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Salman Rushdie: provoking people is in my DNA

Twenty years after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his execution, Salman Rushdie is still alive – and still making enemies. John Preston in the Telegraph:

A car pulls up outside a Georgian house in Soho. Out steps Salman Rushdie. He’s dressed entirely in black – black overcoat, black scarf, black jacket, black sweater, trousers, shoes… The only thing not completely black is his shirt and that’s only because it’s got a few white stripes on it. He looks – actually, he looks just like a hit-man.

In his hand he carries a polythene bag full of books. When he comes upstairs, I find myself peering through the opaque plastic trying to make out the titles. One of them turns out to be the French version of his last novel, The Enchantress of Florence – now out in paperback. The book, declares Rushdie with satisfaction, has done terrifically well in France, getting ‘the sort of rave reviews you find yourself making up in the bath’.

Over here, it had a more mixed reception, but then, as Rushdie says of himself, ‘I’m not the sort of writer who ever gets five out of 10 reviews. I tend to get 11 out of 10, or minus one out of 10. That’s all right, though; it shows that people are having strong reactions.’

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End of the Kashmir Jihad

Aakar Patel in Hindustan Times:

Having predicted that Kashmiris would boycott the election, Indian liberals are now urging the government to act to resolving the Kashmir issue with some sort of geographical solution.

They are wrong.

Elections are the solution. Secular democracy is the only goal: It is what Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted. Kashmiris already have that.

When elections were announced on October 19, Kashmir’s leaders thought they would fail, given the heat generated over the failed transfer of land to the Amarnath Shrine, and the Hurriyat Conference’s boycott.

Few believed the elections would be this successful: The highest polling at 69 per cent, the lowest at 55 per cent.

The communist Yusuf Tarigami said “elections were no solution to the Kashmir problem”.

The secular Yasin Malik said his group, the JKLF, would campaign actively “to boycott the elections (which) was every Kashmiri’s right”.

Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson Omar said his party, the National Conference, would contest, but he worried that “turnout would be low”.

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Men who ‘shot’ the Mumbai terrorists

Thomas Fuller in International Herald Tribune:

When the gunfire started at Mumbai’s main train station last month, Sebastian D’souza was well placed to respond. From his office directly across the street, D’souza, the photo editor of The Mumbai Mirror newspaper, grabbed his Nikon and two lenses and headed out into the blood-soaked night of Nov. 26. Peering from behind pillars and running in and out of empty train cars, he emerged with the singular iconic image of the attacks: a clear shot of one of the gunmen.

“I was shaking, but I kept shooting,” D’souza said as he scrolled through his pictures of the attacks in a recent interview at his office.

D’souza’s photo of Muhammad Ajmal Kasab confidently striding through Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus carrying an assault rife with one hand, finger extended toward the trigger, has been printed and reprinted in newspapers here and flashed daily on television screens.

Four weeks after the terrorist rampage that left more than 160 people dead, the memories of victims are blurring. Some witness accounts remain contradictory. But D’souza and another newspaper photographer, Vasant Prabhu, have millions of pixels of evidence that will remain part of the indelible record.

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India, exporter of priests, may keep them home

As families have fewer children and the Indian economy offers more career options, the West may need to look elsewhere to fill its empty pulpits. Laurie Goodstein from Aluva, India, in International Herald Tribune:

“]

Students at St. Paul's Minor Seminary in the Irinjalakuda Diocese in India taking a ministry trip. [NYTimes photo

In the sticky night air, next to a grove of mahogany trees, nearly 50 young men in madras shirts saunter back and forth along a basketball court, reciting the rosary.

They are seminarians studying to become Roman Catholic priests. Together, they send a great murmuring into the hilly village, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer and the chanting of Vedas from a Hindu temple on a nearby ridge.

Young men willing to join the priesthood are plentiful in India, unlike in the United States and Europe. Within a few miles of this seminary, called Don Bosco College, are two much larger seminaries, each with more than 400 students.

As a result, bishops trek here from the United States, Europe, Latin America and Australia looking for spare priests to fill their empty pulpits. Hundreds have been allowed to go, siphoning support from India’s widespread network of Catholic churches, schools, orphanages, missionary projects and social service programs.

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Unparliamentary expressions

India’s Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament) secretariat has published a 900-page tome that governs speech in Parliament. It lists words and phrases not allowed not only in the Indian Parliament, but also in various state legislatures as well as some parliaments of Commonwealth countries. From Mint:

The book tells you that one cannot be “ashamed” in Parliament and cannot address a lady presiding officer as “beloved”. Neither can one simply say “hello” to catch the chair or Speaker’s attention.

Among the more touchy and no-no phrases: “foreign money”, “true colours”, “for Christ’s sake”.  And some surprisingly unparliamentary expressions include expressions that are commonly used such as delusion of grandeur, clients, barbarian, common sense, fathers-in-law, joke, giggle, laugh and malpractices.

And in the din of Parliament if one suspects that the presiding officer is not listening to him, he cannot complain, “you are not listening to us”.

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The leftist and the leader

From 3quarksdaily:

An imagined conversation between Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto.

By Maniza Naqvi

Act I: The Leftist and the Leader:

Scene/Stage: There is a screen at the back of the stage which plays the clip, of General Zia-ul-Haq, declaring Martial Law, on July 5, 1977.

When the speech ends, two spot lights have searched, found and trained themselves on two people on the stage. Two actors playing Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto stand a couple of feet apart from each other. They are a young Tariq Ali, in jeans and a young Benazir Bhutto also in jeans. Tariq Ali, stands, legs apart, and grabs his head in anger and frustration. Benazir crouches—holds her head and then reaches out her arms as though reaching for someone in grief and pain.

TA: Arghhhhhhhhhhh

BB: ———Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.

Stage darkens.

Lights go up. In the middle of the stage, there are two podiums at a short distance from one another. Tariq Ali stands at one and Benazir at the other. Benazir wears a white dupatta covering her head -and a green colored shalwar-kameez. Tariq Ali is dressed the same way as before, in jeans. They have their backs to the audience and they face two screens at the back of the stage. In the foreground there is a single chair.

The screen in front of Benazir shows one of her typical political rallies. There are massive jubilant crowds of people waving banners and chanting slogans. The screen in front of Tariq Ali shows either at a clip of a talk, or Tariq Ali leading the February 2003 anti war demonstrations.

There is the sound of people cheering and shouting her name. Her fists punch the air she makes movements that show that she is delivering an impassioned speech. There are cheers and slogans in both crowds. Benazir and Tariq Ali turn away from the screens and look at the audience and then turn around to face each other. They stand for a moment just looking at each other. Benazir adjusts her dupatta, in her characteristic way with both her hands. She moves forward away from the podium waving. A flash goes off-from a camera-then another and another. With each pop of the flash, the sound gets louder, till it segues into the sounds of explosions and gunshots.

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Stem cell banking in India

An IANS report in the Hindu:

What could be more precious than gifting your unborn child a way to fight blood, genetic and immune system diseases for the rest of his or her life? Sure enough, many Indians are waking up to the magic of stem cell banking.

“Already 300 people have approached us for information on stem cell banking,” said V.R. Chandramouli, managing director of Europe’s largest stem cell banking company, Cryo-Save, which launched operations in India in December. The company obviously realises the huge potential in this business in India. It has invested over Rs.10 million in 10 stem cell storage banks opened this month.

A couple of companies in India were already dealing with stem cell banking like LifeCell, Chennai; and Reliance Life Sciences. Stem cells from umbilical cord blood are collected at the time of delivery when the cord connecting the baby to mother is cut.

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Ramayan 3392 AD — the movie

From Wired:

With Hollywood hitting up comic books for blockbusters, a new comics publisher is looking to India for ideas. “The world is increasingly realizing that India is a source for creativity and great ideas, not just a back office to execute them more cheaply,” said Gotham Chopra, part of the management team at Los Angeles-based Liquid Comics.

One of the first projects for the publisher will be bringing its Ramayan 3392 AD (pictured) – a colorful, 21st-century re-imagining of Indian literary epic the Ramayana – to movie theaters. Liquid has teamed up with Mandalay Pictures and 300 producer Mark Canton for the film, which has a planned release date of 2011.

Chopra talked with Wired.com about Liquid’s birth, a new wave of Indian comics artists and the challenge of bringing an ancient Sanskrit epic to the silver screen.

Wired.com: Condensing the Ramayana into a comic book must have been hard, but condensing it into a film seems harder. What do you think about the challenge, and how do you think it will do with audiences unfamiliar with the venerable narrative’s mythology?

Gotham Chopra: Can you say, “Trilogy?” Seriously, this is something we’ve talked about at length even in relation to the original comic series. Obviously, our goal is to create a narrative structure that doesn’t require a familiarity with the original story. That’s an important note, not only so that people who have never heard of Ramayan can enjoy it, but also so those who are familiar with it are not offended by the film.

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In Bangladesh, Urdu-speakers finally get a vote

From the Times:

Every morning at 11am, a group of schoolchildren gather in a slum in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to sing not one national anthem, but two.

First, the students at the Non-Local Surovi School raise their shrill voices in homage to Bangladesh, then to Pakistan. Yet they are citizens of neither country: they are among 250,000 Urdu-speakers who were disenfranchised when Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in 1971.

For 37 years now, the Muslim community which migrated here at the partition of British India in 1947 has existed in legal limbo and squalor in camps around Bangladesh. Today, however, its members will vote for the first time in parliamentary elections after a court decision that finally recognised their right to Bangladeshi citizenship.

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Oh the humanity

Robyn Creswell contemplates the provocations of Faisal Devji, whose fascinating new book, “The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics,” upturns conventional accounts of al Qa’eda by investigating ‘the rich inner life of jihad’. From the National:

To Faisal Devji, Gandhi is the embodiment of a kind of humanitarian sacrifice, and ‘would probably have welcomed the comparison between his methods and those of Osama bin Laden, whose practices he might have seen as the evil perversion of his own.’ Courtesy Corbis

The field of jihadi studies, situated at the crossroads of policy-making, intelligence work, journalism and academic research, sprang up almost overnight following the attacks of September 11. It now boasts all the infrastructure that comes with the discovery of a glittering new frontier, as fascinating in its way as superstrings or Martian ice. Conferences, courses and research centres are devoted to explaining the intricacies of holy war. Amidst this mushroom patch of interlocking institutions and individuals, the work of Faisal Devji – an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research in New York – sticks out like a rare flower. Devji’s studies, which focus on the doings and sayings of al Qa’eda, are so at odds with what passes for common sense in this field that one sometimes wonders if he isn’t merely thumbing his nose at received wisdom. In his latest book, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, he suggests that al Qa’eda has in some sense inherited the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. He also argues that the ideology of jihad is a “humanitarian” one, and that the militants of al Qa’eda are “the intellectual peers” of environmentalists and pacifists. What does he mean by such provocations?

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity is in many ways a sequel to Devji’s equally provocative 2005 book, Landscapes of the Jihad. In that work, rather than concentrating on the spectacular violence that has been the focus of most experts, Devji argues that al Qa’eda’s real achievement is to have created “a new kind of Muslim”, one whose attachments to the traditions and institutions of Islam are radically unlike those of his predecessors. The new militancy cannot be understood by inserting it into a now-familiar history of Islamic extremism (Wahhabism, Sayyid Qutb, the Taliban, etc.), because what is significant about the jihadis of today is their relation to the present, or even to the future. “Al Qa’eda’s importance in the long run,” Devji writes, “lies not in its pioneering a new form of networked militancy… but instead in its fragmentation of traditional structures of Muslim authority within new global landscapes.”

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Most viewed photos of 2008

Among National Geographic’s top ten most viewed photos of 2008 is this image of the snowstorm leopard in India’s Hemis National Park:

Stalking India’s Hemis National Park, an extremely rare snow leopard lives up to its name in U.S. photographer Steve Winter’s award-winning National Geographic magazine image.

On October 30, 2008, “Snowstorm Leopard” was named best overall photo in the 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, organized by the Natural History Museum of London and BBC Wildlife Magazine.

Click here for more of the best photos of 2008

Slumdog Millionaire’s Bollywood ancestors

Amitava Kumar in Vanity Fair [via 3quarksdaily]:

Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire has a pedigree. Its director, Danny Boyle, says there are at least three Bollywood films that inspired him directly. Those films were themselves influenced by a long family tree that stretches back to the last days of the nineteenth century.

Here, then, is a list of Slumdog’s ten most flamboyant and influential Bollywood ancestors:

Black Friday (2004). This film, by young director Anurag Kashyap depicts the March 1993 bomb blasts that tore apart Bombay (as Mumbai used to be called). It was based on a book by journalist S. Hussain Zaidi and filmed in an edgy, realistic style. A famous sequence from the film, a 12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum, is mimicked by Danny Boyle in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire, where truant slum-kids take the place of Black Friday’s militants.

Satya (1998) a.k.a The Truth. This film was also cited by Boyle as an inspiration, as was The Company (2002). Both offer slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld. Both films were directed by Ram Gopal Varma, a director with a fine taste for brutality and urban violence. The screenplay for Satya was co-written by Saurabh Shukla (who plays a policeman named Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire) and Anurag Kashyap, who directed Black Friday; with its intense rhythm and captivating performances, Satya instantly became a contemporary classic in India.

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‘When Moshe grows up, I want him to return to Mumbai’

Orphaned in the terrorist attack on Chabad House in Mumbai, two-year-old Moshe is now with his grandparents in Israel. YP Rajesh of the Sunday Express visits him in Afula in Israel as he settles into his new surroundings.

Legend has it that Moses, the most important prophet of the Jews and a significant religious leader for Christians and Muslims too, was ordered by God to deliver the Hebrews from slavery during Biblical times. Moses is said to have fulfilled his task by leading the slaves out of Egypt through the Red Sea and received the 10 Commandments. Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg believes that just as the prophet emerged from the water, his two-year-old grandson Moshe, which is Hebrew for Moses, miraculously emerged unscathed from fire-the 26/11 Terror attack on Chabad House in Mumbai in which Moshe’s parents Rivki and Gavriel Holtzberg were killed along with four other Jews.

The comparisons to divinity don’t end there. Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the New York-based global chairman of the Conference of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, stops by in Afula in northern Israel on his way to Mumbai, carrying loads of goodies for the chubby little boy who now lives here with his grandparents. Among them is a stuffed-toy version and a holy scripture version of the Torah, the most holy of the sacred writings of Judaism, believed to have been authored by Moses. “When Moshe grows up, I want him to return to Mumbai,” says his grandfather. “And do what his father was doing, helping people without discriminating between them by their religion, colour or nationality.”

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Pale horse, pale actor

Bollywood increasingly looks to the west for acting talent. Priyanka Bhardwaj at Asia Sentinel:

Bollywood is fast becoming a new kind of outsourcing destination for the western world: pale flesh. Casting agents are scouring the region to find foreigners for movies requiring international locales, themes and sets.

As these movies require sizeable casts of Caucasoid characters for their imaginary discotheques, British soldiers in period films and Hare Krishna converts, production crews are zeroing in on anyone remotely filling the bill.

That is increasingly including a flock of beauties of indeterminate nationality and ethnic background. Katrina Kaif, a fast-rising starlet who has achieved considerable success in the three years since her debut, has a Kashmiri Muslim father and an English mother. Barbara Mori, of Uruguayan-Japanese and Mexican descent, is starring opposite to Hrithik Roshan in “Kites.” Tania Zaetta is an Australian who earlier appeared in “Baywatch” and “Who Dares Wins” and is now starring in Hindi movies. Yana Gupta is a Czech.

Other sourcing countries for these part-time actors are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Czech Republic, Norway, South Africa, Serbia, US, Britain and Thailand. Many Indians raised abroad too are looking to Bollywood as a passport to fame.

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Bhutanese take divorce in their stride

From BBC:

“The divorce case is very, very common. If you go to the court, you will see most of the cases are all on divorce.”

It may sound like a comment from Scandinavia – but this is Bhutan and the speaker is a young artist, Barun Gurung. His own parents divorced 10 years ago, when he was 13 and his brother a little older.

“I think during their marriage they used to have small fights which, you know, used to have bad impact on us,” he told the BBC.

“They used to fight and you know my father used to put hands on my mother. So it was quite bad to see that.”

We meet in the studio where Barun works – a collective of artists in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu, its walls plastered with brightly coloured pictures.

At least one of his colleagues joins in the conversation saying he, too, comes from a family affected by divorce. Marriage break-ups are common in this tiny kingdom. So, too, are love marriages, not arranged by one’s family.

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Wedding business blues in India

From BBC:

At the Juhu Marriott, one of the fanciest five-star hotels in Mumbai, frenzied preparations are underway for the big night.

Labourers here are working overtime, hanging streams of flower garlands and assembling chairs to get the finishing touches ready for the evening wedding celebrations, due to start in just a few hours time.

A night like this can take months of work to organise and set you back over $20,000 (£13,500) depending on your budget.

But the economic crunch here is curtailing the spending patterns of many Indian brides and grooms.

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Save Pakistan, save the world

US investment in Pakistan’s textile, technology and education sectors could help nudge the country away from terrorism. Feisal Hussain Naqvi in the Guardian:

International attention has focused on Pakistan like never before in the weeks following the Mumbai attacks. To quote Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser to President-elect Barack Obama: “All of the world’s nightmares come together in Pakistan.”

Assuming the world does not have the option of turning its back on the country, what can it do to help Pakistan?

The short answer is that Pakistan needs economic assistance. The militant extremists who wreak havoc are, for the most part, unemployed and frustrated young men.

If the Pakistani people – as opposed to the Pakistani military – were given tangible, visible economic assistance, it would go a long way toward winning over a suspicious populace. After all, starving Pakistanis cannot eat the F-16s sold to their armed forces.

With that in mind, here are three suggestions.

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Why cricker is better than sex

Harold Pinter, who died on Tuesday, gave his last interview to Andy Bull, of the Guardian, on a subject very dear to the playwright’s heart: cricket:

“I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth,” Harold Pinter once said, “certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.” No harm, then, that the game should be the subject of his last interview, given in late October at his home in London. His health failing, Pinter was in nostalgic mood, recalling a childhood in Hackney, east London, during the blitz and his time as an evacuee. “I first watched cricket during the war. At one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was an air raid. We opened the door and our garden, with this large lilac tree, was alight all along the back wall. We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat.

“I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket. I had a great friend who is still going – he lives in Australia – called Mick, Mick Goldstein. He used to live around the corner from me in Hackney, and we were very close to the River Lea, and there were fields. We walked down to the fields; there’d be nobody about – it would really very early in the morning, and there would be a tree we used as a wicket. We would take it in turns to bat and bowl; we would be Lindwall, Miller, Hutton and Compton. That was the life.”

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Taleban threaten to blow up girls’ schools if they refuse to close

From the Times:

The Taleban have ordered the closure of all girls’ schools in the war-ravaged Swat district and warned parents and teachers of dire consequences if the ban is flouted.

In an announcement made in mosques and broadcast on radio, the militant group set a deadline of January 15 for its order to be obeyed or it would blow up school buildings and attack schoolgirls. It also told women not to set foot outside their homes without being fully covered.

“Female education is against Islamic teachings and spreads vulgarity in society,” Shah Dauran, leader of a group that has established control over a large part of Swat district in the North West Frontier Province, declared this week.

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From crisis to crisis: Zardari’s Pakistan

One year since Benazir Bhutto’s death, the frenzied grief that propelled her husband to the presidency is replaced by uncertainty and a creeping radicalisation. Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich report in the Independent:

On the first anniversary of Benazir Bhutto's death, Pakistanis light earthen lamps at the Bhutto family mausoleum in rural Sindh province. AFP

When the assassin struck, Asif Ali Zardari was a thousand miles away. As his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was fatally attacked at an election rally in Rawalpindi a year ago today, Mr Zardari was at one of the family homes in Dubai, out of sight and out of the political plans of the woman who was seeking her third term as Pakistan’s prime minister.

That chaotic, frenzied night – as he and the couple’s son, Bilawal, flew back to Pakistan to take charge of both the funeral arrangements of Ms Bhutto and the reins of her party – fate and the explicit wishes of his wife were conspiring to push him centre-stage in the country’s political arena.

A year on, the man who was once derided as “Mr 10 Per Cent” for his alleged corruption, is not simply head of his wife’s Pakistan People’s Party but President of the whole country. After the party won the greatest number of seats in February’s election and formed the government, Mr Zardari and the PPP then moved against President Pervez Musharraf. Confronted by possible impeachment, the former army boss eventually stood down to be replaced by Mr Zardari.

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Benazir mourners lament Pakistan’s gathering gloom

A year after Ms Bhutto’s assassination, many believe that the country is fast becoming a failed state. Jeremy Page frm Rawalpindi in the Times:

They came by foot, bicycle, train, car and bus. Thousands of mourners gathered at the Bhutto family mausoleum to mark today’s first anniversary of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister.

Her son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, and widower Asif Ali Zardari, who swept to power as President after her death, will lead the nation on a day of public mourning.

For many Pakistanis the commemorations are a chance to mourn not just the death of one of their most charismatic politicians but also their country’s subsequent descent into ever deeper political and economic chaos.

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Short stories

Tehelka has a special issue on short stories around the theme “Excess: Look around you. Look at the year gone by. Look where we are headed.” Here are some random picks:

My house is your house

by Sudeep Chakravarti, the author of “Tin Fish,” “Red Sun – Travels in Naxalite Country,” and “Once Upon a Time in Aparanta.”

AND SO, to Sinbad’s lair. The cocaine whores are already there when I arrive. Sinbad likes cocaine whores: boys and girls; and if they come by, in-betweens. Having them around fills his sails. It’s a sickle moon tonight, and sickly, captured by streamers of cloud. Even with the moon largeand luminous, free in the sky, there is a curious space between the wrought iron gate and the verandah. This is a walk of only a dozen steps, a chessboard of velvet grass and granite that keeps at bay tentative rushes of palm, hibiscus and bird of paradise. Here, the light from the sharp gate lamps and bright rainbow souk-lanterns on the balcony, the laughter of the whores, the chink of glasses touching or the urgent sound of one breaking, are all muted.

The place eats up sound and light, this moat-avenue. It exudes a collective
threat, as if a wall would rise to block progress were anyone to arrive or leave with bad intention.

So far, the place has let me pass, even as it knows of the death I carry in my heart. A mystery. More:

Paraphilia

by Ambarish Satwik, a surgeon and author of “Perineum: Nether Parts of the Empire.” “Perineum” is a rogue and deviant sexual history of the British colonial project in India:

DR KEDAR Deshpande, Head of Unit IV, Department of Surgical Disciplines, Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. Married, childless. Squat-faced wife, square and low set. Of a scabrous ugliness that has no antecedent history of beauty. Both of them are Maharashtrian Deshastha Brahmins, of the Rigvedi subsect and lacto vegetarians. And from a long line of relentless endogamy.

On a vedic purity scale that’s like having the moon on a stick.

Dr Deshpande is a professor of General Surgery. What he likes doing most are cancers of the mouth and the neck. Large resections of fungating masses involving the tongue, cheeks, lips, palate, jaw bone etc and then reparative procedures to fill the holes in the face with skin and muscle flaps harvested from the chest. His patients, after they’ve been beguiled of their cheeks and jaws and then restored with flesh from other parts, are called ‘Deshpande’s Cyclopes’ by his students. They are his labour of love. He keeps a fat photo album in his desk, of ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs. There was a time when he was steeped in the management of breast carcinoma. Now, for a while, it has been oral malignancies. Kedar Deshpande is a man of middle height, civil gray hair and has a smile that is quite fetching, but is proffered with such frequency that it loses most of its fertility. He wears crisp shirts in pastel shades and ties that are manifestly anachronistic in terms of length and width. More:

Mrs Roberts

by Ruskin Bond, author of several novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and children’s books, as well as over 500 short stories and articles:

ELSIE ROBERTS had been quite a beauty in her twenties and thirties; one of those fair Anglo-Indians who passed for European until their accents gave them away. Elsie, it was said, did her best to remain fair, staying out of the sun as much as possible. In her later years, she was seldom seen during the day, but by then she had lost her looks and taken to drink; she slept by day and lived by night.

In her heyday, Elsie (nee MacGowan) was a dancing partner to Roberts, a good-looking French Jew who had made his way to India just before World War II broke out. They danced in Cabaret at the Imperial and Swiss in Delhi, and at Hakman’s in Mussoorie, and Filetto’s in Lahore. They made an elegant pair; they danced beautifully. Inevitably they were compared to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the dancing sensations of the silver screen. They married, and continued to partner each other until the War ended. Then, Roberts made a trip to France to claim and collect some compensation due to him as a war refugee. As he stood at the cashier’s counter, waiting for the first instalment to be handed over to him, he collapsed and died of a heart attack. Chance gives, and takes away, and sometimes gives again; but human life is equally unpredictable.

However, Elsie, as his widow, was entitled to the proceeds. She gave up her dancing career and took to breeding dogs. I first saw her when she came to see my mother in New Delhi, sometime in 1958. My mother was breeding Poms, and Elsie bought a small black Pom. She was still very attractive (Elsie, not the Pom) and was escorted by a gentleman who owned a small restaurant in Mussoorie. More:

Pakistan girl band creates a stir

From BBC:

“We have been doing music together since we were six years old – as long as I can remember,” says Haniya Aslam, as her cousin Zeb (Zebunissa) Bangash sits beside her.

“It started out as a fun thing at family functions.

“Music was very much a part of our family set-up – my father was an aficionado and all my uncles could play an instrument.

“Our grandmother was also a big influence – she was a poet and was fluent in three languages.”

While certainly not a typical Pakistani upbringing, it’s hardly exceptional among educated urbanites.

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Goa’s tourism subdued as police move in

From Financial Times:

Under the palms near the Fort Aguada Beach Resort, a luxury hotel built inside the crumbling ramparts of what was once Goa’s most formidable Portuguese castle, police have set up a sand-bagged observation post.

The post is one of a series of “bunkers” being built along the Goan coast to help fortify it against seaborne terrorist attacks of the kind that brought Mumbai to a halt last month.

“Soon this fortress will be a bastion of armed guards,” says an official at the Fort Aguada resort, a sister property of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower that was attacked in Mumbai.

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A foreign face beloved by Afghans from all sides

John F. Burns in International Herald Tribune:

Alberto Cairo, right, heads the orthopedic rehabilitation program of the International Committee of the Red Cross, a job dedicated to helping disabled Afghans live normally again by equipping them with artificial legs and arms. Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Kabul: History has fostered a notion here that all foreign occupations of Afghanistan are ultimately doomed.

There was the catastrophic retreat of a British expeditionary force in 1842. Nearly 150 years later came the Soviet troop withdrawal of 1989. Now, with the Taliban pressing in on this city and dominating the countryside, there are fears that this occupation, too, will eventually fail.

But whatever the outcome, Afghans of all ethnic and political stripes, even the Taliban, seem likely to count Alberto Cairo as one foreigner who left the country better than he found it.

Cairo, once a debonair lawyer in his native Turin, Italy, is almost certainly the most celebrated Western relief official in Afghanistan, at least among Afghans. To the generation who have been beneficiaries of his relief work for the International Committee of the Red Cross, he is known simply as “Mr. Alberto,” a man apart among the 15,000 foreigners who live and work in this city.

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Microsoft’s new 9-year-old Certified Professional

From PCWorld: Microsoft has a new certified professional in its ranks — and she’s 9 years old. The girl, from the Tamil Nadu region of India, passed Microsoft’s exam this week. She’s now the youngest person to ever do so. Microsoft’s Certified Professional exam is designed for IT professionals. She explains her story in the NDTV video below.

Beyond Mandalay, the road to isolation and xenophobia

In the New York Times, a review of “The River Of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma” by Thant Myint-U:

Burma has the dubious distinction of playing host to the world’s longest-running civil war – it began with independence in 1948 and still goes on – and its most durable military dictatorship. If not for North Korea, Burma might also claim top honors in two other categories, most isolated and most xenophobic, but it could still win the prize for most misunderstood.

Geographically remote, politically retrograde, economically backward, Burma, today called Myanmar, struggles on, burdened by one of the largest armies on the planet and desperate for help. In “The River of Lost Footsteps,” Thant Myint-U offers at least a little understanding, “an introduction to a country whose current problems are increasingly known but whose colorful and vibrant history is almost entirely forgotten.”

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Pakistan may not be ready for its beauty queen

Though conditions in Pakistan might be relatively unfavorable for aspiring beauty queens, Miss Pakistan World is at home in New York. Susan Dominus in the New York Times:

Natasha Paracha, 24, a United Nations worker, was crowned Miss Pakistan World this May in a pageant held in, well, Ontario. NYTimes

If you live in the East Village, you may have seen the reigning Miss Pakistan coming out of her walk-up not far from St. Marks Place. You may have glimpsed her celebrating her victory with some friends at the Hudson Hotel, or entering one of the jazz clubs where she likes to hear live music.

Every once in a while, you can catch Miss Pakistan, Natasha Paracha, 24, hopping out of a cab in her rhinestone tiara, fresh from an appearance. “Give me that tiara!” a young man with his boyfriend called out to her on such an occasion a few weeks ago. “I want it!” She flashed them a megawatt smile but kept the tiara, which she normally stashes in a floral-patterned box in her closet.

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And click here for Miss Pakistan World

Along the banks of a river, the India of old

A river cruise on the Hooghly, past Calcutta, reveals the country at its most rural, without a postcard or T-shirt in sight. From the New York Times:

Howrah Station in Calcutta was packed with travelers as I arrived to catch the 3:30 p.m. train to Jangipur. Passengers and porters charged in all directions, some carrying their suitcases or cloth bundles in their hands, some with their baggage on their heads. One man with a chair; another with a stepladder. At my feet, someone was charging his cellphone on the station’s electricity supply. Our train drew up, and the man next to me suddenly threw himself head first through an open window. With his feet waggling, he was stuck until a friend pushed him through. Luckily, I had reserved seats, so I was able to enter through the door and then settle in for the five-hour journey through eastern India.

A few weeks earlier, I had booked a river cruise on the Hooghly, a tributary of the Ganges that runs south through West Bengal, past Calcutta and out to the Bay of Bengal. I was one of 14 travelers – 13 Britons and one American – who had signed up with Assam Bengal Navigation with the hope of seeing India at its most rural. (I was there in late June, well before the recent attacks in Mumbai, a horrific event that should sadden anyone who loves India as I do.)

It was monsoon season, which promised drenching rains every afternoon, but none of us seemed to mind, and I had come prepared: a raincoat, an umbrella and waterproof shoes were all in my luggage. Plus, the Hooghly is navigable only when summer rains swell its banks.

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Spinning quirky yarns

Film industry in small Indian textile town of Malegaon makes low-budget parodies of Bollywood smash hits with a lot of heart, local flavour and ingenuity. Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:

The making of Hollywood spoof "The Superman of Malegaon."

Past a narrow alleyway filled with sleeping goats, water tanks and women washing clothes, Shaikh Nasir’s modest home is a landmark. This is where he thinks up new ways to make the people of this grim textile town laugh.

Nasir is the father of a homegrown film industry that is famous for its parodies of blockbuster movies from Bollywood, India’s Hindi film capital. For Malegaon’s power-loom workers and others laboring long hours for low pay, his wild and wacky movies provide some relief from bleak lives interrupted by frequent sectarian clashes and bomb blasts. In September, a motorcycle bombing killed six people and injured more than 100 here.

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Steel amid adversity: Tata after Mumbai

Joe Leahy reports from Mumbai in Financial Times:

Ratan Tata was at home in south Mumbai late on November 26 when the call came. On the line was a frantic R.K. Krishna Kumar, head of the Tata group unit that owns the city’s luxury Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel.

The unthinkable had happened, Mr Kumar told the Tata chairman. Terrorists had taken over the Taj, the 105-year-old wedding cake-like structure on Mumbai’s waterfront that was built by Mr Tata’s great-grandfather and is the pride of India’s largest private sector group. Scores had been killed. The building was on fire.

Unable to leave his apartment that evening because of the chaos on the streets, Mr Tata made it to the group’s stately south Mumbai headquarters, Bombay House, the following day. As the country’s politicians engaged in a blame game, Mr Tata was one of the few public figures who seemed to strike the right tone on the attacks. He bluntly criticised the state’s lack of preparedness while expressing grief for those killed.

“This is a very, very unfortunate situation which none of us are going to forget. My message really is that the government and state authorities should also not forget,” he told journalists on the steps of Bombay House.

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Edgy but defiant, Mumbai inches towards normality as hotels scarred by terror reopen

Eight priests from across faiths conduct ceremony to emphasise city’s unity. Randeep Ramesh in the Guardian:

 

The newly reopened Taj Mahal hotel lights up the Mumbai seafront. AFP

 

 

Until gunmen entered the Taj Mahal hotel in the early hours of 26 November, Praful Patel had known no other home for 16 years. Room 1017 was his residence, a sanctuary from which he ran his investment business amid statues of his favourite Hindu deity, Ganesha, the elephant-headed “remover of obstacles”.

During those hours Patel, who is British, “died more than once” as the sound of gunfire and explosions reached the bed he hid in. Indian commandos rescued him the next day, walking him out through pools of blood.

Last night he checked back into his room, part of a collective act of defiance against the gunmen whose rampage left more than 170 dead. Guests had been allowed back in the Taj’s modern wing, and its 268 rooms bore no trace of the violence inflicted. The blood stains around the swimming pool had been cleared, the grenade blast in the cafe was a distant memory and the bullet holes in the lobby were nowhere in sight.

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Mumbai – The things you don’t forget

Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

IT starts when you unpack your bag. You throw your clothes into the laundry basket, unzip your lap-tap, push your shoes under the bed. And then you wonder what else you’ve brought back.

For me, it was a single image that I encountered in the rear of a crematorium, five days after the militants stormed ashore and began their killing spree in Mumbai. Somehow, three weeks later I’ve not been able to shake it.

The occasion was the funeral service for the family of Karambir Singh Kang. Mr Kang had been a general manager at the Taj Mahal hotel, the historic hotel on the seafront which four gunmen had seized. His wife, Niti, and two sons had died from the flames that swept the building, barricaded inside their room on the 6th floor. All the while Mr Kang had worked without sleep to rescue other guests trapped inside the building – even when he learned of them death of his family.

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Oppressed Dalits of Bangladesh

The ‘untouchables’ are hoping to break centuries of discrimination with the help of the charity One World Action. Andrew Buncombe reports from Dhaka in the Independent:

Ramu Nandikolla’s dream is quite simple. He hopes that unlike himself, unlike his father, unlike his grandfather and unlike every member of his family for centuries, his four-year-old daughter grows up to be something other than a sweeper.

“I have been educated to an advanced level by Bangladeshi standards and I have applied for government jobs but they tell me that I have to work as a sweeper,” says the 29-year-old. “They say, ‘Your father was a sweeper and you have to be a sweeper as well’. It makes me feel very bad. I wanted to train to be a nurse.”

Ramu is a Dalit, a member of a so-called “untouchable” caste that sits at the very bottom of traditional Hindu society. Forced to live in separate communities, tradition has held that a higher-caste person touching a Dalit, or in some cases coming within the shadow of a Dalit, had to be ritually cleansed. In some communities Dalits were forced to ring a bell as they walked to warn of their presence.

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From Munich to Mumbai

Given the complex nature of the attacks in Mumbai, the Indians should be praised, not criticized, for their careful gathering of intelligence and planning of counterattacks. Ami Pedazhur, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism,” in the New York Times:

NOW that India and the world are over the initial shock of the terrorist attacks last month in Mumbai, efforts to understand what happened and prevent future calamities are being hampered in ways familiar to Israelis like myself, who have lived through far too many such events: pointless efforts to place blame, and a failure to put the attacks in the proper historical context.

First, contrary to much punditry in India and the West, these attacks did not indicate the emergence of a new form of terrorism. Actually, after decades in which terrorism had evolved mostly in the direction of suicide bombings, Mumbai was a painful reminder of the past.

The multiple hostage-takings and shootings, carefully planned and executed, were a throwback to the wave of hijackings and hostage situations that were the trademark of terrorists in the Middle East from the 1960s until the 1980s. The most famous of these events, of course, was the attack on the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Olympic Games.

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From Mumbai, the story of a stray dog hit by a terrorist’s bullet

Emily Wax in the Washington Post:

On a leafy hospital campus in this still-scarred city, one of the victims of last month’s terrorist attacks is making a recovery. He’s a chubby, cream-colored pooch whom workers have named Sheru — the Hindi word meaning Lion Heart.

Sheru was a stray dog hit by an errant bullet when two gunmen opened fire in a crowded railway station during the first night of the assault. The survival of the aging Sheru, despite a gunshot wound to his left shoulder, has become an uplifting and soothing symbol of Mumbai’s recovery to many of the city’s anxious and angry citizens. In a three-day siege beginning Nov. 26, 10 gunmen killed more than 170 people and wounded at least 230. They attacked two luxury hotels, a restaurant, a train station, a Jewish outreach center and other sites.

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On Newsweek’s Power List

Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who controls the the country’s nuclear weapons,have been ranked among the 50 most powerful people in the world by Newsweek.

        

From the magazine’s cover story by Jon Meacham headlined “The Story of Power”:

In the popular imagination, power tends to be viewed in one of two ways, both extreme. The first is totemic and tactical (how to get ahead at the office, to win friends and influence people). The other is epic and amorphous (the fate of markets, of vast global events and forces that seem beyond anyone’s control, but especially yours).

Power is both these things, and more. At heart, it is best understood in terms of command and control. It is either the capacity to make others do as you wish (the command function) or to reorder the environment around you (the control function).

No. 1 on the power list is Barack Obama, followed by Chinese President Hu Jintao, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Markel and powerful Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Sonia Gandhi is at No. 17. “In the world’s largest democracy, she is the queen,” says Newsweek. Gen. Kayani is at No. 20 and ‘King of Bollywood’ Shah Rukh Khan at No.41.

Click here for Newsweek‘s full and list and for their profiles.

How India avoided a crisis

Joe Nocera in the New York Times:

I arrived in Mumbai three weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 200 people – including, tragically, Yes Bank’s co-founder Mr. Kapur, who had served as the company’s nonexecutive chairman and was gunned down while having dinner at the Oberoi Hotel. (His wife and two dinner companions miraculously escaped.)

My hope in traveling to Mumbai was to learn about the current state of Indian business in the wake of both the credit crisis and the attacks. But in my first few days in this grand, sprawling, chaotic city, what I mainly heard, especially talking to bankers, was about America, not India. How could we have brought so much trouble on ourselves, and the rest of the world, by acting in such an obviously foolhardy manner? Didn’t we understand that you can’t lend money to people who lack the means to pay it back? The questions were asked with a sense of bewilderment – and an occasional hint of scorn. Like most Americans, I didn’t have any good answers. It was a bubble, I would respond with a sheepish shrug, as if that were an adequate explanation. It isn’t, of course.

“In India, we never had anything close to the subprime loan,” said Chandra Kochhar, the chief financial officer of India’s largest private bank, Icici. (A few days after I spoke to her, Ms. Kochhar was named the bank’s new chief executive, in a move that had long been anticipated.) “All lending to individuals is based on their income. That is a big difference between your banking system and ours.” She continued: “Indian banks are not levered like American banks. Capital ratios are 12 and 13 percent, instead of 7 or 8 percent. All those exotic structures like C.D.O. and securitizations are a very tiny part of our banking system. So a lot of the temptations didn’t exist.”

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My friend the quiet, shy student who was converted into a raging terrorist

The Times’s Shiraz Maher on the Islamist radicalism that he encountered at Cambridge University:

I was about to see an old acquaintance from university for the first time in more than three years. He walked into the room wearing a smart suit and a light blue shirt. He had put on weight since I last saw him and his previously shaved scalp was now a head of long hair, which was swept back. By contrast, his once thick beard was trim, almost nonexistent.

He was slouched deep in his seat, with splayed legs, and exuded an arrogance that I had not previously seen him display. But this was no ordinary reunion. Bilal Abdulla was sitting in the dock at Woolwich Crown Court, southeast London, accused of masterminding last year’s abortive terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, for which he was sentenced to 32 years in prison on Wednesday.

His accomplice, Kafeel Ahmed, died from the burns that he suffered when they rammed a Jeep packed with petrol and gas canisters into the passenger terminal at Glasgow airport.

I first met Abdulla and Ahmed in 2004 when I was a student at Cambridge. I was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a deeply reactionary, though nonviolent, Islamist group committed to the creation of a global Caliphate – a theocratic pan-Islamic state. They were not members of the group but shared its separatist message and supremacist ideology, so naturally we formed a close bond.

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The beating heart of Mumbai

It is the biggest slum in Asia, home to more than a million people. It’s also the setting of Danny Boyle’s vibrant new film. But what’s it really like in Dharavi? Eight boys talk about life as slumdog millionaires. Gethin Chamberlain in the Observor:

Amid a narrow warren of side streets close to the mosque that dominates the skyline on the edge of the mega-slum of Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, a young boy tilts his head back and stares up at the narrow strip of blue which is all that can be seen of the sky. Rickety warehouses crowd in from all sides, their high sheet-metal walls and overhanging asbestos roofs blocking out the sun, plunging the dirt streets below into a gloomy half-light, though it is nearly midday.

Far, far above, the vapour trail of a plane is breaking up, fraying at the edges and drifting away. Ten-year-old Anwar Khan watches it for a while, thinking about the question he has been asked. Eventually he gives his answer: ‘A pilot,’ he says. ‘I’d like to be a pilot. I’d love to know what it feels like to be in the air. I’ve never been in the air. I want to be closer to the sky.’

Like most of the 1m people who live in Dharavi – Asia’s biggest, and probably its most vibrant, slum – Anwar has never been in a plane; but like many of those crammed into the 535-acre former fishing village, he doesn’t waste time wallowing in self-pity. Anwar is a boy with a plan.

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Goa bans beach parties

Beach parties in Goa will be banned over the Christmas and New Year because of security fears following the Mumbai terrorist.

“Taking into consideration all the aspects, we have decided that beach parties would not be allowed from December 23 to January 5,” Goa chief minister Digamber Kamat told reporters.Traditional ceremonies and parties in hotels will be unaffected.

Kishan Kumar, Goa’s police inspector general, told Reuters: “Obviously there is a security threat, but we cannot say anything more specific at the moment”.

Some 2.6 million tourists visit Goa each year, including about 400,000 foreign visitors.Tourist arrivals have fallen 20 percent since last month’s Mumbai attacks.

Mother and child

Time has this superb photograph by Alexandra Fazzina in the year-end Top 10 Photos list:

Siamoy, an Afghan woman from remote Badakhshan province in Afghanistan, feeds her one-month old baby. The remote, mountain region has the highest maternity mortality rate in the world.

Click here for Time’s Top 10 Everything of 2008

Pessimism growing in Pakistan

Pakistanis are becoming increasingly pessimistic about prospects for their country and for themselves. According to an opinion poll conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI), a US-based group that promotes democracy, about 88 per cent Pakistanis feel their country is headed in the wrong direction, 59 per cent say the next year will be worse than the current year and 67 per cent believe democracy has made no difference to their wellbeing.

Read the Dawn report here, and click here for the the full IRI survey:

Write a steamy passage to India

Mills & Boon launches competition in the subcontinent to find a new writer. Rhys Blakely from Mumbai in the Times:

Prepare to be romanced as never before: the women of India – the land that brought you the Kama Sutra and countless Bollywood depictions of all-conquering love – are being wooed to write for Mills & Boon.

The world’s most prolific romance publisher, which sells four books a second, has just begun its largest search for fresh literary talent, and has chosen to hunt in the subcontinent for the first time. It is the climax of one of the longest and most breathless unions in publishing.

Starry-eyed Indian readers have sighed over imported Mills & Boon books since the days of the Raj. Indian bookshop shelves groan under the weight of titles such as the recent Virgin Slave, Barbarian King. The 100-year-old British company began printing in the country this year to fill the growing demand.

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And below, Aishwarya Subramanyam, Times correspondent and associate managing editor for Vogue India, gives it a try:

She drew her thin cotton sari closer around her as she walked barefoot on the cool marble, the breeze caressing her long black hair, tied with a string of jasmine and falling to her waist in loose waves. She could feel his eyes on her and tried to ignore him, but couldn’t resist sneaking a look; he hadn’t even bothered to remove his riding boots!

More here on the opening lines of her Rajput Prince’s Defiant Bride:

And click here for some tips:

Be very careful to conform to the sexual mores of your chosen series – nipples at dawn are not right for Romance but for Blaze, they’re a prerequisite.

Clinton fund’s India links

From Business Standard:

Samajwadi Party General Secretary and Member of Parliament Amar Singh, steel baron Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, businessmen Ajit Gulabchand and the late Lalit Suri, companies like Reliance, Ranbaxy, Iffco and Suzlon and the Confederation of Indian Industry have all made large contributions to the foundation set up by former US President Bill Clinton.

The William J Clinton Foundation on Thursday released the list of its donors as part of an agreement to allay concerns about potential conflicts if Senator Hillary Clinton is confirmed as secretary of state in the Obama administration. The foundation has raised over $492 million since its inception in 2001 with the state aim of fighting poverty, disease and climate change.

The list does not mention the date the donations were made or how much the donors gave, though it buckets them in broad categories. Singh, Mittal and Suzlon Energy fall in the third-largest category of $1-5 million.

The disclosure could raise some uncomfortable questions at home. For instance, while filing his Rajya Sabha nomination papers, Singh had last month disclosed that his net worth was Rs 37 crore ($7.4 million).

More here and click here for the full list of donors:

Click here for the list of Indian donors:

Novels new ‘inspiration’ for Bollywood scripts

From Mint:

The Namesake, a movie based on a book by Jhumpa Lahiri by the same name.

While the notion of borrowing from literature for movies is not new in Indian cinema (Satyajit Ray adapted a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay for cinematic release in the 1950s), the age-old trick has found a new manifestation in contemporary literature and has gained currency in multiplexes.

Hot on the heels of the release of Hello, an adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Centre, and Slumdog Millionaire, the critically acclaimed adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s Q&A, Chauhan’s chick-lit debut The Zoya Factor, is being turned into a film by Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, while Bajaj’s Keep Off The Grass is being adapted by Mosaic Media Group-the production company behind The Dark Knight-in conjunction with Bollywood partners.

Siddharth Roy Kapur, chief executive of UTV Motion Pictures, explains that the appeal of turning new-generation fiction into films comes in part from having a ready source of stories to choose from.

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Paper tigers

Before Aravind Adiga’s crudely moralising novel, he wrote crudely moralising short stories. S Subramanian reviews “Between the Assassinations” by Aravind Adiga in The National:

It is no coincidence that Aravind Adiga’s book of short stories, Between the Assassinations (written before his Booker-prize winning debut The White Tiger, but just now published in India), also begins at a railway station. The station is in the fictional town of Kittur, which a short prefatory note locates on India’s western coast, between Goa and Calicut. To really understand the town, Adiga writes, “a minimum stay of a week is recommended.” He gives himself 12 stories.

Narayan and Adiga lived through inarguably the two most exciting periods of modern Indian history – the former through India’s birth as an independent country, the latter through India’s birth as an economic contender. But Malgudi feels timeless, a compact bubble only occasionally nudged by drafts of air from the outside world. In Narayan’s lore, the two most famous people to have ever visited the village are Lord Rama and Mahatma Gandhi, and one imagines they both found a similar Malgudi waiting for them.

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For tips on frugality, look to India

Anand Giridharadas in the International Herald Tribune:

In India, nothing cannot be recycled. AP

The truly frugal segment friends and associates into two camps: those who merit their money and those who don’t.

Cellphone calls may cost a cent a minute in India, but why call people who only rate a text? Why text when you can make a “missed call”? Millions of Indians dial and quickly hang up, hoping for the other person to call back and foot the bill.

Your upholstery is not for everyone. Sofas fray and stain; there is, in the final analysis, a cost per posterior. So cover your sofa with bed sheets and remove them for only the best behinds.

So, too, with crockery: Buy a set of expensive plates and keep it in a case where your friends can see them while they eat from the cheap plates you actually set before them.

When eating out, order soups fractionally: a certain number of soups split by a certain number of people. Start with “one into two,” the realm of Indian beginners, then graduate in time to “three into five” and “six into seven.”

For entrees, count the diners at the table, subtract one and order that many dishes – which, for a table of four, saves 25 percent over the one-person-one-dish norm.

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India’s elephants in peril

Sankar Roy at Asia Sentinel:

Although the world’s concern has risen over the fate of India’s tigers, the descending numbers of India’s elephants have not caused alarm. They are not listed as endangered species. The Federal Ministry of Environment and Forests estimated the population of wild elephants at 26,413 in 2002, the last figure available. Although officials say the population has risen, the World Wildlife Fund believes that India’s elephant population has fallen by 50 percent over the last two decades. Statistical estimation on either tigers or elephants is not sound.

Obviously, as man encroaches, the elephant population faces problems, not least because they love to break into human settlements and poach not only crops but vats of homemade liquor. An Indian elephant needs some 500 square miles to roam, consumes 250 kilograms of leaves and wild fruits and drinks as much as 180 liters of water a day. Indiscriminate felling of trees and development projects cuts their habitat. Although the federal government has written and passed laws, implementation is in the hands of state governments, which often look the other way when poachers strike.

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