Innehållsförteckning för February 2016 från The Caravan

Safia supported their family with money she made teaching Urdu at a college, all the while raising their two young sons. On the evening of 8 January, in the Bhendi Bazaar neighbourhood of south Mumbai, the grounds of a government school bustled not with schoolchildren, but with people attending an Urdu language and literature festival. About 400 people sat in white plastic chairs facing a large stage, and many more watched from the balconies of a nearby building. At 7 pm, an unlikely trio of performers took the stage: Neha Sharad, a television actress; Suhail Warsi, a poet; and Pooja Gaitonde, a singer. That night’s event celebrated a series of letters that Safia Akhtar, an Urdu scholar, wrote to her husband, Jan Nisar Akhtar, himself an Urdu scholar, poet and…

But why is a Nobel laureate and a world-famous leader so keen on people in her constituency learning how to make French bread and gin and tonics? When Myanmar’s most famous politician, Aung San Suu Kyi, spends the night in her constituency, Kawhmu, she sleeps in a fake hotel. The layout looks real enough. There is a spacious reception area with seating. Above a check-in desk, there are clocks set to various time zones all over the world. One afternoon in December, I was given a tour of the place, including Suu Kyi’s room, which had a flat-screen television mounted on the wall. “Last night, she slept here,” my guide told me. Suu Kyi had left several hours earlier to lead a highly publicised trash-collection campaign, organised by her party.…

The Nairobi ministerial meeting served as a reminder of India’s increasingly difficult position within the WTO, where it faces a dizzying matrix of national interests and international pressures. On 15 December 2015, representatives of the 164 member states of the World Trade Organisation gathered in Nairobi for a ministerial conference—a biennial gathering, and the group’s highest decision-making forum. This was the tenth such meeting in the history of the organisation, which was founded in 1995 to arbitrate in matters of international commerce and to progressively lower trade barriers—such as import tariffs and domestic subsidies—in pursuit of an open global market. Writing in the Financial Times before the conference, Michael Froman, the United States’ top representative on trade policy, expressed his conviction that the meeting would “mark the end of an…

SOME OF THE MOST CURIOUS LANDMARKS on the roadsides of Taiwan are small, brightly lit glass stands that sell betel nut, a mild stimulant. What they are perhaps most famous for are their saleswomen, called betel nut girls, or, by another common translation of the local term for them, “betel nut beauties.” These young women stand in the glass enclosures wearing revealing clothes to attract customers, who are primarily working-class men. In his series A Moment of Beauty: Betel Nut Girls, the photographer Chin-pao Chen captures documentary portraits of more than 100 such saleswomen. Chen, who is from Taiwan himself, was 26 years old when he began shooting Moment of Beauty, in 1996. He travelled throughout the island over six years, photographing the women in their workplaces. “Most girls would…

Magnetic Fields 18 TO 20 DECEMBER ALSISAR MAHAL, ALSISAR The third edition of this arts and music festival took place in a seventeenth-century palace turned hotel in Alsisar—a small Rajasthani town surrounded by desert. This setting proved a grand backdrop for visual artists such as Anjali Mody, Shiv Suleman and Shreya Oza, whose installations brought to life the festival’s otherworldly theme: “As the Bedouins Traverse Through the Five Elements.” The weekend’s musical lineup featured acts such as Ratatat, Garden City Movement, Shigeto and DJ Koze. Attendees also enjoyed a plethora of recreational activities, including yoga sessions in the morning, treasure hunts during the day, and star-gazing from the palace rooftop at night.…

Conversation Chambers Museum Bhavan 18 DECEMBER TO 30 JUNE KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART, DELHI The guide to Conversation Chambers Museum Bhavan introduces the piece as “a living exhibition that will wax and wane with the lunar cycle.” While the connection to the moon may be poetic exaggeration, it is clear that the artist Dayanita Singh’s exhibit was built to accommodate change and manipulation. Museum Bhavan is a group of large structures composed entirely of framed photographs—all taken by Singh. The artist also periodically rearranges the photographs into forms such as columns, walls, facades and even doors. When I visited the exhibit, it was divided into several installations named the File Museum, the Museum of Little Ladies, and the Museum of Chance—each distinguished by the type of photography it showcased.…

THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE LEADER Yasser Arafat, wearing his hallmark black-and-white keffiyeh, sits next to Abdel Monem Rifai, the prime minister of Jordan, at a meeting of a Palestinian student organisation in Amman, Jordan, on 12 August 1969. Both men had recently ascended to positions of power. In February of 1969, Arafat was elected the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, a dominant force in the struggle against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Since the Palestinians experienced a harrowing defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, the PLO and affiliated resistance groups had begun to employ guerrilla tactics against Israel from a functionally autonomous territory within Jordan. The month after Arafat began leading the PLO, Rifai, who had held several international diplomatic positions, was appointed the prime minister of Jordan by…

Children born of Nepali women and Indian men are often regarded as “Indians” who jeopardise the national fabric; many perceive the government’s strict approach as an attempt to forestall this threat. On a morning in early October last year, 42-year-old Deepti Gurung headed to the administrative office of her ward in Lalitpur, a municipality in the southern part of the Kathmandu valley. Her 20-year-old daughter, Neha, accompanied her, while her second child, 15-year-old Nikita, was at school. Deepti, a petite woman with long hair pulled into a tight plait, raised the two girls by herself. Their father abandoned them when Nikita was born. Because of their father’s absence, Nepal refuses to recognise Neha or Nikita as citizens—even though Deepti is a Nepali national, and both children were born on Nepali…

IT IS DIFFICULT FOR AN OUTSIDER to think of Karachi and not immediately call up images of violence, death and victims. Scrolling through headlines about the city over the past year is a macabre exercise. In April, Sabeen Mahmood, an activist and intellectual, was shot dead outside a cultural centre she founded. In May, gunmen attacked a bus, leaving 43 dead. A heat wave in June, during the holy month of Ramzan, killed more than a thousand. In August, Shafqat Hussain—tortured at the age of 16 into confessing to the murder of a boy over a decade earlier—was executed. Amid these spectacles of death, where are the stories of the living? Karachi is, after all, a modern port city of some 20 million people, Pakistan’s largest metropolis, and the country’s…

In the opening sequence of the 2012 film Skyfall, the protagonist, James Bond, loses a fight on top of a moving train and falls into a canyon from a tall railway bridge. While the duel ends badly for Bond, it has worked wonders for Hacikiri village in southern Turkey, home to the grand structure in the scene—the Varda Railway Bridge, built in the Ottoman era. For the past few years, the village has seen a large influx of tourists, who travel to appreciate the bridge. If not for bureaucratic resistance, that scene—and the resultant spike in tourism—could have taken place in India. Initially, the Skyfall team entered into negotiations with the then railway minister Dinesh Trivedi, hoping to shoot the scene on a railway bridge in Goa. Trivedi, in a…

The NSG’s poor showing in the Pathankot operations exposes basic flaws in its conception, charter and functioning. On 5 January, a day after Indian security forces had killed six militants who attacked the Pathankot Air Force Station, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar held a press conference at the base. In the course of it, Parrikar blamed “bad luck” for some of the deaths of Indian personnel during the attack. It was a surprising statement, since, in many ways, the security forces had been fortunate in this instance. Before they entered the base, the militants abducted and then released the Punjab Police officer Salwinder Singh and his companions, leading to a security alert. Reacting to intelligence, the government deployed India’s premier counter-terrorist force, the National Security Guard, or the NSG, to the…

Bone marrow (blood stem cell) transplantation started in India in 1985. However, just about 50 Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) centers have come up since then. Fortis Memorial Research Institute is one of the top centers for BMT for children. It is among the top 10 centers in India, having performed more than 100 transplants. Fortis also routinely performs haploidentical BMT. In 2013, we established one of the first pediatric bone marrow transplant programs in the country. Today, the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant unit at FMRI is a leading national center, providing outstanding care to children, adolescents, and young adults in need of a blood stem cell transplant procedure. CARE DELIVERY The Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Program is directed by Dr Satya Prakash Yadav, a renowned BMT physician and expert in…

SWIMMER AMONG THE STARS Kanishk Tharoor Kanishk Tharoor’s debut collection of short stories lives up to the promise of his previous fiction and non-fiction writings, which have attracted recognition and awards. The stories take the reader on imaginative and surreal romps, following subjects such as a village about to be demolished by an invading army; a cook using precious stones to spice up his dishes; and an elephant being transported, as a diplomatic gift, from Kerala to a Moroccan palace. ALEPH BOOK COMPANY, 208 PAGES, R 499 MOTHER, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY LOOKING FOR LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS OF MANIPUR Anubha Bhonsle The Delhi-based journalist Anubha Bhonsle, who has reported extensively from India’s north-east, covers the modern political history of Manipur in this book, drawing on extensive interviews with diverse subjects,…

h.g. 8 TO 11 JANUARY MAX MUELLER BHAVAN, BENGALURU Part installation and part theatre production, h.g.—conceived by the experimental artist duo Trickster-p—was based on the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. In an effort to challenge conventional boundaries between performer and spectator, audience members were invited to create their own stories as they walked through nine rooms, listening to recorded narrations via headphones. The set brought out the darkest elements of the children’s story using a few essential props: bones, a forest, the witch’s house, and some others. But it remained minimal and sophisticated, free to accommodate the imaginations of participants.…

International Theatre Festival of Kerala 10 TO 16 JANUARY THRISSUR The eighth edition of the International Theatre Festival of Kerala, themed “Body Political,” explored questions of power, government, society and the body. Held across six different venues in Thrissur, the festival comprised 20 theatre performances from 11 countries. It began with a stunning performance of the dance piece Sharira, the last creation of the legendary choreographer Chandralekha, which celebrates the sensuality and spirituality of the human body. Dee-pan Sivaraman’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam was also a major highlight; enacted in an open-air theatre, it was performed by artists from Trikaripur village, in Kerala. Also moving was Colour of Trans 2.0, in which transgender Indian actors played largely autobiographical roles. International performances also made a strong showing; Baling, a documentary-style play in which…