Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i The Caravan

Last March, an anonymous user of Quora, a website that lets its members ask and answer queries on any topic they wish, posted a question: “How do I customize Quora to exclude all Indian content, and Indian authors?” By this September, the post, and its thread of answers, had been viewed over 215,000 times. Many users denounced the question as racist; others agreed that the website had an “Indian problem.” One user with an Indian name described his attempts to filter out most content by Indians, even as a non-Indian user denounced the idea. Intense debate is standard on Quora. The company was founded, in 2009, by two Silicon Valley veterans aiming to provide the world with “the best answer to every question.” The website quickly attracted a dedicated core…

Ever since he took charge as the minister for the environment and forests in May last year, Prakash Javadekar has appeared to be in quite a hurry. His task, he has stated over and over again to the media whenever the opportunity has presented itself, is to fix the reputation the ministry had acquired under the earlier United Progressive Alliance government. International investors, he said, “had started withdrawing from India” due to the “delays” caused by the ministry, and the resultant loss to the country “could not be counted in rupees.” He is set on changing the ministry’s reputation from that of a “roadblock” to an office where no files are held up for too long. But the ministry’s monthly report this June seemed to make even this energetic minister…

In February 2014, the United Progressive Alliance government announced a new policy that significantly increased the transparency of India’s lawmaking process. The “pre-legislative consultative policy” mandated that every proposed bill be made available for public scrutiny before its introduction in the parliament. Prior to this, several government ministries had effectively treated draft laws as secret until they came up for legislative scrutiny. Since debates on the floors of both houses of the legislature are televised, and since the parliament maintains publically accessible, verbatim records, the country’s parliamentary proceedings are already transparent. With the new policy, it appeared that, from conception to passage through parliament, every part of a law’s creation would now be conducted entirely in the public’s view. But, in fact, a key aspect of lawmaking is still relatively…

I CAUGHT MANISH MUNDRA, by fortunate chance, in June, on the weekday afternoon he was in Mumbai for the launch of the Indian trailer for Masaan. The entrance to the suburban theatre hosting the event was dominated by posters announcing an upcoming big-budget release. In the lobby, a somewhat thin crowd of journalists mingled with Masaan’s cast and crew, as well as several luminaries of what are called Mumbai’s “indie film” circles. Masaan has, by the standards of mainstream Indian cinema, an unconventional story—involving a sex scandal, inter-caste romance, and an orphan boy who dives for coins in the Ganges. It was shot in Varanasi, and had a comparatively small budget of R 6.5 crore. The film’s credits list several producers and co-producers from India and France, but it was…

IN KOLKATA, we sometimes refer to a particularly clean-cut friend as a “handu” (pronounced “hyandu”). This Bengali derivative of “handsome” implies a little more than just good looks. It is about appreciation with a touch of affection—a way of telling the bloke, “You’re on my radar.” Teasing and mutilating the objects to which they take a fancy comes naturally to the Bengalis of Kolkata—observe the torn rexine upholstery exposing the foam and springs armature in the city’s public buses. Bengalis often do the same to English words. Alternatively, they could try and tame the language of their erstwhile rulers with too much care. Long polysyllables are shortened—their sharp, jagged edges clipped and rounded off with soft-sounding vowels. And as the rest of the world, clubbed together under the label of…

In mid July, Khushboo Chaudhary left her home in Rajasthan to join the MBBS programme at AIIMS, India’s premier medical school. She was among the 195,000 applicants to the undergraduate medical programme this year, and one of just 72 Indian students finally admitted to the institute’s south Delhi campus. As a member of the Other Backward Classes, she occupied one of the 35 seats reserved in the incoming class for students from underprivileged castes and tribes—colloquially, “category students.” Chaudhary, with her entire class, went through a nine-day orientation programme in early August. Among the things she was introduced to was AIIMS’s mentorship programme, established in 2012 after the suicide of a Dalit medical student left the institute reeling under allegations of caste-based discrimination and inadequate support for students. Currently, each…

In early July, when the Supreme Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to take over all the cases related to the “Vyapam scam” in Madhya Pradesh, many believed that it would mark the start of an efficient, independent probe into the sordid affair. The scam, which centres on large-scale fraud in a major examination system in the state, is believed to involve influential government officials and politicians. The public had little faith in the state police’s ability to conduct a fair investigation. The CBI, however, was reluctant to take on the probe. As the number of cases linked to the scam grew, the agency protested to the court that it simply did not have enough officers to handle the workload. “It is humbly submitted that the CBI is finding…

IN A PRIVATE CONVERSATION sometime in the late 1980s, a sharp-tongued young aspiring musician made an extraordinary statement about Carnatic music’s most iconic figure. “MS Subbulakshmi,” he said with disdain, “is the greatest hoax of the twentieth century.” Many readers will leap to accuse me of blasphemy for even citing this rather obnoxious remark. But it has stayed with me ever since, and I have a somewhat severe explanation for why. This musician’s assertion was based on the argument that it was packaging and marketing that made Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi the global face and voice of Carnatic music; her music was otherwise intrinsically hollow, and lacked “stuff.” The Carnatic hinterland would not employ the word “hoax” to describe her, but would consider, with varying levels of empathy, the hypothesis that…

JOHN VICTOR ASPINALL, an Englishman born in Delhi in June 1926, was famous for two things: making millions from covert gambling parties, and his enduring love for wild animals. The latter led him to establish a conservation charity, the Aspinall Foundation, which runs two private zoos in Kent, in southern England. In the late 1990s, the foundation took on its most ambitious project yet: reintroducing captive gorillas into the wild. Since then, over 60 gorillas of all ages have been flown from European zoos to the Batéké Plateau, a region of lush forests in south-eastern Gabon, in central Africa. Several of them died before fully adjusting to their new environs, but most of the gorillas have survived. Already, the community has welcomed over 25 free newborns. Decades ago, before they…

NATURE AND NATION ESSAYS ON ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY Mahesh Rangarajan Mahesh Rangarajan is among India’s foremost environmental history scholars. The ten essays in this collection, written over more than two decades, focus on environmental shifts and continuities in Asian society and polity, and include comparisons of the subcontinent with the world beyond—especially countries in Asia and Africa, which were once under Western domination. They also include studies of specific historical conjunctures under regimes such as those of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere. PERMANENT BLACK, 360 PAGES, R 795 SUSAN SONTAG THE COMPLETE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW Susan Sontag and Jonathan Cott In 1978, Jonathan Cott, a founding contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Susan Sontag, one of the most renowned and controversial intellectuals of the latter…

In the early hours of the rainy Sunday morning of 10 May, a Tamil farmer died in Sampur, on the east coast of Sri Lanka. As he was slowly wasting away from throat cancer, his widow told me, he had wanted nothing more than to breathe his last here, in his hometown. “He had the dream of coming back,” she said. He got his wish on a friend’s property not far from the plot of land he farmed until 2006, when he and his family were forced off it amid the Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in 2009. When I met the widow, in August, she told me of her determination that her husband be laid to rest in the town. (She also asked me not to use her…

In a 2014 interview with the television channel Newsfirst, the then leader of the opposition in the Sri Lankan parliament, Ranil Wickremesinghe, described what he saw as the source of a politician’s strength. “One is the electoral strength that the people give you,” he said. “Other is the strength in your own belief. And the strength to go through the bad times. Politics consists not only of good times, but also bad times, and how you survive it.” It was not the best time in Wickremesinghe’s career. He had served twice as Sri Lanka’s prime minister, in the early 1990s and in the early 2000s. But in 2004, the United National Party, or UNP, which he led, lost the parliamentary elections to its main rival, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party,…

I WAS 26 YEARS OLD IN 1988 , living in Delhi, where I had recently moved after several years as a graduate student in the United States. I was a stringer for the Washington Post, living in a rented apartment in Jor Bagh with my partner, Tandavan, a Frenchman of Tamil and Vietnamese descent in his mid-thirties. We had met by lucky accident one morning outside the nearby Lodi Gardens, and fallen in love instantly. Tandavan was my first boyfriend. Until we began to live together, I had feared that gay men and women everywhere were doomed to living lives without lasting romantic love. Societies, it seemed, permitted only heterosexuals to have fulfilling, steady relationships; and they were, for the most part, bitterly opposed to our partaking of this basic…

KAMALA DAS, BORN IN 1934 , was arguably one of India’s finest poets in English and Malayalam. She became known to Malayali readers by her pen name, Madhavikutty, and on converting to Islam in her final years took the name of Kamala Surayya. As a member of a landed Nair aristocracy, Das, in her writing, projected a modern, urban, bohemian self that was dismissive of social mores. Her conversion, allegedly the result of a marriage with a younger Muslim man, seemed to embody the multiple paradoxes that characterised her life. Was she a radical poet, or a conservative performing a transgressive identity through her writing and life? Since her death, in 2009, most of her writing in English has been reissued in India, allowing us to discover once again the…

Art Nirmalya 12 AUGUST TO 14 SEPTEMBER VADEHRA ART GALLERY, DELHI Nirmalya, or “pure offering,” seemed an appropriate title for this collection of paintings by the artist Chameli Ramachandran. The works, crafted in exquisite Chinese ink and watercolour, were marked by a radiant realism. They included gorgeous floral prints, and landscapes in finely etched, monochromatic strokes. Pale-red peonies, pink-purple lilies, dull-gold carnations and fine-grey lotuses were interspersed with a series of unnamed flowers, ferns and forests. Each painting stood alone, yet rooted in aspects of ancient Indian, Chinese and Japanese lore. ~ NIKHIL PANDHI Film A Gathering at the Carnival Shop 1 SEPTEMBER NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALURU In this curious film, inspired by the work of the painter K Ramanujam, the director Mochu attempts to blur the boundaries…