tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84387752024-03-08T00:26:44.026-08:00Jason Overdorfarticles by a new delhi-based journalistJason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comBlogger480125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-23171114898531006882019-06-14T07:30:00.001-07:002019-06-14T07:30:02.252-07:00The World's Wildest Cities<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Some surprisingly large wild spaces are thriving within metropolitan areas.</i><br /><br />By <a href="https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/jason-overdorf">Jason Overdorf</a> (US News & World Report - June 2019)<br /><br />As cities search for ways to combat sprawl, adopt smart technology and go green, officials are also looking to minimize habitat loss for native and endangered wildlife species. Since the 1970s, some surprisingly large wilderness areas have been set up within metropolitan areas – and sometimes within city limits – all over the globe. Call them the World's Wildest Cities.<br /><br />"A large block of habitat is much more valuable than a bunch of small blocks. You get a greater diversity of animals. You have better connectivity to their resource needs – they need water and they need cover and places to be wild and free," says Scott Hamilton, natural resource manager for the city of Scottsdale, Arizona.<br /><br />Here are nine cities that have ample amounts of green within their borders.<br /><br />1. Chugach State Park, Anchorage, Alaska (495,199 acres)<br /><br /><br />Established in the 1970s, the mammoth Chugach State Park is located completely within the metropolitan area of Anchorage, Alaska. Some of the best trailheads and access points are 20 minutes from downtown,<a href="https://www.anchorage.net/discover/the-chugach/"> according</a> to city officials, attracting more human traffic than any other wilderness area in the state. Yet it remains home to 45 mammal species including 1,000 moose, 120 brown and black bears, at least one wolf pack, and 2,000 Dall sheep,<a href="https://www.travelalaska.com/Destinations/Parks-and-Public-Lands/Chugach-State-Park.aspx"> according</a> to Travel Alaska. Moose and bears wander into town now and then, but nobody seems to mind.<br /><br />2. McDowell Sonoran Preserve, Scottsdale, Arizona (30,580 acres)<br /><br /><br />The Scottsdale McDowell Sonoran Preserve<a href="https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/Assets/ScottsdaleAZ/Preserve/PreserveHistory.pdf"> started small</a> in 1994, but it was always envisioned as the huge “people’s preserve” it is today, functioning as an important wildlife corridor for at least 25 mammal species, 35 species of reptiles and amphibians and 128 identified species of birds like prairie falcons, great horned owls and, of course, roadrunners. Featuring archeological sites and ancient petroglyphs as well as stunning natural scenery, it prompted city officials to realize “the desert was our ocean,” according to Rachel Sacco, longtime president and CEO of the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. Bow hunting is<a href="https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/preserve"> allowed</a> in the preserve, but firearms are prohibited.<br /><br />3. Table Mountain National Park, Cape Town, South Africa (54,610 acres)<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.sanparks.org/parks/table_mountain/about/history.php">Set up</a> in 1998, South Africa’s Table Mountain National Park is entirely surrounded by the city of Cape Town. It’s not all unspoiled wilderness, and it sees some 4 million visitors a year, yet it’s<a href="https://www.sanparks.org/parks/table_mountain/conservation/fauna.php">home</a> to several species of small and large antelope, the Cape Mountain Zebra, Chacma Baboons, the Cape Fox and many other fascinating animals – along with 8,200 different species of plants. The Cape Floral Kingdom lies within the park’s boundaries; the smallest and richest of the six floral kingdoms that occur on earth, it was named a Natural World Heritage Site in 2004. The climbs up Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head are popular,<a href="https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/12-of-the-worlds-most-dangerous-hikes"> notes Fodors</a>, but often more people die in a year on Table Mountain than on Mount Everest.<br /><br />4. Pedra Branca State Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (30,626 acres)<br /><br />Located in the western part of Rio de Janeiro, the Pedra Branca State Park touches 17 different city neighborhoods and occupies 10 percent of the total municipal area of the city, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1679007316300913">according</a> to ScienceDirect. Created in 1974, it’s an important fragment of the Atlantic Forest – which runs along the Atlantic coast of Brazil – offering a home to the white-eared parakeet, the fruit bat and the brown-throated sloth, as well as other threatened species of birds, bats and reptiles.<br /><br />5. Rouge National Urban Park, Toronto, Canada (19,521 acres)<br /><br /><br />Established in 2015, Rouge is Canada’s first National Urban Park. It spans parts of the cities of Markham and Pickering, but most of it lies in the Scarborough district of Toronto. An<a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/rouge-national-urban-park"> ecologically protected zone</a> that includes farmland, wetlands and rivers, it’s home to 247 species of <a href="https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bird/">birds</a>, 73 species of <a href="https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/fishes/">fish</a> and 44 species of <a href="https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/mammal/">mammals</a>, including deer, coyotes, beavers and mink. Now on the anvil is a project called The Meadoway that will connect the park to downtown Toronto via a 10-mile “amazing meadow full of all kinds of insects and butterflies,"<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/meadoway-scarborough-toronto-park-1.5110164"> according</a> to Richard Ubbens, director of parks for the city.<br /><br />6. Losiny Ostrov National Park, Moscow, Russia (28,717 acres)<br /><br /><br />Nearly a third of Russia’s<a href="http://elkisland.ru/index/priroda/0-18"> Losiny Ostrov National Park</a> falls within the Moscow city limits, providing a home for moose, elk and wild boar, as well as rare species like the blue-footed owl and gray-headed woodpecker. The name means “Elk Island” in Russian, and the park was a popular hunting ground for the czars before it was<a href="http://elkisland.ru/about/history/"> turned over to the Forest Department</a> in 1804. It became a national park in 1983. Nearly half the park’s area is closed to the public and another third is open only for restricted use to ensure that the habitat remains pristine. But that still leaves around 7,500 acres for recreational use.<br /><br />7. Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, India (25,659 acres)<br /><br />An island of thick jungle amid the sweltering bustle of Mumbai,<a href="https://sgnp.maharashtra.gov.in/Site/Home/Index.aspx"> Sanjay Gandhi National Park</a>attracts more than 2 million visitors a year, largely due to the 2,400-year-old<a href="https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/the-history-of-the-kanheri-caves-mumbai-in-1-minute/"> Kanheri caves</a> – single cell monasteries built by Buddhist monks that feature elaborate carvings. But the park is also home to spotted deer, rhesus macaque monkeys, the Indian flying-fox and leopards – which occasionally<a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-03-20/india-leopards-stalk-bollywood"> attack people</a> on the park’s fringes in their hunt for delicious stray dogs amid the garbage dumps.<br /><br />8. Bukhansan National Park, Seoul, South Korea (19,749 acres)<br /><br />Like similar parks in India and South Africa, Seoul’s<a href="http://english.knps.or.kr/Knp/Bukhansan/Intro/Introduction.aspx?MenuNum=1&Submenu=Npp"> Bukhansan National Park</a> is completely surrounded by urban life. Set up in 1983, it encompasses the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukhansanseong_Fortress"> Bukhansanseong Fortress</a>, built to protect the capital from foreign invaders in 132 AD, as well as three mountain peaks over 2,500-feet tall and more than 100 Buddhist temples and monk’s cells. Attracting around 5 million visitors a year, it’s not an unspoiled wilderness by any means, but it nevertheless provides a habitat for more than 1,300 species of flora and fauna,<a href="http://www.theseoulstop.com/pages/blog/features/places/why-you-should-visit-bukhansan-national-park.php"> including</a> the rare Great Spotted Woodpecker.<br /><br />9. Margalla Hills National Park, Islamabad, Pakistan (17,386 acres)<br /><br />Located in the capital city of Islamabad, the<a href="http://www.discover-pakistan.com/margalla-hills-national-park.html"> Margalla Hills National Park</a> boasts hiking trails through the foothills of the Himalayas and provides a home for larks, spotted doves, Egyptian vultures and eagles, as well as the Russell’s viper and Indian cobra. Barking deer, golden jackals and leopards are also fairly common. In 2018 inaugurated the country’s longest hiking<a href="https://nation.com.pk/04-Nov-2018/pakistan-s-longest-trail-inaugurated-at-margalla-hills-national-park"> trail</a>through the park, at around 27 miles, as part of a bid to attract more tourists.<br /><br />Chugach State Park, Anchorage, Alaska (495,199 acres)<br />McDowell Sonoran Preserve, Scottsdale, Arizona (30,580 acres)<br />Table Mountain National Park, Cape Town, South Africa (54,610 acres)<br />Pedra Branca State Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (30,626 acres)<br />Rouge National Urban Park, Toronto, Canada (19,521 acres)<br />Losiny Ostrov National Park, Moscow, Russia (28,717 acres)<br />Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, India (25,659 acres)<br />Bukhansan National Park, Seoul, South Korea (19,749 acres)<br />Margalla Hills National Park, Islamabad, Pakistan (17,386 acres)</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-63134836144200674862019-05-07T11:22:00.003-07:002019-05-07T11:22:45.816-07:00One-Man Show Explores Conflicts, Compromises of North Korea Visit<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf - The Washington Diplomat (March 2019)<br />
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">It’s not until the end of John Feffer’s one-man show, “Next Stop: North Korea,” that the foreign policy scholar-cum-playwright offers a withering comment on the failed second summit meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Adopting the guise of a Scottish tour leader who sets the context for the contemplative 12-scene comedy, he opens the question-and-answer session with a setup for a one-liner: “You could ask me what I think about the recent meeting, for example,” he says, “and I’d tell you: They were having such a lovely love affair, I thought they’d consummate it. But instead, we got summit interruptus.”</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The co-director of the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a D.C.-based liberal think tank, Feffer has long blurred the line between his academic and creative work. His most recent novel, “Splinterlands,” for instance, describes a dystopian future that’s informed by his study of virulent nationalism and the pressures threatening to dissolve the European Union. And earlier one-man shows dramatized his thinking on the failed response to an ecological collapse and his research on the fall of the Berlin Wall and spoofed a well-known local type: the foreign policy pundit grubbing for “that most coveted of D.C. positions: a top administration job.”</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The blending of disciplines works particularly well in his latest show, which is less a satire than a travelogue that takes the viewer on an imaginary visit to North Korea. Where journalism and policy writing all too often eclipse the ordinary people affected by the momentous events they describe, dramatization allows Feffer to portray and explore the nuances of life in one of the most closed-off countries in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This includes delving into the conflicts and compromises that the totalitarian state demands of a foreign tourist and aid worker; a tour guide schooled in propaganda; a government apparatchik; and a taxi driver wrestling with patriotism and the struggle to survive. Because the so-called Hermit Kingdom is the proverbial black box for most viewers, the imaginative journey is especially evocative, although director Angela Kay Pirko has eschewed all but the barest hint of sets and costumes.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">- continues <a href="https://washdiplomat.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19459:one-man-show-explores-conflicts-compromises-of-north-korea-visit-&catid=1582:april-2019&Itemid=607">here</a> - </span></div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-53018992999148697062019-05-07T11:21:00.002-07:002019-05-07T11:21:35.140-07:00Security Bloc’s First Post-Soviet Members Remain Focused on a Resurgent Russia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf - The Washington Diplomat (April 2019)<br />
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A day after NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg called for the alliance to hold its ground against an increasingly bellicose Russia, the foreign ministers of the three Central European countries that joined the bloc as part of its first eastward expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union also warned of new threats from Moscow even as they celebrated what Polish Ambassador Piotr Wilczek<span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> termed “arguably the most successful alliance in the history of mankind.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Czech, Hungarian and Polish foreign ministers were marking the 20<sup style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">th</sup> anniversary of their membership into NATO as well as the security alliance’s 70<sup style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">th</sup> anniversary. The day before the three ministers spoke at the Polish ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C., Vice President </span>Mike Pence <a href="https://www.axios.com/pence-germany-turkey-nato-conference-trump-speech-cdb1e557-1e29-45d5-aba6-fac6cf518e0c.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiospm&stream=top" style="border: 0px; color: #657ba7; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">reiterated</a> his boss’s criticisms that some NATO members aren’t carrying their weight, although Pence declared that “the alliance at 70 has never been stronger,” due in large part to President Trump’s leadership.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The three foreign ministers backed Trump’s calls for increased defense spending but cautioned against viewing the alliance in transactional terms during a panel discussion titled “Twenty Years Later: Lessons from NATO’s Enlargement and the Alliance’s Future.”</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Pushed through despite protests from Moscow, NATO’s first eastward expansion added the three Central European countries in 1999, as the sheen was just starting to wear off Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the “end of history,” Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz recalled. Two weeks later, NATO’s intervention in the Kosovo War began.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“With [NATO] membership, we got more rights, we got more security, but at the same time we took responsibility,” said Czech Foreign Minister Tomáš Petříček, touching on a key theme all three countries repeatedly emphasized — that they are among the most vocal proponents of a muscular alliance.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“We want to be active and we have been an active member of NATO. We contributed to many missions, and we also sacrificed the most valuable price, the price of human life,” Petříček said.</span></div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: black; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">- continues <a href="https://washdiplomat.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19585:security-blocs-first-post-soviet-members-remain-focused-on-a-resurgent-russia&catid=1583:may-2019&Itemid=428">here</a> - </span></div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-12523808677426677572019-05-07T11:19:00.001-07:002019-05-07T11:19:12.336-07:00The World’s Most Controversial City Developments<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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From New York City to Moscow, these urban developments have sparked outrage and debate.</h2>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">By Jason Overdorf - US News & World Report (May 2019)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">Hudson Yards - New York</span></div>
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New York's pricey Hudson Yards real estate development bills itself as "a triumph of culture, commerce and cuisine." But the mammoth cluster of multimillion dollar condominiums, retail outlets, restaurants, plazas and green space has inspired more loathing than love amid growing resentment of runaway inequality.</div>
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It's not just the eye-popping rents (a two-bedroom corner apartment at One Hudson Yards goes for $9,715 a month). Critics argue the entire development is a kind of ode to consumption. <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/hudson-yard-billionaires-fantasy-city.html" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: rgb(17, 90, 191) !important; cursor: pointer; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; text-size-adjust: none; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s !important;">New York Magazine</a> dubbed it "a billionaire's fantasy city," decrying it as urban life as imagined by Ayn Rand, "a corporate city-state, branded from sidewalk to spire." Even <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2019/03/14/billionaire-stephen-ross-insists-hudson-yards-is-for-everyone-and-hes-unhappy-that-no-one-believes-him/#523bc3e4f380" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; color: rgb(17, 90, 191) !important; cursor: pointer; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; text-size-adjust: none; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s !important;">Forbes magazine</a> – which unashamedly calls itself "the capitalist tool" – carried a review that scoffed at developer Stephen Ross's claim the project wasn't only a playground for the wealthy.</div>
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Developments like Hudson Yards – centered around posh shopping and luxury apartments – remain as popular with city planners around the world as they are despised by local residents fed up with skyrocketing rents. Here are nine other big redevelopment projects around the world that have inspired similar passions.</div>
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- continues <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/10-of-the-worlds-most-controversial-urban-real-estate-projects?onepage">here</a> - </div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-63969308796417699252018-10-30T20:34:00.000-07:002018-12-14T20:35:11.984-08:00India’s Modi stakes claim to future – and past – with world’s tallest statue<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf<br />
(Christian Science Monitor, October 2018)<br />
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KEVADIA, INDIA --- On his small organic farm in Gujarat, the western home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Lakhanbhai Musafir flings out his arm in disgust in the direction of the soon-to-be-inaugurated Statue of Unity – billed as the tallest statue in the world.<br />
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“Modi calls this development,” says Mr. Musafir, an advocate for local tribes. “It’s his obsession to make himself immortal, like Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal.”<br />
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Towering over the Narmada River, the $410 million statue depicts Vallabhbhai Patel, known as Sardar Patel, one of the most important figures in India’s fight for independence from Britain, and an icon of national unity. The bald, stoop-shouldered subject presents an image of humility – though at nearly 600 feet tall, and clad in some 1,850 metric tons of bronze, it is commanding all the same.<br />
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Twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, the Statue of Unity will be inaugurated on Oct. 31 opposite the Sardar Sarovar Dam, marking the official launch of Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 2019 election campaign. As a symbol, however, it may represent a different kind of unity from the multicultural, secular one that has defined India’s identity since the election of its first prime minister in 1947, and the framing of its Constitution two years later.<br />
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Modi’s party, which has brought Hindu nationalism to the forefront of Indian politics, is on the hunt for a new hero, historians and political analysts say. And though Patel was not a vocal supporter of “Hindutva,” as that ideology is called here, the BJP is now claiming Patel as one of their own – one of several cases in which the party has been accused of rewriting history with a Hindu nationalist bent.<br />
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Patel stands in stark contrast to India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, says Tarun Vijay, a former BJP member of parliament.<br />
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Patel was not a “half-converted Englishman,” he says. “Patel belonged to the Indian soil…. He had the firmness of Napoleon – unshakeable, rock-like decisiveness.”<br />
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Under Nehru’s leadership, India adopted a Constitution that guaranteed the rights of religious minorities and enshrined separate laws on issues like marriage and inheritance for Hindus, Muslims (about 13 percent of the population), and Christians (some 2 percent). For many people, that multicultural vision remains the fundamental ethos of India.<br />
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But for Hindu nationalists, that “pseudo-secularism,” as some call it, is an affront. Their core ideology of Hindtuva, or Hinduness, envisions a state in which Hindu faith and culture are front and center – and that many fear will leave minorities second-class citizens. And since Modi’s election in 2014, his critics argue Hindu nationalists have used increasingly bold tactics to make that vision a reality: from rewriting textbooks and stacking academic institutions, to emboldening mobs who have killed two dozen people for allegedly eating or transporting beef.<br />
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<b>Iron Man of India</b><br />
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Modi launched the project and lay its foundation stone in 2013, amid the lead-up to the 2014 general election, as he wooed moderates with business-friendly reform. At the time, he had been chief minister of Gujarat for more than a decade, including during 2002 riots that killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslim. His administration’s response to the attacks has been hotly debated, with many researchers blaming officials for failing to quell the violence.<br />
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Now, as he begins his campaign for re-election in 2019, the statue has become fraught with political meaning, says Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly.<br />
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Early Hindu nationalist groups, the BJP’s precursors, did not take a leading role in India’s struggle for independence. And it was a Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mohandas Gandhi in 1948, because he felt Gandhi had proved too accommodating to Muslims. By building a mammoth statue of Patel, Modi hopes to gain his own iconic freedom fighter, analysts say.<br />
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“The BJP desperately needs to seize upon Patel because it has no other reverential figures” from the freedom movement, Dr. Ganguly says.<br />
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For Hindu nationalists, Patel presents a compelling alternative to Nehru – whose great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, is the present leader of the Congress Party, the main opposition.<br />
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Known as “the Iron Man of India,” Patel helped convince some 550 princely states to cede their power to the new government after independence. He thus suits many nationalists’ craving for muscular leaders, some analysts observe – reflected in how the movement has embraced a warrior-like version of the Hindu deity Rama and the monkey-god Hanuman who fought beside him; and even in Modi’s boasts about having a 56-inch chest.<br />
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Right-wingers have also suggested that Patel opposed Nehru’s interpretation of secularism, and would have forged a different country had he been India’s first leader, says Mujibur Rehman, an assistant professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University who recently authored a book on the Hindu right, titled “Rise of Saffron Power.” Patel was a life-long member of the Congress Party, but Hindu nationalists have long argued that he envisioned a more assimilationist secularism devoid of “appeasement” of minorities.<br />
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“They see him as an anti-Nehru figure that the Congress [Party] did not explore [as a potential prime minister], and say therefore things have gone wrong in our country,” Dr. Rehman says.<br />
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At times, Patel opposed faith-specific policies that Nehru had supported, says Hindol Sengupta, the author of a recent biography of Patel titled “The Man Who Saved India.” For example, during the division of British India into majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan, which displaced millions of people, Nehru pushed to reserve the homes of Muslims who fled to Pakistan for other Muslims. Patel, meanwhile, argued the homes should be offered to anyone.<br />
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“Patel was strongly secular. He wanted parity for all faiths,” says Mr. Sengupta. “He argued that the principle of division had already divided the country. Now what remained must be one nation.”<br />
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Patel also opposed Nehru’s decision to let the United Nations determine the fate of the Kashmir region, still contested today.<br />
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“For decades, one party devoted all their energies to serve one family,” Modi said in a parliamentary speech in February, excoriating the Congress Party’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. “If Sardar Patel had become the prime minister, today a part of our beloved Kashmir would not have been under Pakistani occupation."<br />
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<b>Look on my works</b><br />
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The Sardar Sarovar Dam that the statue overlooks has been at the center of protests and court cases for decades, over disputes about displaced villages and environmental impact. The dam has already displaced hundreds of villages; now, the statue will add another 16 to that number, according to Mr. Musafir, the tribal activist.<br />
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“We told the government if you spend 10 million rupees ($140 million) to repair the existing canals, the farmland of this entire area can be irrigated, but they said they don’t have the staff or the money,” he says. “Yet to build this one statue they are spending 30 billion rupees ($410 million).”<br />
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But by locating the giant statue opposite the massive dam, the BJP also highlights technological progress, which Modi has promoted in plans for “smart cities” and bullet trains. Constructed at enormous cost and projected to attract 15,000 tourists a day, Patel’s statue includes an elevator up its spine that allows visitors to look out over the dam through Patel’s eyes.<br />
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Amarsingh Tadvi, whose construction crew may work on related projects, is a fan of the statue – and the man it depicts.<br />
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“Nehru thought about his family and his family’s development. But Patel was more selfless,” he says.<br />
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As for Modi, “he’s a great man of India. Modi and development are like the two sides of a coin.”</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-45998154034862704132018-04-11T03:28:00.004-07:002018-04-11T03:28:51.411-07:00Cowboys and sanyasis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Wild Wild Country - TV Series</div>
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Chapman Way, MacClain Way</div>
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Reviewed by Jason Overdorf<br />India Today (March 29, 2018)<br /><br />In the early 1980s, the era of gurus and seekers was finished in America. The Christian right had seemingly put the last nail in the coffin of the counterculture. Ronald Reagan was president. The Official Preppy Handbook was hot. And greed was good.<br /><br />But in one rural corner of Oregon, where a handful of ranchers and retirees had hunkered down and waited out the radical '60s and psychedelic '70s, a new revolution was brewing, filmmaker brothers Maclean and Chapman Way suggest at the outset of Wild Wild Country, a remarkable documentary series about America's encounter with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho.<br /><br />What's stunning about the six-part Netflix series is its subtlety. There's something archetypal about the story: Like Socrates, Osho is mainly a cipher, his wisdom sketched out by the memories of his disciples. Like Jesus, he comes to destroy the conventional order of things and is eventually betrayed. Or like Mao Zedong, he cleverly shifts the blame for his excesses onto his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela - a sort of Jiang Qing figure who presided over her own version of the Gang of Four.<br /><br />But the Way brothers aim to do more than investigate the Rajneeshis' alleged crimes - which included what prosecutors dubbed the largest immigration fraud in American history and the largest mass poisoning. The series is pitched to a contemporary American audience, and it's therefore designed to shake the conventional notions of today's liberals and conservatives in a way that Osho - an admirer of the 19th Century Greek-Armenian philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff - would no doubt find pleasing. (Gurdjieff thought most people live in an oblivious somnolent state and used unconventional mind traps to awaken his disciples).<br /><br />This clever use of context invites the liberal American viewers who surely comprise the series' intended audience to identify with the Rajneeshis and to see the townspeople in the same light as more recent rural holdouts against the march of the New York-California brand of modernity - such as Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters, who in 2014 took up rifles, shotguns and sidearms to resist the American government's attempt to make the cowboy pay $1 million in fees for grazing his stock on public land. If the Constitution and the majority rule, the isolated rural holdout must be a nut or an idiot. But as the series unfolds and more and more details emerge about what was really going on in Rajneeshpuram - which was supposed to be a boundary-busting community dedicated to creativity and individualism, not just uninhibited sex - the Gurdjieffian trap springs shut.<br />In the contemporary interview footage, the supposedly ordinary citizens of Antelope, Oregon, present as exotic, while the one-time Rajneeshis feel familiar. Dressed archaically in farmers' overalls and unfashionable glasses and carping about "evil", the townspeople look and sound like the white nationalist supporters of Donald Trump. In contrast, Rajneeshis like former Los Angeles lawyer Swami Prem Niren (a.k.a. Philip Toelkes) look and sound like the coastal liberals who are now culturally dominant, quoting the Constitution and condemning "ignorance" and "bigots".<br /><br />Spoiler alert: Stop reading and start watching if you want to be surprised by what unfolds.<br /><br />The first inkling that something is amiss comes midway through the series, when the Rajneeshis begin collecting homeless people from cities all around the United States and bringing them to Rajneeshpuram to live. It's a brilliant maneuver. After purchasing a defunct desert ranch that's larger than the island of Manhattan, Osho's followers, now demonized as a cult, have seen their dream of creating a utopian city of some 10,000 disciples frustrated by a bureaucratic interpretation of land-use laws. But because they outnumber the 40 townspeople (the number itself is exotic!) many times over, they've taken over Antelope by democratic means. With the addition of the thousands of homeless people, they aim to take over all of Wasco County. As one of the townspeople puts it, they offered food, shelter, health care, even a ration of two beers a day, and "all you had to do was vote." But when one of the homeless men runs amok - many of the men were homeless because they suffered from serious psychological disorders - a syringe full of Haldol comes to the rescue, and the staunch individualists come to a frightening decision. They decided the best way to control the street people would be to tranquilize them all, without their knowledge or consent, explains Ma Shanti B. (a.k.a. Jane Stork).<br /><br />From there, it is a short road to stockpiling guns and organizing a militia - an unmistakable maroon flag for the contemporary liberals now squared off against the National Rifle Association and rural "gun nuts." And if you're doling out tranqs to keep your own voters in line, why not cultivate an arsenal of salmonella bacteria to dust on the local salad bars a few days before the election? Then again, the only way to stop the insidious plots against the guru might be to assassinate the US attorney general.<br /><br />What once seemed reasonable is revealed as insane. But because it appeared rational initially, its destruction is destabilizing rather than comforting - the exact opposite of the solving of a crime at the end of a detective novel. You cannot return to your comfortable opinions about the contemporary analogues for the townspeople and the Rajneeshis -- refugees and undocumented immigrants and redneck white nationalists and gun nuts and crusading liberals. Or, perhaps, in India, to "bigoted" Hindu nationalists and "pseudo" secularists.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-66225037501503216342018-03-30T03:15:00.002-07:002018-03-30T03:15:20.210-07:00India’s Christians fault Hindu PM for rising climate of persecution<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf — Special to The Washington Times - - Tuesday, March 27, 2018<br /><br /><a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/new-delhi/">NEW DELHI</a> — Religious clashes in the troubled northern Indian state of Jamma and Kashmir are nothing new, but the riot that broke in January targeted an unexpected group: Christians.<br /><br />While most of the state’s problems pit an Islamist separatist movement against <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s Hindu majority, Christianity was at the heart of the violence this time as a mob of thousands interrupted a burial ceremony to seize the body of the deceased for a Hindu cremation.<br /><br />Local Christians and international religious rights groups say anti-Christian incidents are on the rise, particularly since Prime Minister <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Narendra Modi</a>’s Hindu nationalist <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">Bharatiya Janata Party</a> assumed power in 2014. They contend that the government’s failure to censure local leaders for inflammatory rhetoric and sectarian persecution has encouraged a culture of impunity for anti-minority violence — a charge the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> denies.<br /><br />The Evangelical Fellowship of <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> documented some 350 cases of violence and other forms of persecution against Christians last year. That is more than double the rate compared with the 140 annually before the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> assumed power and the highest level of violence since an anti-Christian pogrom that resulted in dozens of rapes and killings and the burning of hundreds of churches in the state of Odisha in 2008, said EFI Executive Director Vijayesh Lal.<br /><br />High points of the Christian liturgical year, such as the coming Easter celebrations, are proving times of particular peril.<br /><br />“It is distressing to see even private worship being attacked by Hindu right-wing activists violating the privacy and sanctity of an individual or a family and trampling upon their constitutional rights,” Mr. Lal said on releasing the organization’s 2017 survey last month. “The instances of attacks on churches on Sundays and other important days of worship such as Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter and Christmas have increased.”<br /><br />Based on voluntary reporting and investigations by civil society organizations, the EFI report documented attacks on churches, the unlawful detentions of children on their way to Bible camp and homicides.<br /><br />Even so, police registered complaints in fewer than 50 cases last year.<br /><br />“There are many reasons,” Mr. Lal said. “Fear is the most common. Victims don’t want to get caught in the whole web of the police and the courts. Refusal to file an [information report] on the part of the police is also very common.”<br /><br />The Ministry of Home Affairs, which is responsible for law and order, did not respond to questions about the EFI report or associated data by the U.S.-based Save the Persecuted Christians Coalition. Indian authorities do not track such incidents.<br /><br />More broadly, clashes among various ethnic and religious communities rose 28 percent from 2014 to 2017, according to an analysis of Home Affairs Ministry data by IndiaSpend, a nonprofit journalism initiative. But the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> Minority Morcha, the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">party</a>’s wing devoted to courting minority voters, insisted that neither the Modi government nor <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> policy is to blame.<br /><br />Violence and other forms of persecution may occur, said <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> Minority Morcha head Abdul Rasheed Ansari, “but it is never sponsored by the government or the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">political party</a>.”<br /><br />Clashes over conversions<br /><br />It’s a thorny issue, analysts say.<br /><br />Almost 80 percent of <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s 1.3 billion people are Hindu. While just 14 percent of the population is Muslim, <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>boasts the world’s third-largest Muslim population. Christians make up about 2.3 percent of the population — nearly 30 million believers — and there are smaller communities of Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains.<br /><br />The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in its 2017 global survey rated <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> as one of a dozen Tier-2 countries for religious restrictions, behind countries of top concern such as China, North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia but on par with Cuba, Iraq and Turkey.<br /><br />“While [<a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a>] spoke publicly about the importance of communal tolerance and religious freedom, members of the ruling party have ties to Hindu nationalist groups implicated in religious freedom violations, used religiously divisive language to inflame tensions, and called for additional laws that would restrict religious freedom,” the commission’s report noted.<br /><br />“Christian communities across many denominations reported numerous incidents of harassment and attacks in 2016, which they attribute to Hindu nationalist groups supported by the <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a>.”<br /><br />The January incident in Jammu and Kashmir shined a spotlight on concerns across <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> about Christian proselytizing and religious conversion. In that case, the mob violence erupted over charges that the deceased, Seema Devi, had been forced to convert to Christianity by her husband and subsequently died from illness after he took her for “spiritual healing,” according to The Indian Express daily newspaper.<br /><br />Afterward, nearly 45 families from the village of Sehyal and the surrounding areas converted from Christianity to Hinduism as part of a “ghar wapsi” or “homecoming” program promoted by the local <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> member of the state legislative assembly. The few Christian holdouts are living under police protection.<br /><br />That assemblyman, Ravinder Raina, said Christian missionaries had converted “poor people through force and deceit,” echoing accusations that <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/bharatiya-janata-party/">BJP</a> legislators and others have used to introduce anti-conversion laws in nine of the country’s 29 states.<br /><br />Lawmakers in a 10th, the northern state of Uttarakhand, introduced a similar bill last week, suggesting a penalty of up to two years in prison for anyone seeking converts through force or “allurement” — which could include money, employment or any material benefit.<br /><br />Conversion is particularly contentious in <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> because the patronage-oriented political system courts voters based on their caste and religious identities, much the way American political parties target communities based on their race, income, gender or ethnic backgrounds. Hinduism over the centuries has faced a steady exodus of the erstwhile untouchables — now called Dalits — whom the tenets of the religion declare to be subhuman. The conversion of aboriginal tribes has also eroded Hindu dominance in some areas.<br /><br />Christian activists insist forcible conversions and allurement are myths invented by the Hindu nationalist right, and the associated push for anti-conversion laws has resulted in the rising climate of persecution.<br /><br />“When challenged in court, when challenged elsewhere, no government at the state level or the government in <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/new-delhi/">New Delhi</a> has ever been able to accuse a single person of forced or induced conversion,” said John Dayal, secretary general of the All India Christian Council. “The most they can say is there has been a conversion. But conversions are not illegal. They are creating paranoia to develop a Hindu vote bank.”<br /><br />Mr. Ansari objected to that characterization and referred to an oft-repeated slogan of the prime minister, “Sabka saath, sabka vikas,” or “All together, all for development.”<br /><br />“All means all,” Mr. Ansari said, “including the minorities.”<div>
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/27/narendra-modi-blamed-rise-indias-christian-persecu/</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-49566986139066468592018-02-19T22:52:00.002-08:002018-02-19T22:52:52.533-08:00Guardian Dogs of the Mongolian Steppe<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By Jason Overdorf</div>
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Scientific American (February 2018)</div>
<br />Two days' drive from the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, 100 miles from the country's border with China, the foothills of the Altai Mountains slash a jagged brown line across the scrubby southern Gobi grasslands. Home to hungry wolves and snow leopards and brutal winters, it is rough country for herders such as 57-year-old Otgonbayar, a weather-beaten nomad who works his flock of 1,000-odd cashmere goats and two dozen sheep from the back of a 100-cc Chinese motorcycle.<br /><br />“The wolves were terrible this winter,” Otgonbayar says on a spring day in 2016, as his wife passes around a dented aluminum bowl filled with Russian candies and sugar cubes. “If it weren't for my dog, my losses would have been much greater.” Just a few days earlier wolves had killed four of his animals. In a typical season, they can take 50 or more.<br /><br />Since the 1990s, to compensate for the animals lost to predators and inclement weather, herders such as Otgonbayar have vastly increased the size of their flocks, which has led to overgrazing that has plunged the steppe into a vicious cycle of herd expansion and environmental degradation. Now, however, an American biologist-turned-entrepreneur named Bruce Elfström is working with the herders to break that pattern by reintroducing a tool developed thousands of years ago: an indigenous livestock guardian dog known as the bankhar. “The idea was to find the dogs of old, their grandfathers' dogs, then breed them and give them back to the people. The goal being that without the fear of predators, they won't raise so many goats, which are turning the steppe into desert,” Elfström says.<br /><br />Collective Failure<br /><br />Before Mongolia abandoned communism in the 1990s, socialist controls dictated how many animals herders could raise. Regulations prevented overgrazing through a system of rotating pastures, and the government made sure herders in remote grasslands could get their meat and wool to market. During the country's transition to a market economy, that scheme was dismantled. The government privatized the herds, but the pastures remained common land. That arrangement encouraged herders to raise more animals without providing any incentive to preserve the range. At the same time, the rise of neighboring China resulted in soaring demand for cashmere, explains Zara Morris-Trainor, a doctoral candidate at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who is studying the impact of the trade on Mongolia's snow leopards.<br /><br />The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—which resulted in a precipitous drop in bilateral trade with Russia—made Mongolia more dependent on China. Almost overnight, nomads who had traditionally raised a mixed herd of camels, goats, horses, sheep, cattle and yaks began ramping up herd sizes with more and more cashmere-producing goats, which are harder on the soil because their sharp hooves puncture the biological crust that prevents wind erosion. Historically accounting for less than a fifth of all livestock, goats made up about a third of some 29 million domesticated grazers by 1996. By 2015 the goat population had surged to nearly 24 million out of a total herd of 56 million livestock.<br /><br />The expansion of Mongolia's desert has kept pace with that increase. Since 1996, which was also the year in which the country first joined the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the amount of its land severely impacted by desertification has more than tripled to around 100,000 square miles—about a sixth of Mongolia's total land mass. As much as 80 percent of the damage is the result of overgrazing, researchers at Oregon State University concluded from satellite maps of the vegetation in 2013.<br /><br />Over roughly the same period, uncontrolled hunting and habitat destruction have killed 75 to 90 percent of various prey animals. Their downfall has forced wolves and snow leopards to target the nomads' herds, even as ever more frequent winter storms known as dzuds have periodically killed millions of livestock. Without other adequate forms of insurance, the nomads have taken matters into their own hands: in good times, they have enlarged their herds in hopes of ending up with at least some animals in the spring; in lean times, they have confined their livestock in smaller areas to try to protect them. Both responses have intensified the problem of desertification.<br /><br />Making matters worse, because the herders are impotent against drought, snow and climate change, many of them focus their resentment on predators. Reliable statistics about how many animals they kill are hard to come by. But as many as 14 percent of Mongolian herders interviewed for a 2002 study admitted to killing snow leopards in retribution for dead livestock. And experts still cite retaliatory killings as among the main threats to the big cats, according to Bayarjargal Agvaantseren, director for the Snow Leopard Trust's partner organization in Mongolia. Wolves are in the crosshairs, too. “For wolves, there is still local-government-level hunting organized annually in some areas,” Agvaantseren says. Conservationists fear for the future of both species in Mongolia.<br /><br />Rescue Dogs<br /><br />Elfström believes he can help. In 2013 he designed a program to reduce livestock losses—and thereby encourage support for wildlife conservation—by bringing back the bankhar, a large, black-and-brown mountain dog. The Mongolian Bankhar Dog Project has set up a breeding and training center near Ulaanbaatar and placed the dogs with nomads who face high pressure from predators. Otgonbayar is one of the first participants. “The goal is to take what we're doing and hand it off to Mongolians so we can have satellite breeding centers around the country,” says the 51-year-old Elfström, who owns a Connecticut-based off-road driving school called Overland Experts.<br /><br />Bankhars were once ubiquitous on the Mongolian steppe. In a nod to their fearsome nature, the traditional Mongolian greeting is “Hold your dog.” Dogs are the only animals the Mongolians believe to be worth naming. Various defining myths and folktales—including the origin myth that traces the birth of Genghis Khan to the coupling of a blue wolf and a fallow deer—confirm that traditionally nomads believed that the Mongolians and their dogs were “of the same bones,” notes anthropologist Gaby Bamana, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.<br /><br />Despite their cultural importance, however, true bankhars have mostly disappeared since the communist era. A symbol of independence, fierce, territorial dogs were unsuited to the ideology of the times and the practical realities of state-owned herds, which allowed herders to keep only seven animals per person as private property. There was even a brief craze for bankhar fur coats in Moscow in the 1930s. Furthermore, crossbreeding between bankhars and other dogs, including an influx of German shepherds that accompanied the effort to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the 1940s and the guard dogs and household pets of more than 100,000 Russian military personnel who moved to Mongolia in the 1960s, has diluted the gene pool of the indigenous bankhar population. Indeed, it is hard to find bankhars that have not been crossed with foreign breeds, which can reduce their effectiveness as livestock protectors by reintroducing predatory traits that breeders promote in dogs like the German shepherd.<br /><br />The expertise required to raise effective bankhars is also in short supply. The same collectivization programs that discouraged their use resulted in the loss of much traditional knowledge. Few of the herders whose families have occupied the steppe for generations now remember how to rear dogs to protect livestock.<br /><br />Why, then, is Elfström intent on reviving the bankhar? Guardian dogs are still common elsewhere in the world, from the ovcharka in the Caucasus to the Anatolian shepherd in Turkey to the Great Pyrenees in the West. Why not just import these breeds to Mongolia?<br /><br />One reason is biological. Like the forebears of other guardian dogs, the bankhar was not created through the kind of careful inbreeding that resulted in modern breeds such as the Great Dane or golden retriever. Rather it evolved through a combination of natural and artificial selection: the best specimens thrived, whereas the nomads did not feed useless ones and culled those that chased or killed livestock. The result is a dog that is purpose-built for guarding flocks under harsh conditions.<br /><br />Standing between 26 and 33 inches tall at the shoulder and weighing 80 to 125 pounds, bankhars are remarkably well adapted to the challenges of the steppe, where temperatures can soar to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and plunge to 50 below zero in winter. Their thick, shaggy fur, which feels almost as fine as cashmere to the touch, features a heavy undercoat that protects them from the cold in the winter and is shed in the summer, when they sometimes dig underground dens to escape the heat. Bankhars also need less food than other livestock guardian dogs of similar size—perhaps because they have evolved a slower metabolism, Elfström suggests—an important consideration in a region where many families have little to spare.<br /><br />But cultural reasons, rather than biological ones, ultimately prompted Elfström to settle on reintroducing the bankhar instead of importing a similar guardian dog such as the ovcharka, which thrives in extreme climates elsewhere in Central Asia. Decades of Soviet meddling have left Mongolians wary of foreign advisers, and herders are especially skeptical that a bunch of Americans who do not seem to know a goat from a sheep will have anything to teach them. The bankhar, however, still has great cultural significance: traditionalists are convinced that the revered dogs can see into the spirit world, and more modern herders view them as a powerful symbol of national pride. “Everybody wants a bankhar,” Elfström says. If he can forge a relationship with the herders through the bankhar program, perhaps they will be amenable to other conservation efforts.<br /><br />Ups and Downs<br /><br />Thus far Elfström and his team have bred and distributed more than 60 bankhar puppies to herders. Although the project is in its early stages, a detailed study of its impact is now under way, and Elfström says he has “firm data” showing a 90 to 95 percent drop in the livestock killed by predators. The scheme has attracted the interest of nonprofit groups, including the Snow Leopard Trust and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). In 2016 the WCS helped to place six dogs with three families in an area of the Gobi that sees a lot of predation from wolves and raptors, according to Onon Bayasgalan, a conservationist who works with the WCS in Mongolia. “If the bankhar initiative proves to be a success with these herder families, we will consider expanding the number of families receiving the dogs. In the future, we may also consider collaborating with the bankhar project in our other project sites,” Bayasgalan said in 2016. This year Elfström is supplying the WCS with another 10 to 14 dogs.<br /><br />Conservationists hope that by reducing stock losses, the dogs can help generate support for other ambitions, such as “sustainable cashmere,” which requires that the nomads focus on smaller herds to produce high-quality wool that they can sell for a higher price than regular wool. Already the distribution of puppies is acting as an informal reward for model herders such as Otgonbayar, whose rangeland is near a protected area for snow leopards. Elfström himself aims to institute further incentives to encourage herders to refrain from killing predators once he has shown how effective the dogs can be at deterring them.<br /><br />That said, he has run into several hurdles. In May 2016 Mongolian environmental regulations forced him to shift his breeding center to a new location near Hustai National Park in the north of the country, thereby prompting a reboot of the project. Because of an accident, the faithful four-wheel-drive van that the team used to transport dogs and equipment now needs to be replaced. And although herders covet the bankhars, it is a constant struggle to find ones who are willing to implement the training protocol necessary to raise the puppies to be effective working dogs. The regimen, which requires keeping the puppies corralled with the livestock from the age of six to 13 weeks so that they bond to the goats and sheep the way pet dogs do to humans, is not complicated, but it requires a herder who is willing to listen.<br /><br />More discouraging, the collaboration with the Snow Leopard Trust has stalled. A little headway has been made, but Gustaf Samelius, assistant director of science for the trust, says it is not actively working to place dogs from Elfström's bankhar project because all the nomads in the areas where the organization works already have dogs of their own. “From the few people I've talked to, they all seem to be happy with the dogs they have,” Samelius says.<br /><br />That claim is a major source of frustration for Elfström. Virtually without exception, the dogs in question are strays or crossbreeds that were not raised to bond with the herders' livestock, he says. They provide some deterrent against predators, mostly by barking if a snow leopard comes near the corral at night, but they cannot be trusted to guard the herd in the pasture because they are bonded to the family rather than its livestock. They are more likely to follow the shepherd back to the yurt than to keep watch over the flock.<br /><br />Despite Samelius's assertion that nobody wants them, the bankhar team is working on its own to place pups with families who live in the same areas where the Snow Leopard Trust is active, though perhaps not the same families who say they are satisfied with their current dogs. Herders sometimes call their untrained crossbreeds bankhar out of ego or loyalty. But when they are offered a true, working bankhar from the breeding project, “all of a sudden, their dog becomes a mix, and they want ours,” Elfström says.<br /><br />“Many people, including scientists, are still of the mindset that ‘a dog is a dog,’ despite an overwhelming glut of papers and data to prove them wrong,” Elfström says. “Herders know bankhars are not just dogs.” Research has shown that similar livestock guardian dogs have had dramatic impacts in Africa, Australia, Europe and the western U.S., where breeds such as the Great Pyrenees and Anatolian shepherd have reduced or eliminated livestock losses to cheetahs, coyotes, dingoes, foxes, bears and wolves. In Namibia the introduction of some 450 Anatolian shepherds over the past 20 years virtually eliminated livestock predation by cheetahs, helping to convince farmers to stop killing as many as 1,000 big cats a year. In Mongolia, where wildlife conservation is in its infancy, the effect could be equally dramatic, Elfström believes.<br /><br /><br />Provided the project succeeds in breeding enough dogs and in convincing enough nomads to rear them the right way, a reduction in retribution killings is likely. Other successful livestock guardian dog programs, including Cheetah Outreach in South Africa, have convinced farmers to sign contracts agreeing to not kill predators, leading to a sharp decline in retribution killings. And evidence from a livestock vaccination program run by the Snow Leopard Trust in Pakistan suggests that reducing livestock losses can encourage farmers to raise fewer animals: the program helped to reduce herd sizes by 17 percent.<br /><br />But even if Elfström does succeed in persuading people to limit the size of their flocks, changing the practices of a few herders will be merely a Band-Aid on the proverbial bullet hole, he realizes, unless it is accompanied by a raft of other nonprofit efforts and policy measures aimed at conserving the Mongolian steppe and its denizens. Luckily, many such programs are already underway. Ulaanbaatar-based Sor Cashmere, for instance, is working to popularize cashmere made from the hair of yaks and camels, which are less environmentally damaging than goats. The Wildlife Conservation Society, for its part, is working with herders, mining companies and other stakeholders to fund ecological mitigation projects and promote sustainable goat cashmere.<br /><br />“What we want to see is the herders moving more. What we want to see is them having a diverse herd. What we want to see is them not having extra animals to counter the fact that they're going to lose so many,” Elfström says. “But that requires that we work with other nongovernmental organizations. We can't do everything.”<div>
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-dogs-help-save-the-mongolian-steppe/</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-85442570081945319132018-01-10T22:44:00.000-08:002018-02-19T22:45:16.256-08:00A Guide to the Hidden Gems of Delhi’s Architectural Legacy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By <a href="http://www.destinasian.com/author/jason-overdorf">Jason Overdorf</a> <br />Destinasian (January 2018)<br /><br />From the rooftop of Haveli Dharampura, Old <a href="http://www.destinasian.com/?s=delhi">Delhi</a> stretches toward the horizon. Turning slowly, I can pick out the towering minarets of the Jama Masjid, the red Lego blocks of the Shri Digambar Jain Lal Mandir temple, the gleaming onion domes of the Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib, and the bustling market of Chandni Chowk. As dusk falls, the sky is fluttering with hundreds of kites, and the neighborhood pigeon caller is readying his birds for flight. It’s a glimpse of a culture that has endured for hundreds of years, practically since the days of the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, whose architects built much of what is still sometimes called Shahjahanabad in the early 17th century.<br /><br />First settled in the sixth century B.C., Delhi has been the capital of a dozen-odd empires dating back to the dynasty of the Pandavas, the five sibling heroes of India’s ancient Mahabharata epic. Remnants of that storied past are scattered throughout the city—some dating to 300 B.C., others from the medieval and colonial periods. But so far, the government has failed to capitalize on this rich trove of monuments, which could make Delhi a tourist center on the order of Athens or Rome. Until now, perhaps.<br /><br />From the rooftop of Haveli Dharampura, Old <a href="http://www.destinasian.com/?s=delhi">Delhi</a> stretches toward the horizon. Turning slowly, I can pick out the towering minarets of the Jama Masjid, the red Lego blocks of the Shri Digambar Jain Lal Mandir temple, the gleaming onion domes of the Gurudwara Sis Ganj Sahib, and the bustling market of Chandni Chowk. As dusk falls, the sky is fluttering with hundreds of kites, and the neighborhood pigeon caller is readying his birds for flight. It’s a glimpse of a culture that has endured for hundreds of years, practically since the days of the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, whose architects built much of what is still sometimes called Shahjahanabad in the early 17th century.<br /><br />First settled in the sixth century B.C., Delhi has been the capital of a dozen-odd empires dating back to the dynasty of the Pandavas, the five sibling heroes of India’s ancient Mahabharata epic. Remnants of that storied past are scattered throughout the city—some dating to 300 B.C., others from the medieval and colonial periods. But so far, the government has failed to capitalize on this rich trove of monuments, which could make Delhi a tourist center on the order of Athens or Rome. Until now, perhaps.<br /><br />Opened as a 14-room boutique hotel in March 2016, Haveli Dharampura is one of the flagships of a nascent heritage renaissance underway across Delhi, a movement facilitated by the Internet, corporate sponsorship, and private initiatives. Another is the dramatic transformation of the area surrounding Humayun’s Tomb and the Nizamuddin Dargah shrine, where the Aga Khan Trust for Culture completed a massive restoration and expansion project in 2013 in an effort to create a template for conservation that could be emulated across the country. Other endeavors—sometimes haphazard, sometimes centralized—have also turned once-ignored monuments like the ruined 13th-century mosque and madrasa of South Delhi’s affluent Hauz Khas neighborhood and the colonnaded colonial center of Connaught Place into thriving entertainment hubs.<br /><br />A growing environmentalist movement, meanwhile, has made strides toward restoring this surprisingly leafy city’s natural heritage, through the conservation of the 80-hectare Mehrauli Archaeological Park as well as the creation of the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary and the Yamuna Biodiversity Park—projects that have involved uprooting invasive species and clawing back forests from slums and garbage dumps.<br /><br />As a longtime resident of Delhi, I had witnessed all this without really registering what was going on. That’s probably because when you are surrounded by its whirling throng, India’s capital always seems to be coming apart at the seams. Up close, it looks like nothing is changing or ever will change. But after living in the city for close to a decade, I moved to Berlin for 18 months—just enough of a hiatus for me to register the transformation I’d missed upon my return in early 2015. This summer, I revisited some of my favorite haunts and discovered a new sense of optimism.<br /><br />A late Mughal–style mansion built in 1887 in the Chandni Chowk area, Haveli Dharampura is among the few local conservation projects to turn heritage into a straightforward commercial proposition. So-called “heritage hotels” have become the lynchpin of neighborhood conservation in Rajasthan, where, in 1971, former prime minister Indira Gandhi inadvertently created a new generation of hoteliers when she abolished the privy purses awarded to the state’s erstwhile royals. Haveli Dharampura marks the first significant hotel-conversion project in the historic center of Delhi.<br /><br />Fronted by a massive arched gateway, the mansion had been carved up into warehouses and shoebox apartments when Vidyun’s politician father (and current minster of state) Vijay Goel acquired the property in 2010. The weight of the roof was causing the building to collapse on itself, and most of the original fixtures had been stripped away and sold. Perhaps even worse, a thicket of well-intentioned government regulations designed to protect heritage buildings paradoxically made every attempt at renovation a maze of bureaucratic hurdles.<br /><br />Formerly a parliamentarian representing the constituency of Chandni Chowk, Goel understood those obstacles as well as anyone. He had initiated the first, halting efforts to restore the 17th-century bazaar district to its former glory in 1998, spearheading a government-led effort to repaint the facades of all the buildings along the main road from the Red Fort to the Fatehpuri Masjid and remove the rats’ nests of improvised electrical wiring strung overhead for a first-of-its-kind cultural festival that attracted some 500,000 visitors. But since then, he’d seen dozens of grandiose plans to turn the city’s historical center into a top-flight tourist attraction broken by their own ambition. Every square meter of Chandni Chowk is occupied by shops and residences. Nobody has any money (or much motivation) to invest in renovation. And the city’s strong culture of tenant rights makes evicting people to make way for historical restoration all but impossible.<br /><br />Rather than a grand plan, therefore, Goel envisioned an anchor project that would be like throwing a pebble into a pond, sending ripples outward into the city even as it inspired like-minded entrepreneurs to develop their own heritage properties.<br /><br />“Ten years ago, my father brought me and my brother here and told us he was taking us to the Taj Mahal of Delhi,” Vidyun recalls as we sit beneath one of the scalloped arches in Haveli Dharampura’s ground-floor restaurant. “I was standing in this complete ruin! It was ready to fall apart at any time.”<br /><br />Today, the property is a stunning example of late-Mughal architecture. Over six years, Goel and his son, Siddhant, painstakingly reviewed documents and photographs and scoured the country for artisans to recreate the original structure, replacing the terrazzo and sandstone flooring, stripping out partitions, and restoring the original scalloped arches, columns, and marble latticework.<br />“They didn’t want to restore it to how it was 10 years ago, but to how it was 100 years ago,” Vidyun says.<br /><br />You can already see the impact the hotel is having on its neighborhood, in the form of new businesses catering to the comparatively well-heeled guests Haveli Dharampura attracts to an area that had hitherto featured only backpacker accommodations. While it’s a long way from the posh medieval lanes of Italy’s Siena or even the rebirth that turned Beijing’s hutong district into a warren of art galleries and hip restaurants, it offers just enough evidence to inspire hope that such a revolution could be possible for Old Delhi, where as many as 200 historic havelis survive in a sad state of neglect. (One notable exception is the Seth Ram Lal Khemka Haveli, a private residence in the Chhota Bazaar area that was recently restored using traditional building materials and techniques—including grout mixed in a specially made circular mill—by young Delhi architect Aishwarya Tipnis.) But first, the bureaucrats will need to get out of the way.<br /><br />“The government should come to the support of the people,” Vijay Goel says. “We should relax the rules that have prevented renovations and give concessions to people who want to restore other havelis.”<br /><br />Neither Goel nor many other Delhiwallahs expect that kind of government support to materialize anytime soon. But across town in another of the city’s remarkable historical centers, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) has demonstrated that civil society can accomplish the same kind of transformation, combining conservation with urban renewal.<br /><br />Despite achieving World Heritage status in 1993, the 16th-century Humayun’s Tomb complex has never drawn as many visitors as the Red Fort or Qutub Minar, the city’s other two UNESCO sites. That’s in part because of the name, explains AKTC’s Ratish Nanda, who has devoted most of his career to the site’s restoration. While the Taj Mahal is also a burial site, it’s known as a “palace,” not a “tomb,” and promoted as a testament to emperor Shah Jahan’s love for his favorite wife. For some reason, the Empress Bega Begum’s devotion to her late husband, Humayun, has never attained the same cachet.<br /><br />To me, though, that has always made Humayun’s Tomb and the neighboring Nizamuddin Dargah more exhilarating. On the off-season morning when I meet Nanda for a walking tour of the restoration project, I am one of perhaps a half-dozen tourists exploring the 12-hectare Persian-style garden that surrounds the massive, domed tomb of India’s second Mughal emperor. It’s not always so deserted, Nanda assures me. The number of visitors has increased from around 200,000 to more than a million per year thanks to the restoration project. But because the complex is so large, you don’t get the fish-in-a-barrel feeling that hits you amid the thicket of touts at the Taj Mahal.<br /><br />A sandstone precursor to the white marble Taj, Humayun’s Tomb had deteriorated steadily even after it was named a World Heritage site in 1993. Poorly planned and underfunded preservation efforts using cement had marred the main structure and devastated some of the 100-odd outlying monuments, while overlooked stone walls and gardens had simply decayed into ruin. Using funds donated by the Aga Khan on the 50th anniversary of India’s independence, in 1997, Nanda undertook the restoration of the gardens surrounding the building. Then, when that project was successful, he began a comprehensive restoration of not only the tomb itself but also the adjoining neighborhood—a medieval colony surrounding a vibrant shrine to the Sufi saint Muhammad Nizamuddin Auliya that is now essentially a slum, though it is nevertheless interesting to visit.<br /><br />According to Nanda, the idea was to counter the perception that conservation was the opposite of development. Bringing in artisans from all over the country, the 200,000-man-hour project created employment and reestablished a sense of ownership among community residents. “Almost 75 percent of our budget goes to wages for our craftsmen,” Nanda says. Along with restoring buildings, the trust improved access to education and healthcare and invested in parks and other public infrastructure, including performance areas for Qawwali music, a devotional genre that began here in the 14th century and is still popular today. (Every visitor should take in a Thursday-night Qawwali performance at the shrine; they’re one of the city’s cultural highlights).<br /><br />Like the owner of Haveli Dharampura, though, Nanda is equal parts optimistic and pessimistic about the future of similar conservation projects. He’s convinced the AKTC project has ably demonstrated the way forward, and he is encouraged that corporate funding has poured in since the government ruled that heritage conservation projects qualified under a recent law requiring companies with a turnover of more than one billion rupees (US$150 million) to give at least two percent of their profits to charity. Low-cost airline IndiGo, for instance, is sponsoring the restoration of the tomb of Abdul Rahim Khan-I-Khannan, who was a prominent courtier during the reign of Akbar the Great. And the chari-table arm of Mumbai-based conglomerate Tata Group partly funded the restoration of Humayun’s Tomb.<br /><br />Nanda, however, remains skeptical that anyone will pick up the torch when the AKTC project—which was recently extended another five years to undertake the restoration of more monuments in the area surrounding the tomb—officially comes to an end.<br /><br />“This cannot go on in perpetuity,” he says pensively as he shepherds me through the warren-like Nizamuddin shrine. “There will be things left undone.”<br /><br />Among other issues, AKTC is only responsible for the restoration project. Though Nanda is working on a 1,000-square-meter museum that promises to improve the standard of curation and interpretation (a weak point here as at most Indian historical sites), the job of running the complex as a tourist site falls to the overburdened and underfunded Archeological Society of India (ASI). This leaves it vulnerable to the same pressures that have allowed ill-informed and irritatingly aggressive freelance guides to take over so many of the country’s remarkable landmarks.<br /><br />Fortunately, the Internet has facilitated a boom in “software” that more than compensates for the city’s failures in the “hardware” department. Facebook-based event calendars and dedicated websites like Meetup.com now make it easy for travelers to find guided food tours, heritage walks, and nature hikes organized by young volunteers or nonprofit groups like the Bombay Natural History Society and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH).<br /><br />Perhaps more than anything else that has happened over the past decade, this has liberated visitors to Delhi from the tyranny of touts and package tours, says INTACH’s Alisha Pathak. “The most exciting thing about it is that now Delhi is discoverable on foot,” she tells me.<br /><br />Every few weeks, for instance, the Bombay Natural History Society organizes a morning hike of some kind through the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, where not long ago I joined an excursion to search for proof that the park has attracted its first leopards. Each winter, the Delhi Walk Festival inaugurated in 2016 by the nonprofit Delhi, I Love You group now offers some 85 culinary, architectural, and bird-watching walks through some of the city’s most fascinating neighborhoods, led by volunteer historians, gourmands, ecologists, and flaneurs. And groups like Delhi By Foot and INTACH itself organize similar outings on a weekly basis that have earned local experts like historian Sohail Hashmi and environmentalist Pradip Krishen a cult following.<br /><br />“If you walk around the hinterlands of Delhi, you keep stumbling on forgotten monuments that are intimately connected to the city’s history,” Pathak says.<br /><br />To me, that’s the most amazing part of this renaissance. I’ve lived in Delhi for more than a decade now, and every year I continue to “discover” major archeological sites such as the 12th-century Qila Rai Pithora (the fortified citadel of the so-called Slave Dynasty) or the 17th-century tomb of the Mughal general Azim Khan.<br /><br />Now, everyday visitors to India’s capital have the chance to discover these hidden gems too—and it finally looks as though they may survive to make Delhi a rival to the other great ancient cities of the world.<br /><br />This article originally appeared in the <a href="http://www.destinasian.com/magazine">December 2017/January 2018</a> print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Restoration Drama”).</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-35969547980180804432017-12-11T22:28:00.000-08:002018-02-19T22:28:45.404-08:00'Going on a witch hunt' in India is real — and deadly<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Jason Overdorf, Special to USA TODAY<br />(December 2017)<br /><br />BHILWARA, India — "Going on a witch hunt" is a custom many in India observe — and for those hunted it can be deadly.<br /><br />Just ask Ramkanya Devi, 80, who still lives in fear three months after a young neighbor branded her as a witch responsible for the girl's illness. <br /><br />“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” Devi said, sitting in the shack she shares with her husband of more than 60 years in this western Indian village. “I’m still scared they might kill me if they catch me alone.”<br /><br />Stories like Devi’s are common across India, even though the state of Rajasthan, where Devi lives, outlawed branding people as witches in 2015, and other states adopted similar laws.<br /><br />Nearly 2,000 people across India, mostly women, were killed for alleged witchcraft between 2005 and 2015, the most recent numbers available from India’s National Crime Records Bureau.<br /><br />Devi, who has lived here her whole life, has been a midwife to countless women, while her husband and two sons run small barbershops. When a local schoolgirl fell ill, she went to the village bhopa, a self-proclaimed sorcerer with powers to heal, bring good fortune, conjure up voodoo and identify witches. He convinced the girl's family that she was a victim of witchcraft, and she named Devi as the witch.<br /><br /><br />That led to death threats and a vow to burn their house, so Devi’s family kept her locked in a musty brick storage room — where she spent 18 days in the dark before an activist who seeks to eradicate witch hunts arranged for her rescue.<br /><br />“She was crying and kept saying, ‘I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch. Don’t kill me,’” said activist Tara Ahluwalia, who has fought to protect women from witch hunts since 1986.<br /><br />Bhilwara police superintendent Pradeep Sharma said bhopas are at the root of the problem.<br /><br />“Bhopas are a very widespread social evil,” said Sharma. “People go to these bhopas for a number of problems, mostly to cure their illnesses. ... They call spirits and try to remove spirits. It’s something like voodoo.”<br /><br />Ajay Kumar Jain, a lawyer who petitioned for protections against witch hunts, said "branding a woman as a witch is itself a serious offense, punishable with up to five years of rigorous imprisonment.”<br /><br />So far, 13 victims of witch hunts have received compensation of $750 to $3,000 from the state government. But no one has been convicted in the 86 cases filed since the Prevention of Witch-hunting Act was passed two years ago, largely because of the slow pace of India’s courts. In three of those cases, the witch hunts ended with the killing of the women accused of witchcraft.<br /><br />Sharma said police receive many complaints, but the term "witch" is often used as an insult during a dispute, and the aggrieved party sees the new law as an opportunity.<br /><br />“It’s not always that somebody is cast as a witch and thrown out of the village,” Sharma said. "By complaining that they were called a witch, they can (file) a legal case.”<br /><br />Ahluwalia set out to prove that witch hunts are real. She donned a garish sari and posed as a superstitious villager to nab aggressors in the act. She caught seven bhopas on video as they tried to “exorcise” women volunteers she claimed were witches by chanting mantras, slapping them and beating them with a broom.<br /><br />“One female bhopa beat my volunteer so badly that she tore out a piece of her hair, and she put a sword to her neck,” Ahluwalia said. “Right now, all seven are behind bars.”<br /><br />Police say eliminating witch hunts will likely remain a challenge, given the fine line between superstition and religion. Sharma said the authorities prosecute these bhopas and run educational programs to convince people to stop going to them, but it's difficult.<br /><br />“We found in a lot of the cases, single women, especially women belonging to the lower strata of society, were harassed by being branded as witches,” lawyer Jain said. “The objective in most of the cases was just to grab their property.”<br /><br />In one of Ahluwalia’s cases, a 40-year-old woman was stripped naked, forced to eat feces, made to walk on hot coals and blinded before she was killed. She was a widow, and her alleged torturers were her niece and nephew, who wanted to snatch the land she inherited from her husband, according to a police complaint lodged by her children.<br /><br />A woman accused of witchcraft who survives the physical abuse is ostracized by society. Ahluwalia said. “Physically, she is alive, but she has been killed in so many ways.”</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-8958504158315994622017-10-27T03:57:00.004-07:002017-10-27T03:57:55.474-07:00 Is Rent-to-Own Solar Power the Answer?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>A Canadian entrepreneur is using a business model familiar from ’70s daytime TV to get Indians to embrace solar</i><br />By Jason Overdorf -- SMITHSONIAN.COM<br />(September 2016)<br /><br />Dressed in a teal green dhoti and a white undershirt, 63-year-old Kisan Singh chuckles when he’s asked how many hours of a typical day the village of Ranchi Bangar gets electricity from the power grid.<br /><br />“At night, light comes from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., so we can watch television and run the refrigerator and water pump,” he says, with a lopsided grin. “In the daytime, it’s anybody’s guess.”<br /><br />Retired from the local government irrigation department, Singh lives with his son, daughter-in-law and grandsons in a squat brick house about 100 miles southeast of India’s capital, New Delhi. It’s a simple four-room dwelling—practically windowless, with brick walls and bare concrete floor, a few pots and pans stored on shelves, and plastic lawn chairs and nylon cots as the only furniture.<br /><br />When it comes to green energy, however, the little house could well represent India’s future.<br /><br />For a little more than a year, the family has been supplementing the sporadic electricity the village gets from the grid with solar energy, thanks to a new pay-as-you-go business model pioneered by Canadian entrepreneur Paul Needham and his company, Simpa Networks. Call it “rent-to-own solar.”<br /><br />Needham is a serial tech entrepreneur whose online advertising company BidClix made its way into the portfolio of Microsoft. As a doctoral student in economics at Cambridge, he was obsessed with the reasons customers will shell out for certain products and not others. One of the questions that always bugged him was, “Why don’t I own solar panels?” The reason, he determined, was the high up-front costs.<br /><br />Imagine if mobile phone service was sold like solar energy. From an operator’s perspective, it would have made great sense to try to sell customers 10 years of phone calls in advance, so as to quickly earn back the money invested in building cell towers. But the person who suggested such a strategy would have been fired immediately, Needham says.<br /><br />“You want to charge people for what they value, not the technology that’s providing it,” he says in a telephone interview.<br /><br />Realizing that the poorer the consumer, the more that axiom holds true, Needham teamed up with two microfinance experts about five years ago to develop small solar house systems for sale in India on a pay-as-you-go model. Today, they’ve installed systems in more than 20,000 homes and created 300 full-time jobs, as well as opportunities for 500-odd technicians and “solar entrepreneurs” who sell services based on having electricity in their shops or homes.<br /><br />With $11 million in financing from various venture capitalists, as well as organizations like the Asian Development Bank and USAID, the company is scaling up fast—now growing its customer base by around 10 percent a month. The target is 1 million solar rooftops in rural India by 2019. With a little tweaking, the model could work in other developing countries, even in sophisticated markets like the U.S., Needham says. It’s actually been applied with some success in the U.S., he explains, but companies face issues due to the financing side of it. Entrepreneurs have to invest in equipment up front and only realize payments over time, so it’s easy to go bust if they don’t have enough capital.<br /><br />Simpa’s solution borrows from prepaid cell service and the “rent-to-own” schemes notorious for fleecing poor Americans desperate for a television—turned to a good end.<br /><br />With the most basic system, customers get a 40 watt solar panel, a 26 amp-hour battery, two LED lights, a 15-watt electrical outlet for appliances and two ports to charge or power USB devices—all of which operate using direct current (DC), so no inverter is necessary. The blue rooftop panel is about the size of a card table, angled toward the sun. The meter looks a bit like a car battery, with an e-ink readout to show how many “days” balance is remaining. It comes with special LED tube lights, about half the size of the schoolroom fluorescents we’re used to, and a freestanding electric fan.<br /><br />It costs about $270 to buy the system outright and get free electricity for an estimated 10 years. But most customers choose a pay-as-you-go contract that allows them to purchase the kit in monthly payments over two or three years. Over three years, that means paying an extra 50 percent for the system. But the small payments are easy to manage, and the arrangement makes customers confident that the company will keep the equipment working, so as to get paid. The pay-as-you-go system also features on-site service and an extended warranty.<br /><br />That’s proven to be vital, because do-gooders and fly-by-night companies alike have in the past failed to maintain systems installed with loans or charitable funds, sowing general distrust in solar, Needham says.<br /><br />“When the batteries need to be topped up or there’s a little problem with the wiring, those systems just stop working,” he says.<br /><br />With the pay-as-you-go scheme, customers typically pay 15 to 30 U.S. cents a day to power a fan, three lights and a mobile phone charger. They can see how many days they have remaining by pressing a button on the keypad of their meter, and call a customer service rep to take a top-up payment anytime, with cash-back bonuses for bulk purchases. About 10 percent choose to buy the system outright after six months or so, Needham said, and everybody is attracted to the idea that their payments are going toward a purchase.<br /><br />“What we found was that most people wanted to own the equipment themselves; they didn’t just want to keep paying to use it,” Needham says.<br /><br />Apart from helping India in its battle to lower greenhouse gas emissions and relieving the strain on its overburdened power grid, the business could play an important role in reducing poverty, he believes.<br /><br />Worldwide, approximately 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity and another 1 billion have extremely unreliable access, <a href="http://www.innovationinsights.ch/sites/default/files/resources/Financing%20New%20Business%20Models%20to%20Expand%20Energy%20Access%20(4%20Feb%202014)_1.pdf">according to a Simpa case study</a>. The poorest spend up to a third of their income on kerosene and access to third-party electricity—a whopping $38 billion for kerosene and $10 billion to charge their cell phones. That means over the 10-year lifespan of one of Simpa’s more advanced $400 solar systems, a typical user would have spent $1,500 to $2,000 on kerosene, candles, batteries and phone charging. Meanwhile, they’ll have missed out on economic benefits associated with electrification, including increasing income-generating working hours and improving school performance.<br /><br />“Before we got the solar system, I was cooking in the dark,” says 26-year-old Anjali Gehlot, Singh’s daughter-in-law. “We were using candles and kerosene lamps. My children weren’t able to study at night or they weren’t able to sleep because there was no fan.”<br /><br />With temperatures soaring to more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit for almost half the year in Ranchi Bangar, that’s a huge selling point. So much so that Gehlot prevailed on her husband to have a second “Turbo 240” system—the number 240 refers to its two 40-watt panels—installed three months earlier.<br /><br />In total, the family now pays about $24 a month for solar power—about 15 percent of what Gehlot spends to feed a family of five—as a result. But the added comfort is more than worth that price, she says.<br /><br />“It’s cheaper than the bill for the grid electricity,” Gehlot says.<br /><br />And the light always comes on when she flicks the switch.<br /></div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-14891817331079993332017-10-12T22:39:00.000-07:002018-02-19T22:40:01.156-08:00Checking In: The Roseate, New Delhi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Tucked just off the busy highway linking New Delhi and Gurgaon, the Bird Group’s 50-room <a href="http://www.roseatehotels.com/newdelhi/theroseate/" style="background: 0px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(92, 177, 195) !important; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.2s;">Roseate</a> is a surprisingly tranquil and green boutique resort.</div>
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By Jason Overdorf</div>
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Destinasian (October 2017)</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">The Look</span></div>
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Separated from the roadway by a towering false-ficus barrier made of elegantly crafted steel leaves, the eight-acre retreat is enveloped by pin-drop silence. More than a thousand trees, landscaped gardens, and a winding reflective pool give it the feel of a fortified retreat—an impression underscored by the high-domed ceilings and twenty-feet-high doors selected by renowned Thai architect Lek Bunnag.</div>
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Closer examination, however, reveals bronze latticework and Persian pillars that give the modern, minimalist resort accents that are reminiscent of the style employed by Mughals who built Humayun’s Tomb and the Taj Mahal.</div>
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Its proximity to Delhi and isolation from the chaos of the city has made it a popular choice for staycations for well-heeled city-dwellers looking to avoid the long drive into the Himalayan foothills. But on the weekday afternoon we checked in, the manicured garden played host to a fashion shoot and an episode of a cooking show starring head chef Nishant Choubey.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">The Rooms</span></div>
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Built to impress, the Roseate comes with well-appointed and spacious 60-square-meter rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the canal-like swimming pool or the lush garden. A complementary iPad controls the lighting, window shade, and television, as well as providing a menu of hotel services and activities.</div>
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Dominating all rooms are glorious, bespoke mattresses and sumptuous pillows that provide just the right combination of softness and firmness. The separate sleeping and sitting areas make it easy to combine business and pleasure, with the window’s natural light illuminating a comfortable desk with plenty of room for getting one’s work done. But the mood lighting is a bit dim for reading in bed.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">The Buzz</span></div>
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With so few rooms, expect a personal touch: every staff member is likely to know not only your name, but your plans for the day. Head chef Nishant Choubey or executive sous chef Anuj Wadhawan will stop by your table with recommendations.</div>
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Kiyan, one of the restaurants, offers world cuisine with a tilt toward European classics along with subtly spiced and artfully plated Indian dishes. Meanwhile Chi Ni offers modern Chinese dishes inspired by London’s Kai Mayfair. Now that the well-meaning but idiotic ban on serving alcohol near India’s national highways has been lifted for five-star hotels, guests can grab their choice of tipples at the cozy Iah Bar, where they can even pair their drink with a cigar.</div>
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The elegant, all-white Aheli spa has justifiably attracted a dedicated following among local residents. It offers a full menu of treatments including what’s arguably India’s best hammam, as well as a small-but-efficient fitness center that’s enclosed in glass so that guests can enjoying working out “outdoors” in air-conditioned comfort. The Aheli signature treatment combines elements of Shiatsu, Thai and Swedish massage. Enjoy it—or one of the spa’s many other treatments—in a soothing white spa room or under the sky in one of its stunning outdoor treatment areas.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Don’t Miss</span></div>
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Ask the friendly staff to arrange for a trip to the resort’s dedicated organic farm, located less than a kilometer away, for a custom-tailored meal prepared with vegetables fresh from the vine. Here, chef Choubey can work some magic with little more than a fresh bottle gourd or two, a few pumpkin flowers, and a dash of baby spinach. Check for special farm-side food events as well.</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Samalka, NH-8, New Delhi, Delhi 110037, India; 91/1133 552211; doubles from US$198 per night</em></div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-65065783577004803712017-10-12T22:31:00.000-07:002018-02-19T22:31:50.255-08:00People are still cleaning sewers by hand in this country — and they're dying<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Jason Overdorf, Special to USA TODAY<br />(October 2017)<br /><br />NEW DELHI — Chandra Kanta shudders when she thinks about how she will explain her son's death someday to her 6-month-old granddaughter. <br /><br />Mohanlal Kanta, 22, died from asphyxiation in August while cleaning a blocked sewer line without a gas mask or other protective gear, as required by laws rarely enforced. <br /><br />“The police came to our house with Mohanlal’s photo and said there had been an accident,” said Kanta, holding her granddaughter on her lap. “They didn’t mention anything about criminal charges against his employer for letting him work in violation of safety rules. <br /><br />Mohanlal is the latest victim of widely flouted laws that have led to at least 750 deaths across India since "manual scavenging" was outlawed in 1993, including 75 this year. The large human toll casts a light on the deplorable working conditions here — even in the capital. <br /><br />In 2013, the Indian government increased penalties up to $7,700 in fines and five years in prison for employers who let their workers clean human solid waste by hand or build latrines that require manual maintenance.<br /><br />Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has launched a massive Clean India campaign that has built more than 80 million latrines to improve public health by discouraging Indians from relieving themselves in the open.<br /><br />But the plight of sewer and latrine cleaners remains largely unchanged, said activist Bewazda Wilson of the non-profit Sanitation Workers Movement.<br /><br />“In Delhi within the last one and a half months, we have witnessed more than 16 sewer deaths,” said Wilson, 51. “You don’t think this is a big problem? How can my democracy just keep quiet?”<br /><br />Indian sewer workers, usually stripped down to their underwear rather than outfitted in protective gear, go down manholes and often spend their days neck deep in human muck using brooms, scrapers and buckets to clean blockages.<br /><br />Their menial occupations reflect their low status in the Hindu caste system. For millennia, cleaning latrines has been the job of the lowest castes, most prominently the Dalits or “untouchables.” India’s 1949 constitution prohibited explicit discrimination against the untouchables. But social and economic norms have kept them in the dirtiest jobs.<br /><br /><br />Wilson said unconfirmed reports put the actual death toll far higher than the official count. Yet no one has been convicted of violating the law against manual cleaning in the 24 years it has been on the books, he said. <br /><br />“We have given the (Delhi) chief minister details of 54 death cases,” Wilson said. “He must arrest these people.”<br /><br />Mohanlal's death was among a spate of similar fatalities that prompted police to file a case against his employer. The Delhi government offered his wife a government job and provided his family with compensation of about $15,000.<br /><br />But it’s an open secret that government agencies — in this case the Delhi Water Board — regularly employ contractors knowing they send people into sewers to clean illegally, Wilson said. <br /><br />Modi's government aims to build 210 million latrines by 2019. But the government has not improved sewage systems at the same pace. Even before the project began, only a third of urban toilets were connected to sewer lines. Many of them dump directly into rivers and canals. That’s already causing environmental problems, in addition to harming the cleaners.<br /><br />“Urban India is already floating on sludge,” said Mamata Dash of WaterAid India, an aid organization with offices across India. “The problem has only increased many fold.”<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="bxc bx-base bx-custom bx-active-step-1 bx-campaign-530106 bx-brand-2186 bx-width-default bx-type-agilityzone bx-has-close-x-1 bx-fx-blur bx-impress" id="bx-campaign-530106" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fafafa; clear: both; color: #222222; display: none; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 1; margin: 0px -15px 15px 50px; orphans: 2; position: relative; text-align: center; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-indent: 0px; text-overflow: clip; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; text-shadow: none; text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; user-select: none; visibility: hidden; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
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THE SHORT LIST NEWSLETTER</div>
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Cap off the night with today's biggest stories<span> </span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />so you'll be ready tomorrow</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-11447233057303847852017-08-31T03:50:00.000-07:002017-10-27T03:50:25.624-07:00Counterpunch tells the story of athletes struggling to excel in a crooked game<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>The contrasting stories in </i>Counterpunch<i> offer a moving portrayal of athletes struggling to excel in a crooked game.</i><br />By Jason Overdorf - INDIA TODAY<br /><br />(August 2017)<br /><br />Now that Vijender Singh and company are introducing India to the theatrics of professional boxing, Jay Bulger's new Netflix documentary, Counterpunch, is required viewing. It follows the careers of former World Boxing Organisation (WBO) middleweight champion Peter 'Kid Chocolate' Quillin, top professional prospect Chris 'Lil B-Hop' Colbert and affable would-be US Olympian Cam F Awesome, yes, that's what it says on his passport. The contrasting stories offer a moving portrayal of athletes struggling to excel in a crooked game.<br /><br />Having barely missed the 2012 Olympics, Awesome has had more amateur fights than anybody in America, and he's still pushing to make the 2016 Games, though he's older than many seasoned pros. At 18 years old, Colbert isn't thinking of the Olympics at all-but a contract with all-powerful promoter Al Haymon. Meanwhile, Quillin, who's already at the top, accepts $500,000 from Haymon in exchange for refusing to fight the mandatory challenger for his WBO belt and taking a year-long vacation instead. It's a Machiavellian manoeuvre by Haymon, who's out to control all the top fighters in the game, and the undefeated Quillin's comeback is marred by a controversial draw and then a loss to Danny Jacob. (Two years later, Quillin is yet to regain his title.) And when Colbert signs with Haymon as well, Bulger encourages you to see it as inking a deal with Mephistopheles.<br /><br />But Haymon and Floyd 'Money' Mayweather aren't the ones who killed boxing. And the Don King-Mike Tyson era Bulger remembers with such fondness was hardly a golden age-as anybody who recalls the name Peter McNeeley will tell you.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-62283569773379990892017-06-20T02:57:00.000-07:002017-07-20T02:57:17.005-07:00Why advertisers are salivating over an obscure Indian sport<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
BY <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/authors/jason-overdorf">JASON OVERDORF</a> <div>
(Newsweek June 2017)<br /><br />This summer, as many as a billion TV viewers will tune in to watch India’s hottest new game: not cricket, not soccer, not basketball but a sport little known in the West called kabaddi.<br /><br />Kabaddi is a contact sport combining elements of tag, rugby and capture the flag and was invented centuries ago in south India. It was first exhibited in the 1936 Berlin Olympics but never became an official Olympic sport. That hasn’t hindered its popularity in India: The Pro Kabaddi League, which is on the eve of its fifth season, starting in July, has more Indian fans than any sport besides cricket.<br /><br />Professional sports have never been as popular in India as they are in so many other large nations, but the country has become an attractive market for global advertisers eager to reach the Indian middle class, one of the world’s fastest-growing pockets of consumers. By 2025, Indian consumer spending is projected to triple, hitting <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/as-affluence-rises-consumption-in-india-set-to-hit-4-tn-mark-by-2025-bcg/597550/">$4 trillion a year</a>. (Germans, by comparison, <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/private-consumption-up-sharply-in-germany/a-19117311">spent $1.81 trillion</a> in 2016.) Interest in entertainment, like music, film and television, has increased in India, and multinational corporations are betting that the middle class will develop an appetite for pro sports.<br /><br />A joint venture among Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, sports and talent agency IMG and Rupert Murdoch’s Star India media group is pumping money into sports, such as professional soccer, tennis and mixed martial arts. It is wooing retired football players from English teams, like former Manchester United forward Diego Forlán and Chelsea winger Florent Malouda, and tennis stars, like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, who reportedly received roughly $4 million apiece from India’s tennis league to play in the 2014-15 season. Meanwhile, small-time entrepreneurs are starting Indian sports franchises in everything from badminton to basketball. Twenty new professional sports leagues have been created since the founding of cricket’s Premier League in 2008.<br /><br />None of these leagues has been as successful as the kabaddi league. According to local data company <a href="http://www.barcindia.co.in/index.aspx.">News Flicks</a>, last year’s 24-match season attracted nearly a billion TV viewers. Kabaddi is now the second most popular sport in India after cricket.<br /><br />“Kabaddi has a unique Indian identity,” says the commissioner of the Pro Kabaddi League, Anupam Goswami. In just four seasons, excitement in India has built a sport with international participation. Twelve teams, including ones from Japan, the United States and Britain, competed in the 2016 Kabaddi World Cup, which snagged 114 million Indian TV viewers over 16 days of matches.<br /><br />The sport still has a long way to go to catch up to the popularity of cricket, which also has a deep history in India. Since British colonizers introduced it in the 18th century, cricket has been called the religion that unites India’s many castes and communities. In less than 10 years since India’s professional cricket league launched, it has become the largest driver of the sport worldwide, with hundreds of millions more viewers than in the U.K., where the sport began.<br /><br />Just as the best soccer players in the world travel to Europe to play, the world’s best cricketers want to compete in India’s Premier League. India’s investment in the sport has generated million-dollar endorsement deals for top players like Sachin Tendulkar, who earned enough from brands like Pepsi, Colgate and Visa to rank among Forbes ’s top 100 highest-paid athletes worldwide before he retired in 2014.<br /><br />But the big question for business is whether newly imported sports can achieve the same popularity in India as those that Indians grew up playing . So far, sports with less familiarity here, like soccer, have not generated the same kind of enthusiasm.<br /><br />Insiders say league officials and franchise owners resort to free tickets and even bussing schoolchildren to games to achieve “stadium fill,” in industry-speak. The three-year-old Premier Badminton League attracted only 3.5 million viewers for its 15 matches earlier this year, for instance, while the Hockey India League had even fewer for its 2016 season.<br /><br />Some of the new sports leagues are thriving. Remus D’Cruz, an executive with the four-year-old Hockey India League, says it is basically breaking even thanks to funds from corporate sponsors like mobile network service provider Airtel and motorcycle maker Hero.<br /><br />Meanwhile, corporate spending on sports-related marketing is growing in India. Overall, sports sponsorship has risen nearly 20 percent in 2016 over the previous year to reach nearly $1 billion, about a tenth of India’s overall advertising spending, according to a 2017 report by SportzPower India. (That is still far less than in North America, where sponsorship spending last year was <a href="http://www.sponsorship.com/IEGSR/2016/01/05/As-Sponsorship-Borders-Fall,-Spending-Rises.aspx">more than $20 billion</a>.) More encouragingly, perhaps, sponsorships of teams outside of cricket now account for nearly 40 percent of the pie.<br /><br />Investors aren’t the only ones who benefit from a thriving sports culture. Chinese smartphone maker Vivo, kabaddi’s title sponsor, is betting more than $45 million this season that the game can win its brand some fans.</div>
</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-90610798477872629312017-06-15T22:23:00.000-07:002018-02-19T22:24:41.966-08:00Why Sports Advertisers Are Salivating Over an Obscure Indian Sport<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
BY <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/authors/jason-overdorf">JASON OVERDORF</a><br />
Newsweek (June 2017)<br />
<br />
This summer, as many as a billion TV viewers will tune in to watch India’s hottest new game: not cricket, not soccer, not basketball but a sport little known in the West called kabaddi.<br />
<br />
Kabaddi is a contact sport combining elements of tag, rugby and capture the flag and was invented centuries ago in south India. It was first exhibited in the 1936 Berlin Olympics but never became an official Olympic sport. That hasn’t hindered its popularity in India: The Pro Kabaddi League, which is on the eve of its fifth season, starting in July, has more Indian fans than any sport besides cricket.<br />
<br />
Professional sports have never been as popular in India as they are in so many other large nations, but the country has become an attractive market for global advertisers eager to reach the Indian middle class, one of the world’s fastest-growing pockets of consumers. By 2025, Indian consumer spending is projected to triple, hitting <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/as-affluence-rises-consumption-in-india-set-to-hit-4-tn-mark-by-2025-bcg/597550/">$4 trillion a year</a>. (Germans, by comparison, <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/private-consumption-up-sharply-in-germany/a-19117311">spent $1.81 trillion</a> in 2016.) Interest in entertainment, like music, film and television, has increased in India, and multinational corporations are betting that the middle class will develop an appetite for pro sports.<br />
<br />
A joint venture among Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, sports and talent agency IMG and Rupert Murdoch’s Star India media group is pumping money into sports, such as professional soccer, tennis and mixed martial arts. It is wooing retired football players from English teams, like former Manchester United forward Diego Forlán and Chelsea winger Florent Malouda, and tennis stars, like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, who reportedly received roughly $4 million apiece from India’s tennis league to play in the 2014-15 season. Meanwhile, small-time entrepreneurs are starting Indian sports franchises in everything from badminton to basketball. Twenty new professional sports leagues have been created since the founding of cricket’s Premier League in 2008.<br />
<br />
N one of these leagues has been as successful as the kabaddi league. According to local data company <a href="http://www.barcindia.co.in/index.aspx.">News Flicks</a>, last year’s 24-match season attracted nearly a billion TV viewers. Kabaddi is now the second most popular sport in India after cricket.<br />
<br />
“Kabaddi has a unique Indian identity,” says the commissioner of the Pro Kabaddi League, Anupam Goswami. In just four seasons, excitement in India has built a sport with international participation. Twelve teams, including ones from Japan, the United States and Britain, competed in the 2016 Kabaddi World Cup, which snagged 114 million Indian TV viewers over 16 days of matches.<br />
<br />
The sport still has a long way to go to catch up to the popularity of cricket, which also has a deep history in India. Since British colonizers introduced it in the 18th century, cricket has been called the religion that unites India’s many castes and communities. In less than 10 years since India’s professional cricket league launched, it has become the largest driver of the sport worldwide, with hundreds of millions more viewers than in the U.K., where the sport began.<br />
<br />
Just as the best soccer players in the world travel to Europe to play, the world’s best cricketers want to compete in India’s Premier League. India’s investment in the sport has generated million-dollar endorsement deals for top players like Sachin Tendulkar, who earned enough from brands like Pepsi, Colgate and Visa to rank among Forbes ’s top 100 highest-paid athletes worldwide before he retired in 2014.<br />
<br />
But the big question for business is whether newly imported sports can achieve the same popularity in India as those that Indians grew up playing. So far, sports with less familiarity here, like soccer, have not generated the same kind of enthusiasm.<br />
<br />
Insiders say league officials and franchise owners resort to free tickets and even bussing schoolchildren to games to achieve “stadium fill,” in industry-speak. The three-year-old Premier Badminton League attracted only 3.5 million viewers for its 15 matches earlier this year, for instance, while the Hockey India League had even fewer for its 2016 season.<br />
<br />
Some of the new sports leagues are thriving. Remus D’Cruz, an executive with the four-year-old Hockey India League, says it is basically breaking even thanks to funds from corporate sponsors like mobile network service provider Airtel and motorcycle maker Hero.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, corporate spending on sports-related marketing is growing in India. Overall, sports sponsorship has risen nearly 20 percent in 2016 over the previous year to reach nearly $1 billion, about a tenth of India’s overall advertising spending, according to a 2017 report by SportzPower India. (That is still far less than in North America, where sponsorship spending last year was <a href="http://www.sponsorship.com/IEGSR/2016/01/05/As-Sponsorship-Borders-Fall,-Spending-Rises.aspx">more than $20 billion</a>.) More encouragingly, perhaps, sponsorships of teams outside of cricket now account for nearly 40 percent of the pie.<br />
<br />
Investors aren’t the only ones who benefit from a thriving sports culture. Chinese smartphone maker Vivo, kabaddi’s title sponsor, is betting more than $45 million this season that the game can win its brand some fans.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-78779173136699603762017-05-31T03:44:00.000-07:002017-10-27T03:44:24.971-07:00India’s prime minster makes waves by attempting to appropriate Gandhi’s legacy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf — Special To The Washington Times - - Wednesday, May 31, 2017<br /><br />NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Narendra Modi</a> raised a lot of eyebrows here recently when he decided it was a good idea to wrap the nation’s advances in plumbing together with a celebration of Mahatma <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>.<br /><br />An audience of smitten followers and party faithful broke into applause as <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> marked the 100th anniversary of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s first campaign against British rule in colonial <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> in May 1917, linking it to his own Swachhagraha — “Clean <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>” — campaign to boost economic performance by ending public human defecation and cleaning up the country’s notoriously polluted and dusty cities.<br /><br />Gandhi pushed for an independent <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> via what he called satyagraha, or nonviolent civil disobedience. “The aim of satyagraha was independence, and the aim of Swachhagraha is to create a clean <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>,” <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> told the crowd. “A clean <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> helps the poor the most.”<br /><br />For any other prime minister, honoring the man often called the Father of the Nation would be a natural part of the job. But, despite his popularity, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> remains a polarizing figure, and critics say the prime minister’s attempt to appropriate <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s legacy to benefit his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and his own cult of personality is political sacrilege.<br /><br />“<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Modi</a> has reduced one of the most interesting and celebrated public lives of the 20th century to toilet paper to clean his image,” said Sopan Joshi, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Gandhi Peace Foundation.<br /><br />Launched in 2014, the Clean <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> campaign has built nearly 40 million toilets, according to government figures.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s first satyagraha movement mobilized peasants growing indigo in the Champaran district of the northern state of Bihar against their landlords and the British colonial government in 1917. The strategy of passive resistance would set in motion a movement that would force the British out of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> 30 years later.<br /><br />Satyagraha is a Hindi term typically translated as “an insistence on truth.”<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a>’s government has linked the two efforts and embarked on an 18-month celebration of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s satyagraha movement that is slated to culminate in a massive spectacle in October 2019 to honor the 150th anniversary of the revered leader’s birth.<br /><br />“The Bharatiya Janata Party and <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> have many commonalities on core issues, like cultural nationalism,” said party spokesman Rakesh Sinha, referring to <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a>’s rhetoric about <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s uniqueness and its history as a cradle of Hinduism.<br /><br />But critics say the behavior of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a>’s supporters flies in the face of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s philosophy of tolerance and nonviolence.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> was hailed as a mold-breaking figure when he was elected in 2014, a pro-business politician who would jump-start the sclerotic and regulation-ridden Indian economy. But he also came to office under a cloud stemming from accusations that he stood idle in 2002 as Hindus massacred more than 1,000 Muslims over the course of three days in Gujarat, where he was chief minister at the time.<br /><br />A special investigation team representing the Supreme Court found no evidence to support those charges in 2012. But even in the aftermath of the 2002 violence, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> referred to relief camps for displaced Muslims as “breeding centers” and joked about the minority group’s reputation for bearing many children due to laws that allow Muslim men to have up to four wives.<br /><br />Since he became prime minister in 2014, Hindu vigilantes have lynched Muslims for allegedly eating beef or transporting cows for slaughter, vandalized Christian churches and stepped up a campaign against romances between Muslim men and Hindu women — which right-wing Hindu groups call “love jihad.”<br /><br /><b>Favoring Hindus</b><br />Critics say <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> has not spoken out or acted swiftly enough against those vigilantes because he still adheres to the Hindu nationalist ideology of Hindutva, which seeks to elevate Hinduism to a special place in technically secular <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>.<br /><br />“Killings of Muslims for allegedly eating beef and vandalizing of churches would have repelled <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> but are at the core of the strategy of the Hindutva brigade,” said Raghav Gaiha, an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Manchester.<br /><br />The partisan and sectarian clashes dominating New Delhi today stand in sharp contrast to the ideals that animated <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s movement. Committed to a diverse <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>, the Father of the Nation famously said he could never force anyone to stop slaughtering cows given that <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> is not a nation only of Hindus.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> helped spawn a political tradition that has long been at odds with <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a>‘s, too.<br /><br />The Hindu nationalist group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which later launched the BJP as its political wing, clashed with <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> when he was alive and reportedly celebrated his assassination by a former RSS member by distributing sweets, Mr. Joshi said.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> is not related to the familial Nehru-<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> dynasty that produced three prime ministers, as well as present Congress Party leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. But during the independence movement, he was its president from 1921 to 1928. Though BJP leaders say that was a different entity from the one that exists today, the modern Congress Party remains the BJP’s largest rival in Indian politics.<br /><br />For <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a>, embracing <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> is one way of rising above his critics’ accusations as he attempts to remake himself from the business-friendly reformer of the 2014 campaign to the champion of the masses now that he is the country’s leader, said commentator N. Chandra Mohan, a longtime editor at several of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s top newspapers.<br /><br />“It’s very essential for [the BJP and its supporters] to occupy the national space,” Mr. Mohan said. “They’re no longer just a majoritarian party. <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Modi</a> is the ruler of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>. They’ve never had this stature before.”<br /><br />But where <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> and the Hindu nationalists converge — on cleanliness, love for Hindu culture, the idea of achieving self-reliance by manufacturing in <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> and conservative morality — <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> can wrap himself in the same loincloth, Mr. Mohan said.<br /><br />It may well be working.<br /><br />This year, on the 2017 calendar produced by the Khadi Village Industries Commission, which has long featured the famous image of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> at the spinning wheel, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Mr. Modi</a> is now spinning the yarn. <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> advocated boycotting British-made cloth and wearing only khadi, or “homespun.”<br /><br />In Mumbai, employees staged a silent “soul-cleansing ritual” in protest, praying before a statue of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> with black cloth over their mouths in January. However, the protest failed to gain traction.<br /><br />BJP spokesman Tarun Vijay said it was unfair to link the independence leader with the modern Congress party, and <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a>’s ideas find many echoes among today’s Hindu nationalists.<br /><br />“<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi/">Gandhi</a> was not Congress, he was a freedom fighter,” Mr. Vijay said. “The Bharatiya Janata Party under <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/narendra-modi/">Modi</a> is the living embodiment of the Gandhian values.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-87485902569686774872017-05-11T03:52:00.000-07:002017-10-27T03:53:08.284-07:00Why India is going bananas over birth control for monkeys<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf -- USA TODAY<div>
(May 2017)<br /><br />NEW DELHI — On a typical afternoon in a posh neighborhood here, a troop of rhesus macaque monkeys climb the wall of an apartment building to the rooftop water tanks with a specific goal.<br /><br />Swinging like circus performers until one of the water pipes snaps off, the monkeys rush to drink the spraying water.<br /><br />“It happens quite often,” said homeowner Shakun Chandhok, who called a plumber after a servant used a stick to drive off the monkeys. “They used to jump into the balcony and come into the kitchen and open the fridge, just like any human being does.”<br /><br />The orange or gray monkeys, which weigh 12 to 17 pounds, have become one of the most dreaded pests in India, biting around 1,000 people a day nationwide and overrunning cities like New Delhi. The monkey problem has become so overwhelming that officials are searching for ways to use birth control on the animals.<br /><br /><br />In the fruit-growing state of Himachal Pradesh, monkeys have increased more than fivefold in the past decade, according the government. The animals create up to $300 million in crop losses and diverted labor every year, the farmer’s group Kheti Bachao Andolan said.<br /><br />“Wherever they go, panic spreads,” said primatologist Iqbal Malik, who runs a nonprofit called Vatavaran, which is Hindi for environment. “Residents warn each other to close all doors and windows. Any houses which get raided by monkeys (are left) in shambles — eatables on the floor, crockery broken, taps open, wires cut, plants mauled.”<br /><br />Himachal Pradesh formed a task force this month to cull the animals, which officials recently declared vermin. In the neighboring state of Uttarakhand, scientists at the Wildlife Institute of India will test an injectable contraceptive that has been used on white-tailed deer and wild horses in the United States.<br /><br /><br />“What our simulation and modeling indicate is that we need to control reproduction by more than 70% of the adult female population for a very long time, eight to 10 years,” to seriously impact monkey populations, said Qamar Qureshi, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Institute involved with the injectable contraceptives program.<br /><br />City and state governments have tried numerous methods to control the monkey troubles. Since the monkeys are associated with the Hindu god Hanuman, mass culling has never been attempted. Officials have tried surgical sterilization. They’ve also employed monkey trainers to bring in tame langurs — a larger, more dominant species — to scare off the macaques.<br /><br />Delhi officials even hired people to impersonate langurs to keep rogue macaques out of parliament. But the impersonators couldn’t keep them out of the building for long.<br /><br />Himachal Pradesh spent around $1 million to set up eight sterilization centers. Officials pay trappers a bonus of nearly $10 a head for capturing the animals. Over the past 10 years, the state has sterilized more than 125,000 monkeys.<br /><br />The cost and difficulty of sterilization has prompted persistent calls for trying oral contraceptives, a proposal first suggested in 2013. Qureshi said that plan failed because it's difficult to ensure the female monkeys consume the correct dosage, plus concerns that the drugs might hurt other species.<br /><br />“Using oral contraceptives is a far-fetched dream at present,” he said. “It’s very difficult to implement in the field. We’re not talking about zoo conditions, where you can feed monkeys in controlled conditions.”<br /><br />Injections are more practical, and in theory could be administered more quickly, but still present challenges. A single dose lasts only one year, and after that booster shots are necessary. At nearly $100 a dose, that's too costly for widespread use in the United States, let alone in India.<br /><br />Surgical sterilization is much cheaper, easier to monitor and permanent, said Mewa Singh, a primatologist at the University of Mysore. But catching and releasing the monkeys is also costly.<br /><br />Adding to the multiplying monkey population in urban centers from New Delhi in the north to Chennai in the south: People feed them at temples and parks, believing them to be holy.<br /><br />“In South India, we’ve been monitoring the (macaque) population for the past 25 years,” he said. “The population has come down by 66%. But the complaint is the same. There are hundreds of thousands of monkeys, and they’re damaging the crops.”</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-22134256099886416972017-02-09T22:34:00.000-08:002018-02-19T22:34:59.471-08:00Post-War Americans<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By Jason Overdorf</div>
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India Today (February 2017)</div>
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The title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s new collection of short stories, The Refugees, is a reminder that America once welcomed those displaced by foreign wars. Its brilliantly drawn characters illustrate how fully those immigrants-mainly Vietnamese-Americans but also Mexican-Americans living in his home state of California-have embraced their new home.</div>
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In ‘The Other Man’, for instance, a refugee fresh from war-torn Vietnam makes his way to San Francisco. There he discovers the freedom to acknowledge his homosexuality, along with the complexity of living “a civil, healthy and correct life”-as his father writes to him from communist Vietnam. Similarly, in ‘I’d Love You to Want Me’, an aging first generation Vietnamese-American woman wrestles with the meaning of love when senility prompts the French man she married decades before to begin calling her by another woman’s name.</div>
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In ‘The Transplant’, a hospital error prompts a Mexican-American gambling addict to search for the man who provided the liver for the transplant that saved his life-by calling all the people named Vu in the telephone directory. Finally, a charismatic seller of ‘better than genuine’ watches and handbags tells him, “I’m the man you’re looking for, Mr Arellano.” The two men forge an unlikely but life-affirming friendship that is doomed to destruction when the real donor appears, and Arellano learns ‘Louis Vu’ is not even really Vietnamese.</div>
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That subtle joke hints at Nguyen’s purpose in this collection-which eschews the stereotypes that can make what American publishers call ‘ethnic’ fiction so irritating. When he first learns the donor’s name, Nguyen notes that Arellano, who is “afflicted with a… common astigmatism wherein all Asians appeared the same”, had “fallen back on his default choice when confronted with [the] perplexing problem of [identifying] an Asian” to decide that Vu must be Chinese. Then, at the big reveal, Louis Vu tells him he was right, but that he’d “never been to China. I can barely speak Chinese. So what does that make me”?</div>
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The answer, of course, is American. And human.</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-63312696940404300512016-12-16T03:47:00.000-08:002017-10-27T03:48:03.405-07:00"The Kohinoor did seem to leave havoc in its wake"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /><i>The world's most infamous diamond, as authors William Dalrymple and Anita Anand describe it, is believed to come accompanied with a curse that condemns its owner to an early and often grisly demise.</i><br />By Jason Overdorf -- INDIA TODAY<br />(December 2016)<br /><br /><br /><i>Much that is known about the Kohinoor is myth, rumour or conjecture. The world's most infamous diamond, as authors William Dalrymple and Anita Anand describe it, is believed to come accompanied with a curse that condemns its owner to an early and often grisly demise. Before the Earl of Dalhousie extorted it from the Sikh Maharaja Duleep Singh and it made its way to Queen Victoria in 1851, it's thought to have numbered among the favourite baubles of Mughal emperor Babur. It's believed to have been plucked from the eye of a temple idol in Southern India by marauding Turks. And it's sometimes thought to be the legendary Syamantaka-a gem brought to earth when the sun god Surya removed it from a chain around his neck to bestow it on the Yadava king of Dwarka. Many think it's the largest or most valuable or at least the most beautiful diamond in the world. Yet many of those 'facts' are outright falsehoods, and few of the other stories that surround the Kohinoor can be verified, Anand and Dalrymple learned, even as they uncovered newly translated sources that deepen the sense of magic and bloody intrigue behind the diamond that once represented history's greatest conquest and now stands for its most infamous theft. In separate interviews excerpted below, they spoke with India Today's Jason Overdorf about their discoveries.</i><br />Overdorf: With William working on the early history of the Kohinoor and Anita covering its fate after the British finally defeated the Sikh empire in 1849, there's not a great deal of obvious crossover in this collaboration. How did you work together?<br /><br />Anand: Right from the start, we were constantly pinging each other, saying, "William, I found this, this is amazing." And then he would say, "Look what I've just found from the Persian archive. Look at this translation." In that way, we were terribly in each other's business. Although there are two distinct halves, there are fingerprints of each of us on both.<br /><br />Overdorf: The book is a bit of a historical detective story. What was the most surprising or interesting discovery that you made?<br /><br />Dalrymple: There is, in fact, not a single reference to a diamond that is to a hundred per cent certainty the Kohinoor before 1750, which is very late. What's happened is that, retrospectively, because the Kohinoor's so famous, people assume that when a large diamond turns up in a Mughal source or another source that it must be the Kohinoor. We just don't know how the Mughals got the Kohinoor or where it came from. The probability is that it came from a Golconda mine; that seems almost certain, but you can't trace a diamond with crystallography. The strong possibility is that it's the stone referred to by Babur in the Baburnama, which Humayun took to Persia. All we know for certain, and the first reference to it is translated for the first time in this book, is that around 1740 Persian historian Muhammad Kazim Marvi says, "I saw the Kohinoor. It was at the head of one of the peacocks in the Peacock Throne." He saw it in Herat. All the great Mughal experts have known this, but I certainly hadn't.<br /><br />Anand: I'm a journalist, not a historian, so I go looking for eyewitnesses. A European called John Martin Honigberger, who was there after the death of [Sikh Emperor] Ranjit Singh, was my eyewitness. He wrote about the committing of sati by the queens of Ranjit Singh. At first you hear his deep discomfort at the way in which these queens are burnt alive on the pyre of their husband, and then he sort of mentions in passing that these seven slave girls of Ranjit Singh are also burnt to death-but they're not even named. When you write such things, you just feel a little wiped out from the horror of it.<br /><br />Overdorf: What was the most striking moment for you in the diamond's history?<br /><br />Dalrymple: I think there are two incidents, just for the sheer mayhem that this diamond can cause wherever it goes. One is the story of Shah Rukh, the grandson of Nader Shah, who it turned out didn't have the Kohinoor, being tortured to surrender it. He has paste put on his head, and then they pour molten lead on him. It's just like the end of Daenerys Targaryen's brother in the first season of Game of Thrones. Then there's an extraordinary moment when the Medea takes the stone over to England in Anita's half of the book, and cholera breaks out on the ship. It's like another of my favorite movies, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, when the plague ship arrives in Amsterdam and rats pour off it. The diamond does seem to leave havoc in its wake.<br /><br />Overdorf: The book covers a great deal of Indian history. What makes the Kohinoor an effective lens through which to view the rise and fall of empires?<br /><br />Anand: That's the kind of thing I'm interested in anyway: looking at one person and how history radiates out from that one person. With the Kohinoor, it is this pivotal point with history teetering around it. It is a stone that is surrounded by stories of blood, intrigue and murder. It has divided empires. It has pitted empires against each other. And even now if the Kohinoor is mentioned, you will have extraordinarily hot passions running. The British may have cut it to almost half of its size but it still retains all of its power.<br /><br />Overdorf: Shashi Tharoor re-energised the debate over the question of its possible return to India last year. How do you feel about that question lying in the backdrop to the book?<br /><br />Dalrymple: It becomes a symbol for colonial loot, a touchstone for the whole question of what do you do about colonial history. Do you try and right the wrongs of the past, or do you just say that history is bloody? There's no question that Ranjit Singh got the Kohinoor by torturing Shah Shuja's son. Shah Shuja's ancestor got it on the bloody night of Nader Shah's assassination. Nader Shah got it by defeating the Mughals. So the diamond, whether or not you believe in the existence of a curse, certainly has the ability to create discord and discontent and division wherever it goes. It could potentially be a major issue in British-Indian relations in the future.<br /><br />Overdorf: As your book makes clear, India isn't the only country with a claim to the jewel, either.<br /><br />Anand: I am as interested as everybody else to see what happens next. India wants it back, Pakistan wants it back, Iran has asked for it back, the Taliban has asked for it back. Whatever legal moves will be made, William and I have done a lot of the casework, if you like. Do I think the British will give it back? They have said many times, "Not on your nelly," which is a peculiar British expression that means "No way." They don't want to set a precedent for giving things back. Once they give the Kohinoor back, then the Greeks are going to immediately want their Elgin marbles back and any number of claimants will want other artefacts back. The museums of Great Britain will empty.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-22119106512942994282016-11-29T03:12:00.000-08:002016-12-11T03:13:31.088-08:00How Narendra Modi's Cash Recall Gambit in India Has Backfired<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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By Jason Overdorf<br />
Newsweek (November 2016)<br />
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On November 8, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a surprise recall of more than 80 percent of the country’s cash in circulation, his supporters hailed the measure as an ingenious “surgical strike” against corruption and tax evasion. Everyone else was too busy running to the ATM.</div>
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Before the move, Modi had made little progress in fulfilling his campaign promise to <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/I-will-bring-back-black-money-and-distribute-it-to-honest-taxpayers-Modi/articleshow/30295281.cms" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">bring back billions in untaxed “black money”</a> stashed abroad so he could deposit it in the bank accounts of India’s poor. Washington, D.C.–based corruption watchdog Global Financial Integrity <a href="http://www.gfintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IFF-Update_2015-Final-1.pdf" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">recently estimated</a> that an average of $50 billion a year in illicit funds flowed out of India from 2004 to 2013, while bureaucrats, politicians and business tycoons amassed huge fortunes from influence peddling, backroom deals and outright graft.</div>
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Some Indians were so disgusted by this corruption that, much like Donald Trump’s supporters in the U.S. or Britain’s Brexiteers, they applauded Modi’s radical gambit—believing any action would be better than continuing to do nothing. But as it becomes more and more clear that replacing old notes with new ones will, at best, result in a small loss for the biggest crooks and only a short hiccup in the bribery business, the scheme is rapidly looking less like a clever economic maneuver than a brilliant but potentially disastrous piece of political theater.</div>
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The idea behind the recall was simple. Overnight, India announced that anyone holding 500- and 1,000-rupee notes had to exchange them for new bills before December 31. After that date, the old money will become worthless. The catch: The government is allowing people to swap only 4,500 rupees (about $65) in the old notes for cash. Anything more than that has to be deposited, thus creating a paper trail. Theoretically, this would either force those hoarding cash to come forward and pay taxes or their money would be worthless. Plus, anyone caught with more than 250,000 rupees in canceled notes—about $3,500—is now subject to investigation.</div>
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<span style="font-size: 1.1em;">To prevent word of the plan from getting out, which might have allowed the biggest violators to exchange their big notes in advance, Modi reportedly opted to make the radical move in secret. He apparently relied on the advice of a few top advisers.</span></div>
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He would have done well to seek further counsel, because his plan has now thrown India’s economy into chaos. The secrecy meant the country’s mint couldn’t print or distribute new notes until the announcement—so banks are struggling to meet demand. Even worse: Indians are standing in long lines to exchange or deposit their old notes, or withdraw cash just to buy groceries.</div>
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Black money—cash hidden to avoid taxes—is pervasive in India. Yet it’s not only that police officers, tax collectors and politicians demand bribes to do their jobs or look the other way, says Surjit Bhalla, senior India analyst at the New York–based Observatory Group, an advisory company specializing in monetary and fiscal policy. Virtually anyone who buys real estate in India pays for it at least partly under the table, and even the poorest Indians routinely forgo receipts to avoid paying sales tax. “Everybody,” says Bhalla, “has been made to commit this crime.” </div>
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Black money can also represent proceeds from legitimate business, while illegal income from bribes or conflicts of interest can be “white”—as long as someone has paid taxes on it. So the politicians in Parliament or various state assemblies, many of whom have somehow earned tens of millions, if not more, after taking office, can pay taxes on their bribes and still get away with it. Recalling and replacing big bills won’t do much to stop this malfeasance, Bhalla says. As long as bribery continues, the new clean notes will swiftly turn into dirty ones. Corruption, it seems, has little to do with the denominations of the bills—except that large notes take up less storage space.</div>
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Meanwhile, violators keep as little as 6 percent of their hidden income in cash, <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/cash-has-only-6-share-in-black-money-seizures-reveals-income-tax-data/story-JfFuTiJYtxKwJQhz2ApxlL.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">according to some estimates</a>. They invest the rest in property or gold—of which Indians hold some 15,000 tons, according to <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/07/14/indias-600-billion-hidden-treasure/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">a conservative 2011 estimate</a> from Citigroup, or they wash it by sending it abroad and bringing it back again as foreign investment.</div>
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Then there’s the question of legality. Lawyers from India’s political opposition have questioned whether some elements of Modi’s plan—such as <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/govt-cannot-deny-access-to-taxed-money-legal-experts-on-cash-withdrawal-cap/story-abEWOs15h46Mr0EGNRZbmL.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">denying people access to their own money</a>—are against the law. Others see the move as an exercise in propaganda. “This is politics as a vast morality play,” wrote Indian political analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/narendra-modis-black-money-promise-cic-asks-pmo-to-respond-to-rti-query/article9060449.ece" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The</em> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Indian Express</em></a>, a left-of-center daily. “Literally every citizen is being enlisted (or conscripted, if you prefer) in a policy cause.”</div>
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This isn’t the first time a charismatic nationalist has used a simple, good-vs.-evil narrative to push a radical economic measure. In 1958, China’s Mao Zedong called upon millions of citizens to wipe out the country’s rats, sparrows, mosquitoes and flies to fight disease and prevent crop losses. And like Mao’s campaign, which engendered a plague of locusts by wiping out the sparrows that ate them, Modi’s strike against corruption has led to some unexpected and painful consequences.</div>
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Around 400,000 trucks <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/four-lakh-trucks-stranded-on-highways-post-note-ban-aimtc-4375569/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">were stranded</a> around the country as of November 14 because their drivers had no valid bills to pay for incidentals (including bribes) on the road, according to the All India Motor Transport Congress—suggesting there may be shortages of essential supplies in the near future. Sugar processors have <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/business/commodities/sugar-test-demonetisation-couldnt-have-come-at-a-worse-time-for-those-in-jaggery-business-4384886/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">reportedly</a>made only partial payments to workers, reserving whatever valid bills they had to pay for fuel needed to run their cane-mashing machines, while other factory owners have given workers several months’ salary in canceled notes to get rid of the old denominations. Critics say Modi’s move could even lead to a significant economic slowdown. As K.C. Chakrabarty, a former deputy governor of the central bank, <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/demonetisation-will-lead-to-six-months-of-chaos-ex-rbi-deputy-guv-chakravorty/story-GbZaYU4zckCClqVHaflERK.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">warned</a>, “You have stopped market transactions for 70 percent of the economy.”</div>
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Yet Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have deflected any criticism of the pain and suffering resulting from the move by saying only people sitting on stacks of black money have reason to complain—recasting the serpentine lines at bank branches nationwide as a vast people-laundering machine: Criminals go in, and patriots come out.</div>
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By making or at least seeming to make the rich suffer alongside the poor, recalling the big notes could give Modi room to execute other measures that would otherwise be rejected as favoring the rich—such as lowering property taxes to reduce the incentive to evade them, Bhalla adds, “This gives them a certain credibility [with the poor].”</div>
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At least in theory. Lines at the bank are getting shorter in cities, while wealthy and middle-class Indians have adjusted by using debit and credit cards for more purchases—as well as downloading payment apps <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Companies/gWu18E6zIzsI0tfsANYsFL/Paytm-claims-record-number-of-transactions-after-govts-demo.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">in record numbers</a>. But such workarounds are not available to hundreds of millions of citizens who have also seen their salaries withheld or their sales drop because of the sudden lack of cash. Small shopkeepers who cater to the poor say business has plunged by as much as 80 percent (even in the capital, vegetable vendors, casual laborers and countless others operate entirely in cash). In rural India, there are fewer than 10 bank branches for every 100,000 people, and many open for business only two days a week.</div>
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Though Finance Minister Arun Jaitley <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/arun-jaitley-tells-people-to-wait-says-may-take-21-days-for-atms-to-run-normally-demonetisation-4372500/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">has promised</a> everything will be sorted out within 21 days, <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/static/demonetisation-2000-rupee-notes/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">a local newspaper</a> recently estimated it could take as long as six months to replace all the canceled notes with new ones, based on the speed at which the mint is working. Such reports are no easier to verify than the opposition claims that BJP insiders and big donors were given advance warning so they could convert their big notes into gold, jewelry and real estate. Other reports suggest some of the worst hit among the rural poor still support the measure—which they believe will not only punish the corrupt but also <a href="http://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-jalandhar/20161120/282144995937997" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #cc0000; text-decoration: none;">lead to a more equal society</a>.</div>
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If the chaos does continue, Modi’s BJP will pay dearly in a series of upcoming state elections early next year. However, like other populist leaders around the world, he may have a better grasp on public opinion than his opponents.</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-10895633919894566782016-07-08T22:50:00.001-07:002016-07-08T22:50:19.724-07:00Sorry, tiger dudes: your ladies are faking it<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />India’s tigresses may be feigning interest in sex as the result of shrinking habitat and overlapping territories<br /><br />By Jason Overdorf<br />Smithsonian.com <br />July 8, 2016<br /><br />When Maya, a much-adored tigress in India’s <a href="http://www.mahatadobatiger.com/">Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve</a>, abandoned her equally adored young cubs this June, park officials feared the worst. Soon after, Maya was spotted mating with some roving males, seemingly unconcerned about her one-year-old litter. But now local naturalists think Maya’s behavior is actually evidence of a crafty new strategy to help ensure her cubs’ survival: “false mating.”<br /><br />Like many mammals—including bears, lions and bottlenose dolphins—male tigers will kill the cubs of their rivals whenever they can, so as to precipitate a new estrus cycle and impregnate the tigress with their own offspring. Tiger moms typically seek to protect their cubs from such a fate for 18 to 24 months, before pushing them out to establish their own territories. (Tiger fathers have no role in raising the young, so no help there.)<br /><br />But the crowded conditions in Tadoba and other Indian national parks are making that increasingly difficult. The ranges of several roving rivals frequently overlap with the dominant male’s, bringing danger precariously close to vulnerable cubs, says Bilal Habib, a carnivore researcher at the <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Wildlife-Institute-of-India">Wildlife Institute of India</a>.<br /><br />“In high-density areas, where there are more males, the best strategy for a female is to try to leave the cubs early, go with the males, and then go back and look for her litter again,” Habib explains. “If she tries to fight with the males, that may be fatal for her and fatal for the cubs.”<br /><br />The name “false mating”—which occurs among lions and other species—is a little misleading. It refers to actual sex, just not at the time when a female is able to conceive. (Typically, tigresses go into estrus once every three to nine weeks, and are most likely to conceive during three to six days within that period.) Habib’s theory is that Maya is using sex not to conceive, but to placate roving male tigers and perhaps make them think they have successfully impregnated her.<br /><br />Afterwards, she returns back to her cubs, leaving the appeased male none the wiser.<br /><br />Nobody will know if he is right for at least another six weeks. “We don’t know as of now if it’s real mating or false mating. She’s probably not conceiving, but it’s not clear yet,” Habib says. “If it was real mating, we will expect to see cubs in 90 to 120 days.”<br /><br />Other tiger researchers say Maya’s seemingly strange mating habits are just the tip of the iceberg. Overlapping territories have bred all sorts of unusual tiger behaviors, including more frequent fighting and dominant males apparently tolerating rivals. In some crowded ranges, serial mating with different males suggests the possibility that tiger litters—like those of domestic cats—may even have multiple fathers.<br /><br />Though scientists have a wealth of data from captive breeding programs, surprisingly little is known about the finer points of tiger reproduction in the wild because there have been very few long-term breeding studies, says Raghunandan Singh Chundawat, a conservation biologist in India who has <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/world/tigresses-have-multiple-partners-too-finds-new-study/story-vOOoz9E7QaLoRk3iNdtzhI.html">published papers</a> on tiger mating behavior.<br /><br />For instance, in some cases, tigresses have failed to conceive after as many as 30 couplings and then inexplicably become pregnant. It's known that friction from the sharp spines of the male's penis are required to induce ovulation. But the variance in how many matings are required for conception has led to the speculation that tigresses, like several other mammals, may be able to control whether or not they ovulate. <br /><br />“We know very little about the biology,” Chundawat says.<br /><br />That’s daunting, considering the stakes. According to the <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/flora-fauna/Indias-tiger-population-increases-by-30-in-past-three-years-country-now-has-2226-tigers/articleshow/45950634.cms">latest population survey</a>, India boasts around 2,226 tigers, or about 70 percent of the world’s total—nearly a third more than believed at the time of the last count (which used a less accurate method). That’s great, but it also means that India’s 13 tiger reserves are more crowded than we thought, even as highways, factories and towns eat away at the rest of the country’s forests.<br /><br />Many of the tiger reserves are too small for the tigers they contain, so animals end up overlapping territories and coming into conflict with each other and with people. In a <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/flora-fauna/Big-cats-need-more-space-Study/articleshow/51505129.cms">ten-year study that tracked tigers</a> in the Panna Tiger Reserve of central India using radio collars, Chundawat and his colleagues found that roving males “floated” in and out of the territories of dominant males, often managing to mate with females on the sly.<br /><br />The researchers found that radio-collared females mated with the territorial males on 14 occasions, and mating with the floater males on six occasions. Meanwhile, three out of four radio-collared females mated with more than one male during the same estrus cycle. "Because in dry forests the ranges are very large, the dominant male cannot keep all the other males out," Chundawat says. "He will tolerate them, as long as he has first access to the females."<br /><br />While that shared access might result in greater genetic diversity and prevent rival males from killing strange cubs, it could also prove problematic. High-density areas see more frequent infighting between rival males and territorial females alike, Habib says. And the imperative for mothers like Maya to leave their cubs early could itself have dire implications.<br /><br />“What we suspect is if tiger cubs in high-density areas are forced to disperse early—at 12, 14 months—that makes their chances for survival very low,” he says. Danger, it seems, comes in many stripes.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-19393830541914288552016-04-22T23:02:00.003-07:002016-04-22T23:02:51.109-07:00Could India's auto rickshaw become obsolete?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf<div>
USAToday (April 2016)<br /><br />NEW DELHI — They're one of the most recognizable icons of modern India.<br /><br />The auto rickshaw, a sputtering motorized three-wheeler that's less than half the cost of a regular taxi, is the backbone of urban transit for millions of Indians.<br /><br />With the vehicle’s soft top, open sides and lack of seat belts, passengers rely on little more than good karma to keep them safe from crazed drivers on India’s congested roads.<br /><br />Despite a top speed of only 30 mph, auto rickshaws accounted for 6,300 of the 140,000 traffic fatalities in 2014 in the country. It’s one reason the industry is in tumult.<br /><br />Sensing a market poised for a revolution, a host of corporations are vying to replace the rattling workhorse of India’s transportation system with the next generation of cheap taxis to ferry 1.2 billion people around the country’s cities.<br /><br />The bare-knuckle competition over the future of India’s taxicabs has bred legal conflicts. <br /><br />The first mover in the race to replace the rickshaw, India’s Bajaj Auto, has been locked in a four-year battle over whether the company’s four-wheeled buggy is safer than the three-wheeler.<br /><br />First unveiled in 2012, Bajaj Auto’s vehicle, a quadricycle called the Qute that already is exported to 16 markets from Egypt to Mexico, offers a fully enclosed steel cab, a fuel-injected engine, seat belts for passengers and head and taillights that are much brighter than those in current rickshaws.<br /> <br />"We’re the world leader in small, three-wheeler taxis — we’re making a lot of money in that segment," said S. Ravikumar, Bajaj Auto's president of business development and assurance who, like many Indians, uses only an initial rather than a first name. "We wanted to upgrade (those taxis) and create a much better product that will serve the same purpose."<br /><br />Bajaj Auto’s competitors, including automaker Tata Motors, voiced safety concerns about the quadricycle. The government drafted new regulations for four-wheelers that delayed approval of the new category of lightweight vehicles until February 2014.<br /><br />Auto rickshaw drivers’ associations and others then filed a unique Indian form of class action called "public interest litigation" that challenged that approval, keeping the Qute off the roads again.<br /><br />“No crash test has been attempted here in India,” said former Indian solicitor general Gopal Subramanium, who is representing the plaintiffs. “The information we have from Europe with regard to a crash test is abysmal. This is the reason why quadricycles are not used as a vehicle for transport in any European countries.”<br /><br />Unlike class action lawsuits in the United States, any concerned citizen can file public interest litigation in India. In theory, courts are supposed to dismiss suits filed solely for financial or political gain. But dismissing the litigation can take years in the Indian legal system, so competing companies often stymie their rivals using the legal maneuver.<br /><br />"Business exigencies are definitely sometimes at the root of (public interest litigations)," said Delhi-based attorney Navin Syiem of IndusLaw, a major firm in India.<br /><br />As Bajaj Auto's court case dragged on, Tata unveiled its own low-cost rickshaw replacement, the four-wheeled Magic Iris, which it began pitching to state governments last year. Tata also reportedly has its own quadricycle, the Bravo, under development.<br /><br />Other makers of electric three-wheelers have gathered steam in the Indian auto-rickshaw market.<br /><br />Japan’s Terra Motors recently announced that it will have 30,000 electric rickshaws on India’s streets by the end of the year, and that many companies from China already are selling electric rickshaws in India without regulatory approvals, Chief Executive Toru Tokushige said in a news release.<br /><br />The Indian automobile and farm equipment conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra was reported to have a quadricycle in the works in 2014, aiming to hit the market next year. And U.S.-based all-terrain vehicle maker Polaris Industries, which entered the Indian market in 2011, has said it is considering the launch of a quadricycle here.<br /><br />Italy’s Piaggio, which sells quadricycles in Europe and is the biggest player in India’s three-wheeler segment after Bajaj, also has said it is looking at the Indian market.<br /><br />"We appreciate that some of our competitors are getting their products ready," said Ravikumar, lamenting the inefficiencies of the Indian courts. "Our hands are tied. This is the legal system."<br /><br />Richshaw driver Jeevan Mishra, 50, is concerned about competitors because he could stand to lose his current investment. <br /><br />Mishra said drivers such as he have taken out loans and sunk their life savings into their three-wheelers and licenses, which run about four times the cost of the vehicle itself.<br /><br />Mishra wondered what would happen if his three-wheeler became obsolete?<br /><br />“Already, we’re getting fewer and fewer customers because there are too many rickshaws,” Mishra said.<br /><br />American tourist Joyce Kim, 37, said she would be sad if auto rickshaws disappeared from India’s streets, but she understood why perhaps they should go.<br /><br />"Riding an auto rickshaw is like jumping on an older carnival ride — terrifying for some, but fun for me," she said. "But rickshaws are not why tourists come to Delhi, nor are they the city's only charm."</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-61299734195229690312016-03-17T23:00:00.000-07:002016-04-22T23:01:07.033-07:00India’s e-commerce boom breeds drama for deliverymen<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf <div>
The Washington Times (March 2016)<br /><br />NEW DELHI, India — Every morning <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/manzar-imam/">Manzar Imam</a> buckles his helmet and straps on a backpack that’s almost as big as a washing machine, girding for the battle ahead.<br /><br />The 45-year-old is a kind of modern-day gladiator, one of tens of thousands of “last-mile” motorbike deliverymen in <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s cutthroat and chaotic e-commerce industry.<br />Zigzagging through New Delhi’s testosterone-infused traffic on his 100cc Hero Honda motorcycle, he ferries clothes, electronics and household goods to homes and offices around the city, the last — and indispensable — link in a global chain of mostly Internet-directed commerce.<br /><br />It’s not an easy job.<br /><br />“It depends on the customer’s mood,” said <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/manzar-imam/">Mr. Imam</a>, a potbellied man with long sideburns and a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache. “Some customers are very angry.”<br /><br />Delivery calls can be truly dangerous in <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>. Tales abound in the Indian press of couriers assaulted, even locked in bathrooms, over trivial disputes such as not being able to make change for an order. In <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>cash on delivery is common, which brings its own dangers for couriers.<br /><br />Last month, two former Amazon deliverymen allegedly ordered a hair trimmer online, then beat up the motorcyclist who delivered it and stole his cellphone and 23 packages intended for other customers, according to Hyderabad police.<br /><br />Last year a story went viral in the Indian media about armed robbers who stole three MacBooks from a Flipkart delivery boy in Uttar Pradesh, luring him to peril by giving him an address that turned out to be a field in the middle of nowhere.<br /><br />Even so, in a nation where Internet startups are legion and e-commerce is booming, the streets of <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s capital teem with delivery vans and motorcycles.<br /><br />Local would-be Amazon.coms and eBay-style online marketplace companies attracted more than $500 million in investments over the first three months of 2016 in <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>, according to startup tracker Trak.in. Flipkart is one of the Indian sector’s four “unicorns” valued at more than $1 billion. In 2014 Amazon announced plans to invest $2 billion to expand its <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> operations.<br /><br />A recent Goldman Sachs forecast predicts that <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s e-commerce sector, already one of the largest in the world, will triple from an estimated $23 billion to $69 billion by 2020.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a>’s PayTM, which entered the e-commerce sphere in 2014, sold $2.5 billion worth of merchandise last year, not including discounts and returns, according to founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma. This year he projects that the company will surpass $10 billion in sales — the same amount targeted by Amazon and Flipkart.<br /><br /><b>Sustainability doubts</b><br />Much of that money is flowing back to customers in the form of deep discounts and unsustainable perks, including free or discounted delivery, cash on delivery and free returns, in a bid to expand and attract new orders. Companies are slashing prices to gain market share and scare off competitors. It’s not uncommon for some sites to sell products at a 20 percent discount to wholesale prices, leading some to predict a reckoning in the months to come.<br /><br />“I think that Indian e-commerce is near the peak of an investment bubble,” said Porter Erisman, a tech entrepreneur who wrote a book about his experience as an executive in the early days of massive Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba.com. “The rush of money has led to a lot of e-commerce companies chasing market share at all costs.”<br /><br />Some companies are riding the wave. Online retailer Infibeam — which posted its first profits in 2014 — has pegged its value at $334 million as it readies its first public stock offering of an Indian e-commerce company on March 21. Former Amazon executive Vishal Mehta founded Infibeam in Ahmedabad in 2007.<br /><br />Some companies are indulging in bubblelike behavior. Online clothing retailer Jabong.com hired writers and launched a fashion magazine with a print run of nearly 200,000 copies — copies that were never distributed. “They were just lying around,” said Sharin Bhatti Nair, a former staff writer for the magazine who now runs a co-working space for entrepreneurs in Mumbai.<br /><br />Another shadow over the industry is being cast by Indian states looking to capture some of the revenues as Web-based sales boom.<br /><br />The Mumbai-based Economic Times reported this week that three states — Uttarakhand, Bihar and Assam — have imposed an “entry tax” on goods purchased online from outside their borders, and more states are looking to follow suit. E-sellers complain this amounts to a double sales tax on their goods and could leave them uncompetitive against traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.<br /><br />“The practice smacks of some kind of predatory tax regime which is being promoted by some states,” Subho Ray, president of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, told the newspaper.<br /><br />Fraud is also increasingly commonplace on Indian e-marketplaces too, said a former investor with a major firm that worked with Indian startups. Mobile phone peddlers can hock high-value phones to relatives or accomplices to score incentives again and again for reselling the same item, for example, he said, under most vendor arrangements.<br /><br />“The burn rates were very high and continue to be high,” said the investor. “We’ve heard numbers as high as $1 million a day being burned.”<br /><br />Couriers like <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/manzar-imam/">Mr. Imam</a> feel the brunt of the companies’ unsustainable choices, as customers complain and pressures mount.<br /><br />Jabong.com offers free delivery and free returns on items that cost less than $5, according to the company’s website. Customers often return delivered items, take store credit and then buy something else online for delivery the next day with that credit. As a result, couriers repeatedly visit the same house to bring products paid for with the same store credit many times over.<br /><br />The companies most exposed to the unsustainable business models won’t survive when the bubble bursts, said Mr. Erisman, who was an executive at Alibaba in the early 2000s.<br /><br />“The same thing happened in the early days of China’s e-commerce boom,” he said. “I would advise the heads of e-commerce companies in<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/india/">India</a> to focus on saving the money they raised and prepare for winter.”</div>
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Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8438775.post-26381743796368814062016-02-29T15:49:00.005-08:002016-02-29T15:49:37.280-08:00Hopes of business-friendly reforms in India fade<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By Jason Overdorf, Special for USA TODAY(February 29, 2016)<br /><br />NEW DELHI — Even as India shines as a rare bright spot in a sluggish global economy, the country’s business-savvy prime minister is watching his popularity wane.<br /><br />Narendra Modi swept into power in May 2014 on the strength of a charismatic personality and a promise to eliminate India's legendary bureaucratic barriers to business. Today, India’s corporate leaders are losing faith that he can remove those obstacles. And public support has fallen as well: If elections were held today, Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party would lose its majority in parliament, according to a recent poll by Karvy Insights.<br /><br />“Expectations were high and people wanted to see a quick turnaround (of the economy),” said Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil, the Indian arm of Standard & Poor’s. “But big ticket reforms ... have been delayed and diluted.”<br /><br />By some numbers, Modi’s performance looks stellar:<br /><br />• Despite a global slowdown, India’s economy is expected to grow 7% to 7.5% for the year ending in March, just above the 6.9% rate recorded the year before he took office.<br /><br />• Foreign direct investment from October 2014 through June 2015 increased 40% compared with the same period a year earlier, thanks to his “Make in India” program, which eliminated or reduced restrictions on foreign investment in many manufacturing sectors.<br /><br />• Foreign exchange reserves now top $350 billion, India’s highest level ever.<br /><br />“A lot of confidence and hope continues to be built around India,” Finance MinisterArun Jaitley said Monday, as he outlined a $288 billion spending program for the fiscal year ending March 2017.<br /><br />Nevertheless, long-awaited moves to loosen restrictions on land acquisition and a tax overhaul sought by corporations to boost business have yet to materialize.<br /><br />That’s because opposition parties that control the upper house have blocked his boldest policies, thwarting the strong majority his party holds in the lower house of parliament<br /><br />Eliminating the red tape also has proved daunting. India jumped 12 places on theWorld Bank’s ease of doing business index during Modi’s first year in office — from 142 to 130 — but many complex regulations and paperwork requirements have not been reduced.<br /><br />Corporate leaders also note that a lack of skilled workers in India prevent Modi's “Make in India” program from becoming reality. “Some low scale manufacturing may move to India. But if you want to build Brand India, you have to first build global Indian brands,”Anand Mahindra, chairman of the Mahindra group, which makes cars, farm equipment and other products, told India Today newspaper.<br /><br />Other business leaders praise Modi's accomplishments in a country where making any major change in how things are done is exceedingly difficult.<br /><br />Binod Agarwal, CEO of a small auto-parts manufacturer, New Engineering Works, cites an increase in government services available online, and says his company has seen a 30% to 40% increase in sales since 2014. Government "has become more efficient and more transparent, and less dependent on government officials,” Agarwal said.<br /><br />In his budget speech Monday, Jaitley unveiled measures designed to rekindle Modi’s popularity. Tripling outlays for rural development, he promised to double farmers’ incomes over the next five years, an ambitious goal many economists consider impossible.<br /><br />Reacting to the early portion of Jaitley’s speech on Twitter, veteran political commentator Shekhar Gupta suggested its tone “echoes a hard Agro-povertarian swing,” indicating the government was “losing nerve early” on reform.<br /><br />With the global economy in the doldrums, India cannot rely on export growth, so it must focus on stimulating domestic demand. While urban consumers are already spending, the real potential lies in rural India, where measures such as massive spending increases on roads and tax exemptions for food processors can simultaneously create jobs and new consumers.<br /><br />Notably, the outlay for rural Indians does not come in the form of free money or other market-distorting measures, such as an increase in minimum support prices for crops, Shubhada Rao, chief economist at Mumbai-based Yes Bank, pointed out. There’s also $33 billion in funds for infrastructure development and a plan to lower corporate tax rates to 25% from 30% over the next five years.<br /><br />“The budget looks to address the weakest link in India’s growth, which is the rural and farm economy,” Rao said.</div>
Jason Overdorfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06482980090381357314noreply@blogger.com