#171

Just received the sad news that Hugh Hefner, the founder editor of Playboy has passed away the age of 91 in California.  To say that he was one of the cultural icons of our times, would be an understatement.  From the kitchen counter of his parents' home in Chicago in 1953, he conceived and executed Playboy magazine, and later on, expanded into a lot of other enterprises.  Today, Playboy is one of the most recognizable brands in the world when it comes to adult entertainment.  For a certain generation of people, not only in the United States but also around the world, hiding Playboy magazine underneath their mattresses was almost a rite of passage into adulthood.  He had enormous respect for all the beautiful women who posed for the publication over the years, not because they had to do it, but because they wanted to.  For they believed in him.  From Marilyn Monroe to Jane Mansfield, from Sharon Stone to Demi Moore, from Cher to Madonna, from Cindy Crawford to Kim Kardashian, the list is exhaustive and long.  But he was much more than this.  He was an uncompromising activist for free speech everywhere.  He supported many philanthropic causes and charitable organizations.  In his heyday, he wasn't shy of taking on puritanical mores of the society in general and religious bigots in particular.  In this day and age when so much grotesque amount of porn is easily accessible on the Internet, Mr. Hugh Hefner reminds me of a relic from a bygone era when guilty pleasure was so much fun.

The VC of the Banaras Hindu University, Mr. G.C. Tripathi is a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man, with no discernible talent or aptitude to be appointed to the post of Vice-Chancellor of this once upon a time, quite a prestigious center of learning. And true to form, he is faithfully trying to implement the agenda of his masters by turning this campus into a fiefdom of reactionary politics. Whether it's the BHU, AMU, JNU or DU, there will never be a new India that Modijee so passionately talks about, unless the young people on the university campuses are left to their own devices as free thinkers, and allowed to make their own independent choices, even if it means making wrong choices. That's what real liberty is all about, give them rational education and let them make their way into the world.

Received this yesterday in the parcel.  This debut effort by the author Emily Fridlund is one of the six shortlisted works of fiction for this year's 'Man Booker Prize', to be awarded in a few days from now.  The Booker Prize, first given in 1969, is a prestigious literary prize awarded each year to the best original novel written in English and published in the UK.  Before 2014, only writers from the British Commonwealth and Africa were eligible to be nominated for the award.  But ever since the doors were opened for the American writers to also participate three years ago, they have been able to corner a major chunk of the nominations.

Protesting girls students at the BHU hostel are beaten up by U.P. Police.  They were demanding their basic rights and facilities as an adult human being.  The demonstrations are perfectly justified.  Why should there be a moral policing on girls?  Like don't wear this or don't wear that?  Why shouldn't they have boyfriends?  Why should they be denied Wi-Fi?  Because they will go astray under the malign influence of the Internet?  Why shouldn't they have non-veg food?  Because it will engender lusty thoughts?  I would like to see young women on every campus across the country rise up in revolt against these regressive patriarchal mindsets.

Roughly 35,000 youths in India are entering the job market every day.  But only about 500 jobs are being created per day.  The Indian economy is stuck in a toilet and the flush is not working!  All the macroeconomic indicators are painting a grim picture.  Indian industry is not investing in India but mostly abroad because the cost of credit is much cheaper in other countries than here right now.  Exports are declining, factory output is at the lowest in recent times.  GST implementation is an almighty mess.  Food inflation is constantly moving north.  I could go on and on, but there is no absolutely no denying the fact that this government has made a terrible mess of the economy.  The 'Supreme Leader' and his devotees (I would not use the word 'bhakts' this time) in the media have been so arrogant in their belief in having a divine right to rule, that like an Ostrich buries its head in the sand at the first sign of approaching storm, so have they hoping that the trouble would just disappear on its own.  But the harsh realities have a strange way of catching up with you.  But who is the net loser in all of this?  We the people.

This image of a dead baby of a grieving Rohingya woman.  The horrible grief encapsulated in this picture by Reuters has really caused a lot of mental anguish to my sister Deepti Deleo who lives and works in New York. So much so that she was telling me, she was not able to either eat or concentrate on her job for the whole day.  Being a young mother herself, she was sickened in the gut.  So, she immediately contributed $100 to some charitable organization working there to minimize the sufferings of those people as much as possible.  She told me, she would be giving more.  By the way, she did not want me to publicize this.  I am doing it on my own.  I am proud of her.

I am reasonably certain now that 90% of the NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) in the US are bigoted reactionaries who are hopelessly drunk on Modi.  Enjoying the cozy comforts of living in Jersey and Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Boston and Atlanta and Detroit and San Francisco, they don't come face to face of countless small and big cruelties of everyday Indian society.  For them, nationalism is not about civilized decency, it has to be a political project tied up not with Hinduism, but with Hindutva.  Their arguments are only grounded in grievances, real or imagined, mostly the latter.  Sitting thousands of miles away, it is so easy to pine for your ''glorious motherland'' and run down the progressive elements of society, who are always swimming against the tide of majoritarian politics in this country.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banarjee has apparently refused permission to the RSS to hold some kind of conference or public meeting in Kolkata.  This is just not acceptable in a functioning democracy like India.  I am no fan of the RSS, in fact, quite the opposite.  But I most certainly believe that they have every right to profess and propagate their views and beliefs provided it is done in a peaceful and nonviolent manner, which it was intended to be.  When we accuse the right-wing of being intolerant, we as liberals are showing exactly the same intolerance that we associate the other side with.  Mamata Banarjee's cussed attitude doesn't help the cause of liberals at all.

I like to read prose and literature in English. But when it comes to poetry, the language of choice is Hindustani, that is, a seamless mingling of Hindi and Urdu. When I came upon the works of Dushyant Kumar (1933-1975), it really shook me up and spoke to me on so many levels. The smoldering fire of his poetry is camouflaged by a strange tenderness which is almost like a longing. Looking forward to this one.

''Without You, There Is No Us''.  How much I love Suki Kim for writing this utterly fascinating account of what it is like to live and work in North Korea.  She is a South Korean born American free-lance writer who spent two semesters working undercover, teaching the English

language to the sons of the elite of the ruling Workers'Party at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.  She took a huge risk in secretly recording and saving her impressions on USB sticks as to what is it like to function as a normal human being in the most oppressive, brutal, and isolated country in the world.