Innehållsförteckning för November 2017 från The Caravan

On an evening in early September, in a modest-sized auditorium called “Nirvana Hall” in McLeod Ganj, Lobsang Wangyal stood at a podium before an audience of about forty people. Wearing a crisp white chupa—a traditional Tibetan top—he began by addressing the audience in Tibetan, then switched to English. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to the Tibetan Music Awards, 2017.” The awards, which honour musicians of Tibetan origin, are held in McLeod Ganj every two years. Wangyal, the 47-year-old founder of the event, has produced eight editions of it, starting in 2003. Winners are decided based on online voting by the public—774 votes had been cast this year, Wangyal told the audience. The 2017 awards were cosponsored by Laughing Buddha Music, a New York-based record company. Dharamshala, of which McLeod…

“Fudging” of box-office collections is an age-old practice in India. The reported box-office figures of Bollywood have long been dispiritingly unreliable. In October 2015, representatives of Indian movie exhibitors—owners or heads of companies that operate multiplexes and single-screen theatres—gathered for a lavish lunch meeting at the JW Marriott Hotel in Mumbai’s Juhu area. Every theatre owner, big or small, had been invited. The host that day was Rentrak, a global media-measurement and research company headquartered in the United States, which had announced that it would be opening an India office in Hyderabad. Rentrak calculates, among other things, box-office figures for Hollywood and other film industries, and claims to track 95 percent of the international box office. It had chosen the entertainment-industry veteran Rajkumar Akella to head its Indian subsidiary. At…

Government of India has announced a massive recapitalization plan of Rs. 2.11 lakh crores, spread over the next 2 years. A sum of Rs. 1.35 lakh crores will be raised through recapitalization bonds and the remainder will be done through budgetary support & market issuances by banks themselves. This move will be positive for all corporate funding banks and go a long way to resolve the stressed assets problem in the economy. This is in line with the framework that we have been highlighting since the past few years on the investment opportunity in the financial sector. It goes as follows: Banking sector and our views on investment opportunity in this sector is along the framework of Hyman Minsky (a famous economist) to understand credit cycles According to this hypothesis,…

ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, in Old Delhi, the pavements of the neighbourhood of Daryaganj and the thoroughfare of Nai Sarak are transformed into one of the largest book markets in India. All kinds of books eventually reach the footpath stalls here. I once found an out-of-print copy of Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977, for a pittance amid piles of test-preparation books. Most of the books here arrive in bulk, having been discarded by their owners and lugged away by kabadiwalas. Pocket books, however, have the footpaths as their principal address. Most are published and sold locally, and are rarely found in bookshops. The Sunday market in Old Delhi can be seen as a footpath archive of the Indian pocket-book industry. These cheap, colourful books have…

IN NOVEMBER 1913 , women made their first appearance in Indian cinema with the film Mohini Bhasmasur. Directed by the Marathi filmmaker Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, it featured the Marathi actor Durgabai Kamat, and her daughter Kamlabai Gokhale, who was 14 years old at the time. Mohini Bhasmasur is a silent film based on the myth of the destruction of the demon Bhasmasur by Mohini, Vishnu’s female avatar. In the story, Shiva granted Bhasmasur the power to turn people into ash by touching their heads. When Bhasmasur threatened to use his new-found ability against Shiva, Vishnu assumed the form of Mohini and enchanted Bhasmasur, coaxing him to dance and match her every move. She placed a hand on her head, and Bhasmasur, in imitating her, reduced himself to ashes. In the…

One day in the early 1990s, Mohsin Ikram coaxed the watchman at Mohatta Palace—the former residence of Fatima Jinnah, the youngest sister and closest confidante of Muhammad Ali Jinnah—to let him in. The palace is one of the most striking buildings in Karachi, with turrets and domes made of pink and yellow stone, but it lay empty and abandoned at the time. Fatima’s clothes, Ikram said, were still hanging in a bedroom cupboard, and some of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s were in a suitcase nearby. The watchman told him he could take as many pieces of clothing as he wished, as long as he paid him 100 Pakistani rupees per item. But Ikram had come to see the cars: a 1966 Mercedes, parked in the shade of a tree and, inside…

ON A COOL, BREEZY EVENING in mid 2017, I was shown into a carpeted tent in Mumbai’s famed Yash Raj Films Studios. The tent was set up in a far corner of the sprawling complex, next to the vanity van of the man I was there to interview: Salman Khan, the Hindi-film superstar, who, along with Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, has dominated the industry for nearly three decades. I sat at a long table and waited for him. I had lost track of time when, suddenly, I sensed a shift in the air and looked up from my phone. Salman had entered and seated himself on a chair across from me. A group of five or six people orbited him—entering the tent, asking him a question, exiting, taking…

ON THE EVENING of 19 February 2017, some of the biggest celebrities in Malayalam cinema gathered at the Durbar Hall grounds in Kochi. The property is commonly used to host cultural events, including film promotions and award nights, but on this day, the meeting was about something far grimmer. It had been called to protest an incident that had shocked the Kerala film fraternity, and revealed some of its deepest fault lines. Among those present were high-profile directors such as Kamal and Lal, and the actors Mammootty, Dileep and Manju Warrier. “It is with a lot of sadness and even more anger that we have come together here,” Warrier began, when it was her turn to speak. Visibly shaken, she continued, “I don’t think it’s possible to express through words…

MRS OSMOND John Banville Henry James’s classic novel The Portrait of A Lady, about an independent woman’s experience in an abusive marriage, ends ambiguously, leaving readers unsure whether the protagonist, Isabel Osmond, leaves her husband. Mrs Osmond is framed as a sequel, in which Isabel travels across Europe and tries to decide between pursuing independence and sticking to her duty. At one level an exploration of character, this novel is also a tribute to James’s style, which Banville makes his own through unspooling sentences that indicate minute changes in Isabel’s temperament. VIKING, 384 PAGES, R 599 WATERCOLOURS A STORY FROM AUSCHWITZ Lidia Ostalowska Translated by Sean Gasper Bye A Polish journalist chronicles the life of Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt, a Czech Jewish artist who painted scenes from the Disney film Snow White…

An unusual emblem entered Nepal’s political iconography early this August. In Bharatpur, supporters of the southern city’s new mayor, Renu Dahal, sewed together the flags of the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre)—stars and stripes in red and white in the first case, and a hammer and sickle in white on red in the other—and paraded in celebration. Dahal, the daughter of the CPN(MC) leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, won after a partial rerun of an earlier local-body election. The first, disputed run of the Bharatpur vote was held in May; CPN(MC) activists interrupted counting to tear up ballots. Prachanda was then the prime minister, at the head of a coalition between the CPN(MC) and the Congress, and, in keeping with the conditions…

IN AN IMAGE CAPTURED by the Spanish artist Laia Abril, a white coat-hanger is pictured against a grey background. While it might appear to be an innocuous household object, the coat-hanger is a frequently used symbol for self-induced abortions, conducted by inserting the metal wire up the cervix and damaging the foetus. For the first showing of Abril’s work On Abortion, in 2016, at a photography festival in Arles, France, she transformed the clinical two-dimensionality of this photograph into a disturbing multisensory experience. A dense pile of mangled coat-hangers lay in the centre of a room, assuming an almost sculpture-like quality. Viewers encountered the coat-hangers repeatedly while exploring the exhibition, their menacing pointed ends serving as a reminder of the danger that women face if they are forced to…

Art The Curious Seeker 21 SEPTEMBER TO 30 NOVEMBER DAG MODERN, DELHI The Curious Seeker is a retrospective on the artist Madhvi Parekh, comprising works that represent each phase of her five-decade career and highlighting such things as her roots in folk tradition and the influence of the Swiss German artist Paul Klee on her early work. Hailing from a small village in Gujarat, Parekh was introduced to Western artists by her husband, the artist Manu Parekh. The exhibition is accompanied by a book that contextualises and traces the evolution of her work. For more information, write to ujjala.gupta@vty.co.in Theatre Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream 12 NOVEMBER THE MUMBAI ASSEMBLY, MUMBAI This play, based on Canadian writer James Alan Gardner’s story with…