Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i The Caravan

Suresh was emphatic that poker is a game of skill. “Have you seen a cricket tournament with a cash prize for the winner? It’s the same with poker.” On a night in late October, in 2011, an advocate named KN Suresh hosted a card-playing party at his house in the posh area of Indiranagar, Bengaluru. Wealthy techies, doctors and realtors were reportedly in attendance. Later that night, a few guests showed up uninvited: a special squad of the Bengaluru city police raided the house, reportedly confiscating liquor bottles, card paraphernalia and cash. The police also arrested Suresh, along with eight of his guests. Over the phone in February, Suresh recalled the night, and told me that he and his guests had been “wrongly booked for playing andar-bahar”—an illegal card game…

The town of Gampola in Sri Lanka’s Kandy district houses a 100-year-old structure comprising five “line rooms”—each windowless square, just ten by 12 feet in size, was once home to an entire family of estate workers. Though elsewhere people still live in such cramped accommodations, this particular row of rooms has been turned into a museum that boasts a peculiar collection of objects: including images of Subhash Chandra Bose and Mohandas Gandhi, an incense-stick holder with Jawaharlal Nehru’s face on it, drums once used to announce news of funerals and marriages, and an ooduku, or small drum, that is used to chase away the devil. Not long ago, these objects could be found in the homes of Sri Lanka’s Tamil plantation workers—also known as Malaiyaha, which means “mountain,” or up-country…

 On 3 March, the Supreme Court stayed the operation of a circular issued in September by the Bar Council of India, or BCI, that imposed age limits on people enrolling for law degree programmes in the country. The circular barred anyone above the age of 20 from entering five-year programmes, and anyone above 30 from entering three-year programmes (with relaxations for students from communities entitled to reservations). The court’s decision came as a relief to those who had been affected by the rule, which has a tumultuous history. The Indian legal-education system has stagnated because of the domination of the BCI by practising lawyers with little pedagogical experience. The BCI, which is responsible for regulating both legal education and the legal profession in India, first introduced the rule in 2008.…

IN FEBRUARY 2012 , trucks of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, loaded with garbage, made their way out of Kerala’s capital, with several hundred policemen in tow. The garbage was to be dumped at a site in Vilappilsala village, about 15 kilometres outside the city. At the Vilappilsala panchayat limit, the trucks were confronted by around 5,000 protestors, mainly women and children, led by the local panchayat’s president, Sobhana Kumari, formed a human wall several hundred metres long. The policemen, deployed to disperse the residents, lathi-charged and lobbed tear gas, but the protestors refused to make way. Kumari and others were arrested. Prohibitory orders under Section 144 were imposed in the panchayat. But the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation had to take its trucks back. It was a do-or-die situation, Kumari told me when I…

YESTERDAY’S FILMS FOR TOMORROW PK Nair This volume of essays comprises the collected writings of PK Nair, who was the archivist at the National Film Archive of India for over 25 years. He salvaged the films of Dadasaheb Phalke, India’s first filmmaker, as well as the works of many other Indian directors. These essays share Nair’s experiences of travelling across India to collect and preserve rare films, posters and ephemera, and are invaluable documents of the history of Indian cinema. FILM HERITAGE FOUNDATION, 312 PAGES, R 495 TEMPORARY PEOPLE Deepak Unnikrishnan This novel is made up of a series of connected stories that explore the precarious lives of migrant workers in the Gulf. Unnikrishnan’s family is from Kerala, but he was raised in the United Arab Emirates and then studied…

In a small hall inside a red-brick school building in the town of Gurdaspur, Punjab, around 15 young men sparred in pairs, throwing one another to the ground in white judo suits. About the same number of players watched from the sidelines, waiting for their turn to practise. Among the judo players—judokas—sparring that March day, Karanjit Singh Maan, standing at a burly six-foot-two, cast an impressive figure. Maan won a gold medal in the South Asian Games in 2016, and is a member of the Indian senior national men’s judo team. When I asked him if he wished to represent India at the Olympics, he replied, “I want to win an Olympic medal in judo, not just participate.” His ambition is unsurprising, given that the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Judo Federation…

Le Canard does not publish ads, has a sparse online presence, and is collectively owned by its staff—characteristics that distinguish it from virtually all other French outlets. On 1 February, Le Canard Enchaîné, a weekly satirical newspaper in France, ran a characteristically tongue-in-cheek front-page headline: “I Keep Telling You That Penelope Hasn’t Done Anything!” The headline was a fictional quote from François Fillon, a former prime minister of France, and at the time, a prominent presidential candidate in the country’s upcoming general election. (In late April, Fillon lost in the first round of the election.) Le Canard‘s headline was alluding to an explosive story that had broken the previous week revealing that Fillon’s wife, Penelope, had been officially employed—and handsomely paid—as her husband’s parliamentary assistant for years, despite…

OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES, Afghanistan has been visually over-represented. Cast against a striking landscape, images of war, poverty and inequality in the country have filled the pages of international newspapers and magazines. In 2011, Lorenzo Tugnoli, a freelance photojournalist, and I, an independent researcher and writer, started working together, looking for an unexplored narrative space within Afghanistan. The result of this collaboration is The Little Book of Kabul: a book that depicts a portrait of Kabul through the daily activities of artists who live and work in the city. The Little Book of Kabul was released in 2014, in a limited-edition print run of 500 signed copies. The research and production for it was partly supported by a crowd-funding campaign. We self-published the book to guarantee our full autonomy…

Art Graphic Prints by Gaganendranath Tagore, Ramkinkar Baij, Mukul Dey & Rani Chanda 22 APRIL TO 30 JUNE GALERIE 88, KOLKATA Galerie 88 will host an exhibition of some of the most talented printmakers in Indian history, with works on display that will cover a range of different print formats: lithographs, woodcut prints, and hand-etchings. From the coloured and almost comical caricatures of Indian society by Gaganendranath Tagore, to the stark, thick black lines of Rani Chanda, the exhibition promises to exquisitely showcase the versatile art of printmaking. For more information, write to mail@galerie88.in Music Lucy Rose: Cinema Tour 23 TO 27 MAY MULTIPLE VENUES, DELHI, MUMBAI & BANGALORE Following performances in Chile and Mexico, the indie-folk musician and former vocalist of the Bombay Bicycle Club, Lucy Rose,…

“My husband used to say that Freemasonry had to do with ‘making good men better,’ and I thought, why just men? I want to do that,” Sadhana said. In the winter of 2012, Sadhana Rao disembarked from her flight in Delhi after having been to London for the third time in 18 months. At the end of her final trip, she had been initiated as a Master Mason into the Honorable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons, or HFAF: a women’s-only Masonic fraternity from London. For the next five years, however, she would remain the only woman Freemason in India. “I remember that feeling of excitement, and how different I felt before and after the initiation ceremony,” she told me when I visited her apartment in Gurugram this March. “I also remember…

Though the results of the panchayat elections still left the BJP considerably behind the BJD, they pointed to gradual erosion in support for the BJD and an upswing in the BJP’s fortunes. An important part of the BJP’s strategy to win Odisha has been the building up of the union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan as the chief ministerial face for the next election. Customers at a popular bookshop in Bhubaneswar had a pleasant surprise recently when the chief minister of Odisha, Naveen Patnaik, arrived there in the company of his elder sister, the well-known writer Gita Mehta, to buy some books. The elaborate security entourage that has become such an integral part of Patnaik’s persona was conspicuous by its absence. It was perhaps this that encouraged an excited young…

ON 2 OCTOBER 2014 , just months into his job as prime minister, Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission, the most ambitious cleanliness campaign in Indian history. Not by coincidence, this was the very date of the birth anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi. Modi, in dramatic style, appeared before a battery of cameras to sweep the courtyard of a police station in a Dalit residential colony in central Delhi. “A clean India would be the best tribute India could pay to Mahatma Gandhi on his one-hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary in 2019,” he said, promising to transform sanitation and waste-management in the country by that day. Since the launch, Modi has put enormous effort into making the Swachh Bharat Mission a flagship programme of his rule. He spoke of it in his…

FOR YEARS, SIX SHORT STORIES, written in Kannada, about a man and his travails in rural Karnataka and Bengaluru, sat in the writer Vasudhendra Shroff’s work folder on his computer. From time to time, he would reread them and edit the prose for clarity, but Vasudhendra, a successful Bengalurubased writer of short stories, essays and novels, who goes only by his first name, did not dare to send them out for publication. He had little doubt that the stories in his folder would be accepted for publication by a Kannada newspaper or magazine. He had, nevertheless, a lingering sense of foreboding. The stories were semi-autobiographical, derived from his experience as a closeted gay man. Though the process of writing the stories had felt cathartic, they were also intensely personal. Publishing…