Archive for the 'People' Category

Pamella Bordes traced to Goa

Published
by
asianwindow
on March 2, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

From the Daily Mail:

She once caused scandal with her links to a minister and a Libyan official. Now, 21 years on, Miss Bordes has a new name and is living in Goa…

As she travels around the Indian resort, she attracts barely a second glance from the British tourists.

And the woman who was once famously pictured stepping out of a limousine in the company of then Tory minister Colin Moynihan, is today travelling alone in a small white Suzuki runaround.

But that is exactly how Pamela Singh likes it. More:

From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Pamela became “Pamella” when the beauty queen travelled west, first to America and then to Britain, where she arrived having married a Frenchman with the surname “Bordes”.

In 1988 and 1989, when she worked as a “researcher” at the House of Commons, she got the newspapers hot and bothered after she was photographed one evening in the company of Colin Moynihan (now Lord Moynihan), the Tory sports minister. She was what westerners consider “exotic”.

She was certainly a pretty girl who was for a while the girlfriend of Andrew Neil, then editor of The Sunday Times. Donald Trelford, the editor of the rival Observer, a newspaper with a much bigger size than it boasts now, also sought her attention, it was said at the time. More:

Jhunjhunwala’s real bull run

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 28, 2010
in Business, India and People
. 0 Comments

It took 17 years for India’s most famous investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala to become a father, and it beat anything that all his thousands of crores could buy. Manju Sara Rajan in Open:

Most women accept discomfort as an essential part of the pregnancy ritual, but it takes altogether something else to survive what Rekha Jhunjhunwala went through. In 2003, 39-year-old Rekha, wife of India’s most famous investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, finally became pregnant for the first time. But by the final trimester in early 2004, her baby was in serious trouble: it was sliding down the birth canal far too fast. Too late to surgically keep the baby in, too early to bring it out, Rekha’s doctor gave her a single prescription: be confined to bed till delivery date. “I didn’t bathe for three months,” she says. “It was difficult to do anything, my legs were elevated all the time, and because I was always lying down, after some time I did everything on my side, even eating. But I was determined.” Nishtha was born on 30 June 2004. Her brothers, twins Aryaman and Aryavir, were born at 12.29 am and 12.30 am on 2 March 2009. It took the millionaire couple 22 years of marriage to complete their family.

The latest Forbes India rich list counts 49-year-old Jhunjhunwala as the 58th richest man in the country, with a fortune of $915 million (Rs 4,209 crore). “I have far less than people think, far more than I need. My wealth fluctuates by 5 per cent every week,” he says. But even an amateur guesstimate of listed and unlisted investments, private equity interests and cash holdings safely puts the former chartered accountant’s net worth at over a billion dollars. “Whatever is known publicly is underestimated,” says a source close to him. More:

The dream of an intellectual marketplace

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 18, 2010
in Economy, India, Leaders and People
. 0 Comments

Ashok V. Desai on Dr K.N. Raj in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

I went first to Delhi in 1966 to be a corporate economist, and then moved over to a research institute. But when I decided to take a chair I was offered in the University of the South Pacific in 1973, Raj sought me out and said, “Ashok, you should not go; we need people like you in this country.” I was touched, and would have listened to him if it had not been for financial compulsions. Five years later, when I was in Sussex University, Raj again came to me and said, “I have now started a new centre in Trivandrum; come and join me.”

I listened to him and went. I saw something unique. Raj had got hold of Laurie Baker, who built him a beautiful, low-cost campus. He bought cheap bricks, and soaked them in water for a couple of days; if they did not disintegrate, he used them. He made large windows with wooden shutters; they gave ample cross-ventilation in the local humid climate, and obviated the use of glass. He scattered a few buildings on a hill; the woods separating them gave them a sense of privacy. And he built a tower to house the library; one could find a seat with a breathtaking view of the surrounding valleys, and get lost in books. Being on the campus, I could walk to the library at any time of the day or night. We could talk economics and much else in any of the many cosy corners. Students would walk into my home whenever they wanted sustenance, material or intellectual. The place was ideally designed for debating and creating economics. It was the DSchool model in a different environment. More:

The softer side of Mr. Jinnah

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 18, 2010
in India, Pakistan and People
. 0 Comments

Ali Farhad at Chowk:

A dazzling beauty and full of life, Ruttie had exquisite taste and affable manners. Quick-witted, she was easily one of the best dressed and most popular women among the elitist circles of Bombay. She was intellectually far more mature than other girls of her age, with diverse interests ranging from poetry (Oscar Wilde being her favorite, whom she often recited) to politics. Her large collection of books, which remained in Jinnah’s possession after her death, reflected her deep interest in poetry, literature, history, occultism, mysticism and sorcery. She was an excellent horse-rider. She attended all public meetings and was inspired by Annie Besant’s Home Rule League. A fierce supporter of India for Indians, Ruttie was once asked about rumors of Jinnah’s possible knighthood and whether she would like to be Lady Jinnah. She snapped that she would rather be separated from her husband than take on an English title.

Jinnah on the other hand also had a special interest in acting and in Shakespeare’s dramas. While in London, he had acted in some Shakespearean plays and even considered seriously taking up acting as a profession. It was his dream to play Romeo at The Globe in London. Khwaja Razi Haider thinks it was probably Jinnah’s deep interest in Shakespeare that gave him insight into the intricacies of the human character, which he was to use for grasping the essentials of Indian politics.

Jinnah was thirty-nine and Ruttie sixteen, but the age difference proved no obstacle in their love. Love has no logic. He was enamored by her beauty and charm and she was awe- struck by “Jay”, as she called him. Jinnah asked Sir Dinshaw for Ruttie’s hand in marriage, who became furious and refused. Jinnah repeatedly pleaded his case but Dinshaw never gave in, as Jinnah had a different faith and he was more than twice Ruttie’s age. Their friendship ended and Dinshaw forbade Ruttie from meeting Jinnah while she lived in his house. He even got a court injunction restraining Jinnah from meeting her (a pity no biographer has yet traced the court papers). The couple continued to meet secretly, and patiently waited for two years until February 1918 when Ruttie turned eighteen, and was free to marry. She walked out of her parental home to which she was never to return, and converted to Islam at Bombay’s Jamia Mosque, under the Muslim Shiite doctrine, on April 18, 1918. More:

The politics of Amitabh Bachchan

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 13, 2010
in Entertainment, India, Movies, People and Politics
. 0 Comments

Why does the greatest superstar in Indian cinema history hanker so much for political patronage? From Open:

In his biography of Sonia Gandhi, journalist Rashid Kidwai writes of a winter day on 13 January 1968, when Sonia Maino landed in Delhi to marry Rajiv Gandhi. It was Amitabh who received her at the airport. In a 1985 interview, Sonia said, “Mummy (Indira) had asked me to stay with the Bachchans so that I could learn Indian customs and culture from close up. Slowly I came to learn a lot from that family. Teji Aunty is my second… no, my third mother. My first is my mother in Italy, the other was my mother-in-law Mrs Indira Gandhi, the third is Teji Aunty. Amit and Bunty (Amitabh’s brother Ajitabh) are my brothers.”

In 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Amitabh was one of the men drafted by Rajiv into politics. The two men had known each other since childhood—Amitabh was four and Rajiv two when they met at a fancy dress party at the Bachchan home in Allahabad. “Ma says he messed up his pants,” Amitabh was to recall.

But the mess that was to follow their entry to politics was more than Bachchan could stand. It took no more than a few years for controversies such as Bofors to surface, where Amitabh’s name figured along with Rajiv’s. It was only then that this son of a Sikh mother, who had given little thought to fighting the 1984 election for the Congress in the wake of the massacres of Sikhs, chose to quit. More:

Take a bow, Sonia Dara

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 11, 2010
in Fashion, People and Women
. 0 Comments

A screenshot of the Sports Illustrated Web site. Sonia Dara was photographed by Riccardo Tinelli in Rajasthan.

She’s 5′11″, has dark brown hair, brown eyes, measures 32″-24″-34.5″ and wears a US size 2. The daughter of Indian immigrant parents, Sonia Dara was discovered at an actors and models talent convention. She’s been seen at Cosmo Girl, Vogue India and Seventeen. Umm, did we say she’s also a sophomore at Harvard College?

Sonia sizzles in her first appearance in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (photographed by Riccardo Tinelli in Rajasthan). For more photographs and a short video, click here

And below, from May 2009 edition of The Harvard Crimson:

Likewise, Dara, who is represented by Elite Model Management in New York City, balances a blossoming modeling career with the demands of school. According to her mother, Poornima Dara, good grades were a prerequisite for her daughter to model in high school.

“We’re the first set of South Asian parents to encourage their child to do modeling,” Poornima Dara said. “We encouraged her because she showed us that she can multitask, model and get a 4.0 GPA. If she weren’t able to multitask, we wouldn’t have encouraged her.”

Dara said her parents have always been supportive of her aspirations, and her mother moved with her to New York City the summer before her senior year in high school to support her aspirations.

“The biggest kicker is that it’s kind of an unorthodox career for an Indian,” Dara said, adding that many of her acquaintances back home wondered if she went into modeling because she was doing poorly in school.

In actuality, Dara says excelled at school, studying for her Advanced Placement tests while modeling with Elite. “They’d call me ‘the AP kid’ because I was the only one taking AP’s and a lot of the other girls got their GED’s,” she said of her time in New York. More:

Mrs Malik

Published
by
asianwindow
on February 1, 2010
in Culture, India, Pakistan, People, Religion and Society
. 0 Comments

How Pakistan-born Mushaal Mullick fell in love with Kashmiri militant-turned-separatist leader Yasin Malik. From Open:

Mushaal is the kind of face the cameraman would pick up in a packed cricket stadium. She is the sort of girl who would keep as souvenirs the cinema tickets of her first-ever date. She is a girl in whose purse you’d find a mirror, a comb and, perhaps, lip salve. She likes Phil Collins and Shakira, and in poetry her taste varies from Rumi to Sylvia Plath. She is, you’d say if you ever met her, full of life. She has a teenage intensity, if there is any such thing. She writes the way she speaks, and like most youngsters, likes to be on Facebook, adding friends so frantically you would think she is on an undercover mission to make the Facebook server collapse. She writes ‘you’ as ‘u’ and makes careless mistakes such as referring to her school principal as ‘principle’ in emails. The 24-year-old Mushaal was in Delhi recently, with her husband, former militant and now Kashmir’s prominent separatist leader, 43-year-old Yasin Malik. “You could write that Yasin is an Aries and I am a Scorpio,” she told me. And, before I could react, she blurted, “Oh, forget it! It will look so childish.” More:

[Image: Mushaal Mullick website]

The froth of Khan

Published
by
asianwindow
on January 31, 2010
in Pakistan, People, Politics and Sport
. 0 Comments

Nadeem F. Paracha at Dawn:

What can one say about Imran Khan? A great former cricketer, a compassionate philanthropist … a sorry excuse for a politician. But his continuing forays into bad politics and tactical blunders can be excused, for he is yet to understand that politics is not a game of cricket, and that the democratic election process does not follow the selection policy he enforced as the captain of the Pakistan cricket squad.

The truth is, Khan’s penchant for picking up talented players seemed to have gone haywire when he decided to pick his early political mentors.

Coming from a highly educated, cultivated, and somewhat liberal background, Khan had slipped into reverse gear by the time he decided to enter politics in the early 1990s. In other words, instead of looking forward to becoming an integral part of a new, democratic, and General Zia-less Pakistan, Khan struck an ideological partnership with shadowy characters who were hell-bent on keeping the country stuck in the 1980s – a decade when Pakistan pulled and damaged all of its important political, economic and social muscles under the stressful weight of a myopic dictatorship and the damaging jihad that a dictatorship sponsored in Afghanistan. More:

The last journey of Jyoti Basu

Published
by
asianwindow
on January 20, 2010
in India, Obituaries, People and Politics
. 1 Comment

Manini Chatterjee in The Telegraph:

There was no hysterical outpouring of raw grief, no unruly outburst of manufactured emotion, no orchestrated display of organisational might.

Today’s moving and fitting tribute to Jyoti Basu — Bengal’s most enduring icon and among the foremost national leaders of post-Independence India — came not from the three-volley rifle salute nor the galaxy of leaders and VVIPs who thronged the bedecked stage in the Assembly before a huge battery of television cameras.

It came, instead, from lakhs and lakhs of ordinary people — men and women from the city and its suburbs, from distant villages and far-flung districts — who stood patiently in serpentine queues and lined every inch of the roads his last journey meandered through, having gathered in silent clusters along the entire route.

Most of them had come on their own, not shepherded by local party bosses as to a Maidan rally; some of them had never voted for the CPM in their lives, and many had ceased to vote Red in recent years. Yet they came, in an unceasing flow from early morning till journey’s end at 4.40 in the evening, to pay a homage that was spontaneous yet sombre, heartfelt but restrained and entirely in keeping with the persona of the man they had come to say goodbye to.

An era had come to an end, they knew, and they had come to make their tryst with history. More:

From INC to Congress Inc.

Published
by
asianwindow
on January 12, 2010
in India, Leaders, People and Politics
. 0 Comments

It was a party of educated professionals once, and Rahul Gandhi wants to make it so again. But his father before him had tried, and he will succeed only if he finds a new way to do it. Jatin Gandhi and Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

Indeed, as an organisation, the current Congress faces the same challenge any family-run business faces—how to bring about greater professionalisation while retaining control. The need to do so is not in doubt, spelt out as it is by the first of Ramachandran’s working hypotheses: family businesses with a higher level of professionalism practised both in business and by the family are likely to perform better and perpetuate their success over a longer time frame.

This, though, is easier said than done. Within the Congress, the idea has been in the making since Rajiv Gandhi’s ascent to power. But what was then a limited initiative to bring in a few friends with professional qualifications has now given way to a far more ambitious approach. Already, in the transition from Rajiv to Rahul, Sonia Gandhi has managed to implement an important step. She has placed a ‘professional CEO’ such as Manmohan Singh in charge of what managers call a ‘key result area’ (KRA): governance. Since 22 May 2004, Manmohan Singh has wrought professionalism across several governance functions, but his party itself has remained much the same. More:

[Image: Open]

Rapping at the Burmese Junta

Published
by
asianwindow
on January 7, 2010
in Burma, People and human rights
. 0 Comments

From Asia Sentinel:

The chain-link gate slides open to reveal a group of young shaven-headed Burmese men and two girls sitting outside a house in Mae Sot, a scruffy town on the Thai side of the Thai-Burmese border.

All are members of Generation Wave, an underground group dedicated to overthrowing the repressive military junta that has ruled Burma since 1962. The odds are against them, as they have been against a long series of movements harboring in Mae Sot and Chiang Mai in Thailand. Nonetheless, Generation Wave has a certain amount of panache, attempting to reach Burma’s youth by using rap and hip hop music and graffiti to inspire others to stand up to authority

“We’ve cut our hair Saffron style,” said Aung Min, one of GW’s founders, referring to the failed Saffron Uprising in 2007, in which tens of thousands took to the streets, led by Buddhist monks, only to have at least 135 people and possibly more shot down by the military. “If something happens in Burma we can go in there quickly and mingle with the monks.” More: