Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Aarushi murder: a new day, a new theory

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on May 30, 2008
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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

Nearly a fortnight after the double murders of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family servant, Hemraj on May 16, we’re still no closer to the truth.

The Noida police — a bunch of incompetent, idiotic bumblers — claimed they had cracked the case with the arrest of Aarushi’s father, Dr Rajesh Talwar (muttering ominously and, perhaps, threateningly that the mother, Nupur Talwar was not above suspicion). But all we have is a bunch of theories; theories which change with every passing day. Here’s a quick summary:

Theory One:The father did it and it was a cold-blooded, premediated crime

Why? Dr Rajesh Talwar was having an affair; his daughter didn’t approve. She confided about this to the servant Hemraj. So, Dr Talwar killed them both.

Flaws in the theory: Dr Talwar was a doctor. If he had wanted to kill Aarushi and Hemraj, he could have used far more sophisticated methods. Also, if he had killed Hemraj up on the terrace of his building, his concern would have been to try and get rid of the body, not hide it under the cooler and then go off to sleep until 6 am when the maid arrived.

Theory promoted by: Noida police

Theory two: the father did it in the heat of the moment

Continue reading ‘Aarushi murder: a new day, a new theory’

Aarushi murder: 10 questions (plus one)

Published
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on May 29, 2008
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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

Ten Questions to the Noida Police. Does anyone have any answers?

1. Does an email exchange between a father and his daughter mean that there was no communication between them, or that they had a friendly chatty style?

2. Was Aarushi involved with Hemraj or was she involved with a teenage student of her school (with whom she exchanged 600-odd emails over the past six weeks)?

3. Did Rajesh Talwar allegedly kill his daughter because he was having an affair or because she was?

4. If Rajesh Talwar was upset about his daughter’s alleged closeness to the family servant, why didn’t he just sack him?

5. If the murder was premediated, ie because Dr Talwar was upset (according to the police chargesheet) why didn’t he as a doctor plan a more sophisticated crime using, perhaps poison that might have been less easy to detect?

6. Does the police actually believe that after killing Hemraj and his own daughter, Dr Rajesh Talwar returned to his bedroom and went off to sleep until 6 am?

7. How much is the SSP’s office at Noida worth in terms of ‘hafta’? How much does it contribute to the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati?

8. How much pressure was the Noida police under after Mayawati ordered them to solve the crime within three days?

9. Is the name of the victim Aarushi or Shruti?

10. How difficult is it to discover a dead body at the scene of a high profile crime?

And, one question to Indianews (which showed an MMS that it said showed Aarushi. They were lying). 

1. How do you sleep at night assholes?

The year of the rat is eating our vitals

Published
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on May 29, 2008
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In Mail Today, Manoj Joshi argues that the travails of the Congress seem to be deepening as the darkness descends on the political landscape of the country

JUST eight months or so ago, everything seemed to be going well for the world. The global economy was ticking along; the US, was headed for an election whose winner felt she was predestined; following a spectacular 2007 when its economy did even better than before, Beijing was readying itself for its coming out party, the 2008 summer Olympic games. In New Delhi there was a government which was beginning to believe that given the disarray in the ranks of the principal Opposition party, and the country’s buoyant economy, the next election was a cakewalk.

Then came the Year of the Rat and everything seems to be in turmoil. Things are not looking too good, not for the world, not for India. Super-billionaire Warren Buffet has declared that the US is now in a recession, one that could last for several years. Having managed to beat down the pro-Tibet agitation, China has been struck by a natural calamity of enormous proportions. The May 12 earthquake has taken 100,000 lives and caused widespread destruction and has brought a pall of gloom over the country which the Olympic celebrations will not lighten. As for India, it is gripped by a different kind of a crisis, a madness, if you will, that is impelling our political class to wantonly undermine, squander, and even destroy, every opportunity and advantage the country has been blessed with.

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In the name of the father

Published
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on May 29, 2008
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In Tehelka, William Dalrymple writes that Fatima Bhutto’s journey to unmask her father Murtaza Bhutto’s killers has her standing between PM-in-waiting Asif Ali Zardari and his ‘clean’ record

AS THE CONVOY neared home, the street lights were abruptly turned off. The police snipers were ready in position; some had climbed up the trees lining the avenue to get clear shots. Their guns were loaded, the roadblocks had been erected, the surrounding lanes sealed off. The guards outside the different embassies nearby had been told to retreat within their compounds in expectation of trouble. By nine o’clock, all 80 police were in position, commanded by four senior officers. There was complete silence, but for the occasional buzz of static on the police radios.

It was September 20, 1996, and Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir’s younger brother, was returning late from campaigning in a distant part of Karachi. He had come home to Pakistan the previous year after a long period in exile to challenge his more famous sister for a role in the leadership of the family party, the Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP. Benazir was then the prime minister, and Murtaza’s decision to take her on had put him into direct conflict not only with his sister, but also with her ambitious and powerful husband, Asif Ali Zardari.

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Mothers of courage

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on May 29, 2008
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Neelam Katara wins a six-year battle for justice for the murder of her son, Nitish Katara. Despite the political connections and wealth of the guilty, Vikas and Vishal Yadav (who, according to a court verdict murdered Nitish six years ago because they disapproved of his relationship with Vikas’s sister, Bharti Yadav), Neelam fought a long and often lonely battle.

The Times of India traces the story of how the veil was lifted and fear was conquered for the truth.

Though Bharti Yadav successfully hid behind a veil in public when she came for her court deposition in 2006, she helped the trial court unveil the motive which led to the conviction of her brothers in the Nitish Katara murder case on Wednesday.
It was Bharti’s two day in-camera testimony, during which Vikas refused to come to court on the ground of illness, that convinced additional sessions judge Ravinder Kaur that her family was aware of her relationship with Nitish. “He knew of the relationship and had no courage to face Bharti for his misdeeds,” observed ASJ Kaur, refusing to believe Bharti’s claim that though she was “very close” to Nitish, her family didn’t know anything and so Vikas and Vishal couldn’t have been enraged about the affair.

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And for another profile in courage, Teresa Rehman in Tehelka speaks to Laishram Gyaneswari, one of the 12 Manipuri mothers who stripped in order to shame the Indian army

IT’S EARLY HOURS on Imphal’s Nagamapal Road. Fateh Chand Jain, proprietor of the Indo-Myanmar Furniture Shop, is unlocking its wooden shutters. He deflects enquiries about his wife, Ima Laishram Gyaneswari, with a self-effacing wave: “You put your questions to her. I don’t interfere in her matters.” But press him a little more and he speaks with pride of how this 56-year-old Meitei homemaker joined a dozen Manipuri imas, mothers, on July 15, 2004, to lay storm to the Assam Rifles headquarters at Kangla Fort. Stripping naked, they thronged the gates, screaming their outrage at the rape and alleged custodial murder of Thangjam Manorama, a 32-year-old suspected member of the banned People’s Liberation Army. Jain recalls how he didn’t even know what his wife had left the house for that day; it was only in the afternoon that he got to know of the imas’ unprecedented act of protest. “I had an inkling my wife might be involved. She had touched my feet before she left the house, something she usually does when she leaves for something important. But this time she didn’t tell me where she was going.”

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A house for Sachin Tendulkar

Published
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on May 29, 2008
in Cricket
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Sachin Tendulkar has just bought an old villa near Carter Road, Bandra West in suburban Mumbai. According to reports, Tendulkar purchased Dorab Villa for around Rs 35 crore. Built in the 1920s, this one storey, 9,000 square feet structure was occupied by a Parsi family. Rumour has it that the master blaster will be tearing down the old structure to build a home for himself — but whether it’ll be multi-storied building or just a small pad for himself and the Missus is something nobody really knows. [Pic: PTI]

Arun Sarin hangs up

Published
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on May 28, 2008
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In the UK Telegraph, Damian Reece looks at Arun Sarin’s departure from Vodafone

When any chief executive says “the timing is right” for his departure, you know something must be wrong. Either he’s being dragged kicking and screaming out of the door and forced to admit it’s time to go, through gritted teeth, or he’s seen the top of a trend and decided to quit before his luck runs out.

In the case of Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone, either scenario could have been true at different times during his five-year tenure. In the early part of 2006 he was being stalked by the boardroom equivalent of an angry mob who wanted him out. He saw off the Vodafone old guard who were leading that particular torch-lit lynch mob. Then he had to deal with the disaster that Vodafone had made of Japan, selling that business but again against the background of much criticism.

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Ten years later

Published
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on May 28, 2008
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Pervez Hoodbhoy on the tenth anniversary of Pakistan’s testing of the nuclear bomb in Dawn [via 3QuarksDaily]

IT’S May 1998 and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulates wildly cheering citizens as the Chagai mountain trembles and goes white from multiple nuclear explosions. He declares that Pakistan is now safe and sound forever.

Bomb makers become national heroes. Schoolchildren are handed free badges with mushroom clouds. Bomb and missile replicas are planted in cities up and down the land. Welcome to nuclear Pakistan.

Fast-forward the video 10 years. Pakistan turns into a different country, deeply insecure and afraid for its future. Grim-faced citizens see machine-gun bunkers, soldiers crouched behind sandbags, barbed wire and barricaded streets. In Balochistan and Fata, helicopter gunships and fighter jets swarm the skies.

Today, we are at war on multiple fronts. But the bomb provides no defence. Rather, it has helped bring us to this grievously troubled situation and offers no way out. On this awful anniversary, it is important that we relate the present to the past.

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It’s bad karma: Sharon Stone links quake to China’s treatment of Tibet

Published
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on May 28, 2008
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“I am not happy about the way the Chinese were treating the Tibetans,” says Sharon Stone on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Watch the video on YouTube.

Aarushi Talwar: a media circus that says something about us

Published
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on May 28, 2008
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Posted by Namita Bhandare: My new column in Mint looks at the double murder of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family servant, Hemant — and the ensuing media circus with a gullible and desperate press clutching at the angles fed to it by an incompetent police force

Because I was out of town with no television access, I missed the first few days of the Aarushi Talwar murder story where a 14-year-old and the domestic help of the house were found murdered in Noida. Yet, even though I came in late, it was obvious to everyone that the story had more holes in it than a tennis net.

Despite the missing links and the questions that seemed to have no answers, it was clear that this story was a best-seller in terms of reader and viewer interest. It had all the ingredients: a shockingly violent crime; a double murder; a bright schoolgirl who had everything to live for, and middle-class, educated parents who seemed as bewildered as we did in trying to understand the motive.

And sell it did. For the next few days, TV channels and newspapers simply couldn’t give us enough of the Aarushi story. Was it a sex crime? Apparently not, said the police; there was no sign of an assault. Was it a love crime? There was some prurient speculation as police released details of calls made some 600 times to a single number in the past six weeks. Was it honour killing? We struggled with the various labels as we tried to sort out the pieces of the puzzle, grabbing the various angles thrown to us by the police.

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Previously on AW:

Rebel brides and ex-wives

Published
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on May 26, 2008
in India and Women
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As India gets more wealthy, arranged marriage is giving way to more love weddings, and divorces. From Newsweek:

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.

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The vocal vamp of Bollywood

Published
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on May 26, 2008
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At 75, Asha Bhosle, the “Queen of Bollywood,” is the world’s most recorded singer, with 13,000 songs to her credit. Rather than following after her older sister, Lata Mangeshkar, who impersonated the voices of virginal screen heroines, Bhosle, the daring rebel, became the voice of vamps. After playing to huge audiences across North America last month, Bhosle returned home to receive the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian honor. Before performing at Carnegie Hall in New York on April 17, she talked to NEWSWEEK’s Vibhuti Patel about her life and work. Excerpts:

Patel: How did you come to sing in Bollywood films?
Bhosle: My father was a classical singer and actor. He taught me and my sisters to sing. When he died at 40, our family was in financial trouble. My mother encouraged us to sing, gave us confidence and suggested we go into films. In those days, there was tremendous prejudice against middle-class girls as performers. Singers were considered low-class. First Didi [older sister] entered films. Then it was my turn. I got a role as a child actor. Later, Didi sang sad love songs and I sang cabaret. She cornered one genre, I the other. There was no competition.

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India’s graduates given British polish

Published
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on May 26, 2008
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The subcontinent’s IT companies are giving graduates soft-skills training to help them deal with working in the West. From The Times, UK:

As if completing a gruelling engineering degree was not enough, a new generation of globetrotting Indian IT workers faces extra schooling on how to deal with British quirks of business.

Most of India’s large technology companies run “finishing schools”, where graduates who are going to work in the West are taught how to dress (no white socks with black shoes), eat (no belching at the table; use a knife and fork, not your hands) and speak (to remedy the habit of young Indians saying yes when they mean no).

Britain can be a bemusing place for somebody brought up in rural India – more so if they have to deal with the foibles of a FTSE 100 chief executive, according to Girish Vaidya, of Infosys, India’s second-largest software exporter.

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Sorry, Asia, you smell

Published
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on May 26, 2008
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Unilever prepares to tell 3 billion Asians they need to use deodorant. From The Times, UK:

You might think twice before telling a friend, and you would bite your lip rather than mention it to your boss, but one soap company has no qualms about telling 3 billion Asians that they need to use a deodorant.

Unilever is preparing to confront the issue head-on with a marketing and advertising push directed at a new Asian generation.

Russell Taylor, global vice-president for Axe, the Unilever-made deodorant marketed as Lynx in Britain, said that no one had yet found a way of making Asians self-conscious about body odour. “Asia is a market we have never really cracked. They don’t think they smell, but people everywhere smell,” he said.

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Aarushi murder: A mother’s story

Published
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on May 25, 2008
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Police have arrested Rajesh Talwar, the father of a teenage girl, Aarushi, in connection with her murder and that of their male servant. Arushi’s body was discovered at her house in Noida, a prosperous suburb of Delhi. The parents are well known dentists. Aarushi’s mother, Dr Nupur Talwar, spoke to NDTV:

NDTV: Nupur, this must be a very tragic time for you – your daughter is dead and your husband is in judicial custody. We understand you would not talk about the details of the case, but tell us your story.

Dr Nupur Talwar: All I can say is my life has come to an end. Aarushi and Rajesh were my life. I lost Aarushi eight days ago who was murdered in a brutal way. Rajesh doted on his daughter. It couldn’t be the way they are suggesting this. This is totally untrue.

We were such a nice family. I always used to think I must have done something good in my last life to get such a nice family. We had so many plans for her. We were planning a holiday. We were about to celebrate her birthday. Rajesh told Aarushi to call as many friends, even if it were to become expensive. I don’t know what to say. I have faith in the legal system. More than that, I have faith in God. I hope justice is done.

[Photo: Aarushi Talwar's father Rajesh and mother Nupur. PTI]

Previously on AW: Aarushi case: How not to investigate a murder

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World’s largest 38,500-meal solar kitchen in India

Published
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on May 25, 2008
in India
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From inhabitat.com

India is well-known for delicious food, and the kitchen is considered to be a sacred place in any Indian home. And now India has something else to be proud of: the world’s largest solar kitchen. The system has been installed as a collaboration between the Academy for a Better World and Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, with technology from Solare-Brücke, Germany. With 84 receivers and cooking at 650 degrees, the system can produce up to 38,500 meals a day when the sun is at its peak!

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A passage to India — with Mom

Published
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on May 24, 2008
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Jeff Greenwald about a trip to India with his 75-year-old mother. “Not only was this my mother’s first trip to Asia, but she and I had also never travelled together,” he writes in the Los Angeles Times.

The driver tossed our bags into the trunk of a white Ambassador cab and pressed his palms together.

“Welcome to India, sir. Is this your wife?”

“No, she’s my mother.”

Mom giggled; neither of us was sure whether the driver’s motivation was flattery or innocence. But it was an encouraging start to an adventure I had planned with anticipation and anxiety.

Bringing my mother to India had seemed an inspired idea. I’d wanted to give her something spectacular for her 75th birthday: an eight-day tour around northern India’s signature sites — Delhi, the palaces of Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal — and of the country that had so profoundly altered my own worldview.

My misgivings were equally broad. Not only was this my mother’s first trip to Asia, but she and I had also never traveled together. And although she had been to Israel and Europe, including Russia, India was something else entirely.

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Special effects of outsourcing: Hollywood heads to India

Published
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on May 24, 2008
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Rhys Blakely in The Times, UK:

As outsourcing projects go it is rather fantastic: the Oscar-winning special effects for The Golden Compass, the Hollywood blockbuster that took $370 million (£187.7 million) at the box office last Christmas were put together in a thatched village hut in India.

Well, almost.

The huts in question are replicas – stylised office cubicles made to look like rural Indian dwellings. Situated in Mind Space, a vast, grey commercial complex on the outskirts of Bombay, they form the Indian headquarters of Rhythm & Hues (R&H), the leading Los Angeles-based special effects studio.

[Photo: The Oscar-winning effects for The Golden Compass were put together at the Indian headquarters of Los Angeles studio Rhythm & Hues]

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Bollywood star Dev Anand takes high road to Scotland

Published
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on May 24, 2008
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Amanda Andrews in The Times, UK:

Bollywood has found the perfect spot to set up a permanent base in the West – the lush, green countryside and watery valleys of the Scottish Highlands.

Dev Anand, 84, the veteran Bollywood heart-throb and award-winning film-maker, disclosed that he was searching for an office and studio on the outskirts of Inverness, saying that the Highlands would become a permanent hub for the Indian film industry.

“I discovered Scotland for Bollywood when I went there ten years ago. Others will follow me,” he said. In 1998 Mr Anand hired a car to drive to Scotland in search of an inspiring location where he could write a script. He found himself in the sleepy town of Pitlochry, where he wrote the script for Main Solah Baras Ki. He plans to film a romance, When Heartbeats are the Same, in the Highlands early next year.

More here, and here:

At home with the General

Published
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on May 24, 2008
in Burma
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There have been street protests, a cyclone and appalling loss of life, yet Burma’s junta remains untouched, winning a 92% ‘vote of confidence’ amid the devastation. The Guardian’s Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from the leader’s hideaway:

Two matching pairs of soft cotton slippers are laid outside the sliding glass doors. Lilies in the adjoining palm grove fill the air with a heavy perfume. This seaside villa on Burma’s west coast – made from polished hardwood, marble and mother-of-pearl – is the holiday hideaway of Senior General Than Shwe, head of the latest incarnation of a junta that has clung to Burma like bindweed for five decades.

It is hard to reconcile the quiet luxury of this villa, its infinity pool overlooking five miles of Ngwe Saung (Silver Beach), with the devastation in the Irrawaddy delta region just a few miles to the south, where cyclone Nargis struck on May 3, killing thousands and destroying a million-plus bamboo-and-wood homes. The Ngwe Saung villa is a haven for the Senior General and his family, and for his fellow generals who share a holiday camp just along the beach. Here, Than Shwe could relax after brutally crushing the uprising by the nation’s monks in Rangoon last September. His villa survived the cyclone.

Cushioned by luxury, serviced by junior officers terrified of imparting bad news, the junta rarely gets to learn of the hardships facing their battered people, Lord Malloch-Brown, foreign office minister, argued this month. He was one of many diplomats and international leaders who criticised the regime for delaying or blocking relief to victims of the cyclone.

[Photo: Myanmar ruler Senior General Than Shwe attends Armed Forces Day ceremonies on Sunday March 27, 2005, in Yangon. AP]

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Reaching out to two and a half million

Published
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on May 23, 2008
in Burma
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Twenty-one days after Cyclone Nargis, Burma finally seems to have agreed to allow all aid workers in. Red Cross volunteers are there already, but there’s still miles to go, writes Markku Niskala in The Guardian’s Comment is Free

Now that the Burmese government has finally indicated it may allow all aid workers into the country, the task of reaching Burma’s remoter regions becomes even more pressing. Every night, the dire situation facing hundreds of thousands of cyclone survivors grows more and more desperate. Solutions tailored to Burma just have to be found.

At least one and a half million cyclone survivors remain homeless, many of them hungry, many of them weak, ailing or exhausted. As the rain pours down there is some relief: people can harvest drinking water. But the misery grows, along with the burgeoning health threats. The homeless – a portion of the 2.4 million people the UN estimates have been affected – are facing their 21st night since Cyclone Nargis swept in from the Bay of Bengal and crossed the Irrawaddy delta. Each night is more wretched than the last. Conditions are worsening all the time, and the need for basic lifesaving aid becomes more urgent.

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[Pic: Portraits of cyclone victims hang on what is left of their home in the Irrawaddy delta, Burma. Getty]

P Chidambaram: ‘We are serious about making poverty history’

Published
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on May 23, 2008
in Economy
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Indian Finance Minister P Chidambaram speaks to Tehelka’s Shantanu Guha Ray and Shoma Chaudhury about poverty, SEZs and the I-word: inflation

A long wait in an ante-room and then the summons. A neat man in meticulous white at the far end of a football field-size room. In a stellar career, P. Chidambaram, 62, has gone from being a left-wing trade unionist to Finance Minister, driving a globalised new economy. Inevitably, he’s in the crosshair of every major argument about the future of India. Certain of his vision, contemptuous of doubting socialist romantics, in an hour-long interview he spoke less numbers, more vision, with combative eloquence

SGR: Let’s start with what’s top of mind. Inflation. Wholesale inflation just hit a whopping 7.83 percent. Given that the tolerance level for inflation has come down in India from a time when people were willing to tolerate 8-10 percent inflation, does this put your government on notice?

PC: I’ve said this many times in the past. In the 70s and 80s average inflation was well over 8 percent, in the 50s and 60s it was even higher but since the 90s the tolerance level of inflation has come down drastically. Since the turn of this century, I think tolerance level of inflation is only between 4 to 5 percent. Therefore when the headline inflation number goes beyond 5 percent there is resentment and naturally political parties seize the opportunity to feed this resentment. We are doing everything to control the situation, but I don’t think it will have too adverse an impact on our government.

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Aarushi case: How not to investigate a murder

Published
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on May 23, 2008
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Shoddy police investigation culminating in the arrest of Dr Rajesh Talwar, the father 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar, run like a leitmotif in the aftermath of the gruesome crime. Vandana K. Mittal raises some questions in Merinews.

THE GRUESOME murder of a Noida school girl, Arushi, on Friday (May 16) has not only rattled the residents of the national capital and the surrounding areas, but also angered them at the way the police has gone about investigating this case of brutality towards an innocent girl.

As the news has flashed across the TV screens and has been reported in other media, the entire nation has gaped in utter disbelief at the shoddy and amateur manner in which the case has been handled. Each passing day has brought forth further news of the cavalier manner in which the local cops have gone about their work.

Even in the best of circumstances our police force is not known for scintillating detective work but with this case of Arushi’s murder they have set new lows. What they have missed is not the fine evidence that needs specialised equipment to detect. They have missed a whole dead body lying at the site of the crime!

For the latest news update on the murder from PTI click here.

But what would my Pakistani father say?

Published
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on May 23, 2008
in Books
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Yasmin Hai is an acclaimed journalist who has worked on BBC2’s Newsnight and Channel 4 documentaries. In a wonderfully honest new book, The Making Of Mr Hai’s Daughter, she describes the challenges of growing up as the daughter of Pakistani parents – and a father who yearned for her to be accepted as English. From The Daily Mail:

Grasping the door handle, I steadied myself against the walls of the moving railway carriage.

“Now!” my father called out. “Squeeze it hard, go on, squeeze it!”

Despite the urgency in his voice, I held back. The train didn’t look as if it had dropped enough speed for me to open the door.

Liberal upbringing: The teenage Yasmin went on marches with rainbow-painted hippies

The faces of the passengers standing on West Hampstead station platform were still fuzzy blurs.

“What are you waiting for?” my father shouted impatiently. “Come on, come on.”

This time, I clasped hold of the lock and with gentle pressure attempted to slide it to the right. Despite my clammy hands, it gave way.

I had done it – the train door was open! A small achievement, but for me, at the age of 11, a significant one.

This was the third day in a row that my family had made the train journey from our home in Wembley across London to Camden.

The mission: to familiarise me with the new school journey that I would be making from next Monday. Nothing could be left to chance.

[via 3quarksdaily]
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Tiger burning bright

Published
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on May 23, 2008
in Books
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A review of V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage by Gail Tsukiyama in Ms. Magazine:

In spare, lyrical prose, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel tells the story of two Sri Lankan Tamil families over four generations who, despite civil war and displacement, are irrevocably joined by marriage and tradition. At the heart of the story is American-born Yalini, 22, the only child of Tamil immigrants. Her father eventually becomes a doctor, her mother a teacher; they make their new life in the United States. Even so, Yalini feels bound to “the laws of ancestry and society.”

Born during “Black July” of 1983, the beginning of the civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese, Yalini is haunted by Sri Lanka’s political turmoil, caught between the political and social traditions of her ancestors and the modern world in which she lives. She can’t forget that in a Sri Lankan family there are only two ways to wed, in an Arranged Marriage or a Love Marriage, even though she knows that “in reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second.”

[via 3quarksdaily]

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Looking for Naipaul

Published
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on May 22, 2008
in Books
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Joseph Lelyveld reviews V.S. Naipaul’s A Writer’s People, in the New York Review of Books [via Powell's Books]

Thirty-two years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to India for this paper to write about the collapse of its post-independence experiment in democracy. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, had declared an emergency and suspended the constitution. Naipaul took this to be a major turning point, and possibly a salutary one, for a sick culture in need of shock therapy. One of his articles explored the notion that Indians experience the world in ways drastically different from those of most Westerners: that Indians were typically more self-absorbed, less observant, more instinctive; in other words, that they were ill-adapted, in their basic consciousness, to the modern world. “India: A Defect of Vision” is what he called that essay.

Naipaul’s latest volume is a set of variations and meditations on that theme. One of its chapters is called “Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way,” but this time, in his characteristic preoccupation with what his subtitle terms “ways of looking and feeling,” he journeys far beyond the subcontinent. A Writer’s People is amazingly concise, as Naipaul can be, but also wide-ranging and tightly packed, a kind of literary Rubik’s Cube, made up of small, exquisitely beveled pieces, with no obvious points of contact, that he manages to fit together effortlessly. At one moment, we go from Nehru’s thoughts about Gandhi to the author’s mother and her experience on her first visit to their ancestral village. A few pages later, we’re into Flaubert and the embrace of concrete French realities that made possible the glorious, seemingly transparent second chapter of Madame Bovary, which then is contrasted to the overblown failure of Salammbo. By a natural progression that brings us to Polybius, only a couple of steps away from Virgil and, leaving the Aeneid aside, his poem “Moretum,” which Naipaul celebrates for its grasp of the physical details of life in this world. Then we’re back on the Gangetic Plain in 1925, observing the young Aldous Huxley observing Gandhi at a political gathering.

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Bangalore airport hurries to make the first flight

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asianwindow
on May 22, 2008
in Travel
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Bangalore is set to get a new airport. But its citizens are lobbying to keep the old one going. Somini Sengupta finds out why in the IHT

For years, frequent fliers in this technology hub complained bitterly about having to suffer the indignities of a tattered and tiny airport scrunched in the middle of a busy city neighborhood.

Now, with a new one opening on Saturday, people are clamoring once more. This time, to keep the old airport open.

The reversal does not reflect a sudden bout of nostalgia, but rather the fear that the new airport, no matter how modern it was intended to be, seems destined to be the latest repository of India’s astonishing inability to plan for its future and fix its sagging infrastructure.

The way things stand now, the trip to the new airport, 21 miles outside town, will easily take 90 minutes from the city center, and even longer from the software companies that have turned Bangalore, also known as Bengaluru, into India’s own Silicon Valley.

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[Pic: Escalators are cleaned in preparation for Saturday's opening. Ruth Fremason/New York Times]

Why Pakistan plays ‘let’s make a deal’

Published
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asianwindow
on May 21, 2008
in Pakistan
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Islamabad is about to cut another deal with the country’s tribal leaders. These agreements rarely last long and appear to have helped no one besides terrorists and hardened militants. But Washington should support the deal-making — at least for a little while longer, writes Daniel Markey in Foreign Policy

The Pakistanis are making deals with tribal leaders again. Islamabad now appears to be in the final stages of protracted negotiations with leaders of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, one of seven semiautonomous areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The recent history of these negotiations has not been a happy one. By nearly all accounts, Taliban and al Qaeda have taken full advantage of the breathing space in Pakistan’s tribal areas to execute attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. American critics have every reason to ask whether Islamabad’s latest deal is precisely the sort of appeasement that might reduce violence in Pakistan in the short term, but which in time promises an even more dangerous insurgency and terrorist menace.

Nor should Pakistanis or Americans kid themselves: In a few months, perhaps sooner, this deal will fall apart. Even if the tribal leaders intended to live up to their obligations—a doubtful proposition—they aren’t up to the task of expelling well-armed, battle-hardened militants.

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Death comes ashore

Published
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asianwindow
on May 21, 2008
in India and environment
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Amitav Ghosh on cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, in the New York Times

THE word “cyclone” was coined in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in the 1840s by an eccentric Englishman named Henry Piddington. Inspired by the great British meteorologist William Reid, Piddington became one of the earliest storm-chasers, besotted with a phenomenon that he once likened to a “beautiful meteorite.” His elegant coinage was originally intended as a generic name for all revolving weather events, but is now applied mainly to the storms of the Indian Ocean region like Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma with devastating effect last week.

Piddington was among the earliest to recognize that a cyclone wreaks most of its damage not through wind but through water, by means of the devastating wave that is known as a “storm surge.” In 1853, when the British colonial authorities were planning an elaborate new port on the outer edge of Bengal’s mangrove forests, he issued an unambiguous warning: “Everyone and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt water rolling in …” His warning was neglected and Port Canning was built, only to be obliterated by a cyclonic surge in 1867.

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Pakistan’s rivalrous coalition

Published
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on May 21, 2008
in Pakistan
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The fissures in Pakistan’s new government are allowing the country’s dangerous problems to fester, writes Irfan Husain in Open Democracy

Pakistan’s newly minted coalition government, in office only since 25 March 2008, is presently lurching from one crisis to another. Its political core, the partnership between the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) ended – for the moment at least – on 13 May 2008 when Sharif withdrew his quota of ministers from the federal cabinet over the ostensibly arcane issue of how to restore to office the senior judges sacked under President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency on 3 November 2007.

But the real problem between the PML-N and the PPP (the party led until her assassination on 27 December by Benazir Bhutto, and now effectively headed by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari) goes far deeper than the high-profile “judges’ issue”. Its root is the longstanding rivalry for power between the two formations, symbolised by the personal contest for power between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif themselves. These figures long alternated in office as Pakistan’s prime minister, sharing the spoils of what became – until Musharraf’s first seizure of power in October 1999 – a virtual two-party state.

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