Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i The Caravan

On a Saturday morning in September, around 20 people assembled in a room at Khoj International Artists’ Association—a not-for-profit organisation that promotes alternative arts—in a narrow alley in south Delhi’s Khirki Extension. As sunlight streamed in through the large windows, the group, which consisted mostly of women, sat in rows and typed hurriedly on their laptops. A woman, who was walking around and supervising the writers, paused to address the room. “No copy-pasting—every piece of information has to be rephrased,” she said. Everyone present was part of a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, an editing session where anyone can be invited to create pages or revise existing ones on the voluntarily edited online encyclopaedia. The theme, women in Indian contemporary art, was chosen by Khoj and Feminism in India, or FII—a digital feminist…

{ONE} AS AMIT SHAH, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, prepared for a three-day visit to Bengaluru in August, the party’s Karnataka unit went into a state of nervous excitement. The BJP’s chances of defeating the incumbent Congress in the state’s assembly election, then roughly half a year away, appeared to be waning, and Shah was to get the party’s electoral machinery rolling in earnest. In anticipation, a senior BJP politician from Karnataka told us, officials of the party’s Karnataka unit drafted an itinerary for Shah, and sent it up the chain for approval. Among the things they proposed was for the BJP president to officiate at an induction ceremony for Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an independent member of the Rajya Sabha from Karnataka. Chandrasekhar, the BJP politician said, was ready…

ANWAR RAZA CAN TALK animatedly for hours about his reporting adventures, local gossip, and the corrupt state of politics and the media in Uttar Pradesh. Even as he holds forth, his phone is likely to beep every few minutes and he is likely to interrupt himself regularly to field or make calls. His job demands it. Raza is a 27-year-old journalist based in the district of Banda, a place where the pace of life might be slow but news certainly breaks fast. He cannot afford to switch off his phone or keep it aside for too long, because Raza is part of a growing breed of journalists who conduct much of their trade on their phones. WhatsApp serves as a vital medium for exchanging text and visuals, keeping tabs on…

WE THAT ARE YOUNG Preti Taneja This new novel by the British-Asian writer Preti Taneja is an adaptation of King Lear situated in contemporary India. A parable about greed and wealth, it depicts a Punjabi business family in Delhi and uses “Hinglish” borrowed from Bollywood films. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 560 PAGES, R 599 THE WORLD GOES ON László Krasznahorkai Translated by John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet and Georges Szirtes In his novels and short stories, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has consistently explored post-Communist society in metaphysical terms, through philosophical writing that mines the details of daily experience to explore the larger human condition. In this latest collection of short stories, set in Varanasi, Shanghai and several other places, Krasznahorkai reflects on the transcendental nature of time and space. NEW DIRECTIONS,…

On a Sunday afternoon in July, a fellow reporter and I were on our way to Sakhuapani, a sleepy and isolated village about 170 kilometres from Ranchi, Jharkhand’s capital. Cell-phone coverage is sporadic here, and the nearest town, Netarhat, often referred to as the “Queen of the Chota Nagpur plateau,” is about 15 kilometres away. As our sedan turned onto a desolate and narrow road, it was blocked by a row of parked lorries. We had to ask the drivers to shift them and let us pass through to get to the village. It had rained incessantly during our three-and-a-half-hour drive from Ranchi, and it was still drizzling as we approached the village. Sakhuapani is inhabited primarily by the Asuran Adivasi community believed to be India’s first metallurgists. The Asur,…

ON A CLEAR EVENING at Salar de Uyuni—the world’s largest salt flat, located high in the alpine desert of the Bolivian Andes, and the brightest object on earth when viewed from space—the setting sun cast a huge shadow over a thin layer of rainwater covering the flat. During the day, hundreds of trucks commuted along the flat’s southern rim, while employees of the state-owned mining company Corporación Minera de Bolivia, or Comibol, drilled the salt with enormous rigs. Under large quantities of magnesium and potassium lay the mineral they were after: lithium. Demand for lithium—a silver metal that has become an essential raw material for electric cars and the batteries of mobile phones and laptops—is booming. In a report last year, the global investment bank Goldman Sachs called it the…

Exhibition Seeking a Poetry of the Real: The Political Works of K G Subramanyan 11 NOVEMBER TO 30 DECEMBER ART HERITAGE GALLERY, DELHI Seeking a Poetry of the Real is a tribute to the late artist KG Subramanyan. The exhibition collates Subramanyan’s work from the late 1960s onwards, and focusses on his response to the political upheavals that impacted the country at the time. It reflects the artist’s concern with the political misrepresentations of India’s culture and civilisation. Subramanyan experimented with various mediums, and his art drew from Indian traditions, folklore and myth. For more information, write to tariqallana@artheritagegallery.com Film Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival 14 TO 18 DECEMBER QFX KUMARI HALL, KATHMANDU, NEPAL The fifteenth edition of the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival, organised by the Himal…

SOMEWHERE IN A UNIVERSE FAR, far away, a wall starts to crumble, and death begins to creep southwards into a land riven by strife and pride. Somewhere in Britain, a dark wizard has gathered his forces, mustering an army that will hold a magical world in thrall. And somewhere in the future, fertile women are enslaved, their bodies turned to the service of a god-fearing state for whom children are the most precious resource. To those who are avid fans of fantasy and science fiction, these are familiar stories, conveyed in the pages of A Song of Ice and Fire—the book series on which the television show A Game of Thrones is based—the Harry Potter books, and the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, respectively. To those who know little of these…