The pro wrestler returns to India for a month-long vacation, and his fans just can’t get enough of him, writes Rama Lakshmi in The Washington Post

After two hours of swaying to thumping Bollywood neo-folk music and listening to stock stage jokes, the fans grew impatient and began chanting for the star of the evening to show up. “We want Khali! We want Khali!”

And when the Goliath-size professional wrestler of that name appeared on stage in a blue cotton shirt, jeans and ponytail, thousands of hands thrust cellphone cameras into the air to capture the image.

“Khali, we love you,” screamed men and women alike. “The Khali bomb!” yelled a male voice. Little boys tried to climb over barricades to get closer to the stage, on a college campus.

In India, public adulation and hysteria like this is usually reserved for stars of cricket or the film industry known as Bollywood. But Khali has earned his frenzied fame by becoming the Indian icon of American TV wrestling. He is the first man from this country to rise high in the American gladiatorial adventure of World Wrestling Entertainment, winning the world heavyweight championship in July 2007.

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Previously on AW:

Big man big heart

Great Khali gears up

Cash-rich Bollywood comes to the aid of cash-strapped Hollywood studios reports Dalya Alberge for The Times

Bollywood has met Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival, with George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt signing rupee-spinning deals for big movie collaborations.

India produces more films than any other country, and sells more than four billion cinema tickets a year, far more than in America. Now one of its biggest companies is to become a significant Hollywood player, it was announced yesterday in Cannes.

Reliance Big Entertainment, part of a $100 billion (£50 billion) Indian conglomerate, is to invest in development funds for eight production companies owned by A-list stars: they include Nicolas Cage’s Saturn Productions, Jim Carrey’s JC 23 Entertainment, Clooney’s Smokehouse Productions, Hanks’s Playtone Productions and Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

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Sex workers in India move one step closer towards legalisation, reports AFP in The Smart Set

Sex workers in India now have the option of taking out life insurance cover — a move they hope will speed up their bid to legalize the profession, a charity said Monday.

“Sex workers approached Life Insurance Corporation of India, which agreed to provide insurance coverage,” said Smarajit Jana, chief adviser to Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Committee for Indomitable Women), a group representing 65,000 sex workers.

“We have started by signing up 199 sex workers in Sonagachi, one of Asia’s largest red light districts, housing over 10,000 women involved in the business,” he told AFP.

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[Pic: Sex workers in Sonagachi/AFP Deshakalyan Chowdhury]

Posted by Namita Bhandare:

My column on the editorial page of the Hindustan Times looks at Mumbai and Delhi and how the differences between the two cities has narrowed in recent years

In the early 90s when I moved back to live in Delhi — ironically because I had married a Marathi manoos who lived as an ‘outsider’ in the capital — the Bombay (not yet Mumbai) versus Delhi debate was at its peak. Bombay was cool and cosmopolitan; a city of opportunity and dreams where everybody who worked hard enough, could make it big; a city that was so egalitarian that it didn’t give a rat’s tit to your last name; a city so safe for women that a ‘beautiful woman’, as the old saying went, ‘clad in the finest jewels may walk in the jungle safely at midnight’.

I had lived between both cities but finished school and college in New Delhi. Then, I left. Returning was like being reassigned to purgatory. Delhi was status-conscious and hierarchical with its own rigid social pecking order. Delhi was about nepotism and networking where those who made it big in the ‘import-export’ business did it because daddy-ji was pulling strings somewhere. Delhi was the city — or over-grown village, depending on your perspective — where no woman could be safe on the streets.

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India has always been a land of extremes. After 16 years of reforms, India has the most billionaires of any nation in Asia, another 100,000 millionaires and a growing middle class estimated to be anything between 200 million and 250 millioin. But 700 million Indians still live on less than $2 a day. Amelia Gentleman has the story for the International Herald Tribune.

There is a kind woman who parks her car near my gate once a day to distribute parcels of rice, neatly wrapped in newspaper, to the wild and possibly rabid dogs who roam the quiet street in this rich part of central Delhi. She caresses them and addresses them by name. One mangy yellow, malevolent animal she calls Bruno.

It is an act of generosity that I still find confusing. Around the corner, sitting by the traffic lights, is a family of four, which receives no rice parcels. The mother, Sayari, is bony thin, and the children’s matted hair has a dull orange tint, a sign of the malnutrition affecting nearly half of all under-fives in India.

Sayari, who goes by only one name, has spent most of her life selling flowers (bracelets made of jasmine, bunches of wilting roses) at this junction. Unable to make a living in his Rajasthan village, where there was neither work nor water, her father brought her here when she was a baby, about 25 years ago.

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Renault, Nissan and Bajaj come together to produce a small car that will cost Rs one lakh — the same as Tata’s Nano. On sale from 2011, the car will be produced at Chakan in Maharashtra near the existing manufacturing facilities of both Bajaj and Renault. Ravi Krishnan and Ammar Master have the story in Mint

Renault SA, Nissan Motor Co. and Bajaj Auto Ltd said in a joint statement that they would collaborate to produce a small car that would cost around $2,500 (Rs1 lakh), making it the second car in the world and in India with ambitions to be the cheapest four-wheeler on the road.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is pulling his party out of the new government. The BBC’s Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad looks at why, and what happens next.

The Pakistan Muslim League-N decision to quit the cabinet has been on the cards for a while.

So when the party’s nine ministers handed in their resignations on Tuesday it did not come as a surprise. The biggest party in the cabinet is the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Its leader is Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto. Since the PPP and the PML-N trounced President Pervez Musharraf’s allies in February’s general elections, Mr Zardari and Mr Sharif have appeared to enjoy an excellent relationship.

And Tuesday’s cabinet split may not be as dramatic as it appears.

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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

My new column in Mint is on sex education, and why ignorance is not bliss. How did you learn to speak words we dare not speak? What’s your story? Tell me. I want to know.

My formal sex education at an all-girls convent school in New Delhi can be summed up in two words: woefully inadequate.

The art of cheerleading is not that different from Indian classical dance. So, what’s all the fuss about, asks Renuka Narayanan in the Hindustan Times

The furore over imported Indian Premier  League (IPL) cheerleaders and that they are  ‘indecent’ is incredibly funny, especially because some American foreheads wrinkle exactly the same way when confronted with Indian classical dance. Where’s the comparison between “Rah-rah-rass! Kick’em in the ass!” and “O Appalamswamy Pappadam Perumal, I pine for you, come to me!” you ask? For one, Kansas City Catholics take a dim view of a man dancing Bharata Natyam as a ‘liturgical dance’ to God, especially if the dancer happens to be Father Saju George, an Indian Jesuit. “Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order, would be rolling in his grave,” fumed an offended American on a Catholic blog just a few months ago.

Just as funny are the NRIs at the biggest Carnatic diaspora festival, the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana. Says a Bharata Natyam dancer, back home after a dozen years in the US, “Some parents in Cleveland object to the more ‘sensual’ padams (devadasi love songs) being taught to their daughters. They seem to have retained the mindset of the last century.”

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A year after the arrest of Dr Binayak Sen, one of the state’s most eminent doctors, Chattisgarh state authorities have gone and arrested another civil liberties activist, journalist and film-maker Ajay T.G., reports Siddharth Vardarajan in The Hindu

On May 5, the Chhattisgarh police announced the arrest of Ajay T.G., a Raipur-based journalist and filmmaker, under the State’s draconian Special Public Security Act (PSA). He has been charged with sedition under the Indian Penal Code and with having unlawful contact with a banned organisation, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), under Sections 3, 4 and 8 of the PSA. Like Binayak Sen, who was arrested last year on May 14, Ajay is a leading member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. He is also a prominent social worker whose contribution to the education of young girls from poor slum-dwelling families is well known. The circumstances leading to his arrest are so bizarre and reflect so poorly on Chhattisgarh’s approach to dealing with the naxalite problem that they bear recounting in some detail.

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For information and updates on Dr Binayak Sen’s arrest click here.

Twenty-two Nobel Laureates have written to Indian President Pratibha Patil asking for the release of Binayak Sen who was recently awarded the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. They want him to personally receive the award at a ceremony to be held in Washington  D.C. on May 29. Read that report here

[Pic: A file picture of Dr Binayak Sen with his young patients in Chattisgarh]

Favourite all-time female star? Most accomplished actor of all time? The best funny man? Outlook readers vote for their favourites. Namrata Joshi checks out the results.

Outlook’s Bollywood Special this year looks at the very core of commercial cinema—the Hindi film star, the one who makes or breaks a film, box-office records, and people’s hearts, whose appeal is of the moment, and enduring, time-tested and timeless, give or take a bomb or two.

And who better to tell us about it than the Hindi film audience—that unknown, amorphous mass of people who vote with their feet every Friday, first day, first show. We sought them out in Delhi and Mumbai, Lucknow and Jaipur, Bhopal and Chandigarh, and asked them to cast their vote for their favourite star of all time. We had no dearth of names, old or new, starting from post-Independence India. Towering over them all was, of course, the Big B. With 32 per cent of the votes, he won this round of the Big B-srk rivalry; Khan was a distant second with just 14 per cent votes. Big B daughter-in-law Aishwarya pipped yesterday’s diva (though some would dispute that) Madhuri Dixit to the post with 21 per cent votes to the latter’s 18 per cent. Sadly, the great stars of yore seem to have faded from the memories of our moviegoers—Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor figured behind the bland lookalikes of Gen Now.
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India’s first home-grown, online graphic porn star is the unlikely Savita bhabhi. In Tehelka, Anastasia Guha checks her out.

COMICS HAVE A WAY of bypassing our critical and moral register and going right to the id. They have a way of getting into, and then staying in, the deepest recesses of the psyche. This is apparent from our frenzied interest in Savita Bhabi, India’s first animated Internet porn star. Created by the appropriately underground Deshmukh, Dexstar and Mad (whoever they may be, they are not telling — we did ask), Savita Bhabhi is growing to be a phenomenally popular pornographic comic strip. It has grown solely by word of mouth to 3911 registered users in little over a month since its inception. The lead character has been drawn with every Kserial bahu trapping firmly in place: the dull gleam of a mangalsutra, sindoor forming a bright contrast to long dark hair parted chastely down the middle.

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A man who gives no interviews and never appears on business television is driving an information hungry media batty. Chidanand Rajghatta finds out why in The Times of India

They are calling him Arjun ‘‘Spike” Murti, but his real middle name is Narayana, the supreme manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Supreme he is, in the oil world. The little known Indian analyst at Goldman Sachs has become a cause cilhbre — a doomsday prophet — for his forecasts about oil prices, based on what he calls the ‘‘super-spike” theory, predicated on rising demand for crude and limitations in refining capacity.

Murti, 38, now a managing director at Goldman Sachs, first came to the fore as far back as 2003-2004 when he predicted that oil prices would breach $80 a barrel when it was still in the 30s. He was sneered at. He was mocked again when he predicted in 2005 that it would double from $50 to $100 before the end of the decade. Last month, when he forecast that a barrel of oil could even touch $200, no one was laughing as it surged to $125 on Friday.

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Indians and Brazilians top in a list of country’s whose citizens have the most environmentally friendly lifestyles finds a survey conducted by the National Geographic. Brian Hendwerk reports for the National Geographic News.

The National Geographic Society and the international polling firm GlobeScan today unveiled “Greendex 2008: Consumer Choice and the Environment–A Worldwide Tracking Survey.” (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

“The Greendex gives us an unprecedented, meaningful look at how consumers across the globe are behaving,” said Terry Garcia, National Geographic’s executive vice president of mission programs.

Consumers in Brazil and India tied as most “green,” while those in the United States scored lowest, or most wasteful.

To create the survey, GlobeScan conducted Internet surveys of consumers in 14 countries, which together represent more than half of the world’s population and use about 75 percent of its energy.

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One of only six plastic surgeons in Sri Lanka, Dr Chandni Perera performs reconstructive surgery to burns victims. She talks to NPR on abuse, why women burn themselves, stigmatisation and changing social attitudes.

Severe burns or fires kill or injure nearly 4 million women each year, according to figures from the World Health Organization, and nearly half of the reported cases occur in Southeast Asia.

Dr. Chandini Perera, one of only six plastic surgeons in Sri Lanka, performs reconstructive surgery to burn victims. She says most of the victims are poor and their living conditions make them vulnerable to the danger of fire. But there’s a disturbing dynamic in some cases: Women are set on fire by their husbands and boyfriends, and others set themselves on fire in an empty bid to escape abuse.

Those who survive the burns do so with disfigurement and disabilities requiring long recovery periods. That process tends to be more emotional than physical, Perera says, noting that victims are often ostracized. That, in turn, keeps the problems hidden. “If you are stigmatized and you are an outcast, then you live in this unseen world,” Perera says.

Perera believes that empowering burn victims to reenter society will help change social attitudes.

Watch her on NPR here

Journalist and old India hand John Elliott on Sunil Bharti Mittal’s new personal challenge in his blog Riding The Elephant hosted by Forbes

Sunil Bharti Mittal, founding chairman of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile phone operator, needs a new personal challenge. And he has found it with the $19 billion informal bid that he is reported to have made, or at least is considering, for MTN, the South African-based telecoms group.

Last week Mittal finished a year as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a leading business federation. That was a time-consuming post that tied him up in tedious committee work, which he disliked. His group is also partnering with Wal-Mart (WMT) in a slow-developing retail and cash-and-carry business, but that is primarily being looked after by one of his brothers.

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Posted by Namita Bhandare, exclusively for AW

Going by press reports, it was hard to judge whether M Night Shyamalan (MNS) was in India — after a gap of nine-and-a-half years — to pick up his Padma Shri award or to promote his new movie, The Happening, which will be distributed by UTV in India and is scheduled for a Friday, 13 June release (read the details of that business report here).

The India-born, US-based Shyamalan has almost never shown an affinity for India but that didn’t stop a mostly adoring press from flocking to his press conference at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel. Here’s a sample of questions and answers:

1. His favourite Indian actor:

MNS:  ”What’s that guy’s name, we were talking about him at lunch, Shah Rukh Khan, yeah.”

2. On his favourite Indian movies:

MNS: [He's seen a total of three] “What was the name of that movie, Kabhi something… [UTV CEO Ronnie Screwvala, co-producer of Night's upcoming film, helpfully supplied Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham]… right, that one; that was kind of cool. And I remember there was an old one, it was supposed to be very salacious at the time, wait, Shivam something? [Satyam Sivam Sundaram, supplied the ever helpful Screwvala]… right, that one, right there, that was smokin’, that one. I don’t remember the name of the third one — wait, Devdas, there you go.”

3. On what he thinks of Indian cinema, based on his three-film viewing experience:

MNS: “I think it is a very powerful art form. I am just starting to learn about it, I find it very powerful — the very heightened vocabulary, the close ups, the loud music, it all adds up to a very powerful form. At first you giggle when you watch it, but then you get acclimated to that vocabulary, and you begin to feel the same sort of heightened emotions.”

4. On winning the Padma Shri:

MNS:  “Honestly at first I didn’t get what it was. I’ve been getting calls for awards, asking me to come to Sri Lanka, Singapore.. but I can’t go to all the events due to work, family. So when my office got the call about the Padma Shri, my staff was like, ‘Oh, you’ve won an award.’ But when there were too many congratulatory calls, I was like, ‘what happened?’ It was only after my family and friends from India told me about the Padma Shri that I looked it up to find more details about it.”

So, was Night Shyamalan savaged by the press? Doff your hat to the power of PR, the morning’s stories were full of such glowing descriptions as ‘consummate performer’ (Rediff.com), ‘the man behind gargantuan films’ (Times of India) and ‘India’s best known Hollywood director’ (Khabrein.info).

Read some complete Shyamalan interviews here, here and here.

With MySpace making its India launch, could YouTube have been far behind? The video sharing website launched its Indian version on May 7 with a localised home page and search functions that allows users to share and upload videos and discover clips most relevant to India.

YouTube India is reported to have signed agreements with content providers like UTV, NDTV, Rajshri Films, Eros Entertainment and the department of tourism.

Check out YouTube’s desi avatar at: www.youtube.co.in

And here’s the Welcome to India clip:

The journey of The Great Khali, India’s first WWE wrestler, is an astonishing one. In Tehelka, Shantanu Guha Ray susses out the man behind the spectacle:

Steve Carell, lead actor of Get Smart, once told an mtv.com reporter about a hulk on the sets who impressed everyone though he had a small role. “He could put his hand over your entire head and crush you. He’s a very sweet guy, but he did not speak English really well. I don’t even know if he was completely aware that he was doing a movie.” Carell was talking about The Great Khali, a former Mr India who briefly held, in 2007, the world champion’s title at the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, formerly, the WWF).

Now an icon across the United States, he was India’s “champion bodybuilder” in 1997 and 1998. At seven feet, three inches, and weighing 190 kilos, he is the only Indian on the WWE bandwagon (there was Tiger Ali Singh signed up before him but Singh was from Canada). Now based in Atlanta, The Great Khali comes from Dhirana in Himachal Pradesh and old-timers in Shimla recall how one Dalip Singh Rana would toss luggage onto the carriers of buses with consummate ease. That was part-time work; his full-time job was crushing stone for local contractors.

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Previously on AW:

Great Khali gears up

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.

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