Monthly Archive for October, 2008

His Majesty the Druk Gyalpo

Published
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asianwindow
on October 31, 2008
in Bhutan
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Bhutan will crown its fifth king, the 27-year-old Oxford-educated King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, on November 6. Jigme Khesar became king late in 2006 after his father, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, abdicated. The coronation was delayed because astrologers said 2007 was not an auspicious time for the young king to be crowned. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck established a parliamentary democracy in the Himalayan Kingdom with the monarch as head of state.

Kinley Dorji at Kuensel on what the coronation means:

It is the end – and the beginning – of history. On the morning of November 1, the third day of the ninth Bhutanese month, His Majesty the King will be empowered as the Druk Gyalpo in a unique and sacred empowerment ceremony, which symbolises his transcendence of the ordinary and the temporal and the personification of divine wisdom.

His Majesty will receive the Dar Na-Nga, a special arrangement of the primary colours that signify the five elements. The ceremony will take place in the Machhen Lhakhang, and the Dar Na-Nga will be symbolically conferred by Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, in the presence of the fourth Druk Gyalpo, with the empowerment prayer chanted by His Holiness the Je Khenpo.

The white, yellow, red, green, and blue silk scarves represent the elements – water, earth, fire, wind, and space – the basis of physical existence, that His Majesty personifies, as well as the underlying energies from which the physical world arises.

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Indian newspaper endorses a US presidential candidate

Published
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on October 31, 2008
in India and Media
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In a first of its kind, a newspaper in India has formally endorsed a US presidential candidate. Mint, a business daily published in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, is backing Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama for US president.

In a front-page announcement headlined “Behind Mint’s endorsement,” the newspaper’s editor Raju Narisetti says:

“On the face of it, some of you might think it is unusual -and maybe gimmicky- for a newspaper whose readers live 11,977km away from the White House to issue an endorsement.

“We are weighing in because we believe that what happens in this election has a critical bearing on India and the rest of the world- for good or bad-in light of the ongoing financial turmoil that started in America.” More:

In its leader endorsing Obama, Mint says:

“We believe the world’s largest economy-and its political, cultural and intellectual capital- still make America the essential nation. The current economic and stock markets crises, we hope, end up being seen as a transformational crisis because what failed us wasn’t necessarily free markets, something Mint has proudly stood for since its own birth, but greed abetted by a failure of transparency. The danger, as some of our columnists have pointed out in recent weeks, is that the very US-led global financial bailout will make some push for a permanent role for governments and bureaucrats in running all aspects of many economies. When those voices become as loud and irrational as those bullish voices that created the crisis, America, we think, will again have to play a vital role in shaping that global debate, just as the US government acted quickly and decisively-while many governments, including that of India, just talked-once the magnitude of the current problem was clear. This is vital because the past few weeks have clearly shown how interlinked we all are, no matter where one lives.”

And it concludes:

“On the day of his party nomination, Obama also said, “It’s time for us to change America.” We believe President Obama has the potential to do just that.” Click here for more:

Asian Window fully supports Mint’s endorsement and choice of candidate.

Buddhist art

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on October 31, 2008
in Art
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From the Guardian’s series, 1000 artworks to see before you die:

One of Buddhism’s earliest artistic inventions was the stupa – a shrine in the form of a building that was not designed to be entered but to be beheld. The early Indian stupa evolved from Hindu burial mounds and took the form of a hemispheric dome surmounted by a column. The sculptures carved to decorate the great stupa at Amaravati between the first century BC and the third century AD are among Buddhist art’s earliest treasures; their proliferation of narrative scenes strongly resembles Roman and Hellenistic art from the same period. They depict scenes from the life of the Buddha in his incarnation as Siddharta Gautama, a scion of north India’s warrior class who rejected his comfortable life and became an ascetic for seven years, then a teacher who preached the ultimate goal of escaping the endless cycle of rebirth.

Among the key works:

• Sculptures from the Great Stupa of Amaravati, India, now in British Museum (1st century BC to 3rd century AD)
• Sculpture of Yakshi or river goddess from Begram, Afghanistan, now in Kabul Museum (circa 1st century)
• Parinirvana, reclining colossal figure in Cave 26 at Ajanta, India (late 5th century)

More:

Also in the series:

All about Hindu sculpture

Shiva dances. He balances on his right leg, his left raised in a gesture that signifies Release. He gestures with his arms too — all four of them. Each arm is elegantly posed in mid-movement with the flattened palm in a different position, each of which has symbolic meaning — he is saying, “Have no fear.” In one hand Shiva holds the flame of destruction, in another the drum of creation. Around him is a great nimbus of fire, symbolising the cosmos.

Among the key works:

• Stone figure of mother and child from Tanesara in Rajasthan, now in LA County Museum of Art (6th century)
• Relief of Shiva holding a trident and a snake, Malegitti Shivalaya temple, Badami, India (7th century)
• Shiva with Nandi, open-air sandstone sculpture, Durga temple, Aihole, India (8th century)

More:

Wildlife photographer of the year

Published
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on October 31, 2008
in Media and Wildlife
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American photographer Steve Winter spent 10 months in remote Indian mountains using remote-controlled cameras to take pictures of snow leopards. One freezing May morning, he found this snow leopard gazing back at him. “I was thrilled to have finally captured the shot I had dreamed of – a wild snow leopard in its true element.”

Steve Winter was today named as wildlife photographer of the year.

More pictures on The Guardian website:

Chandigarh: The remaking of India’s model city

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on October 31, 2008
in India
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John Krich in the Wall Street Journal:

Now, though, Chandigarh’s very success threatens the original traits that gave it appeal. A fight for the model town’s soul has been sparked by a new population explosion driven by the country’s increasingly wealthy middle class, drawn here by the lifestyle. The city’s population is projected to double over the next decade or so to two million, four times the number Chandigarh was designed to house, bringing demands for showy office towers, shopping malls, mansions and highways. Those would hardly be in line with the contemplative landscaping and functional buildings meant as homage to the simplicity of India’s ancient way of life.

“Chandigarh is at a turning point,” declares Prof. Rajnish Wattas, principal of the city’s College of Architecture. “While this was conceived as a dream, a textbook for urban planning, even dreams are surrounded by socioeconomic conditions. Cities can’t be museum pieces kept in a glass box.”

Today, there’s increasing talk of raising height limits and adding parking garages that never figured in the original plans. Even Chandigarh’s uniquely modernist cinema, fronted by one curved sweep of brick, has applied to be turned into a glitzy multiplex.

More:

Not a kheer in the world

Published
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on October 30, 2008
in Food
. 1 Comment

Anjum Anand rustles up a vegetarian lunch for London’s top Indian chefs. Interviewed by Rebecca Seal in The Observer:

Her guests are having those little samosas to start with, accompanied by a fresh and zingy green chutney made with coriander and mint. Then there will be chickpea curry with bhatura, a puffed-up fried bread, or rice for anyone who is avoiding oil, spiced potatoes, crispy strips of deep-fried okra and stuffed chillies with a calming yoghurt sauce flavoured with cumin seeds. There’s also a salad of tomato, cucumber, red onion and coriander, topped with grated coconut. ‘That’s not traditional,’ Anand points out. ‘I’m making this in the south-Indian style.’ Just before serving the salad she rustles up a dressing by quickly frying some cumin seeds, mustard seeds and curry leaves, which she tosses into the salad with the juice of a lemon.

Click here for more and for Anjum Anand’s recipes for carrot kheer:

Czech butterfly collector flees India

Published
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on October 30, 2008
in Crime and Wildlife
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Compiled from dispatches:

Svacha and Kucera

Svacha and Kucera

In August this year, two Czech nationals were arrested “for stealing insects” near the Singalila National Park in Darjeeling. In September, the two — Prague-based entomologist Petr Svacha and his colleague Emil Kucera — were convicted by a local court.

Last week, Kucera, 52, who was sentenced to three years imprisonment for collecting rare insects without permission, fled the country after jumping bail and has reached his home country. Mr Svacha was let off with a fine. Details of the story here and here.

On October 26, after Kucera reached home, a Czech republic-based scientist wrote on his blog, The Reference Frame: “He (Kucera )has contacted his girlfriend in Czechia and asked her for contacts in India, a credit card, plus his second legally held passport. After four kilometers in a Jeep, he spent two hours by getting into Nepal. Again a Jeep, and a bus, and a fine in Nepal for being there without visas. Finally, he legally received the Nepali visas, after some discussions and 2,000 rupees (= USD 40) in bribes (an online interview with readers), and bought an air ticket to Bangkok, Frankfurt, and Prague from a travel agency. That’s what I call transparency. :-) ”

And he quotes Kucera’s letter written after reaching home: “…because it’s been quite some time since I began to feel that Darjeeling District is not able to guarantee my right for a fair trial, I decided to solve the difficult situation by a graceful exit of mine. At this moment, I am already on the territory of the Czech Republic. ” More:

Tides of history

Published
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on October 30, 2008
in Science
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The Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 was not the first of its size to hit the region, according to new research. A massive Indian Ocean tsunami, similar in size to the one that claimed 230,000 lives in 2004, smashed into Thailand and Indonesia around 600 years ago.

Before and after photos show the sediment coverage after the 2004 tsunami

Before and after photos show the sediment coverage after the 2004 tsunami

Rachel Zelkowitz in ScienceNOW:

Within a week of the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, geologist Kruawun Jankaew set out from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok to survey the devastation on the southern coast of her country. What she saw shocked her. “I never thought such a thing could happen,” she recalls. “In some places, we could still smell dead bodies.”

But the catastrophe, which killed more than 225,000 people across Southeast Asia, also gave Jankaew and other researchers an unprecedented opportunity to understand what scars such a disaster leaves on the physical landscape. By comparing sand deposits from the tsunami to deeper layers in the soil, two independent teams of scientists now conclude that a similar killer wave struck the region 500 to 700 years ago. More:

Click here to view the interactive graphic in Nature.

And the BBC report:

The findings, reported in Nature, could be used to put statistical weight behind estimates of future tsunami.

The surge of a tsunami brings with it a great deal of sediment that rushes inland; the bigger the tsunami, the deeper and further inland the layer of sediment it leaves behind.

In locations where those deposits aren’t disturbed by wind or running water, they can be used as a historical record of these powerful events after more layers are added. More:

Fly me to the deity

Published
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on October 30, 2008
in India
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Tunku Varadarajan in the New York Times:

Vivienne Flesher/NYT

Vivienne Flesher/NYT

AN unmanned spacecraft from India – that most worldly and yet otherworldly of nations – is on its way to the moon. For the first time since man and his rockets began trespassing on outer space, a vessel has gone up from a country whose people actually regard the moon as a god.

The Chandrayaan (or “moon craft”) is the closest India has got to the moon since the epic Hindu sage, Narada, tried to reach it on a ladder of considerable (but insufficient) length – as my grandmother’s bedtime version of events would have it. So think of this as a modern Indian pilgrimage to the moon.

More:

Ex-prisoner defeats ‘dictator’ president of Maldives

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on October 30, 2008
in The Maldives
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Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed, a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, defeated President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom in the Maldives’ first democratic presidential election. Gayoom has been the Maldives’ undisputed President for 30 years.

Here’s the Reuters story:

Nasheed’s victory caps a remarkable journey for an activist whose criticism of Gayoom and crusading for democracy saw him charged 27 times and jailed or banished to remote atolls for a total of six years.

“This is a happier day than ever in the history of the Maldives. The Maldives will change, it will have a peaceful government,” said Nasheed, 41, who was just 11 years old when Gayoom took power in 1978. More here, and here

The BBC’s Adam Mynott – who has visited the country many times – has this assessment:

I recorded an interview with Mr Gayoom for the BBC in 2005 when he denied a number of allegations that he had suppressed free speech and thrown political opponents into jail.

International human rights bodies point to a catalogue of opposition figures being incarcerated without trial in the dreaded Maafusi Jail. More:

And click here for the profile of Mohamed Nasheed, the new President-elect of the Maldives.

A house, Partitioned?

Published
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asianwindow
on October 29, 2008
in India and Pakistan
. 0 Comments

A fascinating tale by Ahmad Rafay Alam at Pak Tea House:

It was when I was in Willie G that I met and became friends with Martand. Martand was from India, and for a Pakistani like me he was a great way to get to know about India, the country next door that figured so prominently in defining what my country was. At the time, I had never been to India. I had no notion of what India was like or what Indians were like other than the opinions I’d picked up in school text books, novels, television, the press, movies. You get the picture. Like anyone else, I suppose, I was coloured by the prejudice of history. In the case of India and Pakistan, nothing attracts more prejudice than the fractural events of Partition.

Martand was studying to become an architect. Despite our academic pursuits, we hit it off immediately. Of course, as inevitably happens, we made some social connections. Martand and I had been paying guests, although at different times, in the same apartment in Queensway. Then we found some more interesting ones. His maternal grandfather, Bisham Sahni, the great Hindi writer, was a contemporary of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the legendary Pakistani poet. I learnt that both his grandparents and my father shared the same alma matter, Lahore’s famous Government College. I learnt that part of Martand’s family were from Lahore, and had been forced to flee to India during Partition. I’ve always been a proud Lahori, a vekhiya tay jamiya nahin (if you ain’t seen it, you ain’t seen nothin’) sort, and his connections with the city of my birth, along with his wit and intelligence and the fact that my girlfriend got along with him, made my relationship with Martand stronger.

More:

Burma’s bloody trade

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on October 29, 2008
in Burma
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Rajeshree Sisodia recently entered Burma, where she spoke with workers dependant on the country’s exploitative jade mining industry. Here she reports for newstatesman.com:

Imperial green jade is unique to Burma – and jewellery made from it can sell for millions of dollars on the international market.
But the country’s mining industry is built on suffering: forced and child labour, land confiscation, drug abuse, sexual exploitation and environmental damage – all of which, according to pro-democracy campaigners, have scarred the trade.
More than 20,000 people migrate, or are forced to work for mine companies which are either partly or completely owned by the nation’s military leaders and its business partners.
From mining, to cutting, polishing, trading and selling, the regime’s generals control the gem industry with a vice-like grip. Profits from the lucrative trade filter down only as far as the junta, which spends around US$330million a year on arms – roughly twice the amount it invests in health and education combined. This in a nation ranked among Asia’s poorest; the average person earns less than US$1 a day.

More:

Burma’s Fleeing Masses

Mark Fenn / Far Eastern Economics Review

With his good looks and fashionable clothes, 27-year-old Su could pass for an Asian pop star, or perhaps the small-time kickboxer he used to be back home. In fact, he works illegally as a waiter in a small restaurant in central Bangkok-one of an estimated two million migrants who have left impoverished Burma to seek a better life in Thailand. Fleeing poverty and sometimes brutal oppression at home, they often find themselves living in the shadows, persecuted and exploited in Burma’s wealthier neighbors. Not that Su considers himself a victim. A member of Burma’s Karen ethnic minority, he speaks English in staccato, half-finished sentences punctuated with swear words. He hates the Burmese junta and is a fervent supporter of the struggle for Karen independence. Su admires Burma’s imprisoned democracy icon and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as Che Guevara-and Rambo. In the latest Rambo film, released this year, the hero teams up with Karen rebels to take on the Burmese army. Pirated DVDs of the film, circulated underground, were reportedly a big hit in Burma. “I like the Rambo style,” says Su, smiling.

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In world’s largest democracy, tolerance is a weak pillar

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on October 29, 2008
in India
. 0 Comments

India is reeling from a rash of religious and ethnic clashes, prompting many in the country to ask why their democracy tends to encourage intolerance. Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

With national elections only months away, India is reeling from a rash of spiteful religious and ethnic clashes, prompting many in this country to ask why their vibrant, pluralistic democracy tends to encourage, rather than avert, the cruelty of neighbor against neighbor.

Tensions are growing in several corners of the country. The latest dispute was set off in Mumbai last week, when an upstart nativist party claiming to represent Marathas, the dominant ethnic group in the state, pounced on Indians who had come from elsewhere to apply for jobs at Indian Railways.

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Indians look to America for a new accent on English

Published
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on October 28, 2008
in India
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AFP report from Mumbai at The Smart Set:

In India, speaking English with an American accent is no longer the preserve of call centre workers. Children, business people and the elderly here are now seeking a US twang.

The phenomenon has spread from the Indian offshore operations boom in the late 1990s to a wider cross-section of society, whether to help them get on in business, communicate with family State-side or just show off.

In Mumbai, arguably India’s most cosmopolitan city, a number of language schools have sprung up offering accent coaching. Mumbaikars are also trawling the Internet looking for tutors to teach them to talk like Uncle Sam.

[Photo: Students at the Just Talk Institute language school in Mumbai. AFP]

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Man-eaters rule in a land of widows

Published
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on October 28, 2008
in Wildlife
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West Bengal’s villagers are increasingly the prey of tigers driven out of Bangladesh by flooding. Gethin Chamberlain in the Obserever:

In the remote village of Deulbari, everyone knows someone who has been attacked by a tiger. Until now, humans and tigers have coexisted uneasily in this outpost in the Sundarbans area of West Bengal, where 274 tigers were counted in the last census in 2004. This year has been different.

Approached through vivid green paddy fields dotted with pink water lilies, Deulbari is a village of roughly constructed houses, some with corrugated iron roofs, others just straw, bleached by the sun. It sits on the Indian shores of the mangrove forests that straddle the border between India and Bangladesh. After a cyclone last winter led to rising water levels and forced tigers from the Bangladeshi side over the border into India, the number of documented tiger attacks has soared. According to villagers, there have been 15 already this year, six of them fatal. The ranks of the tiger widows are swelling, and the horrifying tales are multiplying.

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One last stand: a new strategy to save the tiger

Published
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on October 27, 2008
in Wildlife
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Sequestering tigers in nature reserves may doom them to a slow, genetic death. To save them, conservationists want to give them freedom to roam. Lily Huang in Newsweek:

Alan Rabinowitz has spent nearly three decades in a pitched battle to save the world’s few remaining havens for predator cats. He’s turned the Coxcombe Basin in Belize into the world’s first jaguar preserve, and built the largest nature reserve in Taiwan, the first national park in the Himalayas, and the world’s largest tiger reserve in Burma. Nevertheless, he knows he is losing.

The problem, Rabinowitz and other leading biologists now know, is that the classic conservation strategy of preserving habitat is in fact no defense against extinction. Twenty years ago, the devastation of natural forest was a visible danger. What went unseen was the damage sustained on a larger field of battle: the gene pool. A reserve may be a refuge for wildlife, but it is also a genetic sink. When a population of large predators is confined to pristine island of wilderness over time, they fall to inbreeding, leaving the species with weaker young and fewer defenses in an environment increasingly distorted by climate change. This is the deepening lesson of wildlife conservation from the post-industrial age to the genomic age: you can’t save animals without saving their homes, and you can’t save species without saving their genes.

More:

Is the dream of independence for Tibet now a lost cause?

Published
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on October 27, 2008
in Faith and Tibet
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[Updated with the Dalai Lama's response: see link below]

Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

Why are we asking this now?

Over the weekend, his Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet’s Buddhists and the man who has been at the centre of efforts to highlight the Tibetan cause for decades, explained that he “had given up” his struggle. “I have been sincerely pursuing the middle-way approach in dealing with China for a long time now, but there hasn’t been any positive response from the Chinese side,” the 73-year-old told an audience at Dharamsala, the Indian Himalayan town that is the headquarters of the so-called Tibetan government-in-exile. “As far as I’m concerned, I have given up.”

Does that mean the Dalai Lama is retiring?

Karma Choephel, the speaker of the parliament in-exile, told reporters that the Dalai Lama used to say that he was semi-retired and that now he believed he was was almost completely retired. However, a senior aide to the Nobel laureate last night dismissed speculation that he would start taking a back seat in Tibet’s affairs. “Because of the lack of response from the Chinese we have to be realistic. There is no hope,” said Tenzin Taklha. “His holiness does not want to become a hindrance to the Tibetan issue, and therefore has sent a letter to the parliament regarding what options he has.”

More:

An update from His Holiness on Andrew Buncombe’s blog Asian (con)Fusion:

“His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that Tibetans have long been pursuing a path to find a solution to the issue of Tibet that would be mutually acceptable to Tibetans and Chinese. This has received widespread appreciation from the international community, several governments included. More importantly, it has gained the support of many Chinese intellectuals. More:

Welcome to the real Maldives

Published
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on October 27, 2008
in Travel
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Martin Symington cycles round an atoll for a taste of real life in the paradise islands. From The Times:

So, here I am fraternising with the locals and sharing in a bit of everyday life on Addu Atoll, the southernmost and farthest flung of the 26 island clusters that make up the Maldives. It is the end of a day on which I have cycled through villages of coral-walled houses and stopped at busy harbours to watch the to-ing and fro-ing of dhonis bringing home the yellow-finned tuna catch.

A few other tourists have also stopped by for a drink or to nibble gulha (fiery fish balls), propping their bikes against an oil drum. It is an unusual scene in this tiny, Islamic Indian Ocean country, where interaction between visitors and host communities has been a missing element in the overall holiday package.

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The Maldives: now for children too: Once you couldn’t move for the honeymooners. Not now. The island has been transformed for kids. From the Sunday Times:

In word-association tests, if you don’t answer “The Maldives” when the psychologist says honeymoon, the good doctor will give you a sideways stare.

These so-romantic Indian Ocean atolls are now as indelibly imprinted on the gilt-edged marriage map as the best man’s cringeworthy double entendres and the embarrassing dad dancing at the evening disco. So the latest focus for its top resorts is rather puzzling – they’re pushing their kids’ clubs.

In the past, you practically had to walk around ringing a bell if you dared turn up with an infant, but the new hot hotel in the archipelago, Diva, is placing every bit as much emphasis on attracting brats as bridezillas.

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Kids, curries, Kerala: the perfect recipe

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on October 26, 2008
in Travel
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Having fallen under India’s spell while backpacking in his youth, Caspar Llewellyn Smith wanted to share his love of the country with his children. But would the tropical charms of Kerala deliver the ingredients for a successful and safe family holiday? From The Observer:

It would be dark soon, we could tell, because the sun had dipped behind the far ridge of the absurdly picturesque valley, but there didn’t seem to be any urgency to return to our bungalow. The tea country of the Western Ghats in southern India, the knuckle of mountains separating lush Kerala from the plains of Tamil Nadu, is tranquil to the point of caricature and the only danger lay in the eyes of our seven-year-old, Esme, who feared we might encounter more tea pickers.

Earlier, walking up from the bungalow which had once belonged to the English manager of the vast Tallayar estate, the last of these to finish work had descended past us. Three women, Tamils wearing saris, had pinched Esme’s cheeks so hard her smile had morphed into a grimace. Now the tea pickers had all reached their homes further down the valley, from where later in the dark we would hear Tamil film music drifting up. Instead, we were stopped by the recently installed manager of the estate, having first been alerted to his presence by the growl of his gleaming Enfield motorbike. Elephants, he said, roamed these hillsides; and yes, they could be very dangerous and yes, we’d best hurry back to the bungalow.

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The killing fields

Published
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on October 26, 2008
in Books
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In New Statesman, John Sweeney reviews “Butcher and Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan” by David Loyn — “A superb new history shows how successive invaders have tried, and failed, to bring order to the country through force”:

An Afghan man rides his donkey

An Afghan man rides his donkey

The Duke of Wellington was a cantankerous reactionary but he knew a thing or two about Afghanistan: “a small army would be annihilated and a large one starved”. On 13 January 1842, a sharp-eyed sentry in Jalalabad saw the more-dead-than-alive figure of the British army surgeon Dr William Brydon crossing the plain, struggling to stay on his pony. He had a bad head wound and was bleeding from the hand. When eventually the pony was taken into a stable, it lay down and died.

Roughly 16,000 British troops and camp followers hadn’t made it from Kabul – one of the most terrible defeats of British military might in the 19th century, commemorated in Lady Elizabeth Butler’s painting Remnants of an Army. Brydon was the sole survivor. The massacre of Lord Elphinstone’s army prompted a series of revenge attacks by the British, which developed into wars. In 1849, 1850 and 1851, huge numbers of British troops swarmed into Afghanistan, butchered and then bolted. And still the Afghans fought back.

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A passage to India: Slumdog Millionaire

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on October 26, 2008
in Movies
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In The Sunday Times, Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy talk about their critically acclaimed new film, a tale of an 18-year-old orphan from the Mumbai slums who reaches the final of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?:

When we met in Toronto the day after the public screening, he was, as usual, modest and taking nothing for granted. At the same time, he knew the movie had “played” – he would have to have been comatose not to have sensed it. In fact, you could pinpoint the exact moment when the audience fell in love with it. It’s a scene a little over five minutes in. We have already seen 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel) in the hot seat of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, preparing to answer the last, 20-million-rupee question. We have also, jarringly, seen him brutally beaten and interrogated by a couple of deeply suspicious policemen. How can an illiterate chai boy from the slums have known so many correct answers, they want to know – is he a genius, a cheat or just plain lucky? Thereby hangs an unabashedly romantic and picaresque tale.

In the first flashback accounting for his improbable knowledge, we find the seven-year-old Jamal trapped in a wooden outhouse built on a rickety pier that overlooks a private airport. Desperate to greet his favourite Bollywood star, Jamal realises that there’s only one thing for it. He takes a deep breath and plunges into the stinking cesspool beneath the pier. Covered in crap, he walks up to the star and demands his autograph. The sequence may be shamelessly contrived, but the close correlation between money and excrement speaks volumes about India – and not just India, for that matter.

More:

Previously in AW: Two Hollywood movies — made in India, with Indian actors

Sold, pimped, abandoned

Published
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on October 26, 2008
in Crime and Society
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Human trafficking is the third largest illegal industry after arms and drugs. In Tehelka, Neha Dixit meets both traffickers and young victims to tell a chilling tale.

EVEN THOUGH India’s poverty rate has dropped from 60 to 42 percent according to the World Bank, the number of Indians scraping by on less than Rs 60 a day is at an astronomical 467 million. That hunger has almost half the Indian population in its grip is not all that this figure implies. Among huge swathes of India’s poor, life is little more than a bare, often brutalised attempt at staying alive, a struggle in many cases hijacked by human trafficking, deemed by the United Nations the world’s third-largest illicit industry, after arms and drugs. Extreme poverty and the low premium traditionally placed on female lives sees thousands of girls, most of them more children than women, sold into unmitigated hell by family members and acquaintances. As TEHELKA witnessed at close range during a three-month investigation, the grievous trade in human lives is plied not only in the country’s brothels, but in urban domestic placement agencies and rural bride markets as well.

more

God delusion at work: My Indian travel diary

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on October 26, 2008
in India
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Meera Nanda in Economic and Political Weekly [via 3quarksdaily]:

“New cars smell the same in India as they do in the US”, was the first thought that came to my mind as I took my seat in my nephew’s new Hyundai sedan in which he had come to pick me up from the Chandigarh airport. It was the first of August and I had just arrived in India for a short visit. My home- town was my first stop. New cars in India may have the same leathery-plasticky smell as new cars every-where, but they look like nothing else in the world. The car that I was riding in, like the tens of thousands that roll out of auto-showrooms everyday all over India, was bedecked in red ribbons and had a garland of fresh marigolds strung around the number plates. The top of the front window had two swastikas and an “Om” painted on it in red colour. The drivi ng-wheel had the “auspicious” red string tied to it. The Ganesh idol on the dashboard had the residue of burnt incense in front of it.

My nephew told me that he was coming straight from the temple where he had taken his car for a vahan puja, a brand new Hindu ritual invented to bless the new vehicles that are clogging the Indian roads these days. This being his first car – and the object of his loving devotion, at least for now – my nephew told me that he wanted to do something really, really, special for it. That is why, he told me, he took it to the temple where he had to shell out some serious cash for the ceremony, instead of getting a free puja which his dealership had offered as a part of the incentive package. “What”? My ears pricked up. I must have sounded incredulous: “Car dealers offer free pujas? Do they have pundits on their staff now? Car dealerships have become new temples or what?”

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Indian bride

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on October 26, 2008
in Fashion
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Victoria Beckham on the cover of Vogue India

Holding Mumbai to ransom

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on October 26, 2008
in India, Leaders and Politics
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Why attacking Bhaiyyas in Mumbai makes sense for Raj Thackeray — and why this makes sense to the ruling Congress-NCP alliance. S Balakrishnan in The Times of India.

Consider this. Most of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray’s business after Raj’s vast business associates are non-Marathis. His confindante, Sunil Harshe is based in Dubai, look after his vast interests in the UAE. Both Thackeray’s children are at English-medium schools. His son, who entered college this year, chose to study German instead of Marathi. When Thackeray was part of the Shiv Sena, he would often oblige non-Marathi contractors looking for work with the Sena-controlled Mumbai municipal corporation. Thackeray also smokes the best imported cigarettes and sips high-end Scotch and cognac. He loves to drive a Mercedes or Pajero and is a charming host even if his guests don’t speak Marathi. Raj Thackeray is the most cosmopolitan Mumbaikar one could meet at Shivaji Park, where he lives in an elegant penthouse.

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Big bang art

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on October 26, 2008
in Art and India
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In the Indian Express, Siddhartha Tagore looks at the changing imagery and history of firecracker boxes, a pop art that’s going the way of kitsch:

Bollywood stars Jaya Prada (left) and Zeenat Aman on the cover of firecracker boxes.

Bollywood stars Jaya Prada (left) and Zeenat Aman on the cover of firecracker boxes.

Though a precise date of origin is impossible to determine, most historians believe that the first pyrotechnic composition, a precursor to gunpowder, was discovered sometime during the Sui and Tang dynasties (~600-900 A.D.) in China. It was most likely discovered accidentally by alchemists experimenting with sulphurous mixtures in an attempt to create an elixir of life. Some even trace it to 2,000 years before the Tang dynasty. The most prevalent legend has it that fireworks were discovered or invented by accident by a Chinese cook working in a field kitchen who happened to mix charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter (all commonly found in the kitchen in those days). The mixture burned and when compressed in an enclosure (a bamboo tube), exploded.

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India’s conscientious rich are a vanishing breed

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on October 25, 2008
in Business
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In Mint, Vir Sanghvi pays tribute to his friend Vinod Doshi who died this October and pays tribute to India’s old business families that were always aware of the responsibilities that came with wealth.

In this era of easy money, private planes and conspicuous consumption, we sometimes forget what industrialists were like in the days before the economy opened up and every second businessmen became a millionaire. Younger people have been told that they were all crooks who survived by manipulating the licence-quota raj and bribing bureaucrats and politicians. Only after 1991, or so it is said, did the true entrepreneurial energy of India get unleashed and a new class of savvy, globally conscious businessmen emerge.

Like most generalizations, this has an element of truth in it but it is also an exaggeration in some respects. It ignores the fact that before independence there were business families who were deeply committed to the idea of creating an industrial infrastructure for India out of a sense of patriotism. And even after the licence raj took over, such families as the Sarabhais, the Tatas, the Godrejs and the Walchands managed to retain their values and refused to subscribe to the prevailing ethic of manipulation and bribery.

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The godfather of Bangalore

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on October 25, 2008
in Economy, India and Society
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It’s the tech outsourcing capital of the world but there’s a dark side to Bangalore too. Systemic corruption, a Byzantine legal system and a criminal underworld is what controls the city’s real estate market. No wonder local toughs like ‘Mulama’ Lokesh have been thriving, reports Scott Carney in Wired

It’s a little past midnight, and a lonely parcel of farmland not far from the new international airport in Bangalore, India, is soaking up a gentle rain. At the center of the lot is a house surrounded by a low stone wall. There’s a hole in the roof and a bushel of ginger drying under an awning. Large block letters painted on the wall read: this property belongs to chhabria janwani. Inside, eight men—two armed with shotguns—confer in hushed voices as they peer out the windows. Is it safe for them to go to sleep, or should they stand watch another few hours? A guard wearing a dirty work shirt is the first to notice signs of trouble. In the distance, flashlight beams sweep the roadway. The lights advance, accompanied by a chorus of voices. Then the sound of people scrambling over the wall. One of the guards makes a break for the gate, sprinting toward a police station a mile away. Before the others can do much more than scramble to their feet, 20 attackers brandishing swords and knives emerge from the shadows. Some carry buckets of blue paint. It takes them only a minute to overrun the building. Three guards who stood their ground lie bleeding on the floor. The others surrender.

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Nun: Police did nothing as mob raped me

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on October 25, 2008
in India
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Hiding her head and face behind a scarf, a Roman Catholic nun who accused a Hindu mob of raping and parading her half-naked through the streets in eastern India, appeared on television to appeal for justice. The Indian Express has the full text of her statament:

On August 24, around 4:30pm, hearing the shouting of a large crowd, at the gate of Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre, I ran out through the back door and escaped to the forest along with others. We saw our house going up in flames. Around 8:30 pm we came out of the forest and went to the house of a Hindu gentleman who gave us shelter.

On August 25, around1:30 pm, the mob entered the room where I was staying in that house, one of them slapped me on the face, caught my hair and pulled me out of the house. Two of them were holding my neck to cut off my head with an axe. Others told them to take me out to the road; I saw Fr. Chellan also being taken out and being beaten up. The mob consisting of 40-50 men was armed with lathis, axes, spades, crowbars, iron-rods, sickles etc.They took both of us to the main road. Then they led us to the burnt Janavikas building saying that they were going to throw us into the smouldering fire.

When we reached the Janavikas building, they threw me to the verandah on the way to the dining room which was full of ashes and broken glass pieces. One of them tore my blouse and others my undergarments.

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Thirty-one flavors of death

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on October 25, 2008
in Movies and Pakistan
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The shocking true story of the Pakistani gourmet ice cream mogul who ploughed his profits into horror films. Achal Prabhala at Bidoun Magazine [via 3quarksdaily]:

A vanload of city kids takes the wrong turn in the wrong jungle. Witchcraft ensues. Of course, they pass a river polluted by industrial waste. Of course, there is a tribe of cannibalistic zombies who live on its banks, who take a culinary interest in one of our city slickers. And of course, there is a serial killer in a burqa who greets the rest of them with a whirling, spike-studded flail. And there’s a midget. This, in brief, is Zibahkhana, Pakistan’s first high-definition video film, and the brain-hungry lovechild (or love-hungry brainchild?) of Omar Ali Khan, a forty-five-year-old first-time director and schlock-horror cineaste whose kingdom was built on ice cream.

Omar began his tour d’horreur as the black sheep of a prominent Pakistani family. He was not conventionally ambitious. He went to college in America and graduate school in England, but couldn’t bring himself to become an academic. Upon returning to Pakistan, he failed the civil service exam (to the amusement of his father, a diplomat) and took a job teaching high school, which he did for almost ten years, though he found it boring. Mostly he did what he loved-he watched movies. All kinds, from mainstream Bollywood epics to obscure second- and third-tier Hollywood films to the indigenous outpourings of Lollywood, Pakistan’s own film industry. And he ate ice cream.

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