Tag Archive for 'India'

The gut-wrenching science behind the world’s hottest peppers

Published on May 25, 2013 in Food. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Nothing compares to the legendary superhot that spices life in remote India. In the Smithsonian:

The 17 tribes of Nagaland are united, historically, by an enthusiasm for heads. The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India—my reading matter on the two-hour drive from Dimapur to Kohima, in the state of Nagaland —contains dozens of references to head-taking but only one mention of the item that has brought me here: the Naga King Chili (a.k.a. Bhut Jolokia), often ranked the world’s hottest. “In the Chang village of Hakchang,” the anthropologist J. H. Hutton is quoted as saying in 1922, “…women whose blood relations on the male side have taken a head may cook the head, with chilies, to get the flesh off.” Hutton’s use of “cook” would seem to be a reference to Chang culinary practice. Only on rereading did I realize the Chang weren’t eating the chilies—or the flesh, for that matter—but using them to clean the skull.

Such is the perplexing contradiction of the genus Capsicum: condiment and industrial solvent, pleasure and pain. I’ve come to Nagaland to confront the conundrum on its home turf at the annual all-tribe get-together, the Hornbill Festival, which includes a Naga King Chili-Eating Competition.

The last known head-taking raid occurred sometime in the last century. (The verb “taking” is preferred over hunting. You do not hunt heads. You hunt people and then take their heads.) Most Nagas are Baptists now. Nonetheless, they appear to have pride in their gruesome heritage. A crossbeam on the front of the Chang exhibit building on the festival grounds is decorated with a row of cephalic bas-reliefs; lest anyone mistake them for family portraiture, the neck stalks drip red.More:

Mallika Sherawat talks “Dirty Politics”

Published on May 25, 2013 in Movies. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

India bans captive dolphin shows: dolphins should be seen as ‘non-human persons’

Published on May 23, 2013 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

From Treehugger:

Dolphins have long been one of our favorite ocean-going animal counterparts, blurring the line that separates human intelligence and emotion from the wildness of nature. Sadly, though, this attraction has resulted in dolphins around the world being exploited for our entertainment, subjected to a life in captivity.

But now, in a bold move to protect the well-being of dolphins, India has moved to ban dolphin shows — a push that helps elevate their status from creatures of mere curiosity to one that borders more closely to that of personhood.

Late last week, India’s Minstry of the Environment and Forests released a statement banning “any person / persons, organizations, government agencies, private or public enterprises that involves import, capture of cetacean species to establish for commercial entertainment, private or public exhibition and interaction purposes whatsoever.” More:

India among the world’s most racist countries

Published on May 21, 2013 in Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

racial-tolerance-map

Update: A professor who studies race and ethnic conflict responds to this map. In Washington Post

In Washington Post:

• Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

• India and Jordan by far the least tolerant. In only two of 81 surveyed countries, more than 40 percent of respondents said they would not want a neighbor of a different race. This included 43.5 percent of Indians and 51.4 percent of Jordanian. More:

Degrees of desperation

Published on May 6, 2013 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Ramachandra Guha in Hindustan Times:

Among public universities in India, the University of Delhi stands out, and for at least seven reasons:

First, it has an integrated campus, with undergraduate colleges and graduate faculties in the sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, law, and even fine arts;

Second, it has an all-India catchment, with students coming in large numbers from Bihar and Orissa, from the south, and from the North-east;

Third, it has consistently had some of the best colleges and postgraduate faculties in India and even Asia;

Fourth, the campus has always been hospitable to all political tendencies. Unlike some other Indian universities, it has not been a Marxist or Hindutva stronghold;

Fifth, this pluralism is intellectual as well as ideological. In the departments I myself know best, such as history and economics, students are not force-fed a single way of studying the subject (as they would in some other universities), but acquainted with diverse theories and approaches;

Sixth, although women students and faculty are still not fully free or equal, compared to other universities in India DU has more consistently encouraged women to excel in scholarly pursuits;

Seventh, although it is a residential university, it is closely integrated with the city, since it has a large number of day scholars. Unlike the IITs and IIMs, here students can get a good education without being distanced from Indian society as a whole. More:

Academic excellence and St. Stephen’s College

Published on May 6, 2013 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A guest post by Thane Richard in Kafila:

 I recently read an article in Kafila – more like an angry, reflective rant – written by some students from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. To quickly summarize, the piece criticized the draconian views of the Principal of St. Stephen’s College regarding curfews on women’s dormitories and his stymying of his students’ democratic ideals of discussion, protest, and open criticism. More broadly, though, the article’s writers seemed to be speaking about the larger stagnant institution of Indian higher education, overseen by a class of rigid administrators represented by this sexist and bigoted Principal, as described by the students. The students’ frustration was palpable in the text and their story felt to me like a perfect example of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Except Indian students are not an unstoppable force. Not even close.

In 2007 I was a student at St. Stephen’s College for seven months as part of a study abroad program offered by my home institution, Brown University. In as many ways as possible, I tried to become a Stephanian: I joined the football (soccer) team, acted in a school play written and directed by an Indian peer, performed in the school talent show, was a member of the Honors Economics Society, and went to several student events on and off campus. More importantly, though, I was a frequenter of the school’s cafe and enjoyed endless chai’s and butter toasts with my Indian peers under the monotonous relief of the fans spinning overhead. Most of my friends were 3rd years, like me, and all of them were obviously very bright. I was curious about what their plans were after they graduated. With only a few exceptions, they were planning on pursuing second undergraduate degrees at foreign universities.

“Wait, what?! You are studying here for three years just so you can go do it again for four more years?” I could not grasp the logic of this. What changed my understanding was when I started taking classes at St. Stephen’s College. Except for one, they were horrible.  More:

Modi, the man and the message

Published on April 4, 2013 in India, Leaders and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Harish Khare in The Hindu:

During a recent three-week stay in the United States, I was often asked to explain the Indian media’s current obsession with Narendra Modi. The only reasonably cogent answer to give was the convergence between the corporate ownership of the electronic media and Mr. Modi’s corporate bank-rollers. The Gujarat Chief Minister’s induction in the Bharatiya Janata Party central set-up has been celebrated as if he has already been invited by the Rashtrapati to form the next government at the Centre.

Like most Indian political leaders, Mr. Modi is a non-biodegradable entity. He will not disappear. Machinations by the BJP central leadership may delay his storming the party headquarters, but he is not going to be talked out of his national ambitions. It is only the voters who can knock the stuffing out of him and his outsized pretensions.

Mr. Modi promises to do things differently and better than what is being done in New Delhi or even in the other BJP ruled States. Not only is he contemptuous of the Manmohan Singh style of consensus approach to resolving contentious issues, he is also derisive of his own party and its leadership. He believes the BJP has become too flabby as an organisation and that most of its impresarios are compromised and tired.More:

Vagina Monologues challenges India’s taboos

Published on March 8, 2013 in Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

As the debate around the Delhi rape case has demonstrated, India is still a conservative country where sex is rarely discussed in the open. But, for the past 10 years, the Indian version of the worldwide play, The Vagina Monologues, has been trying to challenge some of those taboos. From BBC news.

As she takes to the stage, Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal has a question for the audience.

“How many of you feel comfortable saying the word vagina?” she asks as a ripple of embarrassed laughter erupts.

About two-thirds of the audience raise their hands, but there are some too shy to put their hands up, let alone join in a group chant of the word, which follows.

The show they have come to watch is The Vagina Monologues, which looks at the issue of a woman’s sexuality through a series of sketches.

Famous across the world, it was created by the American playwright Eve Ensler.

After seeing it performed in the United States, Ms Kotwal, a Mumbai-based actor-director, and her son Kaizaad Kotwal came up with the idea of adapting it for India. But that was not easy.

India is still a predominantly conservative country where kissing is rarely seen in films and sex is barely talked about. More

Why Salman Rushdie could not set foot in Calcutta

Published on January 31, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In The Telegraph:

The state machinery swung into action to prevent Salman Rushdie from setting foot in Calcutta today and launched an equally spirited effort to conceal its footprints, accounts from multiple sources and events through the day suggest.

 Hours after it was confirmed that Rushdie would not reach the city, one of the senior-most government officials made a statement at Writers’ Buildings on one condition: his name cannot be revealed.

 The official declared: “The state had no information about Salman Rushdie’s visit. But a rumour spread last evening that the author was supposed to come to the city for a series of programmes. The city police were asked to enquire about this. The Mumbai police confirmed to the city police that Rushdie was not supposed to visit Calcutta today (Wednesday). The city police informed the state home secretary last night.” More:

Freedom From Famine — The Norman Borlaug Story

Published on January 29, 2013 in Obituaries and Science. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009)was an American agronomist, humanitarian and Nobel laureate who has been called “the father of the Green Revolution” and “The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives”. See Wiki

In Times of India: By cranking up a wheat strain containing an unusual gene, Borlaug created the so-called ”semi-dwarf” plant variety — a shorter, stubbier, compact stalk that supported an enormous head of grain without falling over from the weight. This curious principle of shrinking the plant to increase the output on the plant from the same acreage resulted in Indian farmers eventually quadrupling their wheat — and later, rice — production.

It heralded the Green Revolution.

Below, Freedom From Famine – The Norman Borlaug Story:

 

Left with no choice

Published on January 20, 2013 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A chilling account of the circumstances under which a Kashmiri Pandit family was forced out of the Valley. Excerpts from Rahul Pandita’s latest book, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, in Open:

19 January 1990 was a very cold day despite the sun’s weak attempts to emerge from behind dark clouds. In the afternoon, I played cricket with some boys from my neighbourhood. All of us wore thick sweaters and pherans. I would always remove my pheran and place it on the fence in the kitchen garden. After playing, I would wear it before entering the house to escape my mother’s wrath. She’d worry that I’d catch a cold. “The neighbours will think that I am incapable of taking care of my children,” she would say in exasperation.

We had an early dinner that evening and, since there was no electricity, we couldn’t watch television. Father heard the evening news bulletin on the radio as usual, and just as we were going to sleep, the electricity returned.

I am in a deep slumber. I can hear strange noises. Fear grips me. All is not well. Everything is going to change. I see shadows of men slithering along our compound wall. And then they jump inside. One by one. So many of them.

I woke up startled. But the zero-watt bulb was not on. The hundred-watt bulb was. Father was waking me up. “Something is happening,” he said. I could hear it—there were people out on the streets. They were talking loudly. Some major activity was underfoot. Were they setting our locality on fire?

So, it wasn’t entirely a dream, after all? Will they jump inside now?

Then a whistling sound could be heard. It was the sound of the mosque’s loudspeaker. We heard it every day in the wee hours of the morning just before the muezzin broke into the azaan. But normally the whistle was short-lived; that night, it refused to stop. That night, the muezzin didn’t call. That night, it felt like something sinister was going to happen.

The noise outside our house had died down. But in the mosque, we could hear people’s voices. They were arguing about something. More:

Genomes link aboriginal Australians to Indians

Published on January 15, 2013 in Science. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ed Yong in Nature:

Some aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants brought different tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo, researchers say.

This scenario is the result of a large genetic analysis outlined today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It contradicts a commonly held view that Australia had no contact with the rest of the world between the arrival of the first humans around 45,000 years ago and the coming of Europeans in the eighteenth century.

“Australia is thought to represent one of the earliest migrations for humans after they left Africa, but it seemed pretty isolated after that,” says Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who led the study. More:

The Hindu’s fight against rape

Published on January 5, 2013 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

and here’s the link to Part 2

The taboo of menstruation

Published on December 30, 2012 in Health. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Rose George from Bettiah, India, in NYT:

Khushi knew it was cancer. Ankita thought she was injured. None of the girls knew why they were suddenly bleeding, why their stomachs were “paining,” as Indian English has it. They cried and were terrified and then they asked their mothers. And their mothers said, you are normal. You are menstruating. You are a woman now.

But that is not all. The girls, whose names I’ve changed here for the sake of their privacy, were also told: when you menstruate, don’t cook food because you will pollute it. Don’t touch idols because you will defile them. Don’t handle pickles because they will go rotten with your touch.

Pickles, I asked Ankita? Yes, madam, she told me, in her schoolyard in rural Uttar Pradesh. My mother says it is so. Her mother believed it, and her mother before her. It must be true.

I read of another girl who said that her nail polish had spoiled because she had applied it during her period. She saw nothing weird about this. More:

Protests over rape case: in pictures

Published on December 28, 2012 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A 23-year-old woman was attacked by six men on a moving bus and brutalized for 45 minutes in Delhi. Protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against the growing incidence of rape, and slow and ineffective prosecution.

protest

In this photograph in The Telegraph by Prem Singh, a police officer and a woman protester show each other injuries suffered during the violence in New Delhi.

Click here to see photographs

We call this progress

Published on December 23, 2012 in Essay. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Arundhati Roy in Guernica:

I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

Today, as we speak, the U.S., and perhaps China and India, are involved in a battle for control of the resources of Africa. Thousands of U.S. troops, as well as death squads, are being sent into Africa. The “Yes We Can” president has expanded the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. There are drone attacks killing children on a regular basis there.

In the 1990s, when the markets of India opened, when all of the laws that protected labor were dismantled, when natural resources were privatized, when that whole process was set into motion, the Indian government opened two locks: one was the lock of the markets; the other was the lock of an old fourteenth-century mosque, which was a disputed site between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindus believed that it was the birthplace of Ram, and the Muslims, of course, use it as a mosque. By opening that lock, India set into motion a kind of conflict between the majority community and the minority community, a way of constantly dividing people. Finding ways to divide people is the main practice of anybody that is in power. More:

 

Delhi gang-rape victim narrates the tale of horror

Published on December 23, 2012 in Crime and Women. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

New Delhi police fire water cannon at rape protest

In The Hindu:

The victim purportedly told the SDM that around 9.30 p.m. while she and her friend were standing at a bus stop at Munirka, they were called into the bus by the juvenile accused Rahul (name changed), who told them that the bus would go towards Palam. On entering the vehicle, the victims found that in all there were six others besides them in the vehicle.

A few minutes into the ride, her friend got suspicious as the bus had deviated from the supposed route and the other occupants had shut the door. When he objected, the six accused taunted them, asking what they were doing together so late in the night.

A scuffle then ensued between the software engineer and others. The 28-year-old was hit on the head by Ram Singh. The woman was then dragged to the rear end of the vehicle by Rahul and Akshay Singh.

In her statement, the woman said that after hitting her friend, who fell unconscious, Ram Singh went to the back of the bus and was the first to force himself on her. It is learnt that the girl had heard some names while the attackers were calling out to each other. More and here

Why cheap domestic help is no longer in abundant supply in India

Published on December 22, 2012 in Economy and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In The Economist:

A glut of unskilled workers has long provided cheap labour. India’s latest employment survey in 2009-10 estimated that 2.7% of working Indians, or 10.4m people, worked in homes as maids, cooks, gardeners, and the like. The business is mostly unregulated, and the true figure is probably far higher. The International Labour Organisation says domestic workers account for 3.5-12% of the working population in developing countries, against less than 1% in rich countries.

Yet the culture may be changing. In Chennai, a commercial city in southern India, Bangalore, the country’s IT hub, and Goa, a coastal tourism hotspot, families also say it has become harder over the past five years to find live-in staff. Demand is rising as more women go out to work and fewer live in claustrophobic joint families where in-laws act as nannies. Yet supply is falling: 18% of urban women in the informal sector took up jobs as domestic workers in 2009-10, down from 27% five years earlier, according to a 2011 study led by a Harvard academic.

Economic liberalisation in the past two decades has created a wider range of low-skilled urban jobs. Malls need shop assistants. Offices need errand boys. In rural areas a job-creation scheme for poor households is keeping potential migrants at home. More:

Genomic study traces Roma to northern India

Published on December 12, 2012 in Science. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In NYT:

The Roma people of Europe, often called Gypsies, are long thought to have originated in India because of similarities between Roma and Indian languages. But historical records are scanty.

Now a wide-ranging genomic study appears to confirm that the Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago.

“Some genetic studies have also pointed to India before, but it was not clear what part of India,” said an author of the study, David Comas, an evolutionary biologist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. More:

Delhi girl Shreya Singhal, 21, challenges law used for Facebook arrests

Published on November 29, 2012 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

A young law student, Shreya Singhal, has filed a petition in the Supreme Court to review the law under which two young women were arrested recently in Maharashtra for their Facebook posts.

In Hindustan Times:

Voicing concern over recent incidents of people being arrested for posting alleged offensive messages on websites, the Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a PIL seeking amendment to the Information Technology Act. A bench headed by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir said that it was considering to take suo motu cognisance of recent incidents and wondered why nobody had so far challenged the particular provision of the IT Act.

Taking the case on urgent basis, the bench agreed to hear the PIL filed by a Delhi student Shreya Singhal later today.

Shreya has contended in her plea that “the phraseology of Section 66A of the IT Act, 2000 is so wide and vague and incapable of being judged on objective standards, that it is susceptible to wanton abuse and hence falls foul of Article 14, 19 (1)(a) and Article 21 of the Constitution.” More:

In Mint, a profile of Shreya Singhal:

Shreya Singhal, the 21-year-old Delhi girl who filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court calling section 66(A) of the Information Technology Act unconstitutional, has only been back in her home country for a few months.

Singhal, an only child who studied at Vasant Valley school, has spent the last three years studying astrophysics at Bristol University in the UK. Singhal’s back home in her gap year during which she’s also applying to law school. Her return coincided with several high-profile arrests this autumn under the controversial section, which criminalizes “causing annoyance or inconvenience” online. When cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was arrested in Mumbai on 9 September, Singhal was shocked.

“I’m obsessed with reading the news,” she said in a telephone conversation. “So initially this case about the cartoonist caught my notice, but I thought it was a one-off.” More:

 

The quiet grip of caste

Published on November 29, 2012 in India and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Jean Drèze in Hindustan Times [Jean Drèze is visiting professor, Department of Economics, Allahabad University]:

Some time ago I visited a Dalit hamlet in Rewa district. It was hemmed in on all sides by the fields of upper-caste farmers, who refused to allow any approach road to reach the hamlet. There were short roads inside the hamlet, but they stopped abruptly at the edge of it. The hamlet felt like an island, surrounded by hostile territory. I wondered whether any other country still cultivated such absurd and monstrous practices as the caste system.

The next day I read an interesting article on this subject, written by my esteemed colleague André Béteille (The Hindu, February 21, 2012). The article began by pointing out that the hold of caste in social life is subsiding in many ways. For instance, the association between caste and occupation is becoming less rigid (as Chandra Bhan Prasad puts it more succinctly, “pizza delivery is caste neutral”). Similarly, the rules of purity and pollution are a little more relaxed today than they used to be. Following on this, Béteille argues that “organised politics” is the reason why “in spite of all this, caste is maintaining its hold over the public consciousness”. I submit, however, that there are simpler reasons for the survival of caste consciousness.

The real issue, actually, is not so much caste consciousness as the role of caste as an instrument of power. But the two are linked. To convey the point, some of us collected information on the share of the upper castes in positions of power and influence (POPIs) in Allahabad — the press club, the university faculty, the bar association, and the commanding posts in trade unions, NGOs, media houses, among other public institutions. The sample covers more than a thousand POPIs, spread over 25 public institutions. The share of the upper castes in this sample turns out to be over 75%, compared with around 20% in the population of Uttar Pradesh as a whole. Brahmins and Kayasthas alone have cornered about half of the POPIs — more than four times their share in the population. These are approximate figures, partly based on guessing castes from surnames, but the pattern is clear: upper castes continue to have overwhelming control over public institutions. More:

Boris Johnson: I’ve seen the future in India, and Britain can share the spoils

Published on November 27, 2012 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In The Telegraph:

Pssht, I said to Barry from the High Commission. Look, there, I pointed. There it was, slap bang in the middle of the road. It was a giant cat – as black as Bagheera from The Jungle Book, and if anything a bit bigger. We’d only been in India for about half an hour, and we’d already seen kites circling in the blood-red sun of dawn. We’d seen dewlapped cows grazing on patches of grass by the expressways, and elephants waiting for their mahouts to finish their ablutions in the fields. But this was something else.

We drew nearer. Still it didn’t move. “Are you sure it is?” I asked Barry. He leaned over and put the question to the driver. “Is that a Jaguar?” “Yes, sir, it is a Jaguar.”

My friends, it was indeed. Within a few miles of Indira Gandhi Airport, we had found a genuine British Jaguar, waiting at the traffic lights. It was designed at Whitley near Coventry and at Gaydon near Warwick, and assembled into the mighty black beast before us by the workforce of Castle Bromwich near Birmingham. Here, in one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets in the world, I am proud to say that we had found evidence of market penetration by one of this country’s proudest motoring marques. More:

Mapping India

Published on November 16, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Malini Nair profiles cartographer Manosi Lahiri in The Times of India/Crest edition:

Maps of India that conform to modern rules of cartography started appearing only in the late 15th century and were based largely on Ptolemy’s measurements. They were drawn and used mainly by Europeans, says Lahiri. These early maps told mariners, explorers and traders where to expect pirates or find water bodies and local riches.

Initially, the maps were ornamented with an exotic cartouche, or pictorial emblem, at the bottom of the imagined Indoustan. These maps were not strictly accurate. They had phantom lakes and imaginary rivers drawn from old travellers’ tales. But then the British moved in, inching their way from trade to occupation and administration. The maps changed. They became painstakingly scientific. They were maps a ruler needed to establish and consolidate authority. Revenue zones, roads, forts and villages had to be clearly demarcated. The first surveyed map of India drafted by James Rennell, surveyor of British East Indian Company, appeared in the Atlas of Bengal in 1779.

“Historical maps of India were never for Indians, they were for European explorers, traders, colonisers, ” says Lahiri. It is not as if the Arabs, the Mongols and other Central Asians who travelled to or invaded India did not know mapping (Al Beruni took many astronomical measurements a millennia ago), but somehow none of them produced significant, scientific cartographic works, she points out. More

India’s colonial gardens

Published on November 15, 2012 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Eugenia W. Herbert in Berfrois(h/t: Chapati Mystery):

Although at home notions of what constituted an “English garden” were both ever-changing and hotly contested, at a distance they tended to resolve themselves into more generic forms: the park-like settings of the eighteenth century yielding to variations on the classic Victorian in the period of high colonialism. There is little evidence that the “eclectic bandwagon” of styles vying for acceptance in nineteenth-century England had much resonance in India. There was always the time lag, for one thing; for another, most colonials were too impermanent in their postings to sink time and money into a fashionable garden; for a third, they had enough to do simply to get the flowers of home to grow in an uncongenial clime without worrying about the latest fad in topiary or balustrades or weeping willows. The British gardens that characterized high-colonial India and survived the end of empire, however precariously, tended therefore to be variations of the basic Victorian pattern of lawns, defined flowerbeds with as many English flowers as they could coax to grow, gravel paths and ranks and ranks of potted plants. Shrubs and trees of necessity were indigenous rather than imported from home.

As far as I know, only the Mughals matched the British in the intensity of their love of gardens and certainty in their own models (although the British—some British—have had a sense of humor about their horticultural addictions that seems quite lacking in the Mughals). One is hard put to explain why two such different peoples should share this obsession: in the one case, restless invaders from the uplands of Central Asia, in the other, merchant adventurers morphing into civil servants from a small boreal island. Of course there were differences. The British came to see gardens not only as aesthetically pleasing but also as a means of moral improvement for all classes at home and all peoples under the Union Jack, an idea that would have seemed quite strange to their Mughal forebears. Moreover, except for the secluded zenana garden Mughal gardens were essentially male domains, although a few highborn women such as Nur Jahan, the wife of Emperor Jahangir, oversaw the design of several. More:

India’s shocking pre-diabetic numbers

Published on November 14, 2012 in Health and India. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Kavita Devgan in Mint:

Not yet diabetic, but rapidly getting there. Yes, there is a condition like that, and in India, hand-in-glove with diabetes, it is reaching epidemic proportions.

“The statistics are staggering,” says Chennai-based diabetologist V. Mohan of Dr Mohan’s Diabetes Specialities Centre (DMDSC).

The results of the ICMR-INDIAB (Indian Council of Medical Research—India Diabetes) study released in 2011 for adults aged 20 and above showed that an average of 11% had pre-diabetes in India. The prevalence of pre-diabetes in urban areas was found to be higher (13.2%) than in rural areas (8.5%), says Dr Mohan. “We pegged that in 2011 in India there were 62.4 million people with diabetes and 77.2 million people with pre-diabetes,” says Dr Mohan, who also heads the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation and was the national coordinator for the study.

“What I find scary is that the disease is progressing at an even faster pace than anticipated earlier,” Dr Mohan says. “According to the (International Diabetes Federation’s) Diabetes Atlas of 2009, there were 50.8 million people with diabetes in India and in 2011, in just two years, this figure has gone up by around 12 million (to 62.4 million). We are obviously going to overshoot, exponentially, the earlier projections for the year 2030, by millions.” more

The Shakey Rays – Down The Drain and 8 Floors High

Published on November 5, 2012 in Music. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The Shakey Rays are a four piece indie rock band from Chennai, India.

Girish Karnad takes on V.S. Naipaul

Published on November 2, 2012 in Books. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Supriya Nair in Mint:

Karnad, whose session was announced as a masterclass where the playwright would talk about “his life in theatre,” spoke instead about Naipaul’s mischaracterisations of Indian history and the politics of giving him an award in spite of his widely-quoted remarks about Indian Muslims, especially in light of Mumbai and India’s recent history.

Edited excerpts from Karnad’s remarks follow:

Why is Naipaul Being Honoured?

At the Mumbai Literature Festival this year, Landmark and Literature Alive have jointly given the Lifetime’s Achievement Award to Sir Vidia Naipaul. The award ceremony, held on the 31st of October at the National Centre of the Performing Arts, coyly failed to mention that Naipaul was not an Indian and has never claimed to be one. But at no point was the question raised, and the words Shashi Deshpande, the novelist, had used to describe the Neemrana Festival conducted by the ICCR in 2002 perfectly fitted the event: ‘It was a celebration of a Nobel Laureate… whom India, hopefully, even sycophantically, considered an Indian.’

Apart from his novels, only two of which take place in India and are abysmal, Naipaul has written three books on India and the books are brilliantly written—he is certainly among the great English writers of our generation. They have been hailed as a continued exploration of India’s journey into modernity, but what strikes one from the very first book, A Wounded Civilization, is their rabid antipathy to the Indian Muslim. The ‘wound’ in the title is the one inflicted on India by Babur’s invasion. Since then Naipaul has never missed a chance to accuse them of having savaged India for five centuries, brought, among other dreadful things, poverty into it, and destroyed glorious Indian culture. More:

Literary critic Deepanjana Pal was there at the Literature Live session and weighs in with…And Girish Karnad went Boom!

The ghosts of Mrs Gandhi

Published on November 1, 2012 in India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Amitav Ghosh on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. He wrote this moving essay in 1995:

At that time, I was living in a part of New Delhi called Defence Colony – a neighborhood of large, labyrinthine houses, with little self-contained warrens of servants’ rooms tucked away on roof-tops and above garages. When I lived there, those rooms had come to house a floating population of the young and straitened journalists, copywriters, minor executives, and university people like myself. We battened upon this wealthy enclave like mites in a honeycomb, spreading from rooftop to rooftop. Our ramshackle lives curtailed from our landlords of chiffon-draped washing lines and thickets of TV serials.

 I was twenty-eight. The city I considered home was Calcutta, but New Delhi was where I had spent all my adult life except for a few years in England and Egypt. I had returned to India two years before, upon completing a doctorate at Oxford, and recently found a teaching job at Delhi University. But it was in the privacy of my baking rooftop hutch that my real life was lived. I was writing my first novel, in the classic fashion, perched in garret.

 On the morning of October 31, the day of Mrs. Gandhi’s death, I caught a bus to Delhi University, as usual, at about half past nine. From where I lived, it took an hour and half; a long commute, but not an exceptional one for New Delhi. The assassination had occurred shortly before, just a few miles away, but I had no knowledge of this when I boarded the bus. Nor did I notice anything untoward at any point during the ninety-minute journey. But the news, traveling by word of mouth, raced my bus to the university.

 When I walked into the grounds, I saw not the usual boisterous, Frisbee-throwing crowd of students but a small group of people standing intently around transistor radio. A young man detached himself from one of the huddles and approached me, his mouth twisted into light tipped, knowing smile that seems always to accompany the gambit “Have you heard…?” More

 

Modi’s response to the British exposes a typical Indian complex

Published on October 27, 2012 in Politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray in The Telegraph:

A man who tweets “God is great” because Her Britannic Majesty’s envoy has condescended to notice him stands condemned from his own mouth for servility and opportunism. Those who are outraged that James Bevan, Britain’s high commissioner, should forget human rights to shake hands with Narendra Modi ignore the far more serious matter of this manifestation of the Indian’s inferiority complex.

Bevan’s gesture is of no greater consequence than Caroline Quentin, the narrator of A Passage through India, a television serial now running in Britain, saying that Navratri in Ahmedabad is India’s best festival. But people seem to believe it will prompt millions of Gujaratis to vote for Modi in December and persuade the Bharatiya Janata Party to anoint him its prime ministerial candidate. If so, we might as well drop all pretence of being either an independent republic or a civilized, modern state committed to liberal secular values.

It’s understandable that Britain should cosy up to Modi. China and Japan have already started dealing with him. Next year’s Gujarat investment summit will probably include Australian and American participants. Why should Britain miss out? With new missions in Hyderabad and Chandigarh and plans for five more trade offices across India, the British aim to double trade by 2015. Growing friction with the European Union, the setback in the £26-billion plan to merge Britain’s BAE Systems with the European Aeronautics, Defence and Space Company, and Ford Motors’ closure notice demand new initiatives. “Our economy relies on India’s for jobs, investment and opportunities like never before,” Hugo Swire, the junior minister whose portfolio includes India, told a recent International Institute of Strategic Studies conference in London. That was after acknowledging that 700 Indian businesses employ 90,000 people in Britain where the Tatas are the “largest corporate employer”. More:

India’s unassuming Formula One pioneer

Published on October 27, 2012 in Sport. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

hereBrad Spurgeon in IHT:

Talking to the soft-spoken, matter-of-fact, unassuming Narain Karthikeyan, it is easy to forget that he is currently India’s fastest man.

It is also easy to forget that Karthikeyan, 35, is a trailblazer for world motorsport, as the first Indian to race in Formula One, the highest level of racing, when he began driving for the Jordan team in 2005.

“I was the first guy from India to be in Formula One, nobody had been to this territory before,” he said in a recent interview. “So it was all inventing it myself. Being a pioneer is always difficult, and I’m glad to have got another chance to race in Formula One.”

After that 2005 season, he spent several seasons in various other series before returning to Formula One last year to race with the HRT team, where he continues this season.

Looking at his results in Formula One, where he has scored points only once — at the U.S. Grand Prix in 2005, when most of the teams did not race because they had dangerous tires — it is also easy to forget that when he raced in the lower series in Europe, he had results to compare with those of such accomplished drivers as the former world champion Jenson Button, with whom he raced in Formula 3 in 1999, when Button scored three victories and Karthikeyan scored two. More: