5:30 am - the annoying righteous

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

cashless in the hinterlands

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

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

Newsweek Dec. 8

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

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

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

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

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

new best beer candidate

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

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

what to do for xmas and new year's?

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

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

Where to go? What to do?

no sex for the poor

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

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

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

India blowing its big chance...

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

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

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

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

Deal or No Deal

By Jason Overdorf/New Delhi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

clear skies ahead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

travel, wedding season, and general laziness

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

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

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

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

another newsweek article on india's economy

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

BTW: Can anybody say "bubble?"

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

new newsweek article on cricket

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

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

shailaja says....

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

i'm no expat

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

White Indian

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

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

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

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

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

cricket commentary

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

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

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

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

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

surfing india

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

bonded labor - not just in bihar

I'm doing a little reporting on bonded labor this week, so my translator and I made the short hop to Faridabad to visit a stone quarry that employs "freed" bonded laborers -- following intercession on their behalf by Swami Agnivesh. I was intrigued to learn that the conditions of their present contracts are hardly more liberal than the original bonds. The only difference, essentially, is that now they receive cash wages, the terms of their debts are written down and nominally at least they can eventually pay off what they owe. When I first met them, they identified themselves as "former" bonded laborers for this reason, and because they are allowed to move from one employer to another provided they can get a second loan with which to pay off the first guy.

Frankly, I was shocked--not to find bonded labor still exists, but to find out that it was practiced so blatantly so close to the Parliament and that the victims don't even consider themselves to be bonded laborers anymore. The guys I spoke to had all taken loans of 15,000-20,000 from their employer over the years because they receive very low wages and they are required to supply their own equipment, dynamite etc. They're convinced that the employer (who supplies the gear) overcharges them, but they have no other recourse, since they don't have trucks to transport their own dynamite, etc. They're also convinced that the boss downgrades the rock they produce unfairly so he can underpay them. And -- in classic bonded labor fashion -- they have no idea of the rate of interest they're paying on their loans, how long it will take them to pay them off, or any of the financial terms.

And these are the "freed" guys!

any boxing fans out there?

I met my first Delhi boxing fan last night.... Correction: I met my first fan of professional boxing last night, and amid furious planning to share my coveted collection of recorded fights it occurred to me that I've never put out the call: Are there any other boxing fans in Delhi? Anybody else who recognizes the names of Manny Pacquiao, Miguel Cotto, Israel Vazquez or even Floyd Mayweather or Ricky Hatton?

Being the lone fan in the wilderness--especially with all the work I go through to see the fights--is a bit like cooking and eating gourmet meals for one.

'new' delhi nightlife leaves a hole in your pocket

For awhile I was pretty excited about all the new bars, clubs and restaurants opening up around town. But now I've decided that it's all a conspiracy to make me feel underpaid and tight-fisted. As far as I can tell, all the new joints have formed a tacit agreement to boost the going rate for beer at "posh" bars from Rs.150-200 for a large bottle of domestic to Rs.150-200 for the 330 ml bottle that in Delhi is erroneously identified as a pint. (Folks, a pint is about 475 milliliters--40% larger than the small beer bottle).

What is behind this disturbing trend? I've always believed that Delhi bar owners operate under the mistaken impression that well-heeled patrons cause less trouble than regular folks. But the only bar squabbles I've witnessed or heard about have been in the upscale joints, and the most famous such incident (the murder of Jessica Lal) occurred at a chic-chic bar and was allegedly perpetrated by one of the city's rich and powerful.

At the same time, it appears to me that the steady stream of business at the previous generation of reasonably priced nightspots--Buzz, Flames and (formerly) Turquoise Cottage, to name a few that are full of patrons seven days a week--must be more lucrative than posh places that are half-empty many nights and never have many patrons until the end of the night.

new grocery for gk2?

Since the demise of FoodPlus -- which had a good selection but a foolish insistence on a computerized checkout that took eons -- there's no longer any source of "foreign" supplies in GK2. This is a market waiting to be tapped. Now, creative cooks have to fight the parking nightmare at GKI M-block market or drive all the way to Defence Colony if they want items like olives, jalapenos, gerkins, tortillas, mozzarella, etc. Back in the days of FoodPlus, I used to make pasta once or twice a week and my patented burritos, salsa & guacamole once a month or so. But now I hardly ever bother....

Speaking of which, a friend who's new in town suggested that I should share more of my wisdom on matters like where to find inexpensive cheese, how to make guacamole in Delhi, how to get a gas connection, etc. I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to bother--basically it's just the product of living here too long and reading CityLimits, SimplyDelhi and (now) Time Out. But I agree that somebody should do so. How about the folks at DelhiExpat.com? Right now, the site is pretty much a party planner--for people with v. deep pockets....

suddenly burma is in the news....

As some of my foreign correspondent buddies head off to Myanmar/Burma to report on the crackdown on protesters demonstrating against high petrol prices, I'm wondering why this is the moment to resume coverage of Burma.... OK, maybe that's putting it wrong. It makes sense to bring attention to this protest and its suppression regardless of its likelihood of toppling the junta. But why so little attention to the impotence of American/Western action against the regime? (A boycott that means nothing, and a lot of empty lip-service). Why so little attention to India's -- once basically the only regional power that actively criticized the junta -- final abandonment of Aung Sun Kyi to her fate? I hate to say it, but these protests seem like a non-event to me. Just another blip on the graph of what promises to be a long, grim reign of the military dictators... I mean: NOW Bush plans to bring up Burma at the Asian summit? The junta wasn't doing anything wrong over the last decade?

A statement from Laura Bush's office said, according to the IHT, "Mrs. Bush noted that by staying quiet, the United Nations — and all nations — condone these abuses."

And this kind of "harsh condemnation" does what, exactly?

again with the mindblowing mahiya....

BTW: Thought readers would like to know that I got the chance to demonstrate my deeply disturbing knowledge of Mindblowing Mahiya at Buzz on Wednesday. Hadn't been there in forever due to the new parking hassles at Saket. But after two obscenely priced beers at Tabula Rasa (Rs.200 for a 12-oz bottle?), Buzz did me right once again. Good co-ed crowd, terrible food, ridiculous music. Maybe even displaced Flames--where the crowd has really gone downhill; now mostly red-eyed and paunchy whiskey drinkers-- on my "best bar" list. Only problem is that happy hour ends at 7. And of course the hell of driving to Saket with the construction of the purported "high speed" bus lane on Tito Marg.

Speaking of which: Somebody should start a pool on how that thing will pan out. My prediction is that the pedestrian/bicycle path will be thronged with motorcycles & scooters, the bus lane will be jammed with cars, and everything will go to hell at the big traffic lights where Tito Marg meets the Ring Roads.... Any reason this should work better than the pedestrian tunnels that everyone ignores, or the speed governors on the Blueline Buses??