India’s new corporate jet set

Neeta Lal in Asia Sentinel:

India’s newly rich are acquiring that increasingly contentious totem of the western corporate world, the executive jet, in record numbers. At a time when it is becoming de rigueur to be concerned about the carbon footprint - the contrail of greenhouse gases that jets that spew across the stratosphere — India’s 100,000 high-net worth individuals, those with more than US$1 million in assets, are snapping up spiffy aircraft at mind-boggling prices for their personal and business use.

Until very recently, corporate jet travel was a rarity in Asia overall as tightfisted titans eschewed private aircraft as an unnecessary frivolity. That has started to change, with India and China at the forefront, giving succor to manufacturers such as Cessna, Bombardier and General Dynamics and others as the US and Eurozone economies start to flag.

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Biting the bait gets a whole new meaning

British tourists pay 100 pounds to watch endangered lions kill tethered cattle in India’s Gir National Park. Dean Nelson has the story in the Sunday Times.

British tourists are paying more than £100 to watch endangered Asian lions kill tethered cattle at an Indian wildlife reserve.

According to local officials, some visitors eat lunch at dining tables as they watch cows and buffalo being devoured. Animal welfare groups have expressed outrage, saying such gruesome displays break the law and are not only cruel to cattle but also put the lions in jeopardy by bringing them closer to humans. They blame western tourists for encouraging the practice.

According to conservationists, the shows are being organised by tour guides and farmers in collusion with junior park officials. Only about 360 lions survive in India from a subspecies that once ranged from Greece through the Caucasus and into China. It is now confined to the Gir national park in Gujarat, western India, where the incomes of villagers depend on frequent sightings.

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Death Metal and the Indian identity

When writer Akshay Ahuja transported a guitar to India, little did he know he was being led down a rabbit hole to a vibrant subculture by a group that styled itself the Cremated Souls. From Guernica:

It was near midnight on the eve of India’s independence, and I was at a concert called Freedom Jam, held at a club on the outskirts of Bangalore called only The Club. Watching the band perform from beside the stage, I noticed a girl with a nose ring. My grandmother’s nose was pierced when she married at thirteen; her nose ring was a sign that she adhered to a certain traditional image of Indian womanhood. For this girl, however, the ring indicated that she was not just westernized (such girls simply chose not to get their noses pierced) but a member of an alternative community that existed outside the mainstream of westernized Indian youth.

Essentially, the nose ring had traveled to the other side of the world, assumed a fringe rather than traditional meaning, and then come back to India, where it now has two different meanings. Such dual gestures exist in America, but they usually have one sincere and one ironic meaning-trucker hats on truckers, for example, as opposed to everyone else. In India, however, both meanings are perfectly sincere, both carry conviction.

Our group had left late for the show, stopping at a store on the side of the highway for a few bottles of whiskey. When we finally pushed through the turnstiles and found the promoter, all they could get was the 4 a.m. slot.

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Beyond Bollywood, is Indian fashion going global?

Suzy Menkes in International Herald Tribune:

Mumbai: With voluptuous bodies and a sultry glamour, the models looked like a mirror image of the front row movie stars. Flamboyant dresses held together with crystal straps seemed destined for Mumbai’s cinematic royalty. By the time the designer Manish Malhotra took his bow surrounded by slicked males and sensual women, the finale could have been a poster on a Mumbai billboard.

But this red carpet moment was only one act in Lakme Fashion Week. For Indian fashion is aiming to go beyond Bollywood and on to the global stage.

This vibrant city, its spirit caught between the energy of New York and laidback Los Angeles, is determined to establish itself as India’s hot and hip fashion capital. It may be competing with Delhi, the country’s political epicenter, which held its own fashion week earlier this month, but the Lakme show (named for the beauty giant that is the main sponsor) is showcasing fresh talents.

[Photos: Models at Lakme Fashion Week, Mumbai]

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Slum visits: Tourism or voyeurism?

Some tourists are trading museums and monuments for shantytowns and garbage heaps. But critics say these tours are exploitative. Eric Weiner in The New York Times:

Michael Cronin’s job as a college admissions officer took him to India two or three times a year, so he had already seen the usual sites - temples, monuments, markets - when one day he happened across a flier advertising “slum tours.”

“It just resonated with me immediately,” said Mr. Cronin, who was staying at a posh Taj Hotel in Mumbai where, he noted, a bottle of Champagne cost the equivalent of two years’ salary for many Indians. “But I didn’t know what to expect.”

Soon, Mr. Cronin, 41, found himself skirting open sewers and ducking to avoid exposed electrical wires as he toured the sprawling Dharavi slum, home to more than a million. He joined a cricket game and saw the small-scale industry, from embroidery to tannery, that quietly thrives in the slum. “Nothing is considered garbage there,” he said. “Everything is used again.”

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Online Scrabble craze leaves game sellers at loss for words

In The New York Times, Heather Timmons reports from New Delhi on the Scrabulous craze. The Calcutta-based creators of the game collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising.

The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once. Everyone seems to love the online game - everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

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Through a lens, virtually

The biggest and commercially viable names in Indian entertainment are putting their money in full-length animation movies. Suruchi Mazumdar in The Indian Express.

A warrior stands atop a medieval tower. His sword glistens and his majestic robe flutters in the wind. Then he dives in slow motion and takes on his enemies who die minutes later after some death-defying stunts. That’s Tamil superstar Rajinikanth, looking 20 years younger in his next film Sultan-an expensive animated full-length feature to be made by the actor’s daughter Soundarya Rajinikanth.

Sultan is among many animation movies currently being made in India. The culture that began with 2003’s surprise hit Hanuman, a cutesy 2-D cartoon for kids, has moved on to an adult genre with films like Sultan and other mainstream Bollywood productions like the Ajay Devgan-and Kajol-starrer Toonpur Ki Superhero, Yash Raj Films’ Roadside Romeo and Karan Johar’s Kootchie Kootchie Hota Hai (an animated remake of the blockbuster Kuch Kuch Hota Hai).

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Finding Manhattan on India’s real estate map

 Aruna Viswanatha in Mint:

In the US, the trip might take more than a day, but in Bangalore, anyone can hop from Tribeca to Brooklyn, stop off at the White House, and head out to Melrose in just a few minutes.

The miraculous journey unfolds in a new housing development in Bangalore’s Electronic City named “Concorde Manhattans”, which sits on prime real estate across from a Wipro Technologies campus. While location is the major draw, developer Concorde Group is also betting that its American naming scheme will help attract Wipro’s globetrotting employees. “Manhattans is a brand associated with grandeur,” said the company’s marketing manager Alok Mishra.

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Questionable wisdom of being politically correct

We do live in times where political correctness can take bizarre overtones. Namita Bhandare in Mint.

So, I’m wondering: is it OK to be sexist but not so OK to be racist? I ask this question not in the background of Hillary vs Obama but maa ki vs monkey.

Now, if you’ve ever sat in a DTC bus in Delhi, you’ll be pretty familiar with the maa ki lexicon. In its expanded form, it refers not to motherly love but to a rather delicate part of her anatomy. Harbhajan Singh has admitted to referring disparagingly to Andrew Symonds’s mother (and I’m sure Zinedine Zidane has some thoughts on this), which, in some strange way, is less offensive than if he had called him a monkey, an animal that is venerated and even worshipped in India.

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