Tag Archive for ‘Poverty’ at Asian Window

« Older Entries

Tag Archive for 'Poverty'

India’s disjointed prosperity

Published

asianwindow

on March 17, 2010

in India

. 0 Comments

Tim Sebastian, television journalist and chairman of the Doha Debates, in the International Herald Tribune:

New Delhi: When Madan Lal began work here among the madness, color and chaos of the Janpath pavement, Richard Nixon was in the White House and there wasn’t a main street shop anywhere in the world selling computers.

At the age of 15 he sat down on the uneven concrete, in exactly the same place occupied by his father, and began shining the shoes of tourists and anyone else with the luxury of footwear to polish.

Behind him the rickshaws and hooting cars sped past, the world underwent cosmic change and 40 years on, with considerably fewer teeth, his hands engrained with shoe polish and a dirty yellow sweatband across his forehead, he’s still there.

But his is not a story of dire misfortune — at least in Indian terms. His daily income of around $4 puts him ahead of no less than several hundred million of his countrymen, he can buy medicine for his son with a heart condition. He has married off his daughters and can afford to feed himself and his wife. More:

How slums can save the planet

Published

asianwindow

on February 19, 2010

in Economy

. 0 Comments

Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile

From Prospect:

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up. More:

India’s decade

Published

asianwindow

on January 1, 2010

in Economy and India

. 0 Comments

The Indian Express-Indicus Analytics study on how India will look in 2020:

The good:

* Fifty million more households in India will join the ranks of the middle class — defined by those earning between Rs 75,000 a year to Rs 10 lakh a year.

* The households-in-middle class number will jump from less than 120 million now to almost 170 million. Taking the accepted multiple of five people per household, this means that roughly 800 million Indians will be middle class out of an end-of-decade population of 1.3-plus billion.

And not-so-good (if there are no significant reforms):

By end-2019, UP’s standard of living will be what Pakistan’s was in 2005. And Bihar at the end of the decade will offer a standard of living comparable to what prevailed in Djibouti in 2005. MP in 2020? Like Republic of Congo in 2005.

Click here for the full story:

The story of a womb

Published

asianwindow

on December 20, 2009

in Health, India, Science and Society

. 0 Comments

In the Sunday Express a report from Anand in Gujarat, India’s surrogacy hub and the story of a woman who rented her womb:

Ramilaben Solanki: "This time I am asking for Rs 5 lakh ($10,000) because I am too weak to keep doing it many more times."

Before she pressed her inked thumb on the contract agreement, they had made Ramilaben Solanki understand that she is a womb. No more, no less. They had told her that the baby would be no part of her flesh and blood. That she was its shell, only a shell.

But sitting in the dark of her single-room, tin-roofed hovel—home to nine more people in her extended family—this 27-year-old domestic help in Gujarat’s Anand is still fighting to come to terms with herself. She thinks that the “pink infant with the golden hair and light brown eyes” of his American father, the one she bore and delivered, had come of her. Not through her.

For seven days and nights after, until the American couple from Wisconsin, US—whose sperm, ovum and money helped make her baby—flew in, Ramila had fed him her milk, sung him to sleep. She had also whispered in his ears that he is Deep, younger brother to her own five-year-old daughter, Deepali. More:

[Photo: The Indian Express]

Grassroots journalism

Published

asianwindow

on December 19, 2009

in Books, India, Media and Uncategorized

. 0 Comments

A group of women from underprivileged families in remote, rural India have set up Khabar Lahariya, a village paper. The paper, whose name translates into English as News Wave, covers local news, educational features, and information on campaigns for Dalit rights.

Farah Naqvi tells their story in her book, Waves in the Hinterland: The Journey of A Newspaper (Nirantar and Zubaan Books). Gillian Wright on the newspaper and the book in the Hindustan Times:

The Book, Waves in the Hinterland, and the newspaper, Khabar Lahariya

Recently, there was a very unusual book launch in Delhi. Two women from underprivileged families in rural Bundelkhand addressed a packed audience at the India Habitat Centre and told them what it was like to be a neo-literate woman reporter on a local Bundeli language newspaper in two of the most backward districts of Uttar Pradesh — Chitrakoot and Banda.

Their colourful eight-page weekly appears in both the Chitrakoot and Banda variants of the lilting Bundeli language, and their stories expose corruption and injustice affecting the same villages where the paper is read by some 25,000 people.

For standing up and telling the truth, they have been sexually harassed and frequently threatened — at one point with a

masked man with a gun. Attempts have been made to buy all copies of the paper to keep news from getting out, to buy the whole paper and to close them down. But Khabar Lahariya — News Wave — keeps on making waves. More:

In Delhi, doing as we do, not as we say

Published

asianwindow

on November 27, 2009

in Climate change and India

. 0 Comments

Miranda Kennedy in the Washington Post:

In the five years I worked as a reporter in India, I sat through many uncomfortable silences during interviews about Pakistani terrorists, the pervasive caste system and Indian Muslims — sensitive issues that, on the face of it, seem more controversial than carbon parts per million. But these subjects rarely stirred up as much ire as India’s stance on climate change. The topic has become a matter of national pride, a symbol of sovereignty and growing global clout. If you want to make an Indian government official really angry, bring up his carbon emissions.

This fall, when I mentioned to the Indian government’s chief economic policymaker that the United States considers India “intransigent” on climate change, the poised, Oxford-educated Montek Singh Ahluwalia looked slightly stunned for a moment. Pursing his lips, he seemed to struggle to suppress anger. “If I were using a cool description, those are either gross misperceptions or deliberate distortions,” he said in clipped British English. “The Indian approach on this has been, ‘Let’s first decide a fair pollution entitlement for different countries.’ ” More

Why they love to hate Mother Teresa

Published

asianwindow

on November 2, 2009

in Faith and Religion

. 0 Comments

Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:

Hating Mother Teresa has become a de rigueur dinner-party prejudice. As the Vatican speeds up its canonisation of Teresa, having already beatified her in 2003, feminists, atheists and liberal commentators are engaging in games of Teresa-denouncing one-upmanship, to see who can slate her in the shrillest, most outrageous terms. She was a ‘charlatan’ and a ‘master of her own mythology’, said Ian O’Doherty in the Irish Independent last week. No, she was a ‘wicked fundamentalist’, said a feminist contributor to a BBC TV debate last weekend. In fact she was a ‘disgusting fraud and a hypocrite’, says a columnist for the UK Independent, and ‘if there is a hell, Mother Teresa is already there’.

Much of this Teresa-baiting springs from the work of arch atheist Christopher Hitchens. In his 1995 book The Missionary Position, Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a ‘religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermoniser and an accomplice of worldly secular powers’. He exposed her backward beliefs on poverty – it is ‘beautiful’, she said, and the poor should embrace it – and her shoulder-rubbing with dictators and other dodgy individuals. She should never have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Hitchens said, or granted audiences with US presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, because she is little more than an ‘untouchable in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous’.

Of course, much of the criticism is justified. I am an atheist who has no truck with Mother Teresa and her kind. More:

Arundhati Roy: Even Bollywood has completely walked away from the poor

Published

asianwindow

on October 13, 2009

in Books

. 0 Comments

Arundhati Roy said in an interview to DNA that every institution in India is excluding the poor:

Since I am in Bombay, it’s fascinating, if you look at somebody like Amitabh Bachchan. How did he gain the place that he has in the hearts of the people? In many of his early films, he was the poor guy who grew up in the slums. He was like, mein sadak ka kutta hoon, and look at a film like Coolie — he was a Muslim, a coolie, and a trade union leader. There’s a battle against a corrupt minister where the minister holds a trishul and he has a hammer and sickle. And from there, to now, where in the movies, he only lives in villas and is getting out of helicopters, and those movies are only shown in these little cinema halls — multiplexes. Even Bollywood has completely walked away from the poor of this country. The cinema halls have changed and the cinema has changed to accommodate the cinema halls, or the cinema halls have changed to accommodate the cinema, I don’t know. But Amitabh is still adored because of the bank deposits that he made back then. And to me, there’s a terrible poignant tragedy in that. More:

Pollution as another form of poverty

Published

asianwindow

on October 9, 2009

in Economy, India and environment

. 0 Comments

Akash Kapur in the New York Times:

This is how it is all around here now days: the rural economy is booming, development is sweeping over the South Indian countryside like a wave, and villagers are being forced into choices they would rather not have to make. Too often, it’s the environment – the trees and the water and the air – that suffers.

Down by the beach, unauthorized construction and a government-built port are eroding the coastline, changing the contours of the Bay of Bengal and disrupting fishermen’s livelihoods.

In the farms and fields that surround my home, farmers struggle with declining yields and land that is turning barren. Decades of chemical pesticides have reduced the fertility of the soil. A new generation of electric pumps has overexploited the water table.

Behind the village of Edayanchavadi, where Murugayian and his uncles grew up, a waste dump spews toxic fumes into the air. Some nights I smell the fumes in my living room. I know the air is filled with dioxins; I worry for my children. More:

The great Indian darkness

Published

asianwindow

on September 30, 2009

in Climate change and India

. 0 Comments

Grace Boyle at the Independent:

I visited some villages in rural Karnataka this week where people are living without electricity. After nightfall we drove to Mahime Village in Uttara Kannada, a coastal district of Karnataka State and left the car at the side of the road. On foot we picked our way along a dirt path through the forest, splashed through a creek and uphill until we reached a house. The muted blue of the mud walls glimmered in the yellow light of the small kerosene lamps as we picked leeches off our feet and Sarojini Rama Naik, the wife of the house, burnt them with embers from the fire.

Sarojini and her husband, Rama Timma Naik, have lived here for nearly 40 years, fitting their daily schedule into the daylight hours and eating their evening meal by kerosene lamplight before going to sleep at around 8pm. The government provides everyone in the area with three litres of kerosene per month, subsidised to a rate of ten rupees per litre, but as this isn’t enough for their needs Rama travels to Gerusoppa Town, 10km away, once a month to pick up an extra six litres on the black market, at a higher rate. As the express buses don’t stop at their hamlet – Vatehalla – the journey takes him a whole day, on which he must set other business aside. The people in the village who do have electricity don’t always need their government-issued kerosene, so he asks the ration-shopkeeper to deal him the extra.

Mahime village consists of scattered hamlets, like most of the villages in this rural area, and of the 300 families the village is home to about 65 are living without access to electricity. It’s not an uncommon living arrangement, easily overlooked with the district website’s claim that “all towns and villages have electricity facilities in the District.” More:

Arundhati Roy on Democracy Now!

Published

asianwindow

on September 29, 2009

in India

. 0 Comments

Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth, the View of Obama from New Delhi, and Escalating US Attacks in Af-Pak. Click here for transcript.

Filming the real Slumdog Millionaire

Published

asianwindow

on August 22, 2009

in Art

. 0 Comments

Sourav Sarangi recently won eight international awards for his documentary film Bilal, which tells the story of a five-year-old boy who looks after his blind parents in a cramped hut in a poor district of Kolkata. The film-maker describes the journey he and the family have taken with the documentary (watch trailer below). From the Guardian:

I first met Bilal when he was only eight months old. His head was wrapped in bandages after an accident and he was lying on a cot next to my wife. His mother, who was blind, was clinging on to him. After attending to my wife, who had been hospitalised, I looked at the baby. He seemed to smile at me and seemed to nudge his mother as if, in a silent communion in a dark world, he was trying to tell her to talk to me. I was convinced about that. At that point in time, Bilal the film was born.

My friendship with the family grew. As I saw him grow up, what struck me about Bilal was his common sense. Even when he was three years old, the time when we launched the film, he was wise and that is the word I would like to use when describing this remarkable boy.

His Muslim father, Shamim, also blind, had married Jharna, a Hindu who changed her name to Humera Begum after the wedding. That in itself is quite unusual among the poorer communities in India – a Hindu woman marrying a Muslim man and then changing her religion.

Shamim himself is quite a man. He runs a portable phone call centre and, before this film was made, he used to carry a telephone to one of the busiest traffic intersections in Kolkata and sit on the pavement with a table. He has a photographic memory. Even now, he can rattle off 10-digit telephone numbers I told him six months back simply from memory. I am still amazed by this man. More:

Bodies for hire: The outsourcing of clinical trials

Published

asianwindow

on August 22, 2009

in Health

. 0 Comments

Sandhya Srinivasan in Himal Southasian:

In November 2008, the Hindustan Times’ LiveMint broke the story of an infant in Bangalore having died after being administered a vaccine in a drugs trial. The Drugs Controller-General of India (DCGI), Dr Surinder Singh, halted the testing, reportedly the first time that the office of the DCGI had taken such action. The trial, for a new pneumonia vaccine, was being conducted by a Hyderabad-based contracted research organisation, GVK Biotech, for the US-based multinational Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. The infant had been recruited from St. John’s Medical College, a reputed private medical institution in Bangalore.

GVK’s spokesperson claimed that the vaccine had nothing to do with the death, as the child had received an approved and widely used vaccine – not the experimental product. However, the DCGI’s investigation revealed that the infant had a heart condition, and that the trial had been meant to be conducted only on healthy babies. According to C M Gulhati, editor of the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, India and a Delhi-based expert on clinical-trial regulations, the investigation revealed a number of other irregularities as well: the informed-consent document had not been signed before the child was recruited; and the St John’s ethics committee had not been properly constituted, as it was not chaired by an external member to ensure independent functioning.

Yet the infant’s death was not an aberration. More:

And more on the subject in the August issue of Himal Southasian:

India’s Muslim girls box their way out poverty

Published

asianwindow

on August 21, 2009

in India and Society

. 0 Comments

Poh Si Teng from Calcutta in the Wall Street Journal:

As the sun dips below the horizon, roll call begins at a boxing club in southeast Kolkata.

Standing tall, soldier-style in three lines, are 47 students — some as young as 8 years old, a few as old as 23 — who hold their positions in front of an outdoor boxing ring at the Khidderpore School of Physical Culture, a community sports center.

Several are clad in identical athletic shorts and tanks; others wear faded T-shirts and knee-length shorts. As they stand in formation, they look past the yellow ropes of the ring, past the grill that fences the complex, past the open dirt field and crumbling construction at a park, where the neighborhood kids are laughing, screaming and playing cricket and catch.

They look past the squalor.

As a trainer eyeballs the lines, an assistant calls the students by their assigned numbers.

“Number 20,” yells the assistant.

“Present, sir,” responds a soft voice from the second line.

The trainer, Sheikh Nasimuddin Ahmed, calls number 20, a 16-year-old girl named Sughra Fatma, to the front. Grabbing her ear firmly with a twist, the 31-year-old man berates her for snickering during roll call, and reiterates the importance of discipline. As punishment, Ms. Fatma must do a dozen squats. Everyone watches. More:

I prefer to fight today’s battles: Amartya Sen

Published

asianwindow

on August 11, 2009

in Books and India

. 0 Comments

In Outlook, Vinod Mehta and Anjali Puri interview Amartya Sen:

In the 63rd year of Independence, how many cheers would you give Indian democracy?

Out of a total of three (laughs)? That was a scale invented by E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy. I think I will give it a bit more than two but somewhat less than three. If you take the view, is democracy functioning as well as it could, it may even be one. But given the adversities we have had-a very poor country, largely illiterate, border wars with China and Pakistan, with Pakistan going its peculiarly difficult way, the relationship problems that we have had with the United States and the global powers-have we done as well as expected? Yes. Except in one big respect, namely that I had expected that non-dramatic deprivations would receive more attention than they ended up getting. Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.

Of all the injustices that haunt India today, the deprivations you have just spoken of, what disappoints you the most?

They are all complementary. One of the reasons that child undernourishment is so hard to remove in India is that children are born much more deprived here than in much of the world, because women are very deprived when they are pregnant. One basic issue is gender inequality. But I don’t want to say it is the only important one. I would rather speak of a cluster of deprivations. And we should address all of them together. More:

An Indian says farewell to poverty, with jitters

Published

asianwindow

on August 10, 2009

in Economy and India

. 0 Comments

Akash Kapur, a child of rural India, recalls a different rhythm of life. From the New York Times:

Kuilapalayam: The other day I went for a drive on my motorcycle and realized that my world had changed completely.

I drove along a concrete road that was once a dirt path. The road leads to the ocean. I used to be able to see the ocean from the top of the road. Now the view has been usurped by apartment buildings and guesthouses and shops.

When I was a boy, the road was bordered by emerald-green rice fields. There’s not a rice field in sight anymore, only the neon greens – and pinks and purples and oranges – of the concrete blocks that have taken their place.

The area around where I live was once an isolated rural hamlet. It was a hundred miles, along a potholed road, from the nearest big city, Chennai, or Madras, as it was called then. I grew up here, in the country, surrounded by five villages. I had an idyllic childhood. My life ran to the rhythms of an agrarian world: bullock carts and hand plows, bicycles, windmills.

But for the men and women who lived in the villages, who eked out a living from the eroded land, life was much harder. Their existences were circumscribed by poverty. In many respects, their conditions were little improved from those of their grandparents. More:

Is there life after democracy?

Published

asianwindow

on July 5, 2009

in India, Politics and Society

. 0 Comments

Activist and writer Arundhati Roy in Dawn:

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: ‘Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?’

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all ‘developing’ societies aspire to be is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy-too much representation, too little democracy-needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? More:

Climate change will lead to mass migration in 40 years

Published

asianwindow

on June 11, 2009

in environment

. 0 Comments

Seema Singh in Mint:

A report commissioned last year by the international activist group Greenpeace, titled Blue Alert: Climate Migrants in South Asia – Estimates and Solutions, has estimated that 50 million people in India and 75 million in Bangladesh will be rendered homeless by the turn of the century, with the bulk of Bangladeshis likely to seek shelter in India.

“We categorize the poor as the ones who will suffer most, but richer societies will potentially lose as well,” said geographer Alexander de Sherbinin at Columbia University’s Centre for International Earth Science Information Network in New York. Sherbinin has co-authored the report with researchers from the United Nations University and the humanitarian agency Care International. More:

Visible hands

Published

asianwindow

on June 10, 2009

in Economy, India and Indian elections 2009

. 0 Comments

Pankaj Mishra on the West’s fantasies of a free-market “New India”. From the National:

Last month India held its 15th general elections. Those who recall some of the previous 14 could only marvel at the great interest the recent round of voting aroused in the western media. Less than a decade ago India was typically depicted in the international press as a poor, backward and often violent nation. Its experiments with democracy may have been unprecedented for a large poor country – but in the West they usually appeared solely in the guise of photographs of peasant women in colorful saris lining up to vote (this ageless staple popped up again in recent weeks). India’s image received a dramatic makeover only in the early years of this century, when the country’s protectionist economy, which was first liberalised in 1991, opened up further to foreign trade and investment.

With its “turbocharged” economy and its glossy new consumer culture, India suddenly became the poster-child for globalisation among western politicians, businessmen and journalists. It seemed not to matter that India remains one of the poorest countries in the world, where more than half of children under the age of five are malnourished, and where failed crops and debt have driven more than 100,000 farmers to suicide in the past decade. In 2006, Foreign Affairs, the house journal of America’s foreign policy mandarins, crowned a series of ecstatic “India Inc” cover stories in Time, Newsweek and The Economist by declaring India “a roaring capitalist success-story”.

This new idea of India owed much to the post-Cold War ideological climate in the West. If the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions renewed a belief in the “magic of the marketplace”, the collapse of Communist regimes provoked a millenarian conviction among politicians and journalists alike that the world had little choice but to converge on a single model of government (liberal democracy) and single economic system (free-market capitalism). More:

Sikhs and casteism

Published

asianwindow

on May 26, 2009

in Faith and Religion

. 0 Comments

Riots erupted across the Punjab region of India on Monday after a Sikh preacher from an Indian sect was killed by a rival Sikh group in Austria. Within hours of the incident in Vienna, thousands of Sikhs took to the streets, setting fire to buildings, vehicles and a train. Curfew was imposed in four towns and the army fanned out to quell the violence.

The dead man belonged to Dera Guru Ravidass Sachkhand Balan, a Sikh sect of dalits, or untouchables. Sikhism rejects caste divisions; one of its main tenets is the equality of all believers. But caste inequality is entrenched in rural Punjab, resulting in the spread of caste-based sects within Sikhism.

“In fact, all major villages in Punjab today have two gurdwaras – one frequented by the so-called ‘upper castes’ or Jat Sikhs, another by Dalits or ‘lower castes,’” writes Vipin Pubby in the Indian Express. Click here to read the full story.

Deciphering Deras

The Indian Express has an excellent FAQ on the history of deras (Sikh sects) in Punjab:

What are deras and why are they in the news? A dera is technically the headquarters of a group of devotees who follow the teachings of a particular spiritual guru and generally have a living representative of the guru who is equally revered. The representatives of the gurus, who hold the gaddi, are normally anointed by their predecessors.

How many deras are there in Punjab? Estimates vary but it is generally believed that there are about 300 major deras across the state and the neighbouring state of Haryana. Out of these, about a dozen have substantial following – over one lakh devotees each. There are hundreds of others which are restricted to a few villages each. More:

The curse of the hanging latrines

Published

asianwindow

on March 11, 2009

in Health and India

. 2 Comments

Rose George at The Guardian’s Comment is Free:

When you write a book about sanitation, people are always sending you helpful things to read or watch. I lost count of the number of friends who urged me to watch Slumdog Millionaire. “You’ll understand why,” they said. And I did, when the latrines came into view. I knew that slum; Juhu Beach, near Mumbai’s non-international airport, has millionaire Bollywood stars living on one side and the Slumdog slum on the other. The film has been accused of all sorts, but most commonly “poverty porn”. I think it did well to capture the paradox of slum life, which is that it is awful and that it can provoke entrepreneurial survival skills which can be worth millions: Dharavi, Mumbai’s most famous slum, has a recycling industry that earns £800m a year.

Caught on film: India ‘not shining’

Published

asianwindow

on March 3, 2009

in India, Movies and Society

. 0 Comments

Arundhati Roy at Dawn.com

The night before the Oscars, in India, we were re-enacting the last few scenes of Slumdog Millionaire. The ones in which vast crowds of people – poor people – who have nothing to do with the game show, gather in the thousands in their slums and shanty towns to see if Jamal Malik will win. Oh, and he did. He did. So now everyone, including the Congress Party, is taking credit for the Oscars that the film won!

The party claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over India ‘Achieving’. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India’s greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it’s beyond farce.

The ‘Slumdog’ effect: Afflict the comfortable

Published

asianwindow

on February 27, 2009

in India and Society

. 0 Comments

Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:

If India’s well-to-do ran the world, the film that dominated the Academy Awards this week might simply have been called “Millionaire.”

That aspect of the movie – about hope – the well-to-do liked. It was the other aspect, distilled in the word “Slumdog,” that was so deflating.

The boom era now fading left two longings among India’s globalized rich. The first is a desire for recognition by the West, through magazine covers and Booker Prizes and Grammys. The second is a desire to show the world the most sanitized representation of India, not the stereotypical India mired in poverty and degradation, but an India as pristine as the elite’s own posh homes.

Prince Charles declares Mumbai slum model for the world

Published

asianwindow

on February 6, 2009

in India

. 0 Comments

From The Guardian:

The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday.

Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world’s increasingly urban population, he said. The district’s use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to “an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor”.

The slumdog story

Published

asianwindow

on January 24, 2009

in Culture, Entertainment and Movies

. 1 Comment

How ‘Danny uncle’ and his ‘moral compass’ created the biggest ‘Indian’ blockbuster–and why you should watch it. Sanjukta Sharma in Mint Lounge:

Freida Pinto

Every morning, Jamal spends a few special minutes with himself in the loo. Squatting, chin resting in his palms, he dreams. Sometimes, the seven- or eight-year-old slum boy looks at the dog-eared photograph of Amitabh Bachchan that’s neatly folded and tucked in his pant pocket. The loo is makeshift-precariously perched on a wooden platform, which stands on swampland. His neighbourhood is the Juhu slum-the one we see every time our flight is about to touch down in Mumbai. The slum begins where one side of the runway ends.

At other times, Jamal plays gilli-danda or invites the ire of cops, making them chase him through grimy, narrow lanes to his matchbox tenement home.

And later, after his mother dies in a communal riot, Jamal’s life is endlessly and dangerously charged with adrenalin. He begs at traffic jams, palms pressed flat against car windows. He steals food through the windows of running trains.

Horatio Alger relocates to a Mumbai slum

Published

asianwindow

on January 18, 2009

in India, Movies and Society

. 1 Comment

Why “Slumdog Millionaire” is a hit: It gives a dying American myth a future somewhere else. Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:

It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing; it isn’t about gurus or Gandhi. “Slumdog Millionaire,” in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing this country.

Its novelty has given it a dream run in American movie theaters, and last week it was chosen best dramatic picture at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It now is given a good shot at the Academy Awards next month.

But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can, solely of his own effort, hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.

‘I’m a sex worker in India’

Published

asianwindow

on January 14, 2009

in Health, India and Society

. 0 Comments

From the Financial Times:

I think I am 23 years old. My father died when I was young. In the village in India where I grew up, my father was considered well-off, with land and gold, but after his death there was no one to look after us. There was the house, and that was all. We worked hard to eat.

My elder sister was married off to my uncle; I was married at the age of 14. My uncles, mother and older brother made the alliance for me. I was married to someone with polio because we were unable to give a dowry. I didn’t know. I had never seen the boy before. They were rich, with five acres of agricultural land. Many people asked my father-in-law where he found me. I was so beautiful at that time.

With the spotlight gone, the true India can develop

Published

asianwindow

on January 3, 2009

in Economy and India

. 0 Comments

Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:

For romancers of the India Story, the timing couldn’t have been crueler.

The Story was going down so well. Blue-chip multinationals had been persuaded to outsource any work they could to Indians fresh from college. Companies going on sale had begun to think of Indian buyers first. Tourists from Paris to São Paulo, once fearful of malaria and cobras, had shed old fears to arrive by the planeful.

And, in the self-fulfilling nature of modern life, Time, Newsweek and other magazines, whose advertisers were among the major new investors in India, obligingly or unwittingly pumped up the value of those investments by devoting dazzling covers to India’s “arrival.” At times, I was part of this hoopla, part of the chorus that spent more energy heralding this arrival than asking hard questions about it.

Our attention was no accident. The economy was growing swimmingly, and Indian leaders and industrialists had figured out a clever strategy to keep it growing: market it to the world and attract enough investment to diminish the urgency of actually developing the country – filling potholed roads, removing criminals from Parliament, reducing the numbers who die of curable ailments.

Asian Window