj dismissed allegations that the hype over the yatra was an attempt by both the SP and BJP to polarise voters in their favour by fostering a HinduMuslim divide in the state. “The charge is absolutely baseless. There is no tension due to the yatra, but because of statements being made on it. People should refrain from making [such] statements and it will pass off peacefully,” she said. On the day the march was to begin, the UP government swooped down on VHP activists, arrested Singhal, the outfit’s vice-president Praveen Togadia and more than 2,000 others, including sadhus from different parts of the state—as a way to implement the SP’s ban on the saffron mobilisation. The BJP claims that the figure is much larger. “More than 3,000 saints, Hindu activists and Rambhakts [devotees of Ram] have been arrested,” Adityanath said at the 9 September 2013

BJP’s media briefing. The visible lack of resistance put up by VHP activists and sadhus resulted in allegations of the entire drama being a ‘fixed match’ between the SP and the BJP, a way for both to play to their respective galleries of Muslim and Hindu voters. There were other problems with the proposed march. Among them was its timing. Mahant Gyandas, head of the committee that organises one such parikrama every year, blamed the VHP for playing politics. Gyandas told The Hindu: “The yatra has always been held from Chaitra Purnima to Baisakh Navami, according to rituals. I have been participating since I was 10. It has already been performed by sadhus [at the appropriate] time and the original parikrama is done.” Besides, sadhus had been performing the ritual routinely and had not needed the state administration’s permission for it all these years. Both the VHP and SP played a slanging match in full public view for days together. Singhal addressed the media on several occasions in the run-up to the yatra, shriller each time in demanding the temple. On 20 August, he blamed “Muslims in the SP” for the UP government’s decision to ban the chauraasi kosi parikrama.

The VHP is game because Modi’s ascent to the BJP’s top has revived its hopes of the party’s re-adoption of its Hindutva agenda of the late 1980s and early 1990s Polarising Uttar Pradesh

The increase in Singhal’s shrillness coincides with the BJP’s anointment of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the party’s election campaign committee chief. While Modi himself has remained silent on the demand for a Ram Temple in Ayodhya, focusing nationally on his campaign for a ‘Congress-free India’ to cash in on a wave of anti-Congress sentiment, UP is a different battle arena altogether. Within a month of Modi’s appointment, his lieutenant and party general secretary in charge of UP, Amit Shah, visited Ayodhya on 6 July. “Crores of Hindus in the country want to see a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya. We all will work for the construction of a massive temple as early as possible. I have also prayed to the god [Ram] for uprooting Congress misrule in India and replacing it with good governance,” Shah told journalists after offering prayers at the makeshift Ram temple in the area, laying bare the party’s poll roadmap for UP. The BJP won 10 seats in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls in UP, finishing a dismal fourth behind the SP (23 seats), Congress (21 seats) and Bahujan Samaj Party (20 seats). With Narendra Modi set to be anointed the party’s prime ministerial candidate, the party realises it will find allies hard to come by unless it can overtake the Congress’ open www.openthemagazine.com 21

sam panthaky/afp

In Narendra Modi now, the Sangh Parivar led by the RSS sees a potential Prime Minister who is unflinching in his Hindutva affiliation tally by a margin of 30 seats or more. While survey after survey has shown a sharp decline in the Congress’ expected tally in 2014, it has also been pointed out that the ruling party’s losses will not be to the saffron party’s advantage, but will likely go to smaller and regional outfits. In the BJP’s calculations, a Hindu-Muslim polarisation in UP is its best bet. Psephologist and BJP Election Reforms Committee member GVL Narasimha Rao predicts 50 seats for the party in UP based on a survey he says he has conducted. Rao clarifies that it is not an internal survey of the BJP, but his political affiliations are clear. “Every party has a core vote and it should decide its strategy based on that core in mind,” he says, speaking to Open. Rao, a former national executive member of the party, has been batting for Modi for a while now, asserting that secular leadership would do the BJP no good. In June last year, writing in the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s mouthpiece The Organiser, Rao argued in favour of Modi’s declaration as as the party’s PM candidate. He also likened his appeal as a vote catcher to that of former PM Atal 22 open

Behari Vajpayee. He followed it up with another article in the same RSS publication titled ‘Why the BJP should not bother about skittish allies or the ‘Muslim vote’’ In the piece, Rao argues: ‘The widely propagated theory that Muslim consolidation against the BJP hurts it electorally is bunkum. It is a bogie raised by the BJP’s opponents and its own apologists. There is ample evidence to the contrary. Muslims’ rabid opposition to the BJP has indeed proved to be beneficial to it electorally. Take the case of Uttar Pradesh. In the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, held three years after the Babri [Masjid] demolition, the BJP bagged 52 of 85 seats in Uttar Pradesh. Again, in 1998, the BJP bagged 57 seats. If vehement opposition from Muslims and their tactical voting against the BJP could defeat the BJP, it could not have performed well in UP in both these elections. The outcome of the 1996 and 1998 elections in Uttar Pradesh shows that the opposition of Muslims does not adversely affect the BJP. On the contrary, the Muslims’ opposition to the BJP has been beneficial to it electorally by consolidating Hindu votes in its favour.’ Within the BJP, the number of takers for this argument has gradually increased ever since Modi’s anointment. According to a party source, the BJP will make no effort to polarise voters but spare none to effect a reverse polarisation of the sort Rao refers to—with Hindus reacting to Muslims voting en bloc. That could explain why senior party leader and Modi-supporter Arun Jaitley tried to reach Kishtwar in Jammu after violence broke out there in early August between Hindus and Muslims. 9 September 2013

photos vishal srivastav/express archives

The saffron spread (Clockwise from left) a security flag march in Ayodhya after the VHP called its chaurasi kosi parikrama; the arrest of VHP National General Secretary Praveen Togadia; Modi at a temple

Hindutva’s Poster Boy

In the VHP, the BJP sees an ally that can deliver the hard Muslim opposition to saffron politics that could result in a ‘reverse polarisation’ of the electorate. The VHP is game because Modi’s ascent to the BJP’s top has revived its hopes of the party’s re-adoption of its Hindutva agenda of the late 1980s and early 1990s. “The VHP believes that the locks [of the Babri Masjid] were opened and the structure was demolished [on 6 December 1992] because of a movement by Hindus. People in Gujarat have seen that sort of faith in Hindu beliefs resurrected in the last decade or so. If Modi comes to power [at the Centre], he will obviously think of the Hindus of the country,” explains Prakash Sharma, national spokesperson of the VHP. Relations between the VHP and the BJP had reached a nadir in 2003, the last year of Vajpayee’s term in power at the Centre. By then, VHP leaders had become extremely 9 September 2013

critical of the BJP leadership. VHP General Secretary Acharya Giriraj Kishore even termed Vajpayee a ‘pseudo Hindu’ for not actively pursuing the Ram Temple issue. In Modi now, the Sangh Parivar led by the RSS sees a potential PM who is unflinching in his Hindutva affiliation. Vajpayee was never seen as a Hindutva icon, LK Advani let his prime ministerial ambitions get the better of his hardline position. For three years after taking charge of the RSS as its chief, Mohan Bhagwat aggressively supported Nitin Gadkari as the BJP chief and saw him as the party’s future PM candidate. A political lightweight, Gadkari not only proved a colossal failure as BJP president but suffered allegations of corruption that forced him out of contention. The RSS needed an alternate candidate. Modi fit the bill. Even as he harped on his development model and sharpened his anti-Congress pitch, he never let his image as a Hindutva strongman get diluted. Gestures like refusing to wear a skullcap, ironically while on a fast for ‘sadbhavana’ (goodwill) among communities, or accusing the Congress of hiding behind “a burkha of secularism”, have only raised his stature with the RSS. Modi’s acceptability within the broader BJP has also gone up several notches on the back of RSS support. It all adds up. Amit Shah’s Ayodhya visit, Adityanath’s demand for legislation on a Ram temple, the VHP’s new found bonhomie with the BJP, and Subramaniam Swamy’s joining the party are all in accordance with a grand saffron plan drawn up in Nagpur: the return of Ram to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s agenda. n open www.openthemagazine.com 23

Who Cares about the Temple? An Open/C-Voter opinion poll, conducted across the country between 23 and 25 August (sample: the 3,368 who said they will vote BJP), finds that an overwhelming majority of the BJP’s support base will foreground issues of governance and development during the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The national pattern holds even in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP, under Modi’s stewardship, is trying to push a hard line on Hindutva

Does Modi have nationwide acceptance (including rural areas) or is his support limited to urban areas?

Do you support Narendra Modi for his record of governance and leadership or for being aggressive on Hindutva?

Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Both urban & rural areas

Only urban

Others/ Can’t say

Will Modi be able to take along BJP allies like Vajpayee did?

Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Governance & Leadership

Aggressive Hindutva

Others/ Can’t say

Between the issues of a Ram temple in Ayodhya and good governance for India, which would be a bigger factor in how you vote in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections? Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Good governance

Ram temple

Others/ Can’t say

What will help Modi reach the magic figure of 272 plus—raking up the Ayodhya issue or getting more alliance partners for the NDA? Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Getting more allies

Ayodhya issue

Others/ Can’t say

Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Yes

Can’t say

Are the BJP and SP (Mulayam Singh) cynically playing the Ayodhya card for political gain? Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Yes

Can’t say

Will all non-Cong allies back Modi if he falls short of a majority? Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Yes

Can’t say

What is the main reason BJP supporters vote BJP/NDA?

If allies don’t back Modi as PM, which other BJP leader would get a broad enough alliance and support to form a government? Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Sushma Swaraj

LK Advani

Rajnath Singh

Shivraj Singh Chouhan

Arun Jaitley

Nitin Gadkari

Venkaiah Naidu

Jaswant Singh

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi

Others/ Can’t say

Total

Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Development

Economic policies

Strong leadership

NDA’s track

Less corrupt

Ram Mandir/ Hindutva

Anti-Congress

Trad. support

Stable govt

Others/ Can’t say

Between the issues of a Ram temple in Ayodhya and good governance for India, which would be a bigger factor in how you vote in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections? State

What is the main reason critics of the BJP don’t support the BJP/NDA? Traditional BJP voter

Switched from Cong

Switched from regional party

New voter (1st timer/ Dormant)

Total

Modi

Communal image

BJP infighting

Anti-BJP

Vajpayee’s retirement

Economic policies

NDA track

More corrupt

Can’t give stable govt

Others/ Can’t say

All figures in per cent; ‘total’ figures are weighted averages

Andhra Pradesh Assam Bihar Chhattisgarh Delhi Goa Gujarat Haryana Himachal Pradesh J&K Jharkhand Karnataka Kerala Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Odisha Punjab Rajasthan Tamil Nadu Uttar Pradesh Uttarakhand West Bengal ALL INDIA

Good Governance

Ram temple

Others/Can’t say

78 90 84 83 85 88 76 76 74 82 89 83 93 77 75 79 91 78 78 86 74 93 81

12 7 13 11 10 11 17 18 19 12 8 13 5 9 21 4 6 18 17 10 19 6 15

11 3 3 5 5 1 6 7 6 6 3 4 2 4 4 17 3 3 5 5 6 1 4

indranil mukherjee/afp

p syc h o lo gy

The Illusion of Immunity What makes rapists feel they can get away with it? Mihir Srivastava

he had spent four months in Delhi

when it happened. On a freezing night last December, a woman from a northern European country was trying to get home at 2 am after a party at a posh locality in South Delhi. Two Indian men, freshly out of college, offered to drive her home in a big car. It was just a ten-minute ride from the party venue. They were not unfamiliar to her. At the party, they had gotten along well. They were polite and articulate, she says, and she saw no reason to suspect them of inhumanity. She accepted their offer. By her account, she sat in the backseat while the two boys occupied the front seats. Their demeanour changed as soon 28 open

as the car started to move. They said something about having some more fun. She said the party had been fun enough. One of them turned around, grabbed her wrist, and declared that the fun was about to begin now. He then reached out to fondle her breasts. She protested, even if mildly. “I am not in the mood,” she said. “We are in the mood and will get you in the mood,” they said, “We know you like us.” She knew she was in trouble, and gave in to their demands without much further protest. If she resisted, she feared, they would make dead meat of her and bury her somewhere without anyone finding out. They took turns raping her in the moving vehicle, one on the back-

seat while the other drove. Then they dropped her home. The victim did not inform the police. Dealing with the Indian Police, she felt, would be yet another trauma. She went instead to a psychologist. She left India within a week and vowed never to return. She is now back, however, with her partner, and regrets that she didn’t report the matter and the two rapists are free to get their way with other hapless girls.

here is no way of knowing who can turn out to be a rapist. Dr Rajat Mitra, a clinical psychologist and director of the Swanchetan Society for Mental Health in 9 September 2013

hunting ground Shakti Mills had been the site of other rapes perpetrated by the same men who assaulted a young photojournalist there last week

New Delhi, cautions against creating a rapist stereotype. As a counsellor of rape victims who has done extensive research on the behaviour of rapists, he says the will to commit a crime is all that is common to them. “Rape is a behavioural crime,” he says, “not a passion crime.” It is not about sexual fulfillment, but about the infliction of violence and the need to prevail. It rarely happens at the spur of the moment, as it is not an outcome of unbridled arousal. It is almost always a planned crime—with a strategy to trap the victim. According to him, the Delhi gangrape of 16 December aboard a moving bus may have happened because the rapists had done it before and gotten away with it. So also the 22 August Mumbai gangrape of a photojournalist on the deserted premises of Shakti Mills. Sexual predators typically assume that they will not have to face any consequences. Police information suggests that at least one of the Shakti Mills rapists had raped ragpickers there in the past and thus probably saw the premises as a hunting ground. Men of such depraved bents of mind usually pick a target, playing charmers at times, and once the target is trapped, are guided by a will to dominate. Many victims of rape say in their testimonies that the rapist covered their eyes with his hands during the assault. This suggests that the rapist is disconcerted by the victim’s glare of admonition. Psychologists say that rapists often have maladjusted relationships with women and usually hold them in contempt. Many show psychopathic traits. Some are found to have had childhoods characterised either by violence or isolation and poor parenting. Society cannot escape its share of blame, says Patricia Uberoi, former Professor of Sociology at Delhi’s Institute of Economic Growth: “We as a society give encouragement to violent acts against women, including rape.” Men at large are responsible for skewed gender equations in society, and the absurd and insensitive utterances of politicians on rape are a reflection of this malaise. Police attitudes are part of the same problem. Two years ago, a woman in her fifties was attacked by an intruder at night in her house in Delhi’s Defence Colony and had to run and lock herself in a room. When the police arrived in the 9 September 2013

wee hours, the inspector asked the woman in a matter-of-fact way: “Did the intruder rape you?” Violations of privacy continue despite Supreme Court guidelines on identity protection. In July this year, the Gujarat government revealed the identity of a seven-year-old rape victim by releasing her photograph when the state’s minister of state for education, Vasu Trivedi, paid her a hospital visit in Jamnagar. In Mumbai, The Times of India revealed the locality of the Shakti Mills victim’s residence. Says Uberoi, “Masculine attitudes in society even legitimise rape. All men are responsible in creating highly asymmetrical gender attitudes. Men—though most of them will never rape—ventilate views and show attitudes in public that contribute to the creation of spaces, time and situations that are dangerous for women. They foster attitudes that legitimise rape or violence against women. If you ask me, ‘Do men contribute to gender asymmetry?’ My answer is ‘yes’.”

Clinical psychologist Dr Rajat Mitra cautions against creating a rapist stereotype, saying the will to commit a crime is all that is common to rapists Mitra’s study points to some disturbing aspects of how rapists think. Many mix up violence and sex. They see nothing wrong in their actions and justify them in ways that betray both moral and cognitive failures. They feel women send them non-verbal signals of invitation. They feel women say they do not want sex when they do. Others feel that women need to be persuaded ‘strongly’ to have sex, and do not see the distinction between persuasion and violence. Some just cannot deal with a refusal; they see a ‘no’ as an affront to their masculinity and force as a way to gain submission or show who’s boss. Last week in Jaipur, an inebriated 35-year-old man allegedly raped his three-year-old daughter after his wife refused to have sex with him. He raped his daughter in the kitchen and left her 150

metres away from his house before going to sleep. One rapist Mitra spoke to expressed a belief that hitting women arouses them. Another considered having sex in a pool of blood an uplifting experience. As many as 15 per cent of rape cases reported are found to be sadistic in nature, with the rapist enjoying the pain he causes.

apists of such dispositions are sel-

dom deterred by the penalties of law. Their sense of impunity would seem to be heightened by two factors in particular. One, being part of a gang of rapists—with a perverse legitimacy sought to be drawn from joint action. And two, being aboard a moving vehicle. Cars in motion have been the site of some of urban India’s most brazen cases. While the sense of mobility lets rapists feel they can literally get away, the vehicle’s cabin enclosure—especially if it has tinted windows—perhaps gives them the illusion of being in a sort of free-for-all zone beyond the reach of law. In gangrape cases, Mitra’s analysis is that at least one of the rapists is not a first-timer. He is typically the initiator who plots the assault and also the first rapist, the one who uses force to subdue the victim. Once the traumatised victim gives up resistance, her mind having gone numb under the assault, the others take turns. In car-assault cases, Uberoi sees the vehicle itself—a hunk of domineering metal and engine power—as a symbol that resonates with the psyche of rapists. Just as speed has its thrill, so to a demented mind does sexual assault. “A moving car is neither a public space nor private sphere,” says Uberoi, “[It is] a liminal space where people can shed their duality for a while and do things they would not otherwise do.” Yet, bans on tinted windows and the like will achieve little to end that iniquitous sense of impunity. What is needed ultimately is gender equality in actual social practice across the country. “The constitution guarantees equality,” says Dr Ruchika Sharma, a lecturer of history at Delhi’s Kamala Nehru College, “I want to practice equality. I know this change is a slow process. But I want to be part of that process.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

d i s co u r s e

“The Cherry-Picking Has to Stop” Rape is not an exotic crime, but an extension of the oppression that women bear daily. The media must take it seriously KAVITA KRISHNAN

For instance, when Maharashtra’s simple fact of needing to move on. What we saw during the December glaring contrast between the Home Minister RR Patil says women Asaram Bapu case—in which a journalists should take the police along outburst is very relevant now because we minor accused him of rape—and the if they are going to a deserted place, or as a society must be willing to fight for Mumbai gangrape case. In the former, Samajwadi Party leaders compare the idea of the autonomy of women in a the Jodhpur Police are dropping the women to gold, they wittingly aid such mature responsible manner, devoid of the victimisation that they are subjected charges against Asaram and the minor a culture. girl is being pressured into withdrawing It must be noted that these consolidat- to when they attempt to do so. her testimony. In the latter, the accused ed statements are not merely loose The protests that are currently going have been arrested and the police are in- remarks but statements made to clearly on in Mumbai have been largely thoughtvestigating the case. cater to the largely patriarchal constitu- ful and very different from the ones in It is this selective treatment of rape encies that they come from and those Delhi. There have been some kneejerk rethat makes it a problem. It is not taken as who endorse such an ideology. This will actions, but largely it’s been a thoughtful seriously as it is supposed to be. The focus continue to be a trend until and unless and provocative discourse. People have is always on ‘big stories’; been thinking about the dibyangshu sarkar/afp idea of freedom, and not prieven the media picks and marily focusing on the juschooses its topics based tice element of the case. This on what they deem sexy shows a clear shift in enough. thought and agenda, which Every case is important, is very different from the because when there is melast time. The only good that dia attention, the police are has come out of it has been forced to act; otherwise, that it has forced a certain there is no moral accountpart of society to sit and take ability for anything. Also, this is not only about notice and be part of a diarape, but about the daily aulogue that forces them to be tonomy that is denied to open to ideas and to talk women and the victimisaabout women’s issues, which have been ignored for tion they are subjected to. louder still We must be willing to fight for the autonomy of women, not just justice so long. These are all relevant subjects when one talks of rape. Finally, I would just like to Society would have us believe that rape this becomes a political issue. re-iterate my point that rape is not taken is some exotic crime women face. For me, In the US, during the last elections, the seriously in the country—because even it is an outcome of the same oppression politicians who made such remarks were on such a problematic subject, we pick they bear daily. Rape is accorded a certain beaten by a large margin by those who and choose our cases and treat them difamount of ‘sexiness’, which is unneces- created a parallel constituency opposing ferently. For example, if the Mumbai rapsary—especially when the victim blam- the values they endorsed. We need to do ists had been held accountable for the something along the same lines. rape of lower-caste women in the area, ing starts. We also need responsible coverage and maybe this unfortunate incident could There are certain similarities that one can draw between the 16 December case critique of such a culture. The media cov- have been avoided. Why should there be and the Mumbai case. Every time there is erage, for both the 16 December case and less outrage over that? The cherry-picksuch an incident, there are kneejerk reac- the current one, has been largely irre- ing has to stop in order to take the subject tions such as ‘hang the rapists’, but there sponsible. One must remember that the seriously and confront the menace. n are also statements made by politicians victim always has the right to privacy; As told to Gunjeet Sra that aid rape culture. not because of shame, but because of the t this time, I am faced with the

30 open

9 September 2013

I N T E RV I E W

‘Personally I would have had no difficulty with [major parties coming under the RTI]’ As part of Open’s monthly Breakfast Chat series, Minister of State for Human Resource Development Dr Shashi Tharoor spoke to Open Editor Manu Joseph. Excerpts:

Ashish sharma

Good morning and thank you for being here. At Open we have very good-natured, unofficial ban on Bengalis writing about other Bengalis, for the practical reason that there are so many articles about Bengalis by Bengalis. So I feel a bit hypocritical being a Malayalee interviewing you, but of the two of us, I think one of us is authentic. One of us is?

One of us is an authentic Malayalee—you?

Oh, thank you. I can tell you my Malayalee-hood was never more useful and never more challenged then when I was handling the PCB operations in the former Yugoslavia and appointed a Malayalee general as the first commander of the forces. There was a general named Satish Nambiar. He had grown up in Bombay and Delhi; I had grown up in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. So the two of us both spoke such bad Malayalam that in the absence of... We knew we would be eavesdropped upon by the secret services of at least five nations, so we would say whatever extremely sensitive things we had to say to each other in atrocious Malayalam, and he would always say that [even] if there was some Malayalam speaker eavesdropping on the conversation, they wouldn’t understand. So I wouldn’t pretend to any greater authenticity than you, Manu.

But I am sure you can pronounce Thiruvananthapuram...

Thiruvananthapuram, I can. Kozhikode is what you’ve got to pronounce to prove your authenticity…

Kozikhode, I think, is the ultimate test. You just qualified.

So Indian Parliament is meeting today and you usually don’t work on working days or weekdays…

Oh thanks, we don’t work on working days. (laughs)

So why are you meeting on a Saturday?

What happened was that, when the disruptions happened over the last 10 days, there was a feeling that there was too much pending legislative business that would suffer. So the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs said that the only way we can make up for this is by scheduling a session on Saturday and by expel9 September 2013

ling these troublemakers earlier in the week, to get some work done. To everyone’s surprise, two days ago, the BJP actually welched on the deal to expel the troublemakers. So we lost Thursday as well. So until Thursday, we effectively had no Parliament. Yesterday, the Rajya Sabha functioned perfectly. Today, the Lok Sabha is meeting. The contentious Food Security Bill is not being introduced, as far as I understand it. There are, however, five other bills that will be introduced and debated. It is a pity, because when Parliament is disrupted in this petty and most unfortunate manner, what happens is that the rest of the legislative agenda gets so tightly squeezed that you don’t get a serious debate on any of the bills you are voting on. Often, bills are introduced in a speech or two and [there is] a quick vote, and that will be what will happen today. But today, the idea is to get some bills out.

What are the five bills being introduced?

Ah! I wish I knew. I am not the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs. I do know that none of my Ministry’s bills, unfortunately, have made to the head of the queue. So none of our education bills—there are 11 pending—are going to be there. But I have to be a good, diligent MP and go there and show my face. I am going to do that once we are done.

I have to ask you the inevitable question about the perception of the Government, especially by what is called the middle class...

Well, it’s a bit unfair but, as with all these perceptions, it matters because in politics, very often, it is a game of perception. The reality is all too often shrouded by a sort of perceptual veil, which tends to delineate what exactly people are supposed to be thinking—the conventional wisdom, as it were, about a particular situation or government or policies. As far as our government is concerned, if you look back on the last nine years, it actually has some epochal achievements that have transformed this nation in ways that people have taken for granted. When the UPA came to power there was no Right to Information Act. I cannot think of a single far-reaching piece of legislation... Forget paralysis, this has shaken up the entire bureaucracy and the po-

litical world. It has given, of course, a lot of work to activists and lawyers. But it has actually created a level of transparency that is probably unparalleled in the democratic world. Certainly, in the US you would not get a contemporary note from the Prime Minister’s office on the 3G affair being released openly. So we are really, as the result of the RTI, one of the most transparent governments in the world. It has happened and everyone has taken it for granted. Similarly, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). We’ve transformed the nature of our country, in terms of rural India. We have managed to provide employment to millions of people who wouldn’t otherwise have it. Yes, some of these are make-work schemes but they are getting paid. Dignity of labour is there. In order to avoid the potential of corruption by middlemen, we’ve opened over 9 million new bank accounts so that people can be paid directly. This has changed the purchasing power of rural India. It has put money in the pockets and hands of the poor. It has changed [things] in many ways—to the effect that people are complaining that they are not getting cheap migrant labour to work on their fields anymore, because they are getting decent work in their own villages. … Look at all of this and you’re looking at far-reaching changes. That a government has done all of this and has [been] paralysed in any way becomes laughable. And yet somehow this impression has run wild because, I am afraid, of certain people in our media who would like to see certain other things happening that might make life easier for them or their friends—[things] which have not been given priority by the UPA, which is focused on the masses and the aam aadmi. They are going after the Government for power policy paralysis.

You’re saying that it is largely a mediaordained perception?

It is a media perception and, very frankly, it’s an elite perception.

You’re saying that one of the big tickets acts is the Right to Information Act. Why don’t the six major political parties want to be under the purview of this act?

Personally, I would have had no difficulopen www.openthemagazine.com 33

ty with this, but my voice doesn’t count on that. Let’s just say that it’s a decision made by all the political parties. I have got questions, needless to say, because when I don’t like what my own party is doing, I ask some of the leaders. What I was told is that the kinds of information that can legitimately be sought under the Right to Information Act can also be legitimately sought from the Election Commission. Your budgets, your money, your expenditure—you can file it with the Election Commission and you can tomorrow file an RTI application with the Election Commission and get it . If you [allow people to] file an RTI application towards parties, they say you would be deluged with politically motivated—maliciously motivated—questions, and the examples they are giving [are of] questions about how you choose a particular candidate and not another candidate, questions about how you raise the money that was spent on a particular campaign, or whatever. Various things...

That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?

They say that we get 20,000 contributions of Rs 100 [each]. Where are you going to keep account of it and give receipts below a certain figure (I forget what that figure is)? But they are saying that in practical terms, we would all be snowed under. Certainly, we are not only a litigious nation but an RTI-losing nation. And the worry is definitely that the parties would suffer in the process, so [this] seems to be something on which the parties are in unanimity.

Are you convinced?

Look, the problem with me on these questions is that I am a new boy in this game. I have been in politics for four years and a bit. These are all people who have multiples of that experience of the way the politics works in this country. They say, ‘You are still learning. We’ve been at it. We tell you how it is going to be.’ And I really don’t have the basis to question their judgment. I think the only MP, to the best of my knowledge, who has questioned [the paries’ resistance to the RTI] is Jai Panda of the BJD. But frankly, the logic in the BJD is, ‘This thing is going to happen anyway so why not take the moral high ground?’ Because if it really—you know, in our po34 open

sition—would actually result in the change, then maybe we wouldn’t take the position... That seems to be what’s happening in these parties.

What are some of the things in politics that surprised you as a new entrant?

They are both good and bad. I’d say the good that surprised me, I remember, are some experiences in Kerala. People like Rahul Gandhi have told me that Kerala is not typical at all, like say, UP is, for example. But in Kerala, I think there’s practically no distinction between politics and social service. The politicians I’ve come across in my last four and a half years are essentially people who are very much engaged with the real problems of real people. It is not the tokenism of visiting a bereaved home when somebody passes away or attending weddings, which of course politicians do in order to be seen. That, they like to think, is an act of compassion or celebration. But there’s a certain self-serving element to it as well. Every one of us is dealing with literally hundreds of problems to solve. The Chief Minister of Kerala has done something extraordinary that has not been done by any chief executive in the world. He has stood for 18 hours a day, in each of the 18 district capitals receiving petitions from anyone and resolving 90 per cent of them on the spot with a swift instruction. The sense of [using] politics to actually help people change their lives has been so deeply ingrained. I was very impressed. As you know from my earlier writing, I was one of those typical middle class people who was cynical about politics. To this day, my own mother is furious that I went into politics. The tendency is to believe that politics is all dirt and sleaze.

(Sunanda Pushkar, Tharoor’s wife, interjects from the audience: “My mother didn’t want me to marry a politician.”) There you are, her mother did not want her to marry one. I’m sure we rank much below IAS officers and editors of magazines, and so on. …One last thought, I probably wasn’t prepared for the extent of the demands of my constituency. It’s a very demanding and exhausting profession. I work five days a week in Parliament—this being sort of an exception for the Parliament session. Friday evening I am on a plane to Trivandrum. I have 16-17 hour days, all of Saturday and Sunday, and wake up at 4 am to catch a 6 am Monday morning flight back to Delhi

This is every week?

Every Parliament week. It is an exhausting profession.

Increasingly, is the MLA becoming more relevant than the MP?

First of all, there’s a massive confusion in the minds of voters—not just [about] the MP and MLA, but going right down to the Ward Councillor or the Gram Panchayat Councillor—because from their point of view, if there’s a pothole on the road and somebody comes by looking for a vote, he better fix that pothole. And it doesn’t matter to them if it’s a councillor or an MLA or an MP or whatever—and this is something that is very difficult to explain. I have actually found myself, in many of my speeches, especially when I have a councillor and an MLA onstage with me, [saying], ‘so he’s doing this or that for you, and I am representing your interest in Delhi,’ and I make a fairly successful joke out of saying that, you know, I hear all

In Kerala, I think there’s practically no distinction between politics and social service. The politicians I’ve come across in my last four-and-a-half years are very much engaged with the real problems of real people 9 September 2013

these people saying, ‘Why do we vote for this guy? We never see him run. He’s sitting in Delhi. Why should we vote for him?’ I say, ‘You want me to be in Delhi for you, and I am doing your work from Delhi.’ That sort of message. But there’s a real connection to the needs of the constituency. They are not going to get impressed by how many Lok Sabha debates I speak in or what I do in the Ministry of HRD. They want to know how much money I have brought in for roads in Trivandrum, how many new trains are able to get into the stations, whether I was able to elbow my way past other MPs to get funds for my district [that] were being competed for by other districts, and so on. You need to do that. …I am hesitating to generalise because I have seen some of my north Indian MP friends don’t seem to feel all these things as intensely as I have described them to you. But in Kerala, they matter. In Kerala they matter very seriously. I have a very close friend—I won’t name him—who was a minister in my government but who follows my work on Twitter and so on. They often require [that I] don’t go into the full details of all my 17 appointments, but they know when I am in Thiruvananthapuram or what I am doing. He says, ‘Are you sure you are not peaking to early?’

The Indian business community claims it’s a victim and it’s been claiming this for a while, but I think they get away with a lot of rubbish. For example, who sponsors political corruption, and the corporate segments, and there are a lot of things...

‘Lot of things’ starts with the hypocrisy of the election limit, which is so ridiculously low that...

What do you think the limit should be?

I must confess, maybe because I lived there for so many years, [that I am a] bigger fan of the American system, where there are no limits. …But you declare every paisa you earn and raise for it; you account for how you spend it; if you have a surplus left, you can only spend it for electoral purposes, etcetera. There are very defined rules... but if you are the kind of person who has the talent to go out and host a Rs 10,000 a plate dinner for the business community and [can] get people to spend that mon9 September 2013

ey and you can raise that [money] legitimately, why shouldn’t you be allowed to? See, when I fought the elections last time, the expense limit was Rs 25 lakh and I tell myself that, fine, I was in my very first election campaign. People came to me saying, ‘These are the expenses and here are the receipts you need to sign’ and I send them in good faith and we came within Rs 25 lakh. But what else was spent that I wasn’t shown the receipts [for]... I have no clue. And this is a case of ignorance being bliss. I would rather not know, because I don’t want to consciously feel that people, in my name, have spent more than the law allows. But then you have all these conversations with other politicians, and everyone seems to have basically taken in stride that these expense limits are to be scoffed at. If that is true, then the difference between what you can legally spend and what is being illegally spent for you is obviously coming from somewhere, and it has to be unaccounted black money. Where is that coming from? Essentially from the business community.

In your opinion, how many times larger is the actual spending compared to the official...?

Well, [I] can only go by rumours... The rumours range from something like 20 times as much to something like 40-50 times as much, and those are frightening figures, and of course they go up with every election. The rumours also inflate with every election.

Why don’t we just do something about it? Everybody realises that this is unrealistic...

Well, I know I have asked every time I am troubled by something. I go to the party leaders and I say, ‘What is this, why is this being done?’ and the answer I have been given is...

...that you are new to politics?

No, not just that—well, that I get a lot, too. It’s simply, they say, that they cannot raise the expense limit because that would send the signal that elections are only for rich people to contest.

What is going to be the role of social media in the 2014 elections?

I think it’s going to be greater than the 2009 elections for a number of reasons. First, though only about 10-12 per cent

of the Indian electorate is on the internet, the fact remains that it’s not just the people who [you are] directly reaching through social media that you are reaching. What you put out on social media may be directly interacting with 10-12 per cent. But it is mined by media, gets out by newspaper or television. For example, Shakeel Ahmed’s controversy... Social media clearly helped put this issue on the agenda of the political class of that time. The second reason it is important is... There’s a study by a group called Iris Media which has established that in 160 of our country’s 543 constituencies, there are more social media users than the gap [in votes] between the [candidates who came] first and second and the last election—the margin of victory is smaller than the number of social media users in that constituency. So in 160 constituencies, it is a politically relevant number. In some constituency you won by a lakh votes, there are more than a lakh social media users. In some other constituency we won by 10,000 votes, there are more than 10,000 social media users. So that becomes a very important factor. You can’t use social media in India, as you can in the US, to organise a mass rally or a public political meeting. But you can use it in these ways—to help set the agenda and to get messages out that then get multiplied in the traditional media. Final thought: you do need social media because you have to lay a foundation for the future. Right now we talk about 10-12 per cent of people having access to the Internet, but already today 70 per cent have access to mobile phones. In about 10 years’ time—maybe less, maybe by the time we’ve gone through 3G and 4G and so on—access to the internet on your mobile phone will be so fast, so cheap, so accessible, so easy that this 7080 per cent, which may by then be 90 per cent, will certainly be on social media in various languages. And if you have been absent from that space, how on earth will you catch up? You need to lay that foundation.

Social media stars somehow remind me of Narendra Modi. So what are your perceptions of Narendra Modi?

I have to say, the pity of Narendra Modi is that he’s not interactive at all. He has a PR firm or somebody writing his tweets n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

r e s i sta n c e

Two womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stories of their struggle against sand miningâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one protecting a river, and the other, the sea shahina kk photographs by aj joji

To Mother A Beach

eing a mother to three children is

a full-time job but that has not been a constraint for 31-year-old V Jazeera as she sits in front of the Kerala state Secretariat in Thriuvananthapuram. She has been there on the street since the beginning of August, asking for an end to sand mining in her coastal village. Kerala’s Chief Minister did meet her once and promised her action. But he wouldn’t give it in writing. And so Jazeera and her kids returned to their dharna. Jazeera is usually attired in purdah, but

it does not curb her freedom. She has not read any book on environmental protection. She is not worried about her future. She is not bent on sending her children to the best available school. She is not eager to earn money to secure the future of her two girls. She is not scared of sleeping on the street or having the girls there with her. Jazeera has her own way of subverting stereotypes. Jazeera was born and brought up in Puthiyangadi, a coastal village in Kannur district. There was nothing unusual about her life until her marriage. She got married at the age of 17. After suffering torture and abuse by her husband for six years, she decided she’d had enough. She had two children by then. “I fled with my elder daughter leaving the younger one with my mother,” she says, “I didn’t tell anyone about my whereabouts.” Jazeera went to Ernakulum and worked as a domestic help. Then she became a bookseller in Kottayam. “That was the period that changed my life,” she says. She became a local sales agent for a publisher of academic books. During this time, Jazeera also became familiar with police stations, courts and other government institutions. Her relatives, who had found her by then, asked her to return to

Kannur, but she said she would only do so if her husband granted her a divorce. He yielded and Jazeera went home. In Kannur, she was inspired by a Muslim woman running an autorickshaw. She learnt how to drive, got a licence, and managed to get a vehicle on a loan under the Prime Minister’s Rozgar Yojana project. A burkha-clad Muslim woman running an autorickshaw was beyond the imagination of the conservative men there. Male auto drivers ganged up against her and got the police to ask her to stop plying. She went straight to Thiruvananthapuram and submitted a complaint to then Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan. The problem was resolved for the time being, but Jazeera did not want to continue there. She left for Kottayam, where she renewed her career as an autorickshaw driver. There she got married to Abdul Salam, a teacher at a local madrassa. When she became pregnant, doctors advised rest. She went home to her village in Kannur to live with her mother. It was here that Jazeera began her battle against sand mining. atypical activist Jazeera is as unafraid of confronting authorities as she is of camping out on the street with her three children

open www.openthemagazine.com 37

he beach on which Jazeera used to play as a kid had almost vanished. “I noticed how disastrous sand mining was,” she says. Like many youngsters in the locality, her brother was also involved in sand mining, and so her battle began at home. “I asked him to stop mining and switch his occupation. He would not listen. I told him that I could not ask people to stop mining if I was not able to begin my campaign at home,” she says. He finally gave in once she started protesting on the streets. The pregnant Jazeera stayed day and night on the seashore to block Tipper Lorries carrying sand. She took photographs of people engaged in sand mining and handed them over to the police. They had no option but to take action. Jazeera gave birth to a baby boy, but she did not relent in her fight against sand mining. She kept up her night vigils, blocking lorries, taking pictures of illegal mining activity on her mobile phone and filing complaint after complaint with the police, the panchayat and district authorities. Her house was attacked thrice. She and her elder daughter were often beaten up by local women in the locality who’d lost employment as sand mining began slowing down. The illegal miners shifted operations to another part of the beach. On 14 June this year, Jazeera began a sit-in agitation in front of the police station at Puthiyangadi, demanding action against them. Along with her three children, including two-year-old Mohammed, she sat on the street day and night under the torrential rains of the monsoon. They slept on the verandah of a shop adjacent the police station. The stir went on for seven days. Environmentalists and human rights activists intervened. The district collector called her for a discussion and assured her of taking tough measures to shield the seashore. Jazeera agreed to wind up her agitation. She went back home, but found there was no let up in the theft of sand. On 10 July, Jazeera went to the district collector’s office to remind the authorities of their promises. “I got a hostile reception there,” she says, “They alleged I had a psychological disorder. They said I was doing all this only to catch media attention.” Jazeera began the second phase of her sit-in, moving its venue from the po38 open

lice station to the Collectorate’s premises. The dharna went on for another eight days. Finally, the district authorities agreed to set up a 24-hour police aid post in the area and also deputed policemen. “I thought I had won the struggle but soon realised I had been cheated,” she says. Though a police post had been set up, its cops were inactive. They told Jazeera their duty was to watch a strip of only a kilometer-and-a-half and couldn’t do anything about what was happening beyond that. Jazeera took her children and boarded a train to Thiruvananthapuram to begin yet another phase of her struggle in front of the Secretariat. On 2 August, she camped out at its north gate in demonstration. This satyagraha by a woman and her three children hit news headlines. Environmentalists and human right activists staged protests in her support. Three days later, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy called her for talks and promised to look into the matter. Jazeera wanted it in writing, but Chandy refused.

Dressed in purdah, Jazeera is not worried about her future or scared of sleeping on the street with her two girls. She has her own way of subverting stereotypes Adamant, Jazeera said she would not call off her struggle. She and her children went right back to the north gate. As Open goes to press, her dharna is still on.

meet Jazeera in front of the Secretariat amid an unusual scene. Office bearers of Childline, an NGO working in affiliation with the government, have arrived to ‘rescue’ her children and send them to school. Jazeera looks agitated. “They came with a team of policemen as if they were approaching a terrorist,” she later says. Besides, Jazeera argues, the children are not begging on the street. “They are staging a protest for a social cause along with their mother.” Jazeera says she told them to pick up the boys employed as child labour at hotels near-

by and send them to school first. The Childline activists went away. Once she calms down, Jazeera has more to say about the children’s education. “In fact, I want to send them to some school here. I have been on the run to find a school since day one. Everybody is asking for a Transfer Certificate from the previous school in Kannur. When I came to Thiruvananthapuram, I thought I would get a favourable response from the CM within a day or two. I never expected that this agitation would have to be indefinite. My husband is a teacher at a madrassa and he gets leave only one day a week. He promised me he would collect the Transfer Certificate at the earliest possible. Why do all these people insist on such technical things like this?” Jazeera managed to get the document and secured admission for her children in a nearby school the next day She’d had a similar experience during her protest at the police station in Kannur. On the third day, Childline officials had forced her to shift to a shelter home along with her youngest child. “It was like a prison. They did not even allow me to leave the room.” They demanded a written assurance from her that she would take care of her baby. Jazeera refused to sign it. “It is ridiculous. He is my son and I am a feeding mother. I know how to take care of my baby. Why should I give an assurance to someone else?” Finally, they let her go without it. After the Childline workers leave Jazeera’s spot at the Secretariat, I witness another drama. The police pick up a young man who is talking with Jazeera. They ask him for his identity and take him to a nearby police station. Jazeera follows them and has a heated exchange. “Are we not living in free India? Why do you detain a person for talking to me? What is so illegal about it? Don’t we have the freedom to talk on the street?” she asks the police officer at the station. Jazeera’s older children, 13-year-old Riswana and nine-year-old Shifana, help her take care of Mohammed, the little one who likes to run around and play on the footpath. Her husband Abdul Salam says she has his support. “She is fighting for the whole society and yet people are eager to portray Jazeera as a woman of unsound mind,” he says. Abdul Salam recalls the bitter taunts of relatives, friends 9 September 2013

and the media. “The daily Chandrika [mouthpiece of the Indian Union Muslim League] had once written that Jazeera is not mentally well,” he says, “After carrying such a story, they called me and offered help in rescuing the children from Jazeera. They did not bother to contact me before writing such nauseating stuff. I warned them that I would file a defamation case against them. The children are safe with their own mother. Why are they so eager to rescue them?” He says it is not possible for him to be present at the dharna with his wife. “I am a teacher and have limitations in doing such things. Besides, either one of us

should take care of the family. I do that. What is wrong in it?” Two days with Jazeera make me realise that she is fighting not just sand mining, but also prejudices and convictions about the dos and don’ts for a woman in general, and for a Muslim woman in purdah in particular. She has to fight against speculation and slander. Against questions on how a woman can agitate alone on a street. On why her husband is missing. On why she is not scared of her girl children being molested or raped. On why she isn’t at home caring for her family. On why she doesn’t see breastfeeding a baby out on

the street as shameful. On whether all of this means she should be labelled a woman of ‘loose’ morals. Policemen, journalists, government employees, activists and even pedestrians have been among those asking thesequestions. As if that weren’t absurd enough, she has even been portrayed as an agent of an Islamist terror group. But there is also a flipside. Street dwellers, ice cream vendors and sundry passersby have come over to express their respect for and solidarity with Jazeera. Some of them have shabby currency notes to offer in support of her struggle. They see hers as a voice of courage.

The Old Woman and the River

Venice Darly’s house, for which and from which she has been fighting all these years

Neyyar originates in the Western Ghats and flows 51 km east. It is one of the rivers in Kerala worst hit by excessive sand mining. Deep pits have formed in it, often causing landslides along the river bed. Environmentalists he

9 September 2013

say the sand in the river is almost exhausted and now its embankments are being mined. This causes floods during the monsoon. People here, intimidated by the sand mafia, have more or less surrendered their land to these thugs.

In Olathanni village in Thiruvananthapuram, a small hut stands isolated on the river. It is on the verge of collapsing in the heavy rain. This is the house of 72-year-old Darly S or ‘Grandma Darly’, as she is fondly open www.openthemagazine.com 39

adamant In a short-stay government home, both physically and mentally fragile, Darly wants to go back home

addressed. She doesn’t stay there now, having been forced by the police to shift to a state-run home in Thiruvananthapuram two weeks ago. It is from this house and for this house that she has fought, for the past 30 years, a lonely battle against indiscriminate sand mining along the river. She refused to give it up to sand miners. She resisted bribes, threats, expletives and attacks. The path to her house has been narrowed by the shovels of miners on both sides. The river flows 20 feet below her house, which stands on a tiny, narrow islet created by years of ruthless sand mining. The sand mafia has taken over all the land around her house. “Her own relatives let her down,” says Sunitha Kumari, a neighbour and also ward councillor of Neyyattinkara Municipality. “Her brothers cheated her. They sold out the property to illegal sand miners.” The area was vacated by those who sold out, but Darly wouldn’t move. “They offered a big amount for her land, but she refused,” recounts Sreeja Neyyattinkara, state secretary for the Welfare party, a new political formation in Kerala, and also secretary of the River Protection Council, a voluntary organisation. Sreeja first came to know of Darly’s struggle through a media report. “At that time, I was part of an organisation fighting the illegal brewing of liquor. We decided to support Darly’s struggle and sought the help of likeminded people. The sand mafia used all the means at its disposal to get 40 open

her out of the way, but she was adamant,” says Sreeja. Darly, she says, did not just embark on a legal fight. She resisted mining physically. She always carried a knife to intimidate youngsters working as miners. “She was highly articulate on the corrosive effects of sand mining. She could narrate how sand mining was started by individuals for self use and how it turned into an organised crime. She has sound knowledge on the ecosystem of Neyyar and how its flow and depth has gradually changed,” says Sreeja. The struggle has taken its toll on Darly. When I meet her at the short-stay government home, I find her hardly able to speak coherently. Having heard of what she has gone through—verbal assaults, house break-ins, the killing of her pet dogs and cats, isolation from her family, a social boycott, implication in false cases and what not—it is a poignant meeting. Darly seems to have withdrawn into her own world. When I enter the room, she takes hold of my hands and starts talking as if she has known me for ages. From what I can make out, she believes that she has been killed by the sand mafia and given rebirth by Mother Mary. She appears to oscillate between her conscious and unconscious mind. She remembers her childhood on the banks of the Neyyar in Pampala, at the southern end of Thiruvananthapuram district. She was the eldest of seven children and stopped going to school young,

after her father died. “Our family had plenty of land on the banks of the Neyyar. We used to cultivate tapioca and vegetables. We used to catch fish from the river. Tapioca with fish was the main food. The water of the Neyyar was the cleanest and sweetest of all. The river you see now is not the actual one. The course of the river changed due to sand mining…” she trails off as her memory breaks. She speaks of evil forces that have spoilt the river and used ‘black magic’ to finish her off. Darly was once married. Her husband died long ago. She tells me that she has a son being brought up by another woman. Anita S, an environmental activist closely associated with Darly for five years, says this is probably a figment of her imagination. “In my understanding, she has no offspring,” says Anita. Her neighbours too say she has no children. What everyone agrees on is that Darly had a dozen pet dogs and a couple of cats. “She used her dogs to keep mining labourers away,” says Sreeja, “Whenever she saw them come by boat, she would let her dogs run free. They were unable to go to the riverbed in her locality because of her dogs.” “It is painful to know how systematically the sand mafia defeated this woman,” says Anita, who wrote about it on the web portal Counter Current. “The sand mafia was bothered by her presence,” says Anita, “Her house was looted, her pet dogs and cats killed one by one.” Both Anita and Sreeja believe that her suffering cost Darly her mind. Last year, Darly had an accident that marked the beginning of her mental and physical deterioration. “She was hit by a scooter. The police has not taken any action.” says Sreeja, who suspects it was an attempt on Darly’s life, though she has nothing to corroborate this. The office bearers of the short-stay home don’t plan to send her back. The activists who support Darly are reluctant to do so, too. “She might not be able to face reality,” says Sreeja. “She may have an emotional breakdown seeing the present condition of her house, which is about to collapse.” Darly has a request of every visitor who comes by to see her: she wants to be taken back home. She expects to get back to her beloved river soon. That the battle is long lost is too much reality for her to bear. n 9 September 2013

l e p to s p i r o s i s

It’s Raining Rats A killer disease returns to Mumbai KALPISH RATNA

City reels under monsoon, Mumbai grinds to a halt as rains lash suburbs.

ven respectable journalese can

state the literal truth sometimes. This year, like every year, the southwest monsoon took Mumbai by surprise. It arrived on schedule. It was not unusually severe. Our only surviving river, a viscid glide of filth, did not burst its concrete banks. Yet Mumbai reeled because with the very first showers, the municipal infrastructure collapsed irretrievably. Right now, all of Mumbai is one vast suburb. Congested and potholed roads make the daily commute an odyssey. It was not just traffic snarls that kept many home this monsoon. They stayed home because they were too ill to work. Not all of them made the news: their diseases, ‘monsoon illnesses,’ were not notifiable. Some were noticed. July began with eight cases of cholera, then there was the odd swine flu death, a few desultory pneumonias that may have been anything from avian flu to MersCoV. No public advisory of any practical use was issued. The latest illness to make the news is leptospirosis. There have been four deaths from the disease. The best advice for the 20 million at risk is: ‘Don’t go barefoot in flooded areas.’ What kind of advice is that? Is it okay to wade to work in chappals? Hasn’t anyone noticed the season’s unisex street chic? Sari, shalwar, jeans, trousers—everything hitched up way above water level. Don’t they know a rickshaw ride will get you a bath en route to the

9 September 2013

railway station? Have puddle, will splash. But must we die from it? Victims of leptospirosis may die of liver, kidney or respiratory failure. It is also a disease that can quickly become epidemic. And all we can find to say is don’t go barefoot in flooded areas? Not that it’s bad advice, exactly. Yes, you can catch leptospirosis through abraded skin, and yes, don’t drink the water because rats urinate in it. Is that very casual caution prevention enough? It reflects the bizarre disconnect between response and reality that defines our schizophrenic nation.

Victims of leptospirosis may die of liver, kidney or respiratory failure. It is also a disease that can quickly become epidemic About a month ago, I heard experts on infectious diseases talk about ‘monsoon illnesses.’ Apart from the vaunted tests offered by their state-of-the-art laboratory, they had nothing new to say. I wondered how they had missed all the exciting shifts of thought medicine has explored in recent years. They were all professors, engaged in training tomorrow’s doctors, yet here they were spouting stuff already history when they were undergraduates twenty-five years ago. When the talk turned to leptospirosis, the bored audience finally erupted. One

physician barked, “What about garbage? What are you doing about clearing it?” The experts reacted with surprise. The most eminent of them riposted, “Why are you asking us about garbage disposal? Whose garbage is it anyway?” Another offered, “Garbage has nothing to do with it. Leptospirosis is caused by flooding.” “Why?” The question was answered by an embarrassed laugh. It is a common observation, it is well known, it is self-evident— yes, but why?

ollowing the Mumbai floods of 26 July 2005, 2,355 cases of leptospirosis were reported throughout Maharashtra. 167 people died. Earlier outbreaks (2000, 2001) had established that leptospirosis was endemic in the city. Reports of infection in children naively concluded with this circuitous statement: ‘Parents should warn their children to avoid areas flooded with contaminated water.’ Neither paediatricians nor epidemiologists nor parents thought to ask: Why are our roads flooded? Why is the water dangerously contaminated? Leptospirosis today is a very different disease from what it was when first described, in 1889, by Adolf Weil. More specifically, it seems to be a very different disease in India. In very many ways, the changing story of leptospirosis is the story of the way we live.

he thrill of discovery is very apparent in the name: leptospira, ‘fine spiopen www.openthemagazine.com 41

ral.’ These delicate almost-not-there bacteria were first linked to Weil’s Disease in 1916. Leptospira are spirochaetes. Like their more famous relative that causes syphilis, leptospira are best seen in a dark-field microscope. Not all leptospira cause disease—a huge variety of leptospira are saprophytes that exist happily in muddy and aqueous environments without causing disease. Leptospirosis is a zoonosis. Pathogenic (disease-causing) leptospira primarily infect many species—from cattle to cats and dogs to rats. Most of these species are maintenance hosts: the infection is transferred within them and they also form a reservoir. Leptospira’s favourite hangout is the kidney and diseased animals shed the infective germ in urine. Many types (serovars) of pathogenic leptospira are known. Some animals, particularly small rodents, are reservoirs for specific serovars. Humans are incidental hosts. Human-to-human transmission of leptospirosis is, as yet, unknown. But judging from emerging patterns of the disease, it will not be long before we hear of this. Leptospira flourish in alkaline water, rich in oxidising organic waste. In water and soil contaminated with urine from infected rodents, leptospira live for as long as seven weeks. Humans are infected through skin and mucosal contact with rat urine. At any given time, in an endemic area, like Mumbai, the amount of leptospira in a puddle is directly proportional to the number of rats in the vicinity. The average rat is about as socially wired as a Mumbai teenager, and urine is its Twitter account. It tweets every few minutes of its lifespan, and it tweets everywhere. It pees on every surface it crosses, kitchen counter or sewer, they are all one to a rodent. What does the rat tweet about? Any teenager can answer that—profile, availability, networking. Leptospira just happen to be on the page. The rat that infects humans with leptospirosis is not necessarily sick. It might have dusted off a mild infection long back, but the microbe has colonised its kidney and coated the renal tubules with biofilms that can persist indefinitely. A rat in the prime of life will shed about 107 (10 raised to the power of 7) leptospira in 42 open

every millilitre of urine for almost a year after it has recovered. An urban rat (Rattus norvegicus) has the longevity of about three years, and it is ready to date and mingle by the time it starts tweeting at the age of three months. From then on, with singleminded dedication, each metrosexual rodent can produce around 2,000 offspring a year. Let us hope there are distractions, but even if rodentologists have fudged their math, we still are left with an awful number of rats. Mumbai’s professional rat killers have been international news and Rat Race, Miriam Chandy Menacherry’s documentary, spares us no illusions. What methodology of sense does it make to pit a few hundred men, armed with flashlights and sticks, against 88 million rats? And that’s just in one city.

In water and soil contaminated with urine from infected rodents, leptospira live for as long as seven weeks. Humans are infected through skin and mucosal contact with rat urine

hat exactly happens when leptospira enters the human body? It works its way to the bloodstream and sets off fever, bodyache, and chills— in no way distinguishable from a myriad other infections, bacterial, viral or protozoan. In the first week of illness, a bad headache and fever are the principal discomforts, and if you’re lucky, recovery follows. Very often, leptospira persist into a second phase of illness: small blood vessels all over the body are targeted, and, depending on the organ affected, a wide variety of life-threatening complications set in. Weil’s Disease, with jaundice and liver and kidney failure is just one of them. Between 1988 and 1997, 524 cases of a killer fever ravaged the Andaman islands. For want of a better name, it was called Andaman Haemorrhagic Fever

(AHF). Victims bled into the lungs and died of respiratory failure. In 1994, AHF was discovered to be one more vagary of leptospirosis. The Andamans continue to be a hotspot for leptospirosis, but haemorrhagic pneumonitis is a common complication of leptospirosis all over India. Why? Is this something recent? Researchers have recently sequenced the genome of two pathogenic serovars of Leptospira. It is to be hoped that we will soon learn what turns leptospira virulent enough to kill. Until we do, there is one obvious fact we persistently ignore: the ‘size of the inoculum.’ A whopping hit of even mildly infective leptospira can prove fatal. And Mumbai, with Himalayan embankments of stinking garbage on every street, has made certain of that. How common is leptospirosis? More than 500,000 cases are reported globally every year, but that is unrealistic. India is rapidly rethinking the leptospirosis map. Northern states, which earlier were out of the reckoning, now find more than enough reason to suspect leptospirosis in most acute fevers. Kerala, Gujarat and Maharashtra, where the disease is endemic, are seeing more threatening forms of the disease. Gujarat and Kerala have Leptospirosis Control Programmes that actually work. Sporadically the disease manifests in an unexpected form as it did in Madurai where the eye was the principal site of infection. Are these avatars so unexpected? Sushruta, circa 1,500 BC, seemed to have seen them all. They are elegantly documented in his Samhita, which also contains an exhaustive treatise on rats that can be read with profit even today. A quick look at the names leptospirosis has gone by tells us its story. Miner’s disease, Trench fever, Mud fever, Swamp fever, all speak of the longevity of leptospira in slush. It is part of the memory of all rice-growing nations—Japan calls it Nanukayami fever or autumn fever; British India called it paddy field fever or cane-cutter’s fever. Veterinarians were familiar with red water fever in calves, canicola fever in dogs, and swine-herd fever in humans. Leptospirosis was once an occupational disease. It was also largely agrarian. Butchers, sewer workers, fisherfolk, livestock farmers and veterinari9 September 2013

Adeel Halim/REUTERS

monsoon misery Inside a flooded restaurant in Mumbai on 12 September 2005. A common sight in the city every monsoon

ans were the high-risk groups. Just about anybody anywhere can catch leptospirosis today. It is commoner in tropical countries because we have more people, more wetlands and more reservoir species. It is rife in post-disaster situations everywhere. Outbreaks are common after floods and deluges. What if an area permanently assumes the ecology of disaster? A new geographical zone has defined itself on the leptospirosis map: the overburdened metropolis. In cities like Mumbai, with an exaggerated dichotomy between the haves and have-nots, more than half the population lacks sanitation. And it is this beleaguered section that keeps the city up and running. Every highrise is wired to a nearby slum for life-support: domestic work, security, supplies and sundries. Between them is heaped a garbage mountain of 9 September 2013

their making. Children play in filthy puddles around it, fishmongers peddle their catch, dogs and cats prowl about hungrily. The only invisible element in this circus is the sutradhar of chaos— the rat. The rat is everywhere, and so is leptospira. Yes, leptospirosis is curable. Yes, it can also kill. No, there is no vaccine. Not yet. And considering the number of infective serovars, there will not be any very soon, one that is universally effective. Yes, clinicians and researchers all over India are doing marvellous work. How much of this trickles through into policy? Control strategies can be debated and test schedules drawn up, but why not start with what is obvious? Why not clear the garbage first? There are, of course, cogent reasons

why clearing the city’s garbage has no bearing on leptospirosis—or indeed on cholera, dengue, malaria, encephalitis, enteric fever and the myriad gastrointestinal illnesses that afflict us. There have been no studies to show that these illnesses can actually decrease if the garbage is cleared. Other cities, other states, have even more cases of all these diseases, and even more rats perhaps. And who said garbage is not cleared? Giant dumpsters kill schoolchildren every week, don’t they? Oh, the stink? Get used to it, this is who we are. Whose garbage is it, anyway? I was about to ask about civic pride when a rude laugh interrupted me. Oh yes, in case you didn’t know, rats have many human traits. In addition to being sociable, empathetic and avid consumers of junk food, they also laugh. This time the laugh is on us. n open www.openthemagazine.com 43

pop

Love Me Tender Boy bands are back, baby Aastha atray banan

oyzone was my favourite boy

band. They had a pleasant boysnext-door vibe and sang songs that touched my 16-year-old heart. When they sang, Don’t love me for fun girl, let me be the one girl, love me for a reason, let the reason be love, I sang along as I felt exactly the same about the boy I liked at the time. They were the boys who would never let me down; they always knew exactly what to say. They stood by me as I grew up, their good-looking faces smiling down from life-size posters on my wall, their songs taking me through heartbreaks and falling-in-love moments. And even though I knew millions of girls liked them, it often seemed they were meant only for me. My friend Samidha Sharma, who grew 44 open

up with me, shunned the cute Boyzone boys for the funkier Take That and N’Sync. “Justin Timberlake and the gang were edgier than the rest,” she says. “It’s such a teenage fantasy to want to be with those boys.” Maybe that’s why the boy band has returned in full swing over the past two years or so—because teenage girls everywhere need a bunch of good-looking boys singing to them about how beautiful they look when they smile. They need boys to fantasise about when nothing is going right. The boy band phenomenon may have started with the Jackson 5 or The Beatles (who weren’t really boy bands as we know them today), but it really kicked into high gear in the 90s with Boyzone,

Backstreet Boys, Take That, N’Sync, All4-One, Boyz II Men and Westlife. In the 2000s came 98 Degrees and Blue, among many others, and by the end of the 2000s, the Jonas Brothers came on the scene. As of 2013, there are two boy bands ruling the roost—One Direction and The Wanted. The Brit boys of One Direction are reported to have sold 19 million singles and 10 million albums. In 2012, speaking at a conference, Nick Gatfield, chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, UK, was quoted as saying that One Direction represented a $50 million business empire. The band was also named 2012’s ‘Top New Artist’ by Billboard. The Wanted, an English-Irish band, also found success that year, topping UK 9 September 2013

playing to the gallery One Direction (left) and The Wanted (right) are continuing the grand tradition of wooing the teenage girl

charts and selling almost 3 million copies of their hit single Glad You Came. In March 2012, The New York Times published an article about boy bands becoming hot again after One Direction’s debut album went straight to the top of the Billboard charts, becoming the first Brit band to achieve this distinction. The article described the transition of the boy band: ‘the definition of a boy band seems to have changed somewhat. Neither One Direction nor The Wanted uses choreographed dance moves like those American bands of a decade ago. And The Wanted has laced its songs with references to partying and sexual hookups, putting a new spin on the usually wholesome formula.’ That’s one way of putting it. If the boy bands of the 90s were quintessentially good boys, the boy bands of today are more vocal about wanting to kiss you or hold you. But though they talk about drinking the night away or having a one night stand, they are essentially doing what their predecessors did—playing to please their young female audience.

ne Direction— composed of Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson—just missed winning X Factor, the reality talent competition originally started in the UK by Simon Cowell, but were signed by Cowell right away. All five band-members are good looking in that skinny, sneaker-wearing, floppy-haired, teenage way. Look at the lyrics of their hit What Makes You Beautiful: If only you saw what I can see, You’d understand why I want you so desperately, Right now I’m looking at you and I can’t believe, You don’t know-oh-oh, You don’t know you’re beautiful, oh-oh, That’s what makes you beautiful. Or sample this from a song called Little Things: I know you’ve never loved the crinkles by your eyes, When you smile, You’ve never loved your stomach or

9 September 2013

your thighs, The dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine, But I’ll love them endlessly. Their videos usually show the boys singing to the camera with pink pouts and intense eyes reaching out. There isn’t a girl alive who won’t fall for that. Samuel Berlie of The Other People, a Mumbai-based retro cover band which performs What Makes You Beautiful as part of their set, says: “Boy bands never really went out of [style], because their audience has always been consistent. Young teenage girls will never stop wanting a boy band. This song puts a girl on a pedestal, and girls like to hear those kind of lyrics. Also, like Backstreet, which had their own sound, or any other boy band, One Direction has a sound that’s completely theirs, and new. Hence, it works.” One Direction has just released a documentary about themselves called This is Us. Director Morgan Spurlock, who hung out with the band at home and on the road, has been quoted as saying: “Part of the reason they’ve been so incredibly successful with their fans is that they are so incredibly grounded and normal, and that’s what comes off in the movie... You see five guys who are the same five guys they were three years ago.”

he Wanted has a racier image. They

are beefier and have a bad boy vibe.

The video for their massive hit Glad You Came shows bikini-clad girls on the beach and in a dark nightclub dancing suggestively with the boys. The lyrics are also suggestive: Turn the lights out now, Now I’ll take you by the hand, Hand you another drink, Drink it if you can, Can you spend a little time, Time is slipping away, Away from us so stay, Stay with me I can make, Make you glad you came. But when it comes down to it, it’s once again about making the girl sitting across the TV or listening to the radio fall in love with you. In I Found You, they sing: I found you, in the darkest hour, I found you, in a pouring rain, I found you, when I was on my knees, And your love pulled me back again. Bobin James of Rolling Stone magazine says, ‘Sometimes it’s not even about the songs they sing—it’s all about the image. Packaging and marketing are what make a boy band successful.’ Whatever the reason, as long as there are teenage girls in the world, boy bands will continue to thrive, singing romantic tunes that can make even a hardcore cynic bop to the beat. They are like temporary and perfect ‘boyfriends’ for all the girls in the world—they can do no wrong, and they will always be around in one way or another. It’s a match made in heaven. n open www.openthemagazine.com 45

between the sheets

Craving The Unfamiliar Are my days of newness and adventure behind me? sonali khan

he past two weeks have been all about travel. So

We partied at bars I didn’t know existed, drank rum and much so, that I can now draw detailed maps of Delhi Coke, and made out wherever and whenever we felt like. airport’s terrifying T3; so much so, that one particu- There were no rules. I’d clock in an exact eight hours at lar member of Air India’s geriatric cabin crew has started work and rush to his dingy flat where we’d fuck behind to resemble Grandma K to my homesick eyes. But I digress. doors that wouldn’t even properly latch. I’d change into They say there’s no place like home. It is, after all, the clothes I wouldn’t have touched in my other life. The anoplace where the wi-fi connects automatically and the in- nymity was exhilarating. I felt like a character out of a dent in the sofa hugs the contours of your butt in a way that Dostoyevsky novel. can’t be replicated even in a designer’s atelier; where the lizHe was seven years older than me when I met him at a galard looks at you beadily, in silent greeting, when you bend lery where I was taking an art-aesthetics class. He was in my to check if your lone plant, Kaku the cactus, has died due to city for a year-long work project. A coffee date turned into abandonment issues. And yet, each time you come back a dinner invitation which segued into a breakfast engagefrom a long vacation or an extended business trip, even ment. Soon, his driver was waiting outside office to pick home feels different. Familiar, me up after work. His friends CSA Images/Printstock Collection/getty images yet new. Suddenly you’ll find were frighteningly intelligent but mind-numbingly boring to the novel you’d given up lookme. They smoked pretentious ing for. Or come across the pycigars, popped expensive pills jamas of a long-forgotten lover while hunting for fresh sheets. discreetly and owned vacation Cities aren’t all that differhouses in multiple cities. When I decided I didn’t want to ent. When you live in one as be with him, friends wondered unrelentingly fast and unforif I needed psychiatric intergivably exhausting as mine, vention. Only mad women people and places become a kicked a gift horse like that in blur, merging into a continuthe mouth. But the perfection ous whole. Until someone or of our togetherness was more something makes you stop and take a closer look. Like running your than I could handle. I could never find fingers along walls you’ve known forevthat one damning flaw that would make er and finding the door to a secret room. me fall irrevocably in love with him. I believe that half the fun of going away This time when I came home, a series is in the coming back. And that half the of wrong turns had me crossing both the neighbourhoods I’d never have known so fun of meeting someone new is in the intimately if it hadn’t been for these two prismatic way they make you look at men. And suddenly, I’m craving a second yourself and your life. He was three years younger than me and broke when he go at these characters I played in two different lifetimes. came to my city. I was working 20-hour-days in pursuit of Suddenly, I want to be able to see myself and the city I call my big break. We met at a watering hole I wouldn’t be home through a new pair of eyes, to have a stranger breathe caught dead in, if it hadn’t been for a friend’s exhortations. a whiff of new into the old. And then I come back to the preMe with my Harvard dream and he with his disgust for in- sent and its inevitable choices. There is a future that’s beckoning me, urging me to rush stitutionalised education, we had to happen. We tried hanging out with my people but he pissed them into its open arms. And there’s a past that’s trying to seduce all off by routinely turning up unshaven and in clothes me back into its whirlwind, where the next adventure and missing buttons, a strict no-no in my neatly pressed and next hidden room is always just a tap on a familiar wall creaseless universe. We all knew that he gave zero fucks for away. Do I have to forego one to keep the other alive? n their opinion, which pissed them off further. From then Sonali Khan was holding on to her virtue, on, we hung out only with his friends. They pretended to understand world cinema and discussed it self-importantand then she fell in love...with several men. ly until the wee hours of the morning. She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan

I want to see myself through fresh eyes, to have a stranger breathe a whiff of new into the old

46 open

9 September 2013

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A terroristâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Body

48 64

raul irani

where guns were a part of life Celebrating a terroristâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death in Palia Kalan 48

true life

A terrorist’s body Gunjeet Sra recounts her memories of heading out with her grandfather as a child to join the village in a celebration at the spot where a Khalistani separatist had been gunned down

ne winter morning, my house was abuzz with excitement. Since I was the youngest in the joint family, I knew that no one would bother to fill me in on what was happening. My age barred me from the truth and I would often be fed fantastical versions of what had actually transpired by my father’s teenage brothers. I went in search of them. They were nowhere to be found, which was strange because they otherwise spent most of their time at home or on the farm. My grandmother and mother were also missing. The only person to keep me company at home was my great-grandmother and she was no fun because she didn’t know anything. While I sat sulking, contemplating whether I should check out the hen house to see if there were any fresh eggs or gather my army of farm children for mission decode, my grandfather appeared. My grandfather’s only obsessions for as long as I can remember have been his farm, his guns and flashlights (he has one in every shape, colour and size). And somehow, he has managed to combine all three interests: he wakes up in the dead of the night, goes to the roof and conducts regular checks on the farm with his gun in hand. He was a kind and brave man, and was the only person who would reveal things to me in all their ugliness. So it was no surprise when he walked

48 open

up to me and asked if I would like to see a terrorist. I was ecstatic and told him that I would love to. I was seven years old then. This was in December 1993, by which time terrorism had invaded our lives. There was no escaping it. It was in the newspapers, on the television, in the movie Roja—which had me so scared that I vowed never to go to Kashmir—and, worst of all, in our homes. Ours was a family of farmers in a village in the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh bordering Nepal. Surrounded by jungles, our only link to civilisation was the tiny town of Palia Kalan. And our only hope in those uneasy years was our conviction that we were stronger than terrorists and would not bend to them. The terrorists, though, were no strangers; they were fellow brothers, friends of friends, people we knew of. The last of the ‘Khalistanis’ who were too poor to flee the country and had instead come to the Terai for refuge in the homes of people they hoped were like them, those who might sympathise with their separationist ideology and help them secure homes in these areas or give them a place to hide; people eager to be revolutionaries, youngsters looking to add meaning to what seemed like a pointless life. The people of Palia, though, fought them hard with a little help from the law. Sleeping with guns under pillows

became a regular phenomenon. There were shootouts on farms between farmers and infiltrators. There was constant fear of their turning up, and the occasional violence. To a child’s mind, this was all quite incomprehensible and exciting, a great big adventure. Until a few days before this particular incident, I did not fully understand the phenomenon and I didn’t particularly fear it. Then something happened that evoked such deep-set insecurities in me that I still struggle with them. News came to us one morning that a family friend and his wife had been burnt alive in front of their barely teenage children. The terrorists, who had come in search of food, first ate in their home and then set it on fire, leaving the two children as witnesses to the horrific death of their parents. This was done to incite fear and to tell the world what would happen to those who did not— or merely appeared to—cooperate. For a long time after that and sometimes even today, I dream of my family being massacred and me being the sole survivor. This insecurity is inexplicable, but its roots can be found in those years of being a passive observer to a violent time. Perhaps it was this particular fear and the hope that I would be able to vanquish it once I saw the body of a dead terrorist that made my grandfather approach me. I had often tried 9 september 2013

photos raul irani

fear in the air In the 1990s, Palia in eastern Uttar Pradesh was rife with stories of terrorists brutally killing people who refused them help

to imagine what a terrorist might look like. I wondered if he would be handsome, but dismissed the thought as I firmly believed as a child that no one beautiful could be capable of anything so heinous. I was pretty convinced that he would be a manifestation of all the horror that he had induced. An ugly pock-marked face with maybe horns— 9 september 2013

I remember being particularly satisfied with my last addition. I wondered what he would be doing alone out in the fields at night. And from where he got the courage. Was he not scared to be in the middle of nowhere, hiding from the police? There were a lot of questions in my head, but most of all I wondered how many bullets it would

take to kill him. As my grandfather’s jeep moved away from our driveway and onto the dirt road leading up to my friend’s farm where the ‘encounter’ had taken place, he told me that almost everyone we knew would be there to see the spectacle, including my grandmother and mother, two of my least favouropen www.openthemagazine.com 49

ite people that day because they had left me alone. I decided I wouldn’t talk to them and hung on hard to my seat as the Mahindra jeep bounced through the apology of a road, maintaining a brave face but scared that my heart would give way as it was thundering loudly in my rib cage. I looked at my grandfather, but he gave me no reassuring smile; he was lost in thought. I wondered what he was thinking about. I thought of my great-grandmother at home: did she know where we were going? What if there were more terrorists waiting to ambush us? I remembered an instance of a few days earlier when an entire busload of travellers had been hauled up on their way to Palia and each passenger made to stand in line, before they were all shot, one by one, every single one of them. When we finally reached the spot where the terrorist lay dead, my grandfather told me that the end of a menace required a certain degree of fanfare and celebration. This was the explanation for the number of people gathered in the area. I got off the car in trepidation, not knowing what would greet 50 open

I had often tried to imagine what a

terrorist might look like. I was pretty convinced that he would be a manifestation of all

the horror that he had induced.

An ugly pock-marked face with maybe horns. But most of all I wondered

how many bullets it would take to kill him

me. I thought I would hide behind my grandfather’s leg to catch a glimpse of the person who was the subject of such excitement on this cold winter day. I was confounded by the celebration of someone’s death. It seemed so perverse, but my curiosity led me on and I followed my grandfather, prepared to finally confront my fear. However, I had nothing to see. We were too late, they told us. His body had been wrapped up and taken for post-mortem. All that remained were a few bullet shells, the mark of where the body lay, some dried blood and satisfied onlookers who were bursting with details. My friend who had seen the evidence told me pompously that there were so many bullet marks that the entire chest had holes in it. I tried to imagine a man with holes and was terrified with what my mind conjured. I never did get that image out of my mind. That and the image of the dead boy’s mother, head hanging in shame at what her son had turned out to be, muttering inexplicably to herself as her neck swung to and fro. He was just 27, they said. n 9 september 2013

Books The Unending Nostalgia of Punjabiyat Was there a shared Punjabi identity that united the region’s Muslims and Sikhs before the advent of British rule? Gandhi places too much faith in such a notion hartosh singh bal

punjab; a history from aurangzeb to mountbatten

By Rajmohan Gandhi aleph | 400 pages | Rs 695

o history of Punjab has been

written in 125 years, as Rajmohan Gandhi observes in his introduction, even though much has been written about subjects such as the Partition or Sikhs. The task then that Gandhi takes upon himself is immense and necessary—a history of a region that in this study ‘signifies the subcontinent’s Punjabi-speaking region as a whole, or what old-timers remember as undivided or ‘British’ Punjab’. His attempted definition of the region he seeks to describe already indicates a problem. The Himachalis and Haryanvis of today would be perplexed to be counted as Punjabi speaking, but their forebears were certainly part of ‘British Punjab’. Gandhi is dealing with the Subcontinent’s Punjabi-speaking region, the truncated Indian Punjab and the much larger Pakistani Punjab. But once this becomes clear, the premise of the book itself comes into question. Why begin with Aurangzeb and end with Mountbatten? With Aurangzeb’s death, central authority dissipated in the Punjab. Strictly speaking, if the book was interested in Punjab freed of external control, it should have ended with the British victory. If it was interested in the division of Punjab, there was no reason to begin with Aurangzeb. The advent of Islam or the development of Punjabi as a language would have been a far more appropriate choice. This unclear definition of Punjab

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and the uncertain logic of the period it covers may seem a drawback, but the book needs to be read not as a comprehensive history of Punjab—of which it does a poor job—but as an answer to the question that Gandhi poses at the beginning: why was Punjab’s Muslim majority unable to fill the power vacuum when, post Aurangzeb, the Mughal Empire retreated from the province? However, Gandhi himself seems to be unaware of the task he is trying to address. In trying to be comprehensive while attempting an answer to the question he poses, he manages to do neither. I will not persist here with

Punjabiyat was a product of shared interests. When these interests collapsed, so did Punjabiyat; only Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs remained. Today in the Indian Punjab there is no shared Punjabiyat between Hindus and Sikhs the book’s failings as a history of the Punjab. Rather, I will trace Gandhi’s attempt to answer his question. In the immediate aftermath of the Mughal Empire’s decline, Gandhi notes that ‘Sikhs across Punjab had found a common purpose. They felt they were a single people. On the other hand, Muslims across Punjab saw themselves as belonging to a clan, tribe, locality or landlord, not to one another.’ This, of course, is not an answer. What was different about Sikhism as compared to Islam in Punjab that it could erase hierarchy? This common purpose eventually led to Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, the first

time in 800 years that Punjab was ruled by one of its own. This also meant, Gandhi writes, that ‘for the first time in centuries, Punjab’s Muslims were thus being governed by a non-Muslim establishment led by Jat Sikhs… A French Scholar of Punjab… goes so far as to add that the people experienced a ‘feeling of belonging’ and ‘a Punjabi ethos and culture’ was created. The kingdom was not free of religious tension. Bans on slaughter of cows and restrictions on public calls for the Islamic prayer were imposed in many places. However, such bans could not be enforced in overwhelmingly Muslim localities.’ When a Barelvi ideologue from the United Provinces, Sayyid Ahmed, issued a call for jihad against the Sikh kingdom, many Pashtuns responded, but ‘it has been claimed that ‘not a single Muslim chief of standing’ in Punjab supported the jihad.’ Yet, when Gandhi transitions to British India, he asserts that ‘two factors blessed the start of British Punjab. One, the province’s Muslim majority felt glad at the end of Sikh rule. Ranjit Singh was not anti-Muslim, yet his Khalsa sarkar had restricted Muslim practices. Indeed, according to Ian Talbot, ‘most of the leading Muslim families of West Punjab (had) supported the British during the Sikh wars’.’ Gandhi makes no attempt to reconcile the contradictions between his own claims. Was there indeed an incipient Punjabi identity that ensured that Punjabi Muslims did not join the jihad against the Sikh kingdom, or was it simply a case of acquiescence to a powerful authority—of Sikhs while Ranjit Singh was alive and of the British once he was dead? These questions are important to subsequent events. A decade after the fall 9 september 2013

d e agostini/getty images

ruled by one of their own Ranjit Singh, under whom Punjabis felt at home

of Punjab, the 1857 mutiny broke out in the British Army. Punjabis played an important role in helping the British subdue the poorbiya troops who had revolted. Our nationalist historians, often eager to invent a past that tides over uncomfortable facts, seek a ‘war of independence’ in this mutiny. The Sikh role is explained away by saying they had little sympathy for a cause that evoked the return of the Mughals, but if so, what explains the participation of a number of Punjabi Muslim troops as well tribal chiefs in the suppression of the mutiny? In 1857, most Punjabi Muslims saw no grounds to make common cause with non-Punjabi Muslims of a region they termed Hindustan. This fact must be kept in mind when assessing the politics of Punjab under the British and the domination of the Unionist Party, which represented landowning interests across religions, till 1945. While the clash of religious identities set into motion by the British 9 september 2013

resulted in the Singh Sabha movement among Sikhs and the Arya Samajis among Hindus, in political terms this clash was largely played out in urban areas. Rural religious mobilisation was restricted to the Gurdwara movement that saw Sikhs take on the British and wrest control of gurdwaras from hereditary masands or religious leaders often loyal to the Empire. Gandhi does observe that ‘what on the surface seemed to be a recurring Muslim-Sikh clash for control over Punjab did not necessarily mean enmity in the villages’. But he does not understand why this was the case. It was not a case of ‘peaceful coexistence at the grassroots’, rather the social structure of much of rural Punjab ensured that the dominant caste in any particular village was either Sikh or Muslim. Thus, they had a shared interest in issues of land and this was represented by the Unionist Party. Punjabiyat was born of this shared set of interests. It

influenced how Punjabis saw people outside Punjab but this did not make it fundamental to how they saw each other. When the interests of the dominant groups clashed, as they did once Partition became a possibility, they did not continue to coexist peacefully. His own background disposes Gandhi to search for hope amidst the violence of Partition by listing stories of those saved by friends and neighbours. It is a self-defeating exercise. In a tribal culture, people extend a hand to neighbours and friends, what they often do not do is accept our common humanity. The violence of Partition was not an aberration, and we have too often portrayed it as a story of victims. Through much of Punjab it was as much a story of perpetrators. A vast number participated in it with no subsequent regret. It was in the end a tribal battle to assert control and seize power. For Sikhs, it ended with the formation of a truncated state they now dominate in India, for Muslims it ended with Pakistan. Punjabiyat was a product of shared interests. When these interests collapsed, so did Punjabiyat; only Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs remained. Today’s Punjabiyat is only an exercise in nostalgia, it does not even exist in the Indian Punjab between Hindus and Sikhs, leave alone in the diaspora where Punjabi parents get together to hear Bulleh Shah being recited by a visiting singer and then go home to tell their daughters not to marry men of the other community—Muslim or Sikh, as the case may be. As for the other Punjab, the fact is, even though Gandhi does not wish to take his observations to their logical conclusion, Pakistan came to Punjabi Muslims much as the end of the Mughal empire, the advent of Ranjit Singh or the British did, largely for reasons beyond their control. They had not sought it, it was delivered to them by an outsider, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but once it seemed real they saw the advantages it offered. As subsequent events have shown, for the tribal chiefs and feudal families among Punjabi Muslims, Pakistan was not an idea, it was a convenience. n open www.openthemagazine.com 53

music

mustafa qurashi/ap

Where Hip-Hop Lives Tracing the story of Indian hip-hop through that of Alvin Augustine, aka Nivla, legal administrator by compulsion, desi emcee by passion mansi choksi

growing up brown Hip-hop culture has often been adopted as a medium of expression by minority youth

ivla swills a glass of Scotch.

His liquid eyes, set deep inside a face outlined with a Rick Ross beard, are staring into a mirror. Pages scrawled with aborted lyrics are flying, assorted pills tumble into an outstretched palm, a noose dangles and a steel microphone is tipping slowly, oozing blood. Nivla, sinewy in a hoodie layered under a leather jacket, is punching imaginary walls, slicing the air and yowling into oblivion while rapping in the video for his song Feet On The Ground: Come on homie, please console me I’m feelin’ so helpless, so sad and lonely My thoughts control me Man I can’t help this, this feelin’ that I’m feelin’ man, I’m goin’ fuckin’ crazy, man

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Please don’t betray me now, hip-hop I need you to save me. These lyrics had been brewing in Alvin Augustine’s mind for years. They haunted him every morning when he bitterly threw on a pinstriped shirt, boarded a thundering bus from Weehawken, New Jersey, and lumbered into a clinical cubicled law firm in midtown Manhattan. The song was the tremolo in his musical struggle, a rendition of his frustration with leading a dual life: Alvin the law firm administrator by day, Nivla the struggling Indian hip-hop artiste by night. Augustine was born to Malayalee parents in White Plains, New York. At 17, he handed his high school friends a CD of songs he’d recorded at a neighborhood studio for $30 an hour. People

said he had good ‘delivery’ and told him to keep going. At 32, he’s not sure if he should still be taking that advice. “If you’re doing something for your girlfriend and she ain’t appreciating you, at the beginning, you’ll tolerate it. After a while, you’re gonna be like, ‘I’m showing you all this love, but am I wasting my time here?’” says Augustine, who likes to emphasise the last word of every sentence. “I look at music as one of my relationships.” Some relationships are unequal. That’s an idea Augustine is getting used to, 15 years after he denied his parents the bragging rights reserved for those with a doctor or engineer son at Indian gatherings. Instead, he chose to become an emcee, rapping about “growing up as a Brown person in a 9 september 2013

White neighborhood”. It was a time when a dozen other Indians were experimenting with hip-hop. One by one, the others grew out of it and called it a night. But Augustine is still not ready to let the sun set.

n the mid-90s, some of New York

City’s nightclubs could easily have been airdropped into Mumbai and no one would have noticed. Men bathed in perfume spewing bastardised Hinglish and women in silky dresses puckering their red lips around straws expressed collective mock horror when Genuwine phased into Aap Jaisa Koi. This distinctly South Asian youth culture, rooted in hip-hop and Hindi pop, was at the time being carefully curated by roughly a dozen Indian deejays, emcees and party promoters. Augustine was one of them. “The girls would go crazy. And the guys, they’d be, like, confused because they don’t really wanna dance to Aap Jaisa Koi, but the girls were swayin’ so it was like, ‘Whaaat?’ There was, like, a whole crew of us. I don’t see that kinda unity these days,” says DJ Sharad, who started the India Independence Day Parade after-parties. He doesn’t give his last name because he doesn’t like it. Sunaina Maira, a professor of Asian American studies at University of California, Davis, and author of Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City, met a young Indian American in 1996 who articulated the appeal of the desi party phenomenon. He told her that these parties were the locus for young Indian Americans’ negotiation of a “politics of cool” and a “politics of nostalgia”. “That is why each Friday night, I bounce my head to the latest jam, to the latest beat to be found anywhere between New York and DC… Here is where I find my catharsis. Here is where I suspect many other kids find theirs… Indian Americans have started fusing our own music, producing our own act, and writing our own stories. As with all other Americans, we draw from many traditions—African, Latino, European, Asian—but we do it to our own beats,” he told Maira.

9 september 2013

It was at one of these parties that DJ Sharad met Marco Glorious Khare, an NBA presenter, singer and model who is also an Indian emcee and breakdancer. “Look at me; I look like a Black man,” says Khare, whose father is Indian and mother is Black. He wears a Yankees cap paired with a purple tie, a solitaire flashing in one ear. His biceps burst from his sleeves and he has a tendency to wear sunglasses even at night. Khare grew up in Harlem and began experimenting with Indian influences when he was trying to break into the community of South Asian hip-hop artistes in early 2000. When Khare was a boy, his father’s Indian friends would ask who the little Black child holding his hand was. “My dad would be like, ‘That’s my son,’ and they’d be like, ‘Oh.’” When he showed up for an afterparty DJ Sharad had thrown, he didn’t like what he heard. “I went along with one my boys who is Indian and we met up with some of his friends there. And they’re like, ‘Whoa, okay, you comin’ to show love?’ and I’m like ‘Naah, I’m actually half-Indian.’ And they’re like, ‘You’re half Indian for the day, huh? You trying to get Indian girls?’” Most desi parties operated on high levels of testosterone. It was not uncommon to watch men roll their sleeves and come to fisticuffs without much more provocation than an accidental push, says DJ Sharad. According to Maira, desi youth turned to hip-hop fundamentally because it was key to marking their belonging in the multi-ethnic urban landscape of New York City. ‘And for many second-generation Indians, hip-hop style connoted a certain image of a racialised hypermasculinity,’ she writes. By the mid-2000s, the crew began to fall apart. Many gave up and fell out of love with hip-hop. “Guys got older. Guys weren’t makin’ money, guys parents said, ‘Yo, get married and get a job,’” says DJ Sharad, who has a paunch, a bald spot, and wears rimless spectacles, but compensates with heavy use of words like ‘dope’, ‘hawt’, and ‘rollin’. The quitters left with a stinging bruise. None had won airtime on Hot 97, the New York City radio station with the slogan ‘Where Hip Hop Lives’.

For Indian emcees, Hot 97 is some kind of musical moksha. “We didn’t make it on Hot 97 because we kept sayin’ we do Indian hiphop. But hip-hop is not a Black thing, not a White thing, not a Brown thing,” DJ Sharad explains. “Fat Joe didn’t say he was doin’ Latin hip-hop, Eminem didn’t say he was doin’ White hip-hop. These guys were just doin’ hip-hop. To say ‘We do Indian hip-hop’ is to completely pigeonhole us. Music is a universal language right? That’s the way to get to Hot 97.” DJ Sharad retired from the console too. He partnered with Khare to found DJUSA in 2003, “an elite team of seasoned entertainers with years of experience in event production”. DJUSA’s “complete event production services” include providing assorted ottomans, “intelligent lighting” and LED dance floors, and its “complete entertainment services” is a catalogue of DJs making peace signs and funny faces (four of the 18 DJs are Indian). “You’re not gonna pay bills doing college shows and lookin’ cool and coming out with music only Indian people listen to,” DJ Sharad says. He is sitting in the driver’s seat beside Khare in a black Honda with tinted windows, chrome lights and Lord Ganesh peering from the dashboard. “Lookin’ cool is important, man,” Khare interjects. “Hey, I used to pride myself in wearing Timberlands.” “You still wearin’ them now, no one wears them right now.” “No, we bringing them back. Jay-Z wore Timberlands the other day.” “Yep, then it’s a good look.”

t’s 25 March 2010. LQ, a nightclub

in the Radisson Hotel in midtown Manhattan, is crowded with abundant women squeezed into satin halters and men in tawdry Ed Hardys with gelled hair. They are standing around a makeshift stage barricaded with speakers. The crowd is only spasmodically visible when the spotlights above pulsate to the beat of a dhol. An invisible voice finally bellows, “Raise your hands for Nivlaaaaaaa!” The crowd erupts, mobile cameras are whipped out and one open www.openthemagazine.com 55

giddy young woman with shiny flat hair and a livestrong bracelet lets out a remarkable shriek. “LQs, y’all with me?” roars Augustine, in a checkered blue shirt, leather jacket, a Yankee cap and aviators. He is waving a bottle of Poland Spring water. People are jumping. “Then make some nooooise.” Put your hands up, oh, oh, oh Put your hands up, oh, oh, oh “I got a question,” Augustine barks. “Where’s all the Punjabis at?” That night Augustine shared the stage with Sean Paul, the Grammywinning dancehall and reggae artiste. “It was a pretty big deal,” he says. One advertisement for tickets said: ‘You will get to smoke weed with Sean Paul while eating mango with Nivla’. “Okay, the last part is not true. If you are in the NYC area and want to check out the event, call me.” It’s 3 May 2013. Augustine is in Bryant Park, only a block away from his office in midtown Manhattan. This is where he comes to eat lunch on his own, to escape the drudgery of refreshing an inbox full of legal documents that need review. “It’s a basic nine-to-five job… paperwork and stuff like that,” he says, sitting in a leafy corner away from the main street to avoid bumping into colleagues. “There is nothing about my job that excites me [enough] for me to wanna talk about it.” Augustine keeps his alter ego concealed from his colleagues, “a bunch of older women with children,” he calls them. “I don’t want them to know. Let’s say I mess up with my job, they’re gonna be like, ‘He was probably out till 3 am drinking.’ There’s a stigma attached to hip-hop.” Today, he took a detour of three blocks to come to the park, in order to avoid colleagues looking for company. “If you didn’t know any better, you’d think I’m just a person who sits at home on Fridays and Saturdays and reads books all night. The way I am at work… I’m all studious and all quiet, mindin’ my own business,” he says. When he took on the role of coordinator at the law firm in 2008, his plan was to make enough money to live in New York, pay for his videos, get famous and quit. “I wanna break out of this job so bad,” he says. “But if it doesn’t happen, I guess it doesn’t happen.” Tomorrow, he will wake up at 8 am, make himself eggs and get on the 8.50 56 open

bus at Weehawken Port Imperial. He will watch the Manhattan skyline tear past him, force a smile at colleagues and watch the clock tick to 6.30 pm.

t became harder for Augustine to

lose hope after he tasted fame. In 1998, he was trying to get DJ Sharad’s attention. Sharad had already made a name for himself by circulating mixtapes in desi communities in the tristate area. “He heard my stuff in the beginning and told me to keep doin’ what I’m doin’. He was clearly not impressed,” Augustine says. A year later, at a South Asian Students Alliance convention in Houston, Texas, Augustine showed up with 400 CDs he had burnt himself. “By the end of the night, the CDs ended up all over the floor, broken and shattered. I was mad upset,” he says. But one of them landed in DJ Sharad’s hands. “He was like, ‘Yo, before this, I

The appeal of the desi party phenomenon was that these parties were a locus for young Indian Americans’ negotiation of a ‘politics of cool’ and a ‘politics of nostalgia’ wasn’t givin’ you the respect you deserve. I wanna work with you.’” He made it to DJ Sharad’s mixtape and began getting gigs at India Independence Day Parade parties. “The way I look at it is that if you make it, pull me up and if make it, I’ll pull you up. At the end of the day, we are here to help each other. Jealously and stuff— that can’t get in the way of making it.” In 2008, Augustine came close, when he entered the Doritos Crash The Super Bowl Challenge, a contest that asked undiscovered musicians to submit a video clip of an original song that was ‘like Doritos tortilla chips: inspired by the musician’s passion and creativity’. The most popular artiste would have his or her song aired during a commercial break during the Super Bowl XLII broadcast, while three top finalists would win a distribution deal with Interscope Records, the label behind Madonna and 50 Cent. Augustine didn’t make it to the Super

Bowl, but his song, Be Easy, which featured Punjabi vocals, was picked up for distribution. “This was the first time this happened, from what I know, for an Indian person,” he says. He found himself in Yonkers, surrounded by turbaned men in Safari suits and women in tie-dye saris, giving an acceptance speech at an event later reported in a Malayalee paper published in New Jersey called Escharnian. “I would just, you know, like to thank everybody in the Indian community. If it wasn’t for you guys, I wouldn’t be doin’ the music I’m doin’ or [have] gotten that distribution deal with Interscope Records,” he had said. An Indian man in the crowd had butted in good-naturedly: “Next time, you have to win.” In three years, he felt the red carpet being been pulled from under his feet. In 2011, he agreed to be the final act at a campus event at St John’s University in Queens, NY. He was ready: beard closely trimmed, jacket crisp, Yankees cap screwed slightly to the right. But midperformance, the organisers turned off the power. The event had overrun its schedule and the hall had to be emptied. “I was like ‘What? Why?’ They said the hall had to be emptied. I felt like the biggest idiot,” he says. “And then I thought to myself, if I was Jay-Z, that would’ve never happened.” Memories like these have resulted in a cluttered desktop. Finished songs languish there until Augustine feels inspired to upload. These days, he says, negativity is far more familiar than he would like. “I do try to look at the larger picture,” he says. “If it doesn’t happen, you have to understand. I’m a Christian, I’m a believer in God. There’s a reason why things don’t happen for you. Maybe God’s telling me that he doesn’t want me in this industry because I’ll become a drug addict or hang around with the wrong people.” He glances at his wrist where a bracelet reads ‘MK11 22-25.’ It refers to a Biblical verse—‘If anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.’ Those words remind him to be optimistic. “But you know, if Jay-Z sees me with a bunch of other people, he’s gonna look at me and say, ‘He’s not White, he’s not Black, what’s he about’ and, in a way, it could work out,” he says. n 9 september 2013

CINEMA Friday Festival Why people who throng Gandhinagar matter so much to Sandalwood, as the Kannada film industry is called Deepa Bhasthi

crowded and in the jostle and shoving of people getting back home or coming out for a late night, there are many who will ‘accidently’ brush against you ever so often. Most of the lodges have a reputation. Most of the bars with two initials as names seem sleazy; some though are reputed to serve excellent rasam. There are fake branded clothes, tiny sample perfume bottles, imported lingerie and cheap electronics without bills for sale at tiny cubicles in old shopping arcades, the predecessors of glitzy malls. Tucked into some of the lanes are Jain temples, Hindu temples, commercial establishments and the odd house.

A stone’s throw away in all directions from these is also where fortunes are made or paupers born every Friday. Filmdom is fickle that way and Gandhinagar is where they all come to count their new money or rue their fate. For here is the heart of the Kannada film industry, Sandalwood as they call it. Here is the highest concentration of single screen movie theatres in Bangalore—Menaka, Santosh, Bhumika, Sagar, Kailash, Sapna, Tribhuvan, Triveni. Not all

flagged off There is a festive air most Fridays at Gandhinagar, the opening day for films

photos rudra rakshit saran

need not have asked the tender coconut seller standing under the skywalk with his wares tied to the end of a rusty bicycle how to get to Triveni theatre in Bangalore’s Gandhinagar area. The overpowering smell of a long string of crackers that drowned the hoots and shrill whistles of devout fans would have led me right to its front steps. The buntings that flapped furiously above me had the face of a film star on each; I hadn’t paid close enough attention earlier. That road, in fact that whole neighbourhood, is one that I always hurry past. It is not a ‘nice’ area for girls to wander alone after dark, for the streets are

make or break moment The audience at Triveni theatre watches ‘diamond star’ Srinagara Kitty on screen

of them always show only Kannada films anymore; Shah Rukh Khan’s Chennai Express opened in one. But Gandhinagar, its audiences, these box-offices are what matter for a new Kannada film. Multiplexes are fancy places for such films, but these greasy halls of history are where the fates of the film, its star and its director are scripted. That is how it has always been in Sandalwood. It is Friday and a big banner film is opening this morning at Triveni theatre. I am there early enough for the roads to be empty, relatively. But then it is also the Eid holiday. Not that it matters for some ardent fans. When their idol’s latest makes an opening, they will take a day off work, park at home their autorickshaws or feign a sudden illness to make it to the ‘first day first show’, a phrase as important for the film crew to gauge first reactions as it is for fans to prove their devotion yet again. To do that, they will buy tickets in black. They will pour milk over humongous cut-outs that are draped in thick garlands. They will break several dozen coconuts which will then be swept aside and collected by street urchins. They will dance a few crude steps before the floral décor that announces the star and the film’s names at the entrance in bright yellow marigolds. They will do all that makes them a classic study in the stereotype that we know temple-building South Indian movie fans to be. Not quite ready to commit suicide for their heroes like in other states, but steeped nevertheless in the machinery that allows them a small happy haven distant from their mundane lives. That Friday, when Tony, a film that stars 23-film old ‘diamond star’ Srinagara Kitty, opens, there is all that. All the heroes are assigned monikers; there is a crazy star, there is a rebel star, and so on. The promotional posters mostly show Kitty holding a tiger at the end of a leash. The film is a philosophical thriller with three narratives 58 open

that culminate at a common point; later, reviewers will call it among the better films of recent times. Once the fire crackers are spent and the doors open and a feisty old woman asks me if I want a ticket in black for the next show and the two duty constables there look the other way at this and I walk inside telling he who rips the flimsy tickets in half that I am from

I see the hero sitting on a faded sofa just outside the main hall. There are hoots that break through the soundproof walls and slightly open door, but Srinagara Kitty hasn’t lost his look of nervousness the media, I see the hero sitting on a faded sofa just outside the main hall. There are hoots that break through the soundproof walls and slightly open door, but Srinagara Kitty hasn’t lost his look of nervousness. Shorn of all makeup, descended from the posters, he looks…common… as I suppose all stars do. He mumbles to me that of course he gets mighty nervous before a film of his releases, then spouts mandatory

lines about the love and respect he has for his fans. The show is houseful and the director’s phone doesn’t stop ringing all the while that I am there. The fans have pushed and shoved each other to get in. They are too busy to tell me too much about themselves, for there is their hero amongst them to adore, crackers, coconuts and activities to do and a news channel cameraman’s attention to catch. Shankar, first name only, is an auto driver who isn’t working for half a day to watch the first day first show of Tony. I ask him why, and he answers in superlatives, “I am a huge fan of Kitty, he is a great actor, the trailer was fantastic, so I came.” His friend Kumar says, “I wanted to watch the first show. I will come back with my family and watch it again.” Not many others stop to talk to me, but there are auto drivers in their khaki shirts, workers with dirt under their fingernails, some students bunking class from the college nearby, mostly people of a certain working class who buy three hours’ worth of dreams here. The tickets are under Rs 100, even for the best balcony rows. The distributors of the film pay for the coconuts and crackers. Some stars route money to their fan clubs too, I learn later, to organise all the hoo-ha. Like with votes, it isn’t too hard to buy 9 september 2013

golden moment Kitty with a tiger in the poster of his latest film, Tony

Sandalwood fans either. The management at Triveni isn’t sure about getting me a seat in the hall, but tell me to go in and stay as long as I want. I go in. I watch Tony for a bit. I watch the audience chuckling, hooting, glued to the screen, some to their mobile phones. It is just the film that the audience wants, I see, with a simple enough plot, flimsy songs, drama, tears, laughs and a happy ending. What the audience wants, the audience gets. As simple as that. Film historians call the 1970s and the 1980s the golden age of Kannada films. That was the time Puttanna Kanagal was taking popular novels and turning them into women-centric films that explored taboo subjects like postnatal depression, cougar and Oedipal relationships and defiant girls. That was the time the late thespian Dr Rajkumar was at his peak, channelising a background in theatre to Kannada films that were known for their music, his righteousness and slightly over-the-top dramatics. Natural, subtle acting wasn’t for them. He and Vishnuvardhan ruled Sandalwood for decades. Perhaps it was after the 1980s that films began metamorphosing into the commercial stereotypes of today. With Ravichandran, who discovered 9 september 2013

the likes of Juhi Chawla, came the lover-boy films. There was then a period of extremely violent films, then some tame rom-coms. Now I suppose it is a wider mix of themes, some unusual, some experimental. A good actor friend of mine who had a major hit in the last few months nods his head when I complain about Kannada films being the way they are.

My actor friend tells me that the moneybags that produce and distribute these films have usually risen from the ranks of the working class, watching these sort of films. Also, making ‘good’ films is just not worth it He asks me not to mention his name. I am, he says, part of what he calls the “class audience”, educated, exposed to films in other languages, from other countries even, who might find the films of today crass and substandard. He agrees that there are less than a handful of films that this ‘class audience’ might even consider watching. The reason even mediocre films like the older Mungaru Male and the newer

Mynaa become such hits with all levels of audiences, I tell myself. My actor friend says that we, the ‘class audience’, are not a section anyone is interested in. Films will never be made for us, for we are apparently too fickle, too unpredictable. He tells me that the moneybags that produce and distribute these films have usually risen from the ranks of the working class, watching these sort of films. For them it is the glamour of making, of being part of a film that their friends will enjoy. For them, it is never about the aesthetics, legacy or history of cinema. Also, making ‘good’ films is just not worth it, financially. It always boils down to that. The audiences that bring money back to filmmakers are ones that demand a good fight, an item song, straight plots, a simple, commercial film in a nutshell, he tells me sagely. How will the audience like different films unless they are made? I try to argue. We are talking of a commercial industry and if these commercial films are what work, why fix something that isn’t broken? My friend points out. Will the Kannada film industry get better, I wonder. But then, what defines ‘better’, I wonder next. Commercial cinema doesn’t exist to cue a study in cinema aesthetics now, does it? The audiences at Gandhinagar don’t look for it. They seek only to take pictures of the visiting star with their cheap mobile phones to show friends later. They seek only to create a festival on opening day. They seek only some validation of their routine lives from public acts of drama, like their fan frenzy. If the news camera captures two seconds of them doing that, they are happy. If the film they are here for is entertaining, their day is made. Gandhinagar is their Wonderland. Shankar, the auto driver fan, sums it up, “I come to forget my troubles. I know I can never have that life, but for those two-odd hours in the film hall, I get to have beautiful things and a happy ending.” A film has served its purpose. n open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

mature music Experiments carried out by University of Groningen suggest that experienced motorists between 25 and 35 years of age are perfectly capable of focusing on the road while listening to music

Spicing Up Humans used garlic mustard as way back as 6,000 years ago

How Music can Impact Driving

t has so far been believed that prehistoric humans chose their food only for nutrition. The use of condiments and flavourings in the human diet was thought to have been absent among hunter-gatherers; it was an innovation of the agricultural era. However, a new study shows that hunter-gatherers in Europe were using spices in their food as way back as 6,000 years ago. According to research findings published in the journal Plos One, a group of researchers from the UK, Denmark, Germany and Spain found evidence of garlic mustard in the residues left on ancient pottery shards discovered in what is now Denmark and Germany. The pottery shards date between 5,800 and 6,150 years back and were collected from three camp sites in that region. Apart from the spice, the pottery shards also contained remnants of more substantial foods like fish and animal fat—probably of deer. Since garlic mustard has no nutritional value, the researchers believe that the spice was added for flavour rather than nourishment. One of the researchers, Hayley Saul, told Live Science, “The majority of the samples 60 open

showed marine foods, so things like fish and shellfish... This was the cusp of agriculture, so we also saw things like roe deer and wild cow.” Spice residue was found on the inside of the pottery fragments and not outside, thereby showing that it was used for cooking. According to the study, prehistoric humans in this region used to crush the mustard garlic seeds to get its flavour. If they did not have a practice of crushing them, the researchers claim, intact seeds in residues would have been found. They however add that while their cuisine was flavoursome, it was not varied. No evidence of spices apart from garlic mustard was found. The researchers write in the journal: ‘Our evidence suggests a much greater antiquity to the spicing of foods than is evident from the macrofossil record, and challenges the view that plants were exploited by hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists solely for energy requirements, rather than taste... It is now established that the habit of enhancing and altering the flavour of calorie rich staples was part of European cuisine as far back as the 7th millennia.’ n

According to a new study by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, teens listening to their preferred music while driving commit more errors and miscalculations. The study evaluated 85 young novice drivers through six challenging trips. When the teen drivers listened to their preferred music, virtually all (98 per cent) demonstrated an average of three deficient driving behaviours in at least one of the trips. These errors included speeding, tailgating, careless lane switching, passing vehicles and one-handed driving. Without any music, 92 per cent made errors. However, with a musical background designed to increase driver safety (easy listening, soft rock, light jazz), deficient driving behaviours decreased by 20 per cent. n

Wolves Howl Because They Care

When a member of a wolf pack leaves the group, the howling by those left behind isn’t a reflection of stress but of the quality of their relationships, says a new study in Current Biology. At Austria’s Wolf Science Center, human handlers typically take individual wolves out for walks on a leash, one at a time. On those occasions, the remaining pack mates always howl. A study of nine wolves of two packs living in the wolf centre found that wolves howl more when a wolf they have a better relationship with leaves the group and when that individual is of high social rank. And the level of howling had no significant link with higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. n

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sd extended capacity (sdxc) card capacities range from 64GB to 2TB. Because SDXC uses a different file system called exFAT and it works differently than standard SD (secure digital) cards, this new format is not backwards compatible with host devices that only take SD (128MB to 2GB)

tech&style

Fujifilm X-M1 The brand’s smallest and lightest compact system camera for mainstream users gagandeep Singh Sapra

Oris w ProDiver Pointer Moon

Price on request

Rs 42,999

This innovative timepiece from Oris is the world’s first mechanical watch to indicate both the lunar cycle and tidal range, and is specifically designed for professional diving. Its titanium case is water resistant to 1,000 metres, with metres-feet scale engravings on the screwed case back. This timepiece is available with both northern and southern hemisphere tide range indications. n

LG Optimus G Pro

he latest in the X-Series mod-

els from Fujifilm, the X-M1 is an impressive compact camera at a very interesting price point. It has a slim and compact body, yet its 16 megapixel APS-C sensor gives you the sharpness and detail of a DSLR camera. A wide range of lenses from Fujifilm ensures that you have the perfect lens for the perfect occasion too. Over a period of two weeks, I spent time shooting early morning to late night scenes, and the camera was quick to adapt, whether at ‘full Auto’ mode or ‘Manual’ modes. The control dials are placed in a manner that you can use this camera with a single hand. In case you love shooting in low light, there is a tripod mount. The camera takes an SD, SDHC or SDXC card to record images and videos. It can also record full HD videos, and has a great microphone; its optical stabilisation technology is very effective in shooting stills and videos.

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Its inbuilt Wi-Fi allows transfer of images via a smartphone to social media networks, or you could automatically upload images once you get to your desktop. There is also an HDMI output to hook the camera up with a TV set. The camera can record pictures in JPEG and RAW formats, and videos in .MOV format using H.264 compression and stereo sound. Its battery is designed to take up to 350 images. It also supports ‘Film Simulation’ for a feel of shooting on real film. The modes that you can choose are: Rovia (Standard), Velvia (Vivid), Astia (Soft), Monochrome or Sepia. I loved the Monochrome that delivers great images in black-and-white. At Rs 43,000, this camera may seem slightly overpriced, but considering that you can carry it in your coat pocket, or your sling bag, and with an off-to-shoot time of just 0.5 seconds, it makes for a great purchase. n

Rs 42,500

When you pick up this phone and look at its beautiful IPS full 5.5 inches display, you will fall in love with its brightness and clarity. And LG has loaded it with features: a 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Quad Core processor, 2 GB RAM, an Adreno 320 Chip for graphics, NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G connectivity options and 16 gigabytes of internal storage. LG has also optimised Android using its own skins and apps, and runs seamlessly with your day-to-day requirements. If you are looking for a powerful Android phone with a great screen, this is an option you should look at. For others, there is too much choice in this price bracket. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

super teamwork John Abraham and Shoojit Sircar are becoming an enviable team. After the success of Vicky Donor and rave reviews for Madras Cafe, it seems that the producerdirector duo are getting back together again soon for John Abraham Entertainment’s next film Hamara Bajaj

Madras Cafe This political spy thriller is the bravest Hindi film in a long time ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Jobs Director Joshua Michael Stern cast Ashton Kutcher, Josh Gad,

Dermot Mulroney Score ★★★★★

i, m, nargis fakhr Cast john abraha rashi khanna sircar Director shoojit

ith the chop-chop of

helicopters flying across the red disk of a rising or setting sun, Madras Cafe is sometimes stylistically derivative as a movie on a hopeless war (Apocalypse Now), but it works well as a thriller. After labouring the point that Sri Lanka was India’s Vietnam, director Shoojit Sircar counts down the time from the Indian Peace-Keeping Force’s (IPKF’s) withdrawal from the island to the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister who disastrously sent the IPKF into that civil war. This countdown is tightly scripted and edited and though there are lapses in a few performances along the way, the film is well designed. Certainly, you can debate the authenticity of the geopolitical conspiracy in the movie that links international arms dealers, South and East Asian economies and the internal politics of the LTTE to the final call on the PM’s assassination. But it is emotions that the film plays with, the path of inevitability that it careens 62 open

down with the recklessness and high velocity of fate. How could it have been stopped? Madras Cafe is about failure at every single stage, involving every side, in a disastrous war. Since there are no winners, the former PM’s security fails too, and the fictional Major Vikram Singh (John Abraham), first on assignment to RAW in Jaffna and then desperately trying to get to the PM before the suicide bomber, is in a race that he just can’t win. The details seem completely authentic, even though in all likelihood they are not. By toying with the ifs and buts of decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse, the last hour of this film builds tension to a crescendo. This makes for a good thriller. But what takes the movie to another level, to an insight on the futility of individual human action once the dogs of war have been let slip, is the sadness that permeates the film. This is the bravest Hindi film in a long time. n

Steve Jobs deserves a better movie. All director Joshua Michael Stern does is tick all the relevant boxes and then tell us that he has made a movie on the co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. So you have Steve (Ashton Kutcher) dropping out of Reed college but sitting in on that course on calligraphy, tick, spending seven months in India, tick, founding Apple with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), tick, and so on, until he is forced out of the company in 1985 and brought back in desperation in 1996. Then the story of the rainbow— iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etcetera . It’s almost as if the information age has developed attention deficit disorder and is unable to use the medium to give us the full-rounded complexity of its greatest icon, something that the industrial age did quite well actually. The movie puts a dull halo around Jobs and refuses to take a position on his obsessive self-centredness, sometimes outrightly amoral stand, in professional and personal life. On one occasion, at the start of their careers, Jobs tells Wozniak that they were paid $ 700 for work done, with Wozniak’s share $ 350, when the actual figure was $ 5,000. The film responds with ‘no comment’. For a design perfectionist like Jobs, this movie would be a poor tribute to his troubled genius. n ad

9 september 2013

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Fast & Furious Hopefuls

It is hilarious how everyone from Sonam Kapoor and Deepika Padukone to Kangana Ranaut and Chitrangda Singh has been telling the press that they were shortlisted to audition for the new Fast & Furious film. In reality, the casting director of the seventh installment in the popular Hollywood franchise has appointed scouts across the subcontinent to encourage actresses to audition for a tiny role in the movie. So it’s not as if our Bollywood divas were personally handpicked to test for the part. In fact, they’re among hundreds of girls across the country who have rushed their audition tapes to the London casting office. Lunchbox newbie Nimrat Kaur was also approached, as were Isabelle Kaif, Katrina’s younger sister, and Aviva Bidappa, daughter of Bangalore’s famous fashion guru Prasad Bidappa. Each has reportedly sent in her tape and is awaiting the call.

Kat’s Problem with Stealth

Katrina Kaif is amused by rumours that she had leaked photographs of herself with Ranbir Kapoor on a beach in Spain. When I brought up the conspiracy theory, she replied, “First, that’s not the kind of person I am. And secondly, would I really choose pictures of myself in a mismatching bikini? Pictures that don’t even highlight my best features?” On all the flak she received for issuing a statement to the media pleading for privacy, she says, “I realise people felt I’d overreacted, but I guess I was naïve. It was a personal, unguarded moment. Was it really necessary?” Katrina makes no efforts to deny her relationship with Ranbir, but won’t speak about it “because I’ve never discussed my private life in public”. What she does reveal is that she has signed Anurag Basu’s Jagga Jasoos opposite Ranbir, and that she will shoot that film more or less simultaneously with Bang Bang (which resumes filming in November after the release of Krrish 3) and the Kabir Khan film she signed recently opposite Saif Ali Khan. She’s also unperturbed by the media’s constant jibes that she’s been left behind by Deepika Padukone, who has had four backto-back hits in Cocktail, Race 2, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani and Chennai Express. “Two of my films got delayed for reasons that were out of anyone’s control [Dhoom 3 and Bang Bang]. But I know [the tabloids] will sing a differ9 september 2013

ent tune when those films are coming out,” she says. Katrina, who took off to London earlier this week to attend her sister’s wedding, isn’t expecting Ranbir or any of her Bollywood friends to attend the celebrations, insisting it’s “a small family affair”. But she’s looking forward to spending a few days sharing a room with six of her sisters. “It’s going to be crazy,” she says.

Once MBAs Run the Show

An epic passion project to be directed by a celebrated newwave director changed hands some months ago. The studio originally committed to co-producing the film is believed to have passed on the project when its budget bloated to an unviable size. Quickly, though, a rival studio attached itself to the movie, confident of making the numbers work, based on the fact that the project stars a hot young heartthrob who has just delivered a whopping blockbuster. Insiders reveal that the studio originally linked to the film may have balked at the price tag, but the film’s producers were equally disappointed in the corporate giant. The honchos at the studio had apparently conducted a SWOT analysis on the project, breaking down its many merits and demerits. This analysis was conducted in one of the studio’s many conference rooms, whose glass windows double up as writing boards. In the ‘Strengths’ column, while analysing the film’s commercial prospects, the A-list actor’s name was scribbled, while the director’s name was listed in the ‘Weaknesses’ column, a reflection evidently of the fact that his movies rarely make any money. While it’s unclear what may have been decided upon at the end of that studio analysis, what we do know is that nobody had the good sense to erase the glass writing board. As fate would have it, the very same evening in the very same conference room, the same film’s producers assembled for a meeting with studio executives and were reportedly horrified to notice their revered director referred to as a ‘weakness’. An awkward exchange followed. The bloated budget was discussed too. At the end of the meeting, the producers apparently walked out, having made up their mind that their movie couldn’t possibly take shape at this studio. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Hop, Skip and Jump in Mumbai

by v i v e k t h a k k a r

64 open

9 september 2013