Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i The Caravan

Because of the way radio-call ranges are divided, Indian politicians seeking a new nationality mark have been unable to obtain one that they consider suitable. On 3 May, Tarun Vijay, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of parliament from Uttarakhand, delivered a fiery speech on the floor of the Rajya Sabha. It is time to shun “a legacy of British colonialism,” he proclaimed. “India cannot be a viceroy’s territory anymore.” Vijay was not calling for monetary reparations for colonialism, or demanding the return of the Kohinoor diamond. His target was the pair of letters etched onto the sides of every civilian aircraft in India. According to international aviation norms, each civilian aircraft must bear an alpha-numeric code known as a call sign. A call sign uses a one- or two-character prefix,…

“My problem is not with what is happening to the filmmakers of these three films right now. I worry about someone who is just starting to write his script.” On the evening of 5 May, I joined about two-dozen people at a small private venue in Karachi, to watch a film we were not supposed to watch. Security was tight. The attendees—mostly journalists, activists and filmmakers—had all been told of the event only a day earlier, and we were asked to show our national identity cards while entering the building, through a rear exit. Before the screening, one of the film’s directors laid down two strict rules: no photographs, no social media. The film being shown was Among the Believers, a documentary that profiles Maulana Abdul Aziz, the leader of…

“Did you not see what happened to Archie and Parshya at the end of the movie? If you learn, only then you’ll survive, otherwise you’ll die just like them.” Sairat, written and directed by Nagraj Manjule, premiered in Indian theatres on 29 April. It quickly became a phenomenon. Within two weeks, Sairat brought in over R 52 crore at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing Marathi film ever. Videos of people dancing in cinemas to the film’s soundtrack went viral on social media; kids mimicked scenes from it; theatres in Maharashtra’s Satara district scheduled extra screenings at three in the morning. Sairat tells the story of two lovers—Parshya, a Dalit man, and Archie, an upper-caste woman—who elope from their village in south-eastern Maharashtra and are eventually murdered by the woman’s…

{ONE} EVERY SUNDAY, KIRTI JADAV leaves her house in Bhiwandi, a far-flung suburb of Mumbai, at around nine in the morning. She walks for ten minutes and boards a bus, which, in an hour and a half, brings her to Vasai Road station. From there, she takes the Mumbai local train, which reaches Dadar in an hour. At Dadar, she boards another train, and in around 20 minutes arrives at Sion. Jadav then walks for another 20 minutes to reach the famous slum of Dharavi, located in central Mumbai. Even on a good day, the journey takes over three hours. With bad traffic or train delays, it can easily take four. And yet, Jadav treasures her Sundays. Because on these days, she gets to do what she loves most: act.…

IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE SECOND DECADE of the twentieth century that Tri Chandra College, in Kathmandu, became the first institution in Nepal to offer degrees in English. This was arranged through an affiliation with the University of Patna, but Nepal’s rulers—the Ranas, hereditary prime ministers who exercised power in the name of an ostensibly sovereign Hindu monarch—made sure that students took their exams in Kathmandu, and did not allow them to travel to Patna. The arrangement was in keeping with a long-standing policy of restrictions on higher education, partly aimed to insulate young Nepalis from the nationalist and political ferment then sweeping Indian campuses. The Ranas were overthrown in 1951, inaugurating a brief experiment with democracy that ended with Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah, the king of Nepal, imposing royal…

Mark on the Wall 15 APRIL TO 31 JULY GALERIE MIRCHANDANI AND STEINRUECKE, MUMBAI A collaboration between the photographer Gauri Gill and the artist Rajesh Vangad, Mark on the Wall combines photography with Warli, a style of traditional painting from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. In 2013, Gill was invited to an Adivasi village in Maharashtra’s Dahanu district to document drawings made by primary school students. Vangad, a resident of the village, invited her to stay at his place, and took her to various locations that were significant in local folklore. Gill decided to photograph these places, situating Vangad as the protagonist in her images. Vangad then drew monochromatic Warli figures over the pictures. In the photographs, Vangad never looks into the camera, which helps imbue them with a sense of…

Everyday Baroque 13 FEBRUARY TO 21 MAY PHOTOINK, DELHI In Everyday Baroque, the photographer Rajesh Vora documents sculptural objects adorning rooftops in rural homes in Punjab. These first appeared in the 1970s, as an increasing number of non-resident Indians began constructing houses in their villages in the state. The objects were meant as symbols of the struggles and achievements of immigrants, and grew in size and ambition as the years went by. They comprise such things as massive, concrete renditions of pressure cookers, lotuses and airplanes with “Air Canada” and “Air France” inscribed on them. Vora succeeds in capturing the pomp and celebration of life that is often a part of Punjabi culture.…

When I asked if he just enclosed the government fees with the paperwork, Balakrishna tried to hide a smile as he admitted that “a little more has to be packed in” to line the pockets of officials. Each workday around 10 am, Surat Balakrishna reaches his office by way of a serpentine lane behind the newest mall in Vijayawada—the “business capital” of Andhra Pradesh. A soft-spoken 43-year-old man with curly hair, he prays and lights a lamp before small clay statues of deities of business and wealth, which sit on a wooden shelf above his desk. This silent ritual marks the calm before Balakrishna’s daily storm. Once work begins, his small office becomes a standing-room-only space, crammed with helpers, assistants and clients. For the past nine years, Balakrishna has been…

Since Sonia Gandhi took over the party in 1998, the Congress has failed to produce a single leader with mass electoral appeal. It took three days, beginning on 12 June, for the Congress’s central leadership to appoint Kamal Nath as the party’s in-charge for both Punjab and Haryana, defend his appointment in light of vociferous criticism, and then agree to his giving up the posts. The move was so tone deaf—Sanjay Suri, a reporter for the Indian Express, had testified as a witness before both major inquiries into the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 to put Nath at the head of a mob that burnt two Sikhs to death near the national parliament—that it spawned various conspiracy theories. Some suggested Nath had been set up by his opponents within the party.…

“Dr Pachauri’s tendencies with women are the development sector’s worst-kept secret. If you are a woman who is good-looking... then you are expected to be careful of him.” {ONE} ONE DAY IN DECEMBER 2012 , Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, then the director general of The Energy and Resources Institute, or TERI, called a staff meeting at the organisation’s headquarters in the India Habitat Centre, a plush multi-storey complex on south Delhi’s Lodhi Road. Hundreds of employees shuffled into a room on the fifth floor, adjacent to the office’s indoor badminton court. When they had gathered, Pachauri made an announcement. There had been, he explained in a sombre tone, a regrettable incident. A young volunteer in Odisha, who was working with Lighting a Billion Lives, a global energy-access programme run by TERI,…

It is estimated that 6 new patients of Ulcerative Colitis are diagnosed per 100,000 each year in India, making it one of the highest prevalence rates in Asia. FMT, or Fecal Microbiota Transplantation, is the process of instillation of a liquid suspension of stool from a healthy donor into the patient’s colon through colonoscopy. It has been established as a cure for certain types of colitis. However, stool transplantation has yet to grow popular in India, despite the need for it, due to a lack of high quality clinical trials. Fortis Memorial Research Institute is one of the top research and healthcare facilities exploring the advantages of FMT. Dr. Avnish Seth, Director of Gastroenterology & Hepatobiliary Sciences at FMRI, Gurgaon is credited as the pioneer of stool transplant in the…

CHRONICLES ON OUR TROUBLED TIMES Thomas Piketty The economist Thomas Piketty, best known for his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has long been a columnist for the French newspaper Libération. This volume brings together some of his most incisive opinion pieces from the past decade, tackling issues ranging from migration in Europe to the policies of the US president Barack Obama. A highlight is his analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, what has happened since, and what measures should be adopted to cope with it. PENGUIN BOOKS, 192 PAGES, R 699 SECOND-HAND TIME Svetlana Alexievich Translated by Bela Shayevich Second-hand Time is the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s first book to appear in English since she won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature. It features interviews with dozens of people…

Tape a.k.a. The Gentlemen’s Club 28 MAY THE HUMMING TREE, BENGALURU Tape a.k.a. The Gentlemen’s Club is a play about drag kings in Mumbai. The show features a series of interlacing vignettes, performed by women impersonating men. Rocky, aka Shamsher, does an excellent impression of the actor Shammi Kapoor. Alex, aka JT, appears as a character modelled on the musician Justin Timber-lake. The title of the play, Tape, refers to the tape used by drag kings to flatten their breasts. Besides elements of theatre, such as music and dance, the show also employs projected montages, all combining to form both a cerebral and visceral celebration of adapted masculinity.…

“We used to have an organised system where we got state subsidies every year. That completely collapsed in 2011.” Tourists visiting Athens often marvel at the city’s oldest theatres—grand marble monuments that are an integral part of Greece’s ancient history. These tourists, however, would be unlikely to enter one of the city’s newest theatres: a cramped basement in a low-income, immigrant neighbourhood called Omonia. But on a crisp Friday night in late January, the underground venue was at capacity. A few dozen audience members—mostly young, smartly dressed Greeks—sat on pillows and mismatched chairs, sipping wine from paper cups, to watch a play called Odes to the Prince. In a pivotal scene, the lead actor wore a mask of the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras. Behind him, three other actors held…

In light of the deep political rifts over Nepal’s new constitution, and the persistent intrigue among the country’s largest parties, “national unity” amounts to little more than euphemism. When Nepal’s finance minister read out the country’s latest budget on 28 May, he did so under unorthodox circumstances. Where budget presentations usually indicate a degree of stability in government, this one was expected to be a prelude to the exact opposite. Two days earlier, Pushpa Kamal Dahal—the chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre), the ruling coalition’s main partner—had told reporters that, after the budget was announced, he would become Nepal’s new prime minister. He was to replace KP Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist), which heads that coalition. The handover was supposedly promised under a deal…

WHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER Rahul Kumar Das purchased his first camera, decades ago, his father asked to have a good portrait taken, “because we may need it in the future.” This request rings especially poignant in the wake of Sanguinity, Das’s photographic series showing his father’s struggle with deteriorating health in the last three years of his life. Das started the project in 2011, after his father suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed. Witnessing his father’s agony, Das said, “fueled my creative process.” For the series, Das focussed on “various parts of my father’s body, my parents’ moments of sickness and loneliness, and their surroundings.” Following his passion for still-life art, he often photographed objects such as chilli peppers and icicles, to act as metaphors for his father’s pain.…

Contemporary Japanese Posters 13 MAY TO 1 JULY THE JAPAN FOUNDATION, DELHI This exhibition of graphic posters produced in Japan in the 1980s, when the country witnessed a continuous economic boom, shows how they were employed as vehicles for both information and artistic expression. Most of the work displayed combines a spare aesthetic and the use of symmetry and strong geometric forms. A poster by Koichi Sato, for instance, depicts a bowl of tea surrounded by a fading halo of blue, conveying the calm and deliberation of a Japanese tea ceremony.…

Queen Size 27 TO 29 MAY 24, JOR BAGH, DELHI Based on the late gay activist Nishit Saran’s article “Why my Bedroom Habits are your Business,” published in 2000 in the Indian Express, the choreographer Mandeep Raikhy’s dance piece Queen Size invites the audience into the bedroom of two homosexual men. Through dance, it dramatises an encounter that is both carnal and emotional. Queen Size was performed in a square room in a picturesque, abandoned house, with benches to seat viewers and a charpoy in the middle for the dancers. The lighting in the room, designed by Jonathan O’Hear, dimmed and brightened to match the pace of the choreography.…