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How a real hero lost out to a lip-syncing star

It is a timely moment for an Indian ‘Monsoon’ in Manhattan

POLITICALLY INCORRECT SHOBHAA DE WRONG PRIORITIES? When you look at the Rs 3-crore bandobast and security for Bieber, you can’t but help wonder about the failure to protect Ummer Fayaz

cool this summer, or the young man trying to be one up on her by boasting about owning indecently expensive luxury wear. When they weren’t comparing watches and shoes, they were discussing who had worn what at the Bieber concert! No mention was made about his songs. It was as if his brand — not band — was the main reason for attending. People tell me this is today’s India. Is it? I refuse to accept that glib generalisation. The truth is dramatically different. Millions of pre-teen Indians are not dreaming of Bieber tickets but about acquiring basics — food, clean water, sanitation and clothes on their backs. They dream about getting a good education and finding jobs. So why are we fed this Bieber garbage, and made to believe our youngsters are craving for more and more of this form of entertainment and escapism. It is simply not true! And yet, the sort of coverage, the 23-year-old Bieber received from the moment he arrived in India to the time he fled in a hurry, was enough to cancel out the enormous tragedy of a 22-year-old who had been abducted and brutally murdered while attending a family wedding in Srinagar. When a Justin Bieber is treated as a bigger hero than the late Lt. Ummer Fayaz of the Rajputana Rifles regiment by our media-manipulated youngsters it is time to rethink our priorities and ask where the hell have we gone wrong? Why should anybody care what Justin Bieber ate for breakfast, or where he stopped for a coffee. When you look at the Rs 3-crore bandobast and security arrangements for Bieber, you can’t but help yourself from wondering about the failure to protect Ummer. Why not acknowledge intelligence and security lapses? Let’s not whitewash the truth. Meanwhile, let’s hope the purposeless Bieber ‘Purpose’ tour teaches us to be far more selective while manufacturing and aggressively promoting heroes and icons for our impressionable young to look up to. Indian fans are right in asking Justin Bieber to say ‘Sorry’! And not lip-sync it this time. Like the article: SMS MTMVSD Yes or No to 58888@ 3/sms

It’s been 16 years since Mira Nair’s masti-filled, rain-drenched story of a Punjabi wedding became the toast of Venice. The director, who has notched up many awards with her diverse storytelling, is now taking that entertaining mix of Black Label scotch, shaadis and skeletons to the Broadway stage with an ensemble cast and music composed by Vishal Bhardwaj. In an interview to Neelam Raaj, Nair talks about the musical which marks her return to theatre after 40 years Monsoon Wedding, the musical, is opening at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre next week, and it will soon be on Broadway. You took just about 30 days to shoot the movie but its stage adaptation has been quite some time in the making. What took so long and how is the theatrical version different from the movie? It’s taken us 10 years to develop this musical for various reasons but mostly because I chose to return to India to find my creative team rather than go to Broadway. Vishal Bhardwaj (music), Sabrina Dhawan (writer) and the others had to juggle busy schedules. But now we’re ready for our first performance next week. The story and its main issues are the same. It’s very much a tale of the Verma family. The film had five sub-plots which we’ve cut to four — the old-shoe love between the mum and dad of the bride, the arranged marriage with a question mark between Hemant and Aditi, the pure love of Alice and P K Dubey, and the twisted, sick love of the uncle and the niece. We’ve also updated it. Monsoon Wedding was made in 2001 and was really the first portrait of a globalising India. Today, there is more confidence and wealth in India, but the disparity between rich and poor has only increased. And also because the groom is from New Jersey, it’s a chance to reflect today’s America. The play is as much about the madness of Delhi life as much as it is the madness of the Trump era. I believe you’re also introducing American

was that you could recognise yourself no matter where you came from. People from all over the world related to it — they either wanted to be like the Verma family or recognised their own family in the Vermas. And we’re seeing a similar response for the musical with even the previews getting standing ovations.

Courtesy: Kevin Berne/Berkeley Repertory Theatre

He came. He sang. He didn’t conquer. A popular comic made khichdi of the Brat Boy of Pop. Which was most unfair — to the khichdi. I mean, khichdi is India’s number one comfort food. Going by some of the accounts of the suckers who paid serious money to attend Canadian singer Justin Bieber’s much-hyped ‘Purpose’ concert, his performance left a worse after-taste than stale samosas. Frankly, we deserve it. Who the hell is Justin Bieber? Come on. It’s fair to ask that question to anybody above the age of 10. Why did we fall for the hard-sell? Why did parents who should have known better, indulge their kids and buy those absurdly priced tickets only to get short-changed by a singer who didn’t bother to sing? It’s really the worst insult to hurl at die-hard fans who waited for hours in the muggy Mumbai heat to listen to their idol perform live. What did he do instead? Made a few listless moves and lip-synced to the chart-busting hits that have propelled him to the top of the heap in the highly competitive international music industry. Lip-syncing is the worst sin to commit for any performing artist. By doing that Bieber conveyed just one thing — he really didn’t give a damn for India or his desi fans. And you know what? We asked for it. To use a delicious colloquialism: “First you chadhao someone, then you pachhtao.” So what does the Justin nightmare tell us about ourselves? A lot! And it is pretty revolting. I think of overindulgent (or over-bullied) parents who thought nothing of shelling out Rs 36,000 for a ticket, so that their brats wouldn’t feel ‘left out’. 36k is one hell of a lot of money! Imagine those 10 -year-old Beliebers bragging about the concert to other kids with far more sensible parents who had not fallen for the emotional blackmail. Imagine the psychological ‘haalat’ of parents who simply could not afford to spend a large chunk of their salary to please their demanding children. This is getting so ridiculous, one wonders where and how it will stop. The summer vacations are upon us. God help parents who have not invested in a ‘going to phoren’ trip for their kids. All of it is connected. The Bieber-isation of India includes this obsession with all that is foreign and expensive. Having a cold coffee at a cafe in Mumbai, I couldn’t help but overhear a giggly, animated conversation between a couple seated next to me. They spoke ‘brands’ and nothing else for one straight hour. It was either her giving him a crash course on what’s

SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, NEW DELHI MAY 14, 2017

FOR THE

RECORD

Namit Das plays PK Dubey in the musical

audiences to saadi Dilli’s favourite BC gaali? No whitewashing there (laughs). There’s an English translation as well. Is Broadway ready for this onslaught of vibrant Punjabi-ness that is Monsoon Wedding? I do think the world needs this live-for-today philosophy more than ever. It’s a lesson in how to live fully and with masti regardless of the tragedies of life. And that’s an important thing when the world is building walls and borders. One of the reasons the movie was successful

Next year will be 30 years since the premiere of Salaam Bombay! in Cannes in 1988. What do you think of your journey? Has it become easier to be a woman director in Hollywood? Nothing becomes easier, but now I know what to expect and how to deal with it. I still got to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant. You’ve got to take the dhakkas, and not be crushed by them. In that sense, it has not changed. But I no longer feel as desperately lonely as I did then. Whether it was Salaam, Mississippi Masala or Namesake, it always felt like one was opening a door for the first time. Now, it’s the same thing in theatre. We rehearsed in Times Square for weeks before coming to Berkeley. And when we stepped out of the subway, I almost felt like saying, ‘All brown people follow me’. It’s still rare to see people of hue on stage, and there we were — the whole team of Monsoon from the subcontinent. But there are definitely more people who look like us, telling our stories and making it understood that we are not the other — look at Riz Ahmed, Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling. I feel a growing sense of community for sure. I believe that Americans are essentially open-minded people, and so many are desperate in anxiety of what is happening to their world. A great gust of wind like the Monsoon Wedding makes them feel ‘ki haan bhai koi hai’ — that there are people who can counter the insularity and poison of what is being said. It’s a timely moment to open Monsoon Wedding. Were you disappointed by how your last film Queen of Katwe, in which you tell the story of a Ugandan chess prodigy, did at the box office? It was received so ecstatically by critics, audiences and the African continent that I did expect more. I was disappointed with its distribution but with Netflix, etc, people are discovering it again. But the film is exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.

The Maharaja’s worse than Mallya. Declare Indigo the national carrier SWAMINOMICS SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR To call Air India the national carrier, and so justify running it at losses that would make Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher blush, is a tragi-comedy that must end. Indigo is the top domestic carrier with a market share of around 40%, followed by Jet at 18%. Air India comes third at 14%, about to be overtaken by Spicejet at 13-14%. If Air India staff strike to protest attempted privatization, the public will not suffer at all— other airlines will easily pick up the slack. That shows how irrelevant Air India has become for travelers, even as it becomes an ever-thirstier bloodsucker of public funds and bank borrowings diverted from public health, housing and poverty reduction.

Earlier this month, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs decided to privatise three hotels. A press release said “running and managing hotels on professional lines is not the work of the government or its entities”. Surely the same is true of running airlines. Air India has never been run professionally and never will. It is a horrendously costly political plaything. “Air India is nothing but a cronies-filling-jobs programme— it is so bloated that successive govts simply do not know what to do except throw good money after bad,” says Saj Ahmed, chief analyst at Strategic Aero Research. It is hugely overmanned, yet keeps rehiring retirees. Columnist AK Bhattacharya wrote in 2015, “Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh undertook 73 foreign visits between 2004 and 2014, entailing a travel time of 246 days. But the problem is that for as many as five of his last visits (17 days), the bills for chartering the Air India

aircraft are still under process and the chartering costs for the remaining 68 foreign visits came to around Rs 700 crore. For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has so far used the Air India chartered flights for 55 days during his 13 foreign visits, no bills for as many as eight visits have been received by the government, bills for four visits are under process and the bill for only one visit has been computed. Which other airline will agree to offer such easy terms for settling bills for chartering its aircraft?” Air India’s losses over decades have entailed countless write-offs and injections of fresh government equity. The UPA government decided in 2012 to pump into a whopping Rs 30,000 crore to revive a sick giant that never recovers despite swallowing gargantuan doses of cash. At a time when airlines across the world are minting money because of low fuel prices, Air India lost Rs 3,587 crore in 2015-16 even while Indigo made Rs 1.987 crore.

Here’s what it means to not own your body THE RATIONALIST AMIT VARMA A century ago, when India was still a British colony, some of our most prominent freedom fighters were lawyers: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru, Rajagopalachari, Mookerjee and Patel, among others. It is fitting, then, that a few days ago, it was a lawyer who made an eloquent plea for freedom against a government that is arguably as oppressive, and certainly more powerful, than the British were. Shyam Divan was arguing against the government’s recent decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for filing income tax returns. Previous challenges to this act, on the basis of the Right to Privacy, were held up in court, and Divan could not make that argument for technical reasons. Instead, he based his argument on a person’s ownership of his own body. “My fingerprints and iris are my own,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, the State cannot take away

NO IRIS SCAN PLEASE: Arguments in the Aadhaar case by lawyer Shyam Divan were based on Enlightenment and modern-day philosophers such as John Locke

my body. Others cannot act in a way that subjects my body to their interests.” Divan argued that the imposition of Aadhaar “completely takes away your political and personal choices. You are a dog on an electronic leash, tagged and tracked, your progress hobbled.” A person’s body, Divan pointed out, could not be “nationalised”. This is not a new argument. Divan cited both Enlightenment and modern-day philosophers during his masterful submission, and John Locke was among them. It should be intuitive that all humans own their own bodies, but it was Locke, in the 17th century, who gave the first clear articulation of this: “Every man has a property in his own person. This no Body has any right to but himself.” What does it mean to own yourself ? Well, there are three implications of this. One, for the ‘Right to Self-Ownership’ to have any meaning, you need to respect the corresponding right of others. This

leads to what libertarians call ‘The Non-Aggression Principle’. You cannot initiate violence against another person. Two, all legitimate rights flow from this right to self-ownership. The right to free speech — for your thoughts are yours, and you should be free to express them. The right to property, which is a result of your labours, and of voluntary exchange. The right to interact with any other consenting adult in any way you wish — economic or personal — that does not hurt anyone else. Three, because a situation where every person has to fend for themselves is unviable, and likely to be violent, the state is a necessary evil. It commits some violence on the people — for taxes are violence — but only to the minimum extent required to protect our rights. Note that these rights are not granted to us by the state, as if they are favours. Instead, we have these rights to begin with, and we have brought the state into being to protect them. The purpose of the constitution is to limit the power of the state, and not to be, in Divan’s words, “a Charter of Servitude”. Here, then, are the two visions of the state. The old one, where the people are mere subjects, ruled by the state, and for all practical purposes owned by the state. The modern one, in which the state is an instrument of the people, tasked only with protecting their rights. Deep inside the belly of any modern state, though, is the old one waiting to spring forth. Governments consist of humans, who are corrupted by power. The state, with its monopoly on violence, has tons of power. Thus, states tend to grow endlessly, and become an ever-present parasite on their people. Divan’s argument was based on personal autonomy and consent, and the attorney general of India, Mukul Rohatgi, was ready with a response. Indians do not have a right over their own bodies, he said, adding that there are “various laws which put restrictions on such a right”. This made for a shocking headline, but he was stating the obvious. India is a country where you can go to jail for what you say or what you eat. There are countless restrictions on markets, which are basically networks of voluntary exchanges. (If two consenting adults can be put behind bars for engaging in an act that infringes on no one else’s rights, can they be said to own themselves?) There are laws against victimless crimes (like gambling and alcohol). And there is an arrogant condescension by the state towards common citizens, as if it exists to rule us, and not to serve us. Our constitution did not do enough to safeguard individual rights. It will not save us — and thus, nor will the Supreme Court. It is up to us to snap out of our apathy and declare, as that battery of lawyers did a century ago, that we will not be ruled any more, that we own ourselves. What is your view on this? Do you own your body? Like the article: SMS MTMVCOL Yes or No to 58888@ 3/sms

INBOX Liberate our women Apropos Gurcharan Das’s column on triple talaq, the practice is the outcome of a patriarchal mindset which has forced Muslim women to lead a life of fear and submission. Numerous such outdated customs and malpractices need to be eradicated to emancipate women of all sections of society, because true progress will remain a myth without the empowerment of almost half the country’s population. Isha Jangir, Pilani The Indian Constitution is supreme. Personal laws cannot override it. With drastic changes in social norms, there is a need for all religions to rethink the laws that govern marriage and divorce. Men and women must be considered equal in every sphere of life for society to progress. Triple talaq is banned in many Muslim countries. What is India waiting for? Mahesh Kumar, Delhi

To hell with trolls! With reference to ‘Five ways you can survive a troll attack, and carry on living’ (May 7), one has to accept that trolls are a kind of vermin that infest social media, a bunch of sadists who derive perverse pleasure from tearing down reputations, spewing venom and in general engaging in a sinister activity that does no good to anyone, trolls included. The best way to handle the species is to ignore them and not get into a slanging match that would only give them unwarranted publicity. C V Aravind, Bengaluru Dealing with trolls requires lot of patience, wit and experience. Don’t let your private space be abused by those who indulge in vulgar communication. You should engage with them only if you have an appetite for a prolonged heated debate. Otherwise, it’s best to ignore them. Freedom of expression should be exercised with due care and dignity. S C Vaid, Delhi Email the editor at

[email protected] with ‘Sunday Mailbox’ in the subject line. Please mention your name and city

Vijay Mallya has been castigated for Kingfisher Airlines’ unpaid debts of Rs 9,000 crore. But Air India’s debts and losses over the years have been far higher. If it is a scam for banks to lend so much to a bust private company, how is it less scammy to fund Air India on an even larger scale? The losses are all being made good by taxpayer money diverted from other worthy purposes. Despite past write-offs, Air India has a debt of Rs 46,000 crore, which is larger than the entire government outlay for MNREGA, or child vaccination, or subsidised rural housing. To put it starkly, India is killing babies, worsening illiteracy and poverty. In its present form, Air India is too sick to privatise. The government and banks will have to write off a large chunk of its debt, something called a “haircut” in financial circles. Such haircuts are the standard procedure for reviving enterprises that have a future provided past debt is written off. Air India has a large fleet, is a

member of Star Alliance, and has slots at international airports, all of which have substantial value. It can be revived provided it gets a completely new private sector management delinked from political pressures of all sorts. That sort of professionalisation has proved impossible to achieve under successive governments after decades of attempts. The only way out is privatisation. The government must recast Air India financially to make it auctionable at a decent price. The government can retain a 26% minority share for strategic reasons as well as to profit from rising shareholder value after successful privatization. The political and economic conditions will never be better. After winning the UP and Delhi municipal elections handsomely, Narendra Modi has the political capital to bite the bullet. Like the article: SMS MTMVSA Yes or No to 58888@ 3/sms

Yes, India is a democracy but it’s not really a republic AAKARVANI AAKAR PATEL Our constitution opens with the words that India is both a republic and a democracy. We are making an important claim: is it true? Republic is a Roman word. A republican state is one in which power rests with the citizens. Democracy is a Greek word. It means a state in which leaders are chosen from among the general population, and not the aristocracy. Republic and democracy don’t mean the same thing, and even democracy has many interpretations. Athenian ‘democracy’ was actually a psephocracy. For instance, in Athens all (adult male) citizens were equal and therefore leaders and jurors were chosen by lot, meaning by turn. Socrates had total contempt for this democracy and throughout Plato’s works his refrain is: ‘In a storm, would you choose a ship’s captain by lot?’ After the Middle Ages, Europe was inspired by Greece in art, philosophy and science and culture, but by Rome in government. In the US constitution, the word ‘democracy’ in fact does not appear, though ‘republic’ does. Many of America’s founding fathers were classicists who favoured Rome. The Federalist Papers, which is America’s version of our Constituent Assembly debates, were written by figures like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison under the pseudonym ‘Publius’, referencing a Roman who helped set up the republic. A story, probably apocryphal, tells of Benjamin Franklin exiting the constitutional convention of 1787. A man in the crowd asks him what sort of government America has been given. Franklin replies: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Republics are not easy to keep because we are naturally attracted to the heroic saviour who will sort out our problems with his genius. The historian Livy tells us that Rome was a republic for some four centuries. It was, like democracy, different from the republic we know. Suffrage was even more restricted than in Athens, and Rome had an aristocracy (the Senate is a Roman institution) and slavery and colonialism, but it did not bow to one man. The heroic saviour Julius Caesar ended the republic. The UK is a democracy but not a republic, because executive power flows from a monarch. The resistance to this structure is referred to as ‘republicanism’. What about India? It is obvious that we are a democracy, because our leaders are chosen by voters. But are we a republic? Does real power rest with the citizens of India? The outside observer will notice that this is not the case. The interest of the state and its organs is put above the interest of India’s people. There is a background to this: Nehru inherited an aggressively expansionist imperial state with tentative borders. Its relationship with the citizen focused on taxation and law and order.

This continued after 1947. Even today, where the state feels threatened by citizens demanding rights, it will not hesitate to put them down with lethal force. This story was reported on October 1, 2016: “Four people were left dead and as many as 40 were injured after police opened fire on a protest this morning, according to sources in the Chirudih village near Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. Residents have been protesting the acquisition of land by the National Thermal Power Corporation for their coal mines.” This, the murder of citizens by the state, is actually a regular occurrence in India, in the adivasi belt, the northeast and Kashmir. It is not a ‘national’ issue because the killed are not like us. Also, their resistance hinders our development and our version of nationalism. We refer to their questioning of our consensus as anti-national behaviour. We reduce Indian citizens to categories which can be despised: Terrorist, Maoist, Islamist, Separatist, Jihadist and so on. This makes it easier for our armies and paramilitaries to kill them, though as Hazaribagh and thousands of such incidents show, we also have zero regard for the poor. I used the example

STATE FIRST: Our leaders are chosen by voters but real power doesn’t rest with the citizens of India

of the murder of helpless individuals faced with loss of their land, because in India today it is not possible to elicit sympathy for most categories of protestors. In such a place, a media organ that puts the army’s interest above the citizen’s can align itself to the name republic. This is done without irony and perhaps without even understanding of what the word republic means. The army’s interests can be supreme in a martial law state like Pakistan, not in constitutionally republican India. When can we, wholly and in full measure, claim to be a republic? Only when the rights and liberties of Indian citizens are respected by the state, without exception. Not steamrolled over regularly, to applause from the media. And when the violation happens, as it can happen anywhere, it is addressed meaningfully and ended. Till that happens, it would be fair to say that India is a democracy. But it is not really a republic. Like the article: SMS MTMVCOL Yes or No to 58888@ 3/sms