Sanae Takaichi: Heavy Metal

NARA WAS JAPAN’S 8th-century capital for 74 years. It preserved its temples and monuments well enough to become part of a larger UNESCO World Heritage Site. It survived by embracing tradition. Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s 64-year-old first woman prime minister, grew up near Nara and commuted six hours daily to attend university. Notwithstanding her youth­ful desperation to leave home back then, she ended up embracing tradition too, of the kind that opposes legisla­tion allowing married women to keep their maiden names.

A fan of Deep Purple and Iron Maiden, Takaichi was a heavy metal drummer who still keeps an intact kit at home. A self-made lawmaker, her rise to the top in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) owes its debt to the late Shinzo Abe whose protégée she was. And she wants to become Japan’s own Margaret Thatcher, her other idol.

Takaichi is known to meet problems head-on, or think like the enemy. She had got herself a job in Japan-sceptic Democrat congresswoman Patricia Schroeder’s office at the height of the trade war with the US in the 1980s. She learnt that the Americans couldn’t tell the difference between things Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Japan had to ultimately look out for itself. While that forms a core article of faith for LDP’s hard-right conservatives, Takaichi’s main challenge, apart from surviving in office against a far-right surge, will be marrying spendthrift Abenomics with skinflint Thatcherism. Otherwise, she may be Japan’s best bet in the era of Trump 2.0. (By Sudeep Paul)

Noisemaker

Nick Fuentes: The Maga Killjoy

A section of the MAGA crowd, forever on the lookout for a reason to rage, found US President Donald Trump’s Deepavali celebrations at the White House an act of paganism. Leading the pack was Nick Fuentes, a farright figure who had a public parting of ways with Trump. Fuentes typically represents that lowbrow, nativist anger against anyone seen to be an ‘outsider’ and his rant against Trump and Deepavali over the lighting of lamps and eating curry aims to rally MAGA sentiment. Though Indianorigin Americans are a small minority, their educational and professional success makes them a valuable part of American national life, something Trump has not lost sight of.

Ideas

Musician Biopics

 The new much-talked about film on Bruce Springsteen, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, that just hit our screens, may have a worthy subject and might be the first time that the music legend has been portrayed on screen, but one cannot be faulted if it all feels a bit too familiar.

That’s because this film is the latest in a long history of musician biopics that have been flooding our screens. There have been countless such biopics over the decades, and this flurry has become particularly more frequent in recent times. Last year saw the release of films on Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Amy Winehouse and Robbie Williams. And not too long before that, there were films on Elvis Presley, Elton John and Freddie Mercury. There are many more currently reported to be in development, including one on Michael Jackson that is scheduled for release next year.

It’s understandable why Hollywood loves this format so much. These stories come preloaded with drama, of the artist’s origin story, then his struggles with fame and a career-threatening breakdown, often involving substance abuse, and then the euphoric comeback. Commercially, they’re also low-risk goldmines. They don’t cost too much to make, and you usually have a captured audience of the musician’s pre-existing fans. And if you win a clutch of Oscars, which they often do, you could even have a big winner on your hands.

Of course, not all films in this genre are formulaic, and the latest Springsteen film could very well turn out to be inventive, but that would be an exception to the norm.

Money Mantra

Don’T Touch The Provident Fund

Even though the government has simplified rules to withdraw it

 THE GOVERNMENT HAS changed Employees’ Provi­dent Fund (EPF) rules, making it easier for members to withdraw. Also, larger sums can be taken out of the corpus that is built over the years by contributions from both employees and employers. The press release says 13 complex provisions nec­essary for withdrawals earlier have been clubbed into “a single, streamlined rule categorized into three types namely, Essential Needs (illness, education, marriage), Housing Needs and Special Circumstances.”

“Special circumstances” is a nebulous term. It used to be necessary to specify what they were, and that led to a lot of rejections. This has been changed now, and no reason is needed. There are other reforms too and, all in all, those who have EPF have been given more power over when and how much to use it. Whether they need to exercise that power is a different issue.

The idea of EPF is that left to themselves, people don’t save ad­equately for their old age once they can no longer work. The govern­ment gives a better interest rate than banks for this corpus because it serves a social purpose. Any Indian who remains in even an average-paying job adds to this retirement fund bit by bit every month, and at some point, the magic of compounding kicks in, and then when it is time to get it as a senior citizen, it turns out to be substantial enough to live by.

In practice, that is not how it always turns out. Young men jump jobs and take out the money to make not-so-crucial expenses. Or something urgent comes calling, and taking this money out is an easier option. But, especially, in a country like India, where there is almost no social security provided by the state for old age, EPF is, at least for workers in the organised sector, its replacement. It is an extraordinarily powerful instrument but only when left untouched across decades. (By Madhavankutty Pillai)

Viral

Woman Plays Clarinet While Undergoing Brain Surgery

Denise Bacon, a 65-year-old retired speech and language therapist from East Sussex in England who played the clarinet for a concert band, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2014. As the disease progressed, it impacted her ability to walk and move around, to feed herself, and even to play her beloved clarinet, eventually forcing her to leave her band. Now, a video of her on the operation table, undergoing a procedure known as Deep Brain Stimulation in London’s King’s College Hospital, where electrical pulses are sent via electrodes that are implanted in the brain, while she, wide awake, plays her clarinet, has gone viral online. Her doctors had decided that since results of such stimulation are instant, the best way to assess its success would be to get her to play the instrument while they stimulated her brain one electrode at a time.