Archive for the 'Society' Category

My Bollywood wedding

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on December 10, 2009
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Kavita Ramdya

Kavita Ramdya

The Wall Street Journal has edited excerpts from the Introduction of  ”Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement and Marriage in Hindu America” by Kavita Ramdya:

In September 2005, I overturned my family and friends’ expectations that I would have a conventional Indian-Hindu wedding. I married my husband in an outdoor civil ceremony at a country club in Long Island, New York. Marrying in an outdoor civil ceremony was not a decision that came easily to me. In fact the dissimilar cultural and religious backgrounds of my husband and me made it impossible for me to picture our wedding day for much of the time we were seriously dating.

Mansoor was born and raised in Trinidad where he grew up in a devoutly Muslim home; his grandmother taught him how to read the Quran in Arabic, and he ate only halal meat (meat prepared in a manner prescribed by Islamic law). Whereas I grew up dancing garba (a Gujarati group dance) at Indian wedding receptions (while my dad sipped Jack Daniels on the rocks with his friends), alcohol and dancing were absent from the weddings my husband attended. More:

You can read more about “Bollywood Weddings” by going here.

Fight against sex slavery

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on December 10, 2009
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Sunitha Krishnan’s talk was easily the most talked-about at TEDIndia. She has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery, a multimilion-dollar global market. In this courageous talk she tells three powerful stories, as well as her own (she is a victim of gangrape), and calls for a more humane approach to helping these young victims rebuild their lives.

Sunitha Krishnan co-founded Prajwala, or “eternal flame,” a group in Hyderabad that rescues women from brothels and educates their children to prevent second-generation prostitution.

Here’s the link to her blog.

And read her interview (“When we keep quiet, that’s where it all begins“) here.

A striptease class in Bangalore

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on November 29, 2009
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Saritha Rai in the Indian Express:

In a dance studio in an affluent Bangalore neighbourhood, instructor Sneha Kapoor is leading a small group of women through a series of sensuous, steamy moves to the accompaniment of slow music. It is a combination of striptease, pole dancing and lap dancing.

The hour-long lesson is for a group of close friends, all in their mid-thirties or over, married and well-off. Many are housewives but there is a sprinkle of working women as well.

It is strictly a private lesson. There is no advertising or publicity of any sort and admission is by word-of-mouth. The class is decorously called “Exotic dance workout”.

In Bangalore, arguably India’s hippest and most cosmopolitan city, dirty dancing arrived two years ago. But in keeping with the underlying Bangalore conservatism and fear of right-wing attacks — as in the Mangalore pub — exotic dance has stayed behind closed doors. More:

[ps: The YouTube video above is not from Bangalore. It's a promo for the US Pole Dancing championship.]


Obama party crashers are old India hands

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on November 28, 2009
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President Barack Obama greets Michaele and Tareq Salahi during a receiving line in the Blue Room of the White House before the State Dinner with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, Nov. 24, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton. Photo from the White House photo stream / Flickr)

President Barack Obama greets Michaele and Tareq Salahi during a receiving line in the Blue Room of the White House before the State Dinner with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, Nov. 24, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton. Photo from the White House photo stream / Flickr)

From the Hindustan Times:

On July 4, American Independence Day, Tareq Salahi was an honoured guest of the United States embassy here.

Salahi, the man who crashed US President Barack Obama’s state dinner for PM Manmohan Singh on Tuesday, was in town as captain of the US polo team.

Salahi was introduced to everyone by the US Charge d’Affaires, Peter Burleigh, at the American Center event. He later spoke of the need for closer India-US “military and diplomatic ties”, his love for polo and of Tiger Woods being “a dear friend”.

While wife Michaele (his fellow gatecrasher at the White House bash) played the gracious host, Salahi — a glass of red wine permanently attached to his hand — interacted with a chosen few.

“The America’s Cup Polo is a historic and diplomatic tradition. Next year, on June 11-12, we will host the Indian national team and make it memorable for both countries,” he stated. More:

And from Bloomberg: A couple who slipped past security at this week’s state dinner met President Barack Obama in the receiving line for the gathering, according to a photograph released by the White House today.

Punking the White House

Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast:

What is so striking about the behavior of the Salahis is not the vulgarity of it all, it is the tenacity of that vulgarity. This determination, this drive, is evident in the photographs: Plain to see on Michaele’s face, and Tareq’s, is a sense of acme, of achievement. They have scaled a pinnacle in public—and have the pictures to prove it. Witness Michaele’s picture with Joe Biden, vice president of the United States of America. Her left hand rests on his swelling chest; his left arm is snaked around her cheerleader’s waist; her blond head leans into his gray temple. Yet in all this proximity, this physical melding of vice president and gatecrasher, their smiles stand apart: his is a red-blooded, “isn’t-life-good-to-me” smile; hers, by contrast, appears calculating, algebraic. This picture isn’t just going up on Facebook; it’s going straight on to her C.V. More:

Previously in AW: Gatecrashers at Obama’s party for Indian PM


The Indian Thanksgiving

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on November 24, 2009
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Sarah Khan in the Wall Street Journal. Sarah Khan is an editor at Travel + Leisure and blogs at http://www.bysarahkhan.com

A naturalization test at an immigration office in Boston was the last hurdle standing between me and U.S. citizenship. But for me this journey had actually begun years before, on a rickety vessel you may have heard of—The Mayflower. Except in my adaptation, that leaky ship sailed down the Red Sea to the New World of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where I proudly played the role of a pilgrim in a kindergarten play at the American school. Decked out in a gray frock and a hat fashioned from black construction paper, I prepared to welcome a band of friendly Native Americans to the very first Thanksgiving.

n my five-year-old mind, it seemed perfectly logical that a scrawny Indian girl with brown skin and a Canadian passport should be charged with inviting those other Indians (feather, not dot—although I’m Muslim so we don’t have either) to celebrate the founding spirit of America. In a desert nation, no less, thousands of miles from Plymouth Colony.

“Sarah, is it?” asked the immigration official testing me. “So, where are you from?”

Easy question, no easy answer. More:

Also in WSJ, Indian Thanksgiving recipes. Check out Zuhoor Khan’s Cheeni Murg.

Residences of the rich and famous

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on November 22, 2009
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A rendering of 27-storey Antilla in Mumbai, the future home of Mukesh Ambani family.

A rendering of 27-storey Antilla in Mumbai, the future home of Mukesh Ambani family.

Aakar Patel in the News, Pakistan:

Indians invest in two things mainly: gold and property. India is the world’s largest buyer of gold, much of it being turned into heavy and ornate wedding jewellery; and most Indians (Gujaratis excluded) would rather invest in property than in equity.

The world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, lives in the same three-bedroom house in Nebraska he bought 51 years ago. That would never happen in India, because for us our status comes from the size of our residence.

The billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man, bought a house in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens for 70 million pounds (about 560 crore Indian rupees) in 2004, and it was then the most expensive residence in the world. It had 12 bedrooms and parking space for 20 cars, and was sold to him by the Formula One championships owner, Ecclestone.

In 2008, Mittal broke his own record and bought another house in the same neighbourhood for his son, and this cost 117 million pounds (Rs 936 crore). For his daughter, Mittal bought a house in Delhi that cost Rs100 crore ($ 22 million). None of this would have dented his wealth, estimated by Forbes magazine last week, even in these times of recession, to be $30 billion (Rs140 lakh crore). More:

Survey of Pakistan’s young predicts ‘disaster’ if their needs aren’t addressed

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on November 22, 2009
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survey1

From the New York Times:

Pakistan will face a “demographic disaster” if it does not address the needs of its young generation, the largest in the country’s history, whose views reflect a deep disillusionment with government and democracy, according to a report released in Lahore on Saturday.

The report, commissioned by the British Council and conducted by the Nielsen research company, drew a picture of a deeply frustrated young generation that feels abandoned by its government and despondent about its future.

An overwhelming majority of young Pakistanis say their country is headed in the wrong direction, the report said, and only 1 in 10 has confidence in the government. Most see themselves as Muslim first and Pakistani second, and they are now entering a work force in which the lion’s share cannot find jobs, a potentially volatile situation if the government cannot address its concerns. More:

Click here to read the full survey.

Ayan Rand and India

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on November 14, 2009
in Books, Economy, India and Society
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Jennifer Burns in Foreign Policy on the surprising popularity of a libertarian hero in India.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

In recent years, the so-called “Howard Roark effect” has swept across wealthy Indian society. Shortly after winning Miss India Earth, the country’s top beauty pageant, in 2005, Niharika Singh cited The Fountainhead as her favorite book. “Ayn Rand helped me win the crown,” she declared. Other stars, including biotech queen Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, actress Preity Zinta, and soccer-player-turned-dancer Baichung Bhutia have all credited Rand with helping them succeed.

Beyond personal inspiration, however, the Indian excitement for Rand today is linked to a larger enthusiasm for the country’s inchoate but powerful drive for development and wealth. Since the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India has seen a gradual shift away from socialism, much appreciated by Rand’s fans. Vikram Bajaj, a 45-year-old entrepreneur who considers himself an objectivist, has lived through Rand’s evolution from an ignored outsider to a popular prophet of capitalism. When he discovered Rand, taxation rates for high earners were hovering at 85 percent of income; now, with her books widely available, that upper rate is only 30 percent.

Barun Mitra is the founder and director of the Liberty Institute, which hopes to be India’s equivalent of the United States’ libertarian Cato Institute and has recently received a grant from an American foundation to launch a Web initiative promoting “Ayn Rand in India.” He has been a Rand devotee since the early 1980s and even met his wife through a Rand discussion group. More:

Eunuch marriage website

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on November 12, 2009
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Rhys Blakely from Delhi in the Times, London:

In the days of the Mogul emperors, India’s eunuchs were the bodyguards of queens and privy to the most sensitive of state secrets. Today they are most often seen begging at traffic lights.

Now they hope that the internet can help them to edge their way back into mainstream society — by finding them suitable husbands.

The first matrimonial site in the world for hijras — a catch-all term for South Asia’s eunuch, transgender, transvestite and third gender communities — has been launched from the eastern Indian city of Madras.

The home page of Thirunangai.net explains that “transsexual women by birth may not be physically women. But, by soul and heart, we are real women”. More:

Still brewing in a dry land: Pakistan’s only beer and whisky firm

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on November 6, 2009
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Murree Brewery, Pakistan, in 1860s

Murree Brewery, Pakistan, in 1860s

After 150 years, business is booming at Pakistan’s only beer and whisky firm. Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

murree_maltOn the walls of the historic Murree brewery, Pakistan’s sole producer of beer, hangs a slogan that its owners would wish upon the entire country. “Eat, drink and be Murree,” puns the poster, seemingly produced in the 1970s.

Understandably, making beer and whiskey in a Muslim country, where 97 per cent of the population is officially banned from enjoying your products, has never been an easy business. Non-Muslims are exempt from the ban, but even for them obtaining a drink can be complicated: some five-star hotels require foreigners to affirm in writing that they are non-Muslims and will be responsible for anything that happens when they are under the influence before they can order a drink.

And amid the upsurge of militant violence of the last two years that has seen the Taliban attacking targets across the country, setting fire to girls’ schools and even banning the sale of videos and DVDs, common sense might suggest that the fortunes of this establishment, which celebrates its 150th anniversary next year, might be on the wane. Yet the opposite is happening: sales are booming – embarrassingly so. More:

V.S. Ramachandran on the Uniqueness of Human Consciousness

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on November 2, 2009
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V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego. A former BBC Reith Lecturer, he co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.

Below, a clip from an interview from The Science Network [our thanks to 3quarks daily]. Click here for the full interview and to read the transcript.

The Malayali

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on October 31, 2009
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Lost causes, alcoholism, eve-teasing, world politics, parochialism. Is there no end to the contradictions in the Malayali male? Nisha Susan in Tehelka [illustration: Anand Naorem]

malayaliIf you are a shameless believer in the utility of stereotypes you would agree Malayali men are inclined to wanderlust, substance disorders and angst. Mallus do get around. The average Malayali in Tiruvalla, Tippasandra and Timbuktu sets forth blithely towards the furthest point he can imagine. The pursuit of Mammon doesn’t quite explain it. Other communities have sold ice-golas, pushed mutta-dosa carts and made their fortune not so far from home. But the Malayali man? A teashop owner in Leh, a temple keeper in Madhya Pradesh, an arms dealer in Washington, a doctor in Nigeria, a botany teacher in Papua New Guinea – when these Malayali men left home neither they nor their families asked why they had to go so far. Once there, the Malayali abandons his languid air in favour of a furious work ethic and labours to arrange visas for the cousins he barely spoke to at home. For a long while now the location of choice has been the Gulf, from where came infinitely expandable suitcases and infinite variations of a particular phenomena: men who see their wives and children once a year for a month, men who bring up their children in Kerala while their wives work abroad, men who have never known what it is to be parented so they don’t know how to bring up children. It’s fairly normal in Kerala to have a family where four generations have grown up without parents. Men’s relationships with their mothers is thus either distant or stunted: one barely knows what these gaps are doing to the social fabric of Kerala, except when you speculate why it’s the country’s suicide capital. More:

A little less nationalistic hero worship, please

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on October 17, 2009
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When India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize for chemistry with two others, he was flooded with adulatory emails from India. He expressed disenchantment with people from India “bothering” him, “clogging” up his e-mail box and dubbed as “strange” their sudden urge to reach out to him. “There are also people who have never bothered to be in touch with me for decades who suddenly feel the urge to connect. I find this strange,” he said.

In a subsequent article in the Times of India, he clarified what he meant:

I am distressed by the reaction to my comment about being deluged by emails from India, and realize I have inadvertently hurt people, for which I apologize. I hope people realize that I have no personal secretary and use my email mainly for work, so finding important communications became very difficult.

I want to make it clear that I was delighted to hear from scientific colleagues and students whom I had met personally over the years in India and elsewhere, as well as close friends with whom I had lost touch. Unlike real celebrities like movie stars or people in sports, we scientists generally lead a quiet life, and are not psychologically equipped to handle publicity. So I found the barrage of emails from people whom I didn’t know or whom I only knew slightly almost 40 years ago (nearly all from Indians) difficult to deal with.

People have also taken offence at my comment about nationality being an accident of birth. However, they don’t seem to notice the first part of the sentence: We are all human beings. Accident or not, I remain grateful to all the dedicated teachers I had throughout my years. Others have said I have disowned my roots. More:

Diwali in US: ‘Bless my laptop’

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From the Wall Street Journal:

diwaliComputers, checkbooks and accounting records are already being dropped off at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Bartlett, Ill., where over 500 prayer plates have been ordered. Last year as many as 400 people showed up for the accounts puja; this year, the temple expects up to 700. It’s the same story at the Hindu Temple of Minnesota, in Maple Grove, where priests are preparing to tend to up to 12,000 expected visitors — about a thousand of which organizers say will be there for the accounts puja.

“Why wouldn’t someone do it?” says Harish Patel, spokesman for the Bartlett Swaminarayan temple. “People know that businesses are run by acumen, management and strategy. But more are starting to recognize that even in business, there’s the involvement of the divine.”

Mahendra Nath, once the fourth-largest franchise owner of Burger Kings in the U.S., has never missed a Diwali celebration since migrating from India in 1964. He and his wife plan to light candles and other lamps in their St. Paul, Minn., home to welcome Goddess Lakshmi, and will bow their heads for financial success in the year ahead. This year, they’ll ask for just a little more.

“We will pray for the recession to end fast and have a better business going forward,” says Mr. Nath, who also owns three hotels and several fine-dining restaurants through the Midwest. His business has suffered as corporate accounts have shrunk. More:

Bachelors left on the mountain shelf

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Shaikh Azizur Rahman in the National:


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In January, more than a hundred bachelors, young and old, began laying a road from their remote, hilltop villages through thick forests to the villages of the plains, hoping to put an end to a decades-old crisis: because of their extreme isolation, women from surrounding areas refuse to marry the villagers.

The twin villages of Barwaan Kala and Barwaan Khurd sit atop the Kaimur Hills in Bihar state and are known locally as the “villages of unmarried people”. Among the low-caste, impoverished Hindu families are 121 bachelors, in a combined population of 850, including 35 between the ages of 40 and 60.

According to village elders, no marriages have taken place there in the past 50 years.

The lack of infrastructure, particularly roads between the villages and more settled areas, has made Barwaan Kala and Khurd profoundly unattractive for families looking for husbands for their daughters. More

Kitsch in everyday life

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on September 29, 2009
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Githa Hariharan in the Telegraph:

If I were to draw a picture of a typical middle-class Indian home around the time I was growing up, I would leave out some things we now take for granted. The TV set, for example, or the cordless phone and the computer. Instead, I would sketch in some curiosities, especially in the living room. These curiosities, called ‘showpieces’, sat stolidly in cabinets called ‘showcases’, as if they were there by birthright. Any books that had sneaked into these cabinets ended up looking apologetic, like second-class citizens. The most popular showpiece was the miniature Taj, with the best of its kind lit up with tiny light bulbs.

As time went by and technology grew up even in our part of the world, the showpiece began to move – with the assistance of what seemed like magic, but was, invariably, well-charged batteries. The hot favourite of the period was a pair of pink storks on either side of a water tank, taking turns to dip a long slim beak into the water. It went on forever – or at least as long the switch was on.

It took some years, but I was lucky enough to see the scaled-up version of the stork showpiece. This was a grand “religious showpiece” on display in Delhi’s Panchkuian Road. Devi had been animated by human ingenuity to bend from the waist so that her sword could decapitate Mahishasura. Then she straightened up while the demon’s head reconnected itself to his body, ready to be cut off again. Devi bent once more to her task. It could be argued that the showpiece illustrates Good continuously overcoming Evil – but only by ignoring the suggestion of Good caught in a hellish situation where a job never gets done. More:

The significance of Kaminey: Social dystopia or entrepreneurial fantasy

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on September 29, 2009
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kaminey

M K Raghavendra, a film scholar and critic, argues that “celebration of social decay started with the film Satya, and Kaminey takes this to a new high.” From the Economic and Political Weekly:

Urban criminals, until the mid-1990s, were not glamorous figures in Hindi popular cinema, and only people led astray (as in Deewar 1975) became criminals. The film that changed this was perhaps Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1999). Satya appeared “realistic” but had a discourse interpretable in the context of the economic liberalisation initiated by P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in 1991-92, which also marked the end of Nehruvian socialism. Law enforcement has been treated in different ways by Hindi cinema but Satya was the first film to treat the police as though they were no different from a private agency, made stronger by their indifference to the law. The protagonist of the film casually proposes the killing of the police commissioner as though he were a gangland rival and the police responds as another gang might have – by liquidating his group without attention to legality. More:

Aliens in Karachi

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on September 29, 2009
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What if extra-terrestrials with superior intellectual faculties stumbled across Pakistan’s seaside metropolis? Would they get mugged, hugged or asked to tea? Fauzia Husain at Chowk:

If aliens were to arrive in Karachi on an anthropological fact finding mission of the kind described so often by Ursula Leguin- their initial report to base might look something like this:

At first glance Karachi looks like a complicated network of palaces surrounded by the settlements of the palace menials. In each neighborhood one finds a large and materially superior settlement of houses and established in convenient proximity to these residences of the Lords are the corrugated roof, or D-class semi permanent constructions that house the plumber/electrician/mechanic and cook/driver/cleaning woman that supports and maintains the home of the leader/strongman/village head.

The fancies and the fantasies of these privileged superior abode dwellers cannot be contained within the walls of their A/B class construction, concrete homes and are therefore liberally sprinkled along the streets and byways where the royals dart up and down in superior vehicles. Men, women and children smile down vacantly from large, at times lighted and at other times video signs where the characters are depicted as enjoying mattresses/ magic money cards/ large amounts of food/and cleansing agents, amongst other materials. It is supposed that the privileged are so fond of these items that they like to be reminded of their existence even upon leaving the homes where these items surround their waking hours.

In the meanwhile the workers weave in and out of driving lanes offering their rich rulers the opportunity to pick up whatever necessary items the car owners might need upon their journey, flowers, balloons, combs and coconut slices. More:

British Asians ‘outsourcing murder’

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on September 29, 2009
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Poonam Taneja at BBC:

A BBC investigation has uncovered the deadly practice of British Asians travelling to India to hire contract killers.
Family and business associates, who are lured to the sub-continent, are often the targets.

In a country where murder is cheaper and less fraught with risk, the perpetrators of these crimes are rarely brought to justice.

Campaigners in both India and the UK believe this to have claimed the lives of hundreds of victims over several years.
These armchair murder plots are hatched in the living rooms of Britain and executed mainly in the rural Indian state of Punjab.

I made the journey to India to investigate these sinister crimes. More:

Click here to listen: BBC: Passport to Murder

Does it play in Deoria?

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on September 27, 2009
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Humour works in a context. Muff that up-and the joke’s on you. Mani Shankar Aiyar on Shashi Tharoor’s “holy cows” and “cattle class” tweet in Outlook:

Let me share with you another tale when I got myself into a Tharoor-like jam. I had been appointed the conference spokesman at the 7th Nonaligned Summit held in New Delhi in 1983. NAM conferences always get off to a genteel start with everyone politely pretending to listen to the set speeches of the leaders-and then the going gets rough, everyone fighting his corner till the last possible minute. In consequence, the agonised question of Cambodia/Kampuchea got untangled only at three in the morning. I immediately summoned a press conference to brief the media. One correspondent asked why NAM outcomes always emerged at such unearthly hours. Turning to the NAM symbol mounted behind me, I remarked that it was perhaps because the symbol should be changed from the dove to the owl. The Hindi press went berserk the next morning, saying I had described the distinguished leaders gathered-more than 100 of them from across the region-as “ulloos”, while the Western media, notably The New Yorker, sang paeans of praise over my wit and humour. Indira Gandhi, like Queen Victoria, was not amused-and I was promptly suspended, but, happily, a bit like Tharoor, restored to my perch shortly thereafter.

What the Tharoors and the Aiyars have to remember is that all the world is not St Stephen’s College and that what gets by as a PJ (Punjabi Joke) in Allnutt Court can get all of Ludhiana baying for your blood even for calling it a PJ. In a multilingual, multicultural society a joke has to be tailored to the audience. Indeed, even a gesture has to be tailored to the audience, as Tharoor discovered when he foolishly tried to teach a Kerala audience true patriotism by holding their hands across their chests like Americans do when they sing their national anthem. The Malayalis were not amused. Nor was I. Imagine learning patriotism from the Yankees! More:

The bigot in the mirror

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on September 27, 2009
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Indians outraged by racism might want to look closer home for ammunition, says Nisha Susan in Tehelka:

This summer two people, one afflicted by the flu, and the other by sympathy, went to a South Delhi clinic. The flu-bitten woman was leaving the clinic when the doctor told her that she had a ‘pigmentation problem’. The patient was startled. Her deep, smooth darkness has been admired most places in the world. As a Bengaluru woman she had not expected to be feted in Delhi, but she had not anticipated a pink Punjabi doctor saying that her skin could be ‘fixed’. The doctor turned to her companion and pronounced, “You have a pigmentation problem too!” As a Malayali who went to school in Delhi, he was prepared. His earliest memories were of the neighbourhood children refusing to play with him or his equally dark sister. He laughed and tried to calm his outraged friend. Defusing the tension is now as much part of him as his skin. More:

Our racist secrets

Navdeep Singh in Tehelka:

There’s a negro outside”; my sister-in-law runs in, a little out of breath. She’s barely arrived a few hours before from Delhi to visit us in an old Southern California suburb. I peek out of the window to see one of my neighbours washing his car in his yard. Yeah, he’s black. He’s also a doctor. Not that that should be important but, you know. “Is he dangerous?”; she asks, still wide eyed. I’m not sure what to answer. On the operating table, maybe.

“That’s not racism, that’s ignorance”; intones a friend whom I’m recounting the incident to, years later, on a Mumbai terrace. But racism is ignorance. More:

Babies made in India

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on September 17, 2009
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babies

India is rapidly becoming the world’s baby factory. It’s one of the few countries in the world which authorises payment for surrogacy. For €10,000, you can receive fertility treatment, IVF and have the resulting embryos impregnated in a surrogate mother. Nine months later, you return and collect your new baby. On the surface, it seems to be a win-win scenario. Infertile couples get to have a baby while impoverished women receive enough money to pay for their own children’s schooling or buy a small house. But with so many ethical issues at play, can surrogacy really be treated like any other business? Channel4 follows one couple as they travel to India to have a baby.

Click here to watch the full 52-minute video.

[Image: JAVA Films]

Indians need not apply

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on September 15, 2009
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Shefali Anand in the Wall Street Journal:

After returning to India after a few years abroad, a surprising lesson awaited me: Being Indian can be a liability.

As I looked for apartments in New Delhi in recent weeks, it soon became apparent that there’s a type of caste-system that prevails among some landlords here.

Of course, landlords, and the real estate brokers who represent them, have every right to be selective when it comes to choosing tenants. But in Delhi, depending on which neighborhood one is looking in, this profiling goes much beyond a check of the tenant’s income and background. In upmarket neighborhoods, some landlords decide tenants’ suitability depending on their nationality or gender. Bottom line: Foreigners are preferred over Indians. Other landlords don’t want to rent to single women.

I was faced with this discrimination a couple of weeks ago, when I called a broker in response to an advertisement on Delhi’s Craigslist. This site is populated mostly by brokers, who seem to be targeting a foreign/expatriate community. I zeroed in on an advertisement for a fully-furnished, studio apartment with a terrace for just $400 (approx. Rs. 20,000) per month, in the Defence Colony area of South Delhi. This neighborhood is close to the heart of town and has many nice restaurants and cafes, and understandably very much in demand. While $400 is not exactly a small amount in India, it seemed a pretty good deal. More:

Following the leader, in this world and after

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At least 60 persons either committed suicide or died of shock after hearing the news of Chief Minister YSR Reddy’s death in a chopper crash. Suicide on the tragic death of a revered figure has a psychological and cultural context, writes psychoanalyst and novelist Sudhir Kakar in the Times of India:

sudhir_kakar

Sudhir Kakar

Two recent deaths Michael Jackson in June from an overdose of drugs and Andhra Pradesh chief minister YSR Reddy this month in a helicopter crash have led to a number of suicides: the pop star’s fans in one case and the leader’s followers in the other. The world had witnessed a similar spate of suicides after Princess Diana’s death in a car accident. Such large-scale suicides are very different from mass suicides in apocalyptic cults where a megalomaniac leader brainwashed his followers into embracing death, elevating the subconscious fantasy of ‘dying together’ into the highest goal of life. Jonestown in Guyana, where in 1978 the cult leader Jim Jones led 900 people into a mass suicide, is the most chilling example.

Suicides following the death of a folk hero or a leader who has attained that status are also different from Indian farmers killing themselves because they found themselves in a hopeless situation. Suicides in the wake of a folk hero’s tragic, and dramatic, death invite us to reflect on the particular nature of the bond between the leader and his followers that lead some of the followers to take the extreme step of ending their own lives.

If i had to speculate about the suicidal followers of YSR, i would say their connection to him had become their most significant attachment, that they had no other human bonds except to the leader. Significant attachments make a fundamental contribution to our sense of identity and self-esteem, their loss plunging us into despair. Attachment to YSR also gave a meaning to his followers’ lives. Someone has said that although the central human fear is fear of death, the fear of having lived a life without significance or meaning may be even more important. More:

Suicides in Bhutan: How the happy kingdom in the clouds lost its smile

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on September 9, 2009
in Bhutan, Culture, Economy and Society
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Bhutan's capital Thimphu at night. Photo: Birger Hoppe / Under CC

Bhutan's capital Thimphu at night. Photo: Birger Hoppe / Under CC

Bhutan has made its people’s happiness a national priority. But a spate of suicides suggests it is struggling to cope with the modern world. Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

For the emergency department of Bhutan’s largest hospital, last Tuesday was a pressing day. In the space of a few hours six people were rushed in, all suspected of having tried to commit suicide.

One of the patients, a 35-year-old housewife, said she had taken 30 sedatives after problems at home. The second, a woman of 27, had swallowed 15 paracetamol tablets after quarrelling with her husband. The third to require urgent treatment was a 17-year-old girl who was rushed in unconscious having drunk nail polisher remover after an argument with her sister. The other three cases were prisoners from the local jail who had emptied a bottle of mysterious spirit. Some reports claimed they had tried to take their lives, but officials are unsure.

By the standards of a hospital in a large city in the West the numbers might be unremarkable, but the Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital is in Thimphu, capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, which has a total population of less than 700,000. What’s more, this enigmatic mountainous nation is feted around the world for its gross national happiness (GNH) – a national policy in which the emotional well-being of citizens is considered more important than their financial bottom line. More:

[Photo: Birger Hoppe / Under CC]

‘Only whores choose their partners’

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on September 8, 2009
in India and Society
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A Khap is a cluster of villages united by caste and geography. A 14th century concept started by upper caste Jats, a prosperous ethnic group. A Khap panchayat is the he local council formed by the clan from several neighbouring villages. Mainly found in north India: Haryana, western UP and parts of Rajasthan.

A Khap is a cluster of villages united by caste and geography. A 14th century concept started by upper caste Jats, a prosperous ethnic group. A Khap panchayat is the he local council formed by the clan from several neighbouring villages. Mainly found in north India: Haryana, western UP and parts of Rajasthan.

Feudal lords — upper caste Jats — rule a cluster of villages just 50 km from Delhi. They issues fatwas, order honour killings, impose social boycott and fines and settles land disputes. All boys and girls within a cluster of villages called khap are considered siblings. And if a girl happens to fall in love?

“Here, rape is casual, murder-by-pesticide of teenage daughters acceptable and it is routine to dispose of their bodies by burning them in cattle-carts,” writes Nandita Sengupta in the Times of India.

Generally, it’s the parents or father-brother duos who kill ‘wayward’ girls. A sympathetic mother may plead with a daughter to take the goli herself. A protesting daughter may be force-fed a pesticide pill, the preferred mode. The other route is death by hanging, all the better to ‘show’ it as suicide. No police, no complaint, no records. “Yahan izzatdar woh hain jo ladki ko marte hain (Those who kill their girls are respected here),” says another teacher.

Click here to read her full story, “Pesticide pills for wayward girls.”

In another story, “Only whores choose their partners,” Sameer Arshad writes:

Those who dare to cross the line must suffer the consequences. Like Radha of Muzaffarnagar’s Fugana village. Three years ago, she was stripped, burnt and hung from a tree. Her crime was to fall in love. Anecdotal accounts say she is one of many.

He quotes a local leader: “Love marriages are dirty, I don’t even want to repeat the word…Only whores can choose their partners.” Click here to read his full report.

Rushdie’s latest

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on September 7, 2009
in Society
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From the Daily Mail:

The controversial author, 61, was spotted at the opening of the film Francesca with Canadian-born former model Carolann Javicoli.

The pair cosied up around the pool of the exclusive Hotel De Bains at a party after the event and happily posed for pictures.

Mrs Javicoli told the Mail that Rushdie is a ‘wonderful man with a wicked sense of humour’.
‘Salman does tend to attract a lot of beautiful women around him. That’s just the sort of man he is. But he sees the beauty inside and out,’ she said. Click here for photo:

Moral vigilantes crack down in Darjeeling, India’s capital of love

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on September 6, 2009
in India, Politics and Society
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Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

Gorkha separatists fighting for their own state, who control the Darjeeling area in north-east India, are carrying out “moral policing” to stop couples kissing in public or engaging in other behaviour deemed inappropriate.

This week, members of a self-styled police force who are now carrying out some of the duties once performed by regular officers, harangued a couple simply for taking a saunter while holding hands. “Do we have to get your permission even to procreate?” the couple reportedly retorted.

The staff-wielding moral vigilantes, dressed in green and yellow tracksuits, go by the name of the Gorkhaland Personnel (GLP), an organisation of young people initially established by the separatists to direct traffic and provide security at political meetings. More:

The pleasures and politics of pornography

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on September 4, 2009
in Culture and Society
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savita_bhabhi

Shohini Ghosh in Himal Southasian:

Recently, the Indian Government blocked the much loved Savita Bhabi website created by the pseudonymous Deshmukh, Dexter and Mad. The Savita Bhabi (Savita sister-in-law) site carries a daily cartoon strip about the “Sexual Adventures of the Hot Indian Bhabi” who is described as a “regular Indian woman who just can’t get enough sex”. In June, the Government of India instructed internet service providers to block the site under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act which prohibits the publication and transmission of “any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest” or whose effect could “corrupt and deprave” and certain amended provisions that were included after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. These provisions allow for the censoring of material deemed threatening to the “the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence and security of the state”.

In an age of proliferating hardcore cyberporn, why did the government target a cartoon strip as a ‘moral and national threat’? N.Vijayaditya, the Controller of Certifying Authorities – an agency entrusted under the IT Act to block websites – stated that they had acted on “several complaints” made against the site. The demise (not really, since you can access the site through proxy servers) of India’s best loved bhabi was mourned by thousands of online admirers. Headlines reported the “Assassination of Savita Bhabi” and the “Death of India’s First Porn Star”. A Bombay-based rock band dedicated a special song to Savita Bhabi, while blogs and networking sites launched ‘Save Savita Bhabi’ campaigns. On the other hand, Savita Bhabi’s detractors allege that the site denigrated Indian women, insulted ‘Indian family values’ and threatened ‘Indian culture’. Those familiar with censorship debates in India will know that over the last two decades these allegations have recurred with predictable regularity around sexual speech and more particularly around transgressive images of women’s bodies and sexualities. So what precisely is transgressive about Savita Bhabi? More:

United by their loneliness, America’s elderly Indian immigrants

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on September 2, 2009
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Patricia Leigh Brown from Freemont, California, in the Indian Express:

They gather five days a week at a mall called the Hub, sitting on concrete planters and sipping thermoses of chai. These elderly immigrants from India are members of an all-male group called The 100 Years Living Club. They talk about crime in nearby Oakland, the cheapest flights to Delhi and how to deal with recalcitrant daughters-in-law.

Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant places, some culturally light years away.

“If I don’t come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk to,” said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower. Meeting beside the parking lot, the men were oblivious to their fellow mall rats, backpack-carrying teenagers swigging energy drinks.

In this country of twittering youth, Devendra and his friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million – or about 11 per cent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050. In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign born, according to a 2007 census survey. More: