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11 may 2020

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LOCOMOTIF INDRAPRASTHA MUMBAI NOTEBOOK PANDEMIC VERSES APPRECIATION

Curse of the template By Virendra Kapoor By Anil Dharker By Dipankar Gupta Rishi Kapoor: The last romantic
By S Prasannarajan By Kaveree Bamzai

16 18 20 22

TOUCHSTONE SOFT POWER WHISPERER OPEN ESSAY

The code of money Why I admire By Jayanta Ghosal A time for ecosophy
By Keerthik Sasidharan Arnab Goswami By Aseem Shrivastava
By Makarand R Paranjape

Chronicles
26 THE POLITICS OF INFECTION
The campaign against the Government’s response to the pandemic
has borrowed from the playbook of Chinese propaganda but has hit a
wall in the trust Narendra Modi enjoys
By PR Ramesh and Ullekh NP

32 LESS IS MORE
The pandemic has made us uncomplainingly give up things we took
for granted in our daily lives. In an era defined by the unquestioned
virtue of consumption what does living with less entail?
34 FINDING YOUR INNER HERMIT
Lockdown lessons from Gandhi
By MJ Akbar

40 AN INHERITANCE OF LOSS
Illustration by Saurabh Singh

The past comes calling with the return

of memories of deprivation
By Lhendup G Bhutia

42 IN THE DIMINISHED REALM OF THE SENSES

How touch, hearing, taste, smell and sight
have changed in this lockdown
By Nandini Nair

45 LETTING GO
A lifetime of saying goodbye to people and
things—and there was still more to lose
By Sudeep Paul

26 48 WE ARE ALL FRUGALWOODS

Urban millennials have been forced to rediscover virtues that were
the hallmark of India’s pre-liberalisation middle class
By V Shoba

52 A NOBLE UNDERTAKING
Grave diggers and crematorium operators bring
dignity to funerals diminished by Covid-19
By Nikita Doval

58 62 64 66
UNFORGETTABLE IRRFAN MY READING LIFE RHYTHM FOR THE BLUES NOT PEOPLE LIKE US
India’s best known Khan abroad Meeting a younger me The way we are listening Farewell, Irrfan
By Kaveree Bamzai through my bookcases to and creating music is By Rajeev Masand
By Arshia Sattar changing in real time
By Akhil Sood

Cover by Saurabh Singh

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 3
 open mail
editor@openmedianetwork.in

Editor S Prasannarajan
C letter of the week

OPEN
managing Editor PR Ramesh w w w.o p e n t h e m a g a z i n e .c o m

executive Editor Ullekh NP

editor-at-large Siddharth Singh
deputy editors Madhavankutty Pillai The recovery and revival of politics after decades of the 4 MAY 2020 / 50

(Mumbai Bureau Chief), economic rhetoric of Homo economicus is

Rahul Pandita, Amita Shah,
V Shoba (Bangalore), Nandini Nair welcome, even if it comes in the time of the
creative director Rohit Chawla
coronavirus lockdown (‘Patriots against the Virus’ by

VOLUME 12 ISSUE 17
art director Jyoti K Singh
Senior Editors Sudeep Paul,
Vinay Lal, May 4th, 2020). But there are many more
Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai),
Moinak Mitra, Nikita Doval
positives of this crisis, which might appear
Associate EditorS Vijay K Soni (Web), insignificant but will no doubt have a long-term im-
Shahina KK pact. 1) Pollution has decreased exponentially;
assistant editor Vipul Vivek
chief of graphics Saurabh Singh
2) Savings has gone up as discretionary spending
SENIOR DESIGNERs Anup Banerjee, has taken a hit across the board; 3) lower paper usage

4 MAY 2020
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Photo editor Raul Irani
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National Head-Events and Initiatives
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related to this was his aperture on his window Varun Dambal

4 11 may 2020
 LOCOMOTIF
by S PRASANNARAJAN
CURSE OF THE TEMPLATE
How Covideology has infected dissent
I
n lockdown entertainment, nothing could have
rivalled this piece of video revolution by a CPM politburo
member from Kerala, a gentleman comrade of proven
cultural sanity otherwise. When a colleague forwarded the
clip to me—aren’t we all sharing the digital comfort food
nowadays?—I didn’t know the extent to which the Marxist mind
had been invaded by the virus. I said invaded because war was the
preferred operative word in the comrade’s video cry.
There he goes: what we are fighting today is more than a war
against a marauding virus; we are fighting a war against the
capitalist system, and it’s for us to turn this into an ideological war,
a people’s movement, and it’s time to get inspired by the Lenin of
First World War vintage. He traces the provenance of the pandemic
to the evil laboratory that is capitalism. The counter-revolutionary
virus, a recurring metaphor in communist screeds, never looked
more promising to me.
And his emphasis on the war imagery should
further vindicate Susan Sontag’s much-quoted essay
on how language turned diseases such as TB and cancer
into de-humanising metaphors. A pandemic turned our comrade
into a fretting cartoon commissar set against the carrier-capitalist.
If our comrade is a pastiche from a past orphaned by history,
Slavoj Žižek is the real thing. The Marxist philosopher from
Slovenia has already won the trophy for beating fellow zeitgeist
chroniclers with the first book on the pandemic. Take this
line in an excerpt from Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World:
“So, again, the choice we face is: barbarism or some kind of
reinvented Communism.”
The adjective he adds to barbarism is ‘techno’. The experts
of the world have come together to form a “technocratic
dictatorship.” In a video interview I watched, the rambling
philosopher raged against the evil imperium of science and
technology. Salvation lies in dusted-up ideology. In an unequal
world, our anti-viral technological solidarity has only
widened the gap.
What unites the comrade and the philosopher is an old
ghost. Still haunted by the purest of spectres, the comrade,
in his comic-strip revolution, and the philosopher,
in his neo-Marxist scream of consciousness, cut this
endangered planet into neat pieces that will
fit smoothly into the template of ideology. Once
the symmetry of perception is achieved, reality
11 may 2020
gets easier to absorb and analyse.
The comrade and the philosopher are the symptoms of a
parallel infection. Let us call it Covideology. It has already made
dissent, on matters ranging from lockdown to testing, an old
sentence rewritten for a newly afflicted world. No matter what
you are, a lockdown subversive or a test-more fundamentalist,
the enemy of the cause can be put on the same ideological stake
that has been used for other corrective measures in the past.
Take Donald Trump and the liberal rage against his Covid
crimes—fewer testing, shoddy testing, expert-bashing, anti-
scientific rant, media obsession, narcissism… On almost every
count, he is worthy of the rage. Still, one doesn’t need to exonerate
the unpresidential President to see the weary familiarity of the
rage. It is the same ideological template that has been used to make
sense of Trump’s transgressions in the past, and transgressions
have been multiplying ever since the day of his
election. The pandemic is just another occasion; the
ideology that has been deployed remains the same. And
the President is such a resourceful confrontationist that
he supplies daily feeds to keep the permanency of the template.
And it’s ideology that drives the liberal anger against the so-
called social as well as religious insensitivity of Narendra Modi’s
leadership during the pandemic. Yesterday, it was cow vigilantism
and majoritarian brutalism, the indexing of the outcast and the
shaming of the other community. Today, the stranded migrant
and the stigmatised Muslim are just two new items provided by
a pandemic to fortify the same argument, which remains static.
Only the items change. The argument doesn’t.
Template dissent is all about the certainties of arguments
pre-written by ideologies. It homogenises ideas, abhors nuances.
The unequal India may be as old as independent India, and the
socialist ideals of our original liberal rulers may have succeeded in
sloganising it, not abolishing it. In the magical realm of template
dissent, the unequal India is the wretched India where the migrant
labourer gets added poignancy during a lockdown in right-wing
India. In template dissent, arguments stifle inside closed minds.
Today, our choices are determined by experts and politicians,
and in fear, we have given in to them with least
resistance. From shared hardship, we are
now facing up to a reality as horrifying as a
pandemic. In template dissent, old ideologies
feed on new fears. n
www.openthemagazine.com 5
 INDRAPRASTHA
S o near and yet so far. The
coronavirus lockdown has
given that pithy saying a whole new,
everyday meaning. My daughter
who lives a stone’s throw away, has
consciously avoided visiting me
since the lockdown. Why? Being a
covenanted member of the 60-
plus demographic, it is constantly
drummed into my ears that I am
far more vulnerable to contract the
invisible devil than the rest of the
population. That is fine. Since March
24th, I have been confined to my
house. But children are different.
They find it hard why they cannot
stir out, play in the park, or go
across and see their grandparents.
The other day, my five-year-old
grandson face-timed me after he
wistfully remarked to his mother
while pointing at a photo on her
iPhone which had me hoisting him
on my shoulders, “When can Nana
hug me again?” I suppose the entire
scientific community and along with
it, 130-crore-plus Indians, are daily
asking different versions of the same
question that the little angel put to
his mother in all innocence. In fact,
I now tease my daughter for having
hitherto strictly denied her children
(the daughter is eight), the use of
laptops, iPads, etcetera. The lockdown
has per force made her teach them
how to use both these machines
since the school has switched to
online teaching. Now, she sits there
worrying how she will wean her brats
away from the laptop and the iPad,
which, as we all know, are a limitless
repository of all that is good, bad
and ugly in this world, when all the
disruption in our lives is finally over
and we can try going back to normal.
I claim to be no authority on
coronavirus. But since
6 11 may 2020
virendra kapoor
Donald Trump, the stable genius
that he is, floated the idea that
ingesting Lysol or phenyl, among
other household disinfectants,
could possibly rid you of the terrible
microbe tormenting the humankind,
I can make a useful contribution
to his knowledge. I seek no
compensation if the most powerful
man on the planet, the leader of the
mightiest economic and military
nation in the world, can learn from
my experience. Some three decades
ago, I got a frantic call from my wife,
informing me that the niece of our
cook-cum-housemaid who helped
her in doing household chores, had
gulped down a bottle of phenyl and
was being rushed in an unconscious
state to a major city hospital. Why
would she do such a foolish thing?
Because she got disgusted with her
aunt being all too free with her hands
while scolding her for being what
you would expect a mere child barely
out of her teens to do. Anyway, on
reaching the hospital, I was told she
was being administered a stomach-
wash to drain out the deadly stuff and
that she would be under observation
for a few hours before being
discharged. In other words, Lysol and
phenyl, etcetera, are a strict no-no for
treating corona patients. If anything,
gulping these down, particularly in
their vulnerable state, could further
worsen their condition. Meanwhile,
about the other suggestion of the
Great Man about ultraviolet rays, I
confess I have often tried these on
my lower back whenever it begins
to make my life miserable, which is
at least once every winter, but how
to laser the same inside my body
should I contract the virus has left
me puzzled. Maybe, Dr Anthony
Fauci, Trump’s chief medical advisor
who gently corrects his boss almost
daily, would soon enlighten him and
the world at large before millions of
gullible people do the unthinkable.
And relying on the word of, as
Trump loves to describe himself, the
‘most successful president in the US
history,’ jeopardise their life.
T he Prime Minister is a
workaholic, his working day
reportedly extending over 17-18
hours. Even in the corona
lockdown, he has found time to
renew contact with veteran party
members. The other day, the widow
of Madan Lal Khurana, the popular
former BJP Chief Minister of Delhi
who first conceived the Metro
project, was pleasantly surprised
to get a call from Modi. For a long
time, she could not believe her ears.
Modi enquired about her well-being,
reminiscing about the time he and
her husband had spent together in
the then Ashoka Road headquarters
of the party. Modi also spoke to
Vijay Kumar Malhtora, the Chief
Executive Councillor of Delhi in the
late 1960s before it was made into a
state, albeit B-category, and enquired
about his well-being. Malhotra, now
in late-80s, was happy that the party
leaders still cared about those who
had slogged long and hard to make
the BJP what it is now. n
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 Mumbai Notebook
‘W ow, only seven days
left for the lockdown... to
be extended!’ That WhatsApp mes-
sage has gone viral. There are many
more jokes and funny videos doing
the rounds, which just goes to show
how people are keeping their spirits
up during these stressful times. I
am reminded of the dark days of the
Soviet empire when East European
countries were under the Russian
thumb. With heavy censorship the
norm and free speech banned, people
of Hungary, Poland and East Germany
found escape in humour. There was
no internet then, but word of mouth
can be as fast as 5G, so their jokes
quickly went viral.
There’s also a great deal of sharing
on WhatsApp. ‘When will COVID-19
end?’ was a catchy title of a forward. It
came from a respectable source: the
Singapore University of Technology
and Design. With graphs and tables,
the researchers gave data-driven pre-
dictions for the disappearance of the
virus for most countries of the world.
For India, the report said 97 per cent
would disappear by May 22nd and a
full 100 per cent by July 26th. Thrilled
by the prospect of early release from
jail, I sent this to as many friends
as possible. Unfortunately, for my
morale, one of them, a Tata Institute
of Social Sciences luminary, replied
almost immediately. ‘Balderdash,’ he
said, or words to that effect. His con-
tention is that there are far too many
variables from country to country,
and even within a country, to make
any meaningful prediction.
But hope wants to spring eternal
in the human breast, so I turned to the
prediction made by the well-known
astrologer Sushil Chaturvedi, who
had written a weekly column for me
when I was the Editor of The Indepen-
dent and The Illustrated Weekly. His
prediction given in early March this
year was : “The combination of Mars,
Saturn and Jupiter in Capricorn has
8 11 may 2020
Anil Dharker
brought in the Covid calamity. The
alignment of the planets changes on
May 4th, so from May 5th onwards,
we will see the virus receding and by
July 17, India will be more or less clear
of the corona virus.”
At the beginning of the pandemic,
the world’s medical mantra was Test,
Test, Test. Now, more than a month
after the lockdown, my personal
mantra is May, May, May.
I f this is World War III, it’s
the doctors and nurses and
other healthcare workers who are the
world’s soldiers. Many of them are
thrown into battle without adequate
armour, but they fight on regardless.
And it was doctors we roped in for
our digital Literature Live! conversa-
tions. The Coronavirus: What You Need
to Know about the Global Pandemic, is
a very timely book, and its authors,
Rajesh Parikh (a neuro-psychiatrist)
and Maheera Desai (clinical psycholo-
gist) were in conversation with me.
The third co-author Swapneil Parikh
(who is an internal medicine special-
ist) could not be present.
‘Quickies’are not noted for their
depth and comprehensiveness but this
book, so swiftly produced, passes both
tests and has the bonus of being well-
written. The first chapter elaborates on
past pandemics, including the so-called
Spanish Flu (it actually started in Kan-
sas, US, but got its name from its most
prominent victim, the Spanish King).
Between January 1918 and December
1920, it infected 500 million people, a
third of the world’s population at the
time. In India, it killed 18 million. Dr
Parikh revealed a little known fact–
autopsies of many Indians who died
then, showed that a part of the brain
associated with fear, the amygdala, was
most affected, which showed the deep
psychological effects of the pandemic.
No doubt the Covid-19 lockdown will
leave its own scars.
The book effectively debunks
all the conspiracy theories floating
around the pandemic, and it also
gives a definitive timeline for its
starting point: the first signs of the
virus occurred in Wuhan in mid-
November 2019 when Dr Li Wenliang
tried to warn his colleagues about
it. Travellers from there took it to
Thailand, Japan and South Korea in
mid-January, 2020. Thus there was a
full two-month period in which the
Chinese government suppressed the
bad news. Forget their abominable
wet markets, the root cause of the
virus; if only the Chinese authorities
had acted and issued a global warn-
ing, no one outside Wuhan would
have died. Now millions are affected
everywhere, thousands are dead and
nations face bankruptcy. China has
much to answer for.
In the middle of my Zoom conver-
sation with the authors, our screens
were suddenly filled with porno-
graphic images. There was no option
but to cut off the discussion and
restart after a short interval. The next
day, there were reports of the Indian
Badminton Association and the Sports
Authority of India conducting a Zoom
session for 700 coaches which was
similarly hacked with pornography.
Worse, there was a similar attack in
the US, and the victims were 50 pri-
mary school students. Can you imag-
ine the trauma? How would a parent
explain such disgusting images to a
child? What a strange world we live
in, where sick people derive pleasure
from corrupting innocent minds! n
 Pandemic VersEs
Dipankar Gupta

Ode to Lysol

I was strict with hygiene, even drank Listerine I may look on edge,
I felt soiled by family members too. I may seem dense
My mind was melancholic and my hands alcoholic But I see a glow in Trump and Pence.
Even soap would just not do. They don’t fudge knowledge
Like those kids from college
Then from above came a call And journos from CNN.
Go inject Lysol
Like an addict I searched Amazon I readied the needle
I ordered fine needles for pricks I lay on my couch
In packets of six This job was serious and no time to slouch.
Before long they were used and gone. I pierced my skin
Pumped Lysol in.
I trusted that voice, The relief was quick, as was the prick
Anyway, I had no choice And I could feel the wellness begin.
Hoping a remedy was now at hand
Too many had died, Now I drift hither and thither,
But he prophesied Floating on ether
He knew exactly the cure and the brand. Can’t track anybody I know
I turned every stone,
Don’t think like docs, I was seriously alone
Unshackle those locks With nary a friend or foe.
In your hands is the cure, pure and sure.
It’s nothing exotic, I see Earth from afar,
No lab will stock it Like another planet or star.
But it is there in all Mom ‘n’ Pop stores. Not missing the stalls or the malls.
Because I was brave
If a Lysol drop I have been happily saved
Makes for a lethal house mop By nourishing cans of Lysol.
You can bet it’ll zap Covid-19.
And before you know it Lysol! Lysol! Lysol!!
And I promise to show it
Your “old normal” will be back on the screen.

10

Limericks
lToday Dipankar was trembling with excitement
He was stepping out to dump garbage from his basement
He had just this one shot
To look chic, smart and hot
Before the lockdown put him back in his apartment.
lThere are new laws that you must meet
Break them and you will face the heat
Now nose ‘n’ mouth are private parts
Even if this breaks a hundred hearts
You must cover them when on the street
lHegel said Marx was up to his tricks
Stuffing folks with his silly dialectics
As proof he claimed
That Marx be blamed
For making “Synthesis” look like synthetics.
lWhen Hegel and Marx met Lenin
The heavens hadn’t heard such a din
Big words flew like blows
Their meaning? No one knows.
Even God was left scratching his chin
l Hegel said, “Karl, I’ll have you know,
I never thought you could fall so low.
For me, it’s the Spirit
Developing on its merit
But you let Workers take over the show.”
l There was sadness on the face of Xi Ping
By centuries he had missed being a Ming
So he let loose a virus
In order to inspire us
To worship him like he was king
Dipankar Gupta is a sociologist and public intellectual. He is the
author of, among other titles, Q.E.D.: India Tests Social Theory
Illustrations by Saurabh Singh
l“Citizenship” was strolling in the park
And didn’t notice it had become dark
As he rounded a bush
“Multiculturalism” gave him a push
And took his bite away from his bark.
l Scientists’ Brag:
You were happy with caste, class and race
But Covid knows neither status nor place.
It randomly roams
Invading all homes
Leaving sociologists with a disjointed face.
lSociologists’ Response:
When Covid-19 ravaged country and town
Papers were written by scientists renown
But they overlooked its attacks
On poor, Hispanics and Blacks
Which is why you need sociologists around.
lI wish I were a scholar renowned
Easily keeping ear to the ground.
But as I have this natural flair
Of keeping my nose in the air
This exercise gets anatomically unsound
l I gazed out of my window, missing my walks.
Envied a little birdie, rustling the stalks.
As if reading my thought
She said, “Quarantine or not,
I maintain social distance from Hawks.”
www.openthemagazine.com 11
 openings
Appreciation

The Last Romantic

Part of an acting dynasty that began in 1920, Rishi Kapoor symbolised youth, life and love

RISHI KAPOOR
(1952-2020)

S
o many memories. Ranbir Kapoor talking of
the time his parents would talk sit at extreme ends
of the drawing room couch and talk to each other
only through their beloved pet dog. Rishi Kapoor,
at another interview, talking excitedly about face-timing his
granddaughter on his new iPhone. Rishi Kapoor again texting
back and asking me to call on the landline, because you know,
“I’m an old-fashioned person!”
With an old-fashioned bungalow in Mumbai’s swish
Pali Hill named after his mother, Krishna Raj, and now sadly
pulled down. With an old-fashioned, all-knowing secretary
who sat in an office outside and decided ‘dates’ for interviews,
shoots and movies. With an old-fashioned love of nostalgia
that made him an endless treasure trove of photographs, an-
niversary dates and memories.
If Amitabh Bachchan defined the 1970s as the ‘Angry
Young Man’, the one man who kept love alive was Rishi
Kapoor. Beginning with his first adult role in Bobby (1973)
where he, all leather jacket, gloves and boots, took off on a
Bullet with a gorgeous Dimple Kapadia, the actor who died
on April 30th, kept women front and centre at the movies. He
gave pre-liberalisation Indian youth a way of being modern.

12 11 may 2020
Whether it was having a drink with his onscreen father Sujit Kumar. As he grew older and somewhat paunchy, there
(played by his offscreen uncle Shashi Kapoor) in Kabhie Kabhie was still a lot of latent love left in him, but by then new stars
(1976) or whether it was strumming a guitar in the Khel Khel were emerging and the rise of the three Khans at the end of
Mein (1975), he reinvented how young Indians related to each the ’80s meant the end of an era. But that wasn’t before he was
other. As Shah Rukh Khan once said, before Bobby and Rishi cast opposite at least 30 new heroines (by his own estimation,
Kapoor, Indian cinema was about men and women, after him, which extended from Dimple Kapadia to Divya Bharati). In
it became about boys and girls. Unlike the wild stalker-like the 2010s, a new generation of directors cast him in a swathe
energy of his other celebrated uncle Shammi Kapoor, who of roles that tested his enormous talent.
defined cool for the ’60s India, Rishi was more egalitarian. He thrived. As the middle class, perennially-short-of-mon-
And how. Bobby’s Raj saw nothing in barriers of class and ey teacher in Do Dooni Char (2011), he made his Everyman
religion when it came to falling in love with Mrs Braganza’s believable, especially when his scooter wouldn’t start. As the
daughter. He gave up his true love in Chandni (1989) because he villain in Agneepath (2012) who thinks nothing of picking up
was stricken with paralysis. He even fell in love with an older a little girl to do his worst with, he is believably evil. As the pot-
woman in Doosra Aadmi (1977), which Karan Johar paid obei- smoking grandfather who is obsessed with Mandakini in Ram
sance to by casting Ranbir Kapoor in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016). Teri Ganga Maili, he is charming in Kapoor and Sons (2016). As
Rishi Kapoor was the king of cool, dancing, singing and the ageing Muslim made to feel out of place in his own nation,
dimpling his way through mov- he is mesmerising in Mulk (2017).
ies, with a swagger and style all his These movies showed the range he
own, whether it was his multi- had and the empathy he could tap
coloured jumpers ordered from
abroad or his string of musical hit
If Amitabh Bachchan was into, and yet keep everything so
light and effortless.
songs, from Main Shayar To Nahin the man every ’70s boy More than that, it was his candour
in Bobby to Dafliwale in Sargam
(1979). There was a joy to his acting,
wanted to be—tough, that was so refreshing in an industry
that thrives on short memories.
a passion that was all-consuming, gritty and brooding— He would not forget, even if he did
and made everything he did so
authentic, whether it was swinging
Rishi Kapoor was the man forgive. He would not allow Vyjan-
thimala to forget her affair with his
his somewhat ample but extremely every ’70s girl wanted to father, something that caused his
flexible hips to Om Shanti Om in
Karz (1980) or singing a qawwali
date. It didn’t hurt that he mother (after whom he named his
erstwhile Pali Hill home) to move
in Hum Kisi Se Kam Nahin (1977), came from a family with out with the children. He would not
dressed in a frilly shirt and orange
waistcoat. Many years later, pop
pedigree and was both allow Amitabh Bachchan to walk
away by crediting his success merely
culture goddess and Hindi movie fair and lovely to his writer and directors, forgetting
connoisseur, director Farah Khan, critical co-stars. He would not spare
would pay tribute to both songs in himself either, acknowledging his
Om Shanti Om (2007) and Main Hoon alcoholism and his often brutish
Na (2004), with her lead actor Shah Rukh Khan, who in his behaviour towards his long-suffering wife Neetu Singh.
roles as a romantic hero came closest to replacing him. Whether it was his depression at the height of fame, or his
If Amitabh Bachchan was the man every ’70s boy wanted initially formal relationship with his son, he shared much
to be—tough, gritty and brooding—Rishi Kapoor was the of his life with the public. That is what makes his departure
man every ’70s girl wanted to date. It didn’t hurt that he came particularly acute. In the culture of hyper-hypocrisy that rules
from a family with pedigree and was both fair and lovely. Bollywood, very few people tell it like it is. Rishi Kapoor was
But it was his return to cinema in the 2010s that brought a chronic truth teller, even admitting to male menopause in
him a whole legion of new fans as much as it was his Twitter the 1990s when movie magazines would carry stories on his
comments which revealed the sharp mind within. On social marriage, his temper and his love for the bottle. He called it, as
media, he was himself—frank, affectionate, sometimes angry, always inventive, male menopause.
and often, plain irritated. Whether it was his penchant for eat- But to his last, he remained a proud member of an acting
ing beef or his love of Black Label whisky, he was unapologetic dynasty that is now in its fourth iteration. Films, food, friends
about who he was. Often, it got him into socially awkward and family were his life, as for most members of his family.
situations whether it was with Sonam Kapoor (who famously And since the age of two, when he made a special appearance
said Ranbir Kapoor needed a condom) or whether it was berat- with brother Randhir and his late sister Ritu, in the iconic
ing Salman Khan’s sister-in-law for the star’s arrogance which song, ‘Pyar hua ikrar hua’, from Shree 420 (1955), he had been at-
led to a nasty family standoff. tached to the movies. Rishi Kapoor once described his father,
Twitter was his new clubhouse, replacing the old one he Raj, to me as a man who ate, drank and slept his films.
had, of those who had worked together at some point and So did Rishi Kapoor. n
become drinking buddies since—permutations and combina-
tions of actors such as Rakesh Roshan, Jeetendra and By Kaveree Bamzai

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 13

 openings
portrait virtual yoga
The Online Posture
An ancient spiritual system takes a digital leap
I n the classic Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda
describes yoga as the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and
mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned.
And now, thanks to the isolation enforced upon us by the lockdown,
yoga seems ready to transcend all physical restrictions, allowing its
followers to tap into their inner yogis. Across India and the world, people
are doing exactly that, signing up for virtual yoga classes that help them
balance their mind and body. James Mallinson of the School of Oriental
and African Studies believes if we see isolation as an opportunity to reflect
and meditate, then we can recapture some of the original intent.
Virtual yoga is the 21st century’s shorthand answer to the stringent
tapasya of the ancient ascetics, a perfect blend of technology and tradition.
Thanks to the lockdown and the world discovering work from home,
virtual yoga is kind to time zones too. Manish Poddar, trained in the Bihar
School of Yoga and based in Delhi, reconnected with old students who
had left India, and now has a thriving practice that doesn’t require him to
commute. He not only saves two to three hours of travel a day but is also
able to devote that time to going back to the basics and refining his practice.
His students are scattered from Switzerland to Italy, from South Africa to
France. “Yoga teaches you to be aware of yourself, of your body and soul.
It allows you to live within your limitations, maintain your balance, and
manage your breath and body,” he says.
The yogic lifestyle is best suited for this new normal. And its virtual
accessibility has created quite a stir in the community of yoga teachers and
learners. Ira Trivedi who runs a yoga studio, IraYoga Wellness, in Delhi,
is now conducting her classes on Zoom, despite occasional technical
problems. She believes it makes better yogis of everyone, allowing them to
Illustration by Saurabh Singh
14
look deep within. She is using this opportunity to
organise a Being Yoga festival online.
Initially, Mini Shastri was wary of taking her
practice online. “I put some firm stipulations to
invite only those whose practice I had supervised,
as in my head, I knew each person’s limitations
and strengths. We did a few trial sessions and
surprisingly the response was positive. People
jumped in, even those whom I had not seen in the
yogashala for months because of logistical issues.
Similarly with our breath and meditation sessions,
more than the expected number jumped. Most are
surprised, including me, at how well it has worked
since there is no excuse not to attend.”
Bhavani Pinisetti, who runs a yoga practice
called Laxmanayoga in Mumbai, believes the rise of
virtual yoga is a blessing in disguise since it reaches
millions of people across continents. She has been
taking four classes a day and enjoying her work.
Poddar believes teaching virtually has improved
his skills. “It focuses you completely on the student
and the practice, not just the physicality of it
but also breathing and meditation.” Soukya, an
Ayurvedic and wellness resort outside Bengaluru,
is also conducting therapeutic yoga lessons on
Zoom for its foreign clients. “I have seen great
damage for the back by wrong posture, so we have
made a video with an Ayurvedic yoga instructor
who understands the clients’ health issues,” says Dr
Isaac Mathai, founder of Soukya.
With India suggesting June 21st as International
Yoga Day in 2015, and having it endorsed by the
United Nations, the spiritual and psychological
benefits of yoga have come into focus. It is no longer
merely a form of exercise but an entire way of being.
As Deepak Chopra has written, and propagated,
yoga is a new way of looking at life that translates
into a way of interacting with life. Mallinson, one
of the premier scholars of Sanskit and yoga in the
world and perhaps the only baronet who wears
dreadlocks, says the ultimate goal of both yogic
paradigms—ascetic and Tantric—is liberation
(moksha), which can be achieved while alive. Along
the way various supernatural abilities or siddhis are
said to arise, ranging from mundane benefits such as
overcoming hunger and thirst through the power of
flight to the attainment of an immortal body. In the
ancient ascetic tradition, these siddhis are ultimately
impediments to the final goal; in the Tantric
tradition, they may be ends in themselves.
In a locked down world, these have become
critical tools for survival. n
By Kaveree Bamzai
11 may 2020
 ANGLE
Not Staying Alive
Reflections on death and its puzzling numbers
By madhavankutty pillai
D eath is humanity’s great-
est obsession since it developed
consciousness. What happens after it
is a question that has one straightfor-
ward answer—there is nothing. But
that was neither palatable nor accept-
able to the primitive brain and so reli-
gion was invented to create alternative
realities, like Gods and rebirths that
make non-existence tolerable. People,
even fundamentalists, know the lie.
Otherwise, most of humanity would
be relentlessly committing suicides to
get the second chance.
The lie was invented because it was
necessary and now it is easy conve-
nience to hang on to it. The brain lives
on obsessions and patterns, and any-
thing sufficiently striking is clubbed
into an inhouse theory it develops. If
two public personalities, Irrfan Khan
and Rishi Kapoor, passed away in my
neighbourhood back to back in a week
when neurosis is already cresting
because of isolation, then the brain gets
active trying to figure it out. You could
just as well think that the year 2020 is
in some way responsible or that both
were a casualty of the pandemic in
some obtuse fashion.
The same day, I came to know three
people over the age of 70, including a
family friend, passed away and already
I am wondering if there is a connection,
and whether the link stretches even
further to the deaths of the film actors.
But then I look at a Times of India article
of that morning and it tells me that
the overall number of deaths during
the lockdown has, in fact, gone down;
11 may 2020
that the usual count plus what
Covid-19 is claiming is actually lesser
than the usual count. It quotes the
municipality of Mumbai’s figures
which say that in March people who
died of diabetes, blood pressure and
heart problems was 595, down from
over 900 from last year and lesser by a
few hundreds from the last three years.
There was also a Reuters report a few
days ago which said that funeral
parlours were seeing business down.
All this makes no sense to me, given
that I am personally aware of five
deaths in Mumbai in just one day.
If it is any comfort to me, no one
else has solved this mystery either. The
Times of India article has some experts
give guesses, one of which even hint at
hospitalisation itself being responsible
for deaths and how does that make any
sense. The numbers could also mean
nothing and be a statistical fallacy. In a
city of 20 million, what can 600 deaths
instead of 800 in a month indicate? And
if some funeral parlours are losing busi-
ness then who knows, others might
be making up for it—a news report
quoting a couple of them is really not a
survey of any significance.
Simultaneously, my brain is not
averse to cook up a theory of its own.
Maybe, the mind of a body that is
withering away gives it up. But during
a pandemic, it is on high alert to its own
state of aliveness and so takes a little
longer to end. That the mind can have
some say in when we die. It can’t keep
you alive but a small postponement is
within its reach. n
ideas
getty images
Clarity
Sometimes, it takes a pandemic to
see things more clearly. It should
have been evident long before
Covid-19 hit the world that the
practice of applying saliva on a
ball in Test cricket, sometimes
egregiously compared to an art, was
an exceptionally unhygienic thing
to do. What could be more gross
than a group of 11 often spending
more than a day tossing a ball to
one another, each of them taking a
finger to their mouth and lathering
spit on this small surface. This
ball then, when the batsman is in
the mood, sometimes lands in the
hands of spectators, and afterwards,
spends its life as a souvenir. It should
have been declared a health hazard.
According to reports, the ICC’s
medical committee has raised this
issue. New methods of shining
the ball such as the use of artificial
substances, a big taboo which until
a few months ago would have
attracted ball tampering charges, are
now being suggested. Test match
cricket is a conservative sport. It
tends to be resistant to changes. But
in this, there can be no resistance. n
Word’s Worth
‘There’s a lot of clarity
in hindsight’
Julia Hartz us entrepreneur
www.openthemagazine.com 15
 touchstone
The Code of Money
How bitcoins solve the problem of trust among bearers of currency
L
et’s begin with an allegory. Imagine that
many regiments of a Byzantine army are laying
siege outside an enemy city, with each regiment
commandeered by ambitious men who are not
averse to the idea of betraying their own peers, if by doing so
they could themselves profit. The one constraint however is
that these commanders can only talk to each other through
messengers while they try to coordinate a plan of attack.
Thus, the global challenge facing the commanders as a
group—or a lead commander and his underlings—is the
following. Any plan they devise must fulfil the following
conditions. One, all loyal commanders must agree on the
same plan. Two, a small group of traitors cannot mislead
the group from choosing a ‘good’ plan. In 1982, scientists
Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease showed
that the ‘Byzantine Generals’ Problem’ is no different than
the problem of how do we trust a system or a network when
there can be ‘arbitrary malfunctioning’ or when malicious
actors are involved. For nearly 27 years, the Problem
simmered within the computer science community but
rarely slipped into the mainstream. Then, on November
13th, 2008 a pseudonymous post on a cryptography mailing
list that was discussing ‘a new electronic cash system that’s
fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party’ declared: ‘The
proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals’
Problem.’ The post was made by somebody who called
himself or herself Satoshi Nakamoto and the electronic
cash system was bitcoin.
A decade or more later, many have heard of bitcoin, even if
its exact functioning still remains a mystery to most of us. From
afar, bitcoin seems a bit superfluous—at best, a plaything of the
nerds and geeks. But now at the cusp of its teenage years, the
bitcoin-led revolution in finance has continued to grow in ways
that perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto never envisioned. When faced
with this reality of its growth, the natural question one ought
to ask is what fundamental question or problem is bitcoin
trying to solve? To understand this, we need to move away from
technology and ask that most metaphysical of questions about
the most material of things: what is money?
In November 2001, as the world was coming to terms with
16
By Keerthik Sasidharan
the aftereffects of the 9/11 attacks, two economists—Nobuhiro
Kiyotaki and John Moore, both of them taught at the London
School of Economics—wrote a paper titled ‘Evil Is the Root of
All Money’, which inverted a popular bit of Biblical moralising.
In the paper, they sought to understand an old problem: why
does money exist? At its simplest, they argued that in a world
without money, individuals could simply write each other IOU
notes for services rendered. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, a
centralised authority’s (‘the bank’) IOU becomes an object that
is trusted across the economy and helps facilitate economic
interactions. A bank-issued IOU paper, in effect, performs the
role of money. What Kiyotaki and Moore argue is that money,
in effect, is a technology that solves for trust deficit in society.
What is important to notice in Kiyotaki and Moore’s
formulation are the following: (a) the presence of an institution
called the bank that everyone trusts; (b) everybody values trust
in the system similarly; (c) the bank has the ability to track the
production of IOUs via a ledger or an electronic database. What
Kiyotaki and Moore don’t clarify is what they mean by ‘trust’.
And more dangerously, what happens to money if our trust in
that centralising authority fritters away?
All the while as financial economists theorised about
the origins of money, hidden from popular press, in the
subterranean world of chat forums dedicated to cryptography,
a handful of pioneers—names that deserve much wider
reknown than today, which include the late Hal Finney, Nick
Szabo, David Chaum, Adam Back, Wei Dai, Gavin Andresen—
went about tinkering, conceptualising, discussing, writing
code, debugging, inventing new analytical techniques in the
hope of arriving at a self-contained peer-to-peer electronic
cash system. Despite many stabs at various versions of digital
money since the 1980s—called bcash, bitgold and so on—the
hardest question was about how to form a consensus about
the ‘state of the world’. One of the participants in a chat forum,
James A Donald, summarised it thus: ‘It is not sufficient that
everyone knows X. We also need everyone to know that
everyone knows X, and that everyone knows that everyone
knows that everyone knows X… .’ It is the solution to this
problem, the Byzantine Generals’ Problem—that allowed for
the creation of bitcoin.
11 may 2020

Nakamoto’s solution was to ensure that every block of
information in the bitcoin network had three components:
(a) information about new transactions; (b) the prior block of
information with its own set of transactions; (c) a timestamp of
that block’s creation. By concatenating these blocks together—
thus, the word ‘blockchain’—we have, in effect, a long list (a
ledger) of transactions and their time stamps. The challenge
is how to get several computers to form a consensus. This
consensus can only be produced if two principal criteria are
met: 1) the rules must incentivise truthtelling as far order of
transactions are concerned; 2) every act of truthtelling must
however be costly. Nakamoto’s underlying thesis should be
familiar: only those with skin in the game can, on average, be
more trusted to describe the world accurately.
The question then becomes about how we make
verification ‘costly’. To address this, Nakamoto relied on an
older attempt by the cryptographer Adam Back, the inventor
of an earlier avatar of electronic money, Hash Cash, to solve
the same problem, wherein costly signalling in terms of
computer processing power is called ‘proof of work’. In
Nakamoto’s scheme, every node (a cluster of computers) tries
to solve a difficult mathematical puzzle. The answer to that
puzzle is a cryptographic transformation (‘hash’) of all the
data in the block (which contains the previous block, the new
transaction and the time stamp) which fulfils dynamically
set conditions. Upon solving that puzzle, the computer
broadcasts the solution to the rest of the network. The rest of
the computers in the network check if the proposed solution
is correct before using that latest block of information. It is
important to recognise that a correct solution signals publicly
that enough computing power has been expended (‘proof of
11 may 2020
When faced with the
reality of bitcoin's
growth, the natural
question one ought
to ask is what
fundamental question
or problem is it trying to
solve? To understand
this, we need to move
away from technology
and ask that most
metaphysical of
questions about the
most material of things:
what is money?
Illustration by Saurabh Singh
work’) to arrive at a solution that maintains the fidelity of the
order of transactions thus far. What is important to note is
that the rest of the computers update their knowledge of the
state of the world after having verified their peer computer’s
solution without the help of any centralising mechanism. The
successful implementation of this idea is at the heart of the
bitcoin network.
The question that follows is how does the system
incentivise truthtellers? The answer is brilliantly simple: by
distributing bitcoin programmatically, up to a maximum
of 21 million, to whoever helps in verification of the order of
transaction in the system. The more successful verification
you do, the more bitcoins you collect. It is this distribution
mechanism that acts as a ‘money supply’ in the bitcoin
economy. Per Nakamoto’s original design, the older and more
popular the bitcoin network gets, the less reward will be given
out to those who validate the transactions (the ‘miners’). Thus,
‘in 2012, the amount of new bitcoins issued every 10 minutes
dropped from 50 bitcoins to 25. In 2016, it dropped from 25 to
12.5.’ Now, in less than two weeks, it will further drop from 12.5
to 6.25 bitcoins. What this does to the value of bitcoin (around
$8,700 at the time of going to press) goes beyond mere academic
interest. Billions of dollars now ride on the bitcoin economy,
precisely as our trust in global institutions is at its lowest.
Theoretically, with less bitcoin being supplied, it ought to gain
value relative to any other asset that is produced more freely.
And few things have been produced more liberally than fiat
money in the form of dollars, euros or rupees. But the reality of
bitcoin’s price dynamics may have something yet to teach us
about this strangely wondrous dream of money without the
need for trust in an institution. n
www.openthemagazine.com 17
 soft power
Why I Admire Arnab Goswami
It is politics rather than journalism that explains his brand
I
must begin with a confession. I like Arnab
Goswami. I also know him slightly. He’s feisty, fearless,
fearsome. And, as if that is not good—or bad—enough
alliteration, he can be ferocious, facetious and frivolous
too, as the occasion demands.
In the world of Indian media, he is somewhat of a
phenomenon. He stands alone, a sort of crusading colossus.
He’s almost singlehandedly created a new brand of
rambunctious and bellicose journalism, which is as entertain-
ing as it is informative. I would call it the blood sport of
infotainment. But more than that, he has become a brand
himself. He’s a self-made media-Moghul, a one-man institution.
From practically nothing, he’s pushed his Republic TV, a
free-to-air bilingual network with twin English and Hindi
channels and an accompanying website, to one of the most
watched and successful media operations in India. About a year
back, on May 9th, 2019, he bought out most of his backer Rajiv
Chandrashekhar’s shares to assume complete control of his
company. Republic TV’s motto may be, ‘You are Republic, we are
your voice’, but it’s mostly Goswami’s voice that is beamed day
and night from his channels.
He has the uncanny knack of going for the jugular as far
as figures (pun intended) are concerned. He has the ability to
singlehandedly and consistently make his television rating
points (TRPs) shoot through the roof mostly by targeting care-
fully chosen personalities.
He is arrogant, bratty and witty. He can hector and demolish
his opponents. He loves name-calling and personal attacks.
He reduces many a distinguished panelist to a helpless puddle
of fright or fear on his show. Some are so provoked that they
scream their lungs out, making complete fools of themselves.
Others so cowed down that they hardly get a squeak through,
let alone speak their minds.
I myself have been on his show a couple of times. I neither
cherished nor relished the experience. To me most of what he
calls his debate is only a shouting and slanging match, with
little opportunity to make a rational or sustained argument. It
is more like a publicly staged show trial, with Goswami
managing both the views and the abuse.
Observing the proceedings, however, was both edifying and
18
By Makarand R Paranjape
entertaining. Goswami has a carefully concealed earphone
through which he probably receives prompts and points.
Whoever is behind the scenes has really done their homework
because an endless stream of accusations and invectives are sup-
plied to Goswami to spew out, in addition to essential factoids.
Goswami himself is a past master at the theatrics of
situation. He can modulate his voice from a soft, gentle, sooth-
ing caress, to an obnoxiously derogatory sneer, to outright out-
shouting his hapless antagonists. I would hesitate to call the
latter panelists, let alone guests. ‘Atithi devo bhava’—the guest is
like unto a god—the ancient Upanisadic injunction certainly
does not apply to those he invites on his show.
After a couple of appearances, I realised that to be on
Goswami’s debate was more of a trap than an opportunity.
Sooner or later, you were bound to lose credibility. To be in the
midst of a gaggle of rabble-rousers, screaming to have one’s voice
heard over the cacophony, in addition to Goswami’s hectoring, is
nothing short of distasteful if not disgraceful. The dressing down
he gives his opponents could easily be directed at his allies. Even
if you happened to be among the latter, you would not be safe.
And if you were one of the former, then God help you!
A few appearances on his show and you would stand the risk
of being reduced either to a buffoon or nincompoop, a person of
little consequence or credibility. I have long since, I believe wisely,
dodged his invitations till I stopped receiving them altogether.
But does that mean I don’t watch his show? You bet. I do, like so
many other Indians, all his fans. Goswami delivers a punch like
no other TV anchor. More bangs for no bucks, so to speak.
Recently, as we all know, Goswami’s fame reached its zenith
on April 27th, 2020 when he was reportedly interrogated by the
Mumbai police for some 12 hours. This unhappy, if excessive,
questioning follows several FIRs lodged against him for his
alleged defamation of Congress’ interim President Sonia
Gandhi in his programme following the lynching of two
Hindu monks and their driver in Palghar on April 16th, 2020.
Goswami had, some would say with deliberate incitement,
asked why Sonia Gandhi had been silent on the gruesome
murder of Hindu sadhus: “Would Sonia Gandhi have been
quiet if Muslim preachers or Christian saints had been killed
instead of Hindu sants?” he asked. As if that were not needling
11 may 2020
 Sarang Sena
Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. Luckily for him, the
Supreme Court granted him anticipatory bail for two weeks
on April 17th in all the complaints except the Nagpur FIR filed
by Congress minister Nitin Raut, who said, “Using derogatory
language against someone is not acceptable... . [Goswami] also
tried to insult Gandhi.” The apex court transferred the matter
from Nagpur to Mumbai. Goswami’s questioning at the NM
Joshi Marg police station was a consequence.
On the previous evening, Goswami and his wife,
Samyabrata Ray, were attacked while returning home from
work. As Goswami himself described it, two motorcycle-
borne assailants rode beside, overtook, then stopped his car.
They banged on his window, damaged his car, throwing some
substance which looked like black ink in the photos. After that
Goswami proceeded to challenge Gandhi, naming her and her
party, hollering, “Bring it on.” He said he would not be cowed
down by threats.In the end, as usual, it became, quite
narcissistically, about Goswami, not the Palghar lynching or,
indeed, even Sonia Gandhi.
The next morning, a slew of journalists, from all shades
and stripes, supported, in the name of freedom of the press,
Goswami’s right to air his views.
The Mumbai police also arrested the attackers, later
releasing them on bail.
Goswami, from reporting news, was not only making
news. He was in the news—in fact, he was the news himself.
He needed no other subjects. Republic TV could be said to be by
Goswami, of Goswami and for Goswami.
By making his parking lot his pulpit to attack Gandhi,
Goswami raised his game to a new height. It was not polemics
any more but pure politics. Goswami’s brand of demagoguery
is certainly not standard journalism or even business as
usual in a time of polemical or pugilistic TV journalism.
Instead, the journalist is now larger than life, more politician
Arnab Goswami stands alone, a than journalist. Of course, this charge may also be levelled
sort of crusading colossus. He’s against other leading journalists such as Rajdeep Sardesai or
Ravish Kumar.
almost singlehandedly created It is, therefore, as politics rather than journalism that this
a new brand of rambunctious whole chain of events must be understood. When it comes to
politics, we ought to know that both the Congress as well as the
and bellicose journalism,
ruling Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi led by Uddhav Thackeray are
which is as entertaining as not in pole position. The latter’s continuation as Chief Minister
it is informative hinges on his nomination as a Member of the Maharashtra
Legislative Council by Governor BS Koshyari or election before
May 28th, 2020, both of which seem unlikely.
The more the Congress targets Goswami, the more the latter
enough, he added, “She’s quiet today, but I think she feels happy becomes hero or martyr, depending on the outcome of the
that Hindu sants were killed in a state where Congress has a cases against him. As to the Congress, whose own track record
stake in the government. She will send a report to Italy about of muzzling the press and stamping on freedom of expression
the fact that she is getting Hindu sants killed in Maharashtra” is atrocious, it stands little to gain in its leader’s name being
(as reported by ANI). dragged through the mud.
In the next few hours, as many as three FIRs and 11 The one clear winner regardless of which of these two
complaints were registered against Arnab in states as varied comes out on top is the BJP. It is waiting in the wings to return
as Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, to power in Maharashtra. n

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 19

 Whisperer Jayanta Ghosal

Nitish’s Catch-22
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is known as a shrewd and patient politician. But even his followers are
mystified at his intransigence in bringing back migrant workers, even as other states are showing some
sense of urgency. Why is Nitish not ready? He apparently thinks that it will harm the workers in the long
run. There is a huge number of Biharis working in several states in unorganised sectors. Nitish thinks that
they would lose their jobs if they returned home. Once the lockdown ends, employers would hire others.
Nobody would wait for their old workers. Also, in Bihar itself they would strain the government’s meagre
resources which are already stretched. On the other hand, not displaying adequate care for Bihari labourers
could cost Nitish votes. It is a Catch-22 political situation for him.

Fake News Buster Concentrated Power

M inister of State for Prime Minister’s Office

Jitendra Singh has been given a new assign-
ment—to bust fake news related to the coronavirus.
When there were stories about the Government
bringing down the retirement age, Singh said there
was no such proposal. Actually, the Prime Minister
had once said that the performance of Government
employees would be reviewed at the age of 50. It was
a new appraisal approach for better governance but
political adversaries might have tried to twist it into an
exit policy. And then there were other stories about
income-tax hikes and Dearness Allowance cuts, all of
which were clarified by Singh.
W ith so much power concentrated in the Prime
Minister’s Office because of the pandemic,
Narendra Modi’s Principal Secretary PK Mishra is
turning out to be the most powerful bureaucrat in the
country. He has a Cabinet minister’s rank, something
which the Cabinet Secretary, who is the head of the
bureaucracy, does not have. The Prime Minister’s two
advisors, Bhaskar Khulbe and Amarjit Singh, appointed
in February, are said to be PK’s men. RBI Governor
Shaktikanta Das is a close family friend. The key
positions in the top bureaucracy are intimately
connected to him and he has a say in all matters in
which Modi takes a personal interest.

20 11 may 2020
 Illustrations by Saurabh Singh

BJP Connection
B CCI president and former India cricket team captain
Sourav Ganguly is doing a lot of social service
during the lockdown. He is distributing relief material
to poor people in West Bengal, often through ashrams
of Ramakrishna Mission and ISKCON. Interestingly, the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal unit is giving lots
of publicity on social media to his activities. It has led to
people again speculating about Ganguly joining the BJP.

Listening to Opposition
W ho is the opposition face from the Congress
when it comes to the pandemic? Is it Sonia
Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi? While there is gossip that
Rahul is returning to head the Congress soon, Sonia
is very active in writing letters to the Prime Minister
on issues related to the lockdown. And some in the
Congress grudgingly concede that the Prime Minister
has been addressing the suggestions. A demand
Trouble Unmasked
in one letter was an economic package for MSMEs While the Rajasthan model for containing
and the Union Minister in charge of the sector, Nitin
Gadkari, has also said a package is imminent.
the pandemic might be coming in for praise,
the state’s tourism minister, Vishvendra
Singh, is in a spot. He was moving about
Alcohol Distress without a mask in Jaipur and meeting
people. It led to a shrewd senior lawyer going
T here is a lot of
pressure on state
governments to open wine
to the police and lodging a complaint. More
than 10 ordinary citizens had been arrested
shops and restart sale of for the same offence in the city’s red zone and
liquor. But the Centre is
firm on not doing it at present.
the lawyer wanted the minister to be given
States are incurring a huge the same punishment. Singh, who is very
loss of revenue as a result. powerful in state politics, would not even
Excise is one of the few direct
revenue streams for states and express regret. The lawyer then told the
the more wine shops remain media that he had received two threatening
closed, the greater their distress. phone calls and that he would approach the
Publicly, however, no chief minister
except Punjab’s is demanding sale of high court if the police didn’t take action.
alcohol given the political incorrectness
of it. A fresh proposal is to at least start
online sale of liquor. The Centre still
remains unmoved.
Error Testing

Traders’ Relief
S mall traders have taken a huge hit because of
the lockdown and that is not good news for the
BJP, which sees them as a strong vote bank. Traders’
associations associated with the party came to the
leadership to bail them out in the crisis. Several BJP
and RSS leaders are in close touch with the Prime
Minister over the issue. Recently, the home ministry
issued orders to open up some business sectors and
that was said to be under party pressure.
11 may 2020
P rime Minster Narendra Modi is said to be
none too pleased with the Chinese Covid-19
test kits showing large errors. While he does not
want this to detract from the war against the
pandemic, two internal inquiries are reportedly
on. The first is to find out whether there was
any corruption involved, as alleged by the
opposition. The second investigation, being
handled by the National Security Advisor, is
on the role of China in this deal.
www.openthemagazine.com 21
 open essay

By Aseem Shrivastava

A time for ecosophy

The Corona Condition is a last gentle warning from the gods

Earth, is it not this that you want: to rise

invisibly in us?—Is that not your dream,
to be invisible, one day?—Earth! Invisible!
What is your urgent command if not
transformation?

W
—Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Duino Elegies’

ithout nature, we are not. Rilke, in common with the Romantics of a much earlier era, be-
lieved that nature was invisible spirit and spirit was invisible nature. It is in this sense that the earth
wishes ‘to rise invisibly in us’. This is why by the end of his Ninth Elegy, the poet finds an ‘excess of
being’ welling up in his heart.
But this is not all. It appears that in the process of arising within us, the earth has dreams for us! In
a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously consider the possibility that
Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in the manner that a mother has dreams
for her children. And like a mother’s dreams for her children, the earth’s hopes for us must have power,
if anything infinitely more power than the dreams of a mother.
If this is true, might we be accursed fools to seek the fulfilment of our own small dreams, when it might be truer to believe that
we ourselves are perhaps being dreamt by enormously powerful mysterious forces, not merely from the belly of the earth, as Rilke’s
poem suggests, but perhaps as much from the cosmos which appears to us merely as a benign sky? Might we be part of Brahma’s
sleep, dreamt by the Creator in three dimensions, just so we could occasionally pretend to be God ourselves? Might we ourselves be
utterances of the Divine, the God gone astray in the flesh, as the French poet Paul Valéry once said of human language?
In her uniquely insightful book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt observes that from the oneness and wholeness of earth
and sky, we have been reduced by a worldview ruled by science, to man versus the universe. Thanks to the scientific revolution since
the 17th century, consolidated materially in the industrial revolution from the century that followed, we seem to be held, often
inadvertently, in an antagonistic relationship with the natural world and the cosmos, not excluding our very own, very natural
human bodies. We remember the true happiness of our bodies but occasionally now, surrendering normally to an age of appetites
unleashed by galloping markets and their media.
It is the cognitive hegemony of this view of the world that the Corona Condition represents. It is this antagonistic view that the
insignificant virus challenges. We have never been more alienated from the earth. As many around the world have divined, the
virus is a messenger, a goblin, an imp who issues a last gentle warning from the gods. There is even a debate among virologists as to

22 11 may 2020

Though indigenous and traditional cultures have typically held Mother
Earth to be sacred, mainstream modernity is not even accustomed to thinking
of the earth as living, let alone having hopes and dreams for us
whether a virus is dead or alive. To an amateur like myself it
seems like an innocent denizen from that primitive twilight
zone between matter and life about which who can know any-
thing without a powerful electron microscope? If that…
For now, the virus rules the street. It has driven all the privi-
leged among us into our digital burrows almost indefinitely, a
condition which would have been widely (if not universally)
regarded as insane just a month ago. The poor in the hundreds
of millions have been squeezed under the global conceptual
arm of the lockdown. Some have walked 500 km to reach home
in seven days. Others have cycled 2,000 km to ride to their vil-
lage, bribing policemen where they could not evade them. Yet
others have fallen on the way home. Ghar wapasi is not always
pleasant or easy.
For so much of the educated segments of the living human
race to try to suspend all of life in order to fight a common
enemy, to believe that we are all on the same battlefield and to
go after such an insignificant, invisible thing all guns blazing
is more a monument to the state of global idiocy, as fearful as it
is fearsome, that we have long lived with than a tribute to our
knowledge and awareness. Idiocy derives from the Greek ‘idion’,
referring to that which is exclusively one’s own, in contrast
to ‘koinon’, that which is shared. Those trying to privatise the
11 may 2020
Illustration by Saurabh Singh
planet may take note.
As totalitarian technocracies continue to imagine they
are in control, surely the micro-organisms are having a quiet
laugh at our expense.
Though indigenous and traditional cultures have typically
held Mother Earth to be sacred, mainstream modernity is not
even accustomed to thinking of the earth as living, let alone
having hopes and dreams for us.
We are led to seriously consider the conditions on which
life is given to humanity. I say ‘given’, since none of us ever
asked to be here.
If my students’ anxieties are any index, this is a question
which can no longer be postponed even for a second. It has
become ever more urgent to unlearn pride, recognise humil-
ity, unlearn knowledge, recognise ignorance, unlearn habit,
recognise wonder and miracle.
So far as I can tell, these are the moral imperatives of the
Corona Condition.
I teach at Ashoka University something called ‘ecosophy’.
I once found myself describing it to a colleague as the truant
child of ecology and philosophy, congenitally disloyal to both
parents, often absconding from them, listening idly to birds in a
meadow or taking long aimless walks through Himalayan oak
www.openthemagazine.com 23
 open essay

forests. It is not scientific enough to draw the regard in which
ecology is held. Nor is it arcane enough to command the cus-
tomary respect of philosophy. Sometimes, I rather think it is
much too simple for someone who has gone through decades
of modern education and upbringing. The unlettered, on the
other hand, perhaps instinctively know what I refer too much
too well to even be able to articulate it in words.
I follow the Spanish-Indian philosopher-theologian
Raimon Panikkar who very gently and gracefully defines ecos-
ophy as the “wisdom of the earth”. He carefully clarifies that
“it is the earth’s wisdom of which Man is the interpreter, more
than our ‘human’ wisdom about the earth”. (For, that would be
some sort of science.) “We need to listen to the earth and learn
from her,” he says. “Ask the birds of the sky and the lilies of the that 400 million Indians could fall back into poverty. In other
field, and they will teach you,” he says, quoting the Bible.
Such a quest must have been elusive enough in biblical
times. In an age ruled by the church of technology, ever so re-
mote from the living geography of the earth, where the globe’s
cloud elites wish to ‘build a smarter planet’ and millions wish
to do ‘business @ the speed of thought’, an enterprise like ecos-
ophy is more likely to perish for fear of highbrow intellectual
ridicule. That is, when it finds any room to breathe through the
cracks in the vast manmade artifice we inhabit now.
Ecosophy looks askance at the metropolitan imagination
which accompanies such an artifice. It contemplates the
manmade global hardware and software of modernity. It
examines closely the enormity of the violent estrangement
from nature that the edifice, built assiduously over intelli-
gent centuries, entails. It tries to study with love the alien-
ation and nihilism which stalks modern consciousness. It
explores the hypothesis if this alienation is the consequence
of the denial of nature all humanity suffers now.
However, ecosophy does
not stop there. It proceeds to
renew its sensuous and spiri-
tual experience of the natural
world, humanity’s origins in
it and our inevitable destiny
towards it. Most importantly, it
seeks the Eternal that elu-
sively glances at us through
the shadows of time, always
dancing in the midst of nature
and the cosmos. This is what
Panikkar refers to as ‘the Divine
dimension’ of human experi-
ence, in the absence of which
he believes it impossible for
any environmentalism to be If Rainer Maria Rilke were alive
adequate to the challenge of today, would he not ask the earth, Thomas Hobbes cast a dark
the evergrowing planetary eco-
logical crisis that has faced all ‘What is your urgent command if
humanity for much more than not transformation?’
a generation now, threatening
to draw us into the abyss of the future, into terminal climate
chaos, unless…
Up until a month ago, the juggernaut of globally structured
greed—of which mortal fear and terror must be the inevitable
concomitant in consciousness—was continuing its acceler-
ating journey after the scare of the Great Financial Crash of
2008. And then the virus struck. The highest authorities have
warned that the GDP in the wealthiest nations on earth may
collapse by up to a quarter to one-half percentage, unemploy-
ment rising to upwards of 20-25 per cent. It is being referred to
as ‘a greater depression’, the biggest ever slump in the history
of industrial societies over the last quarter of a millennium. A
few days back the International Labour Organization reported
words, all the gains in the reduction of poverty from a genera-
tion of globalisation could be entirely wiped out this year itself.
Especially if farmers lose the motivation to harvest the grain.
The virus has given us pause, albeit a terribly uneasy one. It
is succeeding in doing what those of us involved with educa-
tion so often fail to do: making everyone think.
The skies are falling. How are we to live now? Before we
think of getting out of the ditch, we must ask: How did we get
here? How could we ever be led to believe—as virtually all mod-
ern political thought holds—that humanity could ever find its
freedom and joy independent of nature in the first place? Who
can live with trees and animals, mountains and oceans?
There are deep material roots to the ecological crisis. Ecoso-
phy does not ignore them. It only tries to correct the imbalance
by drawing simultaneous attention to the cognitive roots of
the crisis. After all, every one of us bases our lives on a certain
view of the world. It is then crucial to critically scrutinise and
dissect it when it is so evidently falling apart.
Intellectual modernity
owes its early lineage to three
key 17th century thinkers
who pre-date the European
Enlightenment: The grand-
father of modern science
Francis Bacon spoke of ‘the
conquest of nature’. He spoke
of ‘binding her to our service,
of making her our slave’. The
father of modern philosophy
René Descartes promised
that using modern scientific
methods of investigation we
will one day become ‘the lords
and possessors of nature’.
And perhaps most ironically,
cloud of suspicion not merely
on nature, but also on human
nature, when he said that in ‘a
state of nature’ the life of man

24 11 may 2020
 getty images
is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, can about what we have been
and short’. Wonder what living, about what we have
our Adivasis or the Amazon been asked and made to live
communities would have to for a very long time, stretching
say about that. For Hobbes, the back at least a generation to the
state of nature would inevita- dawn of digitised globalisation.
bly become a ‘state of war’ or Even now, we are so slow to
even a war of ‘all against all’. learn. Is this a war? To a perma-
To prevent such an inevitable nently militarised imagina-
catastrophe, Hobbes argued tion, it seems that fear is a
for an artificial monster that much more available source of
he called ‘Leviathan’, which motivation than love or com-
would ensure order in an oth- passion. Modern conscious-
erwise chaotic universe. These We can see why ness is ever primed for war,
are the anxious origins of the especially in the recent digital
modern state. Not coinciden- rabindranath Tagore’s Sadhana era. Of one thing I am sure. If
tally, Hobbes wrote Leviathan is not taught in our schools and we think of this as a war, we
just after the English Civil colleges. The colonisation of the are bound to ultimately lose
War. The enormous irony of it, for this is neither the first
mind must be sustained for the
Hobbesian bad faith should be nor the last of the devastating
noted, given what a ‘war of all ruthless forces of competitive crisis that global modernity
against all’ has been unleashed industrial modernity to be will face. If you disagree with
precisely in a world of power- acceptable to human society me, I will gift you a copy of
ful states. Is this war because of Melville’s Moby-Dick.
the state or despite it? Let us be absolutely clear
How far all this is from a that war is not the way to
culture which should have been heir to the eternal values of peace. There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. And it is the
‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’! way to health—as much for each of us as for our beloved earth.
We can now see why neither Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj nor Mother earth is our only home. Are we ready to abandon
Tagore’s Sadhana are taught in our schools and colleges. The her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space
colonisation of the mind must be sustained for the ruthless fantasists never fail to promise us?
forces of competitive industrial modernity to be acceptable Everyone knows that time is running out for us. The corona
to human society. Ideas like vasudhaiva kutumbakam are too moment is perhaps our last reasonable opportunity as a species,
dangerous especially for today’s rapidly modernising Hindus! a window of opportunity before we are permanently locked out.
What is true for individuals is as true of societies: a serious What we will do—and more importantly, unlearn and undo—
crisis reveals us. While some risk life and limb to heal the sick, in the next few years will decide our species destiny, whether we
others spend precious time seeking the racial or religious origins will rise to the occasion and abandon fear for love, or sink forever
of the virus. What we need to know is that the sickness out- like evolutionary mutants into the sea of oblivion. I remember
side is merely a mirror of the sickness within. If our hearts are thinking the same thought on the evening of 9/11.
barbarised and our diets are corrupted and we go poking around If Rilke were alive today, would he not ask the earth, ‘What
remote ecosystems with our battery-operated equipment, not is your urgent command if not transformation?’
even letting the seabed rest in peace, should we be surprised if The best one can do at a fierce moment of civilisational trial
Mother Nature releases strange new pathogens from the era of like this is to remind ourselves of the old virtues and verities:
the dinosaurs to defend the primeval aquatic life of the oceans? faith and patience, kindness and compassion, forbearance and
Greed is the original tyrant, the inner termite which destroys truthfulness (for which it is not necessary to know the truth,
a civilisation from within. It breeds a terrible restlessness, which only important not to lie, cheat, deceive or deny). Raimon
the environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert has called ‘Fasutian’. Panikkar counselled the Greek practice of metanoia—a pro-
Today, its prime vehicle is the inescapable smartphone. found feeling of regret and atonement, tantamount to a radical
Over a month ago, the World Health Organization declared change of heart, a spiritual revolution. Among friends, one
a global pandemic. The world has been unveiled for us in this finds the courage to renew one’s deepest commitments and
short time, a view not normally available. The curtains have refresh ancient hopes. n
parted ever so briefly to reveal the nature of human reality. We do
not know how long they shall remain parted and we must make The author is an environmental economist
skilful and opportune use of this opportunity to learn all we and teaches at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 25

 Chronicles Politics

The Politics of
Infection
The campaign against the government’s response to the pandemic
has borrowed from the playbook of Chinese propaganda but has
hit a wall in the trust Narendra Modi enjoys By PR Ramesh and Ullekh NP

26 11 may 2020

c
GTN stands for China Global Television
Network, an English TV channel controlled by the
Publicity Department of the Communist Party of
China (CPC). Its star anchor, Zou Yue, is a native of
Wuhan where Covid-19 originated. He comes on
TV, on Zoom and other platforms in a video that
has gone viral. Zou, a sharp journalist, begins with
reasonable statements about the state of things.
“It [the disease that originated in his Hubei prov-
ince] respects no national boundaries, no social bounds, no political
systems and no cultural values. It hits us just as hard. It levels the
world…It infected thousands in Wuhan in a day. And every hospital
bed was occupied. Now, empty beds and closed wards in the city.”
Before he goes on to preach to the world how China broke
the cycle of the spread, he contends that adjectives such as ex-
11 may 2020
Prime Minister
Narendra Modi in
a video conference
with chief ministers,
New Delhi, April 27
pib
treme, draconian and aggressive are true of the measures the
country adopted. Then, suddenly, he skips to what others had
done when confronted with unprecedented events. “After 9/11,
all airports in the world had to impose draconian security mea-
sures and people accepted it. We traded a little bit of our freedom
for the greater good of the people,” he asserts. “China imposed
[the] largest and most draconian quarantine in history. Factories
shut. Public transport stopped. People stayed indoors. By doing
that, it flattened the curve. China avoided many millions of cases
and tens of thousands of deaths. On the other hand, it stretched
out the time and made the hospitals re-staffed and less strained.”
And then, Zou becomes pedagogic: “This is exactly what Europe
and America should know. But public policy needs both ends to
agree—the decision-makers and the decision-takers. Quarantine
is indeed extreme and extremely restrictive. It needs the people in
www.openthemagazine.com 27
 Chronicles Politics
lockdown to be honest and cooperative. I think what the people
in Wuhan did was exceptional.” He goes on: “We should all move
ahead with humility. There is no decision without trade-offs. And
most of all—there is nothing without skin in the game. And now
the whole world has learnt or learning to play.” The bottomline is
clear: China is exceptional and it can offer the rest of the world tips.
Such campaigns couched in seemingly inventive logic have
the power to attract people’s curiosity—and also to mislead them.
Sample this tweet by Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua
Chunying: ‘China is the 1st to report and share virus data with
WHO (World Health Organization) and other countries. WHO
joint mission including 2 US experts already visited Wuhan and
commended China’s efforts. When will Washington invite joint
international expert team to the US for investigation?’ She is one
of the top Chinese diplomats on an overdrive to deflect global
public opinion against the CPC and its top leaders over their han-
dling of the Covid-19 pandemic and apparent failure to stop its
worldwide spread. Falling back on this mode of propaganda is
nothing new for China.
The Chinese playbook is being borrowed for verbal assault
on the Government’s handling of the crisis in India too, but with
much less finesse. The common thread begins and ends with
loudness. Notwithstanding the alacrity with which the Narendra
Modi dispensation and various state governments sprang into
action, the opposition has been raising objections, highlighting
exceptions rather than the rule. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi
was quick to dole out advice: “In no way does a lockdown defeat
the virus. It helps only to pause the virus for a short while. The
only way to do this is to increase testing and chasing the virus,
and going beyond, and this is my advice to the government—use
testing.” For her part, his sister and Congress Vice President Pri-
yanka Gandhi tweeted: ‘Transparency is a big thing in the fight
against coronavirus. Hiding data and truth will not help.’ These
Congress leaders also went on to talk about their “concerns” about
the “plight” of migrant workers.
Magnifying certain aspects of human behaviour beyond
the control of governments has become a favourite pastime of
rivals seeking political mileage in a grave crisis. What comes to
mind is Mahatma Gandhi’s crisp yet forceful terminology for
India baiters of yore: sanitary inspectors. The hypocrisy of such
posturing when the Government needs the whole political and
bureaucratic classes, and the people, to align with it smacks of
ulteriormotives,especiallyconsideringwhattheadministrationhas
done in steering and coordinating an anti-Covid blitz along with
state governments.
This uproar seems to have influenced the media, too, to focus
merely on the plight of migrant workers. While more measures
are in order to address the concerns of people who have relocated
from their villages to cities, triggering an extreme urbanisation,
the steps being taken by the Centre and states are being glossed
over. What is left, once again, is pandemonium that muffles rea-
son while entrenched lobbies disproportionately put the spotlight
on areas where the Government has been less successful.
Italian scholar Umberto Eco had identified two forms of cen-
28
sorship, both close to Chinese statecraft: one through silence and
the other through noise. ‘To avoid talking about deviant behav-
iour, talk a great deal about other things,’ Eco had written. That
is precisely what the likes of Hua are doing: passing the buck
through clamorous propaganda. Other prominent names in this
Chinese publicity juggernaut are Liu Xiaoming, Chinese Ambas-
sador to the UK; Cui Tiankai, Chinese Ambassador to the US; and
star diplomat Lijian Zhao. The most remarkable thing is they
employ a raft of tactics that includes professing of solidarity with
the rest of the world while never losing sight of the strategy: to lap
up the so-called phenomenal Chinese success story in slowing the
spread of Covid-19 while the West dawdled for weeks until they
bungled when they stood face-to-face with trouble at home. The
ruse is clearly to talk a great deal about everything else, except the
smoking gun that would relate Beijing with apathy and hostility
towards whistle-blowers and deaths in large numbers. The domi-
nant narrative now is that of China’s superlative action against
the virus versus the incompetent response of most other nations.
In India, the opposition is imitating the Chinese. The anti-Gov-
ernment blitz started with Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal
and his team reportedly telling non-voter migrants through a
murmur campaign that buses were ready at the Anand Vihar bus
depot to take them home. Since the lockdown was announced
on March 24th, people began marching, along with children,
towards their homes in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, Haryana and
elsewhere, in the hope of hoping onto a bus. All social distancing
norms and caution were thrown to the wind. Something similar
happened a few weeks later in Mumbai’s Bandra suburb. Migrant
Uttar Pradesh feeds
12.35 lakh people
from its community
kitchens. It launched
14 Covid-19
testing labs where
1,200 tests are done
daily. It also scaled
up manufacturing
of masks and
hand sanitiser
A volunteer packs food at a
community kitchen in
Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh
11 may 2020
labourers thronged the Bandra West railway station looking to
board trains back home. The visuals from outside a mosque
showed no women in the large crowds; nobody carried bags or
any luggage. They had to be dispersed by force.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to be fully aware of the
situation and wonders why the opposition is not measuring up to
the extraordinary challenge. He has repeatedly pointed out that his
interactions with ASHA workers, doctors and others are invigorat-
ing affairs and that even those employed in the final lap, between
our health system and the people, are trained in using apps to make
communication about Covid-19 unhindered.
On migrant workers, Modi has said that most of them now feel
cared for since state governments are working to provide them
the best they can. For instance, only 10 per cent of the migrant
workers from UP in Haryana’s Yamuna Nagar camps want to
return home, although the Yogi Adityanath government has as-
sured them safe transportation to their villages, according to a
state nodal officer. The Prime Minister has also often referred
to migrant workers’ responses in the media when, on TV, they
have categorically stated they have no ill will towards the Centre.
Modi has said that he found it heartening amid stories that his
Government was being brutal and insensitive towards the plight
of the migrant population. Every state is in perfect coordination
with the Centre to ensure migrant workers don’t starve, officials
affirm. It is often other existential woes—such as restrictions on
movement—that migrant workers have got to share. Govern-
ment officials and doctors Open spoke to say that is something no
government can do anything about at the moment. “Lockdown
getty images
11 may 2020
is a stark reality. People have to come to terms with it. No point in
fretting about it,” says a Lucknow-based medical specialist. Not-
withstanding scepticism from various corners, the Prime Min-
ister has said that India will do well in combating this pandemic
thanks to the relentless implementation of a slew of measures
aimed at saving lives and livelihoods.
W
riting in The Atlantic, political scientist Francis
Fukuyama said that the major dividing line in effective
crisis response will not place autocracies on one side and
democracies on the other. “Rather, there will be some high-per-
forming autocracies, and some with disastrous outcomes. There
will be a similar, though likely smaller, variance in outcomes
among democracies. The crucial determinant in performance
will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above
all, trust in government.” In the past six years, Modi has invested
in building capacity and in winning people’s trust. Which is why,
as he notes, the Centre could perform well in tackling the virus
and keeping the death toll low compared with other countries
with more advanced medical infrastructure. Given India’s size,
population and a plethora of factors, including poverty levels
and health infrastructure, even die-hard optimists had expected
the situation to be much worse. So far, the Government’s per-
formance has been phenomenal despite the proliferation of
naysayers. Senior officials and politicians note that blaming the
Centre for targeting the Muslim community as super spread-
ers is ridiculous. After all, senior politicians at the Centre have
insisted on political correctness. The official release that initially
talked about the Tablighi Jamaat attributed the spread to a ‘single
source’ and dealing with the large number of infections caused
by attendees was called ‘special operations’.
“That the fiasco in Nizamuddin at the Tablighi Jamaat confer-
ence [where close interactions among participants resulted in a
recordnumberofinfections]wasintendedatstigmatisinganycom-
munity was peddled by vested interests,” says a senior official, who
adds that the Government’s mission now is to save one-sixth of
humanity from the highly infectious viral outbreak. Democratic
mobilisation of all stakeholders has proved fruitful, too, he adds.
Yet, the noise that Eco talked about still appears pervasive. And
the pessimism of detractors appears contagious. The Congress has
been active through the media and on social media in their appar-
ent political isolation. Like a prototypical irresponsible opposition,
the party’s leaders have been busy pointing fingers at the ruling
coalition for doing what they themselves would have done.
Senior Congress leaders, including former Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi and P Chidambaram, have
criticised the Union Government for freezing a hike in Dearness
Allowance (DA) and Dearness Relief (DR). States like Rajasthan
and Maharashtra where the Congress is in power or is part of the
ruling dispensation, as well as Andhra Pradesh, have ordered
a 50 per cent deferment in salaries of government employees.
Similar ‘freezing’ measures were taken by the Congress Gov-
ernments at the Centre shortly after the wars with China and
www.openthemagazine.com 29
 Chronicles Politics

Pakistan in the 1960s and in the 1970s. Incidentally, it was Man- reflective of the ground reality. Such tales of success in fighting
mohan Singh who, as Chief Economic Adviser, had piloted such Covid can be heard from Kerala to Odisha.
a move in 1974. Besides, India has a rich tradition of its leaders
seeking sacrifice from people in tough times. For instance, Lal

T
Bahadur Shastri had appealed to the people to skip one meal dur- he temptation to construe the demography of India as
ing the India-Pakistan war of 1965 and the majority of Indians its weakness persists, much to the anguish of its detractors.
had readily obliged. Indian Railways is the fourth-largest railway network in
The noise notwithstanding, the Modi Government has the world, and during this lockdown, freight trains have plied
earned praise from the WHO for its prompt cash dispensing round the clock to make sure that essential goods reach even the
scheme (direct benefit transfer) and distribution of food materi- farthest corners. “We are working 24X7 to ensure availability of
al in various parts of the country. The numbers tell the real story: foodgrains. We have set records in the process of our untiring ef-
the Centre has transferred Rs 36,659 crore directly to the bank forts,” Railways Minister Piyush Goyal told Open. Numbers give
accounts of more than 16 crore poor people between March 24th a glimpse of the larger picture. From March 24th to April 18th,
and April 17th to help them tide over the lockdown. The bank over 9.37 lakh wagons have carried supplies across the country. Of
transfers were done by the Controller General of Accounts of- these, more than 6.07 lakh wagons carried essential commodities.
fice, which is part of the Union finance ministry. According to re- According to the ministry, ‘Annapoorna Trains from North and
ports, the Government disbursed Rs 17,733.53 crore to 8.43 crore Jai Kisan Special from South mark the beginning of long-distance
farmers under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM- super heavy fast special freight trains. Indian Railways has made
KISAN) and Rs 5,406.09 crore to 1.55 crore rural workers under railway parcel vans available for quick mass transportation, espe-
the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Em- cially of medicines. Besides, over 16 lakh
ployment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). free meals have been served by railways to
“Such moves by the Government at the the needy till the 15th April 2020.’
Centre and by several states to address the The railways have also made room for
concerns of the needy are not getting due 5,000 beds for the treatment of Covid-19
attention amidst the barrage of criticisms patients at railway hospitals, officials
by opposition leaders,” says an IAS offi- said. Besides, over 5,000 coaches are being
cer, who adds that states are also diligent used for quarantine/isolation purposes,
about such plans. For instance, in Uttar they added. The department has vowed
Pradesh, the state government had dis- to produce over 30,000 PPEs (personal
bursed Rs 1,000 each to daily wage labour- protection equipment) for healthcare
ers and MGNREGA workers through real- professionals. By the end of May, it will
time gross settlement (RTGS) as early as
“Over 1.5 crore free make another 1 lakh PPEs, according to
March 24th. More workers were paid LPG cylinders have been an official, who adds that the railways will
over the next weeks and the disadvan- delivered so far during deploy more than 2,500 doctors and 35,000
taged were given three months’ free ra- paramedical staff from hospitals run by it
tion. Similarly, the state feeds 12.35 lakh
the lockdown” to meet the challenge. Meanwhile, the rail
people through its community kitchens. Dharmendra Pradhan, coach factory in Kapurthala has manu-
It also launched 14 Covid-19 testing labs Petroleum Minister factured a low-cost ventilator named ‘Je-
where 1,200 tests are done daily, besides evan’ for patients in intensive care.
scaling up manufacturing of masks and In line with the efforts of multiple
hand sanitiser from state-run units. Such government departments, state-run oil
initiatives, perhaps in smaller measure, companies are committed to the goal of
are successful in many other states, too. enhancing economic activity and in sav-
Identifying hotspots through state-of-the ing livelihoods, officials told Open. They
art technologies is in full swing in many say that public-sector undertakings in
states, including UP. In most states, phone the oil and gas sector will shortly resume
apps are used by health workers, linking 511 projects stalled due to the lockdown.
them to main centres to update the latest “We are working 24X7 to These projects, according to Union Pe-
figures on tests done, recovered people, ensure availability of troleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan,
deaths, active cases, etcetera. foodgrains. We have set will require around seven crore mandays
As a result, even in India’s most popu- for their completion. These include 196
lous state, 27 districts are now declared records in the process” projects of the Indian Oil Corporation,
Covid-free. Which means scepticism and Piyush Goyal 168 of Bharat Petroleum Corporation, 57
doubts that continue to be aired are hardly Railway Minister of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, 32

30 11 may 2020

Railway employees convert a coach into an isolation facility for Covid-19 patients in Guwahati, Assam
of GAIL and 26 of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. “To rise to
the Prime Minister’s dream of saving lives and at the same time
saving livelihoods, we are following a comprehensive approach
towards fighting Covid-19. Our plan is to lessen as much damage
as possible to the Indian economy. In our sector, we are in con-
stant touch with grassroots-level employees to ensure that we
do our best,” Pradhan told Open. The projects to be kickstarted
cover refinery, exploration and production, marketing and so
on. “Over 1.5 crore free LPG cylinders have been delivered so
far during the lockdown,” the minister said, emphasising that
he has held video conferences with LPG delivery boys whom
he calls “frontline soldiers” in the war against Covid-19. “I am
also in touch with other stakeholders,” he added. Officials told
Open that like the petroleum ministry and Indian Railways,
various other departments are busy with the anti-Covid-19 cru-
sade so that nothing is left to chance. “We are doing everything
from ensuring the welfare of stranded migrants to those who
want to return home from abroad. What we have done in the
past—including dispatching repatriation flights to Italy, Iran,
Wuhan and elsewhere—is well known. We are also working
closely with state governments to make sure that people are
not deprived of supply of essential goods. It is a Herculean ef-
fort, but then, as it happens, not much of it is getting noticed
thanks to those who are fishing in troubled waters. But we have
no complaints. The campaign against the Government has no
substance,” says a person close to the taskforce that manages
the central Covid-19 response.
The Government has also come under attack for a so-called
ad hoc top-down approach, instead a bottom-up framework. It
has also been accused by the opposition of using this opportu-
nity to clamp down on civil liberties. What flies in the face of
such arguments is the near-total participation of people and
11 may 2020
ap
state governments across political divides in the Centre’s major
initiatives to fight the pandemic. The Prime Minister has stated
that the channels of communication between the top and the
bottom are open and everyone’s feedback is taken seriously.
No state government sincerely involved in the Covid-19
response has pointed fingers at the Union Government, which
is busy interacting with experts to evaluate newer ways of
responding. The major advantage Modi has is the trust he en-
joys. Even hitherto recalcitrant opponents of the Centre share
cordial ties with Modi whom they invariably turn to for advice
and help. “We have no complaints. We welcome the moves of
the Centre. We expect the Prime Minister to do more because
the states are resource-scarce and have to depend on the Centre,”
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had told Open in a recent
interview (‘In Kerala, the Fight against Covid-19 Is a People’s
Movement’, April 13).
Modi has emerged as the sole voice the people of India trust at
the national level. His communication skills and candid talk have
only endeared him to a broader section of people cutting across
political, socio-economic and ideological lines, especially when
the country has been looking up to someone who is a dynamic
leader and keeps his word. A long list of initiatives by his Gov-
ernment that have directly impacted the poor and rich alike has
struck a chord. Apart from existing schemes and new imaginative
programmes, other plans, such as ‘Lifeline Udan’ (the operation
of flights to transport essential medical cargo across the country),
are evidence that the Government has its ear to the ground in
these trying times. Meanwhile, the hyperactivity in attributing
a communal tone to announcements by bureaucrats also shows
a propensity to use noise to divert people’s attention.
But the trust deficit in such inveterate campaigners means
their fulminations have failed to hit home. n
www.openthemagazine.com 31
 Chronicles Austerity

Less is More
Illustration by Saurabh Singh

32 4 may 2020
 The pandemic has made us
uncomplainingly give up things we
took for granted in our daily lives.
Either they are not available at all, and
even if they were, there is the looming
shadow of financial insecurity, the
certainty of pay cuts and the
uncertainty of a job. Needs and
vanities have been reined in, the idea
of standard of living upturned, the
senses getting used to absences.
Overnight, we have come to terms
with frugality, syncing ourselves to
earlier deprived generations and even
finding some solace in it. In an era
defined by the unquestioned virtue of
consumption what does living with
less entail? Our writers explore…

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 33

 Chronicles Austerity
Finding Your
Lo c k d o w n l e s s o n s F r o m g a n d h i
By MJ AKBAR
O
n September 22nd, 1921, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, ideologue and Mahatma
of the greatest mass uprising in the annals of
the farflung British Empire, was, by his own
admission, apprehensive to the point of fear.
His anxiety was embedded in a question: would
he look like a lunatic if he appeared before the
people in nothing more than a loincloth?
It has been widely recognised that Gandhi’s
greatest contribution was not the freedom of India from the Brit-
ish, but the liberation of Indians from fear. Without the second the
first would have been impossible. The Indian mindset of 1920 is
aptly illustrated by an anecdote from that time.
When Gandhi launched his non-cooperation movement,
Satyendra Prasanna Sinha—1st Baron Sinha, KCSI, PC, KC, first
Governor of Bihar and Orissa, first Indian to become member of
the Viceroy’s Council and member of the British ministry—is
believed to have remarked: ‘What does this man in a dhoti think
he is doing? The British Empire will last 400 years.’ Photographs
of the Indian Baron do not show him in the traditional dhoti. He
wore a splendid tie between stiff collars and a perfectly ridged
handkerchief in the breastpocket of his superbly tailored suit.
Once the dhoti-clad Gandhi released Indians from fear, the Raj
could not last another 30 years.
But in 1920 the Mahatma was so stricken by the virus of inhibi-
tion that the first hint of radical departure from public wear was
tentative. In September, he declared that he would wear a loin-
cloth, without a vest, for just five weeks.
In October, Gandhi was in Madras, the city where more than
a quarter century before, on October 26,1896 he had lashed out at
the White racism then deeply ingrained in South Africa: “We are
the ‘Asian dirt’ to be ‘heartily cursed’, we are ‘chockfull of vice’ and
we ‘live upon rice’, we are ‘stinking coolie’ living on ‘the smell of
an oiled rag’, we are ‘the black vermin’... we ‘breed like rabbits’ and
a gentleman at a meeting lately held in Durban said he was sorry
we could not be shot like them.”
34
A quarter century later Gandhi had challenged British suprem-
acism with an innovative and unprecedented weapon: through
the peaceful mobilization of a class that had been exploited and
abused by both the British and the Indian elites: the poor. Such
non-violent class warfare was beyond the comprehension of the
Raj. But Gandhi realized that his own identification with impov-
erished not be complete until he abandoned that visible girdle of
entitlement: conventional attire. He had to eliminate class from
his own clothes.
At 10 PM one night in October 1921, Gandhi had his head
shaved. The next morning he went to address weavers, men who
wove finery for their ‘betters’ but could not afford more than a strip
of cotton for themselves. It was his first appearance in the avatar
that quickly became iconic, an image on calendars and pamphlets
that was worshipped in the homes of the poorest with an ardour
reserved only for an architect of existential change. Those first
tentative five weeks extended to a lifetime. Gandhi became the
‘betaaj badshah’, the king without a crown. From 1921 Gandhi lived
and died in a loincloth.
The evolution from England-returned lawyer to public ascetic
was remarkable—and even revolutionary. In 1888, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, Esq, a student at London’s UCL Faculty of
Laws, sported a Gladstone collar, rainbow ties, silk shirt, morning
coat, double-breasted vest, striped dark trousers, patent leather
boots, spats, leather gloves and a silver-mounted walking stick,
while he learnt violin and dancing to improve his taste for Western
mores. As a barrister in South Africa, his donned a frock coat and
regal Indian turban.
The switch came after his resolute commitment to the emanci-
pation of Indians, first in South Africa and then in India. By 1908,
Gandhi had adopted the art of sartorial provocation as political
strategy. Clothes became a metaphor for insurrection. His coat
and trousers turned sloppy. He took to shirt and shorts made from
Australian gunny sacks; his headgear became a black skull cap.
From 1911, he became an advocate, though not yet a prophet,
of homespun. In one photograph, he is seen in a flowing kurta and
11 may 2020
 Inner Hermit

Illustration by Saurabh Singh

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 35

 Chronicles Austerity
lungi, holding a long lathi: the lathi became his familiar walking
companion in India. He had not yet completely dispensed with his
European attire. His eve-of-departure studio portrait taken shortly
before he left South Africa in 1914 shows him in a suit beside his
seated, sari-clad wife Kasturba.
Such suits might have still been required in cold London,
where Gandhi stopped in 1914 en route India, but they disap-
peared once he berthed in Bombay on January 15th, 1915. He
stepped on Indian soil in kurta, dhoti and Kathiawadi headgear.
In 1916 at the Congress session in Lucknow, two richly dressed
landlords mistook Gandhi for a peasant rather than a delegate.
Gandhi was delighted.
The loincloth of 1921 provoked varied reactions. Some sym-
pathisers worried, particularly as the dhoti got shorter, that Gan-
dhi might turn ascetic and abandon politics. Others, more predict-
ably, accused him of ‘indecency’. Gandhi’s response was forceful:
“If we wear so many garments, we cannot clothe the poor, but it is
our duty to dress them first and then ourselves, to feed them first
and then ourselves… .” Homespun or khaddar became standard
bearer of the Gandhian revolution.
The highest in the land and the mightiest in the world were not
exempt from Gandhi’s logic. Of many similar instances, surely
the most memorable is Gandhi’s encounter with King George V
during the Round Table Conference in 1931, which the Mahatma
joined as sole representative of the Congress. Gandhi sailed on Au-
gust 29th with a ‘blank cheque’ to India’s minorities provided they
come aboard the common platform to fight for independence
from British rule. The response was lukewarm from sceptical
Indian leaders at the conference; while the British Secretary of
State, Sir Samuel Hoare, told Gandhi, with seeming sincerity, that
Indians were unfit for self-government. Gandhi was seated next
to Sir Samuel in recognition of his eminence, but his voice could
not carry too far.
However, he was Gandhi. An audience with the emperor of
India was proposed, with one caveat. Clothes. Could the Mahatma
perhaps swaddle into something, er, a little more appropriate?
No. He had come, replied Gandhi, as representative of ‘Darid-
ranarayan’, ‘the semistarved almost naked villager’, and he would
dress like his principals.
His Majesty, a wise man, stooped to retain his conquest; Gandhi
could come as he pleased. When, after the royal audience, the ever
insatiable media asked if he had been adequately dressed, Gandhi
famously answered that the king had worn enough clothes for
both of them.
The conventional trajectory of a successful life measures
achivement by acquisition. Gandhi needed less at every stage on
his road to a momentous triumph, the fall of European colonial-
ism. His foes, none more acid than the unrepentant imperialist
Winston Churchill, dismissed such self-denial as humbug. Some
of Gandhi’s admirers could also find him a bit indigestible. The
poet-nationalist Sarojini Naidu’s jibe, that it cost a great deal to
keep Gandhi in poverty, is an excellent throwaway party line in
a sophisticated drawing room, worthy of Oscar Wilde, and very
healthy too for the democratic spirit—for there is no democracy
36
without satire. But the incomparable cartoonist, Sir David Low,
was closer to the point when, in 1993, he caricatured British Prime
Minister Ramsay MacDonald ordering the stiff-upper-lipped Vice-
roy, Lord Willingdon, to go on a hunger strike against Gandhi.
Gandhi’s abstinence seized the imagination of the world much
before it inspired historic upheaval.
In the arsenal of Gandhi’s minimalism, hunger was an almost
invisible weapon of last resort.
T
here is some inner hermit in all of us. Normal humans
spend a lifetime keeping it at bay or pretending it does
not exist. A very few make their home in this hermitage.
They are savants; those who ‘know’. They may be mystics,
rishis, sages, poets, philosophers. But very rarely are they
politicians.
The gods, perhaps as a continual test of temptation, made hu-
man nature an assertive element of the human being. Divine and
eternal nature, said Gandhi, has provided enough for human need,
but not enough for anyone’s greed. The elimination of greed and
sublimation of need were continuous experiments in Gandhi’s
definition of truth.
Even the hermit needs the three basics: bread, cloth, shelter—
roti, kapda, makaan. Gandhi reduced cloth to a patch, and pared
food to a tasteless paste.
Gandhi’s 17 fasts are famous, but he was on some kind of
ingestion-denial all through his life. His single excess occurred
when he was a schoolboy.
Gandhi, a child of the 19th century who became the father of
the 20th, watched British power rise from dominance to omnipo-
tence to what looked like invincibility for the first five decades of
his life. Unlike most of his peers, Gandhi refused the smug comfort
of fatalism. Even as a child he dreamt of ways to challenge and
overcome foreign rule in his country.
In school he heard, from the teenage grapevine, a doggerel at-
tributed to the Gujarati poet Narmad: ‘Behold the mighty English-
man/ He rules the Indian small/ Because being a meat-eater/ He is
five cubits tall.’ To a schoolboy, size matters. Spurred by fantasies
of physical strength and egged on by a mischievous companion,
Gandhi began to eat meat, which was sacrilege to his faith and
family and heinous to his beloved mother, Putliba. The boy was
wracked with guilt and quickly abandoned this brief incursion
into social and religious perversion. He developed such a passion-
ate belief in vegetarianism that he rejected medical prescriptions
which carried any suggestion of slippage. Gandhi details two in-
stances in his autobiography. Once, when his wife Kasturba was
seriously ill, the family doctor prescribed beef tea to strengthen
her. Gandhi left the decision to his wife and was relieved when
she rejected the option immediately. Life was meaningless with-
out faith. As a younger man Gandhi was ready to risk the life of
a beloved son wracked by very high fever rather than give him
chicken broth as advised by the doctor. Gandhi nursed his son
back to health with fervid prayer and personal attention.
A political confrontation made Gandhi a reductionist. In 1908,
11 may 2020
he was imprisoned during his famous satyagraha in South Africa. survived against all expectations. Dr BC Roy, Gandhi’s personal
The rules permitted only White inmates to drink tea or coffee. physician, later remarked, “He was very near death. He fooled us
Indians could add salt to their food, though not curry powder be- all.” Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, congratulated Wavell
cause, as the medical officer tartly noted, Gandhi had not been for “your most successful deflation of Gandhi”, but knew his terri-
jailed to enjoy himself. Gandhi did not complain. Instead he gave tory well enough to recall what the poet Lord Byron had said about
up tea and coffee altogether and, for a decade, salt as well. his ailing mother-in-law: she had been dangerously ill; now she
His doctrine was simple: “One should eat not in order to please was dangerously well.
the palate, but just to keep the body going.” By 1912, both his body Gandhi’s own reaction after a fast that had reduced his weight
and his soul had tired of milk, since he had been told it stimulated from 110 pounds to 90 pounds, was to thank his medical team and
‘animal passions’. He began to crave for abstinence rather than then add, “I do not know why Providence has saved me on this oc-
sustenance. He turned into a ‘fruitarian’, subsisting on raw ground- casion. Possibly, it is because He has some mission for me to fulfil.”
nuts, bananas, dates,lemons and olive oil. Thanks to memoirs written by Pyarelal, his secretary after the
When he sailed for London in July 1914, the considerate cap- sudden death of Mahadev Desai on 15 August 1942, and Nirmal
tain of the good ship Kinfauns Castle, laid on a plentiful supply of Bose, the Calcutta University academic who joined Gandhi during
fruit and nuts for the special passenger. This was a South African’s his epic tour of Noakhali between November 1946 and the last day
gesture of homage to an unusual hero.
The philosophy of Gandhi’s fasts lay in
the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita:
‘For a man who is fasting his senses/ Out-
wardly, the sense objects disappear,/ Leaving
the yearning behind; but when/ He has seen
the highest,/ Even the yearning disappears.’
The Mahatma went on a fast 17 times, 15
of them in India. Only one fast, during his
detention at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune
between August 1942 and April 1944, was
in protest solely against the British policy.
The rest were efforts to awaken Indians first
and the government later; or, in times of
communal strife, bring them back to their
senses. It was always less a question of calo-
ries and more a test of will: would Indians
change before Gandhi’s body surrendered?
Gandhi never broke a commitment once
he had made it. It was up to Indians to en- (Left) Gandhi in
South Africa, 1908;
sure that he survived. They never let their in India, c 1940
Mahatma down. In contrast, one famous Photos getty images
British Prime Minister wanted Gandhi’s
fast to end in a form of suicide, after which
he could wash his hands off this troublesome half-naked fakir. of February 1947, we have firsthand accounts of Gandhi’s daily
In 1943, Winston Churchill waited impatiently for Gandhi to routine. He woke up at four, brushed his gums with twig and den-
die during his epic 21-day fast. His brutal cynicism was not shared tal powder, heard a recitation of the Gita and then ate a breakfast
by every senior official in the imperial administration. Major of three small spoonfuls of honey, five grammes of baking soda
General Ronald Candy, Surgeon General of the Bombay govern- and a glass of fruit juice.
ment, remained a doctor of integrity through that arduous month This was followed by a mile-length walk, which might include
of February, refusing to either misread the health condition or stops for chats with villagers or to hear chants from the Quran from
mislead the world when Chruchill wanted to spread the canard children at a madrasa. He shaved on alternate days and was thrifty
that Gandhi was a cheat, and was taking glucose secretly. A civil with blades. When a Christmas gift of cigarettes and razor sets
servant, Sir William Lewis, Governor of Orissa, understood what arrived from South Africa, Gandhi kept the shaving equipment
Gandhi meant to his people: Indians, he reported to the Viceroy, and passed on the cigarettes to Jawaharlal Nehru, who enjoyed
Lord Wavell, believed that their saint would never die; something smoking. Gandhi’s early lunch consisted of eight ounces of goat
would happen to end the fast before it became fatal. He added a milk, an ounce of fresh lime and a saltless, spiceless vegetable paste
warning: If Gandhi did die, vast outrage would follow—quickly. which the rest of his entourage found thoroughly inedible. The
Churchill was as petulant as a homicidal bully when Gandhi last meal of the day, at 3.30 in the afternoon, was similarly sparse.

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 37

 Chronicles Austerity
His menu was vegetarian, utilitarian and minimalist, but Gan-
dhi never imposed his frugal fare on others. Since Bengalis eat
fish, he was once asked, mischievously, whether killing fish was
violent or non-violent. His answer was dismissive. Bengal was a
land of water, so what was the harm in people eating fish? In any
case, eating fish was less harmful than selling adulterated food.
Bengal in 1946 was still waking up from the devastating wartime
famine which had taken between three and four million lives and
enriched hoarders.
The saint could be sarcastic with any wiseacres.
M
ohandas was born in a mansion, albeit an
impecunious one, a century-old three-storeyed resi-
dence of officials who had served the small princely
states of Kathiawad in Gujarat. When there were
guests, his father, Karamchand or Kaba, helped by
peeling vegetables. Gandhi learnt integrity from his father and
religion from his mother, Putlibai. One of the rewards of success
as a lawyer in South Africa was an impressive bungalow in Natal.
But the inner churn of those years was taking him towards a very
different ideal. In April 1895, he was deeply impressed after a visit
to a community of Trappist monks living at Mariam Hill near
Pinetown, 16 miles from Durban, in renunciation and poverty. It
helped that they were also vegetarian. Gandhi wrote about their
republican principles and community welfare in a subsequent
issue of a publication called The Vegetarian.
This was a modern model of Tapovan, abode of austerity, the
Vedic ideal. By 1904, with the influence of Tolstoy and John Ruskin
now layered into his thinking, Gandhi created the Phoenix Settle-
ment over 100 acres in the picturesque Piezang Valley, 16 miles
from Durban. His own living space was comparatively modest,
but not spartan: a living room, two small bedrooms, a tiny kitchen
plus a literal shower (a string pulled open a watering can above
from which water sprinkled down).
Gandhi’s fame had preceded him when he returned to India.
There were glittering receptions by the high and mighty of Bom-
bay’s elite and more subdued acknowledgement from Charles
Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, Viceroy between 1910
and 1916. What Gandhi did not possess was a home.
Gujarat was a natural preference for a Gujarati. Moreover, he
could count on some financial assistance from Aurangabad’s in-
dustrialists for his abstemious requirements. His first ashram at
Kochrab, over 36 acres, was founded on May 25th, 1915. On the
one side, Gandhi commented ruefully, were the iron bolts of the
British and, on the other, the thunderbolts of nature. The space
was full of snakes but Gandhi was always at peace with nature.
His instructions were clear. Not a single snake would be killed.
In July 1917, Gandhi shifted to the banks of Sabarmati, where
he seemed to have found a lifelong abode. But any such ascertain-
ment must take into account the epiphany of a Gandhian vow.
More than a dozen years later, on March 12th, 1930, Gandhi began
his historic Salt March from his Sabarmati ashram with a promise:
he would not return until India was free.
38
British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill on his way
to the House of Commons,
February 1943
The optimism was heady, but unjustified. On the morning of
January 4th, 1932, Gandhi was arrested “for good and sufficient”
reasons in Bombay. When Gandhi saw Police Commissioner Wil-
son and his deputy Khan Bahadur Pettigara, he smiled. Kasturba, in
tears, begged the police to take her as well, but they had no instruc-
tions to oblige. Gandhi’s face was wreathed in smiles as he headed
towards Yerwada Jail. He was released at 6 PM on May 8th, 1933, just
as he was about to go on a fast. He was back in jail on August 1st the
same year as he prepared to go on another march. The government
wastotallyuncertaininitsresponses.On4thAugusttheauthorities
ordered release, but this time Gandhi refused to comply. He was
eventually freed on August 23rd because of health conditions. He
now had to find another permanent home, at the age of 65.
In 1934, a devotee-industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj took Gandhi
to his bungalow in Wardha, Bajajwadi. Gandhi chose a village,
Segaon, about eight km away, as his next abode; the ashram for-
mally opened in 1936. Small huts were constructed for inmates.
A local guru, Gajanan Maharaj, lived a short distance away in
a place called Shegaon. Quite a bit of Gandhi’s mail kept getting
diverted there. In 1940, Gandhi renamed his own ashram Seva-
gram, or village of service.
It was also among the hottest spots in India. When in the weeks
prior to the launch of the Quit India movement, Gandhi began to
give interviews to prepare international opinion, he invited jour-
nalists to stay at Sevagram and gave them time in the afternoon:
during the hottest part of the day of the hottest month of the year
(June) in the hottest place in India.
Louis Fischer, son of a fish seller, former schoolteacher, mem-
ber of the Jewish Legion based in Palestine, correspondent from
Moscow in the Stalin era and now on the staff of the left-leaning
American weekly paper, The Nation, would go on to write a biog-
raphy of Gandhi that is still in print. A blistered Fischer asked the
Mahatma if they could schedule their next round of interviews in
an airconditioned place—perhaps the Viceroy’s palace? Gandhi,
tongue firmly in cheek, replied that he would give the suggestion
due consideration. The hermit had a relaxed sense of humour.
Was Gandhi also joking, or perhaps speaking half in jest, when
11 may 2020

One famous British
Prime Minister wanted
Gandhi’s fast to end in a
form of suicide, after which
he could wash his hands
off this troublesome
half-naked fakir. In 1943,
Winston Churchill waited
impatiently for Gandhi to die
during his epic 21-day fast
he said that there was no lofty principle involved in his weekly
vow of silence? Gandhi never spoke on a Monday. During Monday
meetings he would scribble down his answers. The last Viceroy,
Lord Mountabatten, once gathered stubs of such scribbles in the
belief that they would have historical value.
Gandhi told Fischer that there was no great monastic purity
about it; he simply wanted some respite from conversation. “Lat-
er,” he added, “of course I clothed it with all kinds of virtues and
gave it a spiritual cloak. But the motivation was really nothing
more than that I wanted to have a day off. Silence is very relaxing.”
Even in conversation less can be more. Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi, father of India’s freedom, was more eloquent in his silence
on August 15th, 1947, than any oratory could have conveyed. De-
spite the raw barbarism of the spreading communal riots that
accompanied Partition, there was an explosion of joy when the
Tricolour replaced the Union Jack. But Gandhi remained silent.
The information department of the government asked the
Mahatma for a message to be broadcast on August 15th. Gandhi
had none. He was told this would be ‘kharaab’, or bad. Gandhi was
curt: “Hai nahin koi message; hone do kharaab [There is no message;
let it be bad].” When BBC approached him, Gandhi wrote on a
piece of paper: “I must not yield to temptation. They must forget
that I know English.” His reason? This was not the swaraj Gandhi
had given his life for. He had dreamt of a free and united India, not
one partitioned by Jinnah’s bloodstained scalpel.
Gandhirecognisedthereality,buthewouldnotacceptthismon-
strous madness which had ripped apart the civilisational unity of
India and institutionalised a partisan difference into a communal
divide. When, at the famous stroke of the midnight hour, India
won freedom, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, visionary and un-
questioned inspiration of the freedom movement, was fast asleep.
Silence, isolation dislocate us. For countless generations we
have equated civilisation with the creative juices of community
and solitude with either the abdication of the monk or, more often,
with punishment, penance or ostracisation. The child stands in
the corner at school or perhaps used to; the adult suffers the con-
sequences of a penal code.
11 may 2020
The great rishis of Indian belief achieved their powers through
isolation. Even normal mortals could attain boons with sacrifice
and devotion. Sagara, king of Ayodhya, spent 100 years as ascetic
praying for an heir; but his efforts to persuade the Goddess Ganga
to descend from heaven and emancipate his 60,000 unruly sons
failed even after 30,000 years. It was not until Bhagirathi, his great
grandson, stood for 1,000 years that Brahma granted this wish.
There were more trials until Ganga coursed through Shiva’s locks
and wound her way to the sea, which was dry because the iconic
sage, Agastya, had drunk the waters of the ocean. Ganga’s water
replenished the seas and restored the balance.
Who could be more sagacious than Agastya, author of 26
hymns of the Rig Veda? His advice to Lord Rama remains the axi-
om of life as we lead it: ‘Rama, demons do not love men, therefore,
men must love each other.’
Never more so when a demon virus has driven cities and vil-
lages across the world into isolation.
What did Gandhi, who lost his private life when he became a
public personality, do when forced into the isolation of a British
prison, cut off by barbed wire and armed soldiers during his 18-odd
months at the Aga Khan Palace-prison?
Gandhi filled a number of hours with routine: prayer, spinning,
newspapers, letters and teaching his 15-year-old grandniece Manu,
who had become Kasturba’s ward. But the serene story of this pe-
riod is the joy of his relationship with his ‘life companion’ Kasturba.
She cared for him with a fierce protectiveness, even if occasionally
scolding him for sending everyone to jail. They would sing songs
togetheratnight.ButagewasnotonthesideofKasturba.Aftermore
than a year together, in December 1943, she suffered three heart
attacks. Gandhi demanded Ayurvedic treatment, which her body
wasattunedto.BythetimeVaidrajShriShivSharmawaspermitted
to see her, it was too late.
On February 22nd, 1944 at 7.35 PM, Kasturba passed away, her
headinGandhi’slap.Thirty-twominuteslaterGandhiwrotetothe
government hoping it would show better grace in handling her
funeral than it had shown during her illness.
There was international outrage at the fact that she had not
been released on medical grounds even after her heart attacks. In
London, Churchill’s minister RA Butler told Parliament on March
2nd, 1944 that all possible medical care had been provided, which
was incorrect. In Washington, British India’s agent Girija Shankar
Bajpai tried to assuage public opinion by claiming that Kasturba
had wanted to stay with Gandhi, which was a blatant lie.
One ironic consequence was that when Gandhi came down
with malaria the following month, he was released with near-
comic haste.
None of us can be Gandhi. But you don’t have to be Christ to
become a Christian. Perhaps isolation offers an opportunity to
have a brief chat with that elusive inner hermit. It just might have
something to whisper. n
MJ Akbar is an MP and the author of, most
recently, Gandhi’s Hinduism: The Struggle
Against Jinnah’s Islam
www.openthemagazine.com 39
 Chronicles Austerity
FIRST PERSON O p e n w r i t e r s t e l l t h e i r s t o r i e s o f
An Inheritance of
The past comes calling with the return of memories of deprivation
By Lhendup G Bhutia
I
was talking to my mother over the phone the other
day. I had been telling her about the pandemic and what
financial insecurity it may lead to people like us when
she interrupted and said, “Well, you will just have to live
within your means.” I responded with a small laugh,
but I was a little stung by it. A mild irritation remained
with me for a few weeks. Now here I am bringing it up
in this article.
What did she mean by it, I wondered? Was she being na-
ïve, uttering a simple catchphrase without giving it much thought
or was this a small rebuke dressed up as a homily?
I often find myself worrying if I’ve made myself ludicrous in
one way or another, and now I began to wonder if I hadn’t done so,
in the overbearing way I spoke, in front of my mother. Perhaps she
really was imparting a piece of enlightened advice? To live within
your means: a phrase so simple that your first instinct is to discard it.
And then it occurred to me why her words had so rankled me. I
recognised its familiar reproach. It was something from my child-
hood. I don’t recall my mother ever telling me this; perhaps I didn’t
need to be told this then. But this was one such phrase among
several on living with what one had that was repeated again and
again in households such as mine.
I recall how old wiry Tibetan momolas (grandmothers), their
figures bent forward to meet their young wards, a finger of au-
thority raised in the air, as they issued forth this dictum. And
when transgressions were discovered, these warning fingers
wrapped themselves around the ears of these errant children,
and a ‘What-did-I-tell-you’ issued forth. I had felt in the phone call
with my mother, I realised, a momola’s familiar turning of the ear.
I’m certain ideas of living within one’s means is common
among several communities and religious groups. But, I’ve found
in the recollections of my childhood, that there is a particularly
strong and insistent push among Tibetans. I suspect there is a
commingling here of the force of a religious doctrine (the Bud-
dhist ideas on acceptance) and the real lived experience of loss,
that of one’s country, material possessions and loved ones.
Yet everything in my–and your adult life–has told us the exact
40
opposite. We should live life in surfeit. Not less, not just enough;
but in excess. We move in a world of 24-hour online shopping and
same-day delivery. We should buy more, party more; we should
travel internationally because that is the only way we can collect
real life experiences; we are to max our credit cards; take out loans
for holidays and daily appliances. We are to live more. Anything
less would be a lesser life.
And yet as the Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown
continues, it is becoming clear that most of the world will go into
an economic recession like we haven’t witnessed for some de-
cades. Businesses will shut down, livelihoods will be lost, money
will get sparse. And we will all have no alternative but to listen to
our momolas. We will all have to live with less.
I grew up in a place where there was no option of living with
more. This was a small town that stood at the edges of several in-
ternational borders, and whose ideas of identity was always mixed.
Everything was slow and delayed here. Even the day’s English lan-
guage newspaper arrived (from a nearby city) only the next day.
The building that I grew up in–which modern architects
would hesitate to call a building–was now, I recall, filled with
the families of tailors. Each of the fathers would stand, measur-
ing tapes around their shoulders so long and loose that they re-
sembled suspenders, on a floor filled with pieces of snipped cloth.
Most of them, I remember, were also poor.
Whenthegiftsofthe1991economicliberalisationcame,likethe
newspapers, they arrived late. Prosperity arrived slowly, and every
new item in a household had to be shared. I answered telephone
calls in the only prosperous shop in the neighbourhood. Meat was
preservedinaneighbour’srefrigerators.Iremembermyfathercarry-
ingatelevisionantennaasthoughitweresuchapreciouscommod-
ity as he sought permissions to plant it on the terrace of the tallest
building nearby. And I recall the fears that gripped the town–once
the great novelty of the colour TV set had arrived in a few homes–of
how radio transistors if switched on close to such TV sets drained
these wonderful new devices of its most precious quality, its colour.
It fills me with incredulity when I walk the town’s streets to-
day. Those memories of making do with less have no echo in the
11 may 2020
living with less

Loss

Illustration by Saurabh Singh

11 may 2020
 Chronicles Austerity

In the Dimini
town of today. Old houses have been razed down and replaced by
towering structures with cold marbled floors; tailors no longer
appear wear measuring tapes around their shoulders; and the
narrow roads are now forever choked with vehicles.
When I was reading Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise dur-
ing this lockdown, her remarkable novel about the Nazi invasion
of France, as much as I want to resist lazy comparisons with wars,
I was struck with just how some of the passages read today. Hold-
ing an electronic copy of the book in my hands while looking out
at the empty street from my window, the early parts of dread and
uncertainty before Paris was invaded could so easily be used to
describe the world outside my window.
Suite Francaise consists of two parts (Nemirovsky only man-
aged to complete these two in her planned five part novel before
she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died).
And the ones I kept returning to were those in the early sections
when it becomes apparent to people that Paris is about to fall and
that they must flee. They are then faced with a decision – what
to carry and what to leave behind.
“Panic obliterated everything that wasn’t animal instinct,”
Nemirovsky writes in the book. “Grab the most valuable things
you own in the world and then . . . ! And, on that night, only people
— the living and the breathing, the crying and the loving — were
precious. Rare was the person who cared about their possessions;
everyone wrapped their arms tightly round their wife or child and
nothing else mattered; the rest could go up in flames.”
And yet the book is filled with people who are unable to leave
their possessions behind. One woman carries her box of lace and
ironing board and frets over the linen that hasn’t been delivered by
the launderer. Another carries an evening dress so she has some-
thing fit to wear later. One rich man who mothballs his carpets
and hides them in his cellar and whose heart aches because he
has to leave a dressing table behind, fills his car with all sorts of
items, from Nankin cups and vases to porcelain, all of which he
caresses through the straw and tissue paper and worries if he has
packed enough wood shaving and tissue paper to secure them.
Leaving one’s possessions behind even when their life is at
stake, the author seems to suggest, is incredibly difficult. We can-
not give up on anything easily.
When I visited my hometown some years ago, and had retired
to my room remarking to myself as I always appear to do of how
much the town had changed, I discovered a small item that once
belonged to my grandfather.
It was his mani or prayer wheel, one of the few things I know
he had brought with him from Tibet. A mantra lies scribbled
at the core of these prayer wheels, and every turn is meant to
be equivalent to the reciting of the mantra. One of my earliest
memories is of him sitting erect on his bed, most of what he
owned hanging from a nail behind, his mouth mimicking a
silent mantra, as the whir of his spinning mani filled the room.
In my hands, the mani did not turn. Decades of neglect had
accumulated over it. I took it apart. I cleaned the metal frame. I
greased its cylinder with oil. Slowly the exterior revealed itself. And Illustration by Saurabh Singh
when I tried it again, that once familiar whir returned reluctantly. n

42 11 may 2020
s h e d Realm of the Senses
How touch, hearing, taste,
smell and sight have changed
in this lockdown
By Nandini Nair

O ne month into the lockdown, we can

say that most of us are comfortably uncom-
fortable. Adjustments have been made,
pointy edges sandpapered, pretences dis-
carded. We know that work-from-home is
no equaliser; for some it is a wish fulfilled, for
others unremitting toil, and for yet others an
impossibility. By week four (or is it five, who
can keep track?), we’ve mastered the correct
water-to-mop proportions, acceded to the law that the sink will
be dishless only once we are in bed, and that creativity in the
kitchen will eventually give way to boredom. We will emerge
from this either fatter or thinner, and definitely hairier and
greyer. We’ve embraced a wardrobe that requires no ironing.
We’ve substituted all our favourite organic brands with the local
kirana store wares, and are loath to admit that we can barely tell
the difference. We’ve realised that we might not be fulfilled, but
we the elite are not going to go hungry. We have moulted into
new schedules, like a tarantula donning a new exoskeleton; it
has not been easy, took numerous heaves and upheavals, but it
has been done.
Yet while we might have settled into a routine of sorts, what
looms over us all is dread. Our previous convictions roam like
zombies of the night, mocking us, and our naïvety. Our plans
have always been doors to elsewheres. Now we see the door, but
the key has been snatched away. And that frightens us. Frightens
us more than we dare admit.
As we become citizens in this Land of Less, our senses are also
being tweaked. We’ve always known the world through touch,
hearing, taste, smell and sight. But in a lockdown as the walls
have literally closed in upon us all, our senses have sharpened and

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 43

 Chronicles Austerity

dimmed. Without the grace of sunlight gloves. Don’t touch your face. Never
and breeze, open vistas and expanse, we your nose. Three feet apart. Six feet
are forced to move within. We now dwell In a lockdown as the apart. Maintain distance. Abandon hand-
in an altered and much diminished sen- walls have literally shakes. Knuckle elevator buttons. Elbow
sory space. door handles. Sanitise and rub. Rub and
Let’s start with touch. Today people closed in upon us all, sanitise. Never ever embrace. Wash your
are dying alone and mourning in isola- our senses have hands. Wash your hands. Wash your
tion. One reads report after report or
Twitter thread after Twitter thread of
sharpened and damn hands. Touch today is an action to
be feared, an action that needs to be un-
families unable to bid goodbye. The last dimmed in certain done. An act that can cause terrible dam-
glimpse happens (if at all) over a screen. ways. Without the age, and could even lead to your death.
Mourners gather over Zoom for funer- Noise has been sucked out of cit-
als. There is no last clasp of the hand, no grace of sunlight and ies. In the first week, the silence of my
kiss to the forehead, no squeeze to the breeze, open vistas neighbourhood unsettled me. It was
toes. We need the huddle of our fellow
bereaved to tide us through loss. Con-
and expanse, we are a quietude one would otherwise hear
only on Holi afternoons, when the city
tagion denies us that. Dying and grief forced to move within sunk into a bhang stupor after a morning
are solitary affairs, but at the end, we of revelry. Now every day is on snooze
want to know that we have been in this mode. Mornings in the neighbour-
together. hood are usually a series of cries. The
I read Nan Shepherd’s The Living The most fruitwalla, the juicewalla, the sabzi-
Mountain (1977). She writes of the moun- overpowering smell walla, the gamlewalla, the kabadiwalla,
tains of Scotland with the awareness of of today is the the naali saaf karne walla. The sevpuri
a lover. Sample this: ‘Touch is the most walla on the weekends. Over the years,
intimate sense of all. The whole sen- disinfectant. I’ve learnt to identify the vendor with
sitive skin is played upon, the whole The Dettol in the his voice. Each of them had their own
body, braced, resistant, poised, relaxed, brand of advertising. A few would just
answers to the thrust of forces incom-
mopping water, the holler out, “Sabziiii,” while others would
parably stronger than itself.’ Shepherd soap on one’s hands reel out entire lists.
is, of course, describing the effect of the and the chemical Today, I miss those voices. I haven’t
elements on the mountain. She contin- heard a thelawalla in over a month. To
ues, ‘Cold spring water stings the palate, smell of sanitisers hear him would be to know that we
the throat tingles unbearably; cold air that snags in are limping back to ‘normal’. To hear
smacks the back of the mouth, the lungs
crackle.’
one’s throat him would be to know that he is once
again free to walk the streets and enter
I read her and am roiled by missing- the neighbourhood. In this silence, the
ness. Here in isolation, here in lockdown, sound of a car reversing out of a drive-
I miss the feel of things and textures, of way seems an aberration. This lull am-
people and of my person. I miss the softness of my nephews’ hair, plifies voices. For the first time I become aware of raised tempers
the coolth of my mother’s cotton sarees, the grip of my partner’s and pitched voices from neighbouring houses. Mothers scold-
hand, the yoga teacher’s palm on my back, tar beneath my san- ing children. Children screeching back. Husbands standing on
dals, grass under my feet, leaf-fall skimming my cheeks, sand balconies and yelling into phones. Has it always been this way?
below my fingers, the velveteen cushion of a theatre, the debris Or is the silence letting me in on secrets?
of masala peanuts on my fingertips, the examination of fabric In this altered soundscape, however, I continue to take
in a trial room, the satin-like ears of a friend’s dog, the dip of a comfort in the seeti of the pressure cooker. I notice the woots
gooey chocolate cake under my fork. and whistles from adjacent kitchen windows. It is a sound that
How long before I get to feel these again? heralds the arrival of a meal, the appearance of hot, fresh food.
Touch is what connects us to the world, to the animate and I take pride in the fact that I can enjoy a meal on my own.
the inanimate. Touch is how we know our surroundings. A But it’s now been more than a month since I shared a meal with
baby’s first experience with the environment occurs through another human being. Meals alone taste different. Conversa-
touch. Touch is how we delineate who we love and how we tions season dinners. Devoid of company, a meal is an errand to
love. But in the times of contagion, touch has become the Grim complete and not an experience to savour. I haven’t descended
Reaper. (as yet) into eating straight from the saucepan and over the sink.
Today we see all surfaces and bodies as germ-infested. Wear I still sit at the dining table and serve myself on a plate. I do not

44 11 may 2020
rely on a screen for entertainment. I have come to realise
that to truly enjoy a meal is to share it. Flavour is not an ab-
solute, instead it is a measure of how much others appreciate
a common dish.

C
OVID-19 has upended the business of eating out.
Selecting a restaurant, choosing from a menu, rev-
elling in a conversation over food and alcohol is a
quintessential urbane experience. The hum of a res-
taurant, the clinking of glasses and forks, the spores of
conversations that float by, the bonhomie across a table, are East Pakistani
the essential pleasures of city life. Restaurants provide us ref- refugees arrive at
Bongaon station in
uge and a roof under which we meet new people, dine with West Bengal after
old friends, wage arguments, make peace, forge friendships Partition, 1947
and build community. The virus threatens to alter all of that.

Letting Go
I come across a headline, ‘A high proportion of people
infected with Covid-19 report loss of smell and/or taste’. In
illogical moments of panic, I console myself that as long as
I can taste and smell, all is well. But compared to the out-
side world, whether it is the city or the forest, our homes are
scarce on aromas. At times, a whiff of an apple cake baking
in my oven, or the roasting of semolina for suji ka halwa from A lifetime of saying goodbye to
my landlord’s house will waft by. But the most overpowering
smell of today is the disinfectant. The Dettol in the moping people and things—and there
water, the soap on one’s hands and the chemical smell of
sanitisers that snags in one’s throat.
was still more to lose
I think back at all the smells that punctuated my ‘pre- By Sudeep Paul
lockdown days’. The perfumes of friends. The 9 am smell of
my home in Chennai when my parents sit down to break-
fast. The woody waft of tobacco from a colleague’s cigarette,
the tang of steel on my palms once I leave the metro, the And I, too, could personalize History. The line-up was always
grease of potato frying from the chaat seller on the walks before my eyes.

from the station, the buttered toast aroma of popcorn at a
cinema hall.
Then I remember the fragrances of the natural world,
and I feel thwarted. A year ago, at this time, I was travelling
in Japan. One’s sense of taste, smell and sight feasted on this
holiday. I recall the wet cedar at a natural park that over-
looked the Hida mountains; the burst of orange, when we
punctured the skin of the fruit with our thumbs. It was the
season of the cherry blossoms and our overhead canopy was
often paper-like petals. In every direction that we turned,
we could find a thing of beauty and pleasure. Whether it
was the pine trees of Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto, the yakitori
dinners of Tokyo or the wooden alleys of the heritage town
Takayama.
Today, when my sight and sites are bound by four walls,
the travels of the past seem dream-like. My vistas have been
curtailed to the proximate. I can choose to find epiphanies
in the flowering of my champa plant, or the tailor bird that
has woven a nest in my porch. I know I have it good. I know
I am comfortable. But it is the diminishment of my senses
that feels like loss. n
I
—Alfred Kazin
had to kick the butt. By our current standards of
health consciousness and welfare ideals imbibed at
Independence and the end of World War II, not doing
so would have been the epitome of self-centredness in
Pandemia. A lifetime ago, in March, as our perceptions
became prisoners of Covid-19 and people—colleagues
and friends—started disappearing , presumably locked
in at home, the panic that seized the smokers among us
(disclaimer: there are no slaves to hypercapnosis left)
pertained to the procurement of smokes. Where, and for how
long, would we get them? Corner shops, run mostly by migrants,
were shut; department stores and supermarkets were running
low on stock, supplies having dried up. The lockdown would
force people to quit. It did. At least one colleague hasn’t had a drag
since March 21st. I hunted and gathered for a while. And then,
gave up. A couple of weeks, and any lingering regret was gone too.
That was my only indulgence, albeit a killer and nearly unaf-
fordable one. To make it more affordable would have been to die

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 45

 Illustration by Saurabh Singh
quicker. ‘Living with less’ assumes we were living with more. But
then, we were the famine people. We were the olauta (cholera)
people. We may still be the cyclone people. We are the grandchil-
dren of Partition. Weren’t we told of all we lost, our ‘families torn
and borders crossed’? Every other generation, a disaster, natural or
manmade, would take away all we had, throw us onto the street,
naked and hungry, and make us begin again. While history re-
mained unforgiven. And unrepentant.
We could begin again if we survived. Of the 60-odd million that
was re-undivided Bengal’s population in May 1943, more than 2
million would die in India’s last major famine, infamously caused
46
not by a drought. It claimed the lives almost overwhelmingly of
the rural poor, across the countryside, along the rivers, and on the
streets of the city where they came in the hope of a few grains of
rice and a piece of cloth to cover their loins. The gentlemen and
ladies of the city—more than the colonial elite, their flatterers and
exploiters who went by the collective name of babu—lived on,
gave up little, and changed not at all. Four years later, the streets
of the city would be flooded again. Its railway stations and over-
bridges overrun. But this time, the dispossessed would not dis-
appear. All along, through every catastrophe, the centuries-old
history of disease and epidemic, the routine deaths due to cholera,
11 may 2020
 Chronicles Austerity

the extraordinary spikes in deaths due to malaria (both killed at and the consequent lockdowns caught about half of humanity
will through the famine of 1943), continued unabated. between a rock and a hard place, we asked: ‘So what?’ We had let
In the early 1940s, an aunt of mine would die of small pox at go of our domestic help some years ago and never got another. We
the age of two. My father, born a few months before Indepen- wouldn’t miss an absence. We had stopped using air condition-
dence, had never known her. In the 1950s, another aunt, then 14, ers through the Delhi heat because the agedness of the internal
caught the ‘Loo’—the dusty hot wind that sweeps over western wiring in the building surprised us one summer not too long ago.
and northern India in the summer—walking back from school. We got used to that too, and ditto sundry appliances that run on
Her death, about a week later, broke my grandparents who de- electricity and were essentially meant to let Atlas scratch his back
cided to leave Allahabad and move back to Calcutta. I would once in a while. When our TV had finally given up the ghost in
later learn how death visited other families, of the sisters and 2017, we had never replaced it. Periods of austerity had taken care
cousins my late father-in-law had lost, to small pox and rabies, of habits, pleasures and necessities like eating out as often as one
in childhood. It was all a little more than half-a-century ago. In wanted or needed to. And we couldn’t move because that leads
that half-century, the collective memory of easy and ready, and us back to square one—you cannot move between jobs and you
often premature, death, as our personal shadow, had faded. Co- don’t have the time to move on the job. Locked in or locked out,
vid-19, despite its status as a pandemic on a global scale, hadn’t it made little difference. Long before the lockdown, life had sunk
brought that shadow back till the weekly toll in the US crossed from inanition into nonentity, in a manner of speaking. If I want-
the average for cancer and heart disease. Yet, as of April 27th, India ed to look further back for inspiration, I could traverse decades
had 0.6 deaths per million compared to 305, 350, 441, 496 and 622 and re-live a family breaking up, and father and son meetings to
for the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Belgium collect the monthly cheque.
respectively. If it were not for the lockdown, So, the only thing left to give up in the
the empty roads and the sealed areas, we lockdown was my cigarette. And then to
would have missed that shadow of death. get used to it.
But each death takes from someone some- We are the Loss is the sudden disappearance of
thing that cannot be retrieved or replaced. compulsory someone or something of immediate per-
Suddenly living without those that filled the sonal value, especially if we have invested
space around us is a manner of living with witnesses, victims, in adding to that value, emotionally, finan-
less, perhaps an extreme experience, and bearers and cially, out of necessity or from desire. In
one we cannot ultimately avoid. Then again, a house theft when my father and uncle
individuals and families are going through
enforcers in a were boys, 100 extended play records were
the same in the pandemic, without recourse global disaster by all stolen. The collection was a labour of love
to established modes of bidding the departed standards of for them. When I told my wife the story,
goodbye if Covid-19 has claimed them. I heard of a holiday taken sometime in
The most wonderful and frightful history, by any the 1980s, from which her family had re-
thing about us is that we get used to name. The lockdown turned to find that their house had been
things. We get used to living without com-
forts and luxuries, if we had any to begin
saved many lives emptied out. Most possessions were gone.
Yet, the next few days would be spent sal-
with. We even get used to living without but it was never vaging college degree certificates from
the dead. Without stoicism and time’s meant to be the the roadside, not esteemed worthwhile in
enforced closures, we would become ex- the universe where burglars operate. The
istentially suspect. About a decade ago, we great leveller value that we attach to people and things
lost my parents-in-law within a year. For in our lives is, after all, our own.
my wife, the only place, and space, which Something lost is not something
meant a sense of home, something to gained if we remain, after Moshe Herzog,
return to, was abruptly gone. What more could we lose? We prisoners of our own perception and compulsory witnesses.
could just work—and live on. As it turned out, there would be We are the compulsory witnesses, victims, bearers and enforc-
periods of being between jobs, or being unemployed. You use ers in a global disaster by all standards of history, by any name.
up your savings. You sell some assets. You cut costs. You meet The lockdown saved many lives but it was never meant to
the demands of metropolitan rent and food and prepare a face be the great leveller. In textbook terms, some may have tem-
to meet the faces that you meet. And you try to measure up to porarily given up luxuries. Some had to forego some comforts—
the centuries of catastrophe and deprivation looking down like much of the professional middle class. Some lost access
upon you. to necessities—those who, whether in 1943, 1947 or 2020,
We don’t learn from history. But our species still has the gift instantly became photogenic in their loss of livelihood
of recognising patterns. That has differentiated us from those we and dignity. Maybe we are all living with less. And some
are supposed to fairly share the planet with. When the pandemic of us had already lost. But all of us haven’t lost the same. n

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 47

We Are All
Frugalwoods
48 11 may 2020
 Chronicles Austerity

Urban millennials have been

forced to rediscover virtues that
were the hallmark of India’s
pre-liberalisation middle class
By V Shoba

T he last time I bought fresh flowers was on

March 13th–pastel pink oriental lilies, leggy chry-
santhemums, and a Tamil newspaper-wrapped
ball of jasmine from a woman who has been string-
ing flowers at her perch outside a Ganesha temple
for 18 years. We chatted briefly about her impend-
ing visit to her village in Thanjavur. Neither of us
expected to spend the next few weeks cooped up in
our respective sanctuaries. As India went into lockdown, flowers
were among the first indulgences to disappear from our lives.
Not only were they an ancillary lifestyle commodity, their eva-
nescent beauty was ironic at a time when we were doomstruck
and busy loading up our larders with food that would store well.
Organic raw milk from native cows was making way for shelf-
stable cartons, the only cheese in the refrigerator was the salty
taste of nostalgia by Amul, the last bottle of olive oil was liquid
gold. Millets and stevia were out of the question, it took several
calls to kirana stores to even score some jaggery. In the days lead-
ing up to the lockdown, when e-commerce was still delivering
non-essentials, a shipment of chocolate and fine tea had arrived.
It felt like a minor infraction, even if the 21-year-old who had
dropped it off had been happy to ride the surge—with 70-80 de-
liveries a day, at Rs 30 per parcel, he had made two months’ rent in
just a week. After the lockdown came into force, he continued to
make food deliveries for Swiggy—and this, within one of Benga-
luru’s red zones. If waste-nothing-want-nothing had become the
Illustration by Saurabh Singh

middle-class credo of restraint, risk-nothing-gain-nothing was

already the guiding principle of the service industry. Valued at
$3.6 billion, Swiggy recently moved into newer categories such
as grocery delivery and a local courier service.
With all but kirana and chemists’ shops shuttered, supply
chains broken and a fear of contact rendering the outside world
off-limits—my own farthest physical probe has been to water
the trees a few feet from the gate—urban millennials were, for

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 49

 Chronicles Austerity

the first time, discovering the virtues of frugality and industry, We were each making every bloom count–from my torch ginger
values their parents prided themselves on. For some of us, this and scraggly spider lilies to his hibiscus and button rose displays.
was a time to hooverise—and not because we were staring at a Luckily, the magnolia champaca tree across the road was in full
scarcity of the kind that had made Herbert Hoover campaign for bloom and if you left the windows open long enough, you would
Meatless Tuesdays and Wheatless Wednesdays across America be rewarded with a dull, delicious headache. Too much of a good
during the First World War. Dispensing with one meal, or dunk- thing—like the anxiogenic consumerism of recent times. But
ing arid bits of home-baked bread in soup, saved time and effort, now, even the gods have had to contend with sprigs of holy basil
and freed us from feeling absolutely smacked when we ran out and the occasional butterfly pea flower from the terrace.
of our favourite cereal. Admittedly, it also helped stave off the The unremitting explosion of fashion and personal tech-
pangs of guilt we felt at the unearned security of our own com- nology has ceased; the anarchy of social appearance afflicts us
fortable quarantines. no more. According to McKinsey & Co., the global industry for
personal luxury goods will shrink by 35 to 39 per cent in 2020,
compared to the previous year. Living with less, involuntarily or

A
survey by the Health Ministry has now shown that otherwise, cuts both ways, of course. To take the example of the
the lockdown triggered food insecurity among Indian simplest of pleasures, the $8.5 billion global trade in cut flowers
households, with 44 per cent of respondents reporting has rapidly withered. Thousands of women working in flower
eating less than before or skipping meals. The study farms in Kenya and Ethiopia have lost their livelihoods and are
attributes this to a ‘fear of the disease and uncertainty on the verge of sinking into poverty. But one cannot will a plant
about the future with no clarity on either the span or the scope to stop blooming, no more than one can divert resources away
of the lockdown’. Those of us who were devouring a full menu from essential commodities to ship flowers across continents.
of the misfortunes of the poor—from migrants starving on the For the first time in its 71-year history, the Dutch flower park of
streets to farmers dumping produce they could not ferry to a Keukenhof will not open to the public. Weekly virtual openings
market—found moral purpose in sharing food with neighbours will showcase the blooms on social media instead. If millions of
and frontline workers, paying our house help, cook and dhobi precious tulips were destroyed at Dutch flower auctions, acres
and asking them to stay home, endeavouring to support local and acres of marigold and chrysanthemum closer home have
businesses, and shedding the apathetic torpor of modern-day been reduced to cattle feed. With no large social gatherings on
urban living. An epochal event was changing the contours of the cards this summer, the South India Floriculture Association
humanity, and we had a front-row seat if not the motor of mod- expects to bear losses of nearly Rs 100 crore this season.
ern history itself. On my first errand post lockdown, I hope to channel
Forced to shrink into a thin, liminal place between living Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers for a party on a June day in
and existing, we looked at the city, which had offered us a mul- 1923 after the war is over—‘turning her head from side to side
ticultural setting for juggling our various selves and languages, among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her
in a new light. To be sure, each day brought with it a fresh moral eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious
conundrum. To Dunzo produce from a seller 14 km away if the scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how
rider could make Rs 220 from the trip—or to live on potatoes fresh like frilled linen clean from laundry laid in wicker trays
for a day. To be sclerotic and order fresh coffee beans roasted by the roses looked.’ The outside world is disorienting and this is
a local cafe, or to go instant and give as far as she strays from the comfort
in to the Dalgona craze. Other choices of home, even as Septimus Warren
were easier. To give up a portable fan Smith, a traumatised young war
from one’s study that the house help veteran, wanders the streets in a less
was in urgent need of. To initiate a Whether it is for an privileged part of London.
community bulk buy of melons from Whether it is for an errand or for
a farmer in Tumkur. All decisions errand or for a livelihood, a livelihood, when we emerge from
quickly boiled down to the Bentham- when we emerge from quarantine and plunge into the city,
ite principle of the greatest happiness our parallel struggles, our intersect-
of the greatest number.
quarantine and plunge ing fears, may keep us from lapsing
On April 24th, when the hydran- into the city, our into old habits. Some of us would
gea in the northeast corner bore a parallel struggles, our stop buying imported wine and
stunted blue flower, I snipped it, designer bags; a vast number will
dunked it in an embalming concoc- intersecting fears, may struggle to make ends meet as the
tion that florists often use to trick you keep us from lapsing economy limps back to a semblance
into buying days-old flowers, and left
it out on the balcony table in an old
into old habits of normalcy. But here is hoping
we do not forget to stop and smell
juice bottle for the neighbour to enjoy. the roses. n

50 11 may 2020
 While
Inside
Look
For
Outside FREE
With access
visit
www.openthemagazine.com
 Chronicles dispatch

A Noble
Undertaking
Grave diggers and crematorium operators bring
dignity to funerals diminished by Covid-19
By Nikita Doval

Photographs by Ashish Sharma

52 11 may 2020
 Mohammad Shamim (left, foreground) instructs his
family members on where to place a body before burial
at the Jadeed Qabristan in Delhi, April 27

A
t Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi’s oldest
crematorium, a man in his late 30s,
garbed in protective gear, is overseeing some un-
usual farewells. The bodies come sealed in bags.
There are no solemn spectacles or rituals. The
families don’t uncoil in grief as sympathisers
stand by. The face of death is shrouded entirely in
plastic, cold, unfamiliar, certainly not a mirror of
the life led. Mohanlal switches on the incinera-
tor and switches off his emotions. “We do what
we can to protect ourselves, especially emotionally,” he says. In his
decade-and-a-half of service at the Ghat, he has seen nothing like this.
Crematorium No 3 has been earmarked for Covid-19 positive patients
who failed to fight off the disease. They are coughed out of ambulance
vans and wheeled in on a crude push-cart through a side gate. With
11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 53
 Chronicles dispatch
congregations banned during the lockdown, no more than 20
people are allowed to be present at funerals. When someone
dies of Covid-19, however, not even that many are brave enough
to confront the disease and what it is capable of. Funerals at the
crematorium are attended by just four or five members of the
family, Mohanlal says. “Families don’t even get to see the faces of
their loved ones. Some will video call their relatives, but mostly,
even in the midst of grief, there is terror. Everyone wants to main-
tain distance,” says Mohanlal. After every funeral, he straps on a
government issue sanitiser tank and sprays the contents liber-
ally, including on his colleagues at the crematorium. Though
the World Health Organisation has clarified that cadavers are not
infectious—except perhaps in case of death by haemorrhagic fe-
ver—fears persist, given that we know very little about Covid-19.
If doctors, nurses, policemen, cleaners and other frontline
workers have enabled humanity to put up a resolute fight against
the virus, there are those who have stood on the other side, help-
ing families bid goodbye to loved ones when everything is over.
When Mohammad Shamim got the first call about burying a pa-
tient who had succumbed to Covid-19, he flatly refused. A third-
generation grave digger, he lives with his wife, four children, fa-
ther and siblings on the Jadeed Qabristan grounds in Delhi. The
risk of catching the infection weighed on his mind. “But we have
a sense of duty. If we won’t do it, then who will?” says Shamim, 38.
After the Delhi Waqf Board designated the graveyard for Covid
burials on April 10th, he sat down with a doctor to understand
the risks associated with handling the mortal remains of a Covid
victim, and the precautions he needed to take. A plot size roughly
54
measuring an acre was cleared up and a JCB excavator brought in.
“We have been told that the body has to be buried at least 10 feet
deep, instead of the usual three. There are no rituals allowed. The
body comes here straight from the hospital in a bag.”
S
hamim’s phone does not stop ringing throughout
our conversation. There are already 30 odd bodies buried in
the ‘Covid plot’ measuring roughly an acre. Shamil worries
whether they will run out of space. It is only noon on April 27th
and he has already supervised three burials. Two more bodies
are on their way. “You can offer prayers at home. Prepare to leave
now,” he tells a family. There is another that needs his attention.
Ahmed Zia and two others are here to bury his 75-year-old mother
Manazara Khatun. She had gone to the hospital with low sodium
and potassium levels—a routine affair for her. When the hospital
learned she was from a hotspot—Batla House—she was admit-
ted to a Covid ward and eventually succumbed to the infection.
Zia will never know if she caught the infection at the hospital or
before. He struggles to put on the Personal Protective Equipment
(PPE) kit before his mother’s body is ejected from the hearse and
eventually lowered into the pit with the help of ropes. “There
have been a few unfortunate mishaps. Sometimes, only one or
two family members turn up and there aren’t enough people to
lower the heavy cadaver into the ground.” Shamim tries to keep
his distance. He doesn’t have a PPE kit and both his mask and his
gloves are personal investments. Earning Rs 100 per burial, he can
scarcely afford to physically get involved. “I try and help out as
(Left) CNG crematorium
No 3 at Nigambodh Ghat,
Delhi, is earmarked for
cremation of Covid victims;
Mohanlal disinfects the
ghat after a cremation
11 may 2020
 When Mohammad Shamim got the first call about burying a patient
who had succumbed to Covid-19, he flatly refused. A third-generation
grave digger, he lives with his wife, four children, father and
siblings on the Jadeed Qabristan grounds in Delhi

much as I can but in the absence of proper protective gear, I have

no choice but to maintain a distance.” Shamim hasn’t been tested
for Covid-19, and in fact, hasn’t even left the burial grounds since
he does not have a pass to get around town.
The WHO’s list of instructions for handling bodies of Covid-
positive patients includes taking “standard precautions including
hand hygiene” and using “appropriate PPE”. These are extraordi-
nary times, says Sarjeet, an ambulance driver who has worked
at a government hospital in Delhi for over a decade. He sits in
the designated drivers’ room, PPE kit prepared, waiting for a call.
“Before all of this, I would transport six to seven bodies in a day to
crematoriums and burial grounds around the city. It is a job where
you can keep your sanity only by detaching yourself from what is
around you. But the Covid deaths have really shaken us all to the
core. The way last rites are being conducted, with no rituals, not
enough people around to mourn, that stays with me.” Keeping
Sarjeet company in the waiting room is a hospital attendant who
will peel off his PPE and set fire to it after he returns from dropping
off a body, as part of a strict sanitation drill.
The last time Ahmed Zia saw his mother was on March 20th
when he took her to hospital. “She was in the ward and while
the hospital staff was helpful, and yet, I had to say goodbye to her
without even looking at her one more time. She will understand.
All we can do is go home and mourn her,” says Zia. Without a

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 55

 Chronicles dispatch

Stacks of urns
in Delhi’s Lodhi
crematorium

56 11 may 2020
 proper ceremony to mark it, the departure of a loved one becomes
a mere removal, sans emotional closure. Non-Covid funerals, too,
have become diminished affairs. At the Lodhi crematorium as
well as at Nigambodh Ghat, urns filled with ashes are piling up.
“We used to have a token system till 72, and never felt the need
to go beyond it. Today, we are at 265,” says Pandit Dharamveer,
in-charge of the asthi-grah at Lodhi crematorium. No Covid funer-
als take place here because they have only one electric cremato-
rium—burning by pyre is forbidden for Covid bodies. “People
who could not make it to their own parents’ funerals due to the
lockdown have requested us to keep the urns until they can col-
lect them,” says the priest, glancing through a register containing
the details of the urns. Entries for the ones that have been collected
are crossed out, with phone numbers of the family written in
bold letters in case of a
follow-up. With travel
to Haridwar, a preferred
destination for immer-
Without a proper sion of ashes, out of the
question, crematori-
ceremony to mark it, ums have been advis-
the departure of a ing people to do immer-
sions in the Yamuna.
loved one becomes a Relative to the mas-
mere removal, sans sive toll Covid-19 has
emotional closure. taken in countries like
Italy and America,
At the Lodhi the low death rate in
crematorium as well India—at a little over
a thousand—contin-
as at Nigambodh Ghat, ues to remain both
urns filled with ashes good news as well as a
are piling up mystery answerable
neither by allegations
of fewer testing nor by
unreported deaths. Ac-
cording to government
statistics, Covid has claimed 54 lives in Delhi, though enquiries
at both the burial ground and the ghat reveal the numbers could
be higher. “There is a lot of stigma attached to death by Covid.
I have had calls from family members asking for the departed
to be buried in a proper graveyard, but my hands are tied,” says
Shamim. Glancing at the two women waiting for him in the of-
fice, he worries that they won’t be able to lower the body into the
pit. Sher Singh, one of the two JCB drivers, says he could help, but
with no protective gear, save a mask and a bottle of sanitiser, it is
not an option. It is the hospital staff accompanying the body who
help the women out.
With infection rates in India slowing over the past week, there
is hope that there will be fewer funerals to conduct. Having bur-
ied eight on April 27th, Shamim is delighted there are none the
following day. “It could be slowing down, it could be pausing for
breath. We can’t know. Working closely with death teaches you
the value of patience,” he says. n

11 may 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 57

salon

Irrfan Khan
1967-2020

Photograph by rohit chawla 11 may 2020

 Cinema Appreciation
Unforgettable
Ir r fa n
A subtle adventurer, a permanent outsider, an actor who gave death
more dignity than it deserves and India’s best known Khan abroad
By Kaveree Bamzai
H
is eyes captivated the world, and with
good reason. Large, all-seeing, somewhat pro-
tuberant, he had almost superhuman control
over his lachrymal glands. He could be laugh-
ing at a documentary he had seen or speaking
seriously about the discomfort of making love to his wife in his
mother’s home, the tears would swim in his eyes, but rarely fall.
Having opened in 1967, those those eyes closed forever
on April 29th, 2020. The countryalso let its tears fall freely.
In a career that spanned over three decades, the man from
Jaipur, Rajasthan, had gone from being a steady TV actor
overcome by the tedium of schedules to an international star
sought out by the world’s best directors.
Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay in 1988 from which he was sadly
de-cast as part of the gang and given a “nothing of a role” as a
roadside scribe left him heartbroken, recalls co-writer Sooni-
Taraporevala. It was as the proud Lafcadia in Asif Kapadia’s The
Warrior in 2001 which put him on the map of the world. The
Namesake in 2006 where he embodied the sorrow and joy of
being Ashoke Ganguli, an immigrant in America. A Pakistan
police captain in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart in
2007, rubbing shoulders with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at
the height of their fame. Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 where he is
tasked with the interrogation of the boy who knew too much.
The Lunchbox in 2013 where he brought a quiet dignity to the
solitary life of Saajan Fernandes and showed the world a new
kind of confident, urban and urbane cinema from India.
Irrfan was the face of Indian cinema abroad, says Nimrat
Kaur, his co-star in The Lunchbox. “Whenever I went to Los
Angeles for an audition, there was only one Indian name I
heard, and it was his.” There have been actors before him who
conquered the world—Om Puri being one—but none had his
versatility and diversity. From the sharp suit wearing villain
of no particular ethnicity, Simon Masrani, in Jurassic World
in 2015 to Harry Sims in Inferno in 2016 to champion puzzle
solver Robert in the gentle and genteel Puzzle (2018), Irrfan
transcended his race and ethnicity.
11 may 2020
The graduate from National School of Drama—he famously
lied about previous theatrical experience to get in—who did
200 episodes of Banegi Apni Baat and several episodes of
Chandrakanta was re-introduced to Indian audiences after he
had already made his mark in the West with Kapadia’s The
Warrior through Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Haasil (2003) and Vishal
Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (2004). In Haasil, he was the campus rough-
neck, in Maqbool he was Macbeth to Tabu’s Lady Macbeth. Such
was his presence that even as a wraithlike stranger, Roohdaar,
in Haider (2014), he could make his presence felt. There was
something enigmatic about his presence, half liminal, half
physical, almost like the last scene in Piku (2015), where he is
playing badminton in the driveway of Deepika Padukone’s
home. He is playing virtually from the street, and she is playing
from the driveway. He is the eternal outsider, looking in.
At home, no matter how many honours he won, Irrfan
still yearned to be a box-office star, a bankable actor, so studios
didn’t have to think twice about releasing his movies. He would
always point to how UTV Spotboy dragged its feet over the
release of one of his finest movies, Paan Singh Tomar (2012),
where he played a solider-turned-athlete who becomes a dacoit,
a performance for which he won a National Award. In his later
career, with movies such as Shoojit Sircar’s Piku and Saket
Chaudhary’s Hindi Medium (2017), that wish too was being
fulfilled. Piku’s Rana and Hindi Medium’s Raj Batra showcased
the many worlds Irrfan was ready to conquer. Rana’s quiet
romance with Piku, under the constipated eye of her father,
showed the blossoming of a new kind of relationship in rapidly
urbanising India, where class and language were becoming
less pronounced. Hindi Medium’s effusive yet sensitive Raj who
thinks nothing of drunk dancing at a sophisticated cocktail
party underlined his talent for the absurd. Even when you
laughed at him, it was with empathy.
When he was diagnosed with a rare neuroendocrine
tumour in 2018, it grounded an actor in full flight. Tanuja
Chandra who cast him as the enigmatic traveller in Qarib Qarib
Single, in 2017, says he might have only begun his amazing
www.openthemagazine.com 59
 Cinema Appreciation
(Clockwise from bottom left) Irrfan Khan in Angrezi Medium; Qissa; Piku; The Lunchbox; and Paan Singh Tomar
Acting is the art of prolonging life, of leaving a legacy,
of creating char acters that outlive the star. The way
Irrfan fought his disease, seeking new ther apies, working
on Angrezi Medium in the short reprieve he had, has
defined our memory of him
work and onscreen performances. “There was so much still to
explore for him within himself and to bring to the audience,”
she says. In his short life of greatness, his quirky film characters
were finally finding more sophisticated audiences. The easy
man-of-many-parts in Karwaan (2018), part older brother to
Dulquer Salmaan and part counsellor to Mithila Palkar; the
befuddled and cuckolded husband of Blackmail, one of his
last movies, and then his last role, the halwai father of Angrezi
Medium earlier this year who wanted more than anything else
to send his daughter to England—his characters were comfort-
able if not comforting.
Actors become icons in how they live their lives offscreen,
in what they do and say. Irrfan lived a low-key life, lately in a
beautiful, airy five bedroom apartment off Mumbai’s Aksa
Beach, with his writer wife, Sutapa Sikdar, whom he met
when they were students at NSD, and their two boys. The
living room was superbly appointed but he had left enough
room for his boys to play football if they wished. They did.
Icons become legends when they learn to deal with death.
Acting in many ways is the art of prolonging life, of leaving
a legacy, of creating characters that outlive the star. The way
Irrfan fought his disease, seeking new therapies, working
on Angrezi Medium in the short reprieve he had, has defined
our memory of him. Here was a man, cut down in his prime,
handling it with dignity and grace. From his first statement
upon being diagnosed when he said he would be back with
more stories to tell, to his subsequent message when Angrezi
60
Medium was released that his body had been gate-crashed by
“unwanted guests” and he was negotiating with them, he
displayed vulnerability and humour, hope and fear.
Here was a man not afraid of showing his pain, but also
not ready to give in. As Akarsh Khurana, the young director of
Karwaan says,“His fight against the disease was typical of him.
We were all rooting for him to win. This is a massive loss to us
and the art form.”
Always a bit of a philosopher, a reader and avid consumer of
documentaries, Irrfan once said: “It’s the micro mechanism of
life you touch now. You have looked at life with a new relaxed
eye without hurry and anxiety. At least, that’s what I try. There
is this realisation that perhaps you don’t control a thing. The
time with a capital ‘T’ has become magnetic and wondrous.”
It is why he was so perfect for the subtle adventurers he played
on screen. Pi Patel in Life of Pi (2012), who undertakes a most
remarkable journey on a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard
Parker, and says, ‘I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes
an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not tak-
ing a moment to say goodbye.’ Ashoke in The Namesake, who
said: ‘Do yourself a favour. Before it’s too late, without thinking
too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as
much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it
will be too late.’ Robert in Puzzle, who said: ‘Life is messy. And
there is nothing we can do to control it.’
“Wait for me,”Irrfan said in one of his last statements. We
will. See you on the other side. n
11 may 2020
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My Reading Life
Meeting a younger me through my bookcases
O
ne evening, over
a month ago, I was sitting
on my balcony in
Bengaluru, far from my
mother who lives in Pune. As the rumble
of lockdown rumours in India started to
grow louder, a lightning flash of clarity
in my head told me that I needed to get
to her immediately. I was fortunate to
get a late night flight that I could afford. I
threw things I thought I would need into
a suitcase and raced to the airport.
My mother will be 91 years old soon
and I was advised to isolate myself from
her for a few days after reaching her
home. For about five days, I kept to one
side of the house and she to the other.
It struck me how odd it was to isolate
oneself from the most intimate body
of all—the one that birthed you, the
one inside which you grew and whose
blood gave you sustenance, the one
whose genetic makeup is coded within
you to make you who you are. My
mother was impatient with my caution
but I was sure that I was doing the right
thing and spent days and nights at a
distance from her.
The room I was confined to is ‘my’
room in that it has my books and other
random bits and pieces from my past.
My parents and I have both moved
house many times so what ‘my’ room
contains is not a coherent or con-
tinuous record of my life, but there’s
enough in here to give me glimpses
of the person that I used to be. As the
lockdown days have grown longer
and more empty and the nights hotter,
differentiated from one another only
by the light of the moon as it waxes
and wanes at my window, I have been
thrown upon my younger self for com-
pany. I didn’t know it before, but that
younger woman does haunt this room.
62
books essay
By Arshia Sattar
Perhaps it is the silence and the stillness
that has drawn her out, perhaps the
newly padded paws of time and space
have let me notice her presence and, as I
surrendered to an unglamorous ennui,
I recognised her.
I met this young woman first at
the bookcases in our room. The cases
contain an odd assortment of our read-
ing life. There are fairy tales: Chinese,
Japanese, Persian, Indonesian, German,
Celtic, from Assam, from Madhya
Pradesh. Some of these are part of a
lushly produced Hamlyn series with
glorious, complex illustrations; others
are more plebeian and now, a little
ragged. There’s a lot of Kerouac and
Spike Milligan, the Durrells are there
with Ian McEwan and so is Atwood,
Drabble and Fay Weldon. I notice a lot
of dead men but many, many living
women. There are heavily marked up
school texts: Eliot (beloved and wept
over) and Hardy (resisted but never
forgotten) and Lawrence (cautiously
accepted). There’s an attempt to read po-
etry, it’s sincere but unadventurous.
As much as these books reveal a his-
tory of a young woman finding herself
in the world, they also chart a geog-
raphy of place and person. There are
books soft with age, with split spines
and yellowed pages acquired from the
pavements of Bombay, each one pre-
cious for the carefully saved rupees that
were paid for it. These were books that
were bought together with the man I
eventually married. There are books
that are in better shape, from wellkept
and organised secondhand stores in the
UK and the US, there’s an occasional
glittering hardback from a remaindered
pile. If we put our minds to it, the girl
and I can probably remember where we
got each of those books. She remembers
more clearly than I, of course, because
she bought so many of them. My contri-
butions to these shelves are fewer. I am
disdainful of some of what she chose
but equally, I hide a blush when she
sniggers at what I have added to
the shelves.
With that girl and her books, I re-
entered the world that had once been
mine. Together, we reach for Paulo
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and
nod in agreement that a change was
gonna come. We are shoulder to shoul-
der at Germaine Greer’s The Female
Eunuch, humming along at The Complete
Beatles Song book and squinting a bit at
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. She leads
me back to a time when The Future
meant hope, it meant progress and
promised that change was always for
the better and for the greater good. The
hippies and their vision of a world unit-
ed in a republic of flowers were but one
lyrical memory away from her, the age
of Aquarius had but recently dawned
and the possibility of infinite good was
within her grasp. Life was getting easier,
it was likely that the world would
produce enough food for every human
mouth, diseases were being rapidly
eradicated, technology was her friend
and help meet, the women’s movement
was growing wider and deeper and
fighting for the rights of more than one
half of humanity. The Vietnam war had
ended and the last dominos of the co-
lonial period were falling. Democracy
held out the promise that it was the best
of all political systems and voices from
the Left could still rise in a clarion call
that would be heeded by many. With
that girl and her books, I re-entered the
world that had once been mine.
My generation inherited every
capacity—wealth, education, potential
11 may 2020

As much as these books reveal a history of a
young woman finding herself in the world, they
also chart a geography of place and person
solidarity—to make the world a better
and brighter place. But now, we are
faced with dysfunctional political and
economic systems, a planet in deep
distress, the disappearance of plant and
animal species, perhaps the death of
life as we know it. The young woman
who stands beside me at the bookcase
11 may 2020
Illustration by Saurabh Singh
remains eternally poised at the cusp of
a radiant tomorrow but 35 years later, I
stand on the verge of crippling despair.
The books that she read as paranoid
dystopias (Orwell, Kafka, Huxley,
Zamyatin) have become the gross and
brutal reality of my time.
I feel judged by my younger self.
Should we sit and talk, one of us so
immaculate at the brink of a full life,
the other shaped and worn by experi-
ence, by loss and grief? What should I
say to her? Should I say, ‘Hello, I know
you, but it’s been a while... remind me
when we last met...’? Should I offer an
awkward embrace which acknowl-
edges the time that has passed between
us? Should I look away as I recall all the
things I could have done but didn’t?
Should I feel a spasm of remorse for not
being the person she thought I might
be, should I apologise for promises
unfulfilled and dreams woken from too
early? Will she have words of comfort,
solace, inspiration? Does my life make
sense to her? Does my life make sense to
me when I tell it to her?
The books that mark us, each from
the other, become flagstones along
the path of our hesitant conversation.
With her by my side, I can revisit, if
not regain, the idealism of my younger
days. I’m not sure yet what it is that I of-
fer her—perhaps my disappointments
will show her that she has to make the
world she wants for herself rather than
expect it to be given to her. Perhaps
she will understand that a universal
republic of flowers needs a garden that
is tended, weeded and watered, that
our highest ideals are the most delicate
of all plants, that our best selves need
to be nurtured, trimmed and pruned
regularly.
Now, after a month of shared space
we have a tentative friendship, this
dimly remembered girl from so long
ago and me. But as I grow accustomed
to her presence and renew my acquain-
tance with her, I realise that the other
person who lives in the house—my
mother—has always known and cher-
ished the young woman who inhabits
‘my’ room. After all, she gave birth to
her and to me. n
Arshia Sattar is an author
and translator. Her
forthcoming book is
Maryada: The Search for
Dharma in the Ramayana
(HarperCollins)
www.openthemagazine.com 63
 music

Rhythm
for
the Blues
The way we are
Illu listening to and creating
music is changing
str
ati
on
by
Sa
ur

in real time
ab
hS
in gh

By Akhil Sood

friend of mine has this like we’re in a bad dystopian novel. I turn sic to get by; I need it now more than ever.

A tiny wooden music box. It has

a lid on top, inside which lies
its whimsical, turbine-looking
machinery. When you wind the key on
the side, it plays a 10-second fragment
of some of the most haunting music I’ve
ever heard. Pearly, dindong bells clatter-
ing into each other, forming a melanchol-
ic echo of the entire world. I wound and
unwound the thing a few hundred times
in the 10 minutes I had it in my hands. It
sounded newer each time. In hindsight,
I found through that little loop of music
physical joy and hope—a sense of respite,
of clarity, that I wasn’t even seeking.
These days—‘troubled times’, as we’re
constantly reminded—there’s a lot of
unexpected noise everywhere. Out-
side my house, these mini-tempos are
patrolling while playing railway station
music prompts followed by pre-recorded
voiceovers explaining social distancing,
on the TV and that’s a whole other world
of manic farce. Every conversation—on
Zoom or otherwise—begins with the
virus. ‘Hope you’re well’ sounds almost
like a taunt. The birds can’t seem to
shut their mouths. My fridge makes an
annoyed grunt at every minor electricity
surge. The dogs in my neighbourhood
have their own daily ragers happening
post-sundown—they think they’re
wolves. Every door slammed, every water
tap turned on, every seeti from every pres-
sure cooker gets amplified.
This superhuman hearing may be the
result of the bubbling panic everywhere;
a sense of dread and disquiet where
everything is magnified. On top of that,
I’m so bored. We all are. And it’s the adult
kind of boredom, pompously called en-
nui—there are things to do, we just don’t
want to do them. It’s exhausting.
Reflexively then, I’m leaning on mu-
Just to recreate, in some approximate
way, the momentary delight of the music
box. To shut out the outside world.
I find my brain instinctively strip-
ping music off all its intellectualism.
The wordsmithery, the songwriting and
arrangement jiggery-pokery, the ‘craft’,
the innovation, the concept, the sonic
quality. These are all important—per-
haps even essential—elements of the
experience. But somehow, they seem to
matter less to me currently. What I’m
subconsciously searching is a physi-
cal experience; the primal, instinctual
reaction that music evokes in the whole
body. How it washes over you.
Perhaps the very way we’re listening
to music is changing in real time. This
happens every 10 years or so, though it’s
usually propelled by technology and
not a pandemic. But a collective shift
happens. Like how, while growing up,

64 11 may 2020
a Chitrahaar on Doordarshan was the
primary source for my generation: sit-
ting in front of a TV, watching film clips,
processing music accordingly. There was
the radio, most often considered back-
ground activity. Tapes required listeners
to be more present, sitting in front of a
two-in-one, on guard to change sides or
untangle the reel. The Walkman came
along, putting music right in our ears,
opening up physical spaces. CDs, which
cost five times as much as a cassette,
made the process yet more focussed.
And then, 21 years ago, the world
changed forever with Napster and (illegal)
peer-to-peer sharing of songs encoded in
MP3 format. This was bootlegging, times
a thousand. Tastes expanded beyond bor-
ders; we were no longer limited to what
the TV or local music store had decided
was good. And we kept adapting to each
new development, creating habits and
memories dictated by external influences.
Most recently, in the streaming age,
tastes were being shaped by maths.
Artists trying to game the system. Listen-
ers, crippled by the paradox of choice,
playing it safe. No one getting any money
anywhere. The algorithm staging a coup.
Now, with the coronavirus, there’s a
reset of sorts happening.
With a pandemic threatening to
wipe us all out in slow motion, people
are looking for comfort and solace—
the kind only art can provide—far
more than thrill and all its ephemera.
Great music moves you in mysterious,
indeterminate ways, but it also demands
submission, sacrifice, attention. Even as
our brains are racing and we’re unable
to concentrate for more than a few min-
utes at a time, the process of music listen-
ing—in aspiration at least—has become
more concentrated and singular, more
active. It’s become more intense.
For the past month or so, ever since
the world took its bat and ball home and
shut itself down, the music community
has been facing the kind of setback best
described as FUBAR (fouled up beyond all
recognition). The list of lives claimed by
the coronavirus is a long and increasing
one, with the great country artist John
Prine being one of many tragic losses. No
11 may 2020
gigs or concerts for about two years—the Floyd have been putting out archival
primary, or reasonably, the only source of footage and live concerts for fans to
income for numerous artists—coupled watch for free. Many artists have sped
with projections of a worldwide recession up their releases for their fans, leading to
and an understandable paranoia about action-packed Fridays. We’re getting ab-
crowded spaces that’s set to last much lon- surd Skype/Zoom/Houseparty collabora-
ger than this infinite disease will means tions, lost B-sides, unfinished scratches;
the situation is grim. musician Patreons and Bandcamps
But there’s something exciting, are overflowing with corona-jams. We
heartwarming happening at the same even have a brand new concept in place:
time too. Perhaps more than most, the livestreamed home concerts—artists,
community of musicians and music- both Indian and foreign, are sitting in
adjacent individuals understands the their living room with their gear, broad-
value, in such a time, of music that casting a video of themselves which their
people can latch on to for momentary fans on Instagram watch on with love.
peace. It’s why an album like Fetch the Sure, some of these may well be pub-
Bolt Cutters, the spectacular new release licity-grabbing stunts and gimmicks,
by Fiona Apple after an absence of eight but at its core, this flurry of activity in the
years, has been received not just with music world is a fundamentally noble
widespread praise but near universal endeavour. It’s a back-and-forth of much-
untamed adulation. We’re all looking needed kindness between listeners and
for positivity and hope, for that unique artists. An endless hunt for catharsis.
communication between artist and Pre-virus, as a general rule, we all
listener through song. It’s magic. heard music with a sense of grounding.
Remember Gal Gadot getting all But now we’re in an age where that foun-
her A-lister, celeb friends to contribute dational underpinning no longer exists.
to that insufferable rendition of John In its place is perpetual uncertainty. A
Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ a few weeks ago? feeling of restlessness. Music, on a good
Ridiculous as that was—and a reminder day, affects humans in such profoundly
that famous people can be aliens—the abstract ways, relying on unknown
underlying message variables. But now
was one of undilut- we lack even that
ed hope. Bandcamp, This flurry of flimsiest of context.
a great resource for activity in the Things we grew
indie artists who music world is a up with, sought
can stream and sell fundamentally calm and reassur-
their music directly ance in, no longer
to fans with zero
noble endeavour.
sound the same.
fuss, has waived its It’s a back-and- We are, on some
fees—the company forth of much- level, discovering
charges a percent- needed kindness a brand new way
age on every sale— between listeners of absorbing and
on two different and artists processing music—
occasions already through old songs
(one day each in or new— creating
April and May), al- fresh memories in
lowing fans the opportunity to do some unprecedented times that we were never
good and support struggling musicians, supposed to deal with. The ineffable
while at the same time discover exciting ‘feeling’ that comes with it—the music
new music. OK Listen, the Indian digital box—exists, we know that, and we’re
platform for artists to sell their music, now learning how to get there again. n
also waived its fees for all of April, with
all revenue going to the artists. Akhil Sood is a music and culture writer
Bigshot bands like Radiohead or Pink and editor based in New Delhi
www.openthemagazine.com 65
 NOT PEOPLE
LIKE US
RAJEEV MASAND
Farewell, Irrfan Khan
Just when one thought that our spirits couldn’t sink any
further came the news earlier this week that Irrfan Khan
(1967-2020) had passed away on April 29th. The actor was 53
and succumbed to a colon infection while still battling a rare
form of cancer since his diagnosis in early 2018.
Irrfan was that rare star who had toiled away in television,
then risen through the ranks from small film parts that
got him better supporting roles, till he became a key part of
significant A-list projects. Pankaj Tripathi recently told
me he took a single-scene cameo in Angrezi Medium only to
fulfil his ambition of sharing the screen with Irrfan. “When
I was starting out, I used to try to copy his style of acting,”
he admitted. “The way he would casually deliver a line of
dialogue while looking away from camera doing something
totally mundane… it’s a gift us actors aspire for—to be able to
act so naturally.”
Those who worked with him frequently are gutted,
as one would imagine. Konkona Sensharma, who
acted with him in Life in a... Metro (2007) and Talvar
(2015), found herself thinking of those whose lives
he had touched, including his staff who had been
with him for years. Tabu, who has shared some of her
best shooting experiences with Irrfan, in films like
Maqbool (2003), The Namesake (2006) and Life
of Pi (2012), had once told me she shared
a “spiritual connection” with him.
She was so disturbed on learning of
his passing that she chose to stay
away from social media, television
and journalists badgering her for
quotes. Many others from around
the world shared their memories,
tributes and condolences.
Akshay’s Digital Release
Akshay Kumar could be the
first Bollywood A-lister to forego
the theatrical release of his new film
and send it straight to streaming. Even
as filmmakers with unreleased films
and under-production movies sweat it
out over the future of their projects,
66
Akshay appears to have taken the crucial first step towards
embracing the ‘digital release’.
Industry insiders say Akshay has signed a deal to release
Laxmmi Bomb directly on Disney+ Hotstar, skipping its
theatrical release completely. The film was originally slated
for an Eid release on June 5th, but with cinemas unlikely
to open anytime soon in light of the pandemic, Akshay
seems to have decided that waiting is not a good option.
Rumour is that he’s negotiated a sizeable fee from the
streamer, and many in the industry are wondering if this
will trigger a spate of straight-to-streaming releases. Vicky
Donor and Piku director Shoojit Sircar has already said
he’s open to exploring the same option for his Amitabh
Bachchan-Ayushmann Khurrana comedy Gulabo Sitabo,
but only after there is clarity that lockdown in many states is
unlikely to be lifted even after the first week of May.
Money Talks
Industry insiders are gossiping about a
celebrity couple who have repeatedly turned
down requests to appear together on high-
profile chat shows and at public occasions,
yet happily seem to break the rule when it
comes to brand endorsements and all other
kinds of ‘paid gigs’.
The actress, who has a tendency to make
holier-than-thou statements about not
wanting to ‘exploit’ her marriage by
giving joint interviews or appearing
together in the media, accompanied her
hugely popular husband for a ‘virtual
interaction’ while under lockdown
recently that paid them handsomely,
insiders reveal. This has, reportedly,
cheesed off some of her friends
whom she refused to oblige when
they asked in the past for the couple
to harness their clout together to
support things that these friends
were doing.
As it turns out, they’d probably
have done it if the price was right.
Aah, well. n
11 may 2020