Innehållsförteckning för December-16 från The Caravan

The other driver heavily criticised the railways, claiming it is “spending a fortune to run a service that is serving none.” The train’s annual costs, he said, add up to T 1 crore. At 6.30 pm on a Thursday in October, traffic was at a roaring standstill at central Patna’s Hartali Chowk railway crossing. Sitting in a shared autorickshaw alongside five other passengers, I was getting anxious. In 15 minutes, I had to board a train out of Patna Junction railway station, two kilometres away. Frustrated, I got out of the autorickshaw. As I waded through traffic, I struck up a conversation with a man on a motorbike, who suggested that if I took the train that would soon pass by, I might reach Patna Junction on time. Soon, a…

Rehman Azhar, one of the few Pakistani journalists who went to India to cover Modi’s election campaign, said, “Hatred for India sells in Pakistan just as well as hatred for Pakistan sells in India.” In December 2015, when the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, made a surprise visit to attend the wedding of the granddaughter of the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, Pakistani media and analysts were delighted. It was seen as a positive development, building on the bonhomie that had been established when Sharif attended Modi’s swearing-in, in 2014. Much of the media coverage, including by television channels such as Geo TV and Dunya News, focussed on the possibilities of peace between the two countries. The columnist Mosharraf Zaidi tweeted optimistically to discourage commentators’ negative remarks—of which there were…

Abeyance A state of temporary disuse or suspension. The condition of everyday life in a country where most cash has been taken out of use. A cessation. Also a word by which the government may control the broadcasting rights of major news channels, should those channels be suspected of endangering national security. Usage: “In early November, the ministry of information and broadcasting held in abeyance the order to suspend transmission of NDTV India.” Blocker, Ad- Generic term for browser scripts used to aid internet usage without the interference of ads that pop up, drop down, scroll past, spill over, besiege, strafe, split from nave to chaps or otherwise intersect with content. Bugbear of India’s major news entities, including Times Internet and the Indian Express Group, both of which started screening…

RAJDEO RANJAN was a man of habit. He liked to go on a long walk every morning, before meeting a few friends at a popular chai stall behind Siwan’s city council building, at about half past eight. He would stay there for the next two hours or so, reading the papers and talking news and politics. Then he would head home to bathe and have lunch, before leaving for work on his motorcycle. He normally reached his office, at the Babuniya Modh square in the central part of the city, by noon, and spent the afternoon and early evening putting together news dispatches and handling paperwork for Hindustan, the Hindi national daily where he served as Siwan district’s bureau chief. By half past seven, he would send the day’s stories…

Hysteria was at its highest by the time The Year of the Runaways was published: immigrants were being accused of stealing jobs, houses, businesses and welfare benefits. IT BEGINS BRISKLY, with a recognisable intimacy: a man is getting ready to welcome a woman to a flat. But things aren’t as they seem. He doesn’t stay in the flat; he has rented it for her to move into. He shows her around when she arrives—like a broker, or perhaps a friend. The rooms are bare and cold, but she says they are fine. A bus goes to town from the bottom of the hill nearby, he tells her. “And that hill will keep me in shape,” she says. “And this isn’t an area with lots of apneh,”…

LETTER FROM TURKEY  On 4 October, a police squad barged into the Istanbul studio of IMC TV—a nationwide Turkish channel. Utku Zirig, the presenter of that day’s programme, did not stop the broadcast. In a video recording of the event, posted to Youtube on the same day, Zirig narrates the disruption with a steady voice. The video shows many members of his production team filming the action with their mobile phones, and following the police around as they shut down the channel. Zirig’s co-host, IMC TV’s general manager, can be seen shaking his arm frantically, inviting the police into the studio and addressing them with a phrase President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had uttered months earlier to condemn terrorists: “For demons, long live hell.” On 15 July, a faction of Turkey’s…

In 1999, Vajpayee travelled to Lahore on Sharif’s invitation with a 150-strong media contingent—Sharif again played the man of peace and won them over by quoting from Vajpayee’s poem ‘ Ab jang na hone denge’ (We will not allow war). When Nawaz Sharif was elected the prime minister of Pakistan in June 2013, Indian media outlets were largely optimistic about the development, particularly after reports emerged that he had invited the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to his swearing-in. The Hindu said Sharif “had vowed to revive the peace process which was interrupted by the then military ruler Pervez Musharraf.” The Indian Express said Sharif “has reached out to India,” while the Hindustan Times said “India has genuine reason to be pleased” by the election’s results. The…

{ONE} THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY gathered for its twenty-fifth national executive meeting in the very last days of 2005, at Mumbai’s Bandra Reclamation Ground—the very place where the party was launched a quarter-century ago. To mark the jubilee, three days of grand celebrations were planned to follow the two-day meeting. Yet an air of gloom hung over the run-up to the event. The BJP had lost national power after a shock defeat to the Congress in the previous year’s general election, and, more recently, it had performed below expectations in state elections in Bihar, Haryana and Jharkhand. The party’s two main leaders, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, were ageing, and there was a sense that they no longer appealed to an increasingly young electorate. Advani was also facing…

On 29 July 2016, the journalist Sumegha Gulati died at the age of 26, after suffering for four years from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma—a type of blood cancer. Gulati did not stop working, and produced several pieces of journalism during her illness, two of which were published by The Caravan. In her last three months, she worked on a story for this magazine on cancer treatment in India, based on her own time as a patient. She could not finish the project, but managed to record a part of her experience. This essay is an edited version of that record, which Gulati’s family recovered from her computer after her death. The drawings accompanying the text were made by Gulati during her days in the hospital. CANCER ONE ON A FEBRUARY MORNING in…

UTTARA THE BOOK OF ANSWERS Valmiki Translated by Arshia Sattar Uttara Kanda is the final, and perhaps most problematic, of the seven books of the Valmiki Ramayana. In it, Rama banishes his beloved Sita into the forest; he kills Shambuka, a man practising austerities thought to be above his caste; and he is reunited with his sons during a sacrifice in which he loses his wife forever. The scholar Arshia Sattar’s translation captures the delights of the original text in all its detail—frenzied battles, simmering intrigue, lustful demons and the tragic end to Sita’s story. The translator’s accompanying essays explore the destructive consequences of Rama’s actions and the complex moral universe of the Ramayana. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, 304 PAGES, R 349 EXILE A MEMOIR Taslima Nasrin Taslima Nasrin, a…

“Even though my felony was 20 years ago, I can’t vote,” one Floridian told me. “I was a huge Hillary Clinton fan, and I wish I could vote for her.” LETTER FROM THE US Since he was born, 35-year-old Tyler J Markwart has struggled to eat: he has liver and digestive-tract disorders that cause him severe nausea and intestinal pain. When he was a teenager, Mark-wart discovered that marijuana could alleviate these symptoms, easing his discomfort and boosting his appetite. The drug, whose recreational usage is illegal in most of the United States, became a life-altering medicine for him. But that medicine also got Markwart into trouble. Over a phone interview in November, he told me, “In 2010, I was the first person in Washington State to receive a…

The ministry of information and broadcasting has done nothing to curb, monitor or bring transparency to the existing political ownership of cable distribution, as also to political ownership in the wider media industry. In 2011, Day and Night News, a small television channel broadcasting in Punjab and critical of the state government, approached the Competition Commission of India. It alleged that four companies—Hathway Sukhamrit Cable and Datacom, Creative Cable Network, Fastway Transmissions, and Wire and Wireless (India)—had formed a cartel to corner an oligopolistic share of the cable-distribution market in the state, and were refusing to carry its broadcasts on their networks. The CCI accepted that there was a case of market domination, and fined the cable firms R 8 crore. In 2015, a group of owners of small cable…

ON 24 APRIL 2012 , MXMINDIA, a Mumbai-based website that publishes news, research and analysis on the Indian media, carried an opinion piece by Peter Mukerjea, the former CEO of Star TV India. Peter began on a light note, talking about former colleagues and friends in Mumbai who had, the previous week, attended Goafest, which describes itself as a “premier advertising, media and marketing festival.” The industry professionals would be “back at their desks catching up with the backlog of work and the start of a new week,” Peter wrote, some of them still “nursing hangovers” and some “recovering from other forms of stimulation, no doubt.” Peter then addressed the main subject of his column: the Leveson inquiry into the practices of the British press, including of News International, a…

THE REPUBLIC OF SOMALILAND, in the Horn of Africa, has many of the trappings of a modern democracy, including a constitution, a judiciary and an elected government. However, it has not been recognised as a state by the United Nations or any other intergovernmental organisation. Still widely considered a part of war-torn Somalia, the region is, according to the Dutch photographer Chantal Heijnen, a “democratic enigma within what is essentially a failed state.” The area that comprises Somaliland today was a protectorate of Great Britain starting in the late 1880s, through 1960, when the region declared independence from colonial rule as the State of Somaliland. But, only five days after that, the state merged with the neighbouring territory of Italian Somaliland to form the Republic of Somalia. The newly united…

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 15 DECEMBER TO 22 DECEMBER, CHENNAI Held as part of the Chennai International Film Festival, the main theme of the event will be the work of the late Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, who passed away earlier this year. Wajda’s notable works, including Man of Iron and Promised Land, will be screened in new digitally restored versions, along with the work of other notable Polish directors, such as Krzysztof Zanussi, Jerzy Kawalerowicz and others. For more information, call 044-28212652.…