Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i The Caravan

Suprabhat Chai (Good Morning Tea) · COGNITION ENHANCER TEA · INCREASES CONCENTRATION & VITALITY Shubh Saanjh Chai (Good Evening Tea) · DIGESTIVE TEA · NO MORE GAS & INDIGESTION Ratri Chai (Night Time Tea) · RELAXING TEA · RELAXES THE NERVOUS SYSTEM Suprabhat Chai is a natural blend of tea leaves and herbs especially designed to be taken in the mornings between 6 am to 10 am, when kapha dosha is risen in the body. An increase in kapha sometimes leads to the appearance of symptoms such as excessive phlegm, morning coughs, laziness, drowsiness, difficulty waking up in the morning, and heaviness brahmi help increase concentration, and herbs like guduchi, mulethi, kali mirch and lemongrass help strengthen immunity. Green tea variants: # LEMONGRASS + GUDUCHI + BRAHMI + KALI…

On a warm dawn last July, in Gilgit, a city in northern Pakistan, I sat in a bus packed with fans of a historic sport. “We call it ‘the game of kings, king of games,’” one passenger said. In most other places in Pakistan, as in India, such statements are typically reserved for cricket. In the country’s northern mountains, however, polo also enjoys immense popularity. Polo competitions are held across the region, from the beginning of spring until the end of summer. That day, I took a bumpy, nine-hour bus ride up to Shandur Pass, which cuts through the Hindu Kush mountains at an altitude of 3,700 metres above sea level. A plateau called “Shandur Top” stretches out nearby, home to a well-manicured polo field—the highest in the world. The…

The dramatic political events of February 2017 left many of us stupefied in Tamil Nadu. J Jayalalithaa, the chief minister of the state until her death in December, was indicted for corruption in the harshest possible words by the Supreme Court. Yet she was, and is still, hailed reverentially as “Amma” and held up as having been blameless by a large section of the citizenry and media, and by her party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Each of the factions of the AIADMK that now claims the mantle of leadership appears determined to make Jayalalithaa’s compromised political heritage its own. There has been no moral outrage over the judgment, no reflective remorse from any quarter. These events have unfolded in the fiftieth year of Dravidian rule in Tamil…

JODHPUR RAJASTHAN One victim was allegedly raped by Asaram here in August 2013. MOTERA GUJARAT Two young boys were found dead in Asaram’s ashram here in 2008. AHMEDABAD GUJARAT The trial against Asaram involving the elder of the two Surat sisters is underway here, as is the trial in the case of the Motera brothers’ deaths. SURAT GUJARAT The trial against Asaram’s son Narayan Sai involving the younger sister of the two Surat sisters is underway here. SHAHJAHANPUR UTTAR PRADESH The Jodhpur victim’s father helped set up Asaram’s ashram here between 2007 and 2008. CHHINDWARA MADHYA PRADESH The Jodhpur victim studied in the gurukul situated in Asaram’s ashram here. From his first ashram in the town of Motera, in Gujarat, Asaram’s empire expanded to include—according to his website—more than 400…

THE PHILOSOPHER RAYMOND ARON called the fall of Soviet Communism in 1991 “the end of the ideological age.” The Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War buried whatever sense of fatalism there was on both sides of the Atlantic about the future of humankind. New master narratives proclaimed the triumph of the West, the United States as the lodestar of human rights, and the inexorable march of the free market. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s premise that liberal democracy constituted the “final form of government”—the “end of history”—exemplified the emphatic nature of this triumphalism. But since 11 September 2001, there has been a growing sense of catastrophe in the West. Climate change is set to make life a living hell. Europe reels from the influx of refugees escaping war…

Dance NCPA Mudra Dance Festival 20 TO 23 APRIL NCPA, MUMBAI The NCPA Mudra Dance Festival first started in 2012, and has since been held every April around International Dance Day. Centred on the theme of transformation, the festival will host both upcoming and senior dancers performing a plethora of Indian classical forms. For more information, contact 022-66223737 Art SMS (Simultaneous Moments of Silence) 15 MARCH TO 8 JUNE MUMBAI ART ROOM, MUMBAI SMS (Simultaneous Moments of Silence) documents the communication between an artist in Cuba and an artist in the United States, constrained by geographic and political boundaries. The exhibition comprises a series of photographs the two sent each other using phones. For more information, write to office@mumbaiartroom.org Film Lady of the Lake 26 APRIL GOETHE INSTITUT,…

 ted three minutes for this round were over, Taniya checkmated Jayashree. As the practice match came to an end, other players, who were watching the two battle it out, applauded the chess boxers. In only about five years since he introduced chess boxing to India, Das has managed to amass a surprisingly large following for the sport in the country. The institute is run by Montu Das, a fourth-degree black belt in kick-boxing and the founder and president of the Chess Boxing Organisation of India, or CBOI—the Indian governing body of a sport that combines chess with boxing. In only about five years since he introduced the sport to India, Das has managed to amass a surprisingly large following for the sport in the country. Today, there are around 1,000…

 The results of the Uttar Pradesh election, and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s conquest of the state legislature, have already been subjected to much analysis. Not for the first time, one argument being made is that caste identities are no longer the predominant factor in determining voting behaviour, and that Modi’s overwhelming personal appeal has united diverse voters. This belief is espoused not just by some of Modi’s supporters, but also by many of his opponents who, in their liberalism, want to believe that India is shedding caste and identity politics. But a look at the BJP’s strategy for this election suggests that such arguments are far from true, and that one reason the party has done so well is because it has understood some of the iconic Dalit politician and…

In the latter half of 2011, the Indian government was on the verge of finalising an important water-sharing agreement with Bangladesh over the Teesta, a 414-kilometer-long river that orginates in Sikkim and swirls through the north of West Bengal before crossing the two countries’ border and merging with the Brahmaputra. After decades of delay, Delhi and Dhaka reached an agreement that, for 15 years, their respective sides would use 42.5 percent and 37.5 percent of the river’s waters during the dry season, with the remainder left unallocated until a later decision. The agreement was to be signed on a visit to Dhaka by the then Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, who was to be accompanied by the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee. Water is a state subject in…

“I GREW UP AROUND A LOT OF BLACKNESS,” the artist Prabhakar Pachpute told me, as we sat inside a large room in Clark House, a 150-year-old colonial building in south Mumbai. “It’s become an intrinsic part of who I am, and so it will always show in my work.” Only a month earlier, in May 2016, Pachpute’s work had been exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. At the age of 30, he is among the youngest artists to have had a solo exhibition at the NGMA. Sitting at a square wooden table, Pachpute opened his laptop to show me some of his work. After showing me photos of some of his sketches, he played a stop-motion animation video he had made in 2012. The video begins with…

TODAY, THE ENTREPRENEUR IS omnipresent in a way unprecedented in history. Her image is splashed across magazine covers, politicians are always concerned with “promoting entrepreneurship,” even left-wing talking heads, who decades ago were obsessed with class injustice, concede that nothing must be done to restrict the “dynamism” of the entrepreneur. And why not? The entrepreneur is an inspiration, because she can, sometimes, escape from the baggage of caste and hierarchy that still grips much of India. She is comforting because, by virtue of her success, she restores a semblance of meritocracy to an otherwise unfair world. She convinces the intellectual establishment that its agenda of a state perpetually in retreat from economic life is a workable one. The rise of the entrepreneur is, in many ways, directly related to the…

Thousands of people march in San Francisco, California, on 6 April 1969, in protest against the United States’ war in Vietnam. In the 1960s, the United States saw a wave of demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which was increasingly seen as immoral, imperialist and senselessly violent. Though the protest movement was started by small groups of left-leaning university students, it grew quickly, gathering into its fold hippies, artists, the clergy, women’s organisations and racial-minority groups. Vietnam was the first war to be widely televised, with images of atrocities being broadcast into many Americans’ living rooms. In May of 1968, US soldiers slaughtered around 500 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam. Coverage of this event, which came to be known as the My Lai Massacre, prompted outrage in the United States and…

On one of the hills on the outskirts of Lima, the capital of Peru, stands an installation by the artist Sandra Nakamura, inspired by the United States’s Hollywood Sign. The large letters of the work say, “UNA PROMESA ES UNA NUBE,” or “A promise is a cloud”—a reference to an Arabic proverb: “A promise is a cloud; the fulfilment is the rain.” The sign’s full import, though, would be lost on those unfamiliar with Lima’s socio-economic realities. The majority of the city’s urban poor live on its fringes, in slums scattered across the hills above Lima. These localities—called asentamientos humanos, or human settlements—are barely fit for humans. With clouds covering the hills, the settlements are enveloped by fog for most of the year. They have few roads, no property titles…

THE SESSIONS-COURT complex in Jodhpur was particularly crowded on the afternoon of 9 February. By 2 pm, around 200 people had gathered outside the building. They were of various ages and from a variety of backgrounds, though there were unusually many young women among them—some dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, others in crisp salwar kameez and light woollen cardigans. Many in the crowd had travelled from outside the city, and carried small rucksacks or cloth bags. One family told me that they had come from Gorakhpur, in Uttar Pradesh, a little more than 1,000 kilometres away; one man that he had come from Jalpaiguri, in West Bengal, nearly 2,000 kilometres away. Just after 2 pm, police began to cordon off the entrance to the building, forming a semicircle and forcing…

IN AN IMAGE from Arthur Tress’s photography series Dream Collector, a small blond boy sits in a hole in a dilapidated roof, with only his head, arms and upper torso visible. A muddy wasteland, dotted with pools of water, stretches out behind him. The boy’s expression is peaceful amid the decay. Years later, in a book titled Contact Sheets, Tress described the shooting of this image as a moment of “spontaneous accidental ‘improvisation’ done on the spot.” In 1970, as he was driving down a small coastal road in the eastern American state of Maryland, he came across a broken roof that had been abandoned on a long pier. The blond boy appeared on his bicycle, as if out of nowhere, and Tress asked him to pose for the photo.…

JAFFNA STREET TALES OF LIFE, DEATH, BETRAYAL AND SURVIVAL IN KASHMIR Mir Khalid In 1989, Mir Khalid was a schoolboy in downtown Srinagar who watched his elders leave their jobs and families to bear arms against the Indian state. Two decades later, and by then a surgeon, he returned to his hometown to uncover memories of the Kashmir insurgency through the accounts of eyewitnesses from that time. Jaffna Street combines interviews and personal memories to sketch a panoramic portrait of Srinagar during the violent years of the insurgency. RUPA PUBLICATIONS INDIA, 304 PAGES, R 295 WILL THE FLOWER SLIP THROUGH THE ASPHALT WRITERS RESPOND TO CAPITALIST CLIMATE CHANGE Edited by Vijay Prashad This short volume features essays by some of the most vociferous critics of current forms of capitalist growth…