It's hard to guess what India's homegrown terrorist cells want. The series of low-intensity bombs that have disrupted daily life (briefly) in several of the country's major cities this year--most recently yesterday evening in Delhi--have hardly stricken terror into the hearts of the average Indian. Yesterday, for instance, gawkers rushed to the site of the attacks hoping to get on TV--big grins pasted on their faces as though it was the next best thing to bungee jumping.
So, too, the likely result of the bombs seems to be the direct opposite of what the Muslim community would like to see happen in India. First off, the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) -- which is the Indian equivalent of the US Patriot Act, and very prone to abuse by law enforcement -- becomes more certain to return with each new blast.
But worse than that, Narendra Modi's star shines brighter with every explosion. Now with the BJP convention getting ready to kick off, his role as the successor to LK Advani (whom he just might manage to eclipse BEFORE the next election) is set in stone.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 2008
no no no no no no no no no
I can't believe the bump that McCain is getting from Palin. Or that Obama seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel. Are my fellow Americans really that stupid? McCain is Bush with a slightly higher IQ, and a bit less enthusiasm for Christianity. What criteria are the respondents to the latest polls using, anyway?
I knew that the media (of which I don't really consider myself a part, sitting here in India) was exaggerating the degree to which America had moved beyond race. There's still a bunch of white folks out there who are looking for any excuse (OK, maybe subconsciously) to avoid voting for a black guy.
Unfortunately, the black guy in question seems to be the only politician in America with his finger on the pulse of what's happening, in big picture terms, in international relations. I.e. that the rest of the world is soooo over us.
I knew that the media (of which I don't really consider myself a part, sitting here in India) was exaggerating the degree to which America had moved beyond race. There's still a bunch of white folks out there who are looking for any excuse (OK, maybe subconsciously) to avoid voting for a black guy.
Unfortunately, the black guy in question seems to be the only politician in America with his finger on the pulse of what's happening, in big picture terms, in international relations. I.e. that the rest of the world is soooo over us.
Monday, August 11, 2008
when more is worse
India's vast plan to build a bevy of new schools will fix only half the problem: quantity, not quality.
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:21 PM ET Aug 9, 2008
On the sprawling campus of Delhi University, the fear in July was as palpable as the excitement. For several weeks, prospective students rushed from college to college desperately combing admission lists for their names. Never before has India offered a better chance at a comfortable life after graduation. But never has getting a seat at one of the nation's universities been so hard. And for those who do land a spot, the troubles are just beginning.
Although India's economy and its job markets are booming, the nation's university system, which has been struggling for years, has recently hit a full-fledged crisis. The country's post-secondary schools currently offer only enough spots for about 7 percent of India's college-age citizens—about half the Asian average—and face a crushing faculty shortage. Already 25 percent of teaching positions nationwide are vacant, and 57 percent of professors lack either a master's or a Ph.D., according to a recent regulatory report. Curriculums are outdated, forcing companies to spend millions of dollars on "finishing schools" for new employees. Infrastructure is crumbling even at top schools like the famed Indian Institutes of Technology, where once cutting-edge laboratories have grown obsolete. And incompetent (or, as many allege, corrupt) regulators have let fly-by-night colleges proliferate while keeping out elite foreign universities keen to break into a potentially lucrative education market.
There is one ray of hope: for the first time in decades, the nation's leader has finally recognized the gravity of the problem. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India's university system "dysfunctional" and embarked on the boldest educational reform program since Jawaharlal Nehru. But hamstrung by India's unwieldy bureaucracy and by ideological opponents, Singh may manage to dramatically expand the size of the country's higher education system without addressing many of its underlying problems.
Singh, himself a former economics professor at Delhi University, has promised to open 72 new post-secondary schools over the next five years, including eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, seven new Indian Institutes of Management, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology. To fund them, he's promised to boost the government's higher education spending ninefold, to $20 billion annually, during the five-year period that began in 2007.
But these changes may wind up addressing India's quantity problem without affecting its quality crisis. Already up to 75 percent of India's 400,000 annual technology grads and 90 percent of its 2.5 million general college grads are unable to find work. That's not due to a lack of jobs, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom)—it's due to a lack of skills. "For a long time after Independence, we were trying to solve the employment problem. Now we're trying to solve the employability problem," said Vijay Thadani, head of the Confederation of Indian Industry's committee on education. Loosening the purse strings will help Singh improve infrastructure and expand access for students, but it will take more than money to solve the faculty shortage, revamp outdated courses, encourage innovation and crack down on diploma mills. Indeed, rapid expansion could make these problems worse.
To be fair, Singh has tried to address the quality crisis. In 2005, he appointed a dream team of academics, planners and business executives to the National Knowledge Commission with a mandate to redesign India's entire education infrastructure by this October. Led by chairman Sam Pitroda—the architect of the nation's telecommunications network and thus no stranger to bureaucratic hurdles—the commission published a comprehensive set of recommendations in January 2007, focusing on "expansion, excellence and inclusion." Among its proposals, the commission advocated not only expanding the state university system but also diversifying sources of financing to include private participation, philanthropic contributions and industry links. It also suggested introducing frequent curricular revisions, moving away from the present system of standardized university-wide exams in favor of internal assessments of students by their professors, and setting up an independent regulatory authority. Yet while Singh's government has allocated a huge sum for building more universities and improving inclusiveness by expanding the quota system, it has yet to make progress on the crucial regulatory elements of the commission's plan.
That could prove disastrous. At present, India has no less than 16 different supervisory bodies for higher education, few of which are independent and all of which are of questionable efficacy. Mostly due to bureaucratic inertia, they've so far blocked attempts to modernize curriculums and methods of evaluation. They haven't done a good job at policing, either. Shoddy for-profit colleges have proliferated even as internationally respected foreign providers have been barred from opening up branch campuses and have struggled to get their joint programs certified. The All India Council of Technical Education, for example, has approved thousands of substandard private engineering colleges—many of them founded by profit-minded politicians. But it has refused to recognize the Indian School of Business, a private institution founded by former McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta. And political wrangling at the parliamentary level (engineered by Singh's erstwhile communist coalition partners) has stymied legislation to allow foreign universities to set up campuses, even though Cornell, Columbia, and Stanford universities have all sent high-ranking delegations to the country on exploratory missions.
The will to reform remains strong, at least at the top. But the prime minister and his allies haven't succeeded in actually getting much done. In his introduction to the National Knowledge Commission's second report, published this January, Pitroda warned, "there is still resistance at various levels in the government to new ideas, experimentation ... external interventions, transparency and accountability, due to rigid organizational structures with territorial mindsets." If those obstacles can't be overcome, he wrote, "increasing resources could well result in more of the same." In other words, India could end up throwing good money—a lot of it—after bad, something this nation and its students could ill afford.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/151682
Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:21 PM ET Aug 9, 2008
On the sprawling campus of Delhi University, the fear in July was as palpable as the excitement. For several weeks, prospective students rushed from college to college desperately combing admission lists for their names. Never before has India offered a better chance at a comfortable life after graduation. But never has getting a seat at one of the nation's universities been so hard. And for those who do land a spot, the troubles are just beginning.
Although India's economy and its job markets are booming, the nation's university system, which has been struggling for years, has recently hit a full-fledged crisis. The country's post-secondary schools currently offer only enough spots for about 7 percent of India's college-age citizens—about half the Asian average—and face a crushing faculty shortage. Already 25 percent of teaching positions nationwide are vacant, and 57 percent of professors lack either a master's or a Ph.D., according to a recent regulatory report. Curriculums are outdated, forcing companies to spend millions of dollars on "finishing schools" for new employees. Infrastructure is crumbling even at top schools like the famed Indian Institutes of Technology, where once cutting-edge laboratories have grown obsolete. And incompetent (or, as many allege, corrupt) regulators have let fly-by-night colleges proliferate while keeping out elite foreign universities keen to break into a potentially lucrative education market.
There is one ray of hope: for the first time in decades, the nation's leader has finally recognized the gravity of the problem. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called India's university system "dysfunctional" and embarked on the boldest educational reform program since Jawaharlal Nehru. But hamstrung by India's unwieldy bureaucracy and by ideological opponents, Singh may manage to dramatically expand the size of the country's higher education system without addressing many of its underlying problems.
Singh, himself a former economics professor at Delhi University, has promised to open 72 new post-secondary schools over the next five years, including eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, seven new Indian Institutes of Management, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology. To fund them, he's promised to boost the government's higher education spending ninefold, to $20 billion annually, during the five-year period that began in 2007.
But these changes may wind up addressing India's quantity problem without affecting its quality crisis. Already up to 75 percent of India's 400,000 annual technology grads and 90 percent of its 2.5 million general college grads are unable to find work. That's not due to a lack of jobs, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom)—it's due to a lack of skills. "For a long time after Independence, we were trying to solve the employment problem. Now we're trying to solve the employability problem," said Vijay Thadani, head of the Confederation of Indian Industry's committee on education. Loosening the purse strings will help Singh improve infrastructure and expand access for students, but it will take more than money to solve the faculty shortage, revamp outdated courses, encourage innovation and crack down on diploma mills. Indeed, rapid expansion could make these problems worse.
To be fair, Singh has tried to address the quality crisis. In 2005, he appointed a dream team of academics, planners and business executives to the National Knowledge Commission with a mandate to redesign India's entire education infrastructure by this October. Led by chairman Sam Pitroda—the architect of the nation's telecommunications network and thus no stranger to bureaucratic hurdles—the commission published a comprehensive set of recommendations in January 2007, focusing on "expansion, excellence and inclusion." Among its proposals, the commission advocated not only expanding the state university system but also diversifying sources of financing to include private participation, philanthropic contributions and industry links. It also suggested introducing frequent curricular revisions, moving away from the present system of standardized university-wide exams in favor of internal assessments of students by their professors, and setting up an independent regulatory authority. Yet while Singh's government has allocated a huge sum for building more universities and improving inclusiveness by expanding the quota system, it has yet to make progress on the crucial regulatory elements of the commission's plan.
That could prove disastrous. At present, India has no less than 16 different supervisory bodies for higher education, few of which are independent and all of which are of questionable efficacy. Mostly due to bureaucratic inertia, they've so far blocked attempts to modernize curriculums and methods of evaluation. They haven't done a good job at policing, either. Shoddy for-profit colleges have proliferated even as internationally respected foreign providers have been barred from opening up branch campuses and have struggled to get their joint programs certified. The All India Council of Technical Education, for example, has approved thousands of substandard private engineering colleges—many of them founded by profit-minded politicians. But it has refused to recognize the Indian School of Business, a private institution founded by former McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta. And political wrangling at the parliamentary level (engineered by Singh's erstwhile communist coalition partners) has stymied legislation to allow foreign universities to set up campuses, even though Cornell, Columbia, and Stanford universities have all sent high-ranking delegations to the country on exploratory missions.
The will to reform remains strong, at least at the top. But the prime minister and his allies haven't succeeded in actually getting much done. In his introduction to the National Knowledge Commission's second report, published this January, Pitroda warned, "there is still resistance at various levels in the government to new ideas, experimentation ... external interventions, transparency and accountability, due to rigid organizational structures with territorial mindsets." If those obstacles can't be overcome, he wrote, "increasing resources could well result in more of the same." In other words, India could end up throwing good money—a lot of it—after bad, something this nation and its students could ill afford.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/151682
Thursday, July 31, 2008
grassy knoll post 2: smoking gun?
OK, maybe it's not a smoking gun. Or a lone gunman. But the Mail Today reports that all of the unexploded bombs discovered in Surat were found by BJP activists (i.e. representatives of the party in power, and ostensibly "responsible" for failing to stop the deadly terrorist attack in Ahmedabad). No less than eleven of the bombs were discovered by one party worker.
Carefully avoiding libelous language (but not grammatical errors) Kamran Sulaimani writes:
"About two dozen bombs were discovered in the city, some at unlikely places--tucked behind hoarding bills and up on trees. But no one appears to know who first spotted a bomb.... The police seem to have been tipped off about most of the bombs by one group of BJP activists. But in most cases they weren't the ones who spotted the bombs. They were told about it by others. Now, in being asked, they seem to have forgotten who were the people who told them about the bombs."
Among the master sleuths was one Bhimji Budhna, who tipped off the cops about 11 of the 22 recovered bombs. A BJP corporator, he "doesn't remember who informed him about the bombs." But he was pretty good at finding them. He found one hanging from a tree, another hidden behind a billboard, and a third behind a tree guard (whatever that is).
Another guy, Sanjay Kapooria, who isn't a party member but Budhna described as "one of us," actually brought a bomb to the police station, where he claimed he'd fished it out of a trash can near his jewelry shop. Obviously a very courageous fellow, he says that after 18 unexploded bombs were recovered, he was sure that this one wouldn't go off either.
Carefully avoiding libelous language (but not grammatical errors) Kamran Sulaimani writes:
"About two dozen bombs were discovered in the city, some at unlikely places--tucked behind hoarding bills and up on trees. But no one appears to know who first spotted a bomb.... The police seem to have been tipped off about most of the bombs by one group of BJP activists. But in most cases they weren't the ones who spotted the bombs. They were told about it by others. Now, in being asked, they seem to have forgotten who were the people who told them about the bombs."
Among the master sleuths was one Bhimji Budhna, who tipped off the cops about 11 of the 22 recovered bombs. A BJP corporator, he "doesn't remember who informed him about the bombs." But he was pretty good at finding them. He found one hanging from a tree, another hidden behind a billboard, and a third behind a tree guard (whatever that is).
Another guy, Sanjay Kapooria, who isn't a party member but Budhna described as "one of us," actually brought a bomb to the police station, where he claimed he'd fished it out of a trash can near his jewelry shop. Obviously a very courageous fellow, he says that after 18 unexploded bombs were recovered, he was sure that this one wouldn't go off either.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
grassy knoll post: i don't wanna sound paranoid...
I don't want to sound paranoid. But it seems a bit dodgy to me that Gujarat managed to find and defuse 22 bombs in Surat the day after 18 exploded in Ahmedabad. Isn't that a little convenient? Like, Whoa, the police are incompetent--wait a minute, they're heroes! Or, from the opposite perspective: Whoa, the terrorists are evil geniuses--wait a minute, they're stupid morons....
Saturday, July 26, 2008
soft target
As an email from the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) taunts intelligence agencies with the promise of future terrorist attacks--daring police to stop 18 bombs in Ahmedabad BEFORE they went off--it is beginning to appear that India is the proverbial soft target. Several critics, including the Home Minister, had already laid into the intelligence bureaus for working at cross purposes, withholding information from one another, and generally acting incompetently. And few (if any) investigations into the deadly terrorist attacks perpetrated on Indian soil over the past five years have yielded any results. Yes, the authorities announce that they see evidence of the tried and true "foreign hand," and level (apparently unfounded) accusations at Pakistan or Bangladesh, and round up the usual (Muslim) suspects for interrogation. But in the end, nothing comes from their efforts.
It's entirely possible that these cases are simply too difficult to solve. And certainly the last thing India needs is a draconian anti-terrorism law that the incompetent police can use to persecute minority groups. But one wonders whether recent efforts--like the FBI visit intended to share info about forensic investigation--will have any effect, and whether greater international cooperation, as well as a complete overhaul of the Indian intelligence services, are warranted.
It's entirely possible that these cases are simply too difficult to solve. And certainly the last thing India needs is a draconian anti-terrorism law that the incompetent police can use to persecute minority groups. But one wonders whether recent efforts--like the FBI visit intended to share info about forensic investigation--will have any effect, and whether greater international cooperation, as well as a complete overhaul of the Indian intelligence services, are warranted.
Friday, July 25, 2008
businessweek: india beats china over longterm
Businessweek's William Nobrega argues that India will surpass China over the longterm because authoritarian governments always get out of the gate fast but falter late, while democracies build momentum as they slog onward.
He makes an interesting case. For instance, he points out:
"Since the 1980s, the Chinese government has focused on developing an export-driven economy supported by an artificially undervalued currency. Foreign direct investment was encouraged while domestic consumption was limited. Massive infrastructure projects were initiated, fueled by a growing trade surplus, with cities sprouting up in the hinterlands like some mythical phoenix. For years, the Chinese economy benefited from these policies with double-digit gross domestic product growth, vast foreign currency reserves, and ever increasing capital inflows.
But now the economic and social distortions have begun to appear with rising inflation rates, numerous asset bubbles, looming overcapacity, and rampant institutionalized corruption. The Chinese government finds itself in a quandary. If the government allows its currency to rapidly appreciate to reduce inflation it will drive down exports and fuel unemployment. If it fails to quell inflation, social unrest will quickly unfold."
But when it comes to the reasons that he cites for India's impending triumph over China, I'm not so sure that he knows what he's talking about. Here he goes:
Reason #1 - Property Rights
"As India becomes urbanized many families will choose to sell or borrow against their land so that they can start businesses, buy apartments, or provide education opportunities for their children. India is at the beginning of a gradual migration that is being driven by the development of high-end manufacturing and other sunrise industries that will require a vast pool of semiskilled and skilled labor. This migration will create an increasingly urban India that is expected to attract more than 200 million rural inhabitants to urban centers by 2025, primarily in what are known as secondary or "B & C" cities.
This transition will facilitate the sale of land holdings by an estimated 30 million farmers and 170 million other individuals indirectly tied to the agricultural sector. The sale of these holdings is expected to generate more than $1 trillion in capital by 2025. This capital will have a multiplier effect on the Indian economy that could exceed $3 trillion. The development of the mortgage-backed security and asset-backed security markets, driven by financial institutions like Citigroup (C), will create the liquidity required to free up this capital."
Meanwhile, in China he says:
"China, by contrast, has no rural property rights. China's 750 million rural residents who lease land are at the mercy of the local and regional government as to what compensation they will receive, if any, when they are forced from the land as a result of development, infrastructure improvements, etc. Additionally they have no right to borrow against their lease, and as such they have no assets. In fact, the Chinese government's official figures state that more than 200,000 hectares of rural land are taken from rural residents every year with little or no compensation."
...
The result is not unexpected, with over 87,000 mass incidents (or riots) reported in 2005, a 50% increase from 2003. Many provincial governments in China have begun to use plainclothes policemen to beat, intimidate, or otherwise subdue any peasant that dares to oppose these land grabs."
Can anyone say Nandigram?
He makes an interesting case. For instance, he points out:
"Since the 1980s, the Chinese government has focused on developing an export-driven economy supported by an artificially undervalued currency. Foreign direct investment was encouraged while domestic consumption was limited. Massive infrastructure projects were initiated, fueled by a growing trade surplus, with cities sprouting up in the hinterlands like some mythical phoenix. For years, the Chinese economy benefited from these policies with double-digit gross domestic product growth, vast foreign currency reserves, and ever increasing capital inflows.
But now the economic and social distortions have begun to appear with rising inflation rates, numerous asset bubbles, looming overcapacity, and rampant institutionalized corruption. The Chinese government finds itself in a quandary. If the government allows its currency to rapidly appreciate to reduce inflation it will drive down exports and fuel unemployment. If it fails to quell inflation, social unrest will quickly unfold."
But when it comes to the reasons that he cites for India's impending triumph over China, I'm not so sure that he knows what he's talking about. Here he goes:
Reason #1 - Property Rights
"As India becomes urbanized many families will choose to sell or borrow against their land so that they can start businesses, buy apartments, or provide education opportunities for their children. India is at the beginning of a gradual migration that is being driven by the development of high-end manufacturing and other sunrise industries that will require a vast pool of semiskilled and skilled labor. This migration will create an increasingly urban India that is expected to attract more than 200 million rural inhabitants to urban centers by 2025, primarily in what are known as secondary or "B & C" cities.
This transition will facilitate the sale of land holdings by an estimated 30 million farmers and 170 million other individuals indirectly tied to the agricultural sector. The sale of these holdings is expected to generate more than $1 trillion in capital by 2025. This capital will have a multiplier effect on the Indian economy that could exceed $3 trillion. The development of the mortgage-backed security and asset-backed security markets, driven by financial institutions like Citigroup (C), will create the liquidity required to free up this capital."
Meanwhile, in China he says:
"China, by contrast, has no rural property rights. China's 750 million rural residents who lease land are at the mercy of the local and regional government as to what compensation they will receive, if any, when they are forced from the land as a result of development, infrastructure improvements, etc. Additionally they have no right to borrow against their lease, and as such they have no assets. In fact, the Chinese government's official figures state that more than 200,000 hectares of rural land are taken from rural residents every year with little or no compensation."
...
The result is not unexpected, with over 87,000 mass incidents (or riots) reported in 2005, a 50% increase from 2003. Many provincial governments in China have begun to use plainclothes policemen to beat, intimidate, or otherwise subdue any peasant that dares to oppose these land grabs."
Can anyone say Nandigram?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
nothing wrong with veda
Suvir Saran's India venture, Veda, suffered from bad reviews when it opened. Maybe it was the hype of a foreign-returned Indian who'd made a splash in New York (with a hip and stylish joint called Devi). Or maybe it was just that Indians don't like to pay a lot for Indian food, unless it's sanctioned by a five star hotel. But by and large the verdict was: It's not worth it.
I beg to differ.
I stayed away from Veda on the strength of the nay sayers for what must be a couple years, but now that I've finally tried the joint, I have to say that the food is pretty damn good. Definitely better than most of the Indian restaurants in town (especially where the vegetarian is concerned), and WAY better than most of the new "Western" and "fusion" restaurants of the Tabula Rasa-Blanco-Nu Deli ilk (by and large terrible). I didn't sample too much from the menu, so I might be wrong. But it's definitely worth a try.
Also, the bar is a very cool, chilled out place to relax -- very much like New York in ambiance, without too much noise -- and the drinks are comparatively cheap. Where most of the snooty joints in town are charging Rs. 200 for a 12-oz beer (which they incorrectly call a pint), Veda only charges Rs. 90. Cocktails are Rs. 275 or something, compared with as much as Rs. 450 elsewhere.
It ain't cheap, I know. But it is cheaper.
I beg to differ.
I stayed away from Veda on the strength of the nay sayers for what must be a couple years, but now that I've finally tried the joint, I have to say that the food is pretty damn good. Definitely better than most of the Indian restaurants in town (especially where the vegetarian is concerned), and WAY better than most of the new "Western" and "fusion" restaurants of the Tabula Rasa-Blanco-Nu Deli ilk (by and large terrible). I didn't sample too much from the menu, so I might be wrong. But it's definitely worth a try.
Also, the bar is a very cool, chilled out place to relax -- very much like New York in ambiance, without too much noise -- and the drinks are comparatively cheap. Where most of the snooty joints in town are charging Rs. 200 for a 12-oz beer (which they incorrectly call a pint), Veda only charges Rs. 90. Cocktails are Rs. 275 or something, compared with as much as Rs. 450 elsewhere.
It ain't cheap, I know. But it is cheaper.
us to give pakistan f-16s to fight terror
The NYT reports that the US is slated to shift $230 million intended for anti-terrorism aid to supply Pakistan with F-16 fighters instead. Pakistan has rarely (if ever) used this type of fighter as air support for anti-terrorism operations, though the F-16 is an important part of its deterrent force in its ongoing conflict with India.
Obviously, this is a dumb idea. Sell Pakistan jets if you want, as long as you make the same offer to India. But don't give them away. Especially when the so-called anti-terrorism efforts are limited to platitudes and expressions of helplessness.
Obviously, this is a dumb idea. Sell Pakistan jets if you want, as long as you make the same offer to India. But don't give them away. Especially when the so-called anti-terrorism efforts are limited to platitudes and expressions of helplessness.
the long knight
It may not be the best Batman movie, but it's definitely the longest. I've never been grateful for an intermission in an English movie before, but during the Dark Knight I decided it was much needed. Our party was running out of food and water, and we'd instituted rationing. But Shailaja was beginning to eye my leg hungrily. And that was before Heath Ledger started doing that thing with his lips (a tick that emerges after the Joker's capture).
Seriously, I think the only reviewer I've read who nailed this one was Newsweek's David Ansen, who called the film a "sometimes oppressive" epic, and lamented, "You may emerge more exhausted than elated. Nolan wants to prove that a superhero movie needn't be disposable, effects-ridden junk food, and you have to admire his ambition. But this is Batman, not Hamlet." Call me shallow, but I wish it were a little more fun."
By the way: Hamlet was too long, as well.
Seriously, I think the only reviewer I've read who nailed this one was Newsweek's David Ansen, who called the film a "sometimes oppressive" epic, and lamented, "You may emerge more exhausted than elated. Nolan wants to prove that a superhero movie needn't be disposable, effects-ridden junk food, and you have to admire his ambition. But this is Batman, not Hamlet." Call me shallow, but I wish it were a little more fun."
By the way: Hamlet was too long, as well.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
the new yorker's brilliant obama cover...
A good satire is always "offensive," to use the watchword of 1990s political correctness. That's why it works. Now that the New Yorker cover featuring a turban-clad Obama touching fists with his wife looking like a Black Panther in fatigues and Dr. Jay style Afro has been reproduced in the Indian papers, everybody can duly express his outrage.
But one thing that can't be done anymore with impunity is reproducing the thinly veiled innuendos about Obama's alleged foreign / Muslim heritage and emphasis on his race--e.g. when a flap erupted over his supposed dissing of a kid who wanted to give him a fist pump (in fact the kid asked him to sign his arm). That's why the New Yorker cover is brilliant. It steals the thunder from the right wing and exposes their sniping and conniving for what it is: Racism and Xenophobia.
But one thing that can't be done anymore with impunity is reproducing the thinly veiled innuendos about Obama's alleged foreign / Muslim heritage and emphasis on his race--e.g. when a flap erupted over his supposed dissing of a kid who wanted to give him a fist pump (in fact the kid asked him to sign his arm). That's why the New Yorker cover is brilliant. It steals the thunder from the right wing and exposes their sniping and conniving for what it is: Racism and Xenophobia.
making friends
I'm guessing this one will put me at the top of the India-bashers list for a few days.... Not to mention winning me a few friends among the rich and powerful.
Where Blood Runs Thick
By Jason Overdorf
(Newsweek July 21, 2008)
For some time now, Indian firms have been growing in competitiveness; companies like Tata, Reliance, and the Aditya Birla Group now rival giant Western multinationals like General Electric and Procter & Gamble. The conventional wisdom has also been that Subcontinental powerhouses are getting more sophisticated. Management is becoming more professional, too; bullish analysts point to the recent merger of Ranbaxy (India's largest drugmaker) with Japan's Daiichi as a sign of a new willingness among India's CEO scions to move beyond the walled garden of family firms and team up with smart outside companies.
Now a very public fight between Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. and Anil Ambani's Reliance Anil Dhirubai Ambani Group—the billion-dollar refineries to telecoms rivals created when the brothers divided the family assets after a soap-opera-style split in 2005—underscores how much work remains. The brothers are battling over Anil's planned merger of his Reliance Communications unit with South Africa's MTN Group, which would create one of the world's ten largest telecoms companies, worth an estimated $70 billion and with 116 million subscribers worldwide. Mukesh has effectively stymied the deal by invoking his right of first refusal on any sale or transfer of Anil's shares in the company.
Nor are such tantrums limited to the Ambanis—many family-owned Indian monoliths still favor insider deals, hire relatives over better-qualified outsiders, squabble unproductively, and ignore independent directors' advice, according to a managing partner at a private-equity company that invests in such firms. The bottom line: don't look for the next Jack Welch on the Subcontinent any time soon.
Where Blood Runs Thick
By Jason Overdorf
(Newsweek July 21, 2008)
For some time now, Indian firms have been growing in competitiveness; companies like Tata, Reliance, and the Aditya Birla Group now rival giant Western multinationals like General Electric and Procter & Gamble. The conventional wisdom has also been that Subcontinental powerhouses are getting more sophisticated. Management is becoming more professional, too; bullish analysts point to the recent merger of Ranbaxy (India's largest drugmaker) with Japan's Daiichi as a sign of a new willingness among India's CEO scions to move beyond the walled garden of family firms and team up with smart outside companies.
Now a very public fight between Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. and Anil Ambani's Reliance Anil Dhirubai Ambani Group—the billion-dollar refineries to telecoms rivals created when the brothers divided the family assets after a soap-opera-style split in 2005—underscores how much work remains. The brothers are battling over Anil's planned merger of his Reliance Communications unit with South Africa's MTN Group, which would create one of the world's ten largest telecoms companies, worth an estimated $70 billion and with 116 million subscribers worldwide. Mukesh has effectively stymied the deal by invoking his right of first refusal on any sale or transfer of Anil's shares in the company.
Nor are such tantrums limited to the Ambanis—many family-owned Indian monoliths still favor insider deals, hire relatives over better-qualified outsiders, squabble unproductively, and ignore independent directors' advice, according to a managing partner at a private-equity company that invests in such firms. The bottom line: don't look for the next Jack Welch on the Subcontinent any time soon.
finally, I get a eunuch story... now i'm a real foreign correspondent
All these years as a foreign correspondent in India, and I've never written a eunuch story. At first I took that as a point of pride. I didn't write about snake charmers or elephants, either. But then I started to feel a little niggling shame, a little peer pressure. Come on, my conscience whispered, everybody's doing it. Eventually, I succumbed. Who knows, maybe I'll go on an all snake charmers & tantrics, all the time, binge.
Anyway: Here it is
New job-training program aims to improve lot of India's eunuchs
By Jason Overdorf
Toronto Globe and Mail
NEW DELHI -- Following the example of India's 18th-century Mughal rulers, who used castrated men or hermaphrodites to guard their harems, the government of the eastern state of Bihar plans to post eunuchs as guards in girls dormitories, colleges and hospitals.
"We are trying to prepare a plan for them so they can be involved in normal economic activity of society," said Vijay Prakash, a principal secretary in the state social welfare department. "They will be trained to work as security guards and for other types of activities which suit their temperament or in which they have developed certain expertise. They will also be involved in promoting activities related to women and child development and AIDS education."
The program will begin as early as this summer, Mr. Prakash said. The department estimates that about 2 per cent of the state's population of 100 million are transgender.
Known as hijras in the Hindi-speaking north, the so-called third sex has a 4,000-year history in India, where they comprise a distinct religio-ethnic group. Most hijras are born as men, but renounce their gender and sexuality to worship the mother goddess Yellamma, also called Renuka. Traditionally, the castration ceremony was performed, at great peril to the recipient, by an elder of the community. Sex reassignment surgery is not available in India, and even today many hijras go to quacks or fly-by-night hospitals to be castrated, which, though it is not compulsory, gives them higher status among their peers.
Ostracized by their families and mainstream society, hijras live in communal homes headed by their gurus. Because discrimination prevents them from taking ordinary jobs, they earn money through prostitution or begging--and sometimes by extorting funds by threatening to lift their saris and expose their mutilated genitals.
This is not the first time that Bihar—a state with a dismal reputation for lawlessness and poverty--has capitalized on their unique position in society. In 2006, the Patna Municipal Corporation used eunuchs as tax collectors in what became one of its most successful revenue drives, as habitual tax evaders preferred to pay up rather than have hijras singing and dancing on their doorsteps for the whole neighborhood to see. "That was slightly negative," says Prakash, "since they were used to pressurize people to pay. We want to use them in a more positive way." Taking advantage of the hijras' traditional method of earning money—singing for alms at weddings and birth ceremonies—the government will train them to communicate messages about child development, family-planning and other important issues through their songs. "They're great singers, and whenever a child is born they go to the house," Prakash explained.
"They [the hijras] consider themselves to be outside of the society, and their interactions with society have been very, very negative," says Dr. Hetukar Jha, a sociologist based in Bihar. "Although I welcome this move, the government needs to study their culture and habits to find out the best points at which to expand their interactions with [mainstream] society." Otherwise, Jha argues, the added visibility of these new roles could create additional problems for the ostracized group.
Though they held respected positions in the courts of India's Mughal rulers—Central Asian Muslims who ruled India from the 16th to the 18th century—today hijras are often attacked and persecuted, according to the New Delhi-based People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Salacious rumors still circulate accusing hijras of kidnapping children for castration, and apocryphal stories of hijras who passed themselves off as women in order to marry unwitting heterosexual men are common. These myths stoke fear and revulsion, provoking hate crimes ranging from rape to disfigurement with acid and even murder, according to PUCL, which has documented dozens of cases of such abuse.
Because homosexuality remains illegal in India—under Section 377 of the Indian penal code hijras and other homosexuals may be sentenced to a prison term of 10 years to life--corrupt policemen also routinely harrass the transgender community. "They're subjected to violence on a day to day basis by the community and the police, and there's no legal framework to deal with it," said Arvind Narain, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, which represents marginalized groups and communities.
As the protectors of the state's young women, though, the state hopes the eunuchs will regain some of the respect they once commanded.
....
Anyway: Here it is
New job-training program aims to improve lot of India's eunuchs
By Jason Overdorf
Toronto Globe and Mail
NEW DELHI -- Following the example of India's 18th-century Mughal rulers, who used castrated men or hermaphrodites to guard their harems, the government of the eastern state of Bihar plans to post eunuchs as guards in girls dormitories, colleges and hospitals.
"We are trying to prepare a plan for them so they can be involved in normal economic activity of society," said Vijay Prakash, a principal secretary in the state social welfare department. "They will be trained to work as security guards and for other types of activities which suit their temperament or in which they have developed certain expertise. They will also be involved in promoting activities related to women and child development and AIDS education."
The program will begin as early as this summer, Mr. Prakash said. The department estimates that about 2 per cent of the state's population of 100 million are transgender.
Known as hijras in the Hindi-speaking north, the so-called third sex has a 4,000-year history in India, where they comprise a distinct religio-ethnic group. Most hijras are born as men, but renounce their gender and sexuality to worship the mother goddess Yellamma, also called Renuka. Traditionally, the castration ceremony was performed, at great peril to the recipient, by an elder of the community. Sex reassignment surgery is not available in India, and even today many hijras go to quacks or fly-by-night hospitals to be castrated, which, though it is not compulsory, gives them higher status among their peers.
Ostracized by their families and mainstream society, hijras live in communal homes headed by their gurus. Because discrimination prevents them from taking ordinary jobs, they earn money through prostitution or begging--and sometimes by extorting funds by threatening to lift their saris and expose their mutilated genitals.
This is not the first time that Bihar—a state with a dismal reputation for lawlessness and poverty--has capitalized on their unique position in society. In 2006, the Patna Municipal Corporation used eunuchs as tax collectors in what became one of its most successful revenue drives, as habitual tax evaders preferred to pay up rather than have hijras singing and dancing on their doorsteps for the whole neighborhood to see. "That was slightly negative," says Prakash, "since they were used to pressurize people to pay. We want to use them in a more positive way." Taking advantage of the hijras' traditional method of earning money—singing for alms at weddings and birth ceremonies—the government will train them to communicate messages about child development, family-planning and other important issues through their songs. "They're great singers, and whenever a child is born they go to the house," Prakash explained.
"They [the hijras] consider themselves to be outside of the society, and their interactions with society have been very, very negative," says Dr. Hetukar Jha, a sociologist based in Bihar. "Although I welcome this move, the government needs to study their culture and habits to find out the best points at which to expand their interactions with [mainstream] society." Otherwise, Jha argues, the added visibility of these new roles could create additional problems for the ostracized group.
Though they held respected positions in the courts of India's Mughal rulers—Central Asian Muslims who ruled India from the 16th to the 18th century—today hijras are often attacked and persecuted, according to the New Delhi-based People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Salacious rumors still circulate accusing hijras of kidnapping children for castration, and apocryphal stories of hijras who passed themselves off as women in order to marry unwitting heterosexual men are common. These myths stoke fear and revulsion, provoking hate crimes ranging from rape to disfigurement with acid and even murder, according to PUCL, which has documented dozens of cases of such abuse.
Because homosexuality remains illegal in India—under Section 377 of the Indian penal code hijras and other homosexuals may be sentenced to a prison term of 10 years to life--corrupt policemen also routinely harrass the transgender community. "They're subjected to violence on a day to day basis by the community and the police, and there's no legal framework to deal with it," said Arvind Narain, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, which represents marginalized groups and communities.
As the protectors of the state's young women, though, the state hopes the eunuchs will regain some of the respect they once commanded.
....
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
robbing the poor to feed the rich
This week, the Delhi food and civil supplies department cracked down on scams to defraud the public distribution system (which distributes goods at a reduced price to the poor), reports the Times of India. The investigators found 170,000 fake ration cards had been used to cheat the system, exposing what basically everybody already knew to be true: There are disgustingly immoral people out there, pitiless in the extreme, who are robbing the poor to make themselves rich. Apparently, this is a business that can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars, if you have no conscience or self-respect.
Apart from the obvious, I'm disgusted that these people are tacitly sanctioned by society--their friends, neighbors and relatives, who must have some idea what is going on. We need not send these thieves to jail to stop this kind of thing from happening; just ostracize them from decent society. If people "cut them dead" (as they say in 19th century novels to refer to the act of pretending somebody doesn't exist) in the street--even their close relatives--the shame would be too great for anybody to take on. But, on the contrary, their supposed cleverness in making the system work for their own pathetic ends is actually admired! So much so, that some, at least, are not ashamed to brag about their nefarious schemes.
Newspaper editors: If the court system is so incompetent that these scum will never be convicted, then do us all a favor and publish detailed accounts about them, including their names, addresses, and exactly the way they screwed the system, devoting as many words as you do to those "feel good" stories about the victims of terrorist attacks when you are trying to make the events more "real." Stealing from people on the brink of starvation is murder by another name, and those guilty of it should pay a far higher price than being dropped unceremoniously from the list of approved shopkeepers (or whatever slap on the wrist is the current method).
Apart from the obvious, I'm disgusted that these people are tacitly sanctioned by society--their friends, neighbors and relatives, who must have some idea what is going on. We need not send these thieves to jail to stop this kind of thing from happening; just ostracize them from decent society. If people "cut them dead" (as they say in 19th century novels to refer to the act of pretending somebody doesn't exist) in the street--even their close relatives--the shame would be too great for anybody to take on. But, on the contrary, their supposed cleverness in making the system work for their own pathetic ends is actually admired! So much so, that some, at least, are not ashamed to brag about their nefarious schemes.
Newspaper editors: If the court system is so incompetent that these scum will never be convicted, then do us all a favor and publish detailed accounts about them, including their names, addresses, and exactly the way they screwed the system, devoting as many words as you do to those "feel good" stories about the victims of terrorist attacks when you are trying to make the events more "real." Stealing from people on the brink of starvation is murder by another name, and those guilty of it should pay a far higher price than being dropped unceremoniously from the list of approved shopkeepers (or whatever slap on the wrist is the current method).
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, June 23, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
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."
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."
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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
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
Saturday, May 17, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, May 05, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, May 02, 2008
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.
(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?
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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!
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!
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
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
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
Thursday, January 03, 2008
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
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
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