Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 i The Caravan

On a Tuesday afternoon in early August, in a classroom at Bengaluru’s Dr SR Chandrasekhar Institute for Speech and Hearing, a teacher was reprimanding her sixth-grade class for their poor performance on a recent English exam. “Did you children not understand the chapter?” she asked, enunciating each word she spoke, so that her students—many of whom are deaf or partially deaf—could read her lips. As the teacher turned to write instructions on the board, a student sitting in the front row whipped around and, with a cheeky smile, made a series of hand motions to a boy on the bench behind him, who nodded and responded with a few quick gestures of his own. Sensing a disturbance, the teacher turned around and caught the boys mid-conversation. She raised her voice…

 It is easy to forget today that the Aam Aadmi Party was not always synonymous with Arvind Kejriwal. There was a time when he was only one of several party leaders, who all spoke their own minds and contributed to the establishment of the party. As the main face of the AAP in Delhi as it campaigned for and won power in the city he may have been the most prominent, but others such as Prashant Bhushan, Yogendra Yadav and Dharamvir Gandhi also counted. By giving Kejriwal the excuse of a lack of power, the BJP and the lieutenant governor have allowed him to escape the scrutiny he would normally face over the delivery of services after a couple of years in power. The transformation of the party has been…

{ONE} THE VILLAGE OF KANNAPURAM lies in western Tamil Nadu, along a highway that runs across the middle of the state, from Coimbatore to Tiruchirappalli. For most of the year, it is a largely anonymous place. But for a week or so each spring, anyone passing by cannot help but take notice of it. On the morning of 10 April, I visited a sprawling complex of temporary shanties stretching along either side of the broad, smooth highway. By 10.30 am, it was scorching hot. Hundreds of men sat in slivers of shade—under their shacks, beneath scrawny trees, beside a water lorry—with their dhotis or lungis hoicked up and towels fashioned into turbans. The only women, besides me, were a few running food stalls. All around stood thousands of cattle—drinking water,…

ONE MORNING IN APRIL THIS YEAR, I was ushered into the Chennai home of the Tamil writer Ashokamitran by one of his twin granddaughters. The 85-year-old was seated at his desk, above which was a collage of family photos, much like the ones that you or I might put up. With grandfatherly pride, he talked about the twins’ post-graduate studies—one’s in counselling psychology and the other’s in graphic design. And, about one of them getting married, he observed, “Wedding halls are so difficult to get these days. So little parking! People come from long distances. Community life is not like it used to be. That was a more leisurely time. Now a wedding is just a one-meal affair. By mutual consent.” He seemed to approve of the change, though a…

Attakkalari Diploma Graduation Show 20 AUGUST KT MUHAMMED REGIONAL THEATRE, THRISSUR Bengaluru’s Attakkalari Centre for Movement and Arts, founded in 2006, celebrated its tenth anniversary in August by conducting a “graduation show,” with dance pieces by many acclaimed choreographers from India, Italy, the United Kingdom and Hungary. The evening commenced with Minal Prabhu’s piece, which was full of traditional Bharatnatyam grace. Stefano Fardelli’s “Links,” inspired by electric cables intersecting across the Indian skyline, was performed next. It featured contemporary dance performances amid what looked like electric cables on the stage. The show was followed by a workshop on contemporary dance by Jayachandran Palazhy, the artistic director of Attakkalari.…

Some used euphemisms: “I am a collector of worn footwear. If works out could pay for two pairs monthly.” Others were more on the nose: “I need that stink”—of feet. “Could you smell and confirm?” A few months ago, I put a pair of six-inch black-and-blue heels up for sale on OLX, an online platform for local classified ads. I had bought them on impulse for R 7,800 and, after teetering around the house in them once, decided to sell them for R 6,000. To my surprise, within a couple of hours, I had more than 30 messages in my inbox. Surprise turned into bewilderment when I realised that the vast majority of the prospective buyers seemed to be men, who were all interested in knowing just how used my…

Imagine a world where the hottest degree was an MPA, a Masters in Poetry Administration. Where a single poem could send global financial markets into a spin, where poets were the envy of all, and instead of shopping for material objects people ran out to buy poems to hang on the walls of their parlours. This is the world the 25-year-old Hindi poet Shubham Shree imagines in her poem ‘Poetry Management,’ for which she was awarded the prestigious Bharat Bhushan Agarwal Prize in August. It reads, in part: Writing poetry is bogus! Yeah, and useless! Totally. Unprofessional profession! Part time! Why didn’t I do some MBA-type thing? It’d be a blast, man! I’d write a poem; the SENSEX would fall The poet Mr. So-and-So has written a poem against capitalism…

 ON 11 MARCH 2011 , the Japanese city of Fukushima suffered three consecutive disasters. On 11 March, the city was hit by an earthquake, which triggered a tsunami. The waves knocked out the cooling systems of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing fuel rods to melt down and release deadly radiation. In the coming weeks, a total of 470,000 people were evacuated, and an “exclusion zone” was created, with a radius of 20 kilometres from the plant. Five years on, the effects of these tragedies are still being felt in the surrounding region. When the American photographer Brian Driscoll first visited Fukushima, in 2012, it was not to take pictures, but to visit a friend. But on witnessing the impact…

FINDING ZERO A MATHEMATICIAN’S ODYSSEY TO UNCOVER THE ORIGINS OF NUMBERS Amir D Aczel Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical or quantified. The story of how and where we got numerals has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. This book is an adventure-filled saga of the writer and mathematician Amir Aczel’s lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of numbers. Aczel has doggedly criss-crossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, mouldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts. He ultimately penetrates deep into a Cambodian jungle to find the earliest zero on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. MACMILLAN US, 256 PAGES, R 450 THE BURNING FOREST INDIA’S WAR IN BASTAR Nandini Sundar The war…

ON 14 OCTOBER 1956 , BR Ambedkar, considered the father of the Indian constitution and a pioneer of the Dalit movement converted to Buddhism in Nagpur, along with his wife, Savita Ambedkar. Around 500,000 Ambedkar’s Dalit supporters, who had gathered at the ceremony, also embraced Buddhism on that day. Born into a Dalit family, in 1891, Ambedkar established himself as a scholar of law, economics and political science, earning doctorates from both Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Having suffered discrimination first-hand under the Hindu caste system, Ambedkar was politically active throughout his career as an academic and a lawyer, and spoke for the political rights of marginalised castes. He associated the continuance of the caste system with the iron hold of Hinduism over much of India. In…

Kurosamo Tuwaebuesa lay on her back, widened her eyes and held one hand up, twisted in mid-air. This, she said, is how her husband’s body looked after he died in Thailand’s notorious Inkayuth military camp. “They said it was a natural death and not from torture,” the 34-year-old mother of three told me in late February, as we sat on a mat in her house in Pattani province. It was nearly three months after soldiers said they found her husband, Abduldayib Dolah, dead in his cell. “But one hand was black, one hand was gnarled and held up in a strange way. His eyes were popped open.” On 4 December 2015, Dolah became yet another casualty in the insurgency that has plagued Thailand’s southernmost provinces—Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and Songkhla—for more…

ON 8 JULY, INDIAN SECURITY FORCES killed the 21-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani in Kashmir’s Anantnag district. Anger immediately erupted in the valley, and protestors took to the streets in their thousands, even in towns and villages that were usually unaffected by past agitations. Protestors blocked roads, imposed shutdowns, shouted anti-India slogans and pelted stones at security personnel who tried to restrain them. When I travelled through Kashmir in July, most people I spoke to felt that Burhan’s killing was followed by a dramatic upsurge in the Kashmiri resistance movement. “He openly challenged the mighty Indian state,” a Kashmiri journalist told me. “No more hiding guns under the pheran. No more using pseudonyms. No more hiding behind a mask. That appealed to the people who have been suppressed…

DURING THE LATE 1990 S, as an undergraduate student in Delhi University, my fascination for the Indian documentaries I had seen led me to write my final-year dissertation on the form. I was taken with films such as Shabnam Virmani’s When Women Unite, which recreated the story of women in Andhra Pradesh’s Nellore district who rallied to stop the sale of arrack in their villages. There was work such as Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside, a haunting meditation on militarism and borders, and Reena Mohan’s Skin Deep, which investigated the ideal of beauty through the personal narratives of urban middle-class women. In hindsight, it was the sense of widening possibilities and themes that I was drawn to. What I recall most clearly from the days spent researching and writing my…

Enactments and each passing day 9 SEPTEMBER TO 8 DECEMBER KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART, NOIDA This exhibition at the Kiran Nadar Museum in Noida explored the boundaries of videography, taking on the idea of time. Shilpa Gupta’s frenetic ceiling projections of well-known architectural structures distorted kaleidoscopically, before morphing into abstract geometrical shapes. In contrast, Sonia Khurana’s Surreal Pond 1-Epiphany contained an image of an unsettling, absolutely still pond with fog building and rising over it. But the ultimate exploration of time in the exhibit was also the most interesting manipulation of space. Gigi Scaria’s Against Gravity presented six monitors fixed onto the faces of a hexagonal prism. All six screens look identical at first—stills of a desolate, black-and-white landscape that looked like they were from early-twentieth-century India. Then, a…