Madhavankutty Pillai
Open Magazine
Mumbai, MH, India
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Past articles by Madhavankutty:
Touch and Go - Open The Magazine
TRAFFIC AUTHORITIES in Mumbai are instituting a policy by which taxis will not get a clearance certificate unless they have a panic button. So, if a passenger perceives danger from the driver, he or she can press it and the police will come and rescue them. The taxi drivers don’t like it. They have nothing … Continue reading "Touch and Go" → Read More
The Fall Woman
WHEN THE NIGHT before Holi is celebrated across India, there will be bonfires lit and oblations performed around it. Especially in the hinterland, men, women and children hypnotised by licks of fire curling into the night sky will mark the death of a woman who tried to meddle with the design of gods and, obviously, … Continue reading "The Fall Woman" → Read More
Foreign Concept
AN AMPLIFICATION OF the demand for correction to great social evils often happens when the phenomenon is already on the wane. You can see this with how racism has taken centrestage in the US at a point when no one can be overtly racist, and everyone is unanimous on it being wrong. Students there are … Continue reading "Foreign Concept" → Read More
The Case for a Good Death
THE SUPREME COURT is going to tweak its rules that permit passive euthanasia because the red tape was too cumbersome to be practical and this is happening four years after it gave, what many say, was a landmark judgment that recognised every Indian had a right to die with dignity. And yet, one must ask … Continue reading "The Case for a Good Death" → Read More
Out of Fear - Open The Magazine
JUST AS THE YEAR TURNED, ON JANUARY 5, THERE came news that India had its first official death from Omicron. Technically, it was a week earlier that the elderly man from Rajasthan who also had comorbidities passed away. But the news greeting 2022 seemed to presage ominous portents of a new wave. States got ready … Continue reading "Out of Fear" → Read More
A Dangerous Disaffection
SEDITION, IF YOU go by the dictionary meaning and why wouldn’t you, is when a man, or a woman, decides that he or she has had too much of the government and decides to do something about it—“language or behaviour that is intended to persuade other people to oppose their government,” says Cambridge. The word … Continue reading "A Dangerous Disaffection" → Read More
A Convenient Secularism
THE WAY IN which India makes difficult decisions is peculiar and one can see it in the issue of making mosques tone down loudspeakers. This is a practice that has come in for a fair bit of criticism because the sound can be a disturbance to others who are not of the faith. And one … Continue reading "A Convenient Secularism" → Read More
The Fall of Lalu
THE FIRST TIME I went to Bihar was in 2009, a full four years after the end of the long reign of Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), but even then the memory of the anarchy was yet to be shed. You would be hard put to hear a bad word about Nitish Kumar, … Continue reading "The Fall of Lalu" → Read More
Touch and Go - Open The Magazine
TWO EVENTS HAPPENED simultaneously this week that saw the universe telling a business story with a moral. The original BlackBerry died, officially consigned to the dustbin of history. On December 22nd, the company had announced the date for it—January 4th. As the Guardian reported: “Tuesday marks the end of an era: BlackBerry will discontinue service … Continue reading "Touch and Go" → Read More
Saviour Complex
THE INDIAN STATE avoids, deliberately, having failure standards—to decide beforehand and make public for any government policy the markers that say it has delivered nothing of the promised end. Take, for example, demonetisation. No one knows what exactly it set out to achieve in quantifiable terms and so no one can say it has failed … Continue reading "Saviour Complex" → Read More
Why Do We Gamble?
THE EARLIEST INSTANCE of gambling in Indian history is also in its oldest scripture—the Rig Veda. In the 10th Book, the last of the lot, when that society possibly became less nomadic and began to settle, there is what is known as the gambler’s lament. It is a hymn about ruin. “My wife holds me … Continue reading "Why Do We Gamble?" → Read More
A Tall Order for Indians
THE INDIAN INTEREST in height is somewhat different from what you would think is the stereotype. Unlike, say, the quality of fair skin, which parents in this country obsess over for their children, tallness is not on the checklist in the beginning. It makes its appearance as only a comparison when man-woman relations need to … Continue reading "A Tall Order for Indians" → Read More
Don’t Bet On It
JUST THIS WEEK, Anthony Fauci, the man who is leading the battle against Covid-19 in the US and one of the world’s best-known experts on infectious diseases, said that it had the potential to be as bad as the Spanish Flu, the worst pandemic in history. He was speaking in a webinar to students and … Continue reading "Don’t Bet On It" → Read More
Not Staying Alive
DEATH IS HUMANITY’S greatest obsession since it developed consciousness. What happens after it is a question that has one straightforward answer—there is nothing. But that was neither palatable nor acceptable to the primitive brain and so religion was invented to create alternative realities, like Gods and rebirths that make non-existence tolerable. People, even fundamentalists, know … Continue… → Read More
Powerless in Mumbai
IT IS A LITTLE difficult for anyone to be in Raj Thackeray’s shoes. Before the last General Election, he had suddenly discovered an anti-Narendra Modi vein and used his considerable oratorical prowess laden with sarcasm to viral retweets and Facebook posts. But online isn’t votes and the BJP easily swept the state. In the Assembly … Continue reading "Powerless in Mumbai" → Read More
Imagining Love Jihad
LOVE JIHAD IS always a one-way street in the minds of those who imagine it. The girl is wooed, seduced, married and then converted. The boy is always the jihadi, getting money from extremist Muslim organisations or from countries in the Middle East, to bring one more into the fold. He has the criminal brains … Continue reading "Imagining Love Jihad" → Read More
A Shift in the Culture War
TO NOT LEARN history is to repeat its follies but sometimes you learn its lessons too well. And repeat it in the expectation that history must repeat itself. It doesn’t have to. The happenings at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) are possibly telling the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) this. After Narendra Modi took charge the first … Continue reading "A Shift in the Culture War" → Read More
The Moon: Lunar Race
IT TOOK A few thousand years for the moon to get out of its reputation of being an astral body devoted to ratcheting up the insanity of men, to triggering werewolves, being an orb with a trapped rabbit and other supernatural myths. In an age before electricity, on certain days, it was the closest mankind would get to an LED bulb and—is it surprising?— that for a species inured to dark nights,… → Read More
On Literary Dabs by Finance Ministers
LITERARY FLOURISHES in the Budget speech are like the dabs of comic relief in the darkest tragedies of Shakespeare. Hamlet, for instance, which you wouldn’t really turn to for brightening up a gloomy day, has characters called Clowns, gravediggers who insert witticisms and jokes while disposing of bodies. The responsibility for inserting the literary touch in the Budget’s ocean of numbers is… → Read More
Nathuram Godse: Assassin’s Creed
Was he a Hindu terrorist? → Read More