tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71632002024-03-06T20:43:31.896-08:00delhibellyDelhibelly is the whiteboard, barstool, psychiatrist's couch and cutting room floor for two New Delhi-based journalists--Jason Overdorf and Shailaja Neelakantan.
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comBlogger506125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-64031134470810797652015-12-22T16:33:00.002-08:002015-12-22T16:33:47.791-08:00China Daily - a fragment<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For some reason I was digging through my folder of unfinished novels, and I ran across this fragment. In the end, I lost faith in this project. It seemed fake to me, a book that a Chinese person should be writing. I'm not sure if that's valid but I can say I have not read any such books, except for Sid Smith's Something Like a House, which I reviewed for FEER (and saved for posterity <a href="http://jasonoverdorf.blogspot.in/2002/03/like-being-there.html">here</a>).<br />
<br />
Anyway, a few more chapters survive. The book was to be a picaresque comedy about the Beijing Posts and Telecommunications Boxing Team, based on the experience of a couple friends I knew when I lived in Beijing. Somehow it was going to end with the Tiananmen Square incident. There was really a guy named "Patriot Zhang," though he was not a boxer.<br />
<br />
Here goes:<br />
<br />
<h1 class="western">
VI. Train</h1>
<div class="western">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western">
The constant travel – “This moving train car
of a prison” the team called it – was the worst part of being a
Post. Zhang hated the anise-flavored watermelon seeds everyone ate
and spat on the floor. He hated the smell of instant noodles, or, to
be precise, the smell of the plastic sachets of congealed fat
impregnated with flavoring that came with instant noodles. He
disliked chatting. He loathed playing cards. He despised track-side
scenery, all foundries and fallow fields with plastic bags hanging in
the weeds. Worst of all, he could never sleep. The 18 hour return
trip to Beijing from Shenyang—to which they had flown from Seoul on
a rattling China Northern Airlines plane—promised to be terrible,
as usual. Coach Wu was in a bad humor because he felt Gao and Fat
Liu had humiliated the nation, and there was no sign the idiotic
penis remarks were going to cease. Even Chen had joined in.</div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Long-distance
trains offered three kinds of berths, which for political reasons
were not named first, second and third class but soft sleeper, hard
sleeper and hard seat. Only cadres and foreigners booked the 4-berth
soft sleeper compartments, which were as expensive as flying.
Businessmen, schoolteachers, state factory workers, soldiers,
criminals, and what Zhang took for wretched unwashed Russians but in
fact were European adventurers all took hard sleeper, where each had
a cramped bunk to himself and shared a small table, a small thermos
of hot water and a small window with five other passengers. Hard
seat was reserved for peasants and professional athletes.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> At the
station in Shenyang, peasants outfoxed athletes horde: 0, leaving Fat
Liu crammed next to the toilet, which had a broken door that wouldn’t
close, and the rest of them to carve out territory from the aisle
amid the farmers’ tremendous carryalls. Never mind the seat
assignments: the attendants were good for nothing but collecting
tickets and fining those who overslept their intended destinations,
and even if the staff had been more competent, when it came to
territory nobody could prevent a farmer from winning a war of gradual
attrition. They consumed prodigious amounts of peanuts, watermelon
seeds and diesel-scented liquor, the internal combustion of which
resulted in poisonous farts. They opened their mouths fist-wide to
pry out uneaten and unsavory scraps of pork, even teeth of the
deepest black, and carelessly wiped it (the pork) on the seatbacks or
flicked them (teeth) across the compartment with a forefinger. They
blew their noses on the window curtains or, if those were too crisp,
in their hands. And if you still didn’t yield, a farmer would fall
into a deep, snoring, drunken sleep, a silk thread of drool spooling
endlessly from his cavernous maw onto you, his mattress.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> As soon as
the attendant checked Zhang’s ticket, exchanging it for a metal
chit with his seat number, Zhang retreated to the dining car, where
he planned to bribe the supervisor with his 25 yuan bonus to let him
stay the night through. In the dining car the first and second class
passengers were thrown together at mealtimes (the third class brought
its own food), but it was now empty except for two or three smokers
in sharp, foreign-made suits. The kitchen staff busily set to work
preparing box lunches for the trolleys, and the supervisor, a man
with a mole on his cheek, counted the change in the cash box.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Zhang took
a place in the far back, behind a table of idle waitresses, where he
hoped the supervisor would ignore him. No one seemed to pay any
attention until a businessman of middle age entered, glanced around
the car and made straight for him. Zhang decided that the man must
also have wanted to avoid the supervisor, because his eyes widened
with surprise and then narrowed in annoyance when he found Zhang
camped in the bribe-avoidance booth. Judging from the quality of his
shoes and glasses, the man was Overseas Chinese. He nodded and sat
down at the table next to Zhang, where he would be judged and
sentenced by the supervisor in an instant.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Sure
enough, the supervisor sent a waitress on recognizance. Zhang had
hoped to secure a half-finished plate to pick at and thereby hold his
money until nightfall, when the dining car closed and it would be
necessary to bribe the supervisor to stay on. Now he would be forced
to order something or go back to the hell of the hard seat carriage.
Zhang was busy contemplating the cheapest item on the menu when the
businessman demanded the woman’s attention: “Miss, I want to
order food.” </span>
</div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> “Wait
your turn,” said the waitress. “This sportsman was here first.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang
made a self-deprecating gesture. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
am inviting him to join me,” the man said in what Zhang decided was
a Taiwanese accent. He moved over next to Zhang and proceeded to
order sliced pork and scallions, fish-flavored eggplant, stir-fried
spinach with garlic – here he paused to ask Zhang whether he liked
century eggs and found he did – and a plate of century eggs, very
black and very bitter. “And bring us two bowls of rice,” he
said. “You eat rice?” </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> Zhang, who
did not have to make weight for several weeks, nodded. When the
waitress had gone, he thanked the man and introduced himself. </span>
</div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> “Mao
Chen,” the Overseas Chinese said, proffering his business card.
“But you can call me </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>M.C.</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
You speak English, right? Good. English is the global language.”
He spoke in Chinese, except for those aggravating initials. “I
live in France, so I speak English with a French-Chinese accent and
French with a Chinese accent. Have you changed your ticket? Yes?
Do you think they’ll check tickets in here? I haven’t changed
mine and I’ve left my passport with my luggage.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> Zhang
was even more convinced that </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>M.C.</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
was Taiwanese by the way he aped foreign manners and bossed people
around.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">They
have to come back through here when they finish with third class,”
Zhang said. “But I doubt they’ll check our tickets. They’re
assigned by carriage.” After each stop, the conductors collected
passengers’ tickets, checked their passports and gave them a metal
chit with their seat assignment on it. They kept the tickets from
each carriage in a wallet, so they knew where everyone aboard was
meant to get off, and before each stop, they came around and took the
chits back and returned the tickets. One had to produce a ticket at
the station to be allowed off the platform. The system had
practically eliminated fare dodgers, except for during Spring
Festival, when the crowd simply mobbed the attendants and scrambled
over the turnstyles.</span></span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> M.C. asked
to see Zhang’s chit, and when he had inspected it put it down on
his side of the table, next to his chopsticks, rather than handing it
back. Zhang meant to ask him for it right away, but M.C. began to
tell him a story about the first time he had seen the Eiffel Tower
and it seemed impolite and paranoid to interrupt. Then the dishes
began to arrive, century eggs first, and M.C. ordered them each a
bottle of beer. Zhang decided all he need do was be sure to remember
the chit when they finished and M.C. headed back to his berth.</span></div>
<div class="western">
<span style="font-size: small;"> They were
snacking on the final dish when the door leading to the hard seat
carriages opened and the attendants passed through to return to their
between-car posts. M.C. began to move the metal chit back and forth
like an indecisive chess player and finally left it uncovered on the
edge of the table next to him just as the attendants passed. So,
that was what M.C. had been after, Zhang concluded, but then
reflected that M.C. had gone to an awful lot of trouble to avoid
spending a thirty-yuan on a third-class ticket, and bought a
sixty-yuan meal in the process. And, even if he had managed to get
aboard without a ticket in Shenyang and somehow was able to avoid the
conductors for the rest of the trip, he would have to produce a
ticket in Beijing to get out of the station. Maybe M.C. did have a
ticket, but had forgotten his passport at his berth and was too lazy
to go back for it, Zhang decided. In any case, he didn’t like to
be used, especially by a Taiwanese know-it-all. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">With
a beery, self-satisfied look, M.C. began to expound the benefits of
living abroad. The overseas Chinese, who were all trying to be
Americans from tiny satellite dictatorships, were worse about this
than ordinary foreigners, who all had delusional fantasies about
submissive women, kung fu and traditional medicine. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">You
might not live any better, measured by material standards, but you
have a feeling of freedom, that you can do whatever you want and
nobody will pay attention,” M.C. said. “You don’t have bribe
your boss or treat him to dinner to get cleared to change jobs.
Nobody but criminals has a personal file. The police pay no
attention to the old ladies of the neighborhood watch.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang,
who had heard that feeling of freedom nonsense before, poured the
last of his beer into the glass and waved at the waitress to bring
another one. He gave a noncommittal grunt.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">M.C.
changed tact. “Patriot,” he said. “An interesting name.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
was born in ’70,” Zhang said. “Ten years earlier and I’d
have been ‘Steel.’” Just about every man born during the
infamous backyard furnace effort to support the Great Leap Forward
was named Steel, Iron or Metal, just as those who, like Zhang, were
born during the Cultural Revolution, were called Patriot, Hero, Lei
Feng, Rocket and Space Conqueror.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
you do love the motherland, don’t you?” M.C. said slyly. “As
an athletic hero of the state and so on?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">We
must help the country to stride forward boldly into modernization,”
Zhang said, mustering up a winning grin. “It’s our job to
promote international friendship and cultural exchange and to provide
an example for the world of China’s development.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">M.C.
looked at him closely, but apparently could make nothing of his
expression, for he didn’t pursue that line of questioning any
longer. Instead, he rambled for a bit about the boundless varieties
of pornography available in Western countries. When he finally rose
to leave, he tried to take the metal chit with him, pretending to
scoop it up without thinking.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang
grabbed his wrist. “That’s mine,” he said. “I need it to
show the attendant and get back my ticket when we arrive in Beijing.
You’ll have to change your ticket with the person in charge of your
compartment.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">As
M.C. apologized, Zhang again wondered what he was up to. Maybe he
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>didn’t</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
have a ticket, and hoped to exchange the chit for Zhang’s before
they got to Beijing. His suit would certainly stand out in hard
seat. Every farmer in the car would notice.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I’m
terribly sorry,” M.C. replied. He lay the chit on the table, and
Zhang released his wrist. “They might have thrown you off the
train! Please, why don’t you take my ticket, and I’ll take your
place.” M.C. produced a soft sleeper ticket and held it out. His
face was red from the beer. He mopped his forehead with a crumpled
napkin. “Please,” he said.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Done,”
said Zhang, capitalizing on the idiot’s embarrassment without
hesitation.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">It’s
a lower berth. Cantonese newlyweds above, whispering and giggling.
I consider myself lucky.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Have
you seen the hard seat carriage?” asked Zhang, rising from the
table. “I recommend you stay right here.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">He
went directly to M.C.’s soft-sleeper compartment, where he was
pleased to note another example of the man’s stupidity. The couple
who shared the chamber were not newlyweds at all. One was a Hong
Kong businessman and the other his mainland mistress. They were both
crammed into the same overheard berth with the blanket tucked up
their chins so all Zhang could see of them was their faces. The
businessman blinked at Zhang with the confused eyes of someone who
has just taken off his glasses. The girl giggled.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang
sat down on the bunk underneath theirs, where at least they wouldn’t
be staring at each other, and took out the tattered China Daily, now
eleven days old, that he was in the process of decoding. He was a
few paragraphs into an article about the propaganda ministry’s
policy on bad news. The girl above him immediately began to whisper.</span></div>
<div style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<i>You don’t love me…. No, you
don’t. If you loved me you’d want me to be happy….. You’d
want me to have an apartment, like my sister’s boyfriend bought
her.”</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Zhang tried to
ignore her wheedling and concentrate on the newspaper article. The
Ministry of Propaganda had announced a call for more bad news.
Apparently they’d determined that all the rosy reports were making
people skeptical. That was certainly true, but Zhang didn’t
understand what effect they imagined for the more bad news
announcement.
</div>
<div style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<i>I hate you. You never do
anything for me. You left me sitting in that room all day. Of
course I was talking to the security guard. Nobody else paid any
attention to me. No, he’ll hear us. Stop, I don’t like it that
way” --</i></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
door opened, startling the lovers. A foot thumped against the
compartment wall. The attendant brought in a fourth passenger. He
looked like a small-time criminal or a plainclothes agent of the
Ministry of State Security. He glanced across at Zhang, sat down on
the opposite bunk, and began watching the newlyweds as though they
were television.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
haven’t exchanged my ticket,” Zhang told the attendant. He gave
it to her and showed her his temporary passport and his identity
card. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Beijing?”
She took a metal chit marked 20B from a leather case and put the
ticket in its place. She gave the chit to Zhang and repeated the
process with the new man. When she’d given him his chit, she
replaced the hot water thermos with a full one from the corridor and
banged out.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
thug or secret agent now directed his crocodilian assessment at
Zhang, who again tried to focus on his newspaper.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">You
an athlete?” he inevitably asked.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Right.
I’m a boxer.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">What
team?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Beijing
Posts and Telecommunications.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>American</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
boxing?” He emphasized American as though he were accusing Zhang
of treason.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang
folded the paper. “Olympic boxing.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Of
course. You mind taking a photo with me? For my kid.” The man
gestured at a cheap instamatic camera. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang
moved over next to the thug, who gave the camera to the businessman’s
mistress. She held it in one hand and kept the covers pulled up to
her chin with the other.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">My
son will love this,” the man explained dully. “Are you famous?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Zhang
grinned crazily, winked and, secretly hoping it was some unknown
obscenity, gave the thumbs up signal he’d learned from the giant.
The camera flashed.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">No,
I’m just a boxer on a municipal industry team. Nobody’s heard of
me.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
see. Anyway, an athlete has a good life, right? Traveling all over
the country in soft-sleeper berths, chatting up wide-eyed girls and
leaving a trail of broken hearts. Your name in boldface in China
Sport.” </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Had
he been sober, Zhang would have agreed or perhaps even more likely,
responded with the ubiquitous national grunt that could mean
everything from “You said it” or “Do go on” to “Not
exactly” or “Stop talking shit.” But he was drunk, so he told
the truth. “Maybe ten years ago it was like that, though I doubt
it. In any case, it’s not at all like that now. In an Olympic year
everybody gets a little bit excited over you, as long as you don’t
explain just how unlikely it is that you’ll make it from the
municipal level up to the national team. You might chat a girl up
through a dormitory window or in a hotel elevator sometime, but there
isn’t much you can do about it, with the coach, political educator,
the informant monitoring your every step. As for traveling all over
the country! Touring the motherland’s third-class hotels and
collapsing gymnasiums, more like. Prisoners of the train. It’s
like…it’s like Spring Festival week every month, crammed in hard
seat. Only no noodles, no beer and no peanuts, with the weigh-in to
look forward to. This was the first time they let us out of the
country”--</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">He
stopped. He realized that he was leaning forward from the edge of
the bunk, his fists clenched at his sides. He hadn’t exactly
shouted, but he had definitely raised his voice, an observation he
made with some dismay as he watched the man’s sly smile widen with
a slight twitch of his lips. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">So
life as one of our nation’s sportsmen doesn’t suit you?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">No,”
Zhang emended. “It’s not that it doesn’t suit me.
I—er—I—ahem—I’m just a little frustrated with the slow
progress we’re making in our march toward modernization.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
man leaned back against the wall of the compartment so that his face
obscured by the shadow of the bunk above him. He faced the window
and looked at Zhang askance. “So your criticisms of the state are
motivated by boisterous nationalism,” he said. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">That’s
probably true,” Zhang stammered. “Only I hadn’t meant to
criticize the state. I was just talking nonsense.” He could feel
sweat trickling down his back between his shoulder blades—that cold
sweat again. He was now certain he was dealing with an agent of the
MSS. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
secret policeman watched him. In the berth above, the businessman
and his mistress shifted positions restlessly, now and then thumping
the wall with an elbow or heel. They no longer whispered. Zhang
opened his wilted newspaper again and tried to read it, but found
himself instead studying the page, wondering if the agent was still
watching him and fighting the urge to look up and see. He read the
same paragraph over and over again. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Readership
is down for many newspapers, including the China Petroleum News, the
Communist Youth Daily, Chemistry with Chinese Characteristics and
others, the Ministry of Propaganda announced today. Only the
People’s Daily remains unaffected, retaining a circulation of 6.3
million dedicated readers.</i></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">After
some time, the woman began to whisper again, wheedling about her
sister’s apartment. Southerners are fearless, Zhang thought,
remembering the old saying, “The mountains are high and the emperor
is far away.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">You
studying English?” the MSS agent said finally. He indicated
Zhang’s China Daily. “Planning to go overseas?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
personal development,” said Zhang.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Again
silence. Then: “What made you decide to take up American boxing?”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sorry?”
Zhang said, pretending not to have heard.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Chinese
kung fu not good enough? So you went in for boxing?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">It’s
not American boxing. It’s Olympic boxing. Anyway, I didn’t have
much choice in the matter. I was at the Beijing Sports Middle School
to be a hurdler – this was in ’86 – and the coach told me I
wasn’t going to be taken up to the senior league.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">If
you’re traveling with the team, and the rest of them are in hard
seat, what are you doing in a luxury berth?”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">It
occurred to Zhang that the agent was looking for M.C. That would
explain why he had been so anxious to swap his soft-sleeper ticket
for Zhang’s place in hard seat, an act that Zhang had stupidly
dismissed as mad. For an instant, he thought of saying he found the
ticket left behind in the dining car, but then he considered that the
agent’s next step would be to speak to the staff there, who were
certain to remember his idiotic Big Red Machine tracksuit. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
“<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
swapped seats with a stupid overseas Chinese in the dining car,” he
said. “He was embarrassed that he almost took my seat number by
mistake and wanted to save face, I suppose. I went along. Losing
face is one thing, but the hard seat carriage….” He grimaced.
There was no reason to repeat M.C.’s ramblings about the feeling of
freedom one has living outside China or his leading questions about
his patriotism.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
agent produced a flimsy badge – not unlike the pathetic tie-pin
Zhang had been given by the American military officer – and
demanded to see his identity card. He noted his name and address.
When he asked the couple in the upper berth for their identification,
the Hong Kong business man had to reach across to the opposite bunk
for his pants, and the blanket fell away to reveal that his mistress
was topless. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The
train was held up at the next station for M.C. to be taken off by the
secret policeman. Zhang watched through the carriage window as he
was led off, his wrists cuffed behind his back, by two ignorant
People’s Liberation Army soldiers. The secret policeman walked
behind and glanced back toward the train every few paces. When he
caught sight of Zhang, he boxed the air for a moment, grinning.
Despite the comfortable berth, Zhang did not sleep more than a
restless hour or two for the rest of the way to Beijing.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br />
</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br />
</div>
</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-31918950903868198442015-12-20T00:01:00.003-08:002015-12-20T00:02:57.457-08:00The many meanings of horns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Many Meanings of Horns<br /><br /><br />Stay in your lane! Coming through. Oh, baby! Fuck off. 18! And I know what I want. It is okay for me to drive on the wrong side because I am going to the temple. Watch out! I am a human being. Asshole! Don't pull out. Side! Don't you dare. This motorcycle is blessed with magical powers protecting its rider from death by DTC bus. Old man on a Chetak! Hot girl, I compel you to look at me. Jackass! Sorry. Can't you see I have a my pregnant wife-a baby-my elderly mother-my elderly father-my elderly grandmother-my elderly grandfather-all my elderly and/or infantile relatives in my care/on my Chetak scooter? Not sorry, Motherfucker. I ran over seven people just like you last night. Vive la Revolution! I'll kill you, bastard. Chutiya. I don't care if you are going to temple! I will only be driving on the wrong side for a few seconds. I am turning right from the far left lane. Bhenchod. I want to go straight but I am in the turn lane. Ambulance! NSUI rules! I am the driver of a very important person who is going to a very important meeting the significance of which will forever elude me but I do not want to get fired. BJP rules! Why do nice girls hate me? Don't stop in the middle of the road! I am letting out my pregnant wife-a baby-my elderly mother-my elderly father-my elderly grandmother-my elderly grandfather-all my elderly and/or infantile relatives, asshole. I hate Dinesh Mohan. Hot girl, you are even hotter because you are riding a pink Scooty. FUUUCKKKKK! I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Are you trying to kill me? Hot girl, you are crushing my soul. I hate Sheila Dikshit. Legless man, you are going to get yourself killed if you don't gimp out of the intersection before the light turns green. Legless man, I feel your pain but I have no change. Legless man, I am not convinced you did not cut off your own legs to ensure a long and prosperous life as a legless beggar. Congress rules! That tin pot with a little oil in the bottom is not helping to convince me! I am pulling over to get some of that pink stuff the Sikhs are giving away because it is free and it is my god-given right to break all traffic laws to get free stuff. I hate Narendra Modi. DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. I WILL NOT ONLY THINK ABOUT IT, I WILL DO IT, ASSHOLE. Why do I even live here? This road is for motorized vehicles only. AVBP rules! This DTC bus will crush your dented Maruti Swift like a bug and I have no control over where it is going because it is a speeding missile running out of control toward the general vicinity of the bus stop. You almost killed me. I hate Rahul Gandhi. Nothing will happen. Adjust. Mataji, please do not lie in the turn lane lazily swishing flies with your tail. I AM LATE FOR WORK. Don't worry, I am a professional. Dickhead! We are going to-coming from-celebrating Bunty and Deepti's wedding! Gujjar boy-Jat boy-Punjabi boy in the house. I hate Arvind Kejriwal. Go! Kya, yaar? Your car is on fire. You dropped your dupatta back there. Hot girl, you should not be out after dark without at least three male relatives. Auntieji on a Chetak! Mercedes-BMW-Porsche-Audi first. The light is green. I am like that only. I am taking my son-daughter-boss's son-boss's daughter to the board exams. That pink stuff the Sikhs are giving away free is no excuse to stop in the middle of the road. It's free! Legless man, I have told you a million times you're going to get yourself killed. Contortionist-girl-putting-yourself-through-a-small-wire-hoop-over-and-over-again, you're going to get killed as well and anyway I consider that activity to be child labor. Are you looking at me? The light was red! Are you blind? Am I invisible? Your fault! Why do you even live here anyway?</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-28326415328034863062015-11-25T03:17:00.002-08:002015-11-25T03:17:28.224-08:00India's Holy Cow Vigilantes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf<br /><br />Newsweek (November 2015)<br /><br />Outside the 150-year-old Tangra Slaughter House in Kolkata, India, a line of cows stretches down the lane alongside the arched, colonial-style building. There are no fixed prices for beef here, so the noise of a dozen shouted negotiations fills the air. But it's not all business as usual. Photography is prohibited, at least for today, and I'm allowed inside only after agreeing to keep my notebook in my pocket and not ask any questions. The beef-and-leather business is sensitive in the country where “holy cow” is not a throwaway phrase.<br /><br />“People are scared,” says Syed Faiyazul Haque, a supervisor at a Kolkata tannery. “There’s an atmosphere of fear.”<br /><br />That’s because at least three Muslims suspected of eating or transporting beef have been killed in recent weeks. Hindu nationalists have been campaigning for a countrywide ban on slaughtering cows, which they consider holy animals, and religious tensions are rising.<br /><br />Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed the issue of cows to the center of its campaign for elections in the northeastern state of Bihar during October and November. The aim seems to have been to consolidate the Hindu vote by casting Muslims as the chief enemy, and thus counteract divisions among high- and low-caste Hindu voters who favored the party’s opponents. Yet Modi’s party suffered a crushing defeat. The BJP and its local allies took just 58 out of 243 assembly seats in the Bihar polls.<br /><br />Muslims and many secular Hindus across India celebrated the election result, expressing hope that the prime minister who came to power preaching economic development, not Hindu triumphalism, would return to that message. But for beef and leather traders, and perhaps for India’s bid to attract more foreign investment, it may already be too late.<br /><br />Traders involved in the leather and beef industry in Kolkata say vigilantes have stopped large numbers of trucks transporting cows, hides and carcasses since the anti-cow slaughter campaign accelerated last month. Many transporters are reluctant to take the risk, after a trucker accused of carrying cattle carcasses was killed in October by a Molotov cocktail in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir. Because one carcass or hide looks much like another, not even the unrestricted buffalo trade is safe. And the charged atmosphere makes it all too easy for local police and inspectors to demand payoffs.Despite the cultural taboo on killing cows, slaughtering them for meat and hides is legal in five of 29 Indian states, including West Bengal, where Kolkata, the former capital of British India once known as Calcutta, is considered the center of the trade.<br /><br />“This is a reflection of anti-Muslim propaganda in India,” Udayan Bandyopadhyay, a political scientist affiliated with the University of Calcutta, says of the recent attacks. “In order to gain mileage, the [Hindu nationalists] are making a partition in society between Hindus and Muslims.”<br /><br />Even in ordinary times, the country’s meat-and-leather trade is a strange business. Last year, India, which is 80 percent Hindu, emerged as the largest beef exporter in the world. Combined with leather, the industry is worth some $10 billion. How's that possible?<br /><br />It is partly because under a system drawn up by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the meat of Indian water buffaloes, which Hindus do not consider holy, is classified as “beef.” Exporting cow meat is banned, though cowhide accounts for around a third of India’s leather exports. Yet in Kolkata, tannery workers say the mix of buffalo hide to cowhide has fallen from 50-50 to 80 percent buffalo in recent weeks. Since the first attacks on transporters in September, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/27/us-india-beef-idUSKCN0SL0XY20151027#Yvj43j50p9S6wRWA.97">buffalo-processing factories</a> have also been facing shortages.<br /><br />“Our drivers are stopped while they carry buffaloes. There is fear among drivers,” says DB Sabharwal, a Hindu, who's secretary of the All India Meat & Livestock Exporters Association.<br /><br />In most states, and sometimes even in Kolkata, that's technically illegal. Along with bans on cow slaughter and the consumption or possession of beef, various states have made it a crime to sell or transport cows out of their jurisdiction if they are destined for the butcher. In states where cow slaughter is legal, a “fit-for-slaughter” certificate is required to document that the animal in question is more than 12 to 14 years old or “permanently incapacitated for breeding, draft or milk due to injury, deformity or any other cause,” according to the <a href="http://dahd.nic.in/dahd/reports/report-of-the-national-commission-on-cattle/chapter-ii-executive-summary/annex-ii-8.aspx">Ministry of Agriculture</a>. But that rule too is frequently flouted, according to people opposed to killing cows.The domestic market is more complicated. While cow slaughter is permitted in only five states, the animals are everywhere. There's no separate meat industry. But a mammoth dairy industry and the traditional use of draft animals means there are more than <a href="http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=109280">190 million cattle in India</a>, compared with about <a href="http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx">90 million in the United States</a>. As tractors replace bullocks in agriculture, around half of these animals are becoming a drain on the farmers' resources. And while Hindu nationalist organizations have set up nursing homes for hundreds of thousands of superannuated cows, it's no surprise that many farmers prefer to sell them rather than put them out to pasture.<br /><br />The result is a tortuous path of payoffs, smuggling and don't ask, don't tell. The not-quite legal nature of the business means there are no large firms buying cows and shipping them to Kolkata—or smuggling them to Bangladesh. Animals pass through a chain of transporters before they’re sold for slaughter. Then middlemen collect meat and hides into the larger consignments needed by the leather businesses and other industries that rely on tallow and other by-products, says Shahid Akhtar, managing director of a leather goods manufacturer called Elrich International. “Those people will have problems now,” he says. “The police or vigilantes will confiscate the items, then corruption will increase. This has started to happen.”<br /><br />It's not clear how devoted to the issue Modi is, or how beholden he'll be to the larger, parent organization of the BJP—a uniform-wearing cadre of activists called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose second “supreme leader,” Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, was an admirer of Adolph Hitler.<br /><br />It's not all Hindus vs. Muslims. Middle-caste Hindu merchants dominate the leather export business. Some lower caste Hindus eat beef, though many have adopted high-caste food taboos in a bid to avoid discrimination. So do many of the country's dozens of indigenous tribes. Many self-declared secularists and atheists partake too—some viewing it as a badge of tolerance or rationalism. Yet Hindu nationalists and some ordinary Hindus look on killing cows much the way devout Muslims view drawing cartoons of Muhammad—something they say Indian secularists would never countenance.<br /><br />Modi's critics still blame him for the tardy police response to the 2002 riots that killed at least 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus when he was chief minister of Gujarat, his home state, though he was exonerated in court. Opponents have taken him to task for delayed and wishy-washy public statements in response to attacks on churches, belligerent statements from Hindu nationalists and the recent cow-related violence. For instance, he waited 10 days to speak out against the September 28 lynching of a man wrongfully accused of eating beef.<br /><br />Arun Shourie, once one of the BJP's most respected leaders but now marginalized under Modi, believes the prime minister’s silence was deliberate—and it was interpreted as a green light by rowdier sections of the movement. After an incident of inter-religious violence occurs, other members of the BJP and affiliated organizations keep it alive by making provocative statements, Shourie said in a televised interview with a national channel. Only after weeks pass does Modi comment, and then it is to say something cryptic. “It almost comes out as if it is by design,” said Shourie.<br /><br />Supporters reject such criticism. “To defame Modi, a negative campaign is coming from the so-called secularists,” says Surendra Kumar Jain, All India Secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Hindu nationalist group leading the push for a national ban on cow slaughter. Vigilante action has to be understood in the context of the failure of law enforcement, he says. “Suppose a woman is being raped? Will you stand by and wait for the police?”<br /><br />It's not only the beef and leather industry that is at stake. India has climbed in the World Bank's ease of doing business rankings and has replaced China as the most popular destination for foreign direct investment since Modi came to power in 2014. But both the devastating loss in Bihar and the flirting with sectarian strife could further derail his plans for the economy.<br /><br />The vituperative atmosphere will make it more difficult to reach a consensus with the opposition. And the election loss itself means Modi is drifting further away from a majority in Parliament, where several proposals for big bang economic reforms have already withered and died.<br /><br />“Along with a possible increase in violence, the government will face stiffer opposition in the Upper House as the debate turns away from economic policy,” <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/moodys-to-modi-keep-bjp-members-in-check-or-risk-losing-credibility/article7823019.ece">Moody's Analytics</a> said in a November report. “Modi must keep his members in check or risk losing domestic and global credibility.”</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-64809814855586166062015-11-12T03:37:00.001-08:002015-11-12T03:37:16.483-08:00Blood, guts and glory: India's boxers hit pay dirt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>They got India's first pro-boxing event off the ground. We go behind the scenes with the man who may well be the Don King of India</i><br />
By Jason Overdorf</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
GQ India (November 2015)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
An hour after the scheduled start time, Jaisingh Shekhawat, the 30-year-old chief organizer of India’s first professional boxing event, burst into the improvised pre-fight green room in a panic, his brow beaded with sweat. “What the hell’s going on?” he snapped at coach Mahavir Singh, busy supervising a last-minute briefing of the nine Indian match judges. Shekhawat caught me watching him and winced. “Mismanagement,” he said ruefully, juggling his portfolio and walkie-talkie.<br />
<br />
All around the green room – repurposed from the drivers’ waiting area in the basement parking garage of Delhi’s Select Citywalk Mall – the fighters displayed a monastic calm. Punjabi heavyweight Gurlal Singh, to fight Haryana’s Vikas Hooda in the first of four scheduled matches, stood in the corner like a B-movie Hercules as three hangerson laced up his groin protector. Thai super bantamweight (55.3kg) Khunkhiri Wor Wisaruth was taping the hands of American super middleweight (76.2kg) Clinton Smith, while Smith’s opponent for the night, 13-time national champion Dilbag Singh, casually slipped on a glove and sunk a joke-hook into a friend’s belly to test it out, punctuating the punch with his devilish, 100-watt grin.<br />
<br />
If anyone here had reason to sweat, it was Shekhawat, a slim, slicklooking guy with brushed-back hair and gold hoops in both ears. The delayed start put his newly formed North Indian Boxing Association (NIBA) at risk of failing to complete the programme before 10pm, when the permit for the outdoor plaza upstairs would expire. If the authorities shut them down before the end of the main event — a 12-round contest between Indian Neeraj Goyat and Filipino Nelson Gulpe, competing for the vacant World Boxing Council (WBC) Asian Welterweight Championship - the dream of bringing pro boxing to India would be confirmed a fiasco.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Already, one of the biggest news stories to emerge from the farcical pre-fight press conference the day before was a Hindustan Times article headlined “Nothing professional about pro boxing’s India debut”. And tonight, WBC Asia head Patrick Cusick was still fielding basic questions from the judges and referees about pro-level rules and scoring – which differ widely from the amateur game.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
Maybe it didn’t show, but more than a year-and-a-half of work hung in the balance.<br />
<br />
Jaisingh Shekhawat was always a boxing fan, and participated in a few state-level tournaments before getting into the marble business in his home state of Rajasthan. He had long thought there was a potential market for professional boxing in India, but it took the drive of his old trainer Mahavir Singh (best known as the coach of Olympic bronze medallist Mary Kom) and Neeraj Goyat (arguably India’s keenest pro) to get the idea off the ground. With six professional fights in China and Thailand, as well as a brief stint in India’s Mixed Martial Arts Super Fight League, 23-year-old Goyat had made connections with foreign managers and WBC officials while he was abroad. So when he emailed WBC head Cusick about a licence to hold events in India, he got a response.<br />
<br />
Slowly, things came together. Ruling out a stadium – fearing nobody would turn up – the team decided on a free, open-air event that would draw a crowd from passersby. They convinced Cusick they weren’t just blowing smoke, and completed the paperwork to obtain the WBC licence. Handshakes were made with top boxers whose amateur careers were over and who wanted to go pro. Rahul Gokhale of Serendipity Marketing Solutions was pulled in to manage the event. Most importantly, Rakesh Naudiyal, a former international amateur boxer, convinced Kashmiri Marbles to come on board as their major sponsor, contributing around ₹10 lakh rupees – about a fifth of the event’s total budget.<br />
<br />
Yet, when Naudiyal told me about it all, I was skeptical — not least because they were approaching me for advice.<br />
<br />
I’ve been a hack boxer since learning the basics in a Beijing gym that doubled as a karaoke bar and brothel in 1998, picking up trainers in Boston, New York, Hong Kong and Delhi as I’ve moved around. I’d also venture I’m probably the biggest boxing fan on the Subcontinent. But that’s where my expertise ends. (Full disclosure: Naudiyal has been my friend and training partner since 2005.)<br />
<br />
The idea wasn’t to get rich, everybody agreed. It was to give Indian boxers an opportunity to showcase their talent. Most of the team had volunteered their time, and apart from outside contractors like Gokhale, nobody expected to make a rupee off the event. Shekhawat certainly had no illusions he was going to be the next Don King — the notorious American promoter who dominated professional boxing from 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman through the reign of Mike Tyson in the Eighties — known as much for his slimy business deals as his lightning shock of hair and hi-glint smile of pure evil.<br />
<br />
“At the India [amateur] camp, there will be 40-some boxers in every weight class,” said trainer Mahavir Singh. “But only the top one gets the chance to compete in the Olympics. The second, third and fourth guys don’t ever get an opportunity. We want to provide a platform for them.”<br />
<br />
My first meeting with Shekhawat, in April this year, was like a Chinese fire drill. Naudiyal was late, so Shekhawat, Mahavir and I stood around in the blazing sun outside the PVR Cinema hall in Basant Lok Community Centre. Neither was comfortable with English, so I was stuck with my “idhar se left, udharse right” taxi Hindi until Kamaljit and a few others turned up. Finally, we tramped up four flights of stairs to a stuffy office that was smaller than an aloo tikki cart. A steady string of beefy guys filled it up until Naudiyal arrived, whereupon we hit critical mass and moved downstairs again. Scouts were dispatched to find a more suitable spot, which turned out to be a McDonald’s. So I viewed the crew’s laptop PowerPoint presentation and dispensed my wisdom, such as it was, over fries and a Coke at a curvy first-floor banquet table.<br />
<br />
“As they like to say in America, ‘styles make fights’. You don’t want two match technical boxers who’ll spend the whole night playing defence,” I told them, among other non-pearls.<br />
<br />
With that meeting as context, my experience of the pre-event press conference was very different from that of the Hindustan Times writer. I was just gobsmacked that they had actually done anything. “With no money!” exclaimed Naudiyal’s friend Arun Kunal, owner of Add on Entertainment, who’d volunteered to handle public relations.<br />
<br />
Patrick Cusick looked out over the audience of reporters gathered at The Lalit hotel. “We’ve been watching the development of boxing in Asia for the last 15 years,” he said. “Ten years ago, we went to China, and now they have their first world champion. We believe India can progress as quickly, if not faster.”<br />
<br />
Ninety minutes after official fight time, after countless announcements that the first bout was going to start “in a few minutes,” the announcers were running out of material. “Hurry up and light the lamp,” said one, once they’d wrangled the obligatory-but- not-really-important VIPs onto the stage. When tapers were finally put to the aarti, Shekhawat looked like his doctor had just informed him that his biopsy was negative.<br />
<br />
Despite the delays and the 40-degree heat, the crowd hadn’t given up. The 350 ringside chairs for invited guests were full. By the angles of their noses, seemingly every boxer in North India was in the house. Curious onlookers were lined up 20 rows deep in the plaza beyond the guest area, and another dozen rows packed the mall’s first floor balcony.<br />
<br />
A hesitant cheer went up as the first fighter, Haryana heavyweight Vikas Hooda, was announced. A thin plume of fog sputtered from the smoke machine, then nothing, as Hooda jog-stepped through the archway and raised his fists in the air.<br />
<br />
The thing was finally underway. Somebody must have told Hooda and Gurlal Singh that the fans wanted a knockout, because they hammered hooks to each other’s ribs with no more thought to defence than a couple guys chopping down trees. With the first big blows to the head – sweat flying like shooting stars under the lights – the crowd was hooked. After four workmanlike rounds, when Hooda, in his pro debut, was announced the winner, the emcee didn’t have to exhort the crowd to cheer.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Next up, 13-time All India amateur champion Dilbag Singh squared off against American Clinton Smith. It was the kind of mismatch typical for a top amateur’s debut in the pros – where the idea is to get your guy some easy wins and build up his reputation. Smith was listed in the programme as having 18 wins and 5 losses, but in fact he was a Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts fighter. A gristly, tattooed 39-year-old with a shaved head and goatee, he’d told me in the green room that he had five pro Muay Thai bouts, two MMA, but he’d “more or less never boxed before.” Once Dilbag figured that out, it was a matter of Smith being tough enough to avoid a knockout. By that measure, he acquitted himself well. Between rounds, a freshly mohawked Dilbag winked at the ring card girls and grinned at his buddies in the peanut gallery. Smith barely laid a glove on him.<br />
<br />
By the time Delhi’s own Balbir Singh was introduced for his super bantamweight bout with Thailand’s Khunkhiri Wor Wisaruth, a veteran of 11 pro fights, the crowd had gotten into the swing of things. The loudest roar of the night rose as Balbir pranced out of the now functioning fog.<br />
<br />
From the opening bell, it was clear Balbir didn’t think the stringy Wisaruth had the punching power to keep him off. He bullied the smaller Thai around the ring, winging wild punches and pushing Wisaruth to the ropes, until the Thai drew him into a clinch to get his bearings. When the Indian referee separated them, Balbir let go a hook that caught Wisaruth on the chin. The Thai stumbled back and dropped to the canvas, and the crowd went wild. Even by professional boxing’s more liberal rules, “hitting on the break” is illegal, and Balbir’s punch had the look of a premeditated, flagrant foul. But the Indian referee acted like nothing had happened and gave Wisaruth an eight count when he popped to his feet. For a second, disbelief passed over the Thai’s face, then the realization that he was in the stewpot for a bit of “home cooking” – a staple of professional boxing.<br />
<br />
A minute later, Balbir floored him again, this time with a shoulder block, and again the referee pretended nothing was amiss. Wisaruth tried to stick and move after that, but Balbir put him on his back with a straight right in the second round, and seconds later, another right put Wisaruth down and out.<br />
<br />
India’s first pro boxing card had its first KO.<br />
<br />
Now for the main event: Neeraj Goyat vs Nelson Gulpe for the Asian welterweight championship.<br />
<br />
A good-looking and charismatic kid with an easy smile and a mop of curly hair, Goyat was the reason the programme had come together. Unlike most Indian boxers, who quit the game as soon as they get a sports quota job, Goyat was hungry. Though he didn’t have the pedigree to match Dilbag and Balbir, at just 23 he had more years left in his prime. With six fights in China and Thailand, he was already India’s most experienced professional. And along with Dilbag, he’d inked a deal with Las Vegas-based Guilty Boxing to cover his living and training expenses. On the other hand, with two wins, two losses and two draws, he didn’t have the kind of record for people in the fight game to call him “a prospect”. And he hadn’t done anything to merit being invited to fight for the WBC’s vacant Asian welterweight title apart from being born in India. (At 8-4-0 and 3 KOs, Gulpe was a little more legit.)<br />
<br />
“I’ve been fighting at super lightweight (63.5kg), but there was no vacant title in that weight class,” Goyat had told me a couple hours before fight time, tucked up to his chin under the blankets in his hotel room, Mujhse Dosti Karoge blaring from the TV. “That’s why I played welter weight this time.”<br />
<br />
In the greater scheme of professional boxing, it’s a meaningless belt. The WBC Asia is to the WBC what Italian basketball is to the NBA, and even at boxing’s highest level, an alphabet soup of competing sanctioning bodies plague the sport (the World Boxing Association, the International Boxing Federation, the World Boxing Organization and on and on).<br />
<br />
“It’s just to get India on the map,” said Kiwi referee Bruce McTavish, a veteran with more than 100 title fights on his resumé. “It’s showbiz.” But for Goyat, a win would mean an end to being treated like Smith or Wisaruth: “an opponent”, expected to lose. “After this event, people will come to me to fight,” Goyat told me. “Organizers will ask me to come to their countries. Sponsors will come to us.”<br />
<br />
A victory might even earn Goyat a fight in Vegas. His promoter, Guilty Boxing chief executive Puneet Dureja, a non-resident Indian with 25 years experience in movie and television distribution, has purportedly signed a deal with America’s CBS Sports Network to stage a series of international fight cards featuring boxers from ten different countries over the next 12 months.<br />
<br />
From the opening bell, Goyat took the fight to the taller Filipino, whose punches looked sluggish. Goyat pushed Gulpe back to negate his longer reach, but let Gulpe control the distance and ate a couple four-punch combinations for it. But in the end, he went back to crowding the Filipino, ducking and weaving when Gulpe tried to fire back. The strategy worked.<br />
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Compared to Balbir’s knockout, Goyat’s lopsided technical win, drawn out over 12 three-minute rounds, was an anti-climax. But in other respects, it was exactly what Shekhawat’s NIBA and the WBC needed.<br />
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When the scores were announced, Goyat’s supporters lifted him onto their shoulders in the centre of the ring and thrust a microphone into his hand.<br />
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“I’m India’s first professional boxing champion!” he shouted out in Hindi.<br />
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“If the fighters come prepared and the main event is handled in a professional manner, then it will be a success,” Cusick had told me the day before, and at that moment, a success is what it was. It was only a day or two later that the real cracks started to show. Rumours swirled that one of the main sponsors had reneged on a promise to provide ₹15 lakh and Shekhawat hadn’t been able to pay the fighters. Then Rahul Gokhale, of Serendipity Marketing, wrote me to accuse Shekhawat of stiffing him on two of the agreed ₹5 lakh fee for arranging the venue, promotional materials and managing the event.<br />
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“NIBA used my office infrastructure, manpower and consultation services for two months, and apart from that the event cost is also not paid. All commitments regarding the payment failed, and now everyone is absconding,” Gokhale wrote in an email.<br />
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Shekhawat took my call a few minutes later and assured me he was not absconding. He was very much in town, and had sent Gokhale a WhatsApp message offering to meet.<br />
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“I haven’t disappeared. I’m very near his home,” Shekhawat said.<br />
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He didn’t deny that they’d agreed on five lakhs. But he said he was withholding the final two lakhs because he wasn’t satisfied with the job Gokhale had done. Among the issues: Gokhale had promised an aluminium scaffold for the light system, but had provided an iron one; and the LED lights hadn’t been functioning for the first match. The crux of the matter, though, was the delay.<br />
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“The show was 90 minutes late. I was searching for him, where is Rahul, where is Rahul? He was nowhere to be found.”<br />
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Gokhale disagreed. “As far as I was concerned, the event was quite seamless,” he said. “Nothing went wrong.”<br />
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According to Cusick and McTavish, none of the foreign fighters complained that they had not received their money. However, it wasn’t clear if those amounts matched the sums that the team had bandied about in their discussions with me – which included match fees of as much as one lakh and post-fight bonuses ranging from₹50,000 to 5 lakh for the winner of the main event.<br />
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“As far as my purse I was given exactly what I was promised, no haggling,” Smith wrote in an email. “I am not at liberty to discuss [the] total... But I will say I hope they call me again.”<br />
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When I called Goyat, he was more cagey. The organizers had given a cheque for his match fee and the ₹5 lakh bonus for winning the title to a friend in Delhi. But he wasn’t bothered about cashing it, he claimed.<br />
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“I didn’t fight for the money. I fought to make history,” said Goyat. “This is the first professional boxing championship to be held in India. I don’t want it to be the last.”<br />
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Unpaid bills, dodgy match-ups, an incompetent-if-not-crooked referee — to the uninitiated, all that might sound a bit, well, unprofessional. But to the boxing cognoscenti, where this sort of scheming is more common than not, it may be a hint that Shekhawat and India’s newborn pro boxing industry may already be punching above their weight.</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-14556971214030879482013-05-16T21:50:00.000-07:002013-05-16T21:50:03.179-07:00India: Facebook sold my baby!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The buying and selling of children is shockingly commonplace in India.</div>
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(GlobalPost - May 3, 2013)</div>
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<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/india" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">NEW DELHI</a>, India — When police in the north Indian state of Punjab announced the arrest of a grandfather for allegedly selling his infant grandson on Facebook, the news immediately went viral.</div>
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But the real story is hidden behind the headline: The buying and selling of children is shockingly commonplace in India.</div>
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“The numbers are shocking now,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer who works with the Save the Childhood Movement, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that fights child trafficking and other forms of exploitation.</div>
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According to official government estimates, around 90,000 children went missing in India in 2011 alone. And while police contend that many are runaways whose return home is never reported, nearly 35,000 remain untraced, and only 15,000 of the total cases were ever investigated.</div>
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Indeed, the Facebook baby was lucky — even if the anonymity offered by the internet may present an ominous threat in the hands of more savvy criminals. Police acted swiftly to recover the infant boy after his mother, Noori, complained that her father-in-law, Feroz Khan, had allegedly told her the baby had died and spirited him away with the aid of hospital staff.</div>
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“After investigations, we found the grandfather of the child had struck a deal with a man in Delhi and had roped-in the nursing staff to smuggle the baby out of the nursing home,” Ishwar Singh, commissioner of police in Ludhiana, told the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/10015750/Indian-sold-newborn-grandson-on-Facebook-for-850.html" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Telegraph</a>. “We have arrested four people including the grandfather. We have also booked the buyer from Delhi."</div>
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That is hardly the experience of most parents. Since 2007, when the exposure of a serial killer in Nithari, on the outskirts of New Delhi, revealed that local police had ignored parents' pleas that their children had disappeared, evidence has piled up showing that officials continue to disregard complaints of missing children.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130305/india-surrogacy-surrogate-mothers-gay-single-parents" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">No babies for gay couples in India</a></strong></div>
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When GlobalPost visited the homes of parents with missing children for an <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/090323/indias-missing-children" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">earlier report</a>, it was painfully clear that the economic status of the families plays a disturbing role in the treatment of their cases.</div>
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The desperate circumstances of the slums encourage the authorities to believe that children have simply run away. And sometimes, the plight of the family prompts suspicion that a family member — like the grandfather of the Facebook baby — may be involved in the disappearance.</div>
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According to child protection experts, however, cases in which parents or other family members knowingly sell their children are rare. More often, the family is duped into surrendering their child with the promise that he or she will be given a job and a better life in the city — sending home money every month. Some cash changes hands, but it is described as an advance, and most likely intended to sow seeds of guilt among family members that later help stymie any official investigation.</div>
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“In the majority of the cases we deal with the child is being taken away with the promise of a better job or a better life and then disappears,” said Ribhu, who the night before had participated in the rescue of a trafficked girl from a house in New Delhi where she was being held.</div>
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Earlier this year, India enacted a strong new law prohibiting all forms of human trafficking — whether for labor, slavery, sex or adoption — proscribing a prison term of seven years to life. But the new law has yet to make a difference, as it has not yet been backed by widespread institutional changes, says Ribhu.</div>
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Just days before the alleged sale of the Facebook baby, India's capital erupted in wide-scale protests when citizens learned that police had allegedly offered the father of a 5-year-old rape victim a bribe to try to prevent him from revealing that they initially refused to investigate her disappearance.</div>
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The delay in the investigation took on new meaning when the brutalized child was found, 40 hours later, in another apartment of the building where her family lives. (She remains in the hospital where she has been treated for severe internal injuries.)</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130420/india-manoj-kumar-arrested-rape-5-year-old-girl" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">India: Manoj Kumar arrested in rape of 5-year-old girl (VIDEO)</a></strong></div>
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It appears this young girl represents the norm. An investigation by India's Mail Today newspaper, covering six New Delhi police stations, found that despite the new directives, police are still reluctant to file cases when parents come to report missing children. In some cases, they allegedly pressured parents to withdraw their complaints, while in others they demanded money before they would take action, <a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/delhi-police-harasses-parents-refuses-to-file-firs-on-missing-children-mail-today-investigation/1/267491.html" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">according to the report</a>.</div>
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Child protection experts are not the least bit surprised.</div>
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“Out of the 10 children who are going missing every hour, only one case is being investigated,” said Ribhu. “These children are all being put into various kinds of exploitation. And a child who is being sold on Facebook is not even a part of this figure.”</div>
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http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130501/facebook-kidnapping-human-trafficking-missing-children</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-62256529933122571902013-05-16T21:48:00.002-07:002013-05-16T21:48:17.139-07:00India: Watershed unlikely from Pakistan election<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Analysis: Pakistan's democratic transition may not be so historic for India-Pakistan relations.</div>
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(GlobalPost - May 16, 2013)</div>
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<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/india" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">NEW DELHI</a>, India — His first act as <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/pakistan" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Pakistan</a>'s prime minister was to wave an olive branch in India's general direction, but Nawaz Sharif's victory doesn't necessarily position him to take major steps to improve cross-border relations.</div>
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Here's why:</div>
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Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) won close to an outright majority in the weekend polls. With 123 out of 272 directly elected assembly seats, he can form the government without the aid of a significant ally.</div>
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India hopes that means Sharif will not have to deal with political adversaries as he seeks to re-establish civilian control over state policy.</div>
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But despite his near majority, Sharif relies on Islamic fundamentalist parties for support. His rivals contend that one reason his campaign was successful was that the Pakistani Taliban did not target him for attack.</div>
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To many, that suggests a tacit agreement that he will not try to stop the country from sinking deeper into the mire.</div>
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“It's useful, obviously, to have a majority,” said Rajiv Sikri, a career Indian diplomat and author of “Challenge and Strategy: Rethinking India's Foreign Policy.”</div>
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“But as we know the civilian government is not the only center of power in Pakistan. There is the army, there is the judiciary, there are the religious parties, and he is quite dependent on them, and of course there is the ever-present factor of the <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/united-states" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">United States</a>.”</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/pakistan/130510/pakistan-elections-violence-taliban-karachi-imran-khan" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Pakistan election, will the violence end?</a></strong></div>
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Sharif's early remarks condemning terrorism, in which he said Pakistan would “never again” allow its soil to be used as the launchpad for terrorist attacks on India, are the most exciting sign that he intends to initiate a major shift in policy.</div>
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But many question his ability to pull it off — especially when a single ill-timed strike from the Lashkar-e-Taiba or a similar terrorist group can put paid to thousands of hours of peace talks.</div>
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“He would probably be wiser if he were to go a little slowly rather than rush anything,” Sikri said. “He doesn't want to frighten the army into any rash step.”</div>
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Sharif's history could work in India's favor.</div>
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Pakistan's prime minister from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1997 to 1999, Sharif was deposed by a military coup and exiled to <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/saudi-arabia" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Saudi Arabia</a> in a fruitless and probably insincere effort to crack down on corruption.</div>
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So, he knows all too well the problems with an elected government that serves at the pleasure of the army chief. And he has a personal as well as a political stake in righting the balance of power.</div>
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That will require normalizing India-Pakistan relations, for a start.</div>
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The source of the Pakistani military's power is the fear of a conflict with India. And improved trade relations could jumpstart the economy in ways that would simultaneously loosen the grip of the army and (possibly) rob the Islamists of some of their recruits.</div>
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But Brahma Chellaney of the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research said it's too early to tell whether Sharif will be able to facilitate a better relationship between the two prickly neighbors.</div>
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“It is too early to conclude that the recent election marks the advent of a mature, stable Pakistani democracy,” Chellaney wrote by email.</div>
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“Sharif faces a major challenge to make the army and the [Inter-services Intelligence agency] (ISI) more accountable. Unless he achieves some tangible progress on that front, he will find it difficult to achieve structural economic or foreign-policy reforms."</div>
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And it takes two to tango.</div>
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Despite Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's apparent willingness to sacrifice whatever tiny amount of political capital he commands to establish a lasting peace with Pakistan, India itself is due to go to the polls in 2014.</div>
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Even if Singh's United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government opts, bravely or foolishly, to seek some kind of historic agreement with Islamabad in a last-ditch bid to win votes, Sharif will have to evaluate the wisdom of striking a deal with a lame duck with two broken wings.</div>
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For that reason, more than any other, Sharif's engagement with India will probably be limited to fine sounding words and perhaps a spontaneous jaunt across the border to watch a cricket match or visit a shrine. At least until 2014.</div>
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http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130515/pakistan-election-india-relationship-nawaz-sharif</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-60369861600854522342013-04-22T17:03:00.001-07:002013-04-22T17:03:57.753-07:00India's young Hindu radicals<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Is a group of young Hindu radicals terrorizing the college town of Mangalore a sign of a coming culture war?</i><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />
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(GlobalPost - April 22, 2013)<br /><br />MANGALORE, India — Inside the Mangalore city jail, Subhash Padil, a 29-year-old foot soldier in a far right Hindu organization, leaned in to make himself heard through the wire mesh of the visitor's window. Half a dozen of his fellow inmates crowded around him.<br /><br />With an orange lungi wrapped around his waist, sarong-style, and a saffron towel draped over his shoulders, Padil dressed in the guise of a temple priest. His moralistic protestations against his incarceration for an alleged attack on a birthday party held at a local bed and breakfast last year make him sound like one, too.<br /><br />“When we came in, the girls were half naked and everyone was drinking,” he said, through a translator. “They claim it was only a birthday party. But if that was all that was going on, why would they hold it at a guesthouse instead of at home?”<br /><br />Last July, journalist Naveen Soorinje caught Padil and other alleged members of the Hindu Jagarana Vedike on video as they roughed up a group of 20-something party-goers they claimed were up to no good. For exposing the Hindu group's violent answer to moral policing, the journalist spent more than six months in jail.<br /><br />The real shock, however, was the virulence of the young Hindu radicals he exposed.<br /><br />More than half of India's 1.2 billion people are under 25 years old, a potential demographic dividend that optimists say could add two percent per year to the country's gross domestic product over the next 20 years.<br /><br />But contrary to conventional wisdom, it's not all Facebook, MTV and sexting in “Youngistan” — Pepsi's clever tag for this generation now coming into its own. Instead, even as English-speaking India appears to be growing ever more tolerant of dating, live-in relationships and even intercaste marriages, Mangalore's birthday party battle and similar conflicts across the country hint at a simmering culture war beneath the surface of India's economic growth.<br /><br />“If they truly suspected that there were drugs at the party or that the boys were taking pictures of the girls in compromising positions to blackmail them, they should have stopped to assess the situation and confirm something like that was really going on,” said Soorinje, who was finally released from custody after months of protests from civil rights organizations and other media personnel.<br /><br />“But you can see from the video that they just stormed through the gate and started the attack.”<br /><br />The Morality Police<br /><br />A small, coastal city in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, Mangalore seems like an unnatural hotbed for Hindu radicals. It's only about 200 miles from <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/india">Bangalore</a>, the IT hub that has become the public face of India's economic rise. And thanks to dozens of educational institutions like St. Aloysius College, whose colonial-era towers overlook the Arabian Sea from the center of town, the city throngs with young, upwardly mobile Indians studying to be doctors, nurses, executives and engineers.<br /><br />On a typical afternoon at a local branch of Cafe Coffee Day, the unofficial capital of Youngistan, several couples from the local colleges sit together, their heads drawn together over the excuse of a notebook. In one corner of the cafe, a Muslim girl sits with her bearded boyfriend, strappy pink sandals peaking out from beneath the head-to-toe black of her chador, while in another, a Hindu guy with a soul patch has pulled his chair around the table to sit next to his girlfriend. And later that night, at a local bar called Froth on Top, the crowd of young college students drank pitchers of beer, looking no different from any such group in any country around the world.<br /><br />But there's more here than meets the eye.<br /><br />Over the past five years — according to news reports collected by the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), India's oldest and largest human rights organisation — Mangalore and the surrounding coastal area has witnessed more than 100 incidents of so-called “moral policing,” similar to the homestay attack in July.<br /><br />“If a boy and girl walks together, that is not Hindu culture, they will say,” said Swebert de Silva, principal of St. Aloysius College, where students have protested against the self-appointed moral police.<br /><br />“Or women drinking in a pub. Or young people gathering together and drinking a little beer. That is not Hindu culture.”<br /><br />Most of the incidents compiled by PUCL involved members of radical groups such as the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, Sri Rama Sene and Bajrang Dal. In January 2009, for instance, around 40 alleged members of the Sri Ram Sene attacked young men and women drinking at a local Mangalore bar called “Amnesia — the Lounge,” claiming they were violating Indian culture. In August 2011, some 30 to 40 alleged members of the Bajrang Dal reportedly broke up a birthday party being held at a local farmhouse, claiming it was a rave.<br /><br />“If I'm married and I'm having children of age 20 or 25 and I flirt with a girl who is the age of 14, and my intention is to spoil her, and some alert social activists ... stop us, how can you say it is moral policing?” said Franklin Monteiro, a local leader from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).<br /><br />“First they will ask whether they are married or they are lovers, or whether they are having the permission of their parents,” Monteiro said. “These three questions they will ask first. If they belong to the same [religious] community, they [the vigilantes] will leave, just like that.”<br /><br />But in contrast, in dozens of cases compiled by PUCL, members of various right-wing outfits reportedly dragged young people off buses, sprang on couples and hauled them into the police station, or beat them up on the spot.<br /><br />Many of these attacks stemmed from the real or imagined perception that a Muslim boy had sought a connection with a Hindu girl — which right-wing ideologues have characterized as “Love Jihad.” And in almost all of these instances that involve the local police, the authorities appear to have tacitly sanctioned the vigilantes' actions by holding the couple for questioning, calling their parents to retrieve them, or releasing them only after ascertaining that both the boy and girl are Hindus.<br /><br />“Nobody is stopping it,” said Suresh Bhatt, vice president of the Karnataka chapter of PUCL. “We're terribly concerned that the lawkeepers, the police and the politicians, are turning a blind eye.”<br /><br />Activists from PUCL and other like-minded organisations trace such incidents of moral policing — as well as dozens of reported attacks on Muslims accused of slaughtering cows and on Christians accused of trying to convert Hindus — to the recent rise to power of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Karnataka.<br /><br />The BJP and the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, Sri Rama Sene, and Bajrang Dal are all official offshoots, or ideological allies, of a massive, informal political “family” known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), PUCL activists said.<br /><br />The increase in these interreligious skirmishes — whether they're related to the bogey of “Love Jihad,” cow slaughter, or conversion — is part of a well-planned RSS campaign strategy, according to critics.<br /><br />“For us, the final is the Sangh Parivar (RSS family), we are all activists of the Sangh Parivar,” said the BJP's Monteiro. “For us, the final and the most holiest part of life is to protect this country, as well as the culture of this land, which has been practiced by our elders.”<br /><br />In Mangalore, the campaign began in the late 1990s, when a communal clash between Hindus and Muslims offered the RSS and other proponents of its ethnic nationalist ideology of “Hindutva” or “Hinduness” an opportunity to woo low caste Hindus away from competing socialist and communist movements, according to K. Phaniraj, a professor at the nearby Manipal Institute of Technology.<br /><br />But since 2008, when the BJP came to power in Karnataka, the lines have blurred between the grassroots exploitation of tensions between religious communities and official sanction from the authorities. When the government proposed a bill to ban cow slaughter, for instance, local police tacitly allowed hooligans to enforce the ban, though it never became law. And for more than a month last year, the official police website for the district that includes Mangalore featured a photo collage highlighting the supposed public service activities of the RSS (which the group's opponents say are nothing more than recruitment efforts).<br /><br />“I call it Hindutva fascism,” Phaniraj said. “I make no bones about it.”<br /><br />Class and caste, town and gown<br /><br />As disturbing as that sounds, that aspect of the issue is little more than politics as usual for India, where the RSS and Hindu nationalism has been a potent force since 1925.<br /><br />And though various speeches reported by local media suggest otherwise, some RSS members and sympathisers say that the organisation has quietly shunted to the side the outright fascist ideas of Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, one of its principal early ideologues. (In his written works, Golwalkar calls for non-Hindus to adopt Hindu culture or submit to remain “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation” and appears to endorse Hitler's decision to purge <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/internal/section-config/germany">Germany</a>of the Jews, though perhaps not his methods).<br /><br />“There might be a small section of the RSS which is anti-Muslim,” said 31-year-old Brijesh Chowta, an RSS member who cautioned that his statements represented only his personal views. “But if you look at the organisation, they say Hindutva is not a religion. Everybody can practice their religion, but it's about being Indian first.”<br /><br />What's new, and of greater concern to the more liberal citizens of Youngistan, is the idea that India's modernization may not be diminishing the ranks of the true believers, and their conservatism may be contagious — encouraging Christian and Muslim fundamentalism.<br /><br />At a recent regional meeting, 80 percent of the 85,000 uniformed “volunteers” that turned out were between 16 and 35, according to a 28-year-old member of the RSS who lives at its center in the city and works for the organisation full time. (He asked not to be named because he is not an official spokesman.)<br /><br />Meanwhile, the regular attacks on Muslims that accompanied the Hindu vigilantes' moral policing sparked local college students to adopt the burqa and chador as a kind of badge of honor in the tussle between modernity, freedom and identity.<br /><br />And the socio-economic dimensions of the conflict hint that it may soon grow more serious.<br /><br />Apart from the alleged political machinations of the Hindu right, there is a class-and-caste, town-versus-gown element to these incidents of moral policing that some observers believe augurs trouble on the horizon.<br /><br />While educated, upwardly mobile young people move forward to take better jobs, free themselves from the authority of their parents and embrace more liberal attitudes toward love and sex, another group may be growing increasingly lost, hopeless and angry.<br /><br />According to Soorinje, the journalist jailed for his reporting on moral policing, for instance, four of the young men facing charges for the alleged attack on party-goers at the homestay in July do not have electricity in their homes.<br /><br />“The reason that young people are attracted to these kind of [radical conservative] outfits is the uneven development we see in Mangalore,” Soorinje said.<br /><br />“While we have so many colleges and shopping malls, the backward and uneducated tend to take what the leadership says about 'Love Jihad' and so forth at face value, because young men and women socializing together like the college students do is completely outside their sphere of knowledge.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/130412/india-hindu-radicals-mangalore-culture-war-morality-police-muslims-christians<br /></div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-13533002137994609592013-02-16T02:09:00.001-08:002013-02-16T02:09:34.496-08:00It's (Not) Dead, JimI'm writing this post on a dead machine. Or at least that's what the "service" techs at New Delhi's 4 Genius Minds, an Apple authorized service provider, would have you believe.<br />
<br />
More like 4 Gullible Suckers!<br />
<br />
Here's the story, as I've been tweeting on @joverdorf:<br />
<br />
About a week ago, this beautiful Macbook Pro 13" drank a highball glass of vodka soda -- unadvisedly, of course. I didn't witness the event. But it went dead, and I got no response when I pressed the power button. Only then did I observe the puddle of green apple scented liquid on the desk beneath the machine, and start sniffing the keyboard.<br />
<br />
<b>Getting screwed</b><br />
<br />
$1400, down the drain? So my early web research suggested. But I took it to 4 Gullible Suckers anyway. They said they'd see what they could do, but the diagnosis would cost me 1500 rupees (about $30). Fair enough, right? I forked it over and came back two days later, only to be told that the machine had liquid damage that would cost Rs. 139,800 ($2500) to repair. (A new Macbook Pro 13" with the same features costs $1999 from the Apple Store). On the upside, they said the solid-state hard drive was working, so if I went to Nehru Place and got somebody to stick it in an external case, I could recover the data.<br />
<br />
<b>Here's the report 4 Gullible Suckers gave me:</b><br />
<br />
<b>Work done:</b><br />
1. Verify AC power presence with MagSafe LED indicating on or charge state.<br />
2. Reset SMC (System Management Controller)<br />
3. Disconnect all peripherals from unit.<br />
4. Check battery indicator light array (Press button to activate) to verify that the battery is not dead.<br />
5. Use a known good & correct type/wattage Magsafe Adaptor and AC cord connected to a known good AC outlet to test system.<br />
6. Check the system with minimal configuration.<br />
7. Disconnect keyboard flex cable from MLB to isolate power button. With display in open position, short MLB power pins to power on system<br />
<br />
(I'm not an engineer. And I don't want to be too uncharitable. But that sounds a lot like the shaking and cursing the thing that I did myself).<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Diagnosis Details:</b><br />
Logic board faulty (Liquid damage)<br />
Display faulty (Liquid spill)<br />
Topcase faulty (Liquid spill)<br />
CD drive faulty (Liquid spill)<br />
HDD is working fine.<br />
12th feb 1:59 pm, informed<br />
<br />
<b>Spare Replace / Estimated Repair Cost:</b><br />
Inspection fee - Rs. 1500<br />
Optical Drive, Super 9.5 mm - Rs. 12,900<br />
Display Clamshell, Glossy - Rs. 39,200<br />
Logic board, 2.66 Ghz - Rs. 72,500<br />
Top case housing with keyboard - Rs. 13,700<br />
Total: Rs. 139,800<br />
<br />
<b>Getting service</b><br />
<br />
On to Nehru Place. With the help of a friendly tout, I discovered The IThub deep in the bowels of a grungy, paan- and urine-stained building. <br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZKVYoUyMTEeb_foefaPiu_jtfSVFI_nZ-l-tJk6KIqpc44VgFyY_imkmVN8GpOxYxH93wnsfdJaCcBpi3VAiOqoZRMwF-zLbm_8TBvlJmiRbNNehZkkqGSJssP_wVce4Fg/s1600/4zTwRWm9clqGKtkQnCnvTp_fIXccjwbEQGfrfrFQDBo.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZKVYoUyMTEeb_foefaPiu_jtfSVFI_nZ-l-tJk6KIqpc44VgFyY_imkmVN8GpOxYxH93wnsfdJaCcBpi3VAiOqoZRMwF-zLbm_8TBvlJmiRbNNehZkkqGSJssP_wVce4Fg/s1600/4zTwRWm9clqGKtkQnCnvTp_fIXccjwbEQGfrfrFQDBo.jpeg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
Abdul told me, "we can definitely put your hard drive in an external case. But why not let us try to repair your machine?"<br />
<br />
"How much will it cost to look at it?" I asked, expecting a scam.<br />
<br />
"Nothing. How much did they charge you at the place you took it before?"<br />
<br />
I gave him the "Service Report" to scan.<br />
<br />
"They charged him Rs. 1500 for a diagnostic!" he announced to the dozen odd people standing by. General laughter all around.<br />
<br />
I left with a functioning external hard drive, and hope that my Macbook might be salvageable. Three days later, Abdul phoned me up. <b> "Sir, we have diagnosed your Macbook. If you want us to repair it will cost you Rs. 6000 ($110). It's so expensive because we had to replace the logic board." (4 Gullible Suckers price: Rs. 72,500, or $1350).</b><br />
<br />
Do it, I said.<br />
<br />
You can pick it up tomorrow after 11, he said.<br />
<br />
Today I went back. They whipped out the Macbook and booted it up. But when I tried to type the password the keyboard wasn't working. So they took it back and fiddled some more. Chai was consumed. Business cards exchanged. Friendships forged. (A desi in town from Connecticut, a Delhiwallah who works at BBDO). A running twitter commentary unspooled.<br />
<br />
"Sir, your keyboard is not working. We will try to source you another one."<br />
<br />
I booted up the machine with a USB keyboard and checked "About this Mac." What's this? This machine had 8 GB ram. Now it has 4 GB. More fiddling. I checked it again. The specs checked out. And the machine was working. I inserted a DVD. Sure enough, the DVD drive was working. I did a quick review:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<b>Optical Drive, Super 9.5 mm - Rs. 12,900 -- Still working fine, despite 4 Gullible Suckers</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<b>Display Clamshell, Glossy - Rs. 39,200 -- Still working fine</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<b>Logic board, 2.66 Ghz - Rs. 72,500 -- Replaced for Rs. 6000 ($110 vs. estimate of $1300)</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<b>Top case housing with keyboard - Rs. 13,700 -- Not working, but manageable with USB </b></div>
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<b>Total: Rs. 139,800 -- Out Rs. 6000 plus Rs. 1500 for useless "official" diagnosis</b></div>
<br />
<br />
Yep, the only thing wrong with it was the now-repaired Logic Board and the keyboard. I took it home, and looked for a new keyboard/top case online. <br />
<br />
Guess what: They are available for $125 or less.<br />
<br />
Total cost: $110 plus $125 = $225 versus $2500. Oh, yeah, and the $30 I gave to 4 Gullible Suckers for a life lesson.<br />
<br />
Jugaad beats Macbook: 1-0.<br />
<br />Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-59691565099499097372012-12-26T20:10:00.000-08:002012-12-26T20:10:17.879-08:00India: Music's new ambassadors<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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With the death of Ravi Shankar, Indian music lost its most famous ambassador. Here's who will carry the torch.</div>
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<span class="submitted" style="border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; display: block; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 4px 0px;"><span class="submitted-by" style="margin: 0px 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="submitted-by-link" href="http://www.globalpost.com/bio/jason-overdorf" rel="author" style="color: #0066cc; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Jason Overdorf</a></span><span class="submitted-date" style="color: #999999; font-style: italic; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; white-space: nowrap;">December 25, 2012 06:15</span></span><br />
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NEW DELHI, India — When sitar master Ravi Shankar finally succumbed to time last week, Indian music lost its first and most famous ambassador. But a healthy crop of musicians are carrying the torch — straddling pop, indie, Bollywood and classical genres. Here are some names to follow.</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Classical music</strong></div>
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<a href="http://www.zakirhussain.com/" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Zakir Hussain</a> — a former child prodigy who first toured the US in 1970 — has done for the tabla what Shankar did for the sitar. In 1992 and 2009, he collaborated with Mickey Hart, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo on the Grammy-winning “Planet Drum” and “Global Drum Project” albums to introduce the world to Indian classical's curiously melodious drum. In earlier years, Hussain played with John McLaughlin's Shakti — one of the first efforts to fuse the rhythms and melodies of classical Indian ragas with the improvisations of western jazz — touring extensively in the late 1970s. He worked on the soundtracks of Francis Ford Coppola's “Apocalypse Now” and Bernardo Bertolucci's “Little Buddha.” And he's capitalized on the growing crossover audience for Indian films, and films made by the Indian diaspora, with acting cameos and soundtrack work for movies such as Aparna Sen's “Mr. and Mrs. Iyer” and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As1OMMcHXFs" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Ismail Merchant's “The Mystic Masseur.”</a></div>
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“Aside from the fact that [Hussain] works magic on the tabla, I think it's his ability to align himself to various styles, various vocabularies of music [that has made him an important ambassador for Indian music],” said Chennai-based cultural critic Nandini Krishnan.</div>
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Other heirs to Shankar's legacy include slide guitarist <a href="http://www.debashishbhattacharya.com/" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Debashish Bhattacharya</a>, whose “Calcutta Chronicles” was nominated for a Grammy in 2009; classical pianist Anil Srinivasan; and <a href="http://www.mandolinshrinivas.org/" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Uppalapu “Mandolin” Srinivas</a>, who plays the mandolin (natch). In addition to “Calcutta Chronicles,” Bhattacharya won over Western fans with “Calcutta Slide-Guitar, Vol. 3.” (2005) and “Mahima” (2003) in collaboration with American guitarist Bob Brozman — both of which made Billboard's World Music Top Ten. Srinivas, who dueled with Miles Davis at the West Berlin Jazz Festival in 1983, has in recent years brought South India's Carnatic music to the global audience by collaborating with McLaughlin's Shakti and artists as wide-ranging as King Crimson's Trey Gunn and Chinese yangqin master Liu Yuening. And Srinivasan has brought his unique merger of classical piano and South Indian Carnatic music to audiences at New York's Lincoln Center, the Sydney Opera House and the National Center for the Traditional Performing Arts in Korea.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CzGfgvncL80" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" width="420"></iframe></div>
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In other words, Shankar may be gone, but his legacy is bigger than ever.</div>
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“Most of us now are getting an opportunity to perform at mainstream venues as part of festivals,” said Srinivasan. “To a large extent this is something that Uday Shankar and Ravi Shankar created for Indian music.”</div>
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“[Second], you have Indian music inveigling itself into many different global music forms, starting with AR Rahman and going all the way down to myriad composers and choreographers and other people,” Srinivasan said.</div>
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“Rather than one person or group of people who are ambassadors, you have a lot of different influences and influencers. It's a certain philosophy towards composition that has changed worldwide.”</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bollywood</strong></div>
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That brings us to Bollywood, where Grammy-winner A.R. Rahman and music directors like Amit Trivedi have introduced sounds from Indian folk and classical music into love songs and dance tracks and taken advantage of Indian film's growing global popularity to gain a wider audience.</div>
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“A music director like Amit Trivedi is different from the genius music directors from the '50s, who created a gorgeous sound but also brought in many of the nuances of Indian classical and light classical music, as it's called in India, into their compositions,” said novelist (and classical Hindustani vocalist) Amit Chaudhuri — whose own “This Is Not Fusion” project has created a minor internet sensation since he began it in 2003.</div>
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Trivedi's pathbreaking soundtrack to 2010's “Dev. D” in some ways redefined what Bollywood music could be — albeit in one of a new crop of independent films. Songs like "Emosanal Attyachar,” for instance, blend the raucous music of the brass bands that play Indian weddings with western-style rock influences and wordplay worthy of Bob Dylan.</div>
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“The singer used to be central for those older music director,” Chaudhuri said. “Now it seems the singer is just one element in a soundscape that these directors are creating.”</div>
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Beyond the Grammy-winning soundtrack to “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Jai Ho,” <a href="http://www.arrahman.com/" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Rahman</a> has won crossover fans with some of modern Bollywood's most memorable songs (think “Chaiya Chaiya”):</div>
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He's also collaborated with artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Vanessa Mae — making him the top-of-mind choice for Indian music's new ambassador.</div>
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“What Rahman is basing his music on is a few [elements] picked up from Indian folk music, a few picked up from classical and a few picked up from Western music,” said Delhi University music professor Deepti Bhalla. “You cannot say it has a classical base or a folk base. It is a mix of everything.”</div>
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Still, not everybody is convinced that Bollywood's role as ambassador of Indian music is a good thing.</div>
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“The biggest influence on the West, or what the West understands as Indian music, is the sound of Bollywood,” said Krishnan.</div>
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“This amuses me, because several Bollywood composers have stolen popular Western tracks. Try 'Dil Mera Churaya Kyon' from Akele Hum Akele Tum and George Michael's 'Last Christmas', or 'Haseena Gori Gori' and Shaggy's 'In the Summertime.'”</div>
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<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pop, indie and “new” fusion</strong></div>
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The post-Shankar era is also bristling with Indian and Indian-origin pop, indie and fusion artists, who transcend borders and boundaries in ways that the sitar master couldn't have dreamed possible when he was teaching George Harrison to play.</div>
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In India, artists like singer-songwriter Raghu Dixit of the Raghu Dixit Project are starting to gain an international audience for Indian “indie” music:</div>
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while non-Bollywood popstars like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iabk0T5qorM" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Daler Mehndi</a> have caught the ear of international artists such as the UK's Rajinder Singh Rai (aka <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fRNtqD2UBU" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Panjabi MC</a>) and Jay-Z — making so-called “bhangra nights” a fixture at clubs in London, New York and beyond.</div>
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In the UK, indie artists like <a href="http://in.myspace.com/talvinsinghofficial" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Talvin Singh</a> and <a href="http://www.nitinsawhney.com/nitinsawhney/Home.html" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Nitin Sawhney</a> have in recent years popularized a sub-genre of electronica known as “Asian Underground” that incorporates Indian instruments and melodies, while<a href="http://store.cornershop.com/" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Cornershop</a>'s Tjinder and Avtar Singh brought Indian instruments and sampling to Britpop in songs like “Brimful of Asha.”</div>
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And the late-blooming US diaspora is now getting into the game, with Brooklyn-based Himanshu Suri and Ashok Kondabolu of Das Racist bringing an Indian vibe to hip hop and Brooklyn-based Rudresh Mahan Thapar and Vijay Iyer combining Indian sounds with Western jazz.</div>
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“[The UK's] Arun Ghosh, Vijay Iyer, and Rudresh Mahan Thapar all started out as western-style jazz players and they began to explore their cultural origins,” said <a href="http://www.amitchaudhuri.com/music/music.html" style="color: #0066cc; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Chaudhuri</a>, who counts his own “This Is Not Fusion” as part of the same musical movement.</div>
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“It's a move away from the kind of Shakti-idea of fusion, where you had western harmonies and Indian instruments and raga and you brought the two together,” Chaudhuri explained. “This new music was done by people who were not looking at either Western or Eastern music from the outside.”</div>
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In other words: Maybe Indian music doesn't really need “ambassadors” any more.</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-56733580849034235652012-07-17T22:01:00.001-07:002012-07-17T22:03:24.812-07:00India: Food rots as people starve<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(153, 153, 153); line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap; font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:-webkit-xxx-large;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;color:#777777;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; line-height: 19px; white-space: normal; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 16px; font-size:16px;"><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px; font-size:17px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px; font-size:16px;"></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:16px;"></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:16px;"></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">By Jason Overdorf</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">(GlobalPost - July 16, 2012)</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">NEW DELHI, India — Never mind that a fifth of India's population remains undernourished and some 3,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. By all appearances, India, or at least the Indian government, has too much food.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Last week, after the revelation that millions of tons of </span></span></span><a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/120703/business-insider-india-surplus-grain-going-waste" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">improperly stored</span></span></span><strong style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;"> </span></span></span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">grain</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;"> would be ruined by monsoon rains, India lifted a four-year ban on wheat exports and cleared the way for the state-owned Food Corporation of India to send 2 million tons overseas. </span></span></span><a href="http://%20http//www.dnaindia.com/india/report_wheat-export-ban-lifted-to-settle-cabinet-feud_1710744" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">It also approved the release some 8 million tons of grain into the domestic market.</span></span></span></a></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Shipping grain abroad while millions starve in India has elicited a strong response from critics.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">“This is unpardonable. I see no reason why it is happening,” said farm policy analyst Devinder Sharma. “It is because there is no political will to feed the hungry that people are dying, not because there is no food.”</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">On paper, that hardly seems to be the case. India spends about $14 billion a year, or 1 percent of its gross domestic product, to provide subsidized grain to a third of its people — at least theoretically. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration is considering a move to enshrine the “right to food” in law and double the number of people eligible for subsidized grain.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">But everywhere except on paper, the system can seem irretrievably broken. And India's mounting deficit has caused many right-leaning economists to question whether now is the time to spend even more money on a broken system.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Hunger, malnutrition and starvation are different, though related problems, so more calories isn't a cure all – particularly if all those calories come from wheat and rice. But even when everyone knows that people are dying because they have nothing to eat, the government appears incapable of making the welfare system function at its most basic level.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">“The shocking thing is that many of these [starvation] cases have been followed up on by the media, many times,” said Ashwin Parulkar, a researcher with the New Delhi-based Center for Equity Studies who recently investigated </span></span></span><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/tag/starving-in-india/" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">the government response to starvation cases</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">. “But the simple administrative tasks that are supposed to prevent these things aren't even enforced when these calamities have already happened.” </span></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px; "></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">In rural Jharkhand, for instance, a woman whose husband starved to death two years ago was still waiting for a card certifying her as eligible for subsidized grain. When Parulkar confronted local administrators, they told him they would get her the card. They even gave him a specific date. But even after Parulkar published his findings in a thoughtful, six-part series for the Wall Street Journal's India Real Time blog, the woman still hasn't received it.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">They have "no shame in admitting it hasn't been done,” Parulkar said. And "no shame in promising something they know they're not going to do.”</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">For several years now, India has complained of a so-called “paradox of plenty.” As higher yields have produced more and more rice and wheat, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) has snapped up ever larger amounts to prop up prices for the country's millions of farmers — until all the warehouses were full, and towering stacks of wheat and rice had to be abandoned to rot under the open skies.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">But as much as the talk has centered around building more warehouses, or allowing retailers like Walmart into the market to whip the supply chain into shape, the problem was never about plenty, and it was never about storage. The problem was, and is, distribution. </span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">India's food subsidy system was designed for two purposes. FCI buys grain at a so-called “minimum support price” to protect farmers from a crash when the monsoon delivers a bumper harvest. And it is supposed to sell or give away that grain at below market rates to protect the poor from starvation.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">But no matter how much grain the government buys, no matter how many tons lie rotting in its possession, and no matter how many people go to bed hungry each night, the amount of grain it disperses to the poor never gets much larger.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">“The refusal of the government to let go of these food grains is at the heart of [the problem],” said Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the Supreme Court on the proposed right to food law.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Since 2003, the government's “buffer stock” of food grains has rarely been less than double the prescribed norm, according to Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to the prime minister, writing in Economic & Political Weekly. Over the same period, as Indians continued to go hungry, wheat prices in India soared. They rose as much as 30 percent higher than international rates in the summer of 2010. Meanwhile time after time the FCI sold off its so-called excess on the international market for less than the price it could have earned at home.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">“I see no justification for a hungry nation to be exporting food grains,” said Sharma. “How can you be so criminal in your thought process?”</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">The usual explanation is corruption. It's not that the government doesn't want to release its stockpiled grain to the poor, the argument runs. But there's little point to the exercise, since as much as 18 percent of rice and 67 percent of wheat intended for the poor is diverted before it reaches the target, according to a frequently cited study. And if that's not bad enough, corrupt traders sell a healthy portion of that diverted grain right back to the FCI for a minimum price — scamming the government into paying a subsidy for the same grain again and again.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">But that's not the whole story. Theft of the grain intended for the poor has dropped significantly, </span></span></span><a href="http://%20http//www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2098575.ece" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">according to economist Reetika Khera</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">. And the most marked improvements have been achieved in states that have simultaneously reduced grain prices and expanded the system's coverage, Khera argues, citing moves by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to offer rice to everyone at the subsidized price of one rupee per kilogram. In other words, the closer the system comes to a universal subsidy for all, the better it seems to work.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Moreover, corruption isn't the only reason India stockpiles food while its people starve. India's economic liberalization, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), have also played a role, according to Jawaharlal Nehru University's Jayati Ghosh.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Since 1991, when, as finance minister, Manmohan Singh initiated the dismantling of India's planned economy, India has dramatically reduced public investments in agriculture and rural areas. Meanwhile, the WTO-related removal of trade restrictions forced Indian farmers to compete with “highly subsidized large producers in the developed countries, whose average level of subsidy amounted to many times the total domestic cost of production for many crops,” Ghosh wrote in a 2005 background paper for the </span></span></span><a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2005/papers/HDR2005_Ghosh_Jayati_12.pdf" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">United Nations' Human Development Report</span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">. The result was a “very pronounced” reduction in food grain consumption.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">India's economic liberalization also resulted in deep cuts to the public distribution system. On the insistence of the World Bank (which had backed the loans that bailed India out of a financial crisis in 1991), the government scrapped its near universal food grain subsidy in favor of a system that targeted only below poverty line families in 1997. </span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Since then, millions of people have slipped through the cracks, unable to secure ration cards testifying to their poverty. The effort to separate the absolutely destitute from the very poor has added new complexity to a system already plagued by bureaucratic inefficiency, and, presumably, offered new opportunities for graft.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">But the biggest embarrassment has been the government's effort to reduce costs by charging more for grain sold to above-poverty-line families. That effort has backfired miserably.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Between 1997 and 2000, FCI increased grain prices by 80 percent for below-poverty-line families, while the rates that above-poverty-line families had to pay doubled. But the prices were too high for the poor to afford, so the only result was that people bought less grain — and ate less. Instead of selling grain at a loss, the government wasn't selling it at all. The stocks mounted, increasing from some 18 million tons in 1998 to more than 50 million tons in 2003. </span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">Over the past decade, the amount of grain purchased by below-poverty-line families has increased — mostly because states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have expanded coverage and offered additional subsidies over and above the FCI discount. But offtake at the above poverty line rate has remained low, even as market rates soared and states clamored for more, simply because the central government refused to sell, said Ghosh.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">As a result, at last count the government had 82 million tons of grain in hand, hoarded for the emergency it never acknowledges has already arrived. </span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">A cynic might well suggest that no real change is likely anytime soon. The proposed national food security bill aims to make the food distribution system work better by adding new enforcement mechanisms, as well as setting up soup kitchens, school meal programs and direct cash transfers to complement the existing subsidies.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">But despite all the furor about its cost, the new and improved targeted system still relies on the broken method of trying to identify the poor – whose numbers rise and fall much more rapidly than the government can conduct economic surveys. It ignores evidence from the states that suggests universal subsidies work best.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 17px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;">And even after the expansion it will still cover a lot fewer people than the near universal food program India had until the 1990s.</span></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: nowrap; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px; white-space: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FFFFFF;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px; "></span></span></span></span></span></span></p></span></span></span></i></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(153, 153, 153); line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap; font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:-webkit-xxx-large;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:130%;color:#777777;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: normal; line-height: 19px; white-space: normal; font-size:14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 16px; font-size:16px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#777777;"><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline !important; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></p></span></i></span></span></span></i></span></div>Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-24660970854386277242012-06-06T23:11:00.001-07:002012-06-06T23:11:30.074-07:00India economy: How bad is it?<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: -webkit-xxx-large; line-height: 16px; "><div id="gp3_dispatch_top" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; clear: both; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><i>Stagflation looms for the middle class, but higher prices will hit the poor hardest.</i></span></div><div id="gp3_dispatch_top" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; clear: both; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><br /></span></div><div id="gp3_dispatch_top" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; clear: both; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">By Jason Overdorf / NEW DELHI</span></div><div id="gp3_dispatch_top" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; clear: both; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">GlobalPost - June 6, 2012</span></div><div id="gp3_dispatch_top" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; clear: both; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><br /></span></div><span><span></span></span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">NEW DELHI, India — A 52-year-old handyman who has lived in New Delhi for 30 years, Ram Samujh has seen bad times before. But these days, as India faces an economic slowdown amid double-digit inflation, the future looks especially bleak.</span></span></span><div class="gp3_story_content" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; clear: both; "><div class="content" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“There's no more cutting back for me,” says Samujh, a soft-spoken, gray-haired man who carefully takes out a pair of rimless reading glasses. “I'm already down to only the absolute necessities.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“I'm a daily worker,” said Samujh, whose skills give him a leg up on most Indian laborers. “One day I might get three jobs. But then I might go a week without any.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">Over the past three years, as prices for food and other essentials soared, Sadmujh was also able to charge more for odd jobs like installing new electrical outlets, repairing small appliances and fixing clogged drains. But with India's economic growth slowing to a nine-year low of 5.3 percent for the quarter ended March 31 and 6.5 percent for the fiscal year, Samujh's middle-class employers are also beginning to feel the pain — even as economists predict that prices will continue to skyrocket.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“Things are getting very expensive,” said Bharat Singh, who, as a sub-inspector with the Delhi Police, falls smack in the middle of the $4,000-$10,000 income bracket that economists here define as the middle class.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“Vegetable prices have gone up 25 percent. They are going to increase school fees 20 percent next term. We're no longer able to save any money,” Singh said.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“I'm afraid. I'm really afraid. How will I arrange all the things in the coming months, or coming years. I am afraid to see the future.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><strong style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">How bad is it?</span></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><br />The short answer may well be yes. Or as Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley in New York, puts it: </span><a href="http://forbesindia.com/article/boardroom/bric-countries-hit-a-wall/33030/1" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">India now has only a 50-50 chance</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "> of making it to the ranks of developed nations by 2050.Many middle-class Indians like Singh — who has three sons, two in private schools and one in college — have already eliminated luxuries like going to the movies and adopted simple economies like eating vegetarian five or six days a week. As car owners getting by on relatively modest salaries, the middle class was hit hardest by the government's move to hike petrol prices nearly 10 percent last month. And though India's labor laws protect them from layoffs, they now face ever greater competition for a stagnating number of jobs, hiring freezes and, possibly, wage cuts — prompting a </span><a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?281109" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">leading national news weekly</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "> to ask: “Was it just a mirage then?”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">Though 6.5 percent growth no doubt looks pretty good to countries where a full-on recession is looming, India's economy slowed steadily throughout the fiscal year. And the nature of the growth was not too encouraging, either.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“A lot of the income growth is coming from people selling their land,” said Bibek Debroy, an economist at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research. “That's part of the India story, for better or for worse. Parts of India are getting urbanized. So I have a plot of land that is valuable, and I sell it off.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">Real estate gains — which don't create jobs — accounted for an unhealthy part of India's economic growth in the fourth quarter, when it slipped to 5.3 percent. Worse still, India needs to grow at nearly twice that rate to keep its head above water. Because of its expanding population, it needs to create about 12 million new jobs a year to employ the young people entering the work force — which might just be possible at a 9 percent clip, according to Debroy.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">But even that's only the tip of the iceberg. To lift some 600 million farm laborers out of poverty, or near to it, India needs more than simple industrialization, it needs a </span><a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/111230/india-economy-wealth-gap-poverty-shivas-rules" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">complete metamorphosis</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">. And over the past three months, its nascent manufacturing sector contracted instead of growing.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“The question is not whether we're growing faster than the rest,” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the India arm of the credit agency, Standard & Poor's. “The question is whether we're growing fast enough to solve our problems. Clearly, we are not.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">That means that the only thing trickling down these days is belt-tightening.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“The poor man's wages have risen quite swiftly until last year. That cushioned them against inflation,” Joshi said. “The high growth we saw allowed people to pay more for household services, more for their drivers, more to farm laborers. But can wages keep rising at the same rate if the economy slows to 6 percent? I don't think so.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">On Monday, Crisil lowered its growth forecast for this year to 6.5 percent from 7 percent. And that could well drop further, if the troubles in the euro zone get worse, oil prices climb back up, or India's government continues to falter.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">And wages?</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“There's no point in asking for more money now, because nobody will give it,” Samujh said. “It's better to concentrate on keeping my clients happy.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><strong style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">What's next?</span></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">India's business leaders have called for stimulus measures, beginning with an interest-rate cut. And economists like Crisil's Joshi have predicted that some such moves are in the offing — such as fatter tax breaks for export- and labor-intensive industries, and a deep cut to interest rates if growth continues to lag below 6.5 percent.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">But it will take more than rearranging the deck chairs to stop the ship from sinking.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“Reform is a generic word,” said Joshi. “You can't ignore the governance and execution aspect of things, which has led to some pessimissm about India right now.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">The conventional wisdom is that India's economic woes stem from “policy paralysis,” a catchphrase that refers to the current government's failure to push through business-friendly economic reforms like loosening the rules on foreign investment for big retailers like Walmart. And, indeed, as the caretaker of a weak coalition government, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hasn't achieved any big bang reforms, like deregulating fuel prices or selling off beleaguered Air India to end a depressing cycle of multibillion dollar bailouts.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">The recent move to </span><a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120523/india-stasis-or-crisis" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">hike petrol prices</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "> may signal that the economist PM is now ready to rock. And Joshi points out that every Indian government has typically taken a “firefighting approach” to the business of running the country.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“I would not lose hope completely,” Joshi said. “Now there is enough fire, so I would expect some action.”</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">But the paralysis runs much deeper than policy. And, ironically, the root of the problem may not lie with Singh's recalcitrant partners in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) — who stopped him from throwing open the doors to Walmart. It may have originated with the very same middle-class Indians who are now complaining the loudest about the slowdown.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">The reason? It was the normally apathetic middle class that first fueled the anti-corruption campaign led by social activist Anna Hazare, which brought tens of thousands of Indians onto the streets last summer. Now, as the mass movement takes on the character of a witch hunt, the calls for blood just keep getting louder. And the fear of being targeted in a </span><a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/india/india-probe-coal-corruption" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); text-decoration: none; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">Central Bureau of Investigation probe</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "> has brought the already sluggish bureaucracy grinding to a halt.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">Here's why.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">Leaving corruption aside for a moment, India normally functions less by policy than by edict. Sure, there's a law at the root of every government activity. But it translates into action only when, say, the minister of education or rural development issues instructions to the secretaries and joint secretaries who actually make things happen.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">By “moving a file,” the bureaucrats clear the actual projects, choose the contractors, and so on. In the current climate of fear, however, these bureaucrats are demanding their instructions in writing, and their ministers are afraid to comply, say insiders.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">“The damn problem is not coalition politics and FDI in retail and petroleum product prices,” said Debroy. “The issue is that no one takes decisions, full stop.”</span></p></div></div></span></div>Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-14799069386143011852012-05-24T19:06:00.001-07:002012-05-24T19:06:22.069-07:00India: Stasis or crisis?<p style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><i>Why you should care about the plummeting Droopee.</i></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">By Jason Overdorf</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">GlobalPost - May 24, 2012</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">COIMBATORE, India — Combating charges of “policy paralysis,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised India's gas prices by the steepest amount ever on Wednesday, in an effort to woo back foreign investors and slow the fall of the plummeting rupee.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">But the sudden, bold, and much needed move could well put an end to hopes of a third term for his United Progressive Alliance coalition — and could also lead to a call for early polls.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">By hiking the petrol prices charged by India's state-owned oil companies nearly eight rupees per liter — or more than 10 percent — the government will dramatically reduce fuel subsidies, and thus reduce the fiscal deficit. But even though that is exactly the move that economists and investors have demanded to signal that Singh is willing to make the hard choices needed to get India's economy, and the rupee, back on track, he is already facing demands that he reverse the decision from his coalition partners.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">This could be the beleaguered prime minister's moment of truth. If he faces down his recalcitrant allies, Singh could once again emerge as the hero of reforms who averted a financial crisis and put India on the path to rapid growth in 1991.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">If he caves to political pressure, he could erase any achievements he has made since taking office in 2004 and send India's flagging economy spiraling. Sticking to his guns might bring down the government, forcing snap polls. And rolling back yet another policy would virtually ensure his Congress Party's failure in the next scheduled election.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">For now, however briefly, the prime minister appears to have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">His most truculent ally, Mamata Banerjee of the West Bengal-based Trinamool Congress, has intimated that she has no plans to withdraw support for the government — despite her howls of protest over the petrol price hike. And though he has also criticized the petrol price hike, Mulayam Singh Yadav, the head of another powerful regional party that is not yet part of the UPA, was seated on the dais at a function celebrating the third anniversary of the coalition's second term on Tuesday, suggesting that Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi may already have secured Yadav's backup if Banerjee does pull out.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Still, the maneuver truly came at the eleventh hour. And it remains to be seen if it will be enough. The rupee continued to slide Thursday, setting a new record low of 56.4 against the dollar in intraday trading after closing at 55.98 the day before.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports speculated that a panel of government ministers will meet Friday to discuss a possible hike in diesel and kerosene prices — a move that would be even riskier politically.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><b>How did we get here?</b></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Since the UPA's second term began in 2009, economists and investors have been clamoring for new financial reforms that will reduce India's budget deficit and stimulate its now slowing growth. But corruption allegations that forced Singh to remove his former telecommunications minister and brought tens of thousands of protesters onto the streets weakened his Congress Party's mandate.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">As a result, the prime minister was not able to push through any significant financial reforms during his government's two-year, post-election honeymoon period.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Meanwhile, despite concerns about a rising budget deficit, his government passed laws enshrining universal education as a basic right and expanding a government food subsidy to cover three-quarters of the rural population and half of city dwellers — which some estimates say will cost nearly $20 billion.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Singh's “Report to the People” at the UPA anniversary function on Tuesday heralded as achievements four bills aimed at curbing corruption by making the government more efficient and transparent — including one designed to create national- and state-level ombudsmen, which was demanded by anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare last year.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">But all four are still far from being passed.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Worse, opposition from Banerjee's Trinamool Congress — a new coalition partner for the UPA in its second term — forced Singh to roll back a move to allow direct investments from big foreign retailers like Walmart through executive fiat in December, killing his only significant attempt at economic reform and sparking accusations of “policy paralysis.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">"Managing the economy has become almost synonymous with managing the coalition,” said Pai Panandiker, president of the RPG Foundation, an independent think tank.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">“They [Singh and Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi] are not able to manage the coalition,” Panandiker said, referring to the opposition to economic reforms from Congress Party allies like the Trinamool Congress. “That is why they they cannot manage the economy. That is the crux of the whole problem.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Government paralysis has already taken a toll. Economic growth dropped below 7 percent last year, India's slowest pace since the 2008 global financial crisis.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Factory output fell by an unexpected 3.5 percent in March. Foreign institutional investors — that is, fund managers in the US and Europe — pulled $140 million out of Indian markets in April, exacerbating a plunge that has seen the rupee plummet more than 10 percent against the dollar since March 1. And though most analysts say it's too soon for comparisons to the balance of payments crisis of 1991, what few measures Singh's government has taken have served only to throw gasoline on the fire.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">“The final trigger came with the political outcomes in Greece and in France,” said Shubhata Rao, chief economist at Yes Bank. But the foundation was laid by "the measures introduced in the budget, which weren't really global-investment friendly.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Breaching an unheard of 56 against the dollar this week, the rupee has been hitting record lows on a daily basis. Some say it could be headed for 60, raising the specter of a vicious cycle and a possible crisis if foreigners abandon Indian markets wholesale. But as recently as this January, when investors were looking forward to a possible rate cut from the central bank and a bold new budget from the finance ministry, it was Asia's best performing currency.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Why did it all go south? Following the disastrous rollback of the move to open the market to retailers like Walmart and Carrefour in December, Indian business leaders and global investors were hoping for an investment-friendly budget in March, if not some measures to reduce the fiscal deficit.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Instead, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee formulated new tax rules that made India even less attractive for investors. With the General Anti Avoidance Rule, he sought to tax investments routed through Mauritius and other tax havens — a move that made India a less attractive destination for foreign capital by reducing prospective returns.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">And he proposed a retrospective amendment to the tax laws that circumvents a recent Supreme Court ruling and will force Vodafone to pay some $3.5 billion in taxes and penalties associated with its 2007 acquisition of Hutch Telecom.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Though implementation of the General Anti Avoidance Rule has been delayed until 2013, the message sent to foreign institutional investors, as well as companies seeking to make acquisitions or other direct investments in India, was that the rules could be rewritten at any time.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><b>Stasis or crisis?</b></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">With the most pessimistic analysts predicting that the rupee could fall as low as 60 before Singh's move to hike petrol prices, the danger was growing that stasis would spin into crisis. So far experts agree with the finance minister that it's too early to press “the panic button.” But because perception can be as important as hard economic data in determining the flow of investment, the tipping point is impossible to predict.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">“A panic comes when there is a substantial outflow of foreign money — what is called hot money,” said Panandiker. “If foreign institutional investors sell here to take money out, what happens is that there's a crash in the share market, and the money going out will also result in a fall in the value of the rupee.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">The result is a vicious cycle. The more the rupee drops, the riskier investing in India becomes, because the risk of currency depreciation compounds the risk of a drop in share prices.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">So at some point, the further the rupee drops, the more money foreign investors pull out of India, and the more money investors pull out, the further the rupee drops. The only thing the central bank can do then is to intervene directly to buy rupees and try to prop up the currency's value to break the cycle. But there's a limit to how much the Reserve Bank of India can spend.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">“We are running a high current account deficit, and that situation is not likely to be corrected very soon,” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at credit ratings agency Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor's. “If the European problems are contained, we might be able to get financing for our current account deficit. But if the euro zone problems increase, there's an issue of insufficient financing and then again pressure on the rupee.” (A high current account deficit, largely due to a poor balance of trade stemming from high oil prices, was primarily responsible for the economic crisis of 1991.)</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">The good news — and the reason most analysts remain guardedly optimistic that India can get back on track — is India's central bank has much more in its kitty today than it had in 1991.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">Prior to the 1991 balance of payments crisis, which spurred the liberalization of the economy responsible for India's rapid economic growth, the country's forex reserves had dwindled to $1.2 billion, hardly enough to finance three weeks of oil and other imports. Today the central bank has around $290 billion in reserves to play with.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">But the bad news is that a substantial dip in those much larger reserves could still have dramatic effects, said Panandiker.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">“If it starts unloading the reserves, that can create a kind of panic situation,” Panandiker said. “If the outflow is about $10 billion, then this kind of crisis situation comes.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">According to Crisil's Joshi, the central bank has wisely stuck to the sidelines so far, as intervening and failing could be far worse than letting the rupee find its own bottom. But nobody can predict what might happen in the future.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">“It's like going to a doctor. He can tell you that your blood pressure is rising, your sugar levels are dangerous, and you probably are getting clots in your arteries, but he can't tell you exactly when the heart attack will happen,” Joshi said. “With the economy, the parameters are becoming worse, just like the patient I was talking about. When will it translate into a heart attack [like 1991]? I don't think anybody can say.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; ">One thing is clear, though: It's time for the patient to make some lifestyle changes — which is exactly what Singh has prescribed.</p>Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-46078487721484047592012-05-01T21:46:00.001-07:002012-05-01T21:50:50.244-07:00OCCUPY INDIA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
(From GlobalPost -- May 2, 2012)
Indian anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare and the coterie of supporters now known as “Team Anna” are striving to keep their budding mass movement alive, a year after Hazare's first hunger strike against graft brought tens of thousands of usually apathetic middle class Indians to the streets.<br />
<br />
The problem? Anna fatigue, mostly. One guy with a little white cap can only keep television viewers interested for so long, and hunger strikes are notoriously low on vigorous action.<br />
<br />
But Team Anna seems to have missed a trick from Eric Hoffer's seminal primer on mass movements: If your movement has a concrete goal, you can be derailed either by achieving it or by failing to make any progress, and it's all too easy to get bogged down in technicalities.<br />
<br />
In targeting corruption, Team Anna had a sufficiently amorphous and abstract enemy. But as soon as they outlined their solution — a new law known as the Jan Lokpal Bill, designed to set up a national ombudsman's office — they pretty much sealed the movement's fate.<br />
<br />
Before long, Manmohan Singh's Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was pushing a Lokpal Bill of its own. Shouts and slogans gave way to nitpicking comparisons of different pieces of legislation. The halo over Hazare was tarnished by his association with the far Hindu right, and Team Anna itself fractured over whether or not the movement should campaign against the Congress in the recent state elections.<br />
<br />
In the latest spat, Hazare has had to drop plans to tour the country with the hugely popular but controversial right-wing yoga guru, Baba Ramdev, and Team Anna is busily denying that the expulsion of a Muslim leader from the core group signals that it's falling apart.<br />
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This all begs the question: If nobody turns up for a protest rally, does it actually make a sound?
— By Jason Overdorf in New Delhi, India
</div>Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-25103911796552255182012-04-15T22:46:00.001-07:002012-04-15T22:46:34.381-07:00India: School revolution on the way?India's Supreme Court upholds law forcing private schools to admit poor students.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost (April 15, 2012)<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — In a landmark judgment this week, India's Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law that requires almost all private schools to reserve 25 percent of their seats for poor students.<br /><br />The decision potentially paves the way for huge changes in primary and secondary school education here.<br /><br />In a country where a quarter of the population is illiterate and the caste system is still alive and well, the move is lauded by some as an equalizer on par with the decision to desegregate American schools in the 1960s.<br /><br />“I see this entire process as the beginning of a revolution,” said Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer affiliated with an organization called Social Jurists, who says previously fewer than 1 percent of private schools made a sincere effort to admit poor students.<br /><br />According to a recent survey conducted by Pratham, an NGO, 96.5 percent of Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 are enrolled in schools.<br /><br />But with private players charging as much as $200 per month compared to less than a dollar in fees at those run by the government, there are vast differences between the schools they attend. <br /><br />Though India has more than a million goverment-run schools and only around 250,000 private ones, with rare exceptions only the very poor attend government institutions. The division reinforces a broad socio-economic gap between the haves and have nots. And some argue that the failure to educate the poor threatens to derail India's economic miracle before it really gets rolling.<br /><br />A recent survey conducted by The Program for International Student Assessment, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) unit that tests students' literacy reading, mathematics, and science, for instance, ranked India's 15-year-olds second from the bottom among some 74 countries.<br /><br />While the 25-percent quota will be difficult to implement — and some argue that it impinges on the rights of the private schools that have previously refused government aid — the move would see some of the nation's wealthiest students sitting side-by-side with the poorest. <br /><br />The Right to Education Act, passed in 2009, guarantees free and compulsory education for all children between the ages of 6 and 14. Answering a challenge to the act, the court directed all privately run schools to admit at least 25 percent students from socially and economically depressed families beginning this academic year. Only boarding schools and minority institutions that don't receive government aid are exempt.<br /><br />The right to education act places “an affirmative burden on all stakeholders in our society,” the court wrote on Thursday, in a 2:1 majority judgment upholding the provision.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">High cost of reform<br /></span><br />The Supreme Court's move is causing tremors. Parents worry that admission to elite private schools will get even tougher. Schools worry about the administrative and financial burden of admitting more poor children.<br /><br />But even the most optimistic proponents of the right to education law warn that there are still many hurdles ahead.“The judgment removed the uncertainty about the 25 percent, and we now know where it applies and where it doesn't,” said Parth Shah, president of the New Delhi-based NGO, Center for Civil Society. “The hard work of figuring out the design, implementation, monitoring and assessment now has to be done.”<br /><br />Already, for instance, private schools have argued that the plan to reimburse them only for the amount charged by the dismally failing government schools will expose them to a huge financial burden. Some are threatening to raise fees for paying parents. And nobody has thought too hard yet about the intricacies of integrating children from such dramatically different circumstances – like bringing poor children who only speak Hindi or Tamil into a school where classes are taught in English.<br /><br />Meanwhile, in Delhi, where the battle is a little older because the state had earlier tied land grants for private schools to an agreement to take on poor students, streetfighters like Social Jurists' Agarwal have already confronted schools that try to game the system.<br /><br />Because the rules require schools to admit 25 percent poor students only in the first year, for instance, some schools dramatically reduced the total number of first graders they admitted, and then added double or triple the number of full-tuition students in the second year. Others took a more direct approach, simply offering parents of poor children cash — as much as $4,000 — to pull their kids out of class.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Teaching poor kids about McDonalds<br /></span><br />“In India, people have the attitude of 'How can my son sit on the same bench as my driver's son?' That's what's scaring me,” said Anouradha Bakshi of Project Why, a non-profit that runs supplementary afterschool education programs for the poor.<br /><br />To prove that poor children could excel, Bakshi sent eight slum kids to an elite boarding school. But it took more than the money for tuition to ensure they excelled. She first rented a flat and moved the kids in with her, going the extra mile not only to teach them English but also skills that they'd need to fit in — such as how to eat with a knife and fork and find their way around the menu at McDonalds.<br /><br />“In one of these uber-rich schools where the child has to go back to his slum or his little house in the evening, it's easier said than done,” said Bakshi. “Who's going to help that little child with homework and hold his hand?”<br /><br />That's a fair point, and implementation has never been India's strong suit. But even a bad experience at a good private school is likely to be better than the grim reality of the government-run alternative — which is why more and more of the poorest Indians already send their kids to grassroots private schools in the slums that cost a few dollars per month.<br /><br />“In Delhi, for instance, the schools run by muncipality are really in a bad state,” Bakshi said. “There's practically no teaching. The classes are overcrowded. There are schools with no buildings. Those that have buildings have no bathrooms, or no bathrooms for girls, and the teachers are not interested.”<br /><br />In rural areas, students at government schools are lucky if the teacher even shows up.<br /><br />Yet with private schools already receiving as many as 1,500 applicants for 25 seats in a class, there's also a chance that desegregating the posh institutions will allow the government to continue to shirk its responsibility to the vast majority of parents and children.<br /><br />“As usual, laws are made without thinking,” said Bakshi. “It's time that we started thinking about these children longterm, not just jumping up and down and saying now these poor children are going to go to these rich schools. Why is the government putting so much money into private schools?”<br /><br />School choice advocates like the Center for Civil Society's Shah say that the answer is to empower parents and facilitate the building of more private schools. Through a school voucher system, for instance, the government could help to identify qualifying students and give them power to choose the school where they send their kids — creating a financial incentive for schools to teach the poor.<br /><br />And by streamlining a system that requires some 36 different licenses to open a school in Delhi and creating incentives for banks to finance education startups, the government can help private players bridge the gap between supply and demand.<br /><br />“All the things we are talking about how to make businesses easier to open and operate can be applied to schools,” Shah said.<br /><br />Maybe. But if private schools emerge as the backbone of India's education system, this will be the first country where that has happened.<br /><br />http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/india/120413/school-education-supreme-court-poor-studentsJason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-33683465326814554752011-11-09T04:01:00.000-08:002011-11-09T04:03:11.165-08:00Nepal's other revolution: Red turns to pinkThanks (unexpectedly) to Maoist rebels, Nepal is emerging as Asia's pioneer for sexual minority rights.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - November 9, 2011<br /><br />KATHMANDU, Nepal — In the quiet courtyard of Dechenling Garden, a Bhutanese restaurant on the fringes of the capital’s bustling backpacker ghetto, Nepal's first openly gay member of parliament sips on a lime soda during a short break in his busy political schedule.<br /><br />His name is Sunil Babu Pant. A young, maverick politician with dark, wavy hair and a close-trimmed goatee, Pant has already emerged as a leader reminiscent of Harvey Milk in his San Francisco heyday, pushing tiny, conservative Nepal into the forefront of the battle for gay rights. <br /><br />"Nepal is going through tremendous transformation — politically, socially, economically, legally — so a lot of communities who had no space or voice before have emerged," Pant told GlobalPost.<br /><br />Thanks, unexpectedly, to a Maoist rebellion and subsequent decade-long civil war, Pant and other activists have already made some big strides — and they're inching closer to making Nepal the first Asian country to legalize gay marriage. But the struggle for the rights of sexual minorities is intensifying here as lawmakers haggle over a new constitution nearly five years after the peace deal that transformed the tiny Himalayan kingdom into a democratic republic in 2007. On one side is a patchwork coalition that supports a more progressive platform, including gay rights, and on the other is a conservative alignment that believes gay marriage would threaten the religious fabric of Nepal's traditional Hindu society.<br /><br />“A strong attack is going on against Hindu culture, Hindu religion and Hindu society,” said Shankar Pandey, a former legislator and central coordinator of National Religion Awareness Campaign, which urges its followers to adhere to the Hindu way of life. Like many conservatives, Pandey believes that homosexuality is an affront to the country's Hindu heritage.<br /><br />Strangely, the new social and political space for sexual minorities has sprouted from the seeds of Nepal's attempted Maoist revolution. The Maoists — guerilla fighters who draw their support from the rural poor — were hardly liberals when it came to sexuality. Still, their hard-fought insurgency shook the establishment enough that no one political party has been able to achieve a clear majority in post-war elections, and that has increased the power and influence of small parties and tightly knit constituencies. <br /><br />But after Nepal's major political parties reached a pivotal agreement to demobilize the former soldiers of the Maoist army Nov. 1 — paving the way for the drafting of a new constitution — it's not yet clear if all of those groups will be able to capitalize on those gains as the period of political turmoil comes to an end.<br /><br />“It is not liberality, it is just unruliness,” said Pandey. “When there are no rules, no system set, whatever the environment or pressure groups want is what goes.”<br /><br />In Pandey's view, Pant's entry to the legislature is a perfect example. <br /><br />The founder of a non-profit advocacy group called the Blue Diamond Society and a gay-oriented travel agency called Pink Mountain Travel & Tours, Pant worked for the rights of gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities at the grassroots level for 11 years before entering electoral politics. <br /><br />But when rules favoring Nepal's long-established political parties — and the conservative elites of Kathmandu — were suspended for the post-war Constituent Assembly elections, Pant saw a window of opportunity. For the first time, as a concession to the Maoist argument that past elections had not addressed Nepal's ethnic diversity and vast economic inequalities, more than half of the 601 legislators would be chosen through “proportional representation” — which allots seats to parties based on the proportion of votes they receive rather than granting seats only to candidates who win a plurality in their constituencies. Suddenly, there would be a host of new players.<br /><br />"During the Constituent Assembly election we thought it was a good opportunity to lobby the political parties," Pant said. "We went from party office to party office and said we are a significant population, and if you include our cause in your party manifesto we can vote for your candidates. We took it lightly, just hoping that they would buy that idea."<br /><br />To Pant's surprise, not only did the Maoist party take him seriously — it led the way in adopting resolutions related to gay rights. Meanwhile, the tiny Communist Party of Nepal-Unified (CPN-U), unrelated to the Maoists, asked him to stand for election himself.<br /><br />"We had no expectations, no resources, no experience, nothing," he said.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />The CPN-U didn't win an assembly seat in the formal election, but the party won enough votes to earn five seats under the rules for proportional representation. And because the party had carefully monitored the districts where it had done well, the tireless work of Pant's team of gay rights activists paid off. The party rewarded him by allotting him a seat in the new assembly.<br /><br />As it turned out, the CPN-U's most votes came “exactly from those 15 districts where Blue Diamond Society has branches and we did the election campaign," Pant said, explaining his success.<br /><br />Pant and other activists have already accomplished a great deal for Nepal's sexual minorities —people who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, transgender and intersex (those born with physical characteristics of both genders). With the conservatives' cherished rules in flux, the gay rights lobby succeeded in convincing Nepal's Supreme Court to instruct the new government to repeal age-old laws that made homosexuality a crime in 2007. A year later, the court directed legislators to draft new laws guaranteeing equal rights for sexual minorities and convene a committee to consider the implications of legalizing gay marriage in the new constitution. And this year, the Central Bureau of Statistics officially allowed transgender and intersex citizens to classify themselves as "third gender" for the purposes of the census. <br /><br />"Previously, people thought [homosexuality] was an unnatural condition," said 25-year-old Durga, a student activist at Tribhuvan University. "But after 2007, people are changing. Now they are able to accept people from the LGBTI community in their villages and even in their families."<br /><br />But despite progressive court rulings and nascent social transformation, homosexuals and transgenders continue to face discrimination and harassment. Even in Kathmandu, which thanks to higher incomes and the thriving tourist industry is Nepal's most cosmopolitan city, the absence of any real gay scene compels many young men to cruise the local Ratna Park for sexual partners. That leaves them vulnerable to police persecution. And though the police deny the charge, gay activists allege that the authorities have also recently begun "investigating" young men staying together in local hotels, according to Roshan Mahato, the 29-year-old president of the Nepal Sexual and Gender Minorities Student Forum.<br /><br />“We only take action when these people are seen [engaging in sexual activity] in a public place. If they are doing anything openly,” said Nepal police spokesman Binod Singh. “Otherwise, the police doesn't interfere in their personal activities.”<br /><br />The threat that this essentially conservative, traditional society will backslide on its reforms remains ever present, especially with a new constitution slated to take shape over the next few months. The issue of demobilizing the Maoist army settled, negotiations will now focus on the structure of a new, federalist government. As a result, loyalties will likely solidify around ethnic and regional identities, perhaps robbing smaller minority groups of the influence they have enjoyed during the interim. It is also unlikely the new system will incorporate as much proportional representation as the interim elections. <br /><br />Even during the negotiations for the new constitution, some roadblocks have have emerged to the Supreme Court's progressive instructions on equal rights for sexual minorities.<br /><br />In June, for instance, Nepal burst onto the radar of the world's gay community when an American lesbian couple was married in a Hindu ceremony that Pant's Pink Mountain travel agency helped to organize at a local temple. But that same month, the Ministry of Law and Justice submitted an updated penal code that specifically limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman and again defined homosexual acts as "unnatural sex offenses.” Similarly, in July, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to issue a passport to a transgender person, citing a limitation of their software system. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Pant says that despite those bumps in the road, Nepal will not reverse gears. Several legislators immediately objected to the law ministry's proposed recriminalization of homosexuality. Pant believes that indicates the political parties that he convinced to include rights for sexual minorities in their manifestos before the Constituent Assembly elections in 2008 will stay the course in 2012. Moreover, even the National Religion Awareness Campaign's Pandey agrees that sexual minorities' rights should be protected. And he says his insistence that marriage should not be considered among those rights cost him his position with the Nepali Congress.<br /><br />“We believe everyone must have the right of protection. But where the word of marriage is concerned, that is different,” said Pandey. “Hindus believe marriage is only for procreation, not just for relation. Marriage is for the production or creation. Where there is no creation possible, there marriage cannot be imagined.”<br /><br />Pant insists that narrow vision of Hinduism — which has no definitive text like the Bible or the Koran — radically oversimplifies the relationship that the religion, and Nepal, have had with sexuality for centuries. During Gaijatra, for instance, young men dress as women as part of a religious procession. Similarly, the Lakhe dance, performed during Indrajatra by masked dancers wearing lavish hairdos and colorful frocks, is “very much a reflection of gender non-conformity.”<br /><br />“It's a small country, but there's a lot of diversity living in harmony and the indigenous culture has always been much more liberal in terms of rights, expression, sexualities,” Pant said. “Also, the Hinduism, Buddhism and mix of Tantrism has always been pretty liberal in terms of sexuality and gender roles.”<br /><br />The young legislator is trying to prove that with his travel agency, Pink Mountain. Following the successful public relations effort of Nepal's first lesbian wedding — which generated headlines around the world in June — Pant aims to bring thousands of gay, lesbian and transgender travelers to Nepal by promoting the country as a gay-friendly tourist destination.<br /><br />Pink Mountain offers a weeklong wedding and honeymoon package — Hindu or Buddhist — for around $10,000, as well as opportunities to do volunteer work related to sexual minorities. And this summer Pant's travel agency endeavored to turn Gaijatra, a traditional Nepali Hindu holiday that involves cross dressing, into “Gay Jatra” — an international gay pride event on Aug. 14. Tourist turnout wasn't so hot, as it happened, but more than 500 local gays and lesbians danced and chanted slogans in Narayanghat, a town about 160 kilometers south of Kathmandu, local press reported, noting that this was the first time that a large number of gay activists have demonstrated for their rights outside the capital.<br /><br />“He completely screwed our annual Gaijatra festival, which he turned into Gay Jatra. It's actually a festival devoted to families who've lost their near and dear ones over the past year,” said Kunal Tej Bir Lama, a local restaurateur from the gay community. “But it turned into a spectacle of very badly overdressed drag queens.”<br /><br />Lama worries that Pant's public relations campaigns — while they generate headlines and support from the plethora of international non-profit organizations based in Kathmandu — have made the LGBTI community seem more radical and more exotic than necessary.<br /><br />“Because of his actions and campaigns, yes, a lot of people are aware of who the gay people are and what they do, but a lot of them also have very, very, very skewed perception of the whole thing,” said Lama said. “They think that most of us are just guys who dress up as girls, who put on a lot of heavy makeup, bad fashion, and basically work as prostitutes.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-80379435080234023062011-11-07T04:07:00.000-08:002011-11-09T04:08:11.087-08:00Shiva's Rules: Union strikes threaten India Inc.This year's spate of strikes gives an ominous glimpse into a possible future for Indian manufacturing.<br /><br />Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - November 7, 2011 <br /><br />Editor's Note: The Shiva Rules is a year-long GlobalPost reporting series that examines India in the 21st century. In it, correspondents Jason Overdorf and Hanna Ingber Win will examine the sweeping economic, political and cultural changes that are transforming this nascent global power in surprising and sometimes inexplicable ways. To help uncover the complexities of India's uneven rise, The Shiva Rules uses as a loose reporting metaphor Shiva, the popular Hindu deity of destruction and rebirth.<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — This autumn, some of India's highest paid industrial workers took to the picket line.<br /><br />One of the largest and longest running industrial actions to hit the country's manufacturing sector in recent years, the strike by employees at Maruti Suzuki's Haryana automobile factories sent an ominous signal.<br /><br />In the '60s, '70s and '80s, frequent strikes and lockouts slowed India's industrialization, costing companies millions and causing industry to abandon some states like Kerala and West Bengal altogether.<br /><br />Now it looks like those days of industrial turmoil may be on the way back. It couldn't have happened to a more important symbol of the new India.<br /><br />Maruti Suzuki is the showpiece success story of India's post-1991 economic liberalization. One of the country's most respected companies, it ended years-long waiting lists for cars built by Hindustan Motors. And it paved the way for investments by the world's largest car makers by proving that manufacturing in India could be profitable.<br /><br />The joint venture, in which Suzuki Motor Corp. owns a 54 percent stake, became the largest contributor to its Japanese parent's bottom line in 2009.<br /><br />This fall's strike, which resulted in a wider-than-expected 60 percent plunge in Maruti's profits for the second quarter, suggested the company — and India — may be entering a new era.<br /><br />“It's everybody's dream to work for a multinational company like Maruti Suzuki,” said 25-year-old Pradeep Singh, vice president of a new, independent union that workers at the company's Manesar plant fought to establish this fall. “But once you get hired and see the reality, it's a big disappointment.”<br /><br />Singh is typical of India’s disgruntled union laborers. He has achieved what might be described as the Indian dream. His father, a farmer, ekes out a living from an acre or so of land. But Singh left the fields behind and effectively broke into the middle class with his job at Maruti.<br /><br />He normally earns about $300 a month — nearly three times the national average income. Like many of today's workers, however, Singh has higher aspirations. Now, along with around 30 other union leaders, he’s under suspension for his activities during the strike, convinced fighting is the only way to get India Inc. to share its growing prosperity with the work force.<br /><br />“Maruti is No. 1 when it comes to profit,” Singh said. “But when it comes to salary, it's around seventh or eighth.”<br /><br />India's large corporations have faced 10 major strikes in the last three years, and things may well get worse before they get better. This year alone, there have been strikes and protests at Coal India, Bosch India, Air India, Comstar, Ceat Tyres, Volvo Buses and at textile factories in Punjab, according to Outlook Business.<br /><br />“If the management does not learn to deal with the sensitive dimension of labor and their circumstances, I am afraid these kinds of things may increase,” said Kuriakose Mamkootam, a professor at Ambedkar University who has written extensively about industrial relations in India.<br /><br />“There is already what I would call a hidden, unexpressed sense of grief and violence amongst the people.”<br /><br />That tension stems partly from the gradual dismantling of India's socialist economic policies begun by then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh in 1991. But successive governments' reluctance to swallow the bitter pill and reform some of the country's tougher labor laws has also contributed to the friction.<br /><br />Prior to 1991, national unions helped put in place tough labor laws.<br /><br />One such law forces firms with 100 or more employees to seek government approval before they can fire workers or close down. Labor laws also prevent companies from reassigning workers to different tasks, so there is no way for companies to adjust to changes in the market.<br /><br />As a result, the official employees of companies like Maruti have it pretty good.<br /><br />But because of those very same laws, those official employees make up a very small fraction of the work force.<br /><br />Knowing they can't fire or reassign workers, India's large companies simply don't hire them. Instead, they outsource work to the so-called “unorganized sector,” which comprises companies with fewer than 100 employees. Or they employ contract workers through middlemen.<br /><br />As a result, only 7 percent of India's 400 million laborers are employed by firms large enough to be compelled to follow the rules. The rest toil in grim sweatshops, often for less than the national minimum wage.<br /><br />Efforts at reversing course have already been painful.<br /><br />Since 1991, governments have increasingly looked the other way as even the largest firms assigned a greater portion of the workload to contract laborers whom they could not only hire and fire more easily, but also pay less.<br /><br />“An in-between community is being created that can neither get a job, nor continue in agriculture, and they are being used as an army of reserve labor by capitalists to keep wage levels and other rights of the workers at a low point,” said Tapan Sen, general secretary of the Communist Party-affiliated Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).<br /><br />For instance, the official Maruti employees were angered by company payment policies. Only about half of their ostensibly generous salary is guaranteed, workers say. The other half is a “production performance reward” that can be slashed by as much as 20 percent every time a worker takes a day off. Moreover, showing up a minute late in the morning — or from the seven minute break you get between 7 a.m. and noon — will cost you half a day's pay, the union alleges.<br /><br />“In any manufacturing company, especially in assembly line operations, discipline on timings in shopfloor is crucial to the overall process. There are well-organized breaks for lunch, tea etc for every worker,” a Maruti Suzuki spokesman said, via email.<br /><br />Base salary cannot be reduced for employees who miss work, and workers who lose their production performance reward can get it refunded if their attendance improves within three months, he added.<br /><br />Those are not the only footnotes to the Indian dream, though.<br /><br />Nearly half of the employees at Maruti's Manesar plant weren't “regular workers” at all, though they showed up every day, too, and performed much the same work. So while 1,000-odd regular workers like Pradeep Singh could hope to earn about $300 a month if they didn't miss any days, 1,200 contract workers could only earn about $120, said Satvir Singh, who heads CITU in Haryana.<br /><br />“Salaries at Maruti Suzuki are the industry best for permanent workers and higher than stipulated wages by state government for contract workers,” Maruti's spokesman said.<br /><br />Similar conditions prevail at companies like Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, Nokia and Voltas, according to Outlook Business. It may not be coincidence that all of those firms have recently faced strikes.<br /><br />“The only common thread is the issue of contract labor,” said Rajiv Kumar, secretary general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. “That is quite clearly spreading all over the country.”<br /><br />Now, though, the government looks set to double down.<br /><br />On Oct. 25, just days after Maruti's striking workers returned to work, India's cabinet approved a landmark manufacturing policy. Designed to create 100 million new jobs, it aims to boost the manufacturing sector's output to 25 percent of GDP by 2022 from the current 16 percent — where it has stagnated since 1980.<br /><br />But the new plan won't deliver the key reforms to improve infrastructure, facilitate land acquisition and ease labor laws that industry maintains are necessary. Instead, it simply calls for the creation of seven or so islands — mammoth industrial parks known as National Investment and Manufacturing Zones — where the usual rules won't apply.<br /><br />As a staff editorial from India's Economic Times suggested, it is a “fine example of a policy for the sake of a policy.”<br /><br />Or maybe it is something worse.<br /><br />According to union leaders and industry representatives alike, successive governments moves to work around strict labor laws have played an important role in souring relations between labor and management.<br /><br />In the controversial Special Economic Zones set up to encourage export-related industries, for example, companies misused their gated properties to fence out unions and violate labor laws, says CITU's Sen.<br /><br />Similarly, new government sympathy for industry and a reduction in the number of labor inspectors to one for every 200 factories has weakened the enforcement of laws related to wages and working conditions, says Krishna Shekhar Lal Das, an industrial relations expert at the Institute for Integrated Learning in Management.<br /><br />But at the same time, India's failure to reform its labor laws altogether has had disastrous consequences. On the one hand, the tough rules continue to prevent the manufacturing sector from growing, because India's tiny sweatshops can't compete with China's mammoth factories. Yet, on the other, by fighting to keep laws on the books that don't apply to most workers, the trade unions have ensured that for most of the poor neither wages nor working conditions can improve.<br /><br />“They are working for a labor aristocracy, because their interests are tied to them,” Kumar said. “The real poor in this country cannot afford to be unionized.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-66250169095784887432011-11-02T04:09:00.000-07:002011-11-09T04:11:22.777-08:00Nepal: Formal closure to civil warThe Himalayan nation has reached a deal that essentially demobilizes the former rebel army.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - November 2, 2011<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — Nepal may have eliminated the single largest obstacle standing in the way of a resolution to the country's decade-long civil war.<br /><br />But there are plenty of obstacles remaining.<br /><br />After five long years of negotiations following the end of the conflict, the Himalayan nation's major political parties settled on a deal late Tuesday that paves the way for the final dissolution of the rebel army.<br /><br />The deal will see the former Maoist soldiers, who fought government forces from 1996 to 2006, integrated into the national army — or sent home with a fat severance check.<br /><br />Many tout the move as a step in the right direction, given that the deal essentially demobilizes the nearly 20,000 former rebels.<br /><br />But with that stumbling block out of the way, next comes the nitty-gritty work of making a new government. Ironing out the details and drafting a constitution are surely going to remain contentious. The deal is likely going to take much longer than the month the political parties have allocated.<br /><br />Nepal's civil war was started by the Maoist Communist Party in 1996, with the aim of overthrowing the monarchy and establishing a "People's Republic of Nepal." It ended with a peace deal 2006, which has since been monitored by the United Nations.<br /><br />An estimated 15,000 people were killed during the conflict, and more than 100,000 displaced.<br /><br />"We have concluded yet another chapter of the peace process. The main task now is to implement this," Prachanda, the leader of the Maoists, told reporters after signing the agreement Tuesday.<br /><br />Under the deal, Nepal's main political parties — which include the Maoists and the Nepali Congress, among others — agreed to integrate as much as one-third of some 19,600 former Maoist soldiers into the country's official security forces, Reuters reported. The other two-thirds will receive a rehabilitation package including education, vocational training and financial aid of up to $11,500 to start a new life.<br /><br />The former soldiers who are included in the national army will be restricted to non-combat operations, such as the construction of development projects, emergency-rescue operations and patrolling forests.<br /><br />“This is really a major breakthrough,” said Prashant Jha, a Kathmandu-based political commentator.<br /><br />“For the first time there's a formal agreement on the details of the peace process. Now the key challenge is implementing the agreement that has been signed.”<br /><br />Indeed, the deal eliminated the most contentious issue of the peace process, which has made little headway since the shooting stopped five years ago.<br /><br />“With the future of the combatants out of the way, there's no obstacle to moving ahead on the constitution,” said Anagha Neelakantan, senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Nepal.<br /><br />No obstacle, that is, but politics.<br /><br />Although Nepal's various political factions have been discussing the drafting of a new constitution for several years — as United Nations deadlines whooshed by — there is still no formal agreement on the most essential questions about what form the country's new government will take.<br /><br />And because these actors include erstwhile monarchists and Maoist revolutionaries, not to mention a long list of ethnic groups competing for the country's scant resources, ironing out a deal won't happen overnight. Or, most likely, even within the month proposed in Tuesday night's agreement, according to Neelakantan.<br /><br />For example, there is a broad consensus that Nepal's former unitary government will be scrapped in favor of a federalist structure to help address the vast inequality between the central Kathmandu Valley and poorer areas of the country — a major reason the Maoists first took up arms.<br /><br />But there is no such agreement on how power will be shared between the central and state governments, on what grounds the states will be formed, or even how many states the tiny, mountainous country will eventually have.<br /><br />“For any state that has historically been centrally administered to move to a federal model is a challenge,” said the political commentator, Jha. “What complicates it in Nepal is that this is a very diverse country, with many different ethnicities and many minority groups.”<br /><br />That makes for tough questions, such as whether states should be formed along ethnic lines or named for ethnic groups.<br /><br />But at least some of the framers of the new constitution hope to address longstanding grievances regarding social and economic inequalities related to ethnicity, caste and region with leveling measures called “preferential rights” that may prove even more contentious.<br /><br />“Restructuring of the state into federal units will potentially be a hard negotiation, but the parties are still closer than they were a year ago,” said Neelakantan. “This is the start of formal closure on the war. That's the really important thing.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-76745304111317735732011-10-25T04:15:00.000-07:002011-11-09T04:15:30.775-08:00India: burgeoning fast-food paradiseAcross Indian cities, mushrooming malls are driving a revolution in the fast-food business.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - October 25, 2011<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — At the DLF Place mall in the upscale South Delhi neighborhood of Saket, shoppers and employees sit more or less side-by-side in a new “desi” food court, digging into traditional Indian dishes ranging from biryani to dosas to seekh kebabs.<br /><br />There's something for everybody — at many tables three generations are sitting down together. But that's not the reason these traditional upstarts have succeeded in storming what was once the bastion of western brands like McDonald's and Pizza Hut.<br /><br />Some of the city's most famous restaurants are represented here — some of them a century old — transformed by smart uniforms, cheery signage and shining show kitchens to look every bit as clean, efficient and modern as their multinational competitors. Welcome to the future of Indian fast food.<br /><br />“[Quick Service Restaurants or] QSRs are quite successful in India,” said Arun Chanda, founder of New Delhi-based Mint Hospitality Consultancy. “Over the last five years, a lot of Indian companies have started getting into the franchising model and expanding into different cities.”<br /><br />Credit marketers at DLF for inducing popular brands like Karim's, Nizam's, Moti Mahal, Nathu's Sweets, Rajdhani and Sagar Ratna — which had already launched multiple sit-down restaurants around New Delhi — to experiment with nascent fast-food franchises.<br /><br />But the revolution is already underway across the country, as global chains seek to woo a broader cross-section of customers by incorporating traditional spices and ingredients into their menus. And local upstarts have begun to attract deep-pocketed financiers in the bid to build nationwide fast-food chains of their own.<br /><br />“Even people who are into the five-star hotel business are thinking of getting into the QSR concept,” said Chanda.<br /><br />According to Euromonitor and market-research firm RNCOS, India's $13 billion fast-food market is already growing 25-30 percent a year, and global players like Domino's, McDonald's and Yum Brands (KFC and Pizza Hut) are pushing into second- and third-tier cities.<br /><br />Hardcastle Restaurants, development licensee for McDonald's in India, is planning a massive expansion, doubling its India stores over the next three years with an investment of $100 million. Meanwhile, Yum Brands plans to open 1,000 outlets — half of them KFC restaurants — on its way to $1 billion in revenue from India over the next four years.<br /><br />Other multinationals like Burger King, Cinnabon, Dunkin Donuts, and Starbucks are not far behind — with stores already on the ground or aggressive launch plans underway.<br /><br />With 60 percent of the Indian population currently under 30, it's no mystery why.<br /><br />Call it irrational exuberance if you want, but this summer Indian investors judged Jubilant Foodworks — which owns the franchise rights to Domino's and Dunkin Donuts in India and sold about $150 million worth of pizzas last year — to be nearly as valuable as the U.S.-based parent company.<br /><br />“We've now been in India for over 15 years, and we've actually seen the change right before our eyes,” said Amit Jatia, vice chairman of McDonald’s India. "The market is changing very significantly. People are eating out far more often than before, and I think the availability of international QSR brands has brought about that change.”<br /><br />But as the success of DLF's “desi food court” suggest, the future of fast food in India isn't about pizza and burgers.<br /><br />In deference to Indian religious sentiments, McDonald's doesn't even offer its signature Big Mac here, or any other beef or pork products. Instead, it offers the Chicken Maharaja Mac and items like the McAloo Tikki burger (a mashup of potatoes and peas, deep-fried and served in a bun), the McVeggie and the Paneer Salsa Wrap — along with the Filet-O-Fish, McChicken sandwich and Chicken McNuggets.<br /><br />Similarly, Domino's and Pizza Hut don't offer any beef toppings, and offer a wide range of pizzas that incorporate traditional Indian ingredients and spices, such as the Domino's Keema Do Pyazza pizza, with onions, spicy minced goat meat and jalapenos, or Pizza Hut's Kadai Paneer pizza, with onions, green pepper, paprika, coriander and tofu-like unaged farmer's cheese. Food industry experts say these flavors are here to stay.<br /><br />“We believe that we must respect the local culture. Therefore, around the globe we do products that are relevant for the local consumer,” said Jatia. “But we want uniquely McDonald's products. For example, we don't anticipate making a McDosa, but we have a Spicy Paneer burger. That has resonated very well with the Indian consumer. I feel that for global brands, a blend of local and international is the way forward.”<br /><br />At the same time, Indian entrepreneurs are cracking the fast-food franchise model.<br /><br />“We wanted to get the fundamentals right before we started expanding,” said Kiran Nadkari the CEO of Kaati Zone, a Bangalore-based chain. “Once you've got the back-end in place, you can expand rapidly. But during those early stages there's not much investment capital. So, for example, I bootstrapped for three years, from 2004 to 2007.”<br /><br />Now, though, homegrown fast-food companies are expanding rapidly, and some are beginning to attract funding from venture-capital and private-equity firms. For instance, Kaati Zone — which sells Kolkata-style kathi rolls (spiced goat, chicken or vegetarian fillings wrapped in fried flatbread) — plans to add 80-plus new outlets to its 17 existing stores by 2013, with venture capital financing from Accel India, Draper Investment Company and Erasmic Ventures.<br /><br />Mumbai-based Jumbo King — a 43-store franchise business that offers Maharashtra's famous vada pav (spicy, deepfried mashed potato on a bun) — plans to open 250 outlets this year. And Sagar Ratna — a 25-year-old South Indian food chain which bridges sit-down restaurants and fast-food outlets — recently sold a controlling stake in the company to New York-based India Equity Partners for $36 million. It plans to add 200 outlets to its 70 existing restaurants over the next three or four years.<br /><br />“Even Jubilant took 15 years between when they started and their IPO,” said Nadkari. “Now, the valuation of Jubilant [which this summer nearly matched that of NYSE-listed Domino's Pizza Inc.] is showing investors that anything that's touching Indian consumers is hot, and they can get extraordinary returns from this.”<br /><br />That makes India a burgeoning fast-food paradise — where you can get a six-course Rajasthani “thali,” or set meal, in 5 minutes flat, and then dash up the stairs or across the street to top it off with a McFlurry.<br /><br />But it also means that someday soon, if all goes well, you just might be seeing some of these brands — or at least these flavors — at a shopping mall or street corner near you.<br /><br />“We already export some of our products to the Middle East,” said Jatia. “We've done a lot of innovation work in vegetarian products, and there's a lot of interest across the McDonald's countries.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-50830530181129781362011-10-24T04:15:00.000-07:002011-11-09T04:17:31.907-08:00India education: The chain schoolCan a business model made famous by McDonalds revolutionize Indian education?<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - October 24, 2011<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — In a typical Delhi slum, sewage overflows from the drain alongside the street and scraps of colored paper and empty bottles tumble in the foul wind. Here and there, a spindly boy in threadbare briefs fetches water from the hand-pump and a baby, her eyes blacked with kohl, plays happily in the grime.<br /><br />It's not an easy place to live. But even here, Ramesh Singh, a bicycle rickshaw driver, opted to send his son, Dhiraj, to a bare-bones private school when a pilot program for school vouchers gave him the chance several years ago.<br /><br />“You saw when the teacher tested him,” Ramesh said. “He finished class three in government school, and he can't read anything!”<br /><br />Rich or poor, Indians are abandoning the country's disastrously managed government-run schools in droves. Only about two-thirds of India's school-age children attend classes at all, and the fierce competition for places at private institutes means that waiting lists are enormous and it's difficult to win admission to any without pulling strings.<br /><br />More discouraging still, because of its demographics India will need to build another 250,000 schools to meet its goal of universal enrollment by 2015. But that means there's a big opportunity, as well, some investors believe: India could well be the first country in the modern world where the business of educating kids from kindergarten through high school is, well, a business. Meet the would-be chain store of education: the Indus World School (IWS).<br /><br />The school that Ramesh chose for Dhiraj, called R.S. Public School in homage to the legacy of Eton and Harrow, was not part of IWS or any other big corporation. When I visited the place, the paint was crumbling off the concrete walls. Its barred windows give it an aspect more penal than pedantic, and the children in the courtyard were forced to squint and shield their eyes against a fine grit whipped across the compound by the wind.<br /><br />Still, at $6 a month, it cost less than the voucher that Ramesh received as part of a pilot program run by the Center for Civil Society, and the teachers actually showed up for work. Corporation-run chain schools would institute higher standards — perhaps even pioneering the franchise model in education.<br /><br /><br />"India needs entrepreneurs and organizations who are willing to build a scalable execution model of schools," said Satya Narayanan, chairman of Career Launcher. "In terms of numbers, these could translate into a chain of hundreds of schools over a five to seven year period."<br /><br />With 14 schools in operation, mostly in second-tier cities but also including five rural schools, Indus World School has made a good start.<br /><br />Earlier this year, the company secured second round financing from Gaja Capital Partners and sold an additional, undisclosed stake to Housing Development Finance Corp. for around $10 million — suggesting that the snowball is beginning to roll downhill. According to Narayanan, IWS hopes to operate 75 schools with over 40,000 students in five years time, which could pave the way for a wave of followers.<br /><br />According to the entrepreneur, at least a dozen of India's large corporations are discussing similar ventures or investments. But the blue ocean market — 250,000 schools! — means he won't need to worry much about competition for bodies.<br /><br />Nevertheless, Narayanan aims to make sure innovation isn't limited to the business model.<br /><br />The company is steadily developing its own intellectual property for the curriculum, with a focus on age-appropriate linkages to career aspirations and higher education goals — music to the ears of middle-class Indian parents.<br /><br />And the connection with Career Launcher — a test prep and college admissions advisory company that serves 100,000 from 225 outlets — ensures that IWS understands its target customers and their goals.<br /><br />Can for-profit chain schools really step in where the state has failed — especially for students like Dhiraj Singh, whose parents can't afford to pay more than a pittance?<br /><br />Studies of tiny, grassroots private schools and school vouchers suggest that the answer may be yes. So far IWS, like most elite Indian schools, offers scholarships for only a few hundred students. But the gathering momentum of the country's recently passed Right to Education law (RTE) could free up funds for private players.<br /><br />"The RTE needs to be given an operating framework from the current 'intent' state," said Narayanan. "We can contribute immensely to [uplifting the poor] in just a generation if we can implement RTE smartly!"Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-45106795740357765762011-10-12T04:18:00.000-07:002011-10-12T04:20:17.566-07:00In India, customers want the luxe lifeGandhi's homespun cloth or haute-couture? India goes up-market<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - October 12, 2011<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — When one of India's largest real-estate developers opened DLF Emporio — an exclusive shopping mall devoted to fashion designers and international luxury brands — the mall charged would-be patrons a stiff fee just to get through the doors.<br /><br />The charge was about the equivalent of a week's salary for many Indians. The customers poured in anyway.<br /><br />These days, the mall doesn't charge admission. But from the looks of things, it could still get away with it.<br /><br />Even as the government debates whether 32 rupees a day (or about $0.65) is enough to survive on, the sellers of the world's most expensive and ostentatious brands are doing a booming business in India — a land whose most cherished idol once dressed in a loincloth stitched out of cotton thread he spun himself.<br /><br />“The traffic in the mall has increased incredibly, because it's one of its kind in India,” said a salesman at Louis Vuitton's Emporio outlet. “We have all the luxury brands in a single location. That's a big advantage.”<br /><br />Louis Vuitton, Ermenegildo Zegna and company aren't just for socialites and Bollywood stars anymore. Luxury retailers in New Delhi say that in India's major metropolitan cities, the market has expanded to include people from all professional backgrounds, and India's growing, and aspiring, middle class. <br /><br />“We have a number of customers who come in to experience the store, even buying a belt or a shirt,” said a saleswoman at Ermenegildo Zegna. “We have a mix of customers. Yes, we do have lawyers who are looking for a business suit, but there are also people who need formal wear for social occasions.”<br /><br />Clearly, the days when Mohandas Gandhi urged Indians to spin their own yarn and sew their own clothes are long gone.<br /><br />Despite the economic downturn of the past year, India's market for luxury goods grew 20 percent last year to reach around $5.8 billion as top brands penetrated second-tier cities like Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad, according to a new study conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the global consultancy AT Kearney.<br /><br />As the Hindu festival of Diwali approaches, and India enters the busiest shopping season of the year, CII and AT Kearney forecast that the country's luxury market will grow to $14.7 billion by 2015, despite continuing problems with infrastructure and curbs on foreign investment, the report said.<br /><br />That's because even though the economy has slowed somewhat as the central bank works to rein in inflation, consumer confidence in India remains at an all-time high. In a recent survey conducted by Mastercard, for instance, more consumers in India were planning to buy luxury goods over the next year than in any other country in the Asia Pacific region, apart from Singapore — where the per-capita income is more than ten times higher.<br /><br />“The kind of spending power people have is expanding, so Armani and Gucci is no longer a dream,” said Bhauya Nagpal, a salesman for Jimmy Choo.<br /><br />According to CII and AT Kearney, jewellery, electronics, cars and fine-dining grew faster than expected, while apparel, accessories, wines and spirits have continued their strong growth. The market for jewelry, for example, grew 30 percent, compared with an expected 20 percent jump, while the fine-dining segment grew 40 percent versus expectations of a modest 10 percent blip.<br /><br />That makes India the surprising darling of retailers combatting flagging sales in their traditional cash-cow markets in Europe and the U.S. Already, nearly all of the world's luxury brands are competing for a slice of India's new wealth, though currently the law limits foreign investment in single-brand retail businesses to 51 percent. Retailing experts say global brands will launch some 200 stores devoted to luxury brands by 2020.<br /><br />Rolls-Royce sold 80 cars here last year, while Ferrari entered the market in May.<br /><br />Zegna has tapped the haute Indian wedding market with a special “guru collection” of Nehru suits — named after Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the architect of its socialist economic policies — that run around $3,500. French apparel-maker Hermes unveiled a new range of limited-edition saris starting at $6,000 a pop over the weekend.<br /><br />And even Paris Hilton recently visited the country to launch a luxury boutique that will sell her personal line of fragrances, handbags and apparel in Mumbai.<br /><br />So what would Nehru think of the country's enthusiastic embrace of ostentation? Not so much, one expects. With more than 3 million wealthy households, India now has more affluent families than any European country, but the annual average income remains around $3,500. That's just enough for Zegna's take on Nehru's signature suit.Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-2661601593804338842011-10-06T04:26:00.000-07:002011-10-12T04:27:10.418-07:00Blood diamonds: India plays the middlemanConflict diamonds threaten Surat's booming polishing business.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - October 6, 2011<br /><br />SURAT, India — This summer, the authorities in Surat, the commercial capital of the state of Gujarat, arrested two smugglers attempting to sell nearly a million dollars in so-called blood diamonds.<br /><br />Close on the heels of similar busts, the arrest again raised fears that the chaotic conditions making this small city on India's Arabian coast the world's new diamond-polishing hub may also make it one of the weakest links in the fight to stop overlords from financing armies with the precious stones.<br /><br />“Every month, diamonds are coming from Zimbabwe without a Kimberley Process Certificate (KPC),” said Kirti Shah, an elected official of the Surat municipal corporation who is also a diamond trader.<br /><br />“But I'm the only person in the diamond market who will talk about it openly.”<br /><br />Once known for processing small, cheap stones, Surat has gradually replaced Antwerp as the center for cutting and polishing nearly all of the world's rough diamonds — as local traders have invested heavily in technology and infrastructure to compete for large, flawless stones. (Antwerp remains a go-to for shoppers.)<br /><br />Yet even as local factories have installed cutting-edge, laser-guided planning and marking software and the latest grinding and polishing machines, Surat's main advantage over polishers in Belgium and Israel remains its cheap labor force and a centuries-old, trust-based system of trading that keeps transaction costs low.<br /><br />Every day, trading houses small and large rely on couriers to hand-carry millions of dollars worth of diamonds to Surat from Mumbai on local trains — with no protection but anonymity.<br /><br />In Surat's markets, diamonds change hands on the street and zip back and forth across the city by motorcycle as traders haggle over prices. When a sale is finally made, nine times out of 10 the deal is done in cash, with nothing but a hand-written chit to record the transaction.<br /><br />Last year, $30 billion worth of stones passed through this city, according to the Gem & Jewelry Export Promotion Council. That's 11 out of 12 of the world's diamonds.<br /><br />And while there are no reliable estimates, it stands to reason that if nearly all of the world's legal diamonds make their way here, a good portion of the conflict diamonds do, too.<br /><br />“It's a very big market,” said a senior investigator in the local branch of the directorate of revenue intelligence — the outfit responsible for combating smuggling, counterfeiting and other economic crimes. “So many brokers are trading on the pavement itself. It's very difficult to monitor.”<br /><br />Diamond traders say that local press reports claiming that conflict diamonds comprise 15 to 30 percent of the market (citing unnamed sources) have exaggerated the problem. But with some 5,000 polishing units — around 1,500 of them tiny cottage industries scattered throughout the state — it's patently impossible to track each and every stone.<br /><br />“This not a problem only for Surat, or only for India. It's a problem around the world,” said Damji Mavani, secretary of the Surat Diamond Association, which conducts seminars and other programs to raise awareness about conflict diamonds.<br /><br />According to the revenue intelligence officer, who is not authorized to be quoted by name in the media, Indian revenue officials have only been monitoring the diamond trade since 2008, because diamond imports are not taxed.<br /><br />Since the authorities began tracking the business, however, they have already busted traders with three consignments of blood diamonds, each valued around $1 million or more. In September 2008, revenue intelligence officials arrested two Lebanese men — Robai Hussain and Yusuf Ossely — with 3,600 carats in rough diamonds worth around $875,000 at the time.<br /><br />This April, they caught two Indians — Jora and Prema Desai — allegedly attempting to sell 48,000 carats of conflict diamonds from Zimbabwe worth more than $2 million. And in August, Indian authorities arrested an Indian trader named Pravin Ajudiya and a Congolese national named Jean Tshinaga with some 10,000 carats in alleged blood diamonds valued around $950,000.<br /><br />Writing in India Today magazine, journalist Shantanu Guha Ray recently cited local traders as saying that such conflict diamonds routinely come to Surat on dhows sailing from Dubai. But in each of the three cases broken by Indian officials, the alleged smugglers hand-carried the rough stones on international flights and were caught because of tips from local informants, the senior revenue official said.<br /><br />“There may be many such carriers,” the revenue intelligence officer said. “But unless and until we get information, we cannot catch them.”<br /><br />For opponents of the trade in conflict diamonds, India's frontier-style market presents a serious problem, mainly because the entire interdiction system hinges on documentation.<br /><br />Since 2003, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has made it mandatory for diamond exporters to document every shipment of rough stones to certify that they do not come from conflict zones. According to the Diamond Trading Corporation — a subsidiary of De Beers, the world's largest diamond company — the scheme has ensured that blood diamonds account for less than 1 percent of the global trade, compared with 15 percent before there was any monitoring system.<br /><br />But others are less sanguine about the certification scheme's success. Once a diamond is cut and polished, there's virtually no way to trace its origin, though a handful of retailers have tried to set up a method that would allow buyers to do so.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the main market for cut diamonds is increasingly moving to countries like India and China, where the idea of “ethical consumerism” is even less common than it is in richer nations.<br /><br />Last year, as the U.S. economy languished, around 70 percent of India's gem and jewelry exports went to diamond traders Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.<br /><br />“Essentially, illicit diamonds that bypass the early stages of the Kimberley Process (such as those from Gabon and Cameroon, or those smuggled from Cote d'Ivoire, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe) can be laundered through willing companies in the cutting and polishing industry,” Ian Smillie, chairman of the Diamond Development Initiative, wrote in a recent report.<br /><br />“Arrests and the seizure of uncertified rough diamonds in the United States, the European Union, India and elsewhere demonstrate what may be the tip on an iceberg, one that the [Kimberly Process] has been unwilling to acknowledge or deal with.”<br /><br />Non-governmental organizations like Diamond Development Initiative, Amnesty International and Global Witness have repeatedly criticized the Kimberley Process for failing to plug loopholes in the system, and, worse, for failing to crack down on offenders like Venezuela, Guinea, Lebanon and Zimbabwe.<br /><br />But faith in the Kimberely Process has recently fallen to a new low. Activists walked out of a key meeting in June in what Global Witness termed a “vote of no confidence” triggered by a deal to allow Zimbabwe to sell diamonds from its violence-plagued Marange fields that “does not contain sufficient checks and balances to prevent substantial volumes of illicit diamonds from entering the global diamond supply chain.”<br /><br />According to India Today, the deal allowed the Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Limited, a consortium of 1,500 diamond traders, to directly source rough diamonds from miners in Zimbabwe, making it more difficult for the Kimberley Process to track the stones.<br /><br />Last year, Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Limited and the Zimbabwe government signed an agreement for the regular supply of diamonds worth $1.2 billion a year in exchange for training Zimbabweans in Surat's diamond-processing units, the magazine reported in May.<br /><br />Many of those stones will doubtless wind up in Surat's “Mini Bazaar” — a small outpost compared to the main market in Mahidharpura, where there are some 50,000 traders, according to a local broker.<br /><br />On a typical weekday afternoon here, hundreds of diamond brokers line the street. Clad in the standard cheap polyblend slacks, button-down shirt and rubber sandals, they sit on the back of motorcycles and on stoops, lean against shopfronts or squat on their heels, farmer-style, on the curb.<br /><br />Behind them, in open-air shops, dozens of traders sit cross-legged behind rows of tiny desks, examining sachets of glittering stones with tiny jeweler's loupes.<br /><br />If the roughs they came from once had blood on them, nobody would be the wiser, judging from the way polished stones change hands.<br /><br />“Hello, hello, gentleman,” a local trader calls out from behind a tiny desk. Keen to make a sale, he spills a sparkling pile of half-carat diamonds onto the table from a paper sachet.<br /><br />“All the documents are in Mumbai only, so there is no need to look at them,” he says when asked whether they are legal. “We buy the diamonds on trust.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-46420113701673343122011-10-03T04:23:00.000-07:002011-10-12T04:23:56.397-07:00Analysis: India needs US-Pakistan friendshipWhy India can't leverage the US-Pakistan spat, and what it means for regional stability.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - October 3, 2011 <br /><br />Editor's note: The idea for this article was suggested by a GlobalPost member. What do you think we should cover? Become a member today to suggest and vote on story ideas.<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — Indian diplomats and military strategists no doubt felt a twinge of satisfaction last month, when the just-retired chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staffs finally came out and accused Pakistan's spy agency of employing terrorist groups.<br /><br />New Delhi had long hoped for a breakdown of ties between Washington and Islamabad that would put an end to billions of dollars in U.S. aid that it says Pakistan uses primarliy to amass weapons against India.<br /><br />But as much as New Delhi may have hoped and prayed for such a rift, when the United States succeeded in patching things up following Adm. Mike Mullen's accusation that Pakistani intelligence was using the Afghanistan-based Haqqani terrorist network to wage a “proxy war” against U.S. forces, the sigh of relief was almost audible.<br /><br />What India wants above all, is for Pakistan to stay in check. And the fact of the matter, experts say, is that the United States makes that possible.<br /><br />“The unraveling of U.S.-Pakistani ties in recent days posed huge dilemmas for India,” said Harsh Pant, an academic with the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London.<br /><br />It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that whatever satisfaction India may have derived from hearing its own frequently repeated refrain from the mouth of America's highest-ranking military officer, it is more concerned about Pakistan being suddenly unleashed than it is about Islamabad's influence in Afghan peace talks or its diplomatic role in post-war Kabul.<br /><br />That's because even though New Delhi has for years complained that the United States has overlooked Pakistan's alleged use of terrorist groups to wage a so-called proxy war against India, beginning with the Kargil conflict in 1999 and increasingly since Sept. 11, 2001 the United States has offered India its only leverage, however limited, over an increasingly reckless enemy.<br /><br />“While there might be a sense of schadenfreude in certain circles in India, over the longterm [a rift between the United States and Pakistan] complicates the strategic realities for India,” Pant said.<br /><br />Though “proxy war” has been its pet term for the Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence's activities for decades, New Delhi did not seize the moment following Mullen's statement to urge Washington to sever its military alliance with Islamabad. Rather, it issued a call for an extension of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, which makes breaking that alliance impossible.<br /><br />"For peace, stability and security in Afghanistan, it is imperative that the ongoing transition must be linked to the ground realities rather than rigid timetables,” India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Hardeep Singh Puri told fellow delegates in the aftermath of Mullen's statement.<br /><br />“This, the international community in its hurry to withdraw from a combat role in Afghanistan, will ignore at its own peril.”<br /><br />Enemies since the bloody Partition that carved two independent states from the erstwhile British India, India and Pakistan have fought four wars since their creation in 1947 — three times over territory in Kashmir and once as part of modern Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan.<br /><br />But even though India has never lost, Pakistan has never given up. The region remains one of the world's hot spots, with many other conflicts threatening to boil over.<br /><br />More recently, all eyes have been trained on the subcontinent since a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament and a subsequent nose-to-nose confrontation between Indian and Pakistani forces on the border raised fears of the world's first nuclear war in 2002.<br /><br />But New Delhi's retreat from the brink then and its refusal to mobilize troops again after the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai suggest that another full-scale war between India and Pakistan is far less likely than once believed.<br /><br />The reasons are simple. India's growing military superiority virtually rules out an invasion by Pakistan, particularly since Beijing has more or less made clear that its support begins and ends with looking the other way with regard to Islamabad's employment of terrorist groups to nip at India's flanks.<br /><br />And Pakistan's substantial nuclear arsenal, superior missiles and well-equipped air force act as a more than sufficient deterrent to any military action by India — whatever the provocation.<br /><br />“India has not shown interest in fighting, Pakistan or anybody. It has reacted to provocations rather than seeking to resolve its 'Pakistan problem,'” said Sunil Dasgupta, co-author of "Arming Without Aiming: India's Military Modernization."<br /><br />By almost any measure, today Pakistan's military prowess simply does not compare with India's, according to figures tabulated by Global Firepower.<br /><br />At $36 billion, India's defense budget is nearly six times Pakistan's expenditure of $6.41 billion, and if it came to financing a shooting war, New Delhi has $284 billion in foreign reserves to Islamabad's paltry $16 billion.<br /><br />In terms of boots on the ground, India has a standing army of 1.33 million soldiers, versus Pakistan's 617,000. Its tanks and other land-based weapons outnumber Pakistan's by 75,000 to 16,000. Its navy is nearly 10 times larger, and its 2,462 military aircraft are almost double Pakistan's 1,414 — though some say Pakistan's pilots are both superior and better equipped, thanks to decades of American military aid.<br /><br />There's only one problem, says G. Parthasarathy, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan. And that's what America is only just beginning to confront.<br /><br />“I'm glad that reality has dawned, rather late in the day,” said Parthasarathy, in response to Mullen's statement. “But [the Pakistanis] are not going to give up their jihadi assets. If you choose to keep your head in the sand, there's nothing we can do about it.”<br /><br />Pakistan's singular focus on India — some might call it an obsession — and its willingness to employ any means necessary to frustrate its nemesis mean that it remains a serious threat for India.<br /><br />Moreover, India's increasing regional role, and China's saber-rattling response, makes it impossible for New Delhi to match Islamabad's singleminded approach.<br /><br />“India needs to deploy a substantial number of its forces along the Sino-Indian border, thereby attenuating its capabilities,” said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University.<br /><br />“Separately, Pakistan has long adopted an asymmetric war strategy against India [by providing covert aid to terrorist groups] and conventional capabilities are not especially helpful in dealing with such a strategy. Also, because of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, India cannot respond using conventional forces.”<br /><br />Things could well get worse before they get better. According to Pakistan's Ahmed Rashid, author of "Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia," Pakistan now faces economic strife, deadly ethnic tensions and an internal problem with the Islamic extremists it once fostered.<br /><br />Meanwhile, civilian control over the military is at a low ebb. “Pakistan is on the edge of a precipice and one faulty step — either by the Americans or the Pakistan army — could plunge an already beleaguered state into meltdown,” Rashid wrote in a recent column for the BBC.<br /><br />That leaves an ever-reluctant India — still punching below its weight, even as it seeks a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council — on the edge of a precipice, too.<br /><br />“In the longterm, obviously, India and the U.S. are headed for strategic, economic, and social convergence,” said Dasgupta, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The policy challenge for the U.S. and India for some time now has been to figure out how to get from the short-term divergence over Pakistan to the long-term state of natural alliance.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-46677754551203622762011-09-29T04:57:00.000-07:002011-10-03T04:57:37.333-07:00India: bouncing back from the plagueAfter the plague hit Surat in 1994, an amazing thing happened: this Gujarat city cleaned up its act.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - September 29, 2011<br /><br />SURAT, Gujarat — When an outbreak of the pneumonic plague struck Surat in 1994, the so-called “diamond city” took an unprecedented step, as far as India goes: It cleaned up its act.<br /><br />Best known for its booming textile and diamond-polishing industries, Surat fell victim to the plague because it was among India's dirtiest cities — though its lackadaisical attitude toward garbage and sewage was by no means unusual in a country one might call hygiene-challenged.<br /><br />But thanks to a coming together of public will and a host of reforms, Surat successfully went from one of the country's dirtiest cities to one of its cleanest in 18 short months.<br /><br />Perhaps more remarkable, despite the exodus of S.R. Rao, the municipal commissioner who made it happen, Surat has more or less maintained its high standards, despite the city's rapid expansion over the past decade.<br /><br />Is there a lesson here for the rest of India? Definitely. But it will take more than plagiarizing Rao's urban planning documents to get it done elsewhere — at least without a rash of epidemics.<br /><br />“It's not a question only of the model, it's a question of the local people's behavior,” said K.D. Yadav, a professor of civil engineering at Surat's S.V. National Institute of Technology.<br /><br />There's nothing like a dose of the plague to get a city thinking about hygiene, it turns out — especially a strain that's more virulent than the infamous Black Death.<br /><br />Thus, in 1994, after 54 residents died and some 300,000 fled to escape a possible quarantine, the people who stuck around were willing to get with the program — working to eliminate the tons of garbage and overflowing sewers that had inundated the city with disease-carrying rats.<br /><br />But the design of the system is instructive, too.<br /><br />In an effort to make city officials more accountable, Rao divided the municipality into six zones, appointing a commissioner for each, so that it was crystal clear who was to blame for problem areas.<br /><br />Rao ordered officials responsible for solid waste management to make personal field visits every day, rather than relying on dubious reports, and he instituted a grievance-redressal system for complaints and fines for violaters.<br /><br />It sounds like basic stuff, and it is. The trick is that Surat made it work. And there the devil is in the details.<br /><br />“At that time, the [Bharatiya Janata Party] BJP had won 98 out of 99 seats [in the municipal government], so there was no opposition,” said Hemant Desai, deputy commisioner of health and hygiene. “People believed it was for their benefit, so they cooperated.”<br /><br />Thanks to that rare spirit of consensus, Surat was able to make a raft of changes to the system, almost overnight.<br /><br />The city decentralized responsibility for garbage collection so thoroughly that each individual street sweeper answers for a specific stretch of road. Modern garbage trucks with closed beds conduct door-to-door collection of household trash every day — instead of the open bicycle-carts used in most Indian cities — and the garbage is taken directly to a local transfer center instead of being sorted on the roadside by collectors that moonlight in the recycling trade.<br /><br />At the transfer stations for each zone, the city's 240 trucks unload 800-1200 kilograms of garbage to be sorted and collected into loads of 10 metric tons which go to the disposal site. And because the business is contracted out, and the contractors are paid by the ton, the garbage actually makes it to the weighing station.<br /><br />Similarly, in wealthier sections of the city, there's a grant-in-aid scheme that allows 600 residential societies, who have the biggest stake in the cleanliness of their area, to take over their own sanitation system.<br /><br />The entire system is computerized, so that residents' complaints come to the attention of city officials immediately, and the same sanitary workers that are virtually invisible in Mumbai and New Delhi are in Surat empowered to collect fines on the spot from people and businesses that dump trash on the roadside.<br /><br />Instructively, it took a wee tweak of the system to make that happen — the sanitation department calls the fines “administrative charges” because it's not legally empowered to issue tickets — but its workers collect around $400,000 a year keeping residents on their toes.<br /><br />In 2010, Surat dropped a notch to third in the rankings of India's cleanest cities, and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board has pointed out that the city's textile industry has not been nearly as successful in curbing industrial pollution as the garbage collectors have been in cleaning up the streets.<br /><br />But even if it's less than perfect — it takes an eye well-schooled in Indian cities to see it as “clean” — Surat's transformation has already attracted would-be imitators from cities like Lucknow and Pune to study its garbage collection system, according to Desai.<br /><br />And as the city population has doubled over the past 10 years, new residents have gotten at least one timely reminder that cleanliness has its benefits.<br /><br />When a disastrous flood hit the city in 2006, Surat's showpiece sanitation system paid off, allowing workers to clear more than 300,000 metric tons of garbage and debris in less than a month, and Rao's successor in the city commissioner's office, S. Aparna, took advantage of the tragic destruction of the makeshift shanties of thousands of slum dwellers to relocate them into properly constructed, low-income housing she financed with money from the centrally funded Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM).<br /><br />“We have been fortunate in getting officers who are really enthusiastic about development,” said S.V. National Institute of Technology's Yadav.<br /><br />And that right there may be the lesson for India — even if it is bittersweet. Government works. But only if people make it work.Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-34829837046806912092011-09-18T21:34:00.000-07:002011-09-18T21:36:15.316-07:00India: fight to preserve dying languagesA new survey of India's hundreds of languages could have far-reaching political implications.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - September 18, 2011<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — This fall, a plucky Indian professor of English will fire the first shot in a battle to revolutionize how this large, diverse country perceives itself.<br /><br />The key to his project: an army of some 2,000 volunteer linguists, translators and typists.<br /><br />For the first time since the British Raj, Ganesh Devy's People's Linguistic Survey of India will catalog the nation's myriad tongues. The enormous exercise will call into question colonial definitions of civilization and ethnicity that have persisted through the 60-year history of independent India.<br /><br />“This is one of our heritage treasures that we have not been overtly aware of,” said Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. “It's very important to conduct these surveys and catalog [these languages], because it will help us formulate the appropriate language policy. We do not have an appropriate language policy [in India] because we don't have an idea of the breadth and length of lingusitic diversity.”<br /><br />Reminiscent of Sir James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary project — which drew on the knowledge of hundreds of volunteers, including a prolific murderer, for information about the origins of English words — the People's Linguistic Survey promises to be a remarkable resource for academic researchers and a vital aid in the struggle to preserve dying tongues.<br /><br />But the growing stack of tomes may have broader implications, too, for India's education system, and even the political organization of its 28 states and seven union territories.<br /><br />“This will provide good material for fresh thinking about cognitive categories in every walk of life,” said Devy, who is a professor at the the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gujarat.<br /><br />“If I may say so, in all modesty, perhaps this will come to be seen as one of the more important linguistic projects during the last 100 years in India,” he said.It is indeed a huge endeavor.<br /><br />The original British language survey took some 30 years to complete. More recently, India's registrar general, which conducts the census, has taken 15 years to survey just four states.<br /><br />But Devy's army of volunteers have already finished work in nine states. Progress is underway in seven more. The first results are slated, from Jharkhand, to be published in November — with Gujarat and Maharashtra ready for the World Languages Meeting in Gujarat in January.<br /><br />Devy expects the entire project — including a series of books in English — to be finished by the end of 2014.<br /><br />“I have been working with the languages of the tribal communities of India for the last 20 years, working with the tribal communities, so I have been able to set up quite a large network of individuals interested in looking at language identity, language loss, language empowerment, and issues like that,” said Devy.<br /><br />It was through that network that the professor recruited an army of volunteers whose efforts have already put the government to shame.<br /><br />“These volunteers include professional linguists, teachers, cultural activists, farmers and villagers. It is a cross-section of Indian society,” Devy said. “Of course, my list is deficient: I don't have any criminals or black marketeers.”<br /><br />To aid researchers, each language will be detailed with a 1,000-word history, a brief glossary and some examples of poems and stories. And based on preliminary findings, the official number of Indian languages will likely rise from the Raj-era figure of 179 — of which a paltry 22 are officially recognized by the constitution — to nearly 900.<br /><br />However, it's the main reason for the expected increase that makes the project revolutionary.<br /><br />When British linguist George Abraham Grierson conducted his Linguistic Survey of India in 1894, he ignored the languages of many nomadic tribes. He classified as dialects many other tongues that local people used to define their ethnicities. And he neglected a large part of South India because the Nizam of Hyderabad in what is today the state of Andhra Pradesh refused to cooperate.<br /><br />At least partly as a result, when first the British and then Indian authorities divided the country into language-based states, many sizable groups found themselves split by separate administrations and robbed of political influence in keeping with their numbers. For instance, planners deemed the Gond tribe insignificant because the Gond language had no written literature or written script (until 1928) — so the group was scattered across five different states.<br /><br />“These states were formed irrespective of the number of speakers of languages,” said Devy. “To give you an example, the Munda group, the Santhal group, the Bhil group – they did not get their states.”<br /><br />These linguistic boundaries have already proven controversial. Since 1960, when language-based agitations forced the Bombay State into today's Gujarat and Maharashtra states, nearly a dozen new states have been carved out on linguistic or ethnic grounds, and the troubles aren't over.<br /><br />Ethnic rebellions still simmer across the country, demanding separate states, or even nationhood, for the speakers of Nepali, Bodo and other languages that borders — and, too often, government budgets — have ignored.<br /><br />At the same time, Grierson's language survey, and independent India's subsequent propagation of its inherent prejudices, has had a disastrous impact on India's many indigenous tribes.<br /><br />“The marginalized people are speaking marginalized languages,” said the University of London's Abbi.<br /><br />In the most dramatic instances, languages — and sometimes the people who speak them — have simply ceased to exist. Last year, for example, when an 85-year-old Andaman islander named Boa Sr gasped her final breath, the Bo tribe and the Bo language were irrevocably lost.<br /><br />“With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory,” Survival International's Stephen Corry remarked at the time. “Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”<br /><br />But even where tribal communities remain robust in numbers, the low status afforded to their languages has helped to keep them isolated and excluded from India's snowballing economic development.<br /><br />"Only around 15,000 people in India speak Sanskrit, while some 80 million speak various tribal languages in central India alone,” said Shubhranshu Choudhary, founder of CG Net Swara, a mobile-phone based news platform for Indian tribal peoples. “Yet All India Radio, the only source of news for many rural Indians, broadcasts frequent bulletins in Sanskrit and none in these tribal languages."<br /><br />Though various studies have shown that children learn better when taught basic concepts in their mother tongue before attempting to master a second language, India prioritizes just 22 out of the 900-odd languages that Devy seeks to catalog, and the state's promised free and compulsory education is most often available in fewer still.<br /><br />“In the Constitution of India, there is a special schedule of languages, which alone receive official support,” said Devy. “When the schedule was created after independence, it had 14 languages. Now it has 22. All the funds for primary, secondary and higher education can go only to these languages.”<br /><br />Not surprisingly, perhaps, tribal literacy rates lag behind those of the general population, and only about one-fifth of the so-called “Scheduled Tribes” noted by the Indian constitution as historically underprivileged are attending school, according to the latest census.<br /><br />“If we don't include these langauges in our education policy, obviously we are discriminating against them,” said Abbi. “We have a reservation policy [that mandates quotas in jobs and higher education] for the [historically underprivileged] Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. But the reservations are for the tribe, not the language. This is the reason why tribals want to forget their languages.”<br /><br />Meanwhile, the proportion of tribal peoples living below the poverty line, at nearly 50 percent, is also “substantially higher than the national average,” according to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes.<br /><br />“My aim is not to find which is the language that is spoken by fewer than 5 percent, and how will I revive that language,” said Devy, who founded a university for tribal peoples known as the Adivasi Academy in 1999.<br /><br />“My aim is to see where a sizeable number of people exist, have a speech tradition, a language of their own, but because of the denial of the language in legitimate educational spaces this community is suffering on the developmental scale.”<br /><br />Making sure the world knows that these languages exist is the first step.Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7163200.post-61627601868146898742011-09-07T19:45:00.000-07:002011-09-07T19:46:03.211-07:00India: soft-core porn makes a comebackBefore the internet, Indian porn stars were big — literally — but the films showcased more sexuality than skin.<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />GlobalPost - September 7, 2011<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — On a hand-painted poster for a 1990s' grade-B Indian film "Qatil Jawani" ("Murderous Nymphette"), a plump and naked actress sits astride a shirtless man, her head thrown back in apparent ecstasy as the man's hands paw at her chest.<br /><br />Once ubiquitous in so-called “morning shows” at theaters across the country, soft-core films like "Biwi Anadi Sali Khiladi" ("Innocent Wife, Cheating Sister-in-Law") and "Kaam Tantra" ("Principles of Sex") have slowly disappeared from the big screen in India with the increasing availability of hardcore pornography on the internet.<br /><br />But now, as mainstream cinema sheds its former reticence about sex and female sexuality, Indians are beginning to take a second look at soft-core porn, this time for what it says about Indian culture.<br /><br />This December, television soap magnate Ekta Kapoor will release “The Dirty Picture,” a mainstream Bollywood biopic about Silk Smitha — a skin-show specialist from the '80s who crossed over to perform sensuous so-called “cabaret” numbers in mainstream films.<br /><br />More subtly, in this year's "Tees Maar Khan," a Hindi action comedy film, imported British-Indian bombshell Katrina Kaif made waves with the song, “Sheila Ki Jawani," or "Young Sheila." The song was an homage to the Hindi title of one of Silk Smitha's softcore flicks, “Reshma Ki Jawani," or "Nubile Reshma."<br /><br />And in New Delhi this week, Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K) ad agency is presenting an exhibition of soft-core porn posters as, well, art.<br /><br />“School kids, college students and even grown up men used to go to these movie halls just to see a glimpse of a woman bathing or a random love-making scene,” said W+K executive creative director V. Sunil, whose personal poster collection is on display in the exhibition called "Morning Show."<br /><br />Before the globalization of sexuality that came with the internet, India's porn stars were big — literally.<br /><br />Silk Smitha herself was no waif. Looking especially buxom packed into skimpy clothes, she knocked down evil thugs like bowling pins – highlighting a peculiar facet of India's soft-core porn.<br /><br />The Indian films that were once labeled pornography were less about nudity and graphic sex than they were about female sexuality, according to Meena T. Pillai, a cultural critic at the University of Kerala — the state where the softcore porn industry was centered, due to its relatively liberal censor.<br /><br />Apart from voluptuous stars and voluminous cleavage shots, the only real distinguishing factor of pornographic films was that they centered on a sexually aggressive woman, in contrast to the demure domestic ideal.<br /><br />“You'd be shocked if you actually saw a Malayalam [language] softcore porn movie. [The camera] basically stops at the thigh. It doesn't ride further up than that,” said Pillai. “But the moment you show women's desire, that movie would automatically be labeled porn.”<br /><br />I.V. Sasi's 1978 “Avalude Ravukal” ("Her Nights"), for example, was labeled soft-core porn simply because it dramatized the story of a prostitute and depicted the heroine — played by Sasi's wife, Seema — exercising her power over men by offering and denying them sexual favors.<br /><br />Similarly, the titillating 1989 film “Layanam” — starring Silk Smitha — depicted three adult women seducing a young man.<br /><br />Other soft-core hits, like “Air Hostess Girls,” apparently stuck to more tried-and-true scenarios.<br /><br />To make up for any lack of skin, theater owners and distributors illegally spliced in random sequences from foreign films — splashes of nudity or even hardcore porn.<br /><br />The practice was so common that in Kerala it earned its own classification as “bit cinema,” and occasionally found its way onto theater promos like the one for a film called “Honey, I Love You,” where a white woman in a bikini is embossed with the tag line: “THE GOOD PARTS. THE SEXY PARTS. THE BODY PARTS.”<br /><br />Following Silk Smitha, the hottest heroine in the Malayalam porn business was a buxom young actress named Shakeela who just kept getting bigger as she got bigger — appearing in more than 50 movies.<br /><br />“In Kerala, in the south, we like slightly bulky women,” explains Sunil. “Anyone with big boobs is a big thing.”Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com0