In Tehelka, a profile of India’s ‘Passpost Baba,’ the man many believe can guarantee a passport and a job abroad:
If you are aspiring to travel abroad for higher studies or hunt for job opportunities in a ‘phoren’ country, there is one place where you must place a copy of your curriculum vitae - the revered Hazrat Miskin Shah Dargah, in the steel city of Jamshedpur, where passports and applications in the form of letters hang from a peepul tree in thousands or even more. One application and vrooooom! You fly to your dream destination! Baba is there to fulfill your dreams. Not surprising then that this dargah situated at the Berdih Kalubagan kabrsitan has earned fame as the resting place of “Passport baba” over the years.
Does that sound weird? Perhaps weird it is, some even say it is stupidity, but in a country which is known globally for its mysticism and superstitions, the Miskin Shah Dargah has become the destination for students, parents or anybody who has ever dreamt of a passport to foreign shores, be it the Gulf countries, UK or US. The blind belief, that your prayers for a job will be answered - if a mere written application to Miskin Baba and copies of passports are tied to the branches of the tree which hover over Baba’s samadhi or tomb - is perhaps also a classic example of the growing despair among the educated unemployed youth who now have fallen back on saints and fakirs for a solution to the malaise. The extent of the belief, or the malaise, can be judged by the fact that the branches of the tree have to be cleared and cleaned once or twice in every six months so that it can accommodate other applications and passports in the waiting!
There were only two occasions when Mahatma Gandhi was recorded speaking in English. Once in the 1930s and the second, especially historic because it was just a few months before Gandhi was assassinated, was made on April 2, 1947. This second speech has been largely lost to the world. Recently, however, the second speech surfaced in — of all places — downtown Washington. Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post:
Gandhi’s speech — made with the uneven diction of an elderly man who sounds as though he has lost most of his teeth — had the same themes he visited over and over throughout his life: the importance of nonviolence, the eradication of the caste system in Hindu society, amity between South Asia’s Hindus and Muslims, and a world united against violence and exploitation.
“A friend asked yesterday, did I believe in one world?” Gandhi says at one point in the speech. “Of course I believe in World One. And how can I possibly do otherwise? . . . You can redeliver that message now in this age of democracy, in the age of awakening of the poorest of the poor.”
Click here for the rest of the story and here to listen to the rare recording:
Jason Motlagh in the Virginia Quarterly Review (via Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting):
The express bus from Hyderabad to Dantewada takes fifteen hours on a good day. As the suburbs of the software hub are left behind, and then the wrought-iron gates of Ramoji Film City, the smooth pavement falls apart. But the sweep of paddy fields and palms-a facsimile of the INCREDIBLE INDIA! billboard hanging at the Delhi airport when I first arrived-grew more hypnotic with each mile, making up for the rough going. Hills loomed in the hazy distance. Cowherds shunted their stock out of harm’s way, and women carried grain in clay pots on their heads. Passing into virgin forest so dense that hardly a ray of light broke through, I finally dozed off, rustled by the occasional thwack of a tree branch as we hurtled into dusk.
Dantewada, the main town of Chhattisgarh state’s remote Bastar Division, seemed bucolic enough. The smell of freshly fried samosas wafted from the corner dhaba, where lanky men took cover from a sun that beat down like a fist. Long-distance coaches to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa came and went in a fit of honking. At either end of town, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) barricades, reading WE NEED YOUR COOPERATION, were the only signals that something might be wrong.
[Photo: Teenage "special police officer" scans the forest around Rani Bodli camp, scene of a midnight Naxalite raid early last year that left 55 security forces dead, South Bastar region, Chhattisgarh state.]
For an India in California, a visit back home invites a fresh look at the notion of arranged marriages. Swati Pandey (second from right in photo) in LA Times:
Gorakhpur: It was near midnight at the Railway Club, a posh spot at the train station in Gorakhpur, close to the Nepal border. Hundreds of guests had gathered four hours earlier to eat made-to-order dosas and Indian-Chinese fusion finger-foods, to watch green, red and gold fireworks explode over palm trees and to dance to bass-heavy Bollywood tracks.
My cousin’s wedding would soon begin.
A family astrologer had recommended the date and advised that the wedding start after 10 p.m. and conclude before 4 a.m. Those last hours would end six days of ceremonies, the first reunion of my maternal family in two decades and my first full Hindu wedding. They would also end my uncle’s efforts to arrange a marriage, and a future, for my cousin.
In Outlook, Sheela Reddyprofiles Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s daughter Upinder Singh:
“You can’t miss it,” says historian Upinder Singh rather apologetically, giving directions to her home in the St Stephen’s staff quarters. “It looks like a fortress.” It does: a towering blank metal gate, of which a chocolate square pops open at the first knock to reveal the head of a grim securityman. And there’s a whole posse of Black Cats behind the gate, befitting the home of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s daughter. But inside, it’s a different world: cane chairs, cement floors and peeling white walls. The shabby-genteel world of two university dons who, between them, share most of the housework-there’s a part-time cook, Neena, to whom Upinder wants to dedicate her next book and “the boys help a little but not as much as I’d like them to”.
And between them, they have also probably read all the books lining their walls, where plaster casts of Socrates rub shoulders with Harappan dancing girls. In fact, half-a-dozen of these books have been written by Upinder herself.
[Photo: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's daughter Upinder in her modest home in the St. Stephen's staff quarters, Delhi. / Outlook]
Legend has it that it was the apostle, Thomas, the doubting one, who brought Christianity to Southern India - and now, aside from the odd jealous spat, the Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati are worshipped with equal fervour. William Dalrymple in The Guardian:
On the edge of the jungle lay a small wooden temple. It was late evening, and the sun had already disappeared behind the palms. The light was fading fast, and the hundreds of small clay lamps lined up on the wooden slats of the temple all seemed to be burning brighter and brighter, minute by minute.
The oiled torsos of the temple Brahmins were gleaming, too. They had nearly finished the evening ceremony - surrounding the idol of the goddess Bhagavati with burning splints as they rang bells, chanted and blew on conch shells. The ritual prepared the goddess for sleep.
Only when it was over, and the doors of the inner shrine were sealed for the night, were they able to tell me about the goddess they served. Bhagavati is the pre-eminent goddess in Kerala, the most powerful and beloved. In some incarnations, it was true, she could be ferocious: a figure of terror, a stalker of cremation grounds who slaughtered demons without hesitation or compassion.
In Lounge-Mint, Rabbi Shergill talks about the wellspring of his music and the importance of language:
While the riffs of rock music inform his musical thought-he idolizes Bruce Springsteen - Rabbi Shergill’s music is essentially Punjabi. The rhythms and cadences of the Punjabi language, and folk and Sufi musical forms are reflected in his original compositions. He feels strongly about language as a vehicle for thought-the bastardization of the Punjabi language and its homogenization, brought about by mass culture, upsets him. “Homogenizing language is tantamount to homogenizing thought,” says the 33-year-old, adding that using his own language-a dialect of Punjabi spoken in the Majha region, that he was exposed to as a child-is for him a form of protest against the homogenization of the beautiful, rich and diverse Punjabi language. Language, then, is a focal point in understanding and appreciating Shergill’s music.
Former Indian Army chief Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw, who scripted India’s 1971 military victory over Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh, died at the military hospital in Wellington in Tamil Nadu early Friday after developing acute bronchopneumonia. He was 94.
From India Today:
In 1942 at the height of the World War II a fierce battle was raging in Myanmar, then Burma, at the Sittang Bridge. A company of the Indian Army was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the invading Japanese forces for the capture of a position, which was critical for the control of the bridge. The young company commander was exhorting his troops when his stomach was riddled by a machine gun burst. Afraid that his company would be left leaderless if he were evacuated, he continued fighting till he collapsed.
His company won the day and the general commanding the Indian forces arrived at the scene to congratulate the soldiers. On seeing the critically wounded commander, he announced the immediate award of the Military Cross — the young officer was not expected to survive much longer and the Military Cross is not awarded posthumously. Thus began a historic military career that spanned the Indo-Pak wars and the Sino-Indian conflict, the wounded captain surviving to become India’s first field marshal.
A speech by Sam Manekshaw at his old school Sherwood College in 1969:
Your Grace, the Metropolitan of India, My Lord Bishop of Lucknow, Mr. Principal, ladies and young gentlemen of Sherwood:
Yesterday evening when my A.D.C. told me that I would have to speak here, I was horrified. I thought the Principal had asked me to come and join the celebrations; I did not realize he wanted me to sing for my supper! Believe me, as I stand here, I am terrified. Those near me can almost hear my knees knocking and my teeth chattering. For eight years in Sherwood, I was at the receiving end.
It is customary on these occasions for the guest speaker to give a learned discourse or advice to young gentlemen. It is not my fault that, although I received my early education in Sherwood, I am not learned. Sir, I am fit neither to give you a learned discourse nor advice, I really want to tell you what Sherwood has done for me.
Dawn Magazine, Karachi, carried this piece by Commodore (retired) Najeeb Anjum in December, 2007:
It is a reminder of the failure of leadership at the time as exemplified by Yahya Khan and his coterie in their handling of the worst crisis the country ever faced.
The Indo-Pak war of 1971 culminated in the creation of Bangladesh. Ironically, General Yahha Khan, Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army (re-designated as COAS in 1972) and President of Pakistan at the time of independence was a staff officer at Military Operations Directorate as a major and General SAM Manekshaw, the COAS of the Indian Army was posted as GSO-I as a Lt-Col. It was ordained that these two erstwhile compatriots would fight a full scale war against each other on 1971. Manekshaw showed uncommon ability to motivate his forces, coupling it with a mature war strategy and the war ended with Pakistan’s unconditional surrender.
Ayaz Memon looks back at the magical, surreal summer that ended with Kapil Dev raising aloft the World Cup. From cricinfo:
Show me a person who gave Kapil Dev’s team any chance of winning the 1983 World Cup: I will show you a liar and an opportunist.
The story of how David Frith, then editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly, had to literally eat his words after he wrote India off as no-hopers has been told far too often to be repeated here, yet is symbolic of the utter disdain with which the Indian cricket team was viewed before the tournament. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the situation was “hopeless, but not serious.”
My own belief in the Indian team’s prospects, too, tended towards zero. True, there had been some glimpses of excellence when Kapil Dev’s team beat mighty West Indies at Berbice in a one day game preceding the 1983 tournament, but India’s track record in one-day cricket, and especially in the two previous World Cups, had been pathetic to say the least.
[Photo: The catch that changed cricket: Kapil is mobbed by happy spectators after the dismissal of Richards in the final]
Above, Kapil Dev lifting the trophy at Lords, after beating West Indies to win the Prudential World Cup in 1983.
Some thought a World Cup could be won by fluke: Kapil
Kapil Dev speaks to The Telegraph, Calcutta, in the lead-up to the June 25 celebrations at Lord’s. Excerpts:
Q Clearly, this is an emotional time for you…
A (Laughs) Basically, I’m an emotional person… I’m particularly looking forward to the reunion at Lord’s… We’ll be reminiscing, cracking jokes… Pulling each other’s leg.
Well, what could happen on the 25th?
Quite a few (nine, really) of us are 50-plus and, so, I expect a lot of leg-pulling… Generally, I could be a target … I’ll be one of the team, my days of captaincy have gone… (Krishnamachari) Srikkanth and (Sandeep) Patil would talk a lot at team meetings, let’s see whether that has changed… Sunil (Gavaskar) has a great sense of humour and he could lighten up things… Dilip (Vengsarkar) wouldn’t say much at team meetings, but I don’t know whether he’ll be as quiet now when we return to the Lord’s dressing room… Kirti (Azad) would joke a lot and I remember Yashpal (Sharma) knew everything about everybody… Basically, mazza aye ga (It’ll be fun).
India were booked at 66:1 before the 1983 World Cup started. Then they beat West Indies, overcame a hiccup against Zimbabwe, brushed aside Australia, and beat England in the semi-final to set up a final against the two-time defending champions. Having lost the toss, India batted first, making 183, and that paltry score turned out to be a winning one as West Indies collapsed for 140, the greatest upset in the history of the World Cup. Cricinfo picks out five crucial moments from the final.
CNN-IBN celebrates and honours the men who scripted history for Indian cricket on a special show Lords of ‘83.
The show conducted by CNN-IBN editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai saw the legends candidly recall the big moment - both on the field and off it. From the team’s strategy to who got to drink the most champagne to who got the maximum adulation from female fans, the show revisited some of the unseen, unheard of times.
The panel comprised Kapil Dev, the captain of that World Cup winning team; Sunil Gavaskar, an incomparable batsman; Balwinder Singh Sandhu, the man who started it all by bowling out Gordon Grenidge; Syed Kirmani, the finest wicketkeeper India has ever seen; Yashpal Sharma, one of the most astounding heroes of the ‘83 triumph and the charismatic Sandeep Patil.
A pine-wooded outpost in India’s northeast is alive with Bob Dylan, gospel and the blues. Somini Sengupta reprts from Shillong in The New York Times:
Lou Majaw wore his signature skin-tight, cutoff short-shorts. His long gray hair hung like dirty threads around his face. Eyes closed in prayer, a guitar cupped in arms, he strummed the chords to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“Happy birthday, Bob Dylan, wherever you are,” he began, standing on a stage in a near-empty church hall on an overcast Saturday afternoon. “God bless you, and thanks for everything that you’ve done.”
Every May 24 for the last 35 years Mr. Majaw, 61, and one of India’s original rock ‘n’ roll bards, has held a homespun celebration of Mr. Dylan’s birth.
[Photos: Indian rockers Lou Majaw and Phu Baba: NYTimes.]
Leading historian Ramchandra Guha offers seven reasons why it will not. And then, to this objective judgement, he adds the subjective desires of a citizen - that it should not even attempt to become one. An exclusive essay in Outlook:
Who, now, are the Indians who shall hold the centre against the challenges from left and right? Here lies a fundamental difference between the India of 1948 and the India of 2008.
Then, the government was run by men and women of proven intelligence and integrity, who were deeply committed to the values and procedures of democracy, and wholly aware of the threats posed to these values and procedures by men such as M.S. Golwalkar and B.T. Ranadive. Now, the Government of India is run by men and women of limited intelligence and dubious integrity, who know little about and care less for the ideals on which the Republic was founded. (As the late Pramod Mahajan once candidly confessed, the first time most Members of Parliament see the Indian Constitution is when, after being elected, they are made to take an oath on it.)
Effort Is Part of Bitter Debate Over the Role of Hindu Language in a Diverse Society. From The Washington Post:
New Delhi: Hemant Singh Yadav, a lean and sprightly 15-year-old, was sent by his parents to a summer camp to learn to speak Sanskrit, or what he calls the language of the gods.
He had studied the 4,000-year-old classical Indian language at school for six years. He knew its grammar and could chant the ancient hymns. But he could not converse in it. During a two-week course at the camp, Sanskrit Samvad Shala, he had no choice: He was forbidden to speak any other language.
“At first I thought it was impossible. The teachers and attendants spoke to us only in Sanskrit, and I did not understand anything,” said Hemant, one of the 150 students gathered inside a Hindu temple on the outskirts of New Delhi. “I knew big, heavy bookish words before, but not the simple ones. But now Sanskrit feels like an everyday language.”
India’s relations with the US are headed for a downturn, should Barack Obama be elected president. Bharat Karnad in Mint:
Considering the banner headlines on the US presidential nomination race in Indian newspapers, one would think Barack Obama was in the race for power in India! Relations with the US are, in fact, headed for a downturn should he get elected US president, come November. John McCain is an uninspiring alternative, but at least he talks of “a league of democracies” in which India is bound to feature prominently, and not non-proliferation measures that will end up hurting India that Obama is set to pursue. As far as India is concerned, the main problem with Obama is precisely his non-proliferation stance. He is for preventing states from crossing the weapons threshold and is bent on making an example of India (and Pakistan) for obtaining these armaments; verily a latter day King Canute ordering the nuclear tide to roll back!
It takes a city like Mumbai, India - frenetic, transactional and compassionate - to erect eateries for the malnourished: the hunger cafes. Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:
Mumbai: The golden Honda pulled over to the curb alongside the restaurant on a quiet afternoon last week. A window rolled down. A 100-rupee note, worth about $2.30, popped out, courtesy of a woman in a head scarf who would identify herself only as Mrs. Abbas. Then, as quietly as it came, the car sped away.
Inside the Mahim Darbar restaurant, seven men sprang to their feet: gaunt, beleaguered men with pocked faces. But this was the moment they had been waiting for. Mrs. Abbas had, in a quintessentially Mumbai way, bought them lunch.
[Photo: Hungry men waited outside a cafe for a passer-by to pay for their meals on a stretch of road in Mumbai’s Mahim neighborhood. IHT]
Indra Sinha, the author of a Booker-shortlisted novel set in the aftermath of the tragedy of the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, is on indefinite hunger strike in Delhi in support of survivors protesting against “government indifference” over their plight. From The Guardian:
On July 26 2006, my friend Sathyu Sarangi called me in tears from Bhopal to tell me that our mutual friend, Sunil Kumar, had taken his life. Sathyu said that when they lifted Sunil down from the ceiling fan from which he had hanged himself, he was wearing a T-shirt that said, “No More Bhopals”.
Sunil was an orphan of the Union Carbide mass-gassing of Bhopal, losing his parents and three siblings on that night of terror. Aged 12, he began doing two jobs a day to bring up his surviving sister and baby brother Sanjay. He became a leader of the survivors’ struggle for justice and was one of the people I loved most in Bhopal.
The BBC reported, wrongly, that Sunil was the inspiration for Animal in my novel Animal’s People, but Animal certainly benefited from Sunil’s courage, sense of humour and ability to live on 4 rupees (£0.05) a day. Like Animal, Sunil heard voices in his head, and suffered nightmarish visions. You can read his story here.
A letter purportedly written by a British official 94 years ago is at the centre of a passionate debate over plans to clear the sea between India and Sri Lanka of a chain of shoals revered by Hindus.
The Indian Government wants to remove the Ram Sethu, or Adam’s Bridge, to create a new shipping channel that it says will cut 250 miles (400km) and 30 hours from the journey between India’s east and west coasts. Ships at present have to sail around Sri Lanka.
Hindu nationalists are fighting the plans in the Supreme Court, arguing that the Ram Sethu was built by an army of monkeys to allow Lord Ram to rescue his abducted wife - as described in the epic Ramayana.
They want the Archaeological Survey of India to list it as a national monument because of its natural beauty and cultural and religious significance.
When foreigners complain to her that Indians are liars, Ranjini Manian often tells them what’s actually upsetting them is a simple clash of cultures.
The accusation is common among expatriates stumped by the Indian way of doing business and one that Manian tries to counter with the help of Global Adjustments, one of a few firms offering cross-cultural services in the world’s third biggest economy.
“Foreigners can’t understand why Indians don’t say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ clearly,” Manian, the firm’s CEO, told Reuters.
“We tell them Indians have a hard time using the word ‘no’. There is this tendency to want to save face, (but) a polite ‘I’ll try my best’ is not good enough.”
Bruce Stanley from Port Blair, The Andamans Islands, in The Wall Street Journal [From Mint]:
A cultural collision between working-class visitors and the local stewards of high-end tourism at this idyllic archipelago has raised temperatures here, laying bare prejudices and at times exciting a measure of greed on both sides.
The Asian tsunami in 2004 swamped this Indian territory in the Bay of Bengal and took some 20,000 lives. It also left hoteliers and tour operators grappling with the economic aftershocks, as spooked tourists stayed away. So, several months after the disaster, the Indian government began offering free plane tickets to civil servants and employees of big state companies to treat their families to an Andamans vacation.
As wine publications, wine clubs, competitions and tasting dinners have taken hold, gradually, Indian wines with notable finesse are becoming available and appreciated. From The new York Times:
Nasik, India: When Ranjit Dhuru, the owner of the Chateau d’Ori winery, walked through his gently sloping vineyards here in February, the harvest was in full swing. “Already sweet,” he said, nibbling from tight, healthy bunches of cabernet sauvignon grapes. “These will be ready to pick soon, in another week.”
Eight years ago, Mr. Dhuru, who made his fortune in the software business, bought land outside Nasik, a city about 100 miles northeast of Mumbai that has become the center of India’s rapidly expanding wine industry.
This year, with the help of a consulting oenologist from Bordeaux, Mr. Dhuru expects to produce about 300,000 bottles of white and red wines. By next year, he estimates that a million bottles will bear the Chateau d’Ori label.
Hermès’s resident “nose,” Jean-Claude Ellena, scours the Indian state of Kerala for inspiration and ingredients that will make up his newest perfumes. Phoebe Eaton in The New York Times:
India. The House of Hermès had declared it its theme of 2008, and silk scarves are vivid with raw pinks and fleshy mangoes, elephants harnessed to carriages and tigers rampant. The company’s resident ‘‘nose,” the man hired in 2003 to juice perfume sales, Monsieur Jean-Claude Ellena, is back in the south, in the state of Kerala - cut with canals, the Venice of the subcontinent, the world’s supermarket for spice - where he has been wrestling for some time with how to bottle the fantasy.
It is a sweaty day in February, and Ellena is taking stock of his myriad inspirations, at the charming 25-acre Kumarakom Lake Resort on the shores of Vembanad Lake. All the rooms are cobbled out of the region’s 200-year-old teak cottages (tharavadu). His face is all nose, a tapered sensor whose nostrils tingle and flare with the same emotion that plays in most people’s eyebrows. They flare as he talks about the truffles in his freezer, procured in a furtive daylong transaction with all the drama of a drug deal.
As India gets more wealthy, arranged marriage is giving way to more love weddings, and divorces. From Newsweek:
Not long ago, 19-year-old Sreeja Konidela returned home to Hyderabad from Delhi to attend a family funeral-but didn’t get the welcome she expected. Konidela, whose father, Chiranjeevi, is a megastar in the Telugu-language film industry, had been disowned for eloping with Shirish Bharadwaj, 23, who was from a different caste. The two had married on live television last October in a bid to keep Sreeja’s father from interfering-they were afraid he’d accuse Bharadwaj of kidnapping her, a common tactic in such cases. But their TV wedding alerted police and a mob of angry fans, who trailed the couple from the temple to the registrar and scared them so badly they fled to Delhi. Now the lovers were back, but Konidela’s relatives weren’t interested in reconciliation. Instead, she says, they forced Bharadwaj to wait outside and tried to browbeat her into dumping him so she could marry a groom of her parents’ choosing. “They just tried brainwashing me,” she says. “So I got out of there as fast as I could.”
The story electrified India, where a rapidly modernizing society is changing its views on marriage.
India is well-known for delicious food, and the kitchen is considered to be a sacred place in any Indian home. And now India has something else to be proud of: the world’s largest solar kitchen. The system has been installed as a collaboration between the Academy for a Better World and Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University, with technology from Solare-Brücke, Germany. With 84 receivers and cooking at 650 degrees, the system can produce up to 38,500 meals a day when the sun is at its peak!
The Gandhi name can be both a burden and a gift. With the tours of rural India, is Rahul Gandhi starting to find his feet, asks Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:
IT’S 6 PM in Jagdalpur, 300-odd kilometres away from Raipur in Chhattisgarh. Four Scorpio-loads of journalists have travelled here from faraway Delhi, in search of an elusive moment with Rahul Gandhi. A surprising sense of order grips the air. Everyone seems to know what they have to do; things move with clockwork precision. Rahul Gandhi is due any moment for a small closed-door meeting with tribal representatives. A slow but efficient line of people are snaking their way through the door. A frisk, and a question: Are you a tribal? Where is your card? Several sundry enthusiasts want to get in, many have travelled long miles, but they are turned away: this is strictly a meeting for tribal representatives. The journalists are made to stand about a 100 metres away, resolutely cordoned off by a polite row of sten-gun carrying cops. Rahul does not want media intruding on his meeting.
A few minutes later, almost on the dot, Rahul’s BMW SUV pulls up in a convoy of heavy security. It’s hot outside. The mosquitoes are humming in maddening towers overhead. He does not wave at the media, but walks with single- minded focus into the room and squats on the floor with the waiting audience. Their discussions are impossible to overhear.
Thiruvalla, India: Everything about this city of some 60,000 people in southern Kerala – from the battery of job consultancies to endless technical training institutes – is geared towards helping people leave.
In Thiruvalla, travel agents abound, each one selling more than just a plane ticket. Thomas Beno, owner of Tomy’s Travels, does brisk business in facilitating exits – he helps get his clients passports, visas, whatever they need to get out of town, and out of the country.
“So many people are going to the UAE and the United Kingdom,” he said, sitting inside his small street-front shop among scores of similar shops.
Amrit Dhillon from Cochin, Kerala in The Telegraph, UK:
Adorned with gold, and carrying a Hindu deity on his broad back, Babu the elephant plays a central role in religious ceremonies across the Indian state of Kerala.
Now aged 45, he is approaching retirement after a hard working life - and, like many of the 650 working elephants in the state, there have always been fears for his future.
Elephants cost £340 a month to maintain, a great expense when the average monthly wage is only £50, and many owners cannot afford to look after their beasts when they finally stop working.
But help is at hand. India’s first retirement home for elderly elephants opens next month inside a tranquil forest at Kottur, outside the state capital Trivandrum, where the colossal beasts can spend their twilight years in dignity.
[Photo: After 36 years' work, Babu the elephant will be pampered in retirement]
India’s extraordinary conglomerate has found unique solutions to many of its problems. But it’s still unclear what will happen when the boss retires. Heather Connon reports from Mumbai in The Observor, UK:
The favourite boast of executives of the Tata Group is that it accompanies the average Indian throughout the day. They wake to the alarm of its Titan clocks, drink its tea or coffee for breakfast, wear clothes bought from its Westside shopping centres, take a Tata car or bus to work on a computer set up by Tata Consultancy Services, lunch in a Tata hotel, arrange their evening appointments on a Tata mobile phone and use Tata power to light their homes.
These days, the influence of the Indian conglomerate is spreading beyond its home country. Back in 2000, it made the first major acquisition by an Indian group when it acquired the Tetley tea company; last year, that was trumped when it bought steelmaker Corus for £6.2bn, while in March it was confirmed as the purchaser of British icons Jaguar and Land-Rover from Ford. Next month, it will make its first foray into UK financial services when New Star launches an Indian investment fund that will be managed by Tata Asset Management.
Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual - they’ve been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health. The faithful have been observing the ritual at a shrine in Solapur, in western India’s Maharastra, for more than five hundred years. They believe it will make their children strong and say no accidents have ever happened. [Reuters]
A serious hotel shortage has businessmen wandering the country in search of a bed. Neeta Lal in Asia Sentinel:
Paul Douglas had a surreal experience on his maiden visit to India last year. Although the Los Angeles trader was on a business trip to India’s Silicon Valley - Bangalore - he put up in Mumbai, nearly 1,000 kilometers away. Douglas would fly to Bangalore every morning during his three-day stay and then jet back after wrapping up work.
Douglas found the city’s hotels so expensive, he says, that he preferred “to stay with a friend in Mumbai, fly in for meetings to Bangalore and then catch the day’s last flight back.”
Much like Douglas, foreign visitors to India are experiencing the country’s worst hotel room crunch ever. As its economy booms, with growth projected at 8 percent in 2008-09 despite the global slowdown, demand for hotel accommodation has far outstripped supply. The shortfall is so acute that hotel rooms in most Indian metropolitan areas are either unavailable or to be had only for outrageous prices.
Hundreds of children are still being born with birth defects as a result of the world’s worst industrial disaster 23 years ago in the central Indian town of Bhopal, say campaigners. They are demanding that the Indian government provide immediate medical care and research the “hidden” health impacts.
More than two decades ago, white clouds of toxic gas escaped from American multinational Union Carbide’s pesticide plant. The gas killed 5,000 people that night and 15,000 more in the following weeks - and doctors say that a new generation is being affected.
Top-range salaries tempt back tens of thousands of highly skilled Indians who had moved to the West. Amelia Gentleman reports from New Delhi in The Observer, UK:
Ashutosh Gupta’s home in Richmond Park has all the lifestyle comforts that many educated Indians of his generation left India to attain - lush and peaceful gardens, a gym, a pool and, most important, unwavering electricity and water supplies.
This luxury block in the ultra-modern Delhi suburb of Gurgaon (about 4,000 miles from Richmond, London) houses several hundred Indian families who have recently returned from living in the West, part of a ‘reverse brain drain’ migration which is gathering speed.
Indian politicians are beginning to highlight, approvingly, the emerging phenomenon of ‘brain gain’, as large numbers of Indian-born executives decide that job opportunities and living conditions are as good, if not better, in India and make their way home.
Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination is making news once again. This time it is because of his daughter Priyanka Vadra’s visit to a Vellore prison, where the only living member of Rajiv’s assassination squad, Nalini Sriharan, is lodged…
…”It’s completely personal, I don’t want to say anything about it. I needed to make peace with all the violence in my life,” she said.
“I don’t believe in anger or violence and I refuse to let it overpower me. Meeting Nalini (Sriharan) was my way of coming to terms with my father’s death,” Ms Gandhi said.
And on CNN-IBN: My family doesn’t carry anger, hatred: Rahul Gandhi
The Priyanka-Nalini meeting is a moment of grace and humanity, rare in our public life says an editorial in The Indian Express
It is an almost novelistic encounter — Priyanka Gandhi meeting Nalini Sriharan, one of her father’s assassins in Vellore jail, “to make peace with the violence”. Nalini, an LTTE rebel, was part of the squad that killed Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 during an election rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, and would not even have lived if Sonia Gandhi had not pleaded for clemency on her behalf because she had a young child. Priyanka asked Nalini why her father had been so brutally killed, whether Nalini had known him — talking to her, trying to come to terms with his death and refusing to let “anger and violence overpower” her.
Finally, Nalini believes her sins have been cleansed following her meeting with Priyanka, writes Radha Venkatesan in Times of India
To the world, it was a stunning revelation to learn that Priyanka Vadra had met Nalini, serving a life term for involvement in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.
For Priyanka, it was an attempt to attain closure, to come to terms with the tragic loss of her beloved father. But how did Nalini feel about the meeting?
According to the account she gave to her brother, it was a singularly emotional encounter. “I feel all my sins have been washed off by Priyanka’s visit…I feel she has pardoned me by calling on me at the prison…. I am indebted to her all my life,” she told her younger brother P S Bhagyanathan a few days after her March 19 meeting with Priyanka behind the majestic walls of Vellore prison.
Standing in front of his small brick home, in a courtyard where the dirt has been packed down by generations of barefoot children, the middle-aged mustard farmer doesn’t bother to hide his exhaustion.
“Only someone who has been through something like this can understand the size of my catastrophe,” said Sukhpal Singh Tomar. For years, he has struggled to find some reason for his suffering, but has come up with little. He shrugged: “It must be my karma.” The catastrophe? His daughters — all eight — so many he sometimes stumbles over their names.
Many tourists report being treated like gobs of tourist putty in the hands of Agra’s masterful touts, cajoled into unwanted side trips to trinket shops or pressed to hire an unauthorized tour guide.
In a survey published in 2006, the government of India found that 63 percent of foreign tourists complained of being cheated or harassed “in many tourist destinations like Agra,” as well as Delhi, India’s capital.
But there are endless alternatives for a holiday in India without the Taj, and even first-time visitors to the country might choose one of these circuits - provided they can stand up to friends back home boggled by the idea of visiting India without seeing the fabled monument.
Kolkata is bent on burnishing its modern image-and banning a potent symbol of India’s colonial past. From National Geographic:
The strategy of drivers in Kolkata-drivers of private cars and taxis and buses and the enclosed three-wheel scooters used as jitneys and even pedicabs-is simple: Forge ahead while honking. There are no stop signs to speak of. To a visitor, the signs that say, in large block letters, OBEY TRAFFIC RULES come across as a bit of black humor. During a recent stay in Kolkata, the method I devised for crossing major thoroughfares was to wait until I could attach myself to more pedestrians than I figured a taxi was willing to knock down. In the narrow side streets known as the lanes, loud honking is the signal that a taxi or even a small truck is about to round the corner and come barreling down a space not meant for anything wider than a bicycle. But occasionally, during a brief lull in the honking, I’d hear the tinkling of a bell behind me. An American who has watched too many Hallmark Christmas specials might turn around half expecting to see a pair of draft horses pulling a sleigh through snowy woods. But what came into view was a rickshaw. Instead of being pulled by a horse, it was being pulled by a man-usually a skinny, bedraggled, barefoot man who didn’t look quite up to the task. Hooked around his finger was a single bell that he shook continuously, producing what is surely the most benign sound to emanate from any vehicle in Kolkata.
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