Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2015 i The Caravan

I MET SREK AT A CAFE IN KOLKATA, on the last evening of May. Sipping cold coffee and wiping sweat off his forehead despite the air-conditioning, the 19-year-old undergraduate student, who heads a small band of graffiti artists calling themselves Zephyr, told me of how, earlier that month, soon after municipal polls concluded on 18 April, he had tried to “rid the City of Joy of its eyesore walls.” In the dead of night, he snuck out of his house, in north Kolkata, and hopped onto a friend’s motorbike. Half an hour later, the pair arrived at Jadavpur, an area in the city’s south. The two-person “cru”—jargon for crew—pulled out cans of spray paint, and prepared to “reclaim” with their art a wall covered in political graffiti. “But before we…

FRIDAY AFTERNOONS AT THE CENTRE for asylum seekers in Sieversstücken, a cluster of yellow houses in the west of Hamburg, are set aside for community gatherings. When I visited, in mid June, its 300 residents converged in one building to collect their share of bread, groceries, warm clothing and other essentials, donated by the centre’s neighbours. Even after the distribution, gifts of clothing, cutlery, toys and more filled two rooms. Helga Rodenbeck, a long-time volunteer from a church in Blankenese, a wealthy nearby enclave, told me the government plans to soon build housing for another 300 refugees on a vacant plot next door. Germany, just as all of the European Union, is struggling to deal with rising numbers of undocumented migrants. Many try to land in Europe via the Mediterranean…

IN 2008, the Oklahoma City Museum received a package from a long-term benefactor, Mark Landis, containing paintings attributed to the nineteenth-century French artists Paul Signac and Stanislas Lépine. The museum’s registrar, Matt Leininger, was delighted—until he discovered the same works listed in the collections of the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the St Louis University Museum of Art. Those too had been donated by Landis, and it emerged that the philanthropist had been sending counterfeits, crafted by himself, to museums for 30 years. In an interview with the BBC, Landis explained that he enjoyed being “treated like royalty.” With no money exchanged—and with the burden of due diligence on the museums—Landis hadn’t broken any laws, and was never punished for his little con. Contrast that to an art…

WHILE OTHER HINDI JOURNALS of colonial India—whether religious, literary or political—survive only in the archives, to be read by scholars interested in unravelling the heady days of Hindi and Hindu nationalism, Gita Press, with its flagship monthly Kalyan, has grown and prospered as the only indigenous publishing enterprise of the period that continues to this day. With around 70 retail outlets across India, including stalls at many railway stations, Gita Press is a stupendous success in the world of Indian publishing. Founded in 1926, Kalyan did exceedingly well from the start, with a circulation of 3,000 copies each month by the end of its first year: an unbelievable figure for a genre-specific journal. By the end of 1931, its monthly circulation was 16,000. This grew by more than 50 percent…

ONE MORNING IN FEBRUARY LAST YEAR, I noticed that I had missed a call from Vishal Garg, the investigating officer in the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombings case. I returned the call promptly, but no one answered. That evening, I received a text message: “Hello Leenaji this is Vishal Garg from NIA.” Garg went on to ask, over text, whether I could meet him at his office with the tapes from my interviews with Swami Aseemanand, the key accused in the Samjhauta case. Excerpts and transcriptions of these audio recordings had just gone live on the Caravan website, following the publication of my profile of Aseemanand earlier that month. The tapes included his statements that Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, as well as Indresh Kumar, who is…

THE TRACK AT THE MAHALAKSHMI RACE COURSE, in Mumbai, runs around a large field that almost touches the Arabian Sea. As horses gallop to the finish line, they pass the course’s colonial-era grandstand, just behind which stands the high column of Essar House. On the twentieth floor of this building, the billionaire brothers Ess and Ar—Shashi and Ravi Ruia—sit in two corners of a shared office, a room nearly 30 feet long. The chrome and glass exterior of Essar House usually mirrors the green sward of the race course, but not on the afternoon of 22 January 2014. A little after 1pm on that day, six people dangling off the facade, ostensibly hired to clean it, dropped a large white banner. On the sheet, 72 feet long and 36 feet…

SOON AFTER THE END of the Bosnian War in December 1995, the Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a trip to photograph the aftermath of the vicious conflict. On a rainy day, he sat in a library, flipping through an old encyclopaedia of art. He stumbled upon images of giant concrete sculptures, built by the government of Yugoslavia long before communal strife tore that republic into smaller states through the 1990s. The stark outdoor monuments, he learned, were memorials to Yugoslavia’s experience in the Second World War. Deeply impressed, he made copies of the images for his own archive. Years later, in 2006, he came back to them. With the help of a map showing the locations of these spomeniks, now scattered…

ON THE NIGHT OF 7 JANUARY 2012, hackers found a security loophole in Ankit Fadia’s website. Fadia, a self-proclaimed technological wunderkind who was then 26 years old, had published numerous books on cyber security, hosted a show on the subject on MTV India, and trained thousands in ethical hacking: probing computer networks for weaknesses, not to cause harm but to alert their administrators to vulnerabilities. The previous August, appearing on CNBC-TV18, he had issued an open challenge to hack into his website, promising anyone who did a full-time job. The hackers broke into a directory containing passwords and other sensitive information. They emailed Fadia, threatening to go public with the data unless he admitted to being a fraud. After eight hours without a response, they uploaded a press release claiming…

ON 8 MAY THIS YEAR, the Supreme Court of India confirmed the death penalties awarded by the Bombay High Court to Purushottam Borate, a former taxi driver, and his friend Pradeep Kokate. Their crime: the brutal rape and murder of a 22-year-old woman. The Bombay High Court, wrote Chief Justice HL Dattu in his judgment, had been perfectly correct not only in recognising that the circumstantial evidence against the pair led to the inevitable conclusion that they had committed the crime, but also in finding that the imposition of any sentence but that of death “would not meet the ends of justice.” In confirming the sentences, Dattu also employed what has virtually become a leitmotif in cases where the death penalty is imposed: an invocation of the “collective conscience.” “The…

ON A LATE-FEBRUARY AFTERNOON THIS YEAR, 44 young women, dressed in khaki T-shirts and olive-green fatigues, sat in serried rows in an open-air classroom in Kanker, Chhattisgarh. They were newly recruited sub-inspectors of the Chhattisgarh Police, now in the last week of training at the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College. In their early twenties, and strikingly fit, the women sat ramrod straight and pokerfaced, listening attentively to the person whose presence had dominated the past six weeks of ceaseless instruction. “Yeh toh commando ki factory hai,” Basant Kumar Ponwar, the director of the college, said—this is a factory for commandos. He stood trim, in polished black army boots. The military campaign ribbons on his chest provided the only flash of colour on impeccably creased camouflage fatigues. A former brigadier…

EVACUEES FROM SREBRENICA, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, look out from a United Nations truck that formed part of a convoy carrying roughly 700 people out of the besieged town on 20 March 1993, a year after the country declared its independence from the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia. Leaders of the mostly Orthodox Bosnian Serbs refused to recognise the new Bosniak-majority state, and, with support from neighbouring Serbia, declared a state of their own, Republika Srpska, in the Serb-majority east of the country, sparking a civil war. The Republika Srpska government also began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the breakaway entity’s resident Bosniaks, most of whom were Muslim. Srebrenica, with a large Muslim population, was besieged by Serb forces in April 1992, and thousands of Bosniaks from surrounding areas…