SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY PROFILES MAMATA BANERJEE J AM E S ASTIL L O N T H E THR I L LS O F CA R I B B E A N C R I C KE T w w w o p e n t h e m a g a z i n e c o m ThE wILD EAST OF INDIAN POLITIcS march 2019 / rS 50 The Last and Lost War of Pulwama borrows from a history of deception and subversion By MJ AkBAr contents march 2019 46 LOcOmOtif a cricKEtinG caLyPsO The crown prince of bone-saw kingdom India’s tour to the Caribbean could produce a great contest in the wake of an unforeseen West Indian renaissance By S Prasannarajan By James Astill indraPrastha 52 By Virendra Kapoor thE LiGhtnEss Of BrOnzE A new museum commemorates the life and works of Amar Nath Sehgal By Avantika Bhuyan mUmBai nOtEBOOK By Anil Dharker 22 52 56 EyEwitnEss 14 Camera as sketchbook thE rachEL PaPErs By Somak Ghoshal The Indian service industry By Rachel Dwyer 34 58 18 thE writEr Of smaLL thinGs OPEn Essay Mirza Waheed in his new novel excavates the grey area between complicity and consent while exploring the banality of evil The iron sister 46 42 By Sunanda K Datta-Ray By Nandini Nair 22 66 thE Last and LOst war Of PaKistan Pulwama borrows from a history of deception and subversion By MJ Akbar nOt PEOPLE LiKE Us 34 Katrina saves the day By Rajeev Masand a ViEw frOm thE wiLd East The brashness inspired by a Hindi film cannot help in Kashmir From Varanasi to Gorakhpur, from Modi’s constituency to Yogi’s fief, the combined might of SP and BSP and the charisma of Priyanka Gandhi hope to make a dent in the BJP bastion Where’s the reformer who will nail a thesis on the door of the Catholic Church? By Rahul Pandita By Ullekh NP By Stephen David 32 JOsh GOnE awry march 2019 42 GOd aGainst LiBidO Cover photograph by AP www.openthemagazine.com open mail editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor Pr ramesh ExEcutivE EditorS aresh Shirali, ullekh nP Editor-at-largE Siddharth Singh dEPuty EditorS madhavankutty Pillai (mumbai Bureau chief), rahul Pandita, amita Shah, v Shoba (Bangalore), nandini nair crEativE dirEctor rohit chawla art dirEctor Jyoti K Singh SEnior EditorS lhendup gyatso Bhutia (mumbai), moinak mitra aSSociatE EditorS vijay K Soni (Web), Sonali acharjee, aditya iyer, Shahina KK aSSiStant Editor vipul vivek chiEf of graPhicS Saurabh Singh SEnior dESignErS anup Banerjee, veer Pal Singh Photo Editor raul irani dEPuty Photo Editor ashish Sharma aSSociatE PuBliShEr Pankaj Jayaswal national hEad-EvEntS and initiativES arpita Sachin ahuja gEnEral managErS (advErtiSing) rashmi lata Swarup, Siddhartha Basu chatterjee (West), uma Srinivasan (South) national hEad-diStriBution and SalES ajay gupta rEgional hEadS-circulation d charles (South), melvin george (West), Basab ghosh (East) hEad-Production maneesh tyagi SEnior managEr (PrE-PrESS) Sharad tailang managEr-marKEting Priya Singh chiEf dESignEr-marKEting champak Bhattacharjee cfo anil Bisht chiEf ExEcutivE & PuBliShEr neeraja chawla all rights reserved throughout the world reproduction in any manner is prohibited Editor: S Prasannarajan Printed and published by neeraja chawla on behalf of the owner, open media network Pvt ltd Printed at thomson Press india ltd, 18-35 milestone, delhi mathura road, faridabad-121007, (haryana) Published at 4, dda commercial complex, Panchsheel Park, new delhi-110017 Ph: (011) 48500500; fax: (011) 48500599 to subscribe, Whatsapp ‘openmag’ to 9999800012 or log on to www.openthemagazine.com or call our toll free number 1800 102 7510 or email at: customercare@openmedianetwork.in for alliances, email alliances@openmedianetwork.in for advertising, email advt@openmedianetwork.in for any other queries/observations, email feedback@openmedianetwork.in Disclaimer ‘open avenues’ are advertiser-driven marketing initiatives and Open takes no responsibility for the consequences of using products or services advertised in the magazine volume 11 issue for the week 26 february4 march 2019 total no of pages 68 C letter of the week Your Kumbh Mela photographs brought out the exuberance, enthusiasm and religious fervour of the world’s largest gathering (‘Leaps of Faith’, February 25th, 2019) Like always, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath did not miss a chance of deriving political mileage from the once-in-six-years Mela The state showed impressive organisational capabilities in keeping such a huge event largely accident-free It also tried its best to convert visitors’ religious devotion into political commitment Let’s not forget the state government went the extra mile to make the Mela grander with an eye on the upcoming General Election It will be interesting to see if Mela management really has an impact on voters and the not-so-subtle political messaging endures till polling time Tapping such religious sentiments, the BJP seems confident it will defeat the challenge from the combined opposition in UP at least What is not clear is whether it will just manage to win or sweep the state the way it did in 2014 Won’t it be better then for Yogiji to arrange some festivals of minority communities as well to expand the party’s reach and live up to its ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’ spirit? There’s no harm trying, even if it doesn’t convert into votes for the BJP to the country’s ambition of becoming a super power To fulfil their shortsighted goals of power, our politicians want to drag India back by a few centuries Caste-based politics is retrograde Mahesh Kumar don’t veer off vikaas The interview with Ruchir Sharma made it clear why the Jaideep Mittra BJP must stick to its promises on development if it wants to come back to power (‘The stuck with caste along with Muslims will Expectations of Modi Were Regardless of how much I make up a significant portion Unrealistic’, February 25th, might loathe it, anyone who of the SP-BSP vote base The 2019) Prime Minister has lived in Uttar Pradesh BJP has only its upper-caste Narendra Modi has launched understands politics in this vote bank to bail it out scores of welfare schemes Bal Govind that will take time to deliver state always revolves around caste and religion (‘Caste, results The ruling party When the British ruled India, cannot expect all its goals to Cows and the Countryside’, caste hardly mattered UnFebruary 25th, 2019) The be achieved in one term, but fortunately, now that we are BJP’s 71 MPs from this state that does not mean it should helped it achieve a Lok Sabha ruling ourselves, only caste give up on vikaas M Kumar matters Modern India is unmajority in 2014 But if both the SP and BSP fight elections able to give up its premodern the missing money trail together this year, it will hurt politics Caste should have Claims regarding the Rafale the BJP significantly The BJP no relevance in an India of deal cover two broad issues: was never expected to repeat the 21st century This ‘straticontract overvaluation and fication’ of people is merely a its 2014 performance in UP crony capitalism (‘A DefenceThe alliance between the SP political tactic A section less Democracy’, February of politicians wants to take and BSP and the Congress’ 25th, 2019) But when there advantage of caste, the decision to formally induct is no money trail to reveal Priyanka Vadra Gandhi into mark of an orthodox society corruption, how can Rahul the state’s politics are going to It has no positive contribuGandhi say Modi benefited tion to make today and is make it even more difficult personally? an impediment to economic for the BJP to retain its posiVinod C Dixit tion Yadavs, OBCs and Jatavs development It runs counter march 2019 LOCOMOTIF suspicion that he, in spite of the imagologues at his service, struck a fine balance between the military and the mullah, the twin pillars of the state within the state Power neutralises the romance of the outsider, and imran’s current bluster and braggadocio reveal the true work beneath the imagology of the outsider: another stereotypical Pakistani leader who too realises the existential uses of an enemy by S PRASANNARAJAN Now take the prince, who was given a welcome worthy of his wealth and ‘strategic’ power in Delhi, his next stopover The imagologues had photoshopped him to perfection when he began his ‘reforms’ by letting women drive and by opening movie theatres in saudi arabia and his ‘ethical purge’ had its dramatic moment when scores of princes and princelings with a combined net worth of billions were locked up in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton—a gulag for the rich Things turned problematic when a group of saudi hit-men armed with a bone-saw magology is a neologism best explained by milan descended on the saudi Consulate in istanbul to receive Jamal Kundera in his novel Immortality ‘imagologues create Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post and a severe systems of ideals and anti-ideals, systems of short duration critic of the regime investigations by the Cia and Turkey had which are quickly replaced by other systems but which established that the dismembering and killing of Khashoggi, influence our behaviour, our political opinions and a saudi exile living in Washington, was ordered by the highest aesthetic tastes, the colour of carpets and the selection echelon of the kingdom The american president rejected the of books just as in the past we have been ruled by the findings of his own agency and maintained that saudi arabia systems of ideologues,’ he writes while talking about the contributes so much to the Us economy by buying weapons ‘planetary transformation of ideology into imagology’ last worth billions of dollars that he cannot afford to blacklist the sunday in islamabad, all it took was a picture to tell a bad story prince Trump’s transactionalism won the day ever so badly in a photograph clicked for the front pages, we saw and the prince, meanwhile, needed a lot more from his them in the front seats of a mercedes, Prime minister imran Khan imagologues of Pakistan as the chauffeur and Crown Prince mohammed bin The prince’s asian blitz—next stop, China—is salman of saudi arabia as guest it was a gesture that defied post-Khashoggi imagology at work Delhi too treated him protocol and brought out the cool contemporaneity of imran, with the kind of special indulgence a prince of such ‘strategic’ whose election six months ago marked a ‘change’ in a country importance is worthy of strategic, that is the word that comes to otherwise dismissed by some as a historical error, and where aid whenever a transactional government defends a repressive scriptural cold-bloodedness still has quasi-official protection kingdom whose extra-territorial brutalism still goes on and the prince, affectionately abbreviated as mBs, heir apparent unabated beyond the headlines in yemen mBs needs more to the throne of the House of saud, too, launched himself onto the than all the perfumes of arabia to humanise his image after the world stage as an agent of change, and panegyrists even went to bone-saw vengefulness He needs more fawning asian hosts in the extent of calling him a gorbachev in a keffiyeh, ushering in thrall to his benevolence to create an illusion of modernity reforms in the rich and repressive kingdom of saudi arabia so, in morality is seen as naiveté—or idealism without islamabad, it was a perfect piece of ‘imagology’ responsibility—in the age of transactionalism so by talking imagology is a manufactured about the bone-saw kingdom, you run metaphor for a lie as ambitious as the risk of being accused of falling for a ideology Take the chauffeur Western libertarian narrative Which, Pakistan needed a redeemer, and in a sense, leads to another reality: Third Morality is seen as imran, an apolitical politician who Worldism has only lost its geography, naiveté—or idealism initially projected himself as the not its morality or mindset so we still conscience keeper of a country without responsibility—in need to indulge bone-saw princes let’s savaged by generals and complicit nevertheless end this column with a the age of transactionalism democrats, had the necessary quote from Khashoggi: “When i speak image He was the outsider, untainted of the fear, intimidation, arrests and by the transgressions of power, and public shaming of intellectuals and his base was young and restless He religious leaders who dare to speak their could have been the protagonist of a minds, and then i tell you that i’m from Pakistani spring in power, he didn’t saudi arabia, are you surprised?” much to repudiate the lingering some of us are, still The Crown Prince of Bone-Saw Kingdom I march 2019 Mohammed bin Salman Jamal Khashoggi www.openthemagazine.com INDRAPRASTHA virendra kapoor V eteran journalist Kuldip nayar’s 16th and last book, On Leaders and Icons: From Jinnah to Modi, was released at a gala function a few days ago in one of the finest five-star hotels of the capital in this book, Kuldip reminisces about events of pre-Partition days in the Modi era Celebrities whom he met, what they said and saucy tidbits about them are all littered in the unputdownable book now, you would expect Kuldip to write about politicians, but his insider account of filmstars of his time came as an eye-opener For example, he throws new light on the life of Bollywood’s famous tragedienne, Meena Kumari How she was exploited by her estranged husband Kamal amrohi, how she fell head over heels in love with Dharmendra, who nonetheless did not show up at her funeral, and the most sensational of all revelations that Kamal amrohi’s brother was behind her death because he believed she had brought shame to the family due to her excessive drinking and the muchtalked about affair with the then struggling jat hero from the back of beyond in Punjab even as the who’s who of the capital sat engrossed flipping through the book while simultaneously catching snatches of the tributes paid to the late author, there was a little drama going on behind the scenes Former Prime Minister Manmohan singh had begged off at the last minute, declining to release the book; his excuse was that Kuldip had written that PMo files were sent to 10 janpath, something various others, including sanjaya Baru, his media advisor, had duly committed to paper Kuldip’s sons, rajiv, a senior high court lawyer, and sudhir, an ex-Hindustan lever executive, were now hard put to by the feisty sagarika Ghosh who flaunts her anti-saffron credentials on her sleeves When the other two former diplomats learnt of the real reason for sibal’s reluctance, one of them cattily commented, “How can he call us ‘juniors’ when he failed not once but twice in the indian Foreign service exam?” amen! t arrange another speaker Former uPa minister Kapil sibal and exdiplomats Pawan Verma and Hardeep Puri, a union Minister in his new avatar as a politician, were joined by navtej sarna, till recently our man in Washington sarna was called in on the morning of the book release Wellknown tV anchor rajdeep sardesai moderated the discussion However, what surprised everyone in the crowded ballroom of the recently renovated hotel was sibal engaging alone with sardesai while former diplomats, Pavan Verma, navtej sarna and diplomat-turnedMinister Hardeep Puri waited on the side of the stage two separate sessions looked odd while all four were to discuss the book until yours truly learnt from the actors involved that sibal declined to share the stage with the others, allegedly on the ground that all three were junior to him to soften the blow, the three were told that sibal was in a hurry to leave for another function Puri, however, thought that sibal’s reluctance to share the stage with him stemmed from the mauling he had received at his hands when both had participated in a discussion on his book at the recent jaipur literature Festival, despite the session being moderated He ParliaMentary poll is upon us Most sitting MPs are not weighing their chances of winning, which will come later, but being fielded yet again by their parties in the national capital, BjP chief amit shah is set not to repeat at least three of the seven MPs their names are on the chopping block the other three are certain to get BjP tickets the fate of one is hanging in the balance Heading the list of those to be denied tickets is the member from new Delhi constituency, Meenakshi lekhi the chatter in the party is overwhelmingly against her, though often this is attributed to her not being a good constituency MP while proving her worth in Parliament unfortunately, what counts with voters is whether you have got someone a job, someone else’s uncle a transfer, someone’s child school admission, etcetera Distortions in the role of a Parliament member have been the undoing of several leaders in the past Meenakshi seems to be falling victim to an injection of the local in national politics a nD tHey say there are clamps on india’s free media imposed by the Modi sarkar in the ongoing hearing of the Kulbhushan jadhav case at the Hague, Pakistan’s attorney General approvingly quoted two indian journalists, Karan thapar and raghav Bahl of Bloomberg Quint need not say more n march 2019 MuMbai NoTebook Anil Dharker T he blue synagogue is no longer blue For years, Mumbaikars have seen a distinctive building in one of the small lanes off Kala ghoda which stood out for its colour, a kind of sky blue but how many of us actually went inside? not too many, I imagine, because people are never sure whether you can enter a religious place unless you belong to that faith The blue synagogue which is no longer blue is now open to all; more importantly, you can visit it without the Wrath of god literally coming down on your head because the structure has been repaired and strengthened simultaneously, the blue faỗade has given way to indigo and white because abha narain lambah, the celebrated architect who worked on its restoration, so decreed it (she says it’s the more authentic colour palette and we have to take her word for it since the building is 135 years old and unless a guinness World Record holder for longevity is hiding somewhere, no one from 1884, when it was built, is around anymore.) ‘are you Jewish?’ people asked sangita Jindal, head of JsW Foundation, when she decided to fund the restoration of course not, she said, what does that have to with it, thus emphasising once again the secular nature of the Foundation’s philosophy and her own liberal view of the world When you think of it, the synagogue— of the Jewish faith though it might be—is a symbol of the liberal underpinnings of our country after all, it was erected by the sassoon family that fled baghdad in 1832 due to persecution there and found a home in bombay In fact, the history of the Jewish community in India goes much further back in time: bene Israeli Jews in the 2nd century bCe fleeing from persecution in galilee were shipwrecked off the Konkan Coast and found refuge in India later, towards the end of the 18th century, members of the Jewish merchant community escaping from Iraq, syria and other West asian countries settled here and played an important role in the development of bombay The blue synagogue (officially, Knesset eliyahoo synagogue after eliyahoo sasoon, father of David who built it) was designed by the british architectural firm gostling & Morris The inside has ornamental pillars and wonderful stained glass, now beautifully restored although primarily designed as a typical baghdadi synagogue, the english architects incorporated neo-Classical and gothic-Victorian architectural elements The exterior is made of Porbandar stone, while the floor tiling inside was imported from stoke-on-Trent in england These combinations make the synagogue itself a secular and cosmopolitan symbol Much like Mumbai that was bombay Much like bharat that was India ‘R esToRaTIon’ Is a tricky business, especially when zealous attempts by amateurs result in disastrous shortcuts a common mistake is to paint over paint, quite often ignoring the original colour palette and material used, as abha narain lamba found in the synagogue another is to paint over polished wood, which is the fate of most old buildings (To my surprise, I found this at anand bhavan, the nehrus’ home in allahabad, now converted into a museum It’s an unfussy and elegantly designed museum, but all the doors are painted white, whereas there’s enough wood-panelling in the building to sug- gest that they too were polished wood.) The recent renovation of Flora Fountain has revealed the same ascendancy of paint over imagination: after two years of restoration, Mumbai’s iconic fountain was found to have layers of not only paint, but also plaster and cement! goddess Flora, the central figure atop the fountain, now turns out to be not marble-white, but a luminous off-white The fountain’s location makes it look as if it stands in the centre of the city; that impression is reinforced by its being in the middle of a traffic-free square around which the buzz and hubbub of Mumbai rushes by The square’s wonderful symmetry, however, is somewhat marred by a soviet-style statue placed in 1960 to honour the 105 people killed in the samyukta Maharashtra agitation to keep bombay a part of Maharashtra (hence the square’s official name, hutatma Chowk, or ‘Martyrs square’) Flora was a Roman goddess of Flowers The whole edifice is delicate, and Flora herself is exquisitely carved (by an english engineer James Forsythe, the fountain being designed by another englishman, R norman shaw) Its name was supposed to be Frere Fountain, after sir bartle Frere, the then governor of bombay who commissioned it Realising that Flora Fountain was equally alliterative but less vainglorious, the name was changed to the goddess’ as with much of urban history, no one asks why an english governor, an english designer and an english sculptor chose a Roman goddess as the centerpiece of an Indian metropolis, but there it is It just goes to show that however hard nationalist fervour and regional chauvinism may try to erase the past, it stays with us as received memory Tell a taxi-driver to take you to hutatma Chowk and he won’t know where to go history, mercifully, ignores all our wrong turns, however many we might take n march 2019 openings NOTEBOOK A Partnership for the Future J ust days before saudi arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin salman made his maiden visit to India, New delhi quietly signed a $1.5-billion deal with the us for the supply of three million tonnes of crude oil It is a sign of the times that one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil wants to invest in energy, refining, mining, infrastructure, health and education in India diversification of economic interests is something that is propelling closer relations between India and saudi arabia salman’s visit came at a charged time on february 14th, at least 40 security men were killed by a suicide bomber in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir, leading to greatly elevated tension between India and Pakistan the saudi crown prince returned home for a couple of hours after completing his Pakistan visit before he flew to India Purely in political terms, this appears a somewhat cynical move to give an appearance of a ‘stand-alone’ visit, but the symbolism was important: India wants no truck with Pakistan when it comes to developing ties with other countries, even if they are close partners of Islamabad It is unrealistic to hope that no comparison will be made between salman’s visit to India and to Pakistan just a day before he landed in India at one level, any such comparison reveals a surge in positive expectations, which was inconceivable even a decade ago at another level, the comparison is troubling as the nature of relations between saudi arabia and the two countries is premised on different outlooks and goals Pakistan and saudi arabia have deep military and political ties spanning a period all the way back to the creation of Pakistan the two countries have a formal military alliance dating to 1982 but even before that, Pakistan was closely involved in the fight to end the seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca In 2017, Pakistan dispatched its soldiers, led by its former army chief raheel sharif, to help saudi arabia pursue its interests in yemen the two countries are members of the organisation of Islamic Cooperation (oIC), the ‘collective voice’ of the Muslim community worldwide India, despite a vast Muslim population, is not a member of the oIC India, in contrast, has a very different basis for ties with saudi arabia based on energy security—we buy large quantities of crude oil from the kingdom—and has a substantial diaspora there until some years ago, there could be no realistic comparison between saudi arabia’s ties with India and Pakistan on one side were shared religion and military dependence and on the other side little more than an oil buyer-seller relationship there has been much protestation about shared cultural values and historical ties, but the skew in favour of Pakistan was obvious It is against this background that salman’s visit to India should be seen the carefully worded joint statement issued late on february 20th did make a mention of the importance of restarting a comprehensive dialogue with Pakistan the statement noted, ‘His royal Highness appreciated consistent efforts made by Prime Minister Modi since May 2014 including Prime Minister’s personal initiatives to have friendly relations with Pakistan In this context, both sides agreed on the need for creation of conditions necessary for resumption of the comprehensive dialogue between India and Pakistan.’ but this was quickly followed by condemnation of the attack on security forces in Pulwama and, in rather general terms, the need to fight terrorism In contrast, when he was in Islamabad, the saudi arabians echoed the sentiments of their hosts when they said, ‘during the official talks in Islamabad, His royal Highness the Crown Prince and deputy Prime Minister, Minister of defense praised openness and efforts of Prime Minister Imran Khan for dialogue with India and the opening of the Kartarpur crossing point and the efforts exerted by both sides, stressing that dialogue is the only way to ensure peace and stability in the region to resolve outstanding issues.’ there’s nothing surprising here Joint statements are carefully choreographed diplomatic documents In both New delhi and Islamabad alike, salman stuck to the formulations of his hosts Nothing more can, or Saudi Arabia has announced a potential investment of $100 billion in India If this happens, it will be a huge upswing in business relations between the two countries 10 march 2019 art porting a lot of craft, one witnessed collaborations with master weavers to create tapestries The artist also had other collaborations over time—with a screen printer in new York for his rendition of Ganesha with pronounced human attributes He also worked with an arabic calligrapher for his exhibition in Jeddah, when he created wood cuts such as The Target and Call for Prayer and got verses from the Qur’an calligraphed in the same also, interesting are his renditions of the new York skyline, moving from earlier drawings of Central Park to later works, in which buildings come to resemble people while most of sehgal’s drawings are devoid of colour, you can see vibrant hues make an appearance in the works from the 1970s-80s There is copper, burnished red and hints of green, seemingly inspired by the autumnal colours in luxembourg There are also evocative and humanised representations of myths from the Mahabharata and ramayana—Bhishma Pitamah on a bed of arrows, Ganga appearing to shantanu for the first time, Maricha, the golden deer, and more However, throughout his life, he maintained that bronze, “the eternal material”, was his main medium That is perhaps because he studied engineering and metallurgy, and could understand this medium thoroughly “In order to create, the sculptor has to become one with his material, seeking to petrify his emotions or mental idea right through the long, laborious process of creation,” sehgal once told critic-curator Gayatri sinha in an interview Four of his bronzes—Nari, Alap, Lovers, Head with Horns—which were acquired by The oberoi Hotel, new delhi, are considered representational of his style T He GovernMenT oF India, among other world institutions and hotels, was one of sehgal’s biggest patrons, and one can see 20 commissioned sculptures and installations across delhi nCr There is the Flight, from the 1980s, at akbar Bhawan, and The Captive at India International Centre The latter is a replica of the work designed by sehgal in 1986 to highlight the united nations’ opposition to the apartheid regime in south africa Then, there is the Dragon at the Indira Gandhi national Centre for the arts, which took the artist four years to complete and, with its jagged teeth and claws, embodies the overpowering tendency of man to politically and economically exploit the downtrodden also, significant is Aiming for Excellence, a stone sculpture at the dda Yamuna sports Complex However, one of the most ambitious public works by sehgal was created in 1962 for the vigyan Bhawan annexe author Mulk raj anand wrote about this 480 x 1680-inch mural: ‘The metal used here weighed approximately three tons The moulding of it into recognisable symbols of the variegated life of India, was an enormous task, in view that it had to project from the wall about four inches, in order to show off the montage to effect.’ anand felt that the lyrical 54 march 2019 There is more To sehgal Than his large-scale public works and drawings each of The 15,000 To 18,000 documenTs, poems and skeTches aT The museum highlighTs his deep engagemenT wiTh world poliTics low of one form into another, within the limits of figurative representation, required a high talent for mobility, balance and grace It was this skill and futuristic handling of materials that made sehgal one of the avant-garde Modernists The vigyan Bhawan mural is significant for several other reasons as well, as it led to a legal battle between the artist and the Government of India It all started in 1979 when the mural was removed during renovation without informing sehgal or seeking his permission The artist chose to file a case against the Government, leading to a 13-year-long battle It culminated in a landmark judgement by the delhi High Court in 2005, upholding the moral right of an artist over a work The case was decided in sehgal’s favour, who was awarded damages The Government was also asked to return the mural This continues to be the benchmark case for artist’s rights and protection of an artwork’s integrity in India Meanwhile, there are two other significant public works that sehgal did, but which the team at the museum is still looking out for in order to maintain and restore them: one, which used to be at the Qutub Hotel, and the other, Monument of (Clockwise from left) A gallery shot; an untitled bust of a lady; Bhishma’s Advice Aviation, which used to be at Palam airport according to rajan sehgal, how a 1,200-kg work could get lost, beats him as one looks back at sehgal’s vast oeuvre, one realises that there is more to sehgal than just his large-scale public works and drawings each of the 15,000 to 18,000 documents, poems and sketches at the museum highlights his deep engagement with world politics, and a sensitive and perceptive response to key events that took place during his lifetime on the ground floor of the 1,550-sq-ft space, one can see a cluster of images of sehgal with a host of personalities such as Jacqueline kennedy, Yuri Gagarin, Indira Gandhi and French president Franỗois Mitterrand, among others There is also one with Coretta scott king, wife of Martin luther king Jr, who had come to delhi to inaugurate the sculpture, Monument to Love and Non-Violence (bronze, 1963) “apparently, one of the figures is supposed to be Mahatma Gandhi and the other one Martin luther king Jr, and they are engaged in a dialogue,” says Issac This sculpture, which now resides in the museum, features a gentle trickle of water flowing from the two figures “In between, when there is a fluctuation in electricity, one slows down and the other starts talking loudly It’s very engaging,” she says with a smile within the archive are also letters from former us presidents richard nixon and Jimmy Carter “He had gifted a work called To Space Unknown to the white House, which is now in the smithsonian Museum,” says Issac not many know that sehgal had also been a part of the nation-building process for the uae, with several exhibitions in abu dhabi and dubai There are also images of him in luxembourg, which served as his home for 24 years “He came in contact with officials from luxembourg during the 1965-exhibition at the Museum of Modern art Paris, and in 1979 he came to the conclusion that he should move there with his family But even then, he didn’t lose his connect with India, and J-23, Jangpura, continued to serve as his studio in delhi till he passed away in december 2007,” says Issac If one has to excavate sehgal’s practice layer by layer, one will find his deep-set belief in humanity and the power of the subconscious at the heart of it “The basis of all my work lies in the unconscious It is symbolic of themes and emotions dormant within my own system These come to the surface only through great concentration and it is ultimately the artistic imagination which gives shape to the feelings,” he said in a 1977-interview to The Indian Express, titled Unconscious Moulds his Bronze n Amar Nath Sehgal Private Collection is located at J-23, Jungpura, Delhi march 2019 www.openthemagazine.com 55 eye witness Camera as Sketchbook Rediscovering Jyoti Bhatt, the chronicler of living traditions ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair,’ says the narrator of the english-american writer christopher Isherwood’s novel, Goodbye to Berlin (1939) By Somak Ghoshal ‘Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’ I remembered these lines last month when the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on the artist, Jyotindra manshankar Bhatt, better known as Jyoti Bhatt, on republic Day Painter, printmaker and, perhaps most memorably, photographer, Bhatt picked up the camera in the late 1950s, moved by a desire similar to that of the narrator of Isherwood’s story The device, to Bhatt, was a wondrous substitute for the sketchbook, one that could freeze the sights and scenes he beheld during his peregrinations across India, some of which would become the raw material for his paintings and prints But passive observation wasn’t in Bhatt’s nature even the most candid shots he took—of pilgrims waiting outside a temple; Ram Leela actors in performance; or a smiling boy in the foreground, his eyes shyly averting the camera, framed by a toddler and a girl—were touched by a special aura of distinction In Bhatt’s expert hands, documentary photography, the most reliable conduit for social realism, transcended its role of only preserving the here and now Photography became, for him, an extension of his practice as painter and printmaker, a tool to critically look at postcolonial India and explore what it means to be ‘modern’ and ‘independent’ in such a society Born in 1934 in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, Bhatt was among the earliest students who enrolled at the faculty of fine arts, maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda He trained in painting under teachers like NS Bendre and KG Subramanyan, studied fresco and mural painting at Banasthali Vidyapith in rajasthan, spent time at the accademia di Belle arti in Naples, Italy, and the Pratt Institute in New York, in the US Like many masters of modern Indian art, his education was eclectic, in the best cosmopolitan sense of the word, and a catholicity of 56 influences marinated to form his mature style Bhatt’s early education in drawing and painting began under his father He was a keen observer of birds and much of his juvenilia pertain to academic imitations of various avian species Soon he was copying other scenes that unfolded around him with equal keenness In Parallels that Meet, a book about his life and legacy, there is an image of one of Bhatt’s earliest paintings, a watercolour made at the age of 12, depicting a Harijan man walking down a street Titled Chheta R’ejo, it refers to the call, ‘Chheta R’ejo Mai Baap’, that all lower caste members of his village were required to utter loudly to warn people of higher castes of their presence This composition of a man carrying a bucket on his head and a broom in his hand may seem unexceptional in its execution, but it’s the young boy’s gaze, cast on those who live on the margins, that catches our attention all his adult life—whether in front of a canvas, as a printmaker, or with a camera in hand—Bhatt remained interested in the wretched and the ordinary The Family of Man, an exhibition put together by edward Steichen in New York in 1955 to capture ‘the gamut of life from birth to death’, impressed him profoundly But he could be witty and goofy too Some of his early photographs feature him, along with his friends, in selfironising moments of levity For instance, in a classic shot taken by his friend Bhupendra Karia in 1968, Bhatt stands garlanded with multiple cameras, two pairs of sunglasses perched on his forehead Beyond the obvious comedy of the situation, the image conveys a sense of urgency: a portrait of the photographer with a capacious appetite for every detail that passes him by In 1969, Bhatt helped organise an exhibition called Painters with a Camera in Bombay, along with friends and colleagues like Jeram Patel, Gulammohammed Sheikh and others The title of the show was polemical—it would be decades before photography in India became acknowledged as ‘art’ by galleries and museums Yet, fifty years ago, a group of artists had already owned the camera as a painterly tool For Bhatt, this was more than an idea He used the camera, as he would the brush or intaglio plate, as a vehicle for his sensibility to flourish Without his early investment in photography behind them, a generation of Indian photojournalists may not have given their work that extra push, which turned reportage into something rich and strange at the headquarters of the museum of art and Photography (maP) in Bengaluru, Nathaniel Gaskell, associate director of the organisation, acknowledges Bhatt’s key presence in the history of modern Indian photography “maP was the recent recipient of a generous donation of an exhaustive collection of march 2019 Courtesy Museum of Art & Photography, Bangalore bear testimony to vanishing customs of painting murals, weaving, or making other handicraft The encroachment of modernity on these ancient traditions became his abiding theme Some of the captions, inscribed by Bhatt on the back of the prints, are illuminating Behind an image showing three girls in frocks—two of them carrying pots on their heads—taken in Kutch in 1976, is the comment: ‘Dresses are changing fast but living conditions are not changing much.’ In another photograph of a tribal festival in Bastar in 1984, Bhatt sharply focuses on the face of a lone woman sitting under a tree, while the rest of the gathering has its back turned to the camera Interspersed with these striking observations are classic portraits, studies of the human face in closeup, enlivened by the hint of a smile or clouded by a pensive stare The face of a tribal woman in Gujarat in this set, hand-coloured by Bhatt, reinforces the cross-pollination between painting and photography in his work most poignantly Then there are haunting visuals of natural An elderly womAn is the focus of this photogrAph, destitute And filled with pAthos, sitting before A murAl pAinting of sitA, imprisoned by rAvAnA in the Ashok vAtikA in lAnkA Sita by Jyoti Bhatt, silver gelatin print (1974) photographs, negatives, contact sheets and diary notes from Bhatt,” he says “We are dedicated to ensuring that such a critical body of work is looked after for future generations, as well as made accessible to academics and the public to study, learn from, and enjoy.” Taking him up on the offer, I recently spent a morning at maP, going through the contents of one box of Bhatt’s photographs from the massive archive, including mostly images taken during his travels through Gujarat, West Bengal, rajasthan, Punjab, among other places even from studying those 100-odd prints, one can discern a gradual shift in the photographic gaze, a steady accretion of complexity of themes and approaches, taking off from the documentary impulse that had set him down this path There are plenty of examples of his work as the chronicler of ‘living traditions’ (the term was coined by Subramanyan) of rural India These photographs march 2019 landscapes that look like abstract sculptures, dotted with rocks and boulders, flora and fauna, the ruins of decrepit monuments and places of habitation alive with the warmth of human bodies These continuities between the present and past—the persistence of ‘living traditions’ in modern and contemporary India—are visible either archly or suggested through artful juxtapositions, as in Sita (see picture) an elderly woman is the focus of this photograph, destitute and filled with pathos, sitting before a mural painting of Sita, the legendary queen of the ramayana, imprisoned by ravana in the ashok Vatika in Lanka In a feat of ingenuity here, Bhatt not only draws a line between India’s epic past and its poverty-stricken present, but also among the different strands of his practice—a painter (the mural in the backdrop is by him), photographer and, above all, a restless wanderer among people n www.openthemagazine.com 57 books The Writer of Small Things Mirza Waheed in his new novel excavates the grey area between complicity and consent while exploring the banality of evil By Nandini Nair Photograph by raul irani 58 I n December 2014, when we met last, mirza Waheed was like a cricketer denied his pitch All he wanted to was talk about the sport And he did, with a passion and eloquence, describing his bendy wrist and mean leg spin for the Authors cricket club (or Authors cc) in London cricket at that time was as much about leaving the house, enjoying the exertions, brandishing bruises, as it was a “game of return”, transporting him to Kashmir, which he left in 1993 for Delhi University and later for a job with the bbc but when we met a fortnight ago, in Delhi, cricket had been elbowed to the balcony, and fatherhood had taken centre stage Waheed, who is the father of a nine-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, now seems happiest describing parenthood; cricket will just have to wait as he no longer has weekends to spare It is little surprise then that his new novel Tell Her Everything (context; 234 pages; rs 599) pivots around a father-daughter relationship, while dealing with much more As the stay-home adult, with his wife working full time at the bbc, he wrote this novel when parenting allowed him to It took him a few months to realise that his primary concern was not this book, but a little person “You don’t have the luxury, ‘Oh, I am going to be in the zone now What zone! There is someone saying, ‘Dad I need to wee now.’ You the usual thing of parenting, which is you spend a lot of money, to wipe a lot of shit but if I were asked, [parenting] is the most fascinating and delightful thing even if you are devastated by the time you put them to bed.” Waheed is an author devoid of artifice He is quick to laugh and entertain Over the years, his Kashmiri lilt seems to be fading out to a more british twang He tends to draw out words when he wants to make a point A poor sleeper while travelling, he is nursing a heavy head, and is glad when a paracetamol comes to his aid He is amused rather than outraged when the hotel staff insist that he has got his own room number wrong He knows that bluster is for the insecure; he prefers to be amicable The triumph of Tell Her Everything is that it slithers away from neat categories It is a love story but it is not just that It is a thriller but the big reveal is a series of smaller disclosures It is a political novel but it doesn’t deal with politics It is a monologue but it is also a conversation It could be a memoir but it is more of a confession Kashmir was the beating heart of Waheed’s previous novel, The Book of Gold Leaves (2014) In Tell her Everything, there is no overt Kashmir, Dr Kaiser Shah is from Saharanpur, who came to england 34 years ago as a 27-year-old The novel is a “rehearsal” of a conversation that he has as an affluent doctor, with a house overlooking the Thames, with his now 25-year-old daughter Sara In this imagined conversation, Dr K tries to explain why he did what he did as a surgeon, at the behest of his superiors His daughter Sara is not actually present during the conversation, but Dr K imagines her voice in the form of letters that she writes to him from a train in the US In these letters we hear the voice of a young woman who is prospering professionally but feels betrayed by her dearest father The novel took seed in Waheed’s head during conversations with friends in the field of medicine about what happens “in the intersections of doctors and hospitals and the judicial systems and justice” Having taken five years to write this novel, Waheed says, “it was a hard book to write”, as it required getting into the doctor’s head and trying to unpick why and how a ‘good man’ crosses moral and ethical boundaries at work while being a perfectly loving and devoted son, father and husband at home He says, “I briefly toyed with the third-person, but then I thought the language has to be his equally then, very soon, I began to be very interested in the form of the novel How will it be narrated That was an exciting I was interested in the intersections of doctors and hospitals and the judicial systems and justice” mirza waheed part It wasn’t all torment.” He wrote the letters from the daughter on the balcony of his apartment in London at night, with a notebook on his lap, and all in long hand The tone of these letters is distinct from the voice of Dr K It is the voice of an erudite daughter trying to make sense of her father’s behaviour, she might even forgive him, but she cannot reconcile with his decisions Waheed gets the feel of these letters right; the voice is stagey (as all letters are), but they are also heartfelt and accusatory (as letters from children to parents can often be.) Waheed says, “It is difficult to write women When I say ‘difficult’, it is not a question of getting it right It is a question of having the correct tone, which you cannot possess as a male.” The only way to achieve it is to spend enough time working on it When it comes to South Asian writers living abroad, the immigrant novel has become a trope With novel after novel reworking the same premise; a not-so-well-to-do man arrives in the West with dreams in his head, and hope in his heart, he struggles at first, but eventually succeeds via hard work and determination Waheed is also fatigued by the trite lines of www.openthemagazine.com 59 books ‘When the Westerner comes here, he is an expat, when we go there, we are immigrants.’ Such stereotypes and whingeing hold little draw for him He is keen to excavate the larger issues: like the nature or work and choice He says that if this is a book about a father-daughter relationship, it is also about the migrants “Who are the migrants of the world?” he asks, “broadly speaking, when migrants move elsewhere, they two kinds of work They the kind of work the host community might not want to do, or can’t do… What they end up doing at times to have a better life? They make compromises in their lives Sometimes they end up dwelling in worlds that are greyer.” Waheed is interested in these grey areas, between evil and good; are, certainly were, a great father A good man, a good father but not good enough.’ I ask Waheed how he understands complicity, as embodied by the figure of Dr K, is it simply a question of not being good enough He says, “With this person, he doesn’t think he is complicit in anything He thinks he is part of the system, he must follow the rules of the system, because he is a correct man… His complicity occurs in a small, creeping way It is quite banal as well.” While Kashmir is not obvious in this novel, Waheed’s concerns with his home state filter through In Tell Her Everything, the reader is once again confronted with the machinations of the State and the perils of living in a “morally exhausted world” It is dishonest, for anyone to say, ‘Oh, I am a free agent.’ Kashmir has defined me But there is also more You’ve read stuff, seen stuff, and that also defines you as a writer” between consent and complicity; between success and failure As Dr K says early in the book, ‘Integration, I’ve come to understand, Sara, is basically a part of the migrant-immigrant-refugee’s job description They should just say it at the top Integrate, assimilate, or else Or else what? Annihilate, immolate, evaporate, disintegrate?’ What people to integrate, to prevent disintegration? What ‘good’ people in unusual circumstances? What they to ensure the best for their children and their families? Unethical acts are not committed by evil people, they are merely brought to fruition by good people, who are not good enough As the daughter Sara writes in a letter to her father, ‘You are a good man, a very good man: that’s the reason you became a perfect wreck You 60 How ordinary people behave in an imperfect, even cruel world? This imperfect world is oiled by a State What states do, Waheed asks “It is not merely being disproportionate in its exercise of power It is about how you’ve arrived at a point where within your policy framework a decision has been made It is not an accident It is not an oops moment; that you’ve arrived at a rationale where men—there are mostly men in the State—who’ve convinced themselves that it is perfectly alright to have a system, and that is a word I choose very carefully, to have a system, in place, which will inevitably, definitely, result in the blinding of children… You’ve accepted a moral ethical compromise.” These are travesties which upset him “not only as a Kashmiri writer”, but as “a writer, and as a person.” He adds, “There is also another layer, it is not that dictatorships are perfectly free to that but as the world’s largest democracy, it doesn’t behove you to that These are people who might be protesting, might be throwing stones, but in my view of the world, it still does not justify shooting to blind people.” Given our conversation, I feel compelled to ask a hackneyed question Does he feel a responsibility as a Kashmiri writer today? He admits he has been posed this before, and now has a better answer He says, “I’ve found a good word recently, I am happy to report A better word ‘expectation’ And I understand that expectation I respect that expectation When you come from this place, this difficult place, this troubled place, it does define you in many ways It is dishonest, for anyone to say, ‘Oh, I am a free agent.’ Kashmir has defined me but there is also more You’ve read stuff, seen stuff, and that also defines you as a writer.” He refuses to be bogged down by the expectation that Kashmiri readers might have that he will only write about his home state While he “understands and respects” that, he also has to pay heed to the voice in his own head, to explore other stories While Waheed is writing down notes for his next novel, he is also working on a “personal history of Srinagar” In an article (published in the Herald, 2017) on Verinag, the source of the Jhelum where he spent time as a schoolboy in the 80s, one can get a sneak peek into what this personal history might be like He describes a paradise wrecked by war, where solace can only be found in our common humanity He writes, ‘In Kashmir, poetry issues from both gardens and graves In our age of resentments, loathing, and normalised untruths, it seems a return to the primeval poetry of human existence is essential.’ In his fiction and nonfiction, Waheed reminds us that hope springs only in the ‘rudiments of the human heart’ n books Epic Shift A female retelling of the Mahabharata By Chatura Rao alamy T he One WhO had Two Lives, by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, is the second book in her series, ‘Girls of the Mahabharata’ The series explores portions of the great epic through the eyes of a seemingly minor female character Minor, because she is one among a huge cast of characters The character Madhavan chooses, however, catalyses situations and moves key pawns across the chessboard of the epic’s larger plot In the first section of The One Who has Two Lives, the protagonist, Princess Amba and her sisters, Ambika and Ambalika, are kidnapped by the legendary warrior, Bheeshma, and brought to Hastinapura to be brides to the crown prince, Vichitravirya Amba, the oldest daughter of a ruthless king and a subdued queen, has never felt completely at home in her father’s kingdom All through her royal young life, she is aware of her sisters and herself being tools of barter for the power that marital alliances would bring to her father’s home More poignant is her constant awareness of her mother’s lack of agency The last time that the queen is mentioned by Amba is at the Swayamvara of her sisters and of herself ‘Our father does mention our mother after all—a great beauty when I won her hand The audience is respectfully silent Suddenly we think to worry about our mother when we leave her; without us, there is no reason for our father to continue the way he does.’ Amba then speaks about how the guests at the march 2019 Swayamvara are socialising amongst themselves ‘Our mother should be among them, making talk, finding out about their sons, their kingdoms, but no one expected her to And now the queens will find out that she is here, but not here, present but absent.’ Madhavan’s skill lies in delicately shaping the narrative so that women characters and their situations evoke the empathy of the reader by seeming equally relevant to women today Amba’s story ends tragically as per the original tale She requests Bheeshma to return her to her father’s kingdom, only to be rejected by her family Anguished, in the company of her eunuch maid, Lalita, she starves herself to death in the forest But not before swearing to take revenge on Bheeshma, who kidnapped her without taking complete responsibility for The one who had Two lives Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan HarperCollins 240 Pages | Rs 299 the turn her life could—and did—take The second part of the novel is told by Amba reborn as Shikhandi or Shikhandini This portion is hypnotic, both for the rhythm of Madhavan’s words as well as for the connection she prompts the reader to weave between Amba’s and Shikhandi’s stories ‘I am born and I die, and I am born and I die, the cycle of rebirth over and over again, until I can find the perfect life to slip into.’’ The wrath of Amba dying is nowhere in evidence in the young girl-boy Shikhandi, who is one of ten children of the affectionate king and queen of Panchala However, Shikhandi dreams of becoming a mighty warrior, and we know, of course, that it was Shikhandi who eventually killed Bheeshma in the epic battle Shikhandi, in Madhavan’s book, is a young person who grapples on a day-today basis with the sense of being male in a female body—again, delicately told In space and time drawn away from the forest they were in (harking back to Amba and Lalita’s last days in a forest together), Shikhandi and her friend, Utsarg, wait for the yaksha, Sthunakarna He eventually helps Shikhandi turn into a man Madhavan ends this novel, like the previous one, at the start of a passage that would open out into the breathtakingly vast arena of the Kurukshetra war The reader bids farewell to the novel’s protagonist Shikhandi here and watches him walk through and disappear into his destiny: to fulfill Amba’s vow, to destroy Bheeshma n www.openthemagazine.com 61 books T The Day of the Outsider A deeply human account of decoding the ribosome By CP Rajendran Photograph by rohit chawla 62 he blurb on Venki ramakrishnan’s recent book Gene Machine by richard Dawkins characterises the author ‘as a sort of nice Jim Watson’ born to an Indian scientist couple, the baroda university graduate ramakrishnan’s saga of reaching the scientific summit of the nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for unravelling the structure and function of a tiny molecule in the cell called a ribosome has parallels with Watson’s autobiographical account of how the structure of DnA was discovered back in the early 1950s Watson’s book The Double Helix, although hailed as ‘an intimate first-person memoir about scientific discovery’, had also become an object of criticism for being too hubristic and self-centered and ‘disagreeably sexist’ towards rosalind Franklin, an unsung co-discoverer of DnA who missed out the nobel Prize in 1962 along with Jim Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins because of her premature death even if she were alive, it is not clear how she would figure in this team as the prize was subjected to a rule that it would not be awarded to more than three recipients like the race to the discovery of DnA, ramakrishnan’s quest for understanding an equally evasive life molecule of the ribosome that hosts rnA strands has all the ingredients of a suspense thriller like competitive ambition, intrigue, secrecy and occasional vanity, all of it finally capped by a thrilling finish but what makes this science thriller different from Watson’s are its frankness and the author’s professional respect for his competitors despite intense one-upmanship among them, at least with Ada Yonath, an Israeli woman crystallographer who shared the nobel Prize with Thomas Steitz and ramakrishnan in 2009 There are numerous examples in science to argue that advances in scientific disciplines not necessarily originate at the centre of inquiry, but are triggered by those at the margins who bring in new perspectives and analytical prowess; who are not weighed down by the dusty volumes of previously march 2019 accrued knowledge The spark of creativity—if it must leapfrog the disciplinary walls— needs to remain unencumbered by conventions and traditions ramakrishnan, a physicist by training, by his own admission was a rank outsider in molecular biology The main protagonist of this story happens to be the ribosome, which is largely made up of ribosomal rnA and is a complex molecular machine within a cell that long remained in obscurity, unlike its more popular cousin molecule DnA ramakrishnan uses the analogy of assembly-line car manufacturing to describe the work of the ribosome assembling the pieces to make proteins DnA and rnA, which transact information between each other, are the workhorses that sustain fundamental cellular functions by manufacturing proteins without which cells would die one of the most important practical applications of resolving the 3D structure of ribosomal molecules is that it is now possible to know where exactly antibiotics bind to the ribosomal body and that information is useful to develop more efficient drugs, paving also a way for gene therapy The ribosomal structure was also a tougher nut to crack until recently, structural studies on ribosomes were hindered by difficulties in obtaining crystals that diffracted to high resolution however, key technological developments in X-ray diffractography and synchrotron beamlines, along with improvements in computing techniques and crystallographic software, helped in ushering a revolution in ribosomal research ramakrishnan chose to be at the right time and right place he opted to shift from university of utah, where he was a professor of biochemistry, to Medical research Council of Molecular biology in Cambridge, england, that too for a lower salary and as a research scientist ramakrishnan writes, ‘I could have fallen off the edge and disappeared from the world of science, a fate I only avoided by changing tack or starting all over again’ This trait of a bungee jumper who is prone to jump in the face of fear is what stood him in good stead how else march 2019 can one explain the rationale of a physics PhD holder from ohio university choosing to join the university of California to study molecular biology as a grad student? but ramakrishnan’s explanation is this, ‘There seemed no question that if I stayed on in physics, I would spend the rest of my life doing boring and incremental calculations that wouldn’t result in any real advance in understanding biology on the other hand, was undergoing the sort of dramatic transformation Gene Machine: The Race To DecipheR The secReTs of The RibosoMe Venki Ramakrishnan HarperCollins India 288 Pages | Rs 699 that physics had in the early twentieth century.’ That explains why he opted to desert the mothership Though less amplified in the book, his American wife Vera rosenberry’s support may have also been a bulwark to sustain his tough research career that required great quantities of physical and mental stamina At the end of the chapter ‘The Phone Call in october’, ramakrishnan records how his wife reacted when she heard about the nobel Prize: ‘I thought you had to be really smart to win one of those!’ ramakrishnan rounds it off with a quote from Maryon Pearson, the wife of former Canadian prime minister, ‘behind every successful man, there stands a surprised woman’ This profoundly human story is written with honesty and humility, and you find a person who isn’t afraid to laugh at himself Despite occasional patches of hard science, ramakrishnan has written a deeply absorbing human story of how modern science is conducted, which is no longer a solo exercise but involves big teams of equally competent individuals—a far cry from the days of newton and even einstein when scientists worked in relative isolation ramakrishnan says that these days it is not easy to determine ‘who made the real difference in a particular field’ and often decisions become subjective In ‘The Politics of recognition’, he critiques the way the prizes are decided and says that ‘the whole system is beset by a kind of cronyism’ Instead of inculcating a feeling that the work is its own reward, he adds, scientific establishments encourage this desire to feel special and better than our peers at virtually every stage of the process ramakrishnan has been called a ‘dark horse’ by some of his peers as he was perceived to have come out of nowhere and surprised everybody with his scintillating scientific results The commotion started when he and colleagues published results in a 1999 Nature paper That was when his competitors like Ada Yonath realised they were far behind in their ribosome pursuits despite being in the field for long Although he did not like to be called a dark horse, he admits that he had deliberately kept his team’s efforts from the limelight for long because of the stiff competition from more powerful groups ramakrishnan qualifies science as a marketplace of ideas, and just ‘as in business, competition can spur people to think and work harder, weed out bad ideas and dead ends, and accelerate the pace of science’ recently I was introduced to ramakrishnan by P balaram, a former director of IISc and a high caliber biochemist himself I told Venki that I was reading his book As a postscript to this meeting, I want to add that this highly readable account informs me how tortuous the road is that leads to new knowledge Yellow brick roads are only found in fairy tales n www.openthemagazine.com 63 books Masculine Feminine An investigation of how modern male writers depict women in short stories By Gillian Wright r akhshanda Jalil is a tireless proponent of non-English indian literature—in particular, Urdu she is a prolific writer and translator, and in Preeto, an anthology of Urdu short stories in English, she is both the editor and a contributing translator The theme of the book is one of her many good ideas she investigates how modern male writers depict women in their short stories in her very readable introduction, she talks of the way male writers in the past, and not just in india, have tended to objectify women and present them as either unnaturally good or unnaturally bad, thereby ‘othering’ 50 per cent of the human race Jalil examines the way women Urdu writers have responded to patriarchy For example, writers like Rashid Jahan, a champion of women’s education, and ismat Chughtai, who challenged contemporary morality and notions of womanhood to the extent that she, like her contemporary male writer saadat hasan Manto, faced obscenity charges it’s to the credit of the courts that the charges were thrown out Jalil describes some of Manto’s powerful REUTERS Preeto and other stories: the Male Gaze in UrdU Edited and introduced by Rakhshanda Jalil Niyogi 203 Pages | Rs 450 women characters to illustrate how far he was from the patriarchal rut she does not, however, include a Manto story in this collection—fair enough, considering how many translations of his stories have been published recently instead, she quotes the poet Majaz, who also drank heavily and died young, and wrote of women as equals living in the same reality Bataon kya tujhe ham-nashin kis se mohabbat hai? Main jis duniya mein rahta hun woh is duniya ki aurat hai (What shall i tell you my friend of her whom i love? she is a woman of the world i live in.) it is this attitude that Jalil looks for in the stories she chooses and, although preferring contemporary writers, she does select stories of two of the other greats of the Urdu short story: Rajinder singh Bedi and krishan Chander One of them, krishan Chander’s Preeto, is the title story of the anthology For me Preeto and hussainul haque’s The Unexpected Disaster are the real humdingers of this collection— engrossing, powerful and true in the first, a husband finds unexpectedly in his wife someone equally fearless and capable of a crime of passion The story though is told by him, not by Preeto herself in The Unexpected Disaster, the story is told from the woman’s point of view Bibi izzat-un nissa is pushed to the very limits of endurance as she multitasks, coping with a bed-ridden husband, three children and financial fraud Yet when she finds a chance of happiness, she is not afraid to break convention and grasp it several of the stories are disturbing, but not necessarily in ways Jalil intends One by Rajinder singh Bedi shows an appalling attitude to ‘special’ children another story dehumanises sufferers of paralysis and appears to imply there is something unseemly in women medical professionals nursing male patients in this implausible tale, a young woman with no training or equipment is able to act as the sole caregiver of a man so badly paralysed he cannot swallow, and so heavy that she cannot lift him shocked by his nakedness, she fantasises about him Then there is a very troubling story of child abuse in yet another story, the author expects his readers to accept as patriarchy a son’s accusation of his mother however, given her dreadful parenting decisions, any self-respecting teenager—male or female—would have given her hell The quality of the translation is high on the whole, but the volume would have undoubtedly benefitted if niyogi had provided Jalil the strong editorial backup that good publishers should give all in all, this is a thought-provoking book which will reward readers and make them question the authors’ and perhaps their own values too n march 2019 Hollywood reporter Noel de Souza ‘Science fiction is my centre of gravity’ S et in the very distant future, Alita is found by a cyber doctor in a scrapyard She is unconscious and when she awakens, she has no memory of who and where she is Alita: Battle Angel is the story of the eponymous character finding her identity in a world of cyborgs and robots James Cameron of Avatar fame has produced the film based on Yukito Kishiro’s drawings and narratives Tell us about your relationship with science fiction i’ve loved science fiction since i was a kid i don’t know where that comes from it’s imagination, it’s visual imagination the films that i loved as a child were always the space ones or the robot or fantasy ones i couldn’t get enough of them and i read voraciously My taste was very specifically science-fiction when i was in high school and in college i didn’t read sorcery-type fantasy at all i might the occasional film like True Lies (1994) or Titanic (1997) that’s not science fiction, but i will always gravitate to science fiction—for me that is the centre of gravity Alita looks almost human How far away is technology from creating a full human actor? As you see in Alita, we are pretty much there in terms of being able to reproduce a human the thing is, she is never really going to look completely human, because she’s not supposed to the purpose of doing her [computer graphics] in the first place is to preserve the look of the character as Kishiro created march 2019 James Cameron her—with these enormous eyes and this very tiny mouth and the heartshaped face And so setting aside her body, clearly a synthetic machine body that had to be done in CG, we did her face CG to preserve the character as he imagined it Alita’s eyes are half the size of how Kishiro draws her But manga’s a very gestural art form, and it’s never really stated in the film Why does she have such big innocent set of appealing eyes? Well, part of it is she is an infiltrator sent to earth to destroy it, so with her big, innocent eyes she does not look threatening But we are not too far away from creating a life-like human How much of science fiction you think will become real in 100 years? in this film, all cyborgs have human lives, human organic brains inside a machine body i think we will see prosthesis become more sophisticated eventually they will crack the code of being able to get signals from the spinal cord or the brain directly into a prosthetic body, giving the paralysed—a paraplegic or a quadriplegic—the ability to have mobility again We don’t have to use too much of our imagination to see that people who have bad accidents and don’t have full use of their bodies will be restored the question is, when people start doing it by choice? People who are otherwise healthy maybe want to have some augmentation, maybe even want to move faster or walk around on the moon or Jupiter that is baked in radiation and cannot sustain organic life; so maybe they will have a machine body, i can imagine that But i think the bigger issue is artificial intelligence and the potential threat of an artificial super-intelligence emerging Personally, i think it’s already happened the world doesn’t make any sense right now unless you assume there is somebody, somewhere controlling everything for their own amusement, because nothing of what’s going on right now seems to make any sense to me that’s my paranoid perspective: if it’s really a machine super-intelligence, why would it something dumb like let us know if it’s actually in charge? Anyway, my point is experts believe it’s going to happen in some decades from now, from one to call it five So a 50-year horizon it’s almost certain that we will have machine intelligence actually in a human and it could happen as soon as 10 years from now n www.openthemagazine.com 65 NOT PEOPLE LIKE US RAJEEV MASAND All Praise for Gully Boy Ranbir Kapoor has passed on a chance to work with Zoya Akhtar twice (she wanted to cast him in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara with Imran Khan and Farhan Akhtar; she also famously wrote Dil Dhadakne Do with Ranbir and Kareena Kapoor in mind for the sibling parts that Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra eventually played), but the Sanju star is reportedly a big admirer of her work An insider reveals that he sent her the warmest message after watching Gully Boy, telling her how much he loved the film Sure, he might have a soft spot for the film because it stars his girlfriend Alia Bhatt, but my source reveals that it’s not the first time he’s reached out to Zoya with such generous praise Any chance she might be able to pull off what no one has succeeded in putting together yet—a film with both Ranbir and Ranveer? Seems unlikely at the moment, although her possible next project, a two-hero crime thriller, might be the perfect film to pitch both actors But, again, very unlikely given the allergy that superstars have of doing multi-hero films Remember, Ranbir turned down Karan Johar’s Takht, which will now star Vicky Kaushal alongside Ranveer And 30 years in, Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan still haven’t done a movie together Katrina Saves the Day Katrina Kaif, who got the best reviews of her career for her convincing performance as a heartbroken movie star who finds solace in alcohol after being jilted by her lover in Zero, might be on to something The actress has been telling friends she’s done some of her best work in the Salman Khan starrer Bharat, and is really hoping that the film is looked upon favourably when it’s time to hand out the National Awards She stepped into the film at the eleventh hour after Priyanka Chopra exited the project citing her impending marriage to Nick Jonas as the reason she would not be able to honour her commitment to Salman and director Ali Abbas Zafar It was Ali, in fact, who went to Katrina (who he directed in both Mere Brother Ki Dulhan and Tiger Zinda Hai) to take the role after PC left them stranded so late in the day 66 Katrina has said it turned out to be a good choice for her since it’s proved to be one of the most challenging roles she’s been entrusted with yet The film, which has been described as a sprawling epic whose story begins shortly before Independence and plays well into current day, is the official remake of a 2014 Korean film, Ode to My Father Like that film (which was itself loosely inspired by the Tom Hanks starrer Forrest Gump), Bharat is the story of one man’s fictional life journey set against historical events Salman’s character, the film’s protagonist, is expected to go from his twenties to his seventies, while Katrina will presumably play one of the women in his life Tabu and Disha Patani also have key roles A Double-Edged Sword A well-regarded senior film journalist who authored the official biography of a veteran movie star has an interesting story that points to the ‘special treatment’ that filmwaalas expect from those in the media who they think of as ‘friends’ Not long after the release of her book, in her role as a film critic, the author in question happened to write a not-especially-flattering review of a new release that starred the actress daughter of the veteran movie star who was the subject of her book Not for a moment did the author think she was expected to go gentle on the film because of the ‘connection’, but the actress clearly had different ideas She reportedly messaged the author shortly after reading her review, addressing her as ‘aunty’ as if to remind her of their personal relationship, and went on to disagree with her review of the film, stating that the audience’s reaction to the movie was very different from hers The author says the actress was not satisfied with her explanation that the review was a personal viewpoint, or that she really did think the movie sucked The actress clearly felt ‘betrayed’, could not understand how a ‘friend of the family’ could be so ‘unsupportive’ and made her displeasure apparent the next time they met It also became awkward for a while between the author and the actress’ father So much for film folk and their routine chant that reviews and critics don’t matter Tsk, tsk n march 2019 ... Rahul Pandita By Ullekh NP By Stephen David 32 JOsh GOnE awry march 2019 42 GOd aGainst LiBidO Cover photograph by AP www.openthemagazine.com open mail editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan... 1800 102 7510 www.openthemagazine.com Visit www.openthemagazine.com/subscribe Enclose your Cheque/DD favouring Open Media Network Private Limited Open Media Network Private Limited, 4, DDA Commercial... reality: Third Morality is seen as imran, an apolitical politician who Worldism has only lost its geography, naiveté—or idealism initially projected himself as the not its morality or mindset so