Sunday View: The Best Weekend Opinion Reads, Curated Just For You

We sifted through the papers to find the best opinion reads, so you won't have to.

A curation of essential opinion pieces of the weekend from across newspapers, made just for you.  

(Photo: iStock) 

Dented Hubris

Mukul Kesavan, in an opinion piece in The Telegraph, speaks of the controversy involving the Hindenburg report on the Adani Group, and Gautam Adani's response to it. In the article, Kesavan says that Adani's rebuttal to the report, in which he compared an attack on his enterprise as an attack on India itself, was rooted in "hubris".

"Backed by the Government of India, rich beyond the dreams of diamond merchants, Adani’s conviction that his rise was inevitable, that everything he touched would turn to gold, was the very definition of hubris. He forgot, perhaps, that the writ of his political patrons didn’t run beyond national borders, where an unlikely nemesis, a muckraking short seller, was biding his time."

Mukul Kesavan

Budget (1): Text Ignores the Context

In his weekly column for The Indian Express, P Chidambaram criticises the Union Budget for 2023-24 on several counts, including the slashing of funding for MGNREGA and the alleged loopholes in the new tax regime. "Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride in an uncertain year," he warns.

"Three things stand out in the Budget: (1) Having failed to spend the money allocated to capital expenditure in 2022-23, the FM has bumped the Budget Estimates for capital expenditure in 2023-24 upwards by a whopping 33 per cent. (2) Having made cruel cuts in expenditure on social welfare programmes, the FM has sought to assure the poor and the disadvantaged that their welfare is paramount. 3) Having failed to motivate people to migrate to the New (no-exemption) Tax Regime (NTR) that she introduced in 2020, the FM has put out questionable calculations of how the NTR is a boon for the middle-class tax-payer."

P Chidambaram

How History and Geography Shape the Way We Eat

In an article in The Times of India, Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee leaves economics on the back-burner and turns on the food enthusiast side of himself. He says that through his long and extensive travels, the one thing that he has learnt about food is that no matter where people go, their food choices will depend on what their food habits were in their native cities or towns.

"In this age of fat-shaming and moral one-upmanship about diet and discipline, it is easy to forget just how much of the way nations eat stems from their history and geography. Within India, my MIT colleague David Atkin’s work shows, people eat what grows well in their home geographies, but when they move, they carry history with them in the form of their food habits — Bengalis in Punjab and Maharashtra eat rice while everyone else is chewing on their rotis or bhakris."

Abhijit Banerjee

India’s Two Biggest Art Events Paint a Picture of Contrasts

Gautam Bhatia, in an article in The Times of India, speaks of two recent exhibitions held in India that portrayed the beauty of art, albeit in extremely different ways. He says that art should be free-flowing and not rigid. However, he argues that the trouble in India is that "we take life so deathly seriously that the artistic freedom to push ideas and boundaries has been lost."

"Both events, the India Art Fair and the Kochi Biennale, try to bridge the gap between reality and hope. One does it by selling art as beautiful objects, the other by reinventing current affairs into political statements. Which is valid art is not even a fair question. It is unlikely that someone will replace a MF Hussain painting from their living room wall with a neon-light installation, just to be with the times. Art, after all, is a riddle not waiting to be solved. When French surrealist Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa, it did not take away from Leonardo’s masterpiece, but added another dimension to her enigmatic smile. Was Duchamp the real master, and Da Vinci just a conventional draftsman? Who knows, art couldn’t care less."

Gautam Bhatia

The Quiet Subversions of 'Pathaan'

In an opinion piece in The Indian Express, Natasha Narwal draws a comparison between the film Pathaan and the current socio-political climate in India. She says that in the film, the protagonist Pathaan – played by Shah Rukh Khan – invokes the Japanese art form of kintsugi, which is used to repair broken things with gold. She says that India should embrace this metaphor to heal its many wounds instead of giving into hate and bigotry.

"In fact, this (kintsugi) is a central metaphor running through the film, invoked from the beginning to the end and is perhaps its most radical suggestion, though delivered through its worst lines. It is suggested by the character of Pathaan as a way of harnessing the potential of injured soldiers in the service of the nation, but it again seems to offer us an alternative to discarding what is broken within us and the nation and repairing it with tenderness instead; rather than getting caught in the cycle of revenge and rage which comes from the pain of festering wounds, examining and tending to these wounds."

Natasha Narwal

Hosting World Cup

R Vineel Krishna, in an article in The Tribune, speaks of the lengths that the Odisha government went to to create the perfect venue for the 2023 Men's Hockey World Cup. He says that despite several obstacles, the fact that the state government could manage to create the best possible atmosphere for the tournament despite facing several obstacles is nothing short of a miracle. He also says that the Hockey World Cup was so personal to Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik that he shed "tears of joy" when the tournament was received warmly by fans and players alike.

"Under normal circumstances, organising a Hockey World Cup at one venue, with top teams participating from across the world, is quite a challenging task in itself. To organise it at two venues is like organising two World Cups simultaneously. Organising a marquee event in a small city like Rourkela which had never seen any international event, at a new stadium directly going into World Cup matches without conducting a single international match, to hosting eight teams in a 225-room World Cup Village (completed days before the arrival of the teams), to starting commercial and chartered flights at a new airport just days before the event — it all looks unreal. But, with grit and determination and despite numerous challenges, including COVID-19, the Government of Odisha, in partnership with Hockey India and Government of India, pulled off one of the best organised Hockey World Cups, providing a spectacular experience for the teams and fans."

R Vineel Krishna

The Rules of Democracy

In an opinion piece for The Indian Express, Tavleen Singh says that the news of the release of journalist Siddique Kappan this week deserves more attention. Slamming the Narendra Modi government, she says that the "misuse" of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act has become so normal that it attracts little media attention nowadays.

"(Narendra) Modi is deeply sensitive to criticism in the western media but appears to have not discovered that if journalists, dissidents, and students spend months in jail without trial, he will inevitably be seen as an autocrat. When he is called an autocrat his army of spokesmen and supporters are deployed on social media to rave and rant about western plots against India. Would it not be simpler for democratic norms to be followed by the Modi government so that our democracy does not keep being downgraded? Dissidence is brutally crushed only in countries that have no pretensions to being the ‘mother of democracy’. So why is this not more obvious?"

Tavleen Singh

Comedy Undivine

In an article in The Telegraph, Upala Sen argues that while the recent controversy surrounding the Adani Group may be too much for the common Indian to understand, the one thing that everybody knows is that whoever is guilty of any kind of alleged misdeeds will go unpunished owing to their status and power.

"The Adani 'fraud' has too many zeros for the aam Indian to wrap his or her head around. In a litany of impenetrable word arrangements such as “FPO”, “DRI”, “EBITDA”, “LAS position” etc., the only recognisable and, therefore, heebie-jeebies-inducing arrangements are “SBI” and “LIC”. The aam Indian may not be able to tell Hindenburg from an iceberg, may even believe Adani and Ambani to be the fraternal twins they are not, but he knows this for sure — nothing will happen to whoever has been guilty of any kind of thievery."

Upala Sen

Winds of Change That Films Portray

In an article in The Tribune, Ira Pande speaks of the success of the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan, and reflects upon the changes that the Hindi film industry has undergone from the days of Dilip Kumar, RK films, and Guru Dutt to new-age actors and directors, like Karan Johar.

"Their (fans') enthusiasm (for Pathaan) took me back to my own youth and the heady delight of bunking classes to go and see a movie on the sly. In 1968, when I joined university, there was precious little by way of entertainment but see every film as soon as it was released. Those simpering, over-dressed and coy heroines and rakish heroes (some who wore lipstick!), were the ones from whom we copied our hairstyles, clothes and stupid nakhras. I laugh now as I remember those giddy times but on a more serious note, I can now see how those films and their music were reflections of a slow social and cultural change that we were then unable to discern."

Ira Pande

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