Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i The Caravan

On a sweltering April afternoon in Mumbai, I flagged down an autorickshaw for an embarrassingly short distance, roughly 200 metres, to my university. I was running late. As I sat distracted, smoking a cigarette, a polite voice snapped me out of my thoughts. “Madam, do you like comedy?” the auto driver asked me, in Hindi. “Huh? Comedy? Yes, I do. Why?” “Then let me tell you a joke,” he said. “What happens when a foreigner comes to India for the first time, and tries to get an auto?” Before I could respond, my khaki-clad companion launched into mimicry of a high-pitched English-speaking foreign woman caught in a power struggle with an overenthusiastic auto-wallah, who struggled to justify in English the fare he’d quoted. Before I stepped out, he told me…

“If somebody has everything, then why would they become part of the movement? For jihad, for jannat” —for holy war, for paradise. On 12 April, word spread in Kashmir that a soldier of the 21 Rashtriya Rifles battalion had molested a 16-year-old girl outside a public toilet in Handwara, a town in the north of the valley. The news sparked protests in the town, and the army fired at agitators, killing a middle-aged woman and two young men, one of whom was a promising cricketer. Mehbooba Mufti, of the Peoples Democratic Party, or PDP, who had been sworn in as the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir around a week earlier, struggled to contain the crisis. She had faced turbulence as soon as she came to power,…

To the south, fresh bungalows and multi-storey apartment complexes block out the horizon. Separating those from the road is a tract of scrubland the size of some half a dozen football fields, with no sign at all of its ownership. {ONE} BEFORE MERGING into National Highway 12, Hoshangabad Road runs through the swathes of new development that form the south-east extremity of Bhopal. It is one of the widest strips of tarmac in the city, which serves as the capital of Madhya Pradesh. The Bhopal Institute of Social Sciences, Barkatullah University and Major Dhyan Chand Sports Complex sit along one side of the road; modish two-storey houses dot the other. The neighbourhood of Bawadia Kalan spreads out on either side of Hoshangabad Road, just south of Barkatullah University. Take a…

ON A BRIGHT AFTERNOON in mid April, on the fifth floor of the Balaji Telefilms building in Mumbai, Rajesh Joshi, the most influential soap opera writer in the country, sat at his desk scratching his brow. His hair was a mess. Just above his chair, a small shrine jutted out from the wall, in which little idols of Hindu gods sat draped in sequined clothes. Around the desk sat three other writers, waiting for him to speak. Joshi stared at his notes. The meeting had been called to discuss the plot of the third episode of a new serial by the production house run by Ekta Kapoor. It would be called Kawach, meaning “armour,” and would soon air on the channel Colors TV. Kawach would replace Naagin—also a Joshi-Balaji product,…

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE WORK of the Karachi-based Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed left me feeling like I’d been handed a beautiful, breakable object with jagged edges, glazed with a grief that is at once intimate and public. Or like standing in front of a wall crowded with a riot of miniatures, hundreds of images telling stories that are compelling but fractured, weighty but whimsical. This was one of the most remarkable voices of contemporary poetry in the subcontinent, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard it earlier. I was not alone in my excitement over Syed’s Rococo and Other Worlds, which appeared last year. There is an enthusiastic recommendation on the book’s back cover by his fellow poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra: “One reads Afzal Ahmed Syed’s poems first…

Tower of Silence 21 APRIL TO 29 MAY INSTITUTO CERVANTES, DELHI When the photographer Aitor Lara encountered a medieval-era diary of a Spanish ambassador’s trip through Central Asia, he was inspired to recreate a similar journey. After securing funding from the Spanish ministry of foreign affairs, he travelled throughout Uzbekistan to document its contemporary society. The resultant series, called Tower of Silence, was displayed on the grounds of Delhi’s Instituto Cervantes in large bamboo frames. The exhibition principally featured a range of portraits of Uzbeks of various ages and backgrounds—as though Lara had attempted to present a personified version of the country itself. Particularly striking among these portraits were ones that depicted a boy with a bottle on a market street, a girl standing on the outskirts of a village,…

ON 19 APRIL 1966 , Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb, aged 23, runs towards the finish line of the Boston Marathon, on the way to becoming the first woman to complete the 42.2-kilometre race. Gibb trained for the contest for two years, doing some of her most intense preparation on a month-long road trip across the United States. With only her dog for company, and wearing the sturdiest footwear she could find—nurse’s shoes—she ran along the Mississippi River, through the Great Plains, and even up and over the Great Divide in the Rocky Mountains. In February of 1966, she contacted the Boston Athletic Association, or BAA, the body in charge of the marathon, requesting permission to register as a racer. The race director curtly refused to send her the application forms, saying…

On a chain-link fence near a small trailer car, on Twaddell Street in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an Israeli flag usually flies amid a thicket of Union Jacks. But when I visited in August last year, while the colours of the United Kingdom’s national flag fluttered proudly, the Israeli one—with its bright blue Star of David—was absent. “Somebody stole it,” I was told by Helen, a 71-year-old woman who was sitting guard in the trailer. Helen is a Protestant Christian and a Unionist: she supports the British Crown and the power it holds over Northern Ireland. Britain colonised Ireland for nearly eight centuries, starting in the twelfth century, when it invaded and conquered the island. In 1921, Ireland was partitioned into the Republic of Ireland, which became an independent country, and…

Lawyers for the pharmaceutical industry “regularly visit the patent office. It is not uncommon for examiners to get a biased view why their claims should be granted.” On the evening of 9 May, the office of the controller general of patents, designs and trademarks posted a new verdict in a closely watched case on its official website. This was the American pharmaceutical company Gilead’s patent application for its blockbuster hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, which the office had at first rejected, in January 2015. But Gilead challenged the decision in the Delhi High Court, which set the decision aside and instructed the office to re-evaluate the application. The court’s order proved advantageous to the company: Rajesh Dixit, the officer who re-examined the case, granted the company the patent for the compound.…

POZEGA PENITENTIARY, nestled in a quiet valley in eastern Croatia, is a beige-coloured block of a building. Some of the windows on its ground floor have been filled in with concrete, and a few wiry trees line its front driveway. Housing over 130 inmates, it is Croatia’s only correctional institution for women who have been convicted of serious crimes, with sentences of six months or longer. Marina Paulenka, who grew up near Pozega, became fascinated by the institution after she met a few women who had been convicted on minor charges—such as traffic accidents and petty thefts—and sent to prison since they were unable to post bail. “I heard many interesting stories which I wanted to document,” she said. Her efforts culminated in The Other Home, a stark photo series…

THE GENE AN INTIMATE HISTORY Siddhartha Mukherjee From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, this book provides a detailed history of the scientific discovery and development of the gene—the fundamental unit of heredity. Woven through it is also the intimate story of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s own family and its history of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to our everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today, as humans are learning to “read” and “write” the human genome, unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children. ALLEN LANE, 608 PAGES, R 699 PAKISTAN AT THE CROSSROADS DOMESTIC DYNAMICS AND EXTERNAL PRESSURES Christophe Jaffrelot Edited by the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot (also a contributing editor of The Caravan), this collection of articles…

When I sat down with Maddox, an 18-year-old teenager from Paris, he told me it was his first time speaking to a journalist. “I want to break the terrible silence,” he said, to “prevent these kids from going through the same hell as me.” He pointed to a group of black toddlers playing nearby. I met him in the office of Soleil—an association that has been in the national news since December, when it helped 18 adolescents file a complaint with the Paris prosecutor against a dozen police officers, citing charges that included grave voluntary violence, sexual aggression and discrimination. Maddox, who wished to be identified only by his nickname, had his first encounter with the police when he was 12 years old. He and his friends were sitting on…

There are 37 separate pharma regulatory bodies nationwide: one for each of the 36 states and union territories, and the CDSCO operating from Delhi. Last May, the Indian pharmaceutical firm Cipla recalled about 140,000 vials of levalbuterol solution, used to relieve shortness of breath and coughing, from the US market. In mid July, also in the United States, another major Indian drug firm, Wockhardt, recalled over 162,000 cartons of various drugs used in the treatment of hypertension and ulcers. In September, the Canadian company Apotex recalled almost 118,000 bottles of cevimeline hydrochloride pills—used to treat dry mouth, especially in patients with an autoimmune disorder called Sjögren’s syndrome—manufactured by its Indian subsidiary. This, again, was in the United States. So, too, was a recall initiated this February by Sandoz, the generic-drugs…

“They have perfected the art of burglary,” Kapil Deo Narayan Agarwal, a lawyer who has practiced in Rajmahal for 30 years, told me. “They spend lakhs of rupees just to plan and plot a crime.” ON 15 FEBRUARY 2015 , the owners of a commercial space in a building named Gokul Kshitij, in the city of Virar, around 80 kilometres north of central Mumbai, leased out the property to a group of fruit sellers. In the days that followed, the new tenants stocked their shop, introduced themselves to the other shopkeepers in the building, and settled into their business. In particular, they struck up a rapport with the staff of Omkar Jewellers, adjacent to their shop, occasionally giving them fruit on credit. Ten days later, on the morning of 25…

“AND WERE YOU POLITICALLY INVOLVED in Beirut?” an interviewer once asked Faiz Ahmed Faiz, arguably the greatest Urdu poet of the last century. “I was, indeed, yes!” he replied. “You had to be, if you were part of the suffering of the place and of the people.” Today, the most visible signs of the subcontinent’s involvement in Beirut are the neon-green-uniformed South Asian men emptying plastic garbage bins into large green trucks on the street. Images of India abound in the city’s hip yoga culture, with Pakistan harder to find. The Arabic word for “Sri Lankan,” in its feminine adjectival form, is widely synonymous with “maid.” Diversity fares mildly better in elite liberal enclaves such as the American University of Beirut or the contemporary art scene, which are generally sprinkled…

Untitled 13 TO 15 MAY ALLIANCE FRANCAISE, BENGALURU Untitled, a play written by Vijay Padaki and directed by Shashank Purushotham, made waves in Bangalore’s avid theatre community. Shifting between two time-frames that were 20 years apart, the production told the story of an unwanted intersex child, referred to at different points as Indrani or Indranil. Padaki’s script struck a balance between being entertaining and socially observant, with some of its scenes even incorporating improvisation and audience participation. The stage design, composed of multiple sets positioned next to one another, was especially unique. Almost each time a scene changed, audience members had to turn their necks to look at the actors. Although this initially seemed like an inconvenient quirk, its purpose became clear as the plot developed, and the unconventional staging…

Narratives for Indian Modernity 12 TO 22 MAY INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE, DELHI Brij Mohan Anand, a self-taught artist from Punjab, who died 30 years ago, has been less known than his modernist contemporaries, such as MF Husain and VS Gaitonde. But the recent discovery of a vast cache of Anand’s work, in the attic of his Delhi home, has culminated in this exhibition. The works displayed showcased the artist’s experimentation across many media, including painting, illustration, scratchboard etching, poster and even book cover. Especially remarkable was his audacious intervention during the height of the Vietnam War, when he sent a New Year’s greeting card to several foreign embassies in Delhi. The card reads “Stop Burning Asia/The Death Is Shadowing You,” and shows a Native American carrying the world on his…