Open on cricket

Akshay Sawai says in Open "Gavaskar’s passivity on issues in which he has a stake is unbecoming of his stature. It is his failing to address the inconvenient truths" and "Popularity cannot be the lone yardstick of the health of a sport; credibility is important too". 

“Being ambitious is not particularly suspicious behaviour, especially for capable men,” says senior cricket writer Gulu Ezekiel when speaking of Jagmohan Dalmiya. 

Home Space - malls in India

Home Space

Malls in India offer expats a disturbing comfort of familiarity

By Michael Edison Hayden, Open 

The Oberoi, situated in the Goregaon East neighbourhood on the southeast corner of where Film City road meets a flyover (and conveniently tucked right next door to my current flat), is a simultaneously beautiful and horrible mirage— a purified monument to capitalist escapism. 

If I’m fed up with being an expat, a writer, or simply being shaken down by taxiwalas, I can always count on the Oberoi’s cool, synthetic interior to erase my mind, and suck me into its delightful mind-melting core.

If you have never visited the Oberoi, it could best be described as a large air-conditioned cube of glass. Inside this cube, you will find four floors of shops, the top of which boasts a somewhat undisciplined looking food court, a thali place, an Indo-Chinese place, a movie theatre, a bookstore and a Pizza Hut that inexplicably purports itself to be a legitimate dine-in Italian restaurant. In short, every big city neighbourhood in India has something similar today— but this one is mine.

When I first moved to this country and lived in the chaotic Delhi suburb of Haryana’s Gurgaon, the MGF mall (the cleaner one of two malls that straddle the MG Road Metro stop) served a similar purpose. I would feel homesick at Thanksgiving or Christmas, check in to the MGF, buy tickets to the most inane Hollywood blockbuster I could find, perhaps something directed by Michael Bay, suck a soda, and then ride the Yellow Line back to the Guru Dronacharya stop, thoughtless and amused.

Malls are carefully designed to be this seductive. And in almost every meaningful way, I ought to represent the last line of defence against their very existence. Politically and spiritually, they offend me greatly. 

When Starbucks opened at the Oberoi Mall a few months ago, and lines stretched around the corner, I felt like I ought to somehow vomit sheets of blood across the floor in order to scare people away from it. For one thing, Starbucks is reportedly paying its Indian employees very small wages. For another, its coffee tastes like liquid cardboard. But now that the lines have subsided, and Starbucks is no more special than McDonald’s, I have my precious Oberoi back. I still don’t buy coffee there, but I don’t have to. Like everything else in the mall, I see its neon logo and feel comfortably numb.

The late French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard said of shopping malls that they synthesise “all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these”.

As I am a frugal person, and detest spending money on things that will not get me drunk, only flirting with objects and idle wandering should appeal to me in this case. But it doesn’t seem like enough to explain my fixation with the Oberoi. And while I occasionally went to malls in America (the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island near where I grew up comes to mind, as does the Coralville Mall in Iowa where I did my Masters), it is here in India that I noticed these places forming an integral part of my perverse psyche.

The reason for that is twofold: 1) I miss my home country, and 2) I take pleasure in watching future Indian history unfolding in real time. (Even if that future history strikes me as a distinctly bad one.)

As depressing as this might sound to you, a shopping mall is the closest approximation to my own country as I can find on foreign soil. Like the many Indians who congregate around stores called ‘Subzi Mandi Cash n’ Carry’ in Edison, New Jersey, thrusting bags of Parle-G biscuits into the air like small trophies, I too desire a material connection to my place of origin. And what could be more American than sipping a Coke through a red-and-white straw while staring at a poster of some starlet’s airbrushed cleavage? The answer, sadly, is not very much.

The first indoor shopping mall was probably created in Cleveland, Ohio, and the entire mall ‘culture’ (if we can use that word in this context with any degree of seriousness) was arguably created in every American suburb from Orange County, California, to Vienna, Virginia. It used to be that that culture was met face to face with an equally powerful, antagonistic, American subculture of serious-minded artists and thinkers, but through the years, I worry more and more that that battle has been lost. It’s not that an alternative to multiplex, fast food ‘culture’ doesn’t exist in America, it’s just that it no longer offers any real hope of supplanting its rival. Maybe one day, America will simply extend a dome over itself, pump in some air-conditioning, and call it a night.

But regarding India: a lot has been made in the last decade of India’s burgeoning middle-class, and nowhere is it more apparent than in its popular shopping malls. The first time I waited behind two aunties paralysed at the foot of a moving escalator, I was sure that these good sisters had mistakenly taken too much bhang. But upon further examination, I realised that these women had never seen an escalator before in their lives. Now I’m accustomed to witnessing this same occurrence at least once every other week. Someone, having never experienced an escalator, stands at the foot of it, stares down its forbidding slope, paralysed with terror, and doesn’t know what to do. As a person who grew up riding escalators shortly after I could crawl, the effect the sight has on me is always both heartwarming and surreal.

But as an American who is highly critical of my own country’s failures, I can’t help but be saddened as I wonder where that escalator really leads India. A friend of mine from New York recently visited me here, and although I’m pretty sure he was mostly charmed by his stay, he still vocalised the truism that my brain softly repeats to itself every day, “Every place in the world is the same now, anyway”, shortly after visiting the Oberoi Mall.

India adds its distinct touches to the American capitalist experience, of course. The fast food chaat stalls are proof of that, as are the plastic Diwali lamps that are brought out front in early November. The life-size Shah Rukh Khan watch ads claim a completely independent dependence on the lives of celebrities, and the ice-cream stands are built to replicate the unique experience of Mumbai street vendors, while providing a decreased risk of catching amoebiasis. But in the end, these things are only a commodification of human life in this country. And life as a commodityvdoes not technically exist. It’s simply a representation of our desire for a break from the hurdles of daily life, and our awe-inspiring fear of a thing bigger and more powerful than us—money.

Even as I write these pessimistic words, I am already planning my next visit to the Oberoi Mall. I can’t help it. I’ll be there tomorrow, if not sooner, allowing its inherent numbness to wash over me like gentle rainwater. So, if you ever go shopping in Goregaon East, and you see a firang wearing big glasses, drifting aimlessly down an escalator, sipping a soda, or perhaps even editing a story while eating dahi puri, feel free to tap me on the shoulder to say ‘hello’.

Just don’t expect me to wake up.

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/arts-letters/home-space

IT Act, POTA, cricket, Rajesh Parameswaran and Robert Frost

Interesting reads 

From Open Magazine 

About India's Information Technology Act - Under the IT Rules of 2011, a provision called ‘intermediary liability’ holds website owners legally responsible for content on their website. Thus, YouTube is responsible for knocking off pirated movie clips and Facebook for deleting status updates that are defamatory or communally inflammatory.

Offline, intermediary liability does not apply so strictly. A mobile network owner isn’t held responsible if two of its users plan a terror attack in a conversation on its mobile network, and a car maker is not accountable for drunken driving. Online, however, it’s a different story. India’s infotech law, like most such laws across the world, holds websites responsible for offensive content.

About POTA - Special criminal laws are a reward that the State gives the police for its incompetence. The trick is to keep making the alleged crime more and more terrifying so that the initial action is not questioned. 

About cricket - Cricket in India  is a game run by private clubs. If some players decide it is profitable to throw a no-ball at an appointed time, it is between them and the BCCI. Let the BCCI file a case of cheating or breach of contract and invite the police in to investigate.

Writer Rajesh Parameswaran on writing 

One of the challenges of writing a short story is there is really very little margin. Everything has to be to a purpose. If there is a line or a paragraph that is not part of the machinery of the narrative, there’s no space for it, typically, in a short story. Whereas a novel is a much bigger tapestry and you can have different worlds within the world, you can take digressions and then come back to the main path. That has been very freeing and exciting.

It takes less time to fail at a short story than it does at a novel. So if you want to fail a lot and fail quickly, as they say, then you can do that with a short story in quick succession. To me, that was reassuring. I did end up spending years and years at it, but I think the idea of spending six years on a novel and failing, at the time was, to be honest, more than I was willing to risk.

For me, writer’s block just takes the form of compulsive internet surfing, and I don’t know what writer’s block means outside of compulsive internet surfing. I think you have to give yourself the time and space to really focus on what you’re working on, and if, given that, [you’re] still unable to write, then maybe there’s just no need to write. Why force yourself? Go and do something else. Maybe writer’s block is just a sign to take some time off.

Robert Frost said in an interview when somebody asked him, “So what does this poem mean?” and he responded, “So you want me to say it worse?”

Take life in your stride!

Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of the RAW passed away yesterday, after battling cancer. He was known for his candour and determined optimism. 

He said in his memoir 

"Throughout my 26 years in the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency, I was known as a man with a poker face. 

As someone, who showed no emotions or passion on his face or in his words. 
As someone, who led a robot-like existence, working from 8 in the morning till 9-30 in the night — seven days a week, 365 days in a year. 
As someone, who took life in its stride." 

In his talk at the Intelligence Summit in 2007, he struck a positive note while he said 

"Nothing demoralises terrorists more in the long-term than the sight of a state, which keeps growing from strength to strength despite their worst acts of terrorism." 

He defined International jihadi terrorism as revanchist in character, medieval in its objectives and modern in its methods of operation. 

He added that it wants to avenge through mass killings the imaginary wrongs which, according to it, were done to the Muslims of the world over the ages by the rest of the world. It is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash between savagery and civilisation.