Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2017 i The Caravan

Because of the language barrier, “one day’s work sometimes takes ten days,” Tarikh said. “Nobody here understands me as they do back home.” When I walked into Asharq al-Awsat on a morning in early July, a man named Anas was praising Abdullah, the restaurant’s head chef, for helping him feel like he was back in his native Syria. Anas’s praise was prompted by Abdullah’s kibbeh labaniyeh—a yoghurt-based meat dish that is a staple of Arab cooking. Like many of the guests who frequent Asharq al-Awsat, Anas was receiving treatment at a medical centre nearby. Over the past several years, Sarita Vihar has become a hub for medical tourists from all over the world, especially West Asia, who come to receive affordable medical treatment at nearby private hospitals. While here, many…

Access to developmental funds required maintaining friendly relations with the very state government that the movement’s leaders officially challenged in order to demand Gorkhaland. In August, the Gorkhaland protests in Darjeeling entered their third month. They had begun in mid June, after fears spread that the state government would make the study of Bengali compulsory for school students in West Bengal, including in the Nepali-speaking areas administered by the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, or the GTA. After an initial protest directed specifically against the move, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, or GJM—the political party that controls the GTA—expanded the scope of the agitations by reviving a demand that has its roots in the twentieth century: that a slice of the northern part of West Bengal, including the districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong,…

Appointed by and answerable only to the prime minister, Ajit Doval heads the National Security Council, an advisory body that includes the ministers of home, finance, defence and external affairs. {ONE} “INDIA’S JAMES BOND” PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump addressed a joint press conference at the Rose Garden of the White House on the afternoon of 27 June. This followed the first meeting between the two leaders, and now each stood at a lectern with his prepared remarks. Trump addressed the audience first. “I’m proud to announce to the media, to the American people and to the Indian people, that Prime Minister Modi and I are world leaders in social media,” he said, drawing some laughter, before plunging into the usual diplomatic boilerplate. As Trump plodded…

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF IMPHAL, an abandoned red-brick house stands amid rice paddies, its front garden overgrown with weeds. It does not have a front door, just a chained gate, and its floors are made of concrete. The house looks like it is still being constructed, with pieces of wood, piles of garbage and other building materials lying around in it. Dirty footprints on the ground are the only signs that visitors frequent the decrepit structure. The house is a spot where injecting drug users in the Imphal area congregate. When I visited the place on a dusty morning in late May, I encountered a group of men and women of varying ages, lying down on the floor of a back room, which was littered with needles. Some were injecting…

THE RULER’S GAZE A STUDY OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA FROM A SAIDIAN PERSPECTIVE Arvind Sharma In 1978, Edward Said’s book Orientalism showed how Western scholarship legitimised colonial rule by creating an idea of the “Orient” as an exotic, irrational and uncivilised place. Almost four decades later, Arvind Sharma, a religious-studies professor, unifies three decades of Saidian studies of India to provide a comprehensive view of how colonial scholarship on India from the mid-nineteenth century onwards created an image of Indian society as backward, uncivilised and in decline, and thus legitimised British rule. HARPER COLLINS INDIA, 699 PAGES, R 432 VENGEANCE IS MINE, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH Eka Kurniawan This novel is the third by the Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan to be translated into English. While it lacks the monumental…

Boys in the Raju family are raised to practise bone-setting. “Only gents have a right to the hospital,” Kishore said. “Ladies do not even enter the hospital.” On a July morning in the town of Tirupattur, Tamil Nadu, a woman named Padmapriya fell down in her bathroom and fractured her wrist. Some of her neighbours brought her to a hospital in Puttur, a small town in southern Andhra Pradesh that is a four-hour drive from Tirupattur. In the hospital’s waiting area, I met Sheikh Kamal, a middle-aged philosophy teacher from Tirupattur, who had been the one to suggest that Padmapriya be brought to this hospital. Kamal told me he had first heard about the place after one of his relatives, a lorry driver, severely injured his leg in a road…

Imran Khan has in the past even referred to the Pakistani Taliban as “our estranged brothers” and recommended that they be permitted to open a political office. At the end of July, Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, resigned from his post following a supreme court ruling that disqualified him from office. He had been targeted over months of protests for alleged corruption, after reports about the Panama Papers in April 2016 revealed links between his family and several offshore companies. In November, the supreme court agreed to hold an inquiry into the allegations and, eight months later, Sharif became the second elected head of state—after Iceland’s prime minister—to fall from power as a result of the leaked documents. Among the most triumphant reactions after Sharif’s fall came from his rival…

The corporate sector of India has played a major role in driving the growth and development process of the Indian economy. The advent of Corporate Social Responsibility, which formalised initiatives taken by the corporate sector towards furthering social causes, ensures its consistent engagement with the upliftment of society. It is often said that “public enterprises without a plan can achieve something; a plan without public enterprises is likely to remain on paper.” As ‘extended arms of the government’, public enterprises are perhaps the most appropriate institutions that can assist the state in realising these ends. In the early stages of planning for development, the government would exercise strict control over private investments, paving the way for the dominance of the public sector in all areas of social and economic growth.…

Photography Indian Photography Festival The Indian Photography Festival, organised by the Light Craft Foundation every September, is a congregation of photography enthusiasts from around the globe. The photojournalist Reza Deghati, the documentary photographer Q Sakamaki, the fine-art photographer Cecilia Paredes and the photo editor Gurinder Osan will be among the speakers at the event. 21 SEPTEMBER TO 8 OCTOBER STATE GALLERY OF FINE ARTS, HYDERABAD For more information, please contact info@indianphotofest.com Art Reflections in Mercury The veteran Indian artist Jaideep Mehrotra will be presenting a solo exhibition after a hiatus of six years. Titled Reflections in Mercury, the exhibition will deploy a mixture of metal, paint and mixed media. While Mehrotra’s paintings have always been figurative, he steps off his beaten path and brings colour to abstract forms…

 On the evening of 13 January, Birna Brjansdottir—a 20-year-old woman who worked as a salesperson at a department store—went out with a friend to an indie bar in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland. Brjansdottir’s friend headed home at 2 am, but Brjansdottir wanted to stay out longer. Shortly after 5 am, she left the bar on her own. “Even if people can show that a crime happened, is this the price we want to pay for it?” Sigridur Andersen, Iceland’s justice minister, asked. After that, Brjansdottir was filmed by at least five CCTV cameras in the downtown area. In footage that would be viewed thousands of time in the coming weeks, she walks unsteadily down a well-lit street, bumps into a man, drops a few coins and almost falls over as she…

Even as the country has convulsed internally over the question of cattle slaughter, the government’s economic policies show that it recognises that bovine meat is an important part of the export economy. In mid August, news broke that more than 200 cows had starved to death in a shelter in Chhattisgarh owned by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader named Harish Verma. After the reports appeared, Verma protested that he had not received funds that the government had promised him for the shelter. But the irony could not have been starker. The BJP has long been opposed to cow slaughter, and the central government as well as the state governments that it heads have clamped down on it. The years since 2014, when the party came to power at the centre,…

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) came into existence in January, 1976 when Burmah-Shell was taken over by the Government of India. A Fortune Global 500 Company, BPCL is one of the premier integrated energy companies in India, engaged in the refining of crude oil and marketing of petroleum products, with a significant presence in the upstream and downstream sectors of the oil and gas industry. BPCL’s Refineries at Mumbai and Kochi, subsidiary Numaligarh Refinery Ltd.at Assam and joint venture Bina Refinery at Madhya Pradesh have a combined refining capacity of over 30 MMTPA. BPCL’s subsidiary, Bharat PetroResources Ltd. has acquired participating interests in 22 oil & gas blocks in India and abroad. BPCL markets its products through a robust marketing and distribution network comprising 14,015 Retail Outlets, 4701 LPG distributorships,…

MANI KAUL IS OFTEN REGARDED AS one of the foremost directors India has produced but he is also, in some ways, one of the best-kept secrets of Indian cinema. His films, though well received in the international film festival circuit, hardly saw a domestic theatrical release. When he died in 2011, there were moving obituaries from fellow filmmakers, students, artists, writers and film critics, attesting to the wide influence he has had on Indian aesthetic life. Yet, throughout his life, his films were also frequently critiqued by directors and reviewers as slow, obtuse or self-indulgent exercises that ignored the demands of the audience. To read Kaul’s essays and interviews now is to encounter the philosophical complexity that surrounded his idea of cinema—a cinema of the future that is perhaps only…