signs of trouble

Delhi's traffic woes continue, with flyovers falling on cars, jams slowing the average speed during rush hour to 16 kmph, and the Bus Rapid Transit System (otherwise known as the great gridlock creator) sinking into neglect and disrepair as the government tries to lull voters into forgetting about it. The latest, though, is a story in today's Express about Rs. 1.6 crores (i.e. 160 million rupees, or about 4 million dollars) that has been spent to erect road signs in the leadup to the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Apparently, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit finds them "odd."

I'm not sure which signs are the new ones. But I can tell you this. Delhi's road signs are terrible. There are hardly any of them, and most of those that do exist are written in 12-point type and hidden behind a bush or secreted behind a public toilet, where a driver cannot see them unless he stops, gets out of the car, and asks a dozen passersby to help him in the search. The large ones that are legible are useless. Consider the signs leading to the flyovers that are meant to tell you what lane you should be in so that you don't miss the turn for where you're going. They show three arrows, all pointing up, indicating the various choices, e.g. Khelgaon Marg (up arrow), IIT (up arrow) and Delhi airport (up arrow). These signs are supposed to imply that you should keep left if you want Khelgaon Marg, but they unwittingly indicate you should be in the middle lane for IIT and the right lane for the Airport, and that you should go straight for all three destinations. In fact, there are more than four lanes (all in constant flux of course). If you want Khelgaon Marg you don't want to go straight at all, you want to go below the flyover and turn right or left. And if you want IIT or the airport it doesn't matter a bit what lane you're in, as long as you stay on the flyover. Because the signs are so bad, you constantly find drivers reversing down the flyover after realizing they've screwed up. More annoying, there's a simple solution to the problem, which the government sign painters would have hit upon immediately had they done the briefest of surveys of international signage standards. The answer: the arrows for the left lane should point DOWN if you're meant to go below the flyover. Better still, there should be a warning a kilometer before the flyover that says something like "Next intersection Khelgaon Marg, Keep left". Of course, I'd be happy if they actually labeled the roads. And stopped the practice of changing their names every few meters to honor a new leftist leader. But that's just me.

misread

The blurb for Outlook Magazine's cover story on Manmohan Singh this week reads: "With Manmohan Singh intent on pushing the nuclear deal when he should be worrying about inflation, many have begun to wonder if he's putting personal interest before the national one." Nothing could be further from the truth. It's decidedly against Singh's personal interest to pursue the nuclear deal, since it would mean losing his post and having to fight elections (which as a terrible politician, he is loathe to do). I seriously doubt that "many" of whom Outlook writes really exist.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it is silly to link the two issues of inflation and the nuclear deal, since they have nothing to do with one another, apart from the fact that one may precipitate elections and the other may make it impossible for the Congress to win. Inflation, like all economic problems, is not easy to manipulate by the stroke of a pen, and it is likely that the PM is very worried about inflation but also very much at a loss about how to initiate a sudden reversal.

The bottom line is that this deal (as Shekhar Gupta correctly wrote earlier this week) is not about energy--the Left gets that right. It's about bringing India back into the fold after years of ostracism following its nuclear test. Any supposed limitations that it puts in place are already in place today--when India is still essentially under sanctions--so it is ridiculous to say that India should keep out of it to protect its autonomy. (Essentially, that is like a prisoner saying he doesn't want to come out of jail because if he breaks the law he'll be thrown back inside).

The Congress will have to face elections in April, regardless what it does now. And Manmohan Singh will be the de facto choice as its prime minister, since Sonia Gandhi has already demonstrated her unwillingness to take the post, Rahul Gandhi is too young (by consensus) and there isn't anybody else that Sonia can rely on to rule by remote control. With those realities, the more that the party hamstrings Singh and turns him into an emasculated figure of ridicule, the more it increases the (already likely) scenario that it will be thrown out of office.

making anti-incumbency work...

One thing that's always bothered me about India's version of democracy. The politicians keep claiming that they can't enact unpopular, but necessary, legislation because they're scared of being thrown out of office. The nuclear deal is the latest big-ticket casualty, but the argument applies to everything from parking tickets and more expensive licenses for cars (to curb pollution and congestion in Delhi) to raising the tariff for water for the middle class (to finance better supply and reduce waste).

The argument bothers me for two reasons.

The first is that it's patently untrue. Witness the BRT. It was fantastically unpopular from the beginning, and has only gotten more so, yet it's being pursued with vigor.

The second reason is that anti-incumbency virtually guarantees that you'll be thrown out, no matter what you do. Why not do something productive?

The "golden quadrilateral" highway project (justifiably popular) is an example here. It has been pursued by two successive governments, despite their traditional rivalry and the long-standing practice of bringing in your own contractors so you can shift the kickbacks from the old govt to the new.

Considering that the two largest political parties--and many of their allies--can agree on substantial parts of the agenda of what needs to be done for India to develop as a modern nation, this seems to be the way to make anti-incumbency work: Focus on projects / legislation where there is a broad consensus, and push forward regardless of party ties, while using other line items to try to differentiate the party. Leaving aside economic reforms--even though the Congress and BJP are basically agreed on what measures are needed, though they refuse to admit it--Everybody wants good roads. Everybody wants functioning sewers. Everybody wants clean water. If you're going to essentially take turns holding power anyway, what do you have to lose in actually providing them?

There must be another reason than anti-incumbency that nothing gets done.

unisex toilets

This Sunday I was entertained by a little gripe from a woman journalist about the unisex toilets in some of Delhi's popular bars. The bad news: The closet-sized space means that your face is inches from the urinal when you're seated on the pot.

Personally, I could never figure out why they have the urinal in there at all. If I'm taking a leak, I lock the door: The last thing I want is for some massive mustachioed marauder in urgent need to come barging in and flop down on the seat to take a dump when I'm midstream. So I (and other dudes) could just pee in the toilet like we do at home, unless there's some special cache in urinals that I don't know about. Incidentally, this is the case in ALL the men's toilets, not just the unisex ones.

Now that I know women are freaked out by the whole staredown with the soapcake thing, though, I'm thinking I may be more metrosexual than I originally considered. Then again, I'm also tormented by Delhi's other (more common) architectural faux pas--the light switches with so many toggles that coming into your house feels like firing up a 747, the canted rooms (everything skewed at a ten degree angle), the bathrooms that you have to walk upstairs into because they had to make room for the pipes underneath.... These guys really need to start hiring professionals.

murder (al)most foul

My pal Andy Buncombe of the Independent has written an interesting piece on the Aarushi Talwar murders, arguing that the furor over the whodunnit has exposed the rift between Delhi's rich and poor.

Some highlights:

"While the media attention devoted to Aarushi's murder was exceptional, even the family's lawyer believes such servants are often responsible for crimes. Pinaki Mishra said there were many factors behind the phenomenon – increasing economic disparity, the increasing influx of rural people into India's cities and even mafia-style groups that force domestic servants to steal from their employers....

Yet while such killings made big headlines, official figures suggest that the problem is not as great as some may believe. Mr Bhagat, the Delhi police spokesman, said that five people in the city with a population of more than 16 million had been robbed or killed by their servants so far this year. Last year the total was six."

the crappening

It's confirmed. M. Night Shyamalan is in freefall.

The Happening is only marginally better than, and just as stupid as Lady in the Water. How does one explain his "crappening?" I think it all goes down with his childish and pretentious obsession with casting himself as an auteur--a concept so pretentious that there's only a word for it in French--which puts him in the disastrous company of Abel Ferrar (Bad Lieutenant to The Funeral and on downward) and David Milch (Deadwood to John from Cincinatti) as well as folks like Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman. It is entirely possible that Shyamalan cannot write--the Sixth Sense notwithstanding--and it is definitely proven by his last three films that his critical faculties are severely wanting. Delusional is the word that springs to mind. (I'm sure that the wise man at Disney who dumped him has been promoted way, way up the ladder). Filmmaking--like writing--is not really a solitary profession, it seems. You need people to tell you when you're doing something ridiculous, or pompous, or just plain dopey. My guess is that Manoj had about 100 projects in the trash can before he came up with The Sixth Sense, and that was a good thing. Unbreakable came next, and it was OK. But then the critical world (Newsweek and Time in particular) did him a colossal disservice by saying that Signs was a brilliant masterwork and enshrining him as the next Spielberg. Signs was stupid, too, folks. With badly drawn aliens and, again, that crushingly horrible whimsy that Manoj has patented in his post-Sixth Sense career: the aliens could be destroyed by tap water.

That's it. He's in the heap with Karan Johar and Abel Ferrar--I vow never to spend money on one of his movies again.

I guess this means UTV is not going to catapult itself into the realms of Village Roadshow etc--at least not yet.

rebel brides and ex-wives

As India gets more wealthy, arranged marriage is giving way to more love weddings, and divorces.

Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
May 17, 2008

Not long ago, 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela returned home to Hyderabad from Delhi to attend a family funeral—but didn't get the welcome she expected. Konidela, whose father, Chiranjeevi, is a megastar in the Telugu-language film industry, had been disowned for eloping with Shirish Bharadwaj, 23, who was from a different caste. The two had married on live television last October in a bid to keep Sreeja's father from interfering—they were afraid he'd accuse Bharadwaj of kidnapping her, a common tactic in such cases. But their TV wedding alerted police and a mob of angry fans, who trailed the couple from the temple to the registrar and scared them so badly they fled to Delhi. Now the lovers were back, but Konidela's relatives weren't interested in reconciliation. Instead, she says, they forced Bharadwaj to wait outside and tried to browbeat her into dumping him so she could marry a groom of her parents' choosing. "They just tried brainwashing me," she says. "So I got out of there as fast as I could."

The story electrified India, where a rapidly modernizing society is changing its views on marriage. Tales of rebellion are on the rise. Now that fresh college grads can start outearning their parents right away and the rising influence of Western culture is empowering women, more young couples are challenging tradition. So-called love marriages were rare a generation ago, but now account for 10 percent of urban weddings, according to a November study by Divya Mathur of the University of Chicago. An additional 19 percent in Mathur's survey chose their own spouses but confirmed their engagements with their parents—choosing what urban India awkwardly refers to as "love-cum-arranged" unions. Meanwhile, more and more couples are meeting online or through friends instead of at torturous, parent-chaperoned tea sessions. The revenue of online matchmakers more than doubled from $15 million in 2006 to $35 million in 2007, and more than 12 million Indians—about half the country's Internet users—now visit matrimonial sites.

The changes aren't producing only love and bliss, however: demographers say divorce rates doubled to about 7 percent from 1991 to 2001, when the latest Census was taken. Lawyers affirm that, at least among urban couples, they've since climbed much higher, though they're still very low by Western standards. "India is facing changing times," says Pinky Anand, a lawyer who represented Konidela and Bharadwaj when they sought protection in a Delhi court. "Modernization, urbanization, access to information and globalization—there are no holds barred."

Traditionally, under all of India's major religions, all marriages were arranged by the bride and groom's parents. Unions were considered religious contracts between families, designed to uphold the social order and cemented with the gift of a virgin daughter. They were not seen as private agreements between two people in love, says King's College anthropologist Perveez Mody. With strict injunctions against crossing caste boundaries, arranged marriages helped Hindus to prevent lower castes from gaining status and made it easier to restrict them to hereditary occupations. "Many women got married before puberty, and to keep a nubile girl in the house was a monumental sin," says Delhi-based sociologist Patricia Uberoi. After marriage, couples moved in with the husband's parents to form what is known here as the "joint family." New brides had few rights and answered to their mothers-in-law, their husbands' siblings and his brothers' wives (if they'd been in the family longer). Today class and religious divides remain very strong, so in many respects the old system persists. Parents still work the family network and advertise in newspapers to make advantageous matches for their children—often without informing their sons or daughters until the process is well underway.

Now, however, a complex mix of political, economic and social developments is putting pressure on the old methods. The caste hierarchy itself is under threat thanks to urbanization and civil-rights reforms. India's city population has increased from about 20 percent of the total in 1971 to more than 28 percent today—bringing a new anonymity that makes it more difficult to identify a person's caste. Similarly, quotas for the lower castes in education and government jobs, along with the shift to an industrial economy, have allowed the lower castes to break out of traditional occupations. At the same time, young people—particularly young women—have become better positioned to assert their independence and become more exposed to Western influences, as Hollywood begins to compete with Bollywood, and Vogue and Cosmo hit the newsstands. Today's top engineering graduates, moreover, can earn as much as $30,000 within a few years of starting work—more than most parents ever earned—and even call-center employees make enough to defy their parents. Many of these new lucrative careers also require young people to relocate outside their families' ambit. And although a recent study by Watson Wyatt Asia-Pacific shows that women make up only 18 percent of India's urban work force, they now account for 38 percent of enrollment in higher education, and the number of women in white-collar jobs is increasing. As a result, they now enjoy more power and greater awareness of their rights, as well as more unsupervised contact with men. Together, these shifts have caused a decline in the number of joint families, a relaxation of the rules that once gave husbands' parents (but not wives') a dominant role in their children's marriages, and an uptick in children choosing their own partners.

Society is struggling to cope with the shifts. While the weakening of tradition has made relationships more equal, it has also led to higher divorce rates, as women object to archaic constraints and loveless unions. This is true even in remote corners of the country; according to India Today magazine, about a tenth of all child marriages now end in divorce. Geeta Luthra, a New Delhi-based lawyer who works on divorce and other women's issues, says that men are often the ones to split up their marriages when their newly empowered wives refuse to do housework, play the good hostess or kowtow to her in-laws.

Love marriages, meanwhile, are also leading to serious conflict, especially among India's rural populations. In communities like the Jat caste of rural Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the murder of couples that elope has become disturbingly common; at least five such cases made headlines in the last month alone. "If a lower-caste man is involved with a higher-caste woman, he is invariably killed. And the girl, whether belonging to the higher caste or the lower, is also almost certainly eliminated," says Prem Chowdhry, author of "Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India."

So far, the state's response to these changes has also been flawed. Officially, intercaste and interreligious marriages have been legal in India since 1872, almost 100 years before interracial marriages were legalized in all 50 American states. But over time, the law designed to facilitate these unions, known as the Special Marriage Act, has been twisted around to prevent love marriages. Under a 1954 amendment still on the books, couples are required to register their intent to marry with the court, provide the names and addresses of their parents and wait 30 days while the police verify that neither spouse-to-be is already married. Although in 2006 the Supreme Court directed police and other authorities nationwide to protect intercaste and interreligious couples from harassment, this filing requirement still helps parents locate runaway lovers and retrieve them, often by accusing the groom of kidnapping. (Since 2002, such charges have grown 30 percent faster than other crimes against women.) Though police acknowledge that in most of these cases the women have willingly fled with their future husbands, the cops nonetheless often track the couples down, throw the boyfriends (or husbands) in jail and return the women to their parents. Judges also often play a pernicious role, rejecting girls' testimony of consent or ignoring documents that prove she is of marriageable age.

India's divorce procedures similarly lag behind the times. The formal rules have become more liberal over the past 30 years—for example, by allowing Muslim women to sue for alimony and expanding the grounds for Christian divorce. Yet in practice, getting India's overburdened courts to process a divorce if one spouse objects can take up to 15 years. For women like 23-year-old Rani—a resident of provincial Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh—such waits can be unbearable. "I want to be divorced this minute!" she says. And because the glacial pace of courts often drives women to misuse laws against dowries and domestic violence to threaten their husbands into granting a quick settlement, the separation process can mean almost weekly trips to court and the police station, and constantly wondering whether one is going to be arrested and jailed.

Perhaps because of all these obstacles, even many of India's Westernized urban youth remain fairly conservative when it comes to love. Most still strive to find a partner who is roughly acceptable to their parents, even if not of their choosing. Often, when they do marry without their parents' blessing, they keep the marriage secret at first and continue living with their parents, only gradually introducing the new spouse as "a good friend," hoping to win over their parents before revealing the truth. If all goes well, a proper public ceremony then follows.

Even for those who do play by their parents' rules, however, things are slowly changing. Caste and class boundaries have expanded over time to permit more unions, and the old prohibition on the bride and groom's meeting before the wedding has been relaxed so that prospective spouses are now allowed to date or at least exchange phone calls before the big day.

The advent of online matchmaking has also helped. In the old days, young people often had no idea they'd entered the marriage market until photographs and résumés of prospects began arriving in the mail (parents aimed to avoid confrontation with their children by cluing them in as late as possible). Now as many as 40 percent of the profiles posted online on matrimonial sites are written by the candidates themselves, and industry experts say would-be brides and grooms—not their parents—make up a similar percentage of those viewing their pages. The result: today "the marriage decision is negotiated between parents and their adult children," says Delhi University sociologist Radhika Chopra.

One middle-class Delhi couple that wedded three years ago illustrates how such negotiations work. Arun and Deepti decided to get hitched in 2005 after dating secretly for a few years. When they approached their families, both sides objected. Though both are Brahmins, they belong to different subcastes, and Arun is from Bihar, considered a backward region, while Deepti grew up in Delhi; she is also better educated, speaks better English, and has a higher-paying job than Arun. But over time, sustained lobbying won over the families. "We both were ready to have a runaway marriage," says Deepti. "But we wanted our parents to agree. That is something which has not changed in India." Today, to show her respect, Deepti veils her face when she visits Arun's family in conservative Bihar, and Arun (a rare atheist) goes to temple to please Deepti's parents. Love, as they say, may still conquer all; but in India today, tradition remains nearly as powerful.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/137472

vir sanghvi on food & wine snobs

In this week's Brunch (the Sunday magazine of the Hindustan Times, readers outside of Delhi), editor/food critic Vir Sanghvi decided to take on food & wine snobs, and has identified various types (the olive oil bore, the wine bore, and the Michelin bore, etc). One that he forgot to mention, though, was the Five Star Hotel bore--perhaps because he's the worst of them all.

At the beginning of my stint in India, I liked Vir's column in Brunch because he seemed to be the only Indian food writer who had any standards (the others wrote clearly from the perspective of a guy who enjoyed a lot of freebies in return for unjustified, and badly written, raves). But over time I've come to feel that Vir writes the same two articles every week: (1) Some kind of revelation about why the chef at X five star hotel is a genius (he makes a half-decent something or other "from fahrin" as they say, and he has recognized Vir as a fellow master of all things culinary) and (2) Some reminiscence about a vile concoction that he learned to eat at Mayo College. Food snobbery & reverse food snobbery? It would seem so.

...speaking of murder

Just after I finished writing about The White Tiger, I had a look at the front pages of the papers and turned up this gem about a recent child murder in Noida.

Normally, the Indian press has to fear of printing potentially libelous conspiracy theories--see the coverage of Noida's own serial killer for reference--which is why this story caused me to sit up and take notice. First the girl turns up dead, then the police and the papers blame one of the servants, then the servant terms up dead on the terrace of the same house. But the only story to come out of it is that now the police are looking into the possible involvement of "a third man" in the girl's murder. A couple observations: (1) The implication of this slant on the story is obviously that the middle/upper class girl's murder desperately cries out for solution, while that of her servant is only relevant as a clue. (2) Why isn't anybody jumping to the (logical, if not founded in fact) suspicion that the family caught the servant they blamed for the girl's murder and administered their own rough justice? Why the rare instance of the press taking a conservative line, rather than jumping to conclusions for the sake of a salacious story?

Girl murder case takes a new turn

Ashok Kumar

NOIDA: In a bizarre twist to the murder of young Arushi, who was found stabbed to death at her Sector 25 house here on Friday, the body of the suspect Hemraj was found with his throat slit on the terrace of the same house on Saturday.

The 14-year-old daughter of a dentist couple was found lying in a pool of blood in her bedroom with deep stab injuries on her face and head. Her body was found by her father Rajesh Talwar when he went to her room to wake her up in the morning.

The police had suspected the involvement of domestic help Hemraj in the crime as they found him “missing”. A reward of Rs.20,000 had also been announced for providing any information leading to him.

However, the case turned on its head on Saturday when retired senior police officer K.K. Gautam staying in the neighbourhood of the family discovered the brutally stabbed body of Hemraj on the terrace of the same building on Saturday afternoon. The officer had gone to the house of the Talwars to convey his condolences to the bereaved family and apparently his cop instincts took him towards the terrace.

“I had gone to the Talwars to express my condolences and went to the room of Arushi and the domestic help to have a look at the crime scene. I found several clues there and decided to reconstruct the sequence. Following the leads, I reached the terrace of the house and found the door locked. When the lock was broken, I was flabbergasted to find a body lying in a pool of blood. The deceased was later identified as Hemraj,” said Mr. Gautam.

In the wake of the dramatic discovery of the body from the terrace of the same house, the police said the involvement of a third person cannot be ruled out.

“The discovery of the body has completely changed the line of investigation. We are now investigating the possible involvement of a third person. There are three or four possibilities but it would not be right to discuss those at this point in time. The post-mortem report is expected to throw more light,” said SHO (Sector-20) Datta Ram Nauneria, who is investigating the case.

Based on his inspection of the crime scene, Mr. Gautam said that more than one person could be behind the murder.

“The body of Hemraj has been dragged several metres in an attempt to hide it. It cannot be the handiwork of a single man. There must be more than one person involved in the murder. Since there are no blood stains on the staircase, Hemraj must have been murdered on the terrace. The blood stains on the terrace door can help the police reach the assailants. I think the assailants could have also hid the weapon of offence somewhere on the terrace itself,” added Mr. Gautam.

aravind's book

By now, those of you with literary pretensions will already have read Aravind Adiga's first novel, The White Tiger. I'm coming a little late in the game. But nonetheless:

I don't want to "review" the book. That's something I only do for money, and, these days, I don't even do it for money, having lost my outlet for that kind of thing. But I will say that it's as good as the positive reviews make it out to be--somewhat less impressive than Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke, I think, but perhaps more skillfully executed in its own way. In a nutshell, this is all the stuff Aravind was never able to write for Time Magazine, because these problems are eternal and therefore not "news." The best thing about it is its anger.

Rather, I'd like to address a few points made by at least some of the local reviewers (who, it must be said, did not recuse themselves despite their own feelings of literary jealousy): (1) that the book is somehow flawed because it was "written for the foreign audience" (2) that the gimmick of the narrative--a letter addressed to Chinese Premiere Wen Libao--is unrealistic and (3) that the book's endorsement of violence is somehow morally repugnant.

Points 1 and 2 are really related ones. The use of the Chinese Premier is a device that allows the narrator to explain things that an Indian may already know about--which some have misread as indicating that it is written for the dreaded "foreign audience" who are always frustrating educated Indians with their insistence on seeing elephants, snake charmers, and starving people where there are none. It's a gimmick, of course. But the tone makes it clear from the beginning that it's being used with a wink and a nod, so calling Aravind out for its lack of realism is both uncharitable and absurd--essentially outing the reviewer as somebody with his own unpublished (or justly forgotten) novel someplace. The contention that the book is written for the foreign audience--as opposed, I suppose, to One Night @ The Call Center and the like--is equally ridiculous, it should go without saying. But even if "writing for the foreign audience" was actually a literary crime of some kind-- perhaps because it tempts the writer into oversimplifying? perhaps focuses him too readily on the exotic--again the tone of Aravind's book makes it crystal clear who his audience is. This book skewers India's English-speaking middle class (perhaps unfairly, at times) and takes as its "enemy" all the dreams that they hold for the country. It's not exactly a satire, but it has the same vicious bite. Who else, then, can the audience be than the people getting bitten? (See also one of Aravind's best responses to an interview question about whether it's really possible that a DRIVER might write a letter to the Chinese premier: "You're betraying your class.")

The third point, that the book's murderer hero should be caught and punished (though it's never been articulated so baldly) also betrays the class of the reviewer. The fantasy that the thousands of servants who murder their masters (seemingly more common, or more feared, based on recent newspaper reports) represent some kind of proto-revolutionaries is also a device Aravind clearly uses with a wink and a nod, his real agenda being to point out how amazing it is that there has been no great uprising against the obvious injustices faced by the poor. I suppose there were people who complained similarly about Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas (Native Son), on both sides of the black-white divide, even though Bigger did face justice in the end.

Like every novel, The White Tiger has its flaws. But as far as I can tell, the false ones that reviewers have pointed out have said more about them than about the book.

the new brt

I missed this one--but I can't resist commenting on it now.

Apparently, Delhi has decided to experiment with a "new model" for the BRT, where the buses drive in the left lane and the cars drive on the right and there's no physical barrier between the lanes. It sounds suspiciously like the way the roads were before this fiasco started, I know, but here's what chief secretary Rakesh Mehta had to say, according to the Hindustan Times: "We have decided to try out another model for the Moolchand to Delhi Gate stretch. The bus lane will be on the left, while the car lane would be in the centre. The bus lane will be painted in a different colour, and traffic police will be asked to enforce discipline." ("Stop, please! You're killing me! You had me at 'another model'," a local scribe is rumored to have remarked).

Three days later, transport minister Haroon Yusuf demystified the elusive "second model" for the Times of India. "Bus stops will remain where they are and cars will ply as usual. It is not a second pilot because we are not doing anything at all. It will just be status quo," he said.

Apparently, he didn't get the memo that the Sheila Dikshit government was trying to save face.

cheerleaders, born in the USA

Thought you folks might like my latest opinion piece. Very erudite and serious, as it is, and as it should be, since it appears in Outlook!

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080512&fname=ACol+Jason+%28F%29&sid=1


Not long ago, a columnist for the New York Times celebrated the arrival of the Washington Redskins cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League by remarking that this hallowed event must surely signal that India now more than ever looks to America, rather than Britain or Europe, as its model for cultural development. Apparently, while you are still playing cricket—a kind of baseball with a flat bat—you are now doing it in a satisfyingly snazzed-up American way.

As a red-blooded Yankee with a more than passing love for the steroid-pumped spectacle of the US National Football League (the one with armour and the funny-looking ball), as well as the more historic American standbys of Mom, baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, I felt my eyes well with sentimental tears. Not since the foul-mouthed hulks from Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment toured India has American culture had so representative an emissary as the humble and hardworking cheerleader.

Keep your Ramanujan and your 6,00,000 engineers a year. So you invented zero. Discovered it. Whatever. It's a number for losers anyway. For statistical and mathematical gimcrackery, we'll take our guys any day. Consider P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter who calculated, "There's a sucker born every minute." Or, of course, Earl Whipple, who invented the giant foam finger, aid to sports fans everywhere, that eloquently proclaims "We're Number One!" Anyway, what's math compared with Reality TV? Most of your software geeks are even now cracking open cans of Budweiser, and watching large-bosomed women wolf down plates of worms on Fear Factor. Yes, readers, I will say it. American culture has converted "pop" into a celebration of the dumb. Today's Elvis is Britney Spears. Genius!

Naturally, I was stunned to discover that not all Indians have greeted our scantily-clad emissaries with my own enthusiasm. Some members of Parliament have rashly sought to ban them, others to curb their freedom of expression by imprisoning them in pants. Clearly, this is both prudish and undemocratic. Worse, even, than rejecting our nukes.

It is obvious from America's present ascendancy in economic and political affairs that the dumb-beats-smart phenomenon is not limited to sports and entertainment—stupidity and vulgarity triumph over reason and good taste in all arenas. To prove this to the world, we elected George W. Bush, a former cheerleader. Twice! It is now time for you to fall in line. You're starting to get the hang of stupidity. So far you are doing very well with Indian Idol and Nach Baliye, and Bollywood has mastered the art of stealing Hollywood plotlines and denuding them of their last vestiges of intelligence. You even refer to Vijay Mallya as "doctor". Why baulk at the bimbos?

Most Americans—who, to be quite honest, remain perplexed about why Christopher Columbus was looking for India in the first place—are blissfully ignorant of this blatant slap in the face. But were they to read of it, perhaps at the end of an amusing story about a eunuch who has run for mayor or a village woman who has married an elephant, it would only confirm their convictions that we are embroiled in a battle more perilous than the one we fought against communism. The truth is, we can't help but feel we are beset on all sides, because we are! No matter which backward country to which we bring the joys of freedom and democracy—processed food, bleach blondes, and some other stuff to do with civil rights and powerful detergents and whatnot—the people greet our sharp-dressed marketing executives and our fresh-faced soldiers the same way: with suspicion and distrust. When even our cheerleaders—who did for the ballerina what Velveeta cheese spread did for brie—receive such a reception, it is no surprise we're always wondering, "Why do they hate us so?" Ours is an utterly thankless task.

Perhaps a bit of background is needed, if the cheerleader is to make a comeback in an India worthy of KFC. Once upon a time, American sports were primitive and wholesome, like cricket, and there were no cheerleaders for the professional teams. (Now only Major League Baseball remains sadly bimboless). Cheerleading began at the University of Minnesota in 1898. Through what now seems an obvious oversight, the squads were all-male until 1923. But as it evolved, a dearth of athletic activities for women made cheerleading into a sort of substitute sport for the fairer sex. The original purpose, that is the leading of the crowd in cheers ("Rah, rah, ree! Kick 'em in the knee! Rah, rah, rass! Kick 'em in the other knee!") has long since been forgotten. The crowd is better at organising its own cheers anyway, and the players have money and performance-enhancing drugs to keep them motivated. But high school cheerleaders—like Olivia Newton John's character Sandy in Grease, or more recently the characters played by Mena Suvari in American Beauty and Hayden Panettiere in Heroes—have become iconic representations of America's youthful exuberance: contortionist Lolitas in tiny skirts, fresh and innocent...or maybe not.

Still more progress was made in the Farrah Fawcett 1970s by the cheerleaders for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys ("America's Team") who scrapped the virginal facade and made cheerleading unapologetically sexy. In tiny white hot pants, white cowboy boots and cowboy hats, they merged the worldly glamour of the Coffee, Tea or Me era airhostess with Playboy's liberated (but still pliant) bombshell. Now, professional cheerleaders look and perform less like wholesome girls filled with school spirit than like the entertainers known in America as "exotic dancers". You may not understand, but this transformation has reached its peak in India, where they play a wonderful double role—first as women with remarkable (if surgically enhanced) bodies, and second as the white, blonde temptresses of the West—in encouraging India's much ballyhooed rise.

I dare say this important reinforcement of femininity—cheering for men, rather than playing on a team yourself—has been no less important than the Barbie Doll. But it is faltering in America, due to a foolish new emphasis on women's athletics. Not long ago, for instance, when a mother in Texas committed first-degree murder to make sure her daughter made the cheerleading squad, the court was not sympathetic. The judges failed to see she was defending a vital American tradition that is now under serious threat.

Today, it is mostly in nostalgic films and TV shows that the cheerleaders are the most beautiful and popular girls, ruling the school together with the male athletes in their varsity letterman jackets, tormenting the smart kids by pushing their heads down the toilet and similar time-honoured pastimes. In real life, sad changes are afoot. At the school I attended, for instance, the pretty girls turned up their noses at cheerleading, letting those who were plain and slightly overweight fill in the ranks. The guys who played guitar and could dance—even some "straight A students", what we call the kids who ace all the exams—had more girlfriends than the football players. Something has to be done to stop this perversion of the natural order of things.

Thankfully, as it did with the Miss Universe pageant, India has stepped forward to shoulder the burden, casting off benighted traditions like purdah and socialism. It is high time somebody said it. Like the editorial staff of the Indian Express, who last week decried the joyless opposition to the "shiny, happy girls who inject a bit of pep into the IPL".So brave it was, it reminded me of a red-white-and-blue declaration along similar lines: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

how americans can solve the food crisis

Recently, Condi Rice, who apparently thought her surname qualified her to weigh in, incensed Indians by implying that India and China are causing the food crisis because these days they can afford to eat better. Alongside this unsettling truth--vaguely reminiscent of Swift's Modest Proposal, but made in all seriousness--Condi could have made a fair number of equally useless observations on how America could solve the food crisis.

(1) By dieting.
Americans are too fat. We used to be pleasantly obese, a sign of our great wealth and relaxed lifestyles. Now we're just sick. If we're not grossly overweight--I'm talking bending the steel picnic table benches at Dairy Queen--then we're hooked up to our ipods and frenetically exercising, like Hamsters on one of those pointless wheels, to burn all the calories we consume. If everybody would stop eating so damn much, all this talk about the food crisis could stop.

(2) By eating less meat.
A cow eats a lot of grain before you slaughter it for its steaks. How does India feed 17 percent of the world's population with only 3 percent of its arable land (or whatever) and farms that are less than half as productive as America's? It's simple. They're vegetarians. And, even if they eat meat, they don't eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday the way Americans do. (Unless Condi is right).

(3) By cutting back on junk food.
How much flour can one person eat? Not very much, if every time you feel the need for wheat you have to get out a bag of the stuff and mix it up with water and yeast to make a loaf of bread. As far as I'm concerned, the food crisis should be blamed on the people at Nabisco, who make too many delicious cookies, snack cakes and crispy fried things. It makes it almost impossible for anybody to achieve point 1, even if they manage to achieve point 2.

what's the status of the other "n word," anyway?

More and more recently I'm running across the word Negro in literary and popular fiction--and maybe even here and there in a magazine. Now, I know that the N word is totally out of bounds, except to hip hop artists. But I was under the impression that Negro was sort of N-lite (well, maybe zero calorie N). And now here it is back again. What's the deal? Is Negro a racist term or not, or is it just like saying Formosa instead of Taiwan or Burma instead of Myanmar?

what if andrew symonds burst into tears?

(Warning to American readers: What follows is about cricket)

As I watched the aftermath of Harbhajan Singh's infamous slap, I couldn't help but feel that the way Sreesanth's breakdown was treated says something nice about Indian culture, or at least the Indian media. If Andrew Symonds had burst into tears, mucous running down his face, when Harbhajan called him a monkey, you can bet that the Australian press would have been all over him. Crybaby! Then again, maybe he'd have seen Harbhajan get the fine/ban he deserved for racism.

Here in India, though, despite Punjab's reputation for machismo, Sreesanth has been given a carte blanche for letting his tears flow. Even though he has repeatedly acted the tough guy on the pitch, nobody has dared to suggest that the next time he gives a batsman his baleful glare, the guy will just laugh and warn him that he might get his behind paddled, or caution him lest he get overwhelmed by his emotions. You can be sure that America's sports columnists would be over the moon at the opportunity. We've already joked about it in one movie (OK-a chick flick). But it's true. There's no crying in baseball.

More significantly, though, I wonder how Harbhajan would have been punished if Sreesanth had not bawled in Yuvraj Singh's arms on national TV. What if Sreesanth had instead fumed in anger, and complained to the board (like the Australians)? Would Harbhajan have received an 11-match ban, losing 30 million rupees? I think not.

The punishment needs to fit the crime. A little slap is certainly wrong--we can't condone violence--but 4 matches / 1 crore would have been more than sufficient to send that message. I think what is happening here is that the board is making up for its failure to punish Harbhajan for his much more serious offense--the racial slur he busted out in Australia. At that time, they blew with the prevailing wind rather than take a tough decision and send a clear message to the players. And now, no surprise, they're doing the same thing.

The only stunning thing was that India sided with the sensitive southie, instead of the tough guy from the north who did what any Bollywood hero would do and everybody is always talking about.... Delivered "one tight slap" to a guy who (frankly) has been asking for it since he first stepped on the pitch.

electricity, heat and traffic

Does anybody know if Delhi (or any Indian city) has ever contemplated adopting climate-based work schedules, or even shifts, to reduce the burden on the power and transport infrastructure? It occurred to me the other day during the height of the BRT fiasco that there's never any traffic on the roads before about 8:30 a.m. Then there's a jam that lasts from about 9:15 until 11:30--when it appears most people actually start work. (Anyway, I can never get anybody on the phone before then).

At our house, there's a power cut most mornings around 10 a.m. and sometimes another one at 10 p.m.--not too long, thankfully--presumably because the guys who overcharge us need to shed some of the load. Then there's all that talk about not running your geyser (aka water heater) in the mornings, etc, etc.

What would happen if businesses were encouraged to run from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. -- perhaps with preferential power tariffs, guaranteed insulation from power cuts, or something? Others could continue their usual 11:30 to 7:30 schedule (during which time no work is done between 11:30 and 1 and 6 and 7:30 as far as I can tell). But maybe it would help a bit....

In any case, the roads would clear up if half the people finished their commute before the others got out of bed.

of scanty skirts and snazzy uniforms

First it was the purists decrying the dastardly practice of paying cricketers real money--though only a pittance compared with the sums paid to professional athletes in baseball, basketball, football and soccer. Now the BBC has even weighed in--against the bastardization of the game with cheerleaders, fireworks, music, Bollywood stars, and other fanfare.

Though I have to say there's something especially sleazy about the cheerleaders--perhaps because they had to be imported from foreign shores since no local woman would be caught dead with her tits out on national TV--and notwithstanding my general loathing for the monopolist tactics of the BCCI... I have to say that I love the Indian Premier League--pompous name or not. I don't care about the hoopla. I never watch Extraaaaaa Innings anyway, so I don't see much of it. But the games are fun, and it's refreshing to see the mix of international players on each side.

No, it's not because I'm an American and I can't sit through a One Day International or even (gulp) a Test. I've been known to watch a whole series at one go. And no, CNN/IBN, there are no cheerleaders in baseball, even in the debauched USA. Only football and basketball. And only in the pro games do they look and perform like a dance team selected from the country's top strip clubs. In college, they're a bit more like gymnasts, and the terribly short skirts can remain a tasteful nod to so-called "necessity"--like in women's tennis--so that dry-mouthed leches can retain their veneer of respectability.

Go Daredevils!

fixing BRTS

Already, with a several million dollar destruction project lurking like an unacknowledged elephant in the room, the fingerpointing has begun. Who is to blame for the BRTS? Is nobody in charge? We need somebody in charge. A new committee! A new chairman! A new office! It would really be a lot of fun if I didn't rely on this route to get to Andhra Bhavan for the unlimited thali.

The latest "convoluted solution" according to CNN/IBN includes removing the Blueline buses from the corridor. I'm not sure that this makes any sense--surely since the centre lanes are virtually empty it would be better to push the Bluelines into them along with the fabled DTC "low floor, A/C buses". But I won't go into that.

In the meantime, they've decided to let taxis with yellow number plates use the (almost empty) center lanes. This makes no sense whatsoever. First of all, there aren't all that many taxis. Second, they are no better than cars in terms of environmental impact (or safety, or whatever). A much more sensible proposal would be to make the BRTS center lane available as a carpool lane--any vehicle allowed in provided it contains at least four passengers including the driver. This would alleviate some of the pressure on the two "slowspeed car lanes", and encourage people to share rides rather than take separate vehicles, thus reducing the number of cars on the road or simply rewarding those people with a smaller "carbon footprint." Fines for driving in the carpool lane with fewer than the required number of passengers should be set at Rs. 5000. I'm no expert on cops, bribery, etc. But perhaps it would work if all the fines were assessed by mail through the central office, and marshals were equipped with digital cameras to record the license numbers of offenders.

I know. I'm getting crazy here. Wait, maybe we could give them all Simputers! No, Nokia Communicators! No, laptops!

Maybe we should save everybody the headache and start ripping up the lane barriers again.

brt: what is it for?

According to the newspapers and TV channels, Delhi's newly opened Bus Rapid Transit System (or BRTS) has already been a dismal failure. The move to build separate lanes and bus stops in the center of the road for buses, so they don't have to weave back and forth amid the bicyclists, pedestrians and delivery carts to make their stops, has done nothing to relieve traffic congestion in the car lanes. But was that ever what it was intended to do?

From the outset, we've heard that the BRTS would be all things to all people. First, it was supposed to relieve congestion on the route and make things safer for bicyclists and pedestrians by reining in the (mad) bus drivers and encouraging car drivers to opt for public transport instead. Then, Post-Nano, it was the solution to Delhi's air pollution woes, a feat that can only be accomplished by reducing the number of drivers. Then, when the anti-Metro lobby got ahold of the idea, it was supposed to be a more equitable and humane form of transport for the millions of poor people who presently are at the mercy of the Bluelines and DTC, which hasn't upgraded its fleet in eons despite (I believe) a Supreme Court edict ordering it to do so.

Was it ever possible that it could accomplish all these things while simultaneously making the way faster and smoother for cars? Of course not. When you reduce the number of lanes from three to two, traffic slows down. That is an inescapable rule of urban planning. In order to ease congestion, the BRT essentially has to force people to give up their cars and take the bus. And because there are no other measures to do so--such as high license fees, restrictions on entering the city center, etc--the only way to do that is to MAKE CONGESTION WORSE.

Now the bus takes 30 minutes to do the route it takes you an hour and a half by car. We shouldn't be surprised. That was exactly what the BRT was designed to accomplish. But is it a good thing? Should the city be designed to improve the lives of the greatest number of people, or for the people who have money? Chaos has surely resulted. But maybe it is the kind of chaos that Delhi needs--lest we spend the tax money intended to develop the country building air-conditioned passages from every posh South Delhi house to every elite shopping mall and five-star hotel.

if a crowd roars in the stadium, and nobody covers it, does it make a noise?

Clearly, no country can afford to boycott the Beijing Olympics, despite the compelling reasons to do so. But the world's major media outlets could. Imagine the impact if no reporters turned up. The broadcast would go forward--too much money has been invested. But what if nobody tuned in?

A news media and fan blackout could actually be more effective than a national boycott.

The question is whether anybody has the balls, or we'll once again trot out our platitudes about objectivity.

I guess you already know the answer to that one.

boycott!

I lived in Beijing from 1994 to 1996 and again in 1998. I still have many friends in China, and I consider myself to be "a friend to China" as the old phrase goes.

In spite, or perhaps because of that, I was dismayed to see that Beijing has once again opted for a violent solution to civil protest in Tibet over its continuous and absolute suppression of individual freedoms.

The only morally acceptable response is to to boycott the Beijing Olympics. If we don't, and we certainly will not, addicted as we are to cheap Chinese goods, nothing we will say about human rights will have a shred of credibility.

Already, I have been blacklisted by the CHinese embassy in Delhi because I foolishly sought a journalist visa to write what would have been a very complimentary article about the Chinese auto industry. (Meanwhile, in India, I have complete freedom to try to unearth stories of scandal and corruption wherever I may find them). I'm systematically forcing myself to forget my Chinese, driving it out with Hindi. Now I'll go a step further.

I will not watch a minute of the Olympics. I won't read a word about it. I don't care who wins. AS far as I'm concerned, it has already been a colossal failure for China, proving that no matter how fast their economy grows and how vibrant their people bloom, the government will remain paranoid, weak and petty.

cheap, not dirty

The unveiling of Tata Motors' people's car—perhaps the most highly anticipated vehicle in more than a decade worldwide--had all the frenzied atmosphere of a celebrity perp walk. A hundred or more photographers jostled for position in front of the dais where the as yet unnamed economy car was to be revealed. Usually cynical old hacks burst into applause and even whistles when chairman Ratan Tata, after implicitly comparing the company's achievement to the first flight by the Wright Brothers and the invention of the computer, revealed that the car will be called the Nano and despite all speculation to the contrary it will indeed retail for the target price of 100,000 rupees (or $2500). “A promise is a promise,” was the line that got them.

There was good reason for the excitement. The Nano has been under development for four years, during which time no pictures have leaked to the media and only a handful of details about it had been revealed. It costs less than half the amount that Maruti Suzuki—the current market leader in India—charges for its cheapest model. And, as Tata himself revealed at the press conference, the first models to roll off the company's assembly line in Singur, West Bengal, will get about 20 kilometers per liter of gasoline (50 mpg), pass the head-on crash test mandated by Indian regulators and also the offset and side impact crash tests required abroad, and meet stringent European emissions standards that have yet to be adopted in India.

Tata's emphasis on these performance features was well considered. He has repeatedly insisted that the Nano will outperform India's current emissions standards, pollute less per engine than the motorcycles and scooters it is intended to replace, and get roughly the same gas mileage as the market-leading Maruti models. But he has been beleaguered by doomsday predictions from India's leading environmentalists. The most notable among them was Nobel prize winning climatologist RK Pachauri, who said last month that he feared Tata's cheap car for the masses would prove to be an environmental nightmare. “We will emit less pollutants than the best two-wheelers in the country. I don't mean per passenger mile or anything. I mean per vehicle. So I am both amused and intrigued by why we are being banned as an environmental disaster.”

To be sure, pollution and traffic conditions in India's cities are grim. A ten-mile drive across town during the morning commute can take an hour and a half or even more, as drivers forge eight lanes out of two lane roads and scrum for position—horns blaring—like NASCAR competitors. Worse still, as Anumita Roy Chowdhury, associate director of New Delhi's Center for Science and the Environment, points out, more than half of India's cities suffer from air pollution levels that are officially classified as critical. In Delhi, for instance, which has the largest number of registered vehicles in the country, adding about a thousand new vehicles per day, but has also forced taxis, auto rickshaws and buses to shift to less polluting natural gas, respiratory diseases are 12 times more common than the national average. That's not surprising. In the city's central Connaught Place district, the density of air pollutants at peak hours ranges between 286 and 617 micrograms per cubic meter—as much as 30 times the level that the World Health Organization says is a safe target for such particles.

It is also certain that the Nano will inspire other manufacturers to develop their own cheap cars and force Maruti Suzuki, at least, to slash prices to continue to compete in the economy segment. And both developments will have the effect of rapidly increasing the number of new cars hitting the road in India over the next five years. But the assertion that Tata's Nano--a car for the masses that, it is claimed anyway, will emit fewer toxic particles than the millions of vehicles currently on the road—will drive the already terrible situation to the brink of disaster both suggests that the car manufacturer is responsible for everything from building roads to encouraging carpooling and implies that for some reason India's poor should not be allowed to drive cars so as to make life as convenient and pleasant as possible for India's rich. “Were we to succeed and sell 500,000 small cars every year, we would then, at the end of five years, constitute approximately 2.5 percent of all passenger vehicles in this country,” Tata said. “We could hardly be considered a nightmare, [as] has been raised about our small car.”

Indeed, the Nano is hardly the principal culprit. Currently, much of India requires only Euro 2 emissions standards, which are ten years out of date, the diesel fuel and gasoline sold in the nation's pumps is so dirty that even engines equipped with modern emissions technology still pollute more than the current European norms, and there are few, if any, government measures to penalize gas-guzzlers or discourage unnecessary driving. “Currently, if you look at the way our transport system is taxed,” says Chowdhury, “The tax is actually higher per person for a bus than it is for a car.”

The real danger, therefore, is not from the Nano itself but from its potential effect on policymakers, who have been somewhat schizophrenically pushing India as a global hub for the manufacturing of small cars and scrambling to improve the public transportation infrastructure to make its cities more livable. If Tata distracts India's leaders from the latter mission by convincing them that one day everybody from the shoeshine boy to the president will be driving a Nano, and India's economy will develop along the path beaten by America and Henry Ford's Model T, that will indeed be disastrous. But if all goes well, the Nano could actually have a positive environmental impact. By setting the benchmark for emissions standards higher, and still producing the car for less money than its competitors, Tata has scuttled the perception that a car has to run dirty to be cheap. And by raising the specter of cities choked by even worse gridlock, it could spur city and state governments into action on infrastructure and public transport projects like the introduction of low-cost airlines and the huge surge in air travel did for the Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai airports. In India, nothing happens until it is clear that a disaster is around the corner if it doesn't.

Tata's Nano could be that kind of disaster. A good one.

few defenders

Surprisingly, Ratan Tata has had few defenders in India in the leadup to the launch of his one-lakh Nano, a car that was first greeted with disbelief by global competitors and then scorn by environmentalists who have yet to take to bicycles themselves. In my estimate, there's more than a little racism and elitism here, along the lines of "brown people can't make good cars" and "the world will go to hell if poor people are allowed to drive."

One of the most interesting, though somewhat long-winded takes came from an unusual source--a guy named Vivek Sharma writing on a site called, of all things, domain-b.com.

the world's cheapest wheels

When Tata Motors set out to build a $2,500 car, people said it couldn't be done. This week the company will unveil its vehicle of the future.

By Jason Overdorf
(Newsweek January 14, 2008)

Tata Motors is best known as a maker of industrial trucks from India's rust belt that launched the country's first completely indigenous passenger car, the Indica, 10 years ago. Next week the company will unveil another revolutionary new vehicle that will throw down the gauntlet in the highly competitive race to capture the first-time-buyer segment of the world's automobile market. Tata's not-so-secret weapon: the car is cheap. Unbelievably cheap.

Back in 2003, when chairman Ratan Tata revealed his plans to build a car that would cost less than 100,000 rupees (about $2,500 in today's dollars), rival carmakers said it couldn't be done. As time passed, and Tata kept at it, they hedged. Maybe it will be more like an enclosed motorcycle, they said. As tantalizing details about the car's design leaked, they started to get worried. Finally, in April, Renault-Nissan's Carlos Ghosn announced his own plans to build a $3,000 car in partnership with Indian motorcycle maker Bajaj Auto.

The move signaled that the race to create the world's best-selling starter car was on. The stakes are incredibly high, which is why the international auto industry is descending in unprecedented numbers on the New Delhi Auto Expo, where Tata will reveal the design for its People's Car for the first time on Jan. 10. The vehicle could have almost as large an impact in India as the original Volkswagen had in Germany back in 1938—perhaps doubling the size of India's passenger-car market overnight, and delivering a much-needed boost to the manufacturing sector in a country that has long suffered from so-called jobless growth. By encouraging parts suppliers to develop innovative ways to slash costs, it could also help build a highly efficient supply chain for the Indian automotive industry.

But the tremors won't be felt only in India. Small cars like VW's Gol, Nissan's Tsuru and Renault's Clio are already the top sellers in Latin America and Europe, and PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that about half the growth in automobile sales between 2006 and 2011 will come from Brazil, Russia, India and China, countries that are expected to buy mainly small, cheap vehicles. Even in gas-guzzling America, where the cheapest car is today the $10,000 Chevy Aveo, buyers are warming up to subcompacts. As a result, virtually all of the world's major automakers are striving to develop cheap, fuel-efficient small cars that can first be sold in emerging markets, then exported to the West.

Until the past year, these cars were meant to be sub-$10,000 vehicles like the Renault Logan. Now, with Tata setting the limbo stick much lower, the price target has been slashed to below $5,000. Add to that Tata's pole position in the bidding to buy the premium Jaguar and Rover brands from Ford Motor Co., and it truly looks like the Indian carmaker has arrived.

If successful, the People's Car could help shift the growth dynamic of the entire Indian economy, which has until recently been based more on service than manufacturing expertise. When Suzuki first brought the Maruti 800 (currently the world's cheapest car at about $5,000) to India in 1983, it completely transformed the domestic component business, laying the foundation for India's current emergence as an auto-parts hub. Suzuki's Indian factories have always built for the domestic market, but recently it announced it will sell an Indian-made hatchback in Europe next year. Others have also set up production in India, attracted by its large domestic market and growing components expertise. Hyundai has been the most aggressive in its efforts to make India a manufacturing hub. It exported more than 100,000 cars built here to Europe, South Africa and Latin America last year, and it chose India as the site for the global launch of its new compact model, the i10. But even Ford and General Motors, slower to see India's potential, have ramped up their efforts.

Analysts are even more bullish on Tata's plans. "There's no doubt this car is going to create a new [automotive] segment altogether," says Abdul Majeed, a partner in the automotive practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers. "If you look at the Indian automotive market, the bulk of it—over 70 percent—is two-wheelers. But the price gap between two-wheelers and four-wheelers has been very significant." The price tag for the People's Car is a bit more than double the cost of a midrange motorcycle, like Hero Honda's 100cc Splendor. Majeed forecasts that Tata's new car could encourage 10 to 20 percent of India's scooter and motorcycle buyers to purchase a car instead. If that happens, it would mean an additional 1.8 million vehicles sold per year—almost equal to the current size of the entire Indian passenger-car market.

Most analysts are waiting for a view of the car before pegging sales estimates—a task made difficult because Ratan Tata has played his cards very close to the vest in the three-year lead-up to the launch of the People's Car, revealing almost nothing about the design and features of the vehicle, or how the company managed to slash costs—both of which will define how the car affects the global industry. Prototypes have been as jealously guarded. Virtually all that is known for sure about the car so far—courtesy of a scripted "leak" by one of the company directors after Nobel Prize-winning climatologist R. K. Pachauri suggested the People's Car could be an environmentalist's nightmare if it vastly increases numbers on the road—is that it gets 25 kilometers per liter (59 miles per gallon) of gasoline, meets European emissions standards and matches the Maruti 800 in acceleration. It was also revealed that the car uses more plastic and fewer bolts than conventional designs, lending credence to rumors that Tata engineers visited Lotus in Malaysia to study adhesive bonding as an alternative to welding.

But its other cost-saving measures could have the biggest impact. Promising huge sales volumes, Tata has worked closely with components suppliers to bring the price of each part into a predetermined target range. The efforts are reminiscent of the techniques Tata used a few years back to bring down the price of the Ace, India's first mini-pickup truck, to about $6,000—close to the cost of the three-wheeled vehicles generally used for small jobs. In a considerable feat of engineering, the company came up with a design that allowed it to cut two engines for the Ace from the same block it used for the Indica. Not only did that allow the company to avoid building a new assembly facility, it also allowed it to capitalize on further economies of scale. If the People's Car shows more of the same, Tata—and India—may well win the race to miniaturize the automobile.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/84503

this just in: i ramble for rupees, too

Check out my latest word spew in Outlook. Don't worry, it's not a treatise about Narendra Modi or anything.

The headline reads:
Objective Observations By A Ludicrous Freak
Often, it all ends up as a strange, involuntary, one-man circus act by a bald white man

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080114&fname=JDCol+Jason&sid=1

5:30 am - the annoying righteous

As I am once again driven from bed by a mob of drum-toting chanters intent on proving to the neighborhood how devout they are, I can't help but think (once again) god must be hard of hearing. Why else is such volume necessary? To wake me up? To get revenge on all the non-religious folks who don't crawl out of bed before the sun comes up? Nope. Apparently, although he/she is all powerful, all knowing and all seeing, god is not all hearing. It explains a lot, actually. Otherwise he/she really isn't much on the ball.

cashless in the hinterlands

Here's my latest article from Newsweek. Old news for some people, I know. But maybe a few new tidbits in there....

Cashless in the Hinterlands
By Jason Overdorf
Mobile banking might save the government and banks money and reduce fraud that plagues the public-distribution system.

Newsweek Dec. 8

Mobile phones are making life better for people in remote, underserved areas of India. They no longer have to walk kilometers to public call offices to use a telephone—an essential tool for buying and selling goods based on the latest market data, getting credit from lenders and other commonplace activities. So far, most of the benefits have come from one of the phone's simplest features: voice calls.

With more than 250 million mobile users and 6 million new ones added each month, India now has the "teledensity" to support more-sophisticated mobile technologies, which could have a big impact on Indian society and the economy in the next few years. (An extra 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country leads to an additional 0.59 percentage points of growth in GDP per person, according to a London Business School study.) These include "voice broadcast" services that would let a truck owner inform residents of a village about a scheduled trip to the city, or doctors announce the availability of polio vaccinations. A more complex system would allow a small business, say, to keep track of shipments. What's holding up these services is the lack of mobile banking.

With urban markets nearing saturation, global giants like Nokia are now looking to appeal to the hinterlands. Reliance Communications, which has offered Internet service over its mobile phones since 2002, is sponsoring a contest this year for developers to invent new rural services. "We want to really take advantage of our mobile platform, our data network, and our ability to provide the mobile Internet experience to bridge the digital divide," says Mahesh Prasad, president of applications and development.

Several small companies are at work on mobile banking for small businesses. New Delhi-based ekgaon technologies has developed a system for tracking transactions made by so-called Self Help Groups, which pool members' money and offer small loans to poor people. The system uses a camera-equipped mobile phone to scan forms and a voice-recognition system. A.Little.World, a mobile software business in Mumbai, has developed a microfinance and payment system that lets customers perform banking transactions through a local agent affiliated with a bank (a practice allowed for the first time in January 2006). Customers get a secure electronic identity via phone or smart card; agents take deposits and dispense cash. Biometric data, such as fingerprints, make the phones and smart cards more secure than paper-based banking. A.Little.World has extended such services to about 400 local businesses acting as agents. And it's now working on a national rollout with the State Bank of India—the biggest player in the rural market. Meanwhile, ekgaon, whose partners include CARE, WorldVision and the World Bank, has a pilot transaction-management system for 10,000 Self Help Groups, with plans to extend it to 14 Indian states.

Mobile banking services can reduce the cost of transactions for loans and other services—the main obstacle to providing banking for the poor—by as much as three quarters, according to ekgaon's chief operating officer Rohit Magotra. Mobile transactions could have an even broader effect applied to India's social-security payments and public-distribution system, which sells essential goods to the poor at subsidized rates. By March 2008, people in 8,000 villages in Andhra Pradesh will get their benefits zapped via mobile phone to their smart cards, which they may eventually use instead of cash to buy goods at the ration shop. A.Little.World, which is building the system, says a nationwide service could help reduce fraud in the public-distribution system. It would also mean going from a bankless world to a cashless one, maybe even faster than America or Europe.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/74440

new best beer candidate

And the winner is.... Kingfisher Draft in the ugly yellow can! Yep, that's right folks. It's better than the original (by a mile) and even better than the export variety packaged in the little pint bottles. Pricewise it's nice, too. Rs. 35 for 500 ml, compared with Rs. 20 for 330 ml for the pints (last year's winner).

Now: Who represents Paulaner over here, anyway? I want that stuff down below Rs. 100 a pint pronto!

what to do for xmas and new year's?

Readers:
What the hell is going on in Delhi for Christmas and New Year's Eve? So far, I've read about a couple buffet dinners for Christmas, some church services (of course), and that's it! Aren't there supposed to be legions of turkey roasts at the various five stars? Which one is the best (and cheapest?)

As for New Year's Eve, do I HAVE to go to Mumbai and watch one of those floor shows with Rakhi Sawant (see earlier post). Or can I get my groove on here, even though I have no posh friends with luxurious farmhouses?

Where to go? What to do?

no sex for the poor

Yet another slam on Rakhi Sawant in the paper the other day, this time by some fifth-tier would-be star who's doing a sexploitation flick and trying to spin it as highbrow stuff. (Why, why, why do Bollywood people try to do this? High brow talk and Bollywood don't mix any better than high brow movies and Bollywood. Maybe it's because they're such "vorashous" readers?)

Anyway, on to my point. She said something like "It's not tarty like Rakhi Sawant," and I immediately thought here it is again: the upper / upper middle class suggesting that you can't be sexy (only slutty) if you come from a family of modest means. First it was Mallika Sherawat, who was hammered for wearing revealing clothes that were far less revealing than Malaika Arora's. Now it's Rakhi Sawant.

Seems to me it's not what they wear, or what they say (though the fact that they're outspoken appears to be a bigger offense). It's who they are. "Regular" folks who dare to challenge the upper crust's monopoly on moral transgression. The implicit argument appears to run: If they don't remember their "place" as women, next thing you know, they'll be forgetting their "place" as poor provincials. And it's amazing the amount of firepower that's brought into play to try to keep that from happening. All the stars bring out the knives on the chat shows. The newspapers jump on the bandwagon. And on and on.

India blowing its big chance...

In case you haven't seen this week's Newsweek, the cover story is "Why India is blowing its big chance" and the subject is (you guessed it) the nuclear deal with the US. Read below for my contribution: a tidbit on why the economy keeps trundling along despite Mr. Singh's recent woes.

I also wrote my own bit on the nuclear deal for Newsweek Japan (in Japanese, of course). I don't speak it or write it, but apparently I am infinitely translatable.

Those of you who hate long blog posts can stop reading now.

As for the rest of you... Imagine the following is in Japanese.

Deal or No Deal

By Jason Overdorf/New Delhi

Not long back, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a group of executives that his fractured mandate has made it difficult for his government to do “what is manifestly obvious” to maintain his country's impressive economic growth. For Singh, who is renowned, and sometimes even criticized, for his humility, that was as acerbic as it gets. But the message hidden between the lines is the one that international observers should heed: If doing the obvious is difficult, then achieving the unexpected and controversial is well-nigh impossible. And unfortunately, by pushing forward a nuclear deal with the United States, that is exactly what the man often called India's weakest prime minister in history has set out to do.

To many, the nuclear pact, which was clinched between the two governments in August, does indeed seem obvious. For India, it is essentially an invitation to come in from the cold without substantially altering its nuclear policies. The pact would finalize the rollback of sanctions imposed when India tested its first nuclear device in 1974, allowing for the free transfer of technologies classified as “dual use” because they can be used for both peaceful and military projects. That in turn would spark a boom in the construction of nuclear power plants in a country which desperately needs more electrical power to meet its future targets for economic growth. For the US, the deal would provide a measure of international oversight for India's nuclear program by requiring international inspections of some of its facilities, even though it would not bring India under the ambit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It would facilitate billions of dollars worth of business agreements. And, perhaps most importantly, it would put an official stamp of sorts on India's gradual alignment of its foreign policy objectives with America's, making the one-time leader of the Cold War's Non-Aligned Movement into a full-fledged, bankable US ally.

But there's the rub, according to policy analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research. India's left sees the deal as the first step in a major overhaul of India's foreign policy that will force it to take a strong position against Iran—which some see as a natural regional ally; reorient its military spending from Russia and other former principal allies toward the US; and take on a pre-scripted role as the US-friendly counterbalance to China in Asia. “Part of it is a trust deficit,” says Mehta. “The prime minister wants to say, 'Trust me, I'm not going to sell India out to the US. And the others are saying, 'Well.... you sort of are.'” Many in the left, in fact, believe it was only their opposition that prevented India from sending troops into Iraq. As a result, India's communists--who hold 59 seats in the parliament and thus have the power to bring down Singh's United Progressive Alliance coalition government if they choose—said in no uncertain terms that they will withdraw support for the UPA and force new elections if Singh moves to implement the pact. This week, the deal received a new lease on life as the left relented and agreed to allow the government to send negotiators to talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on a nuclear safeguards agreement that needs to be signed before the pact can be implemented. But many observers suggest the move is designed to allow Singh to save face by conveniently letting the IAEA talks fail.

Because the question of a strategic alignment with the US is a sticky one, Singh, who has yet to give up, has of late begun to emphasize the economic benefits of the deal. India desperately needs more electrical power, the argument runs, and foreign-built nuclear plants will help meet that need while decreasing India's reliance on oil and gas imports and improving carbon emissions. "It's imperative for India to diversify its energy portfolio and enhance the share of nuclear energy because its heavy and growing reliance on [imported oil and natural gas] is going to be expensive and inflationary," argues Professor Anupam Srivastava, director of the Asia Program at the University of Georgia's Center for International Trade & Security. "The government cannot subsidize energy imports beyond a point, which makes 8-10 percent economic growth simply unaffordable. And as this growth slows down to around 5%, foreign capital and technology investment will also slow down, and in turn reduce India's ability to leverage economic gains in other strategic sectors."

To avert that problem, India plans through the pact with the US to increase the share of nuclear power in its energy mix from around three percent to as high as 20 percent by 2050—a goal that would involve building more than 40 new nuclear facilities. For US nuclear suppliers, but also for French, Canadian and Russian firms, this could mean orders running into many billions of dollars over the next several years. However, the deal's opponents argue that India's nuclear power targets may be overly ambitious, and may not even be necessary. In one recent study, for instance, the international development consultancy Dalberg found that even though India will need to increase its power generation capacity from today's 127 gigawatts to around 960 gigawatts by 2032 to meet its GDP growth target of 9%, that increase can be achieved without a dramatic increase in nuclear power production and the biggest gains in emissions will come through the use of clean coal technologies. “[The government's] projections are essentially doubling what they have done historically, so there are big questions about whether they'll be able to hit these numbers,” says John Stephenson, a senior consultant at Dalberg. “And even if they do hit these numbers, it [nuclear power] is a marginal energy source.”

However, focusing on the energy aspect of the agreement—whether to insist it is necessary or to denigrate it as trivial—is to ignore its real significance. And assuming, as do many pundits in India, that the ever closer political and economic relationship between India and the United States has attained an inevitable momentum may be a mistake. “India above all wanted to end its status as a 'nuclear outcaste,'” explains Teresita C. Schaffer, director for South Asia at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The deal would accomplish this.” On the other hand, if Singh fails to push it through after the US has agreed to virtually all of India's demands, it could have serious consequences for India's future ability to conduct bilateral negotiations with the US and other nations. “It [India] will start to look like a country that can't take yes for an answer,” Schaffer says.

Meanwhile, this deal could be a “now or never” proposition. President George W. Bush's status as a conservative hawk who was willing to invade Iraq over the perceived threat of the proliferation of nuclear weapons grant him an authority to revisit the usefulness of the NPT in much the same way that former President Richard Nixon's anti-communist credentials made rapprochement with Mao Zedong politically feasible. If India blinks now, the deal will run into next year's American electoral campaign—guaranteed to put it on hold—and whatever president succeeds Bush will likely have neither the desire nor the mandate to put it back on the table. “I genuinely doubt that any successor, whether Republican or Democratic, would be in a position to make the same offer,” says Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at the University of Indiana.

Likely, that's music to the ears of India's communists.

clear skies ahead?

India's economy reaches the "takeoff" point. But will tumultuous politics put it in a holding pattern?

By Jason Overdorf/New Delhi
(Newsweek Web extra - November 24, 2007)

India's politics may be in turmoil, but so far the chaos hasn't put a crimp in the country's economy. Last quarter, GDP grew by more than 9 percent, a huge improvement over the 3.5 percent the country averaged in its first 30 years.

The explanation for the disconnect, according to a recent report by Lehman Brothers, is that India's economy has reached what experts call a "takeoff" point where the "old blocks and resistances to steady growth [have been] finally overcome." The report predicts that India's economic momentum has become virtually unstoppable, thanks to two main factors: an average 6.9 growth rate in per capita GDP since 2003, and a trade-to-GDP ratio that has doubled over the past seven years.

The surge in per capita GDP to about $800—from less than $350 in 1995—has more than doubled the size of India's middle class to about 50 million, increasing demand for consumer goods and stimulating manufacturing. The increase in the trade-to-GDP ratio shows that India's economy has finally opened up to the world as dramatically as China's and South Korea's did before it. Meanwhile, a boom has boosted India's investment-to-GDP ratio into the 30 to 40 percent range, from about 15 percent in the early 1990s—hitting the level many analysts believe was essential to the rapid growth experienced in other parts of Asia. And the trends, according to Lehman Brothers, suggest that India is just getting started. If it continues to make economic reforms, such as simplifying taxes, loosening labor laws and changing the pension system to help build a healthy corporate bond market, the economy could soon hit China's mythic 10 percent annual growth rate.

But that's a big if. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's reforms—most of which he made as finance minister between 1991 and 1996 (one reason he doesn't get credit for them now)—succeeded so well that they eliminated any sense of urgency. In this sense, the prime minister may be a victim of his own achievements. The problem, says Subir Gokarn, chief economist at Crisil, a credit-rating agency, is that "when the economy is doing so well, you cannot create a constituency for reform." The ability to make big changes, he explains, is "independent of the individual, independent of the party, independent of the system. When there's a widespread perception of crisis, then reform happens. When there isn't, it doesn't." In 1991, such a crisis atmosphere came from an exchange-rate drop that nearly depleted India's foreign-exchange reserves. But the country has faced no similar threat since 2004.

Thus reform has slowed dramatically. Singh's government has failed to take steps like relaxing India's stringent labor laws and selling off state-owned industries. That said, it has managed to make some important improvements in recent years—despite fractures within the governing coalition and the lack of an outside prod. For instance, after becoming prime minister in 2004, Singh, despite local opposition, began measures to allow foreign direct investment in the retail sector and to facilitate the creation of large domestic retail chains. He also moved to encourage public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects—potentially bringing more money and better management to one of India's biggest laggards. And he unleashed what could be the biggest stimulus for India's manufacturing sector since 1991, setting up a huge number (386) of special economic zones last year, where industry will enjoy preferential tax policies and government assistance in acquiring land. (Between 1965 and 2004, by contrast, India established only eight.)

The alignment of economic agendas between India's two largest political parties—Congress and the BJP--is perhaps the best sign of all for the country's economic future. Politics in India can prove unstable; four different governments ruled during the 1990s; the BJP-led alliance held sway from 1998 to 2003, and a coalition led by the Congress Party has ruled since 2004. But as the politicians have traded seats, economic reforms have continued apace. This suggests that despite some resistance and reluctance to make further changes, both of the major parties believe there's no going back on reforms already undertaken. Moreover, as the Lehman Brothers report points out, "The general pattern in democracies worldwide is that governments find it easier to push through reforms—and other potentially controversial legislation—earlier in their term of office." That means the 2009 general elections might give the Indian snowball another push, bringing 10 percent growth into view at last.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/72071

travel, wedding season, and general laziness

I must apologize for my long absence from this space.... The truth is that, in what is a rare occurrence, I've actually been busy. First my good school friend (yes, practically chaddi buddies, if I'm spelling that correctly) came to visit and we went off to Udaipur and then, somewhat randomly, to Leh. Then I started to get a bunch of unexpected writing assignments.

I don't know how I feel about the latter. I need the money, I like the the idea that people want me to work for them. But somehow the work itself never seems as fun as the stuff I do on my own initiative. Nevertheless, it seems to be the role of the freelancer never to say no, like some actor trapped forever in an improvisational sketch.

At the same time, we suddenly have started meeting people again, after many months spent in despair over the exodus of all our friends. It's almost funny, as in recent weeks it seems like *everybody* we meet is someone that we like so well (I know, I'm talking like we're a psychological unit, but on this score we are agreed) that we have to scheme ways to meet them again and again. Having friends, or trying to have friends, can be such a chore.

Anyway, between actually making enough money to live on, seeing a little of the country, and meeting people that I like, I've hardly had any time to complain about Delhi, fantasize about the book I'm supposed to be writing, fight with Shailaja, surf the property ads for apartments in Ghaziabad, or to ramble on existentially here, my regular access to The Void.

another newsweek article on india's economy

In case you weren't bored enough by the plethora of articles on India's economy, here Newsweek superstar George Wehrfritz and I do a little channeling of Thomas Friedman to pump up India a little before the stock market tanks. The premise: India doesn't have much of an export economy, so it will be safer in a US recession than China.

BTW: Can anybody say "bubble?"

Read on at http://www.newsweek.com/id/43340

new newsweek article on cricket

I finally convinced Newsweek to write about cricket. It wasn't easy, and along the way there was some confusion. For instance, at one point, an edit came back that suggested that a World Cup played in the one-day format instead of five-day test cricket was a brilliant new innovation. (They were talking about Twenty20 of course). But in the end, it turned out OK. It also appeared in Enterprise, a magazine for so-called "high net worth individuals," where I believe they used my complete, and therefore slightly funnier, lead paragraph.

Read on at http://www.newsweek.com/id/43341

shailaja says....

"I can't believe all these so-called experts on Indian movies keep buying into the claim that Bhool Bhulaiyya is India's first psychological thriller, when it's a remake of the Malayalam film Manichithra Thazhu!"

i'm no expat

This is a little piece I wrote for Time Out Delhi. Hopefully people took it in the spirit in which it was intended.

White Indian

I'm not an expat. I'm a white Indian. I don't brunch at the Hyatt. I don't skip town every June. I don't have kids enrolled in the American school. I don't have a housing allowance, driver or a cook. I don't say, “India is a difficult place to live, but frankly I don't know how I'm going to survive without all the help when we go back.”

It's not a point of pride. I'm just broke. I drive an eight-year-old white Maruti 800 with a massive dent in the driver's side door (don't get me started). I fly Air Deccan. I drink IMFL. I pay a little more than 10,000 a month in rent. I wobble and say yaar. I know a shameful percentage of the lyrics to “Mindblowing Mahiya.” I even have the Person of Indian Origin card. Designed for non-resident Indians, it's made me a resident non-Indian. Sometimes, in the depths of despair, I contemplate buy property in some wasteland on the road to Faridabad or beyond Ghaziabad or Rohini—places I've never been. I may never leave.

I don't know how this happened. It had something to do with quitting my job as a drone at a “financial newswire” (I used to dream of inventing a computer program to replace myself—it seemed so obvious). I was in Hong Kong, which was too expensive a place to be unemployed. I spoke Chinese, but my fiancee (now wife) did not, and China's notoriously inhospitable stance toward journalists made the simple crossover into the mainland seem much more difficult than migrating to India. Here, I've discovered as a white Indian (and freelancer), the rules are flexible. You don't comply; you do jugaad.

I don't want to complain about the country that embraced me. But it's not easy being a white Indian. Most people think I'm rich and don't know what anything costs, that I have a direct line (like the Bat phone) to the visa officers at the US embassy, that I must be finding Indian food too spicy, or that we have a deep personal bond because they have a cousin who is working in Houston. These things are trying. My neighbors know better. They think I'm a bum, or a shamelessly overgrown trust fund kid. I don't leave the house; ergo, I don't work. I'm always carrying crates of Kingfisher up the four flights of stairs to my rooftop lair. There's loud music and doors slamming at odd times of night (3 a.m., 4 a.m.--even when the puja hour begins and the guys show up for the laughing club).

And I do love the place, albeit in a repressed, white Indian kind of way. There is something wonderful about the smell of Delhi's burnt air in the summer, something inspiring about the street kids who laugh and smile when they see my newly shaven head. Indians are much wittier than Americans, whose humor relies on a sarcasm that belies an essentially naive view of the world. I revel in snatches of overheard conversations: “He is a sportsman... but only at night!” TK, TK. I like running red lights, driving like a prick and cursing at the other drivers for driving like pricks. I enjoy Delhi passtimes like drinking late night whisky in a car parked outside Salim's and booking future drinks at happy hour prices just before deadline. I “white guy” my way into things—a variation on the old Delhi version of the “do you know who I am?” I earn in dollars and spend in rupees. I ask you: For a hack, what could be better?

cricket commentary

Despite all the new activity in cricket -- new channels, two new leagues, a new world cup -- it appears to me that the sports reporting from India, and the commentary on the Indian matches, remains behind the times.

The biggest weakness, as far as I'm concerned, is not the commentators but the number crunchers "in the truck" (i.e. the guys who produce the broadcast on site). Though they do a great job of tracking the performances on the day, and the technology is great for stuff like the Hawkeye etc, their use of historical stats is very poor in comparison with the broadcasts for professional baseball, football and basketball. This is especially notable because cricket, like baseball, should be a game that lives and breathes stats.

One small example: Consider Sehwag, who stunk out the joint for match after match before he was dropped. I can't recall any substantial discussion of his stats, looking at his performances over, say, his last ten and twenty matches and taking into account the quality of the opposition. This allowed him to be selected for the World Cup when he was playing quite badly, and the same stat-ignorance allowed people to conclude that all was well after he blasted a few runs against Bermuda. Runs against bad bowling was never his problem. Consistency was. Armed with the right stats, the commentators should take the selectors to task for their poor decisions.

Which brings me to another point: Stats from domestic cricket should be picked over, analyzed and re-analyzed for hidden stories when the team brings in new players. What are the selectors using to make their decisions, if not numbers? Are they just looking at the guys and saying, "Hmmm. He looks good, and he's from Maharashtra?" Presumably, they have some basis for their arguments. But one gets the idea that they only wake up when a player has a breakout performance on a big stage--such as when Irfan Pathan blew away the opposition in the under 19 world cup a few years back. And that's a big problem for the team. Why else does a Mahendra Singh Dhoni "burst onto the scene" at such a late stage in his career? Did he suddenly become good at 27? I don't think so. He must have been doing great things in obscurity before. What were his stats? Where was he playing? Why was Patel selected and he overlooked? These are questions that should be part of the cricket coverage on an ongoing basis.

Maybe I'm wrong about the players I'm using as examples. I don't know. But if I was constantly bombarded with statistical comparisons--the way I'd be in a US sports broadcast--I'd know for sure.

surfing india

Thought you folks might want to see me catch my first wave. This was my third day on the board. Surfers: Check out www.surfingindia.net.