S. Prasannarajan
Open Magazine
New Delhi, DL, India
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Between London and Beijing
THE LAST FEW DAYS have been rich with lessons on how a leader was made in a democracy and how another was mythicised in a dictatorship. Both provided high drama. In one, the revered and recently riotous home of parliamentary democracy, the leader was chosen amidst economic ruins and political tribalism. Elsewhere, in the closed … Continue reading "Between London and Beijing" → Read More
The Rage of the Fringe
DOES THE FRINGE set the aesthetics of power—or of the anxieties of powerlessness? Has the street theatre of vulgarism become more than a diversion from the larger national performances? Has the noise from the margins come to make the message from the lofty heights inaudible? Is the conversation being replaced by the commandments of madmen? … Continue reading "The Rage of the Fringe" → Read More
Who Wants Salman Rushdie Killed?
It all began from the dreams of Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses, a novel which has gained more critics, among them politicians and priests, than readers. Farishta, a movie star with a conflicted soul, spiritually torn between belief and doubt, owes his first name to the Archangel. Dreams are his flight from the torments … Continue reading "Who Wants Salman Rushdie Killed?" → Read More
The Tragedy of Boris Johnson
Amidst the chaos, we tend to return to the lost loftiness of politics. There is nothing loftier in British political thoughts than Peter Hennessy’s “good chap theory of government”, which I think is the modern-day English alternative to the Confucian model of enlightened men in power. In the kingdom without a constitution—Britain relies on loosely … Continue reading "The Tragedy of Boris… → Read More
To Kill a Mockingbird…And a Boris Johnson
IT WAS ANOTHER SUMMER, six years ago, when Brexit’s most popular and charismatic apostle was knifed in the back by his comrade-in-arms just before his coronation as the restorer of Englishness, though he always wanted to see himself as the Last Churchill. Even as Boris Johnson lay there bleeding, and Michael Gove loomed over him … Continue reading "To Kill a Mockingbird…And a Boris Johnson" → Read More
What Democracies Owe Ukraine
AUTOCRATS ABHOR THE present. They endure it as an assault on memory, as a bad reminder that further downgrades their diminished inheritance. The present is a country without justice; it’s a lie exacerbated by the worst instincts of those who claim to have won history. In their rage against the present, autocrats travel back in … Continue reading "What Democracies Owe Ukraine" → Read More
Editor’s Choice
IS IT THAT WE GET TO read more stories, and are surprised by the way they are told, in non-fiction now? I still remain a fiction junkie but the stories, non-fictional stories, that kept me awake ranged from the cultural portraits of the past to the mental sketch of novelists, from God’s autopsy to the … Continue reading "Editor’s Choice" → Read More
Lamentation 2021
THIS IS ONE of those moments, when the distance between life and death is made bearable by the shared sense of sorrow. A moment when we realise the banality of consolations and the weary sameness of condolences. Words, I tell my friend, won’t fill the void left by the passing of the one who added … Continue reading "Lamentation 2021" → Read More
The Name of the Normal
A NEW ADJECTIVE IS haunting the shaken citadel of democracy and its name is ‘normal’. There are times when, in nations rattled by the raw force of change, consolation comes from the familiar, and a cliché becomes more reassuring than lofty reminders from history. The normal has a remarkable elasticity about it. It can be … Continue reading "The Name of the Normal" → Read More
Editor’s Choice
When memory powers the pages of a good writer, time shrinks, and imagination makes the real starker and intimate. Martin Amis, yesterday’s enfant terrible and today’s elder statesman of English fiction, is not a sentimental writer. The best of him exudes the comedic exuberance of a writer whose every sentence is a showy declaration of … Continue reading "Editor’s Choice" → Read More
The Mind and Mandate of America 2020
America just had its longest nights in politics. An electoral thriller, defying psephology and conventional punditry, lingered there—a prolonged denouement with no closure in sight. President Donald Trump, as was expected, played King of Darkness to horrifying perfection, crying “fraud” and “disenfranchisement” and threatening litigation whenever the numbers went against his private algorithm.… → Read More
The Trial Then And Now
BEFORE 2020, THERE was 1968. Then: The streets erupted in counter-cultural romance of what Le Monde called the “bored” generation. In Paris, they occupied universities and factories and invited Sartre for philosophical input—and old icons of communism were worthy of being there on the wall and the placard. That was a time when capitalism and … Continue reading "The Trial Then And Now" → Read More
The Silence of the Moderate
THE MODERATE HAS just vanished. No one has the time to mourn him. No one bothers to. It was the quietest of exits, through the backdoor of the hall of illusions. It was inevitable; in the shrunken middle of politics, his existence was getting precarious by the day, and his words, feeble and inconsequential, increasingly … Continue reading "The Silence of the Moderate" → Read More
Parasite at Play
LAST YEAR THIS time of the Oscar season, we were talking about a Mexican servant, a housemaid named Cleo, who brought a searing new sensibility with a pronounced foreign patois to Hollywood. The painted-to-perfection mise-en-scènes of Roma, in black and white, made memory a humanising adjective to a bad piece of Mexican history. As Alfonso … Continue reading "Parasite at Play" → Read More
The Revenge of Religion
THE CONSTITUTION IS a codified national behavioural system. It’s imposed morality, loftier than what a people assume to be practical freedom. It’s the edict of lawful destiny. On the eve of the 70th anniversary of our Constitution—of the Republic—the conversation is all about the political temptations of a constitutional democracy like India. Everything is written, … Continue reading "The… → Read More
Animal Spirits
FREEDOM COULD BE the cruellest experience for the writer shaped by unfreedom, something similar to what Pavel went through in the Czech novelist Ivan Klíma’s post-Velvet Revolution novel Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light. Lost in the many tantalisations of freedom, Klíma’s filmmaker protagonist could not find the perfect frame he had been … Continue reading "Animal Spirits" → Read More
The End of a Conversation
CONVERSATION IS PRECIOUS. It breaks the barriers between incompatible perceptions and polarising prejudices. It democratises the intimacy of communication, for an exchange of ideas may not demolish hierarchies but it certainly establishes the sovereignty of arguments, and celebrates the sportsmanship of outsmarting the other position. Conversations are more rewarding than the sermons from Mount… → Read More
Being Boris
Can Boris Johnson play Churchill in the divided kingdom? → Read More
Modi Versus Them
WORDS MAKE ALL the difference, and words have made Narendra Modi the most successful campaigner in power today. Those who have been rattled by the ease with which he makes people believe in him will of course continue with the refrain that it is ‘provocations on the stump and platitudes in power,’ nothing more. Not really. It’s provocation all the way, and that sets him apart as a self-conscious… → Read More
The Name of the Change
Change is a word that has lost its lustre due to the overuse of it by both politics and journalism. It is a word killed by premature aphorisms and desperate slogans. Still, there are times when this worn out word regains its original resonance. When dead certainties crack open to reveal the raw passions of freedom. When ideas of tomorrow redeem power from its darkest corridors. When a people… → Read More