Blood, guts and glory: India's boxers hit pay dirt

They got India's first pro-boxing event off the ground. We go behind the scenes with the man who may well be the Don King of India
By Jason Overdorf

GQ India (November 2015)

An hour after the scheduled start time, Jaisingh Shekhawat, the 30-year-old chief organizer of India’s first professional boxing event, burst into the improvised pre-fight green room in a panic, his brow beaded with sweat. “What the hell’s going on?” he snapped at coach Mahavir Singh, busy supervising a last-minute briefing of the nine Indian match judges. Shekhawat caught me watching him and winced. “Mismanagement,” he said ruefully, juggling his portfolio and walkie-talkie.

All around the green room – repurposed from the drivers’ waiting area in the basement parking garage of Delhi’s Select Citywalk Mall – the fighters displayed a monastic calm. Punjabi heavyweight Gurlal Singh, to fight Haryana’s Vikas Hooda in the first of four scheduled matches, stood in the corner like a B-movie Hercules as three hangerson laced up his groin protector. Thai super bantamweight (55.3kg) Khunkhiri Wor Wisaruth was taping the hands of American super middleweight (76.2kg) Clinton Smith, while Smith’s opponent for the night, 13-time national champion Dilbag Singh, casually slipped on a glove and sunk a joke-hook into a friend’s belly to test it out, punctuating the punch with his devilish, 100-watt grin.

If anyone here had reason to sweat, it was Shekhawat, a slim, slicklooking guy with brushed-back hair and gold hoops in both ears. The delayed start put his newly formed North Indian Boxing Association (NIBA) at risk of failing to complete the programme before 10pm, when the permit for the outdoor plaza upstairs would expire. If the authorities shut them down before the end of the main event — a 12-round contest between Indian Neeraj Goyat and Filipino Nelson Gulpe, competing for the vacant World Boxing Council (WBC) Asian Welterweight Championship - the dream of bringing pro boxing to India would be confirmed a fiasco.

Already, one of the biggest news stories to emerge from the farcical pre-fight press conference the day before was a Hindustan Times article headlined “Nothing professional about pro boxing’s India debut”. And tonight, WBC Asia head Patrick Cusick was still fielding basic questions from the judges and referees about pro-level rules and scoring – which differ widely from the amateur game.

Maybe it didn’t show, but more than a year-and-a-half of work hung in the balance.

Jaisingh Shekhawat was always a boxing fan, and participated in a few state-level tournaments before getting into the marble business in his home state of Rajasthan. He had long thought there was a potential market for professional boxing in India, but it took the drive of his old trainer Mahavir Singh (best known as the coach of Olympic bronze medallist Mary Kom) and Neeraj Goyat (arguably India’s keenest pro) to get the idea off the ground. With six professional fights in China and Thailand, as well as a brief stint in India’s Mixed Martial Arts Super Fight League, 23-year-old Goyat had made connections with foreign managers and WBC officials while he was abroad. So when he emailed WBC head Cusick about a licence to hold events in India, he got a response.

Slowly, things came together. Ruling out a stadium – fearing nobody would turn up – the team decided on a free, open-air event that would draw a crowd from passersby. They convinced Cusick they weren’t just blowing smoke, and completed the paperwork to obtain the WBC licence. Handshakes were made with top boxers whose amateur careers were over and who wanted to go pro. Rahul Gokhale of Serendipity Marketing Solutions was pulled in to manage the event. Most importantly, Rakesh Naudiyal, a former international amateur boxer, convinced Kashmiri Marbles to come on board as their major sponsor, contributing around ₹10 lakh rupees – about a fifth of the event’s total budget.

Yet, when Naudiyal told me about it all, I was skeptical — not least because they were approaching me for advice.

I’ve been a hack boxer since learning the basics in a Beijing gym that doubled as a karaoke bar and brothel in 1998, picking up trainers in Boston, New York, Hong Kong and Delhi as I’ve moved around. I’d also venture I’m probably the biggest boxing fan on the Subcontinent. But that’s where my expertise ends. (Full disclosure: Naudiyal has been my friend and training partner since 2005.)

The idea wasn’t to get rich, everybody agreed. It was to give Indian boxers an opportunity to showcase their talent. Most of the team had volunteered their time, and apart from outside contractors like Gokhale, nobody expected to make a rupee off the event. Shekhawat certainly had no illusions he was going to be the next Don King — the notorious American promoter who dominated professional boxing from 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman through the reign of Mike Tyson in the Eighties — known as much for his slimy business deals as his lightning shock of hair and hi-glint smile of pure evil.

“At the India [amateur] camp, there will be 40-some boxers in every weight class,” said trainer Mahavir Singh. “But only the top one gets the chance to compete in the Olympics. The second, third and fourth guys don’t ever get an opportunity. We want to provide a platform for them.”

My first meeting with Shekhawat, in April this year, was like a Chinese fire drill. Naudiyal was late, so Shekhawat, Mahavir and I stood around in the blazing sun outside the PVR Cinema hall in Basant Lok Community Centre. Neither was comfortable with English, so I was stuck with my “idhar se left, udharse right” taxi Hindi until Kamaljit and a few others turned up. Finally, we tramped up four flights of stairs to a stuffy office that was smaller than an aloo tikki cart. A steady string of beefy guys filled it up until Naudiyal arrived, whereupon we hit critical mass and moved downstairs again. Scouts were dispatched to find a more suitable spot, which turned out to be a McDonald’s. So I viewed the crew’s laptop PowerPoint presentation and dispensed my wisdom, such as it was, over fries and a Coke at a curvy first-floor banquet table.

“As they like to say in America, ‘styles make fights’. You don’t want two match technical boxers who’ll spend the whole night playing defence,” I told them, among other non-pearls.

With that meeting as context, my experience of the pre-event press conference was very different from that of the Hindustan Times writer. I was just gobsmacked that they had actually done anything. “With no money!” exclaimed Naudiyal’s friend Arun Kunal, owner of Add on Entertainment, who’d volunteered to handle public relations.

Patrick Cusick looked out over the audience of reporters gathered at The Lalit hotel. “We’ve been watching the development of boxing in Asia for the last 15 years,” he said. “Ten years ago, we went to China, and now they have their first world champion. We believe India can progress as quickly, if not faster.”

Ninety minutes after official fight time, after countless announcements that the first bout was going to start “in a few minutes,” the announcers were running out of material. “Hurry up and light the lamp,” said one, once they’d wrangled the obligatory-but- not-really-important VIPs onto the stage. When tapers were finally put to the aarti, Shekhawat looked like his doctor had just informed him that his biopsy was negative.

Despite the delays and the 40-degree heat, the crowd hadn’t given up. The 350 ringside chairs for invited guests were full. By the angles of their noses, seemingly every boxer in North India was in the house. Curious onlookers were lined up 20 rows deep in the plaza beyond the guest area, and another dozen rows packed the mall’s first floor balcony.

A hesitant cheer went up as the first fighter, Haryana heavyweight Vikas Hooda, was announced. A thin plume of fog sputtered from the smoke machine, then nothing, as Hooda jog-stepped through the archway and raised his fists in the air.

The thing was finally underway. Somebody must have told Hooda and Gurlal Singh that the fans wanted a knockout, because they hammered hooks to each other’s ribs with no more thought to defence than a couple guys chopping down trees. With the first big blows to the head – sweat flying like shooting stars under the lights – the crowd was hooked. After four workmanlike rounds, when Hooda, in his pro debut, was announced the winner, the emcee didn’t have to exhort the crowd to cheer.

Next up, 13-time All India amateur champion Dilbag Singh squared off against American Clinton Smith. It was the kind of mismatch typical for a top amateur’s debut in the pros – where the idea is to get your guy some easy wins and build up his reputation. Smith was listed in the programme as having 18 wins and 5 losses, but in fact he was a Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts fighter. A gristly, tattooed 39-year-old with a shaved head and goatee, he’d told me in the green room that he had five pro Muay Thai bouts, two MMA, but he’d “more or less never boxed before.” Once Dilbag figured that out, it was a matter of Smith being tough enough to avoid a knockout. By that measure, he acquitted himself well. Between rounds, a freshly mohawked Dilbag winked at the ring card girls and grinned at his buddies in the peanut gallery. Smith barely laid a glove on him.

By the time Delhi’s own Balbir Singh was introduced for his super bantamweight bout with Thailand’s Khunkhiri Wor Wisaruth, a veteran of 11 pro fights, the crowd had gotten into the swing of things. The loudest roar of the night rose as Balbir pranced out of the now functioning fog.

From the opening bell, it was clear Balbir didn’t think the stringy Wisaruth had the punching power to keep him off. He bullied the smaller Thai around the ring, winging wild punches and pushing Wisaruth to the ropes, until the Thai drew him into a clinch to get his bearings. When the Indian referee separated them, Balbir let go a hook that caught Wisaruth on the chin. The Thai stumbled back and dropped to the canvas, and the crowd went wild. Even by professional boxing’s more liberal rules, “hitting on the break” is illegal, and Balbir’s punch had the look of a premeditated, flagrant foul. But the Indian referee acted like nothing had happened and gave Wisaruth an eight count when he popped to his feet. For a second, disbelief passed over the Thai’s face, then the realization that he was in the stewpot for a bit of “home cooking” – a staple of professional boxing.

A minute later, Balbir floored him again, this time with a shoulder block, and again the referee pretended nothing was amiss. Wisaruth tried to stick and move after that, but Balbir put him on his back with a straight right in the second round, and seconds later, another right put Wisaruth down and out.

India’s first pro boxing card had its first KO.

Now for the main event: Neeraj Goyat vs Nelson Gulpe for the Asian welterweight championship.

A good-looking and charismatic kid with an easy smile and a mop of curly hair, Goyat was the reason the programme had come together. Unlike most Indian boxers, who quit the game as soon as they get a sports quota job, Goyat was hungry. Though he didn’t have the pedigree to match Dilbag and Balbir, at just 23 he had more years left in his prime. With six fights in China and Thailand, he was already India’s most experienced professional. And along with Dilbag, he’d inked a deal with Las Vegas-based Guilty Boxing to cover his living and training expenses. On the other hand, with two wins, two losses and two draws, he didn’t have the kind of record for people in the fight game to call him “a prospect”. And he hadn’t done anything to merit being invited to fight for the WBC’s vacant Asian welterweight title apart from being born in India. (At 8-4-0 and 3 KOs, Gulpe was a little more legit.)

“I’ve been fighting at super lightweight (63.5kg), but there was no vacant title in that weight class,” Goyat had told me a couple hours before fight time, tucked up to his chin under the blankets in his hotel room, Mujhse Dosti Karoge blaring from the TV. “That’s why I played welter weight this time.”

In the greater scheme of professional boxing, it’s a meaningless belt. The WBC Asia is to the WBC what Italian basketball is to the NBA, and even at boxing’s highest level, an alphabet soup of competing sanctioning bodies plague the sport (the World Boxing Association, the International Boxing Federation, the World Boxing Organization and on and on).

“It’s just to get India on the map,” said Kiwi referee Bruce McTavish, a veteran with more than 100 title fights on his resumé. “It’s showbiz.” But for Goyat, a win would mean an end to being treated like Smith or Wisaruth: “an opponent”, expected to lose. “After this event, people will come to me to fight,” Goyat told me. “Organizers will ask me to come to their countries. Sponsors will come to us.”

A victory might even earn Goyat a fight in Vegas. His promoter, Guilty Boxing chief executive Puneet Dureja, a non-resident Indian with 25 years experience in movie and television distribution, has purportedly signed a deal with America’s CBS Sports Network to stage a series of international fight cards featuring boxers from ten different countries over the next 12 months.

From the opening bell, Goyat took the fight to the taller Filipino, whose punches looked sluggish. Goyat pushed Gulpe back to negate his longer reach, but let Gulpe control the distance and ate a couple four-punch combinations for it. But in the end, he went back to crowding the Filipino, ducking and weaving when Gulpe tried to fire back. The strategy worked.

Compared to Balbir’s knockout, Goyat’s lopsided technical win, drawn out over 12 three-minute rounds, was an anti-climax. But in other respects, it was exactly what Shekhawat’s NIBA and the WBC needed.

When the scores were announced, Goyat’s supporters lifted him onto their shoulders in the centre of the ring and thrust a microphone into his hand.

“I’m India’s first professional boxing champion!” he shouted out in Hindi.

“If the fighters come prepared and the main event is handled in a professional manner, then it will be a success,” Cusick had told me the day before, and at that moment, a success is what it was. It was only a day or two later that the real cracks started to show. Rumours swirled that one of the main sponsors had reneged on a promise to provide ₹15 lakh and Shekhawat hadn’t been able to pay the fighters. Then Rahul Gokhale, of Serendipity Marketing, wrote me to accuse Shekhawat of stiffing him on two of the agreed ₹5 lakh fee for arranging the venue, promotional materials and managing the event.

“NIBA used my office infrastructure, manpower and consultation services for two months, and apart from that the event cost is also not paid. All commitments regarding the payment failed, and now everyone is absconding,” Gokhale wrote in an email.

Shekhawat took my call a few minutes later and assured me he was not absconding. He was very much in town, and had sent Gokhale a WhatsApp message offering to meet.

“I haven’t disappeared. I’m very near his home,” Shekhawat said.

He didn’t deny that they’d agreed on five lakhs. But he said he was withholding the final two lakhs because he wasn’t satisfied with the job Gokhale had done. Among the issues: Gokhale had promised an aluminium scaffold for the light system, but had provided an iron one; and the LED lights hadn’t been functioning for the first match. The crux of the matter, though, was the delay.

“The show was 90 minutes late. I was searching for him, where is Rahul, where is Rahul? He was nowhere to be found.”

Gokhale disagreed. “As far as I was concerned, the event was quite seamless,” he said. “Nothing went wrong.”

According to Cusick and McTavish, none of the foreign fighters complained that they had not received their money. However, it wasn’t clear if those amounts matched the sums that the team had bandied about in their discussions with me – which included match fees of as much as one lakh and post-fight bonuses ranging from₹50,000 to 5 lakh for the winner of the main event.

“As far as my purse I was given exactly what I was promised, no haggling,” Smith wrote in an email. “I am not at liberty to discuss [the] total... But I will say I hope they call me again.”

When I called Goyat, he was more cagey. The organizers had given a cheque for his match fee and the ₹5 lakh bonus for winning the title to a friend in Delhi. But he wasn’t bothered about cashing it, he claimed.

“I didn’t fight for the money. I fought to make history,” said Goyat. “This is the first professional boxing championship to be held in India. I don’t want it to be the last.”

Unpaid bills, dodgy match-ups, an incompetent-if-not-crooked referee — to the uninitiated, all that might sound a bit, well, unprofessional. But to the boxing cognoscenti, where this sort of scheming is more common than not, it may be a hint that Shekhawat and India’s newborn pro boxing industry may already be punching above their weight.

http://www.gqindia.com/get-smart/sports/indias-pro-boxing-gq-india

Meet India's child bride turned wrestling champ

By Jason Overdorf

GlobalPost (October 2015)

NEW DELHI, India — When the biggest female star in US martial arts, Ronda Rousey, announced that she was taking the fight to Hollywood this month, India’s latest wrestling heroine was most likely working in the fields or helping her two sons with their homework.

She is known only by her first name, Neetu — and she was once a child bride.

Forced into marriage with a 43-year-old, mentally challenged man by her cash-strapped parents when she was only 13,Neetu was the mother of twins before she turned 15. But she didn’t let an illegal child marriage or the repressive morals of her ultra-conservative village in the north Indian state of Haryana stop her. 

Against the wishes of her parents, Neetu left her husband less than a week after their wedding. Even though she was almost immediately remarried, she refused to give up, according to her interviews with Indian media. 

“Rowdy” Rousey would be proud.

Village elders barred Neetu from practicing at the local “akhara” — a training ground used by her town’s male wrestlers — because she was a girl. And her family didn’t want her to wrestle, either. So she used to sneak out of the house at 3 AM to go running so that she could be back at home before anyone else was awake, she told India’s NDTV. From tipping the scales at 176 pounds, she now weighs in at 105. 

Child marriage has been illegal in India since 1929, though definitions varied. In 1978 the legal age of marriage was raised from 15 to 18 for girls and from 18 to 21 for boys, where it stands today, and in 2006 the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act increased the penalties for adult men who marry underage girls or anyone who promotes, permits or solemnizes a marriage in which the bride or groom is underage.

But Neetu’s story illustrates an unfortunate failure in implementation, as tradition trumps the law. The International Center for Research on Women estimates that 47 percent of Indian girls are married before they turn 18 (though the number to wed before 15 has fallen). With its huge population, therefore, India has the most child brides of any country in the world — one third of the global total, according to UNICEF.

While the problem is most common in the states of Bihar and Rajasthan, Neetu’s home state of Haryana may be witnessingan uptick in the number of child brides. A cultural preference for male children has resulted in one of the most skewed gender ratios of any state in India, making brides a valuable commodity and raising the financial incentive for poor families to force girls into marriage. 

India has produced some of the world's top female wrestlers competing today, including Geetika Jakhar (top), also from Haryana state.

INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images

Now 21 years old, Neetu has tilled fields, worked a shop counter and sewn clothes to make ends meet, and even today she pretends to be a student to save on the fare for the hour-and-a-half bus journey from her village to the training center in the city of Rohtak.

“I became a mother at 14 and the family’s financial condition didn’t allow me to think about sport for the next two-three years,” Neetu told the Hindustan Times. 

Encouragement from coaches, as well as the example of Indian boxer and Olympic medalist Mary Kom, inspired her to return, she says.

“Finally, I started wrestling in 2011, and in 2014, I won my first medal in the Nationals.”

When she brought that first medal back to her village, the same village elders who’d barred her from the local training ground embraced her as their own homegrown champion. Her status as a local hero grew even further this August, when she represented India at the Junior World Championships in Brazil — even though she was eliminated in the first round.

Coach Mandeep Singh says that’s only the beginning. 

“She never wastes time,” he told NDTV. “She works very hard at her training. If she can improve her technique, the results will show.”

India's Hindus won't eat cows, but they might just drink their pee

HARIDWAR, Uttarakhand — In a concrete-block factory a few miles from one of the holiest spots on the Ganges, workers in hairnets and beanies slap caps on bottles zipping down an assembly line. A few feet further, another group sticks on no-nonsense, pharmaceutical-looking labels that read, “Divya Godhan Ark.” 

The room reverberates with a droning, mechanical whir, and it’s redolent with a distinctive smell — like when you first open a jar of multivitamins, combined with a gas station men’s room. 

That’s because the clear liquid in the bottles is purified cow’s urine — quite possibly the fastest growing alternative medicine in India these days.

“Cow’s urine is a diuretic. It helps in detoxification of the body, and many other beneficial effects are described in the Sanskrit scriptures, such as helping to expel excess bile,” says Anil Kumar, a vaidya — practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine — employed by the company Divya Pharmacy.

Since successive Indian governments stepped up their promotion of alternative medicine a decade or so ago, unproven health products and nutritional supplements made from cow milk, cow urine and cow dung have become huge business.

Already, Patanjali Yogpeeth, which owns Divya Pharmacy, collects hundreds of thousands of gallons of cow’s urine per day to be processed and packaged as facial cream, shampoo, soap, nasal drops, hair tonic and various medicines, press reports indicate.

Patanjali Ayurved, the brand’s parent company that makes everything from herbal cosmetics to juices to cornflakes, has estimated annual revenue of around $380 million, according to investment firm Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia. Other producers such as Calves N Leaves and Vedic Cow Products report year-on-year sales growth of 10 and 30 percent respectively. And it’s not just the masses buying it: Cow dung is giving tea tree oil a run for its money at posh stalls like The Thela (“the cart”) in some of the country’s biggest malls.

Pupils at Shree Swaminarayan Gurukul Vishwavidya Pratishthanam, a Hindu school in Ahmedabad, apply a holy paste made up of cow dung, cow urine, milk, ghee and curd before a sacred ceremony on August 24, 2010.

SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images

Bovine products are just the tip of a mammoth iceberg of soaps, lotions, ointments and medicines founded in ancient Indian texts.

But medical doctors warn they can be harmful, despite being “all natural,” and critics argue that the government is promoting alternative medicines without seeking to test their efficacy and develop them into modern treatments. 

Worse still, the focus on these unproven remedies may be detracting attention from the genuine crisis in the mainstream healthcare sector — where this year the government slashed federal funding in a bid to push responsibility onto the states.

Doctors complain that patients come to them when their cancer has progressed too far for surgery or when hepatitis has already resulted in liver failure, because they’ve spent weeks or months in the care of alternative practitioners. Meanwhile, as an ongoing outbreak of dengue fever in New Delhi has illustrated, the public health system is creaking its way toward abject failure, says Dr. Sumit Ray, vice chairman of critical care at the capital’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

People “are desperately looking for alternatives which are not expensive,” he said in a telephone interview. “That is understandable. The failure is on the part of the government.”

"IF YOU WANT TO SAVE YOURSELF FROM CANCER, THERE IS A NEED TO PROTECT COWS ON A PRIORITY BECAUSE COW URINE IS EFFECTIVE IN CURING CANCER COMPLETELY. IT CAN CURE CENT PER CENT. I CAN VOUCH FOR IT."SHANKARBHAI N. VEGAD, BJP MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

This summer, for example, Delhi’s worst-ever outbreak of dengue — a vector-borne illness spread by mosquitoes that spikes during the monsoon season — has resulted in some 7,600 infections and at least 25 deaths.

In this case, cow’s urine is not involved. But prices have spiked this monsoon season for products like goat’s milk and papaya leaves that some Ayurvedic doctors say can alleviate symptoms associated with dengue — even though medical doctors caution that they’re of little benefit.

Meanwhile facilities and personnel at government hospitals are dramatically overstretched. In some cases, hospitals have been compelled to put two or three children in one bed and set up cots on balconies to house the influx of dengue patients.

“It’s probably gotten worse [under the current government], because public health spending has actually decreased,” Ray said.

Though a program to standardize and promote traditional medicines has been in place since 1995, some see a direct connection with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist support base.

After Modi took power in May last year, the department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy, or AYUSH, was upgraded to ministry status in November. Despite spending just $105 million of the $195 million it was allotted as a department in 2014, this year the new ministry was awarded a budget of $185 million. Meanwhile federal funding for the National AIDS Control Organization, which also failed to spend all its 2014 funds, was cut to around $215 million from $275 million last year. (India has an estimated 2.1 million people living with HIV, representing the third-largest number of cases in the world.)

While investing in alternative medicines is not a bad idea in itself — in China, for example, research into traditional remedies resulted in the discovery of the anti-malarial drug artemisinin in the 1970s — critics point out that India’s program seems more oriented toward marketing than scientific research. 

A storekeeper displays a bottle of cough syrup made from cow urine on sale at his pharmacy in Ahmedabad, February 27, 2010.

SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images

Few, if any, studies have been published in respectable, peer-reviewed journals, they say. But that hasn’t stopped practitioners — and politicians — from making grandiose claims, in part because the rules governing such “supplements” are less stringent than those for allopathic medicines. 

“If you want to save yourself from cancer, there is a need to protect cows on a priority because cow urine is effective in curing cancer completely. It can cure [100] percent. I can vouch for it. Nobody wants to hear this,” Shankarbhai N. Vegad, a member of parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), announced to the upper house in March. 

And in January, the governor of Karnataka state, Vajubhai Rudabhai Vala, proclaimed that while allopathic medicine might control disease, only Ayurvedic medicine has the ability to cure it — permanently and without side effects. Meanwhile, high-profile practitioners have claimed that Ayurveda can treat dengue, epilepsy, AIDS and other serious conditions.

Advocates of Ayurveda do more than just talk. Last year, for instance, a bill was introduced that would have allowed AYUSH practitioners to perform abortions, if it had passed. Tuberculosis experts bemoan a decision to allow AYUSH practitioners in certain states with a shortage of medical doctors to prescribe antibiotics — saying bad prescriptions have contributed to a spike in antibiotic resistance. And AYUSH Minister Shripad Yesso Naik recently announced that five new universities of alternative medicine will be set up in the name of the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), despite the lack of scientific evidence for the principles they’ll be teaching. 

“India cannot be completely different from the rest of the world,” Ray said. “It’s been established that healthcare improves with increased spending on public healthcare and improved nutrition and sanitation.

“You can invest in alternative medicine, too. But more stress has to be on allopathic medicine.”

A woman piles cows dung onto a cart in the village of Luni in Gujurat state, June 5, 2013.

SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images

At Haridwar’s Divya Pharmacy, a unit of the Patanjali Ayurved group founded by a wildly popular television yoga guru known as Swami Ramdev, there’s some evidence the company is attempting a marriage of the two systems. 

In a hushed office that — apart from the portraits of the robed and bearded swami on the walls — looks as though it could belong to Merck or Pfizer, an employee fans out confidential studies on the chemical properties of cow’s urine, some conducted in house and others independently. One compares its efficacy in treating cancer with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin.

A quick scan of some of the publicly accessible research suggests that credible proof is a long way off. 

But perhaps one day we’ll discover that quaffing cow’s urine is not as crazy as it sounds. The estrogen treatment Premarin, after all, was developed from pregnant mare’s urine by the erstwhile Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical firm Wyeth in the 1940s.

The secret to saving India's plummeting camel population: Legalize their slaughter

An Indian camel trader stands with his camels at a traditional camel fair.

By Jason Overdorf 

GlobalPost (August 2015)

NEW DELHI, India — In a shaky video clip, a camel bellows in protest as a crane lifts it into a waiting panel truck bound for an underground slaughterhouse. In others, camels thrash with their throats slit, which ensures their flesh remains halal.

It's not pretty. But the trade in camel meat has surprising advocates in the western desert state of Rajasthan—where the export and slaughter of camels was banned this March.

For centuries, the Raika, a caste of camel breeders, have worshipped the hardy animal the way most Hindus revere the cow. But with the demise of the royal camel herds kept by the state's once-plentiful rajas and maharajas, followed by the replacement of camel carts with cheap cars and trucks, the few camel breeders that remain in Rajasthan worry that outlawing camel slaughter will ensure they disappear altogether.

That's because unlike wild animals, the continued survival of domesticated livestock depends on their profitability, argues Hanwant Singh Rathore, who runs a nonprofit called Lokhit Pashu Palak Sansthan, or "Welfare Organization for Livestock Keepers," that works closely with the Raika.

“Nobody is buying camels, so nobody is keeping camels,” Rathore said.

“If you're a young camel breeder, you can't find a wife, because you don't have any income.”

The Raika aren't the most surprising advocate of legalizing camel slaughter, however. That title belongs to the co-founder of LPPS, German veterinarian-turned-anthropologist Ilse Köhler-Rollefson. A tall, athletic-looking woman with wild, curly hair, Köhler-Rollefson came to India 25 years ago when unrest in Sudan forced her to abandon a research project involving the Bedouin.

At that time, India had the world's third-largest population of wild and domesticated camels, so it seemed a natural choice. But soon after she arrived, the anthropologist learned that India's main camel herders, a desert-dwelling caste called the Raika, were unlike the Bedouin or any other camel-based society she'd ever encountered. Moreover, their cultural taboos were rapidly causing the animal from which they'd always derived their identity to disappear.

Unlike the camel breeders of Africa and the Middle East, the Raika traditionally did not believe in slaughtering camels for meat, and historically only sold them for use as riding or draft animals. They thought selling camel's milk brought with it a plague of misfortunes ranging from drought to disease—even new grazing fees issued by the forest department. They consumed camel's milk themselves, of course. But the only real income they earned from them came from selling them at the huge annual livestock fair in Pushkar, where prices had plunged due to the growing affordability of trucks and tractors that replaced camels as a means of transport.

Since her first introduction to the Raika, the anthropologist has gone native. She's bought a camel. She's founded a non-profit trust for pastoralists. She's pioneered a milk-selling cooperative. She's led teams of bards and shepherds to Germany and Africa for international conferences, and she's undertaken a 500 mile camel trek across the state known as “the land of kings” to draw attention to the rapid decline in the camel population, which plunged from more than a million to fewer than 200,000 over the past 20 years.

Gradually, she and Rathore—who started out as her driver and made himself indispensable—have succeeded in convincing many Raika to break their cultural taboos, though they still don't like to talk about camel slaughter. But their dogged advocacy backfired earlier this year when their long campaign to get the camel declared Rajasthan's state animal finally bore fruit.

Instead of releasing grazing land controlled by the state forest department or encouraging camel's milk products, the government simply named the camel a protected animal, barring export and slaughter of the animals for meat.

“We were initially very happy, because we thought there would be all kinds of support for camel breeders,” Köhler-Rollefson said. “But exactly the opposite happened.”

Pressured by a signature campaign that attracted tens of thousands of animal rights activists, the government opted to apply the same approach to protecting the camel that Rajasthan and other states have used to protect cows—a subject that draws more pressure from Hindu groups. But anecdotal evidence already suggests that has been counterproductive, because it makes raising livestock unprofitable. Half of the animals born are males, which cannot be sold for as much as the cost to raise, since there is no legal market for their meat.

“If you have 150 female camels, you only need one male camel,” said Rathore, who points out that Rajasthan’s recent law also bans castration.

“If you have 10-15 male camels, they're fighting and killing each other."

Calling any potential move to normalize camel slaughter “a cop out,” Arpan Sharma, a spokesman for the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations (FIAPO), says Indian state governments should instead look for other ways to support breeders like the Raika.

“All of us have more than a full empathy with the plight of many such [people],” Sharma said. “But there is a moral and an ethical question, whether camels should pay the price.”

In principle, Köhler-Rollefson and Rathore agree. They just worry that alternatives to camel's meat aren't profitable enough.

The unlikely team, along with a group of die-hard Raika breeders, are fighting a rearguard action to save the state's camels and the Raika culture through the sale of products made with camel's wool and camel's milk. But even though a growing, if unproven, belief that nutrients in camel's milk can be beneficial to autistic children has driven Indian parents to go so far as to fly from Mumbai to Rajasthan on literal “milk runs,” Köhler-Rollefson fears there may not be any camels left by the time a viable mass market develops.

Currently, Rajasthan's milk cooperatives don't officially accept camel's milk—though they do so on the sly in times of shortage—and prices based on fat content prevent that from being a very profitable outlet.

News that the multi-billion dollar, Gujarat-based dairy cooperative Amul aims to add camel's milk to its product mix by the end of the year is more encouraging. But Köhler-Rollefson is skeptical that the initiative can succeed in Gujarat, due to its low number of camel breeders, and the issue of fat content.

That's why, to keep the herds alive, she and her Raika associates want Rajasthan to roll back the ban to allow the trade in male camels, as ugly as it may look on YouTube.

Supercharged Tuberculosis, Made in India

A patient with extensively drug-resistant TB flew from Mumbai to Chicago, and the deadly disease could become an infamous export due to problems in India's public health system
By Jason Overdorf

Scientific American (July 2015)

MUMBAI, India—On a drizzly Monday afternoon here a few weeks ago, patients crowded around a door in a hallway in P. D. Hinduja Hospital—a private, nonprofit facility that caters to around 350,000 people per year. There is a loud, steady roar of voices, and patients and nurses have to shoulder past one another to get through the door, which leads to the office of lung specialist Zarir Udwadia. The walls are clean and white, and the air carries the tangy smell of disinfectant.

Against one of those white walls a grizzled old man with a breathing tube in his nose lies moaning on a stretcher. Nearby, clutching a sheaf of prescriptions, the father of a sick college student tries to catch the attention of one of Udwadia's assisting physicians. Several families have traveled thousands of kilometers to be here. Many of these patients, like 19-year-old Nisha, an engineering student from the central state of Madhya Pradesh, have tuberculosis (TB). Nisha, who asked that her real name be withheld, has been treated for lung problems for more than a year, only to learn that inaccurate diagnoses and prescription errors have supercharged the disease rather than curing it. “My doctors kept on changing the drugs,” says Nisha. Dressed in jeans and a floral-print blouse and black Buddy Holly–style horn-rimmed glasses, she speaks in a bright, optimistic voice, although her battle with TB has left her anorexic-thin.

By exposing Nisha's TB to various drugs without wiping it out, her doctors just made it stronger, a problem that Udwadia—the doctor who first identified extreme drug resistance in the germ—and other health experts say is becoming increasingly widespread in India. Too few diagnostic laboratories, too many poorly-trained health practitioners and thousands of infected people living in crowded, unsanitary conditions has made India home to the world's largest epidemic of drug-resistant TB. More than two million Indians every year get the highly contagious disease, and a patient dies every two minutes. Around 62,000 of these people harbor TB that is immune to at least four types of drugs, according to the World Health Organization, and as many as 15,000 may have an even more dangerous type called “extensively drug-resistant” TB that fights off almost every antibiotic in the medical arsenal.

Now, difficult-to-kill TB is no longer just India's nightmare. In June U.S. health authorities confirmed that an Indian patient carried this extreme form of the infection, called XDR-TB, across the ocean to Chicago. The patient drove from there to visit relatives as far away as Tennessee and Missouri. Health officials in several states are tracking down everyone with whom the patient—who is now quarantined and being treated at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland—had prolonged contact. The disease can be cured in only 30 percent of patients and sometimes requires surgery to remove infected parts of lungs. Although TB’s slow rate of infection makes explosive epidemics unlikely, the Chicago episode shows how easy it might be for the illness to become a worldwide export.

Yet until recently Indian public health officials remained reluctant to admit there's a problem, says Nerges Mistry, director of the Mumbai-based Foundation for Medical Research. “They were always trying to deny it [existed],” she says. (Neither the head of India's Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) nor Mumbai's main tuberculosis control official—both of whom are new to their posts—responded to interview requests from Scientific American.)

Resisting a cure

Tuberculosis typically attacks the lungs, but can also develop in bones, the stomach or even the genitals. Unlike the Ebola virus, which can only be transmitted by direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, TB can be transmitted via coughing, in airborne droplets from an infected person, though experts say it's harder to catch than viruses like influenza or chicken pox. (However, in 2013 Scientific American reported that some TB strains may be getting more virulent.) The typical symptoms of a TB lung infection include fever, night sweats and a chronic, hacking cough.

For an ordinary infection, the WHO-mandated treatment includes lengthy treatment with a cocktail of antibiotics: a two-month course of rifampicin, isoniazid, pyrazinamide and ethambutol followed by a four-month regimen of isoniazid and rifampicin alone. If the patient fails to complete the treatment or the TB bacilli in her system is already immune to one of those antibiotics, however, then some of the germs will survive, adapt and grow stronger. Some the hardier organisms can survive to pass on drug-resistant traits to their progeny, and those traits then spread to a wider group of descendants. That means it's crucial to kill off the entire population with the first course of treatment and hunt down and kill off any resistors.

The WHO defines drug-resistant TB as a strain of bacteria immune to one of the first-line drugs used to treat the disease. Multidrug resistant TB, or MDR-TB, does not respond to the two most powerful drugs, isoniazid and rifampicin. Finally, XDR-TB is resistant to those two drugs, plus any fluoroquinolone and at least one of the three injectable second-line drugs, capreomycin, kanamycin and amikacin.

In Nisha’s case her doctors never tested her for drug resistance, so she underwent treatment for more than a year with compounds doomed to failure. As a result, she suffered side effects from the antibiotics—which included hearing loss and joint pain so severe she couldn't get out of bed—without being cured. Worse, her infection grew stronger.

What concerns TB specialists like Udwadia is that India has been creating thousands of Nishas this way. And although it has begun to respond to the problem, the reaction is too small and too slow. A slim, fastidious man with a sharp nose and a thick shock of black hair, Udwadia doesn't look like an alarmist. He wears a conformist's pinstriped dress shirt and red tie as he puts Nisha through a brief examination. But Mistry and other health experts from nongovernmental organizations say his original identification of alarmingly resistant disease strains, and his continued pressure on the medical community to do something about it, are among the biggest reasons that India's culture of denial is beginning to show some cracks.

The country’s resistance problems have arisen, paradoxically, because India has made great strides against the nonresistant form of the disease. Beginning in the 1990s India adopted a WHO-developed program called “Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course,” or DOTS. It is designed to ensure poorly educated patients in the developing world properly complete the six-month-long, first-line TB treatment. Through a huge network of volunteer “DOT providers” the RNTCP has managed to dispense the free treatment to corners of the country where the nearest hospital lies hundreds of kilometers away. It boosted the detection rate for new cases above 70 percent in 2010 and it is targeting 90 percent this year. And it has achieved a treatment success rate of 88 percent for the patients it identifies, according to RNTCP documents.

In other ways, however, India’s performance has been less than stellar. Although public health spending has risen steadily since 2000 the federal share is still less than $5 per person, a perilously low level.** As a result, the country has fewer than one doctor per 1,000 people and an even more dramatic shortage of laboratories that can test for TB resistance. DOTS cannot substitute for testing infrastructure. As recently as 2008, less than one percent of high-risk patients were tested to see if they were susceptible to various anti-TB drugs. And private sector doctors screened for TB with blood tests that were notorious for false positives.* These errors simply meant that frontline antibiotics were overused, and overuse is the classic recipe for developing resistance.Number of multidrug-resistant TB cases estimated among known TB patients, 2013. Source: WHO

In December 2011 Udwadia decided that he had seen enough. The laboratory at Hinduja—one of the few Indian labs equipped to perform drug-susceptibility testing—identified a fourth patient infected with TB that was impervious to all 12 of the first-line, second-line and last-resort drugs that the hospital had at its disposal. He dashed off a two-page note to the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, declaring an outbreak of what he called “totally drug-resistant TB.”

Italian scientists had made the same claim in 2006, and the bacteria’s capacity to develop drug-resistant strains was already well known. In a country that thought it was getting its TB problems under control, however, Udwadia’s article was as important as pulling the fire alarm when you see the building in flames.

The doctor, like the antibiotics he was trying to use, encountered resistance. WHO questioned the term “totally drug-resistant,” saying absolute imperviousness had not been demonstrated. The agency also hinted that Udwadia's laboratory results might be flawed. India's health ministry added doubts about the lab, noting that Hinduja Hospital had not received accreditation from the government to conduct drug-sensitivity tests for second-line drugs.

The dispute caught the attention of the press and the public. The Times of India and other newspapers launched lengthy discussions on the extent of drug resistance. Bollywood star Amir Khan devoted an hour-long episode of his wildly popular, Oprah-style talk show to Udwadia and TB. And other Indian medical experts came out to support him, accusing the health ministry of attacking the messenger. Citations of hisClinical Infectious Diseases article by other researchers skyrocketed.

The public outcry forced the government into action. It dramatically boosted the budget for the national tuberculosis control program and increased hospital and outreach staff fourfold. Authorities stopped using older, error-prone blood tests, and began a transition to molecular testing with new GeneXpert machines that identify genetic markers of resistant strains. Though still in short supply, the machines drastically reduced false positives and allowed doctors detect resistance to first-line drugs within two hours, rather than weeks. Where they've been implemented, the machines produce a fivefold increase in detection of rifampicin resistance, for instance, according to the largest Indian study to date. Cases that the machine flags as drug-resistant are referred to the district TB officer, and a committee of specialists decides on a treatment regime. “I don't think the push would have been sustainable if not for Zarir [Udwadia]'s reports in the newspapers,” Mistry says. “It forced people to come to terms with what was really happening in the city.”

An expanding problem

But machines alone will not solve the problem. Mumbai now boasts 18 GeneXpert machines. There are only 120 nationwide, though—not enough to test all patients suspected to have MDR-TB, as recommended by WHO. And even in Mumbai, government hospitals only conduct GeneXpert tests on patients that have failed to respond to the first two months of DOTS treatment, due to the high cost of the cartridges the machine uses.

Udwadia and other physicians voice a bigger concern. The GeneXpert test can only confirm resistance to rifampicin, they note. Because India doesn't have enough laboratories to conduct further drug-susceptibility tests, any patient flagged by the machines is immediately put on the national TB program recommended regimen for MDR-TB. This one-size-fits-all treatment does have an advantage; it makes it “easier for lower category people to supervise patients and easier for the patient to take the medicines regularly,” says Rajeshree Jadhav, chief medical officer at Mumbai's government-run Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya Hospital.

Yet the off-the-shelf regimen does not account for further, stronger drug resistance that has already spread in Mumbai. According to a yet unpublished study conducted by Udwadia and his colleagues at Hinduja, it would now only cure a third of the drug-resistant patients in the city. The rest would receive three or more useless drugs and thus become even more resistant. “In Mumbai it is absolutely critical to follow up GeneXpert with full drug-susceptibility testing,” says Madhukar Pai, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal and a leading TB researcher. “Otherwise, patients might get inadequate treatment.

Nor does the country have a good sense of how big the resistance problem really is. Because of the small number of diagnostic laboratories there's no way of knowing how the proportion of XDR-TB patients here compares with central Asian and eastern European countries like Lithuania—where nearly a quarter of MDR-TB patients actually have XDR-TB. But the sheer numbers of new TB infections every year, together with the tardy government response, suggest the problem may soon be larger here. A nationwide drug-resistance survey should provide more data in 2016, according to Pai. But the evidence that is available suggests XDR-TB will be “a sizeable fraction of all MDR” in cities like Mumbai—although it will remain low in rural areas.

If there are indeed many people with resistant germs, it heightens the chances of those pathogens leaving the country for the rest of the world. Nearly a million Indians traveled to the U.S. in 2014, compared with less than three million from all of central Asia. More and more middle-class Indians are being diagnosed with TB, and although the patient who carried XDR-TB to the U.S. was immediately placed in isolation, India has no provisions for quarantines or travel restrictions.

The risk of an epidemic outbreak from a single traveler is low, since TB is transmitted from person to person through prolonged, close contact. Moreover, the US has both the resources and tuberculosis control programs to react swiftly, according to Neil Schluger, chief of pulmonary medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and a specialist in TB. However, the worldwide migration of drug resistant strains does worry him a good deal. "It is like Ebola in slow motion. Potentially it is a huge public health problem,” says Schluger, but it is likely to creep along rather than explode.

A difficult future

In India, the troubling situation is not without hope Udwadia has found that some XDR-TB strains can be treated with a cocktail of drugs including the broad-spectrum antibiotic meropenem–clavulanate and the antileprosy medications linezolid and clofazamine. Johnson & Johnson's bedaquiline, the first novel TB treatment to be released in some 40 years, can also be effective. But the chances of survival using bedaquiline are less than 50–50, depending on the severity of drug-resistance and how early treatment begins. The treatment is grueling because the drug itself is highly toxic. It has not yet been approved for use in India, so Udwadia has to lodge individual requests to treat each patient on what is called “compassionate basis.”

Whereas regular DOTS patients undergo a short course of chemotherapy, MDR- and XDR-TB patients may be subjected to it for as long as two years. Radical lung surgery is sometimes also required. And other second-line medications frequently cause nausea, joint pain, hearing failure and depression so severe that suicide is not uncommon.

In Udwadia’s office a stocky, lower-middle-class woman who asked to be called Vanita (not her real name) says she was diagnosed with XDR-TB some four years after she was first treated with DOTS. For months she has been striving to eat better so that she is strong enough to withstand bedaquiline. She is too shy to express her relief when one of Udwadia's assistants tells her that she's finally met the health criteria. But her eyes shine with grateful tears above the green cloth mask covering her mouth and nose. And her doctor, who pushed the concept of total resistance, insists that particular adjective does not determine fate. “‘Total’ never means ‘totally doomed,’” Udwadia says.

Inside India's Zodiac Murders

By Jason Overdorf
Newsweek (July 2015)

Kurapati Nagaraju is one of India’s wealthiest astrologers. He’s also very lucky. Several months ago, two gunmen on motorcycles skidded to a halt near his house, pumped three bullets into his gut and fled. Rushed to the hospital, Nagaraju survived—only to be jailed on murder charges.

Three of Nagaraju’s relatives—also wealthy astrologers—were much less fortunate. Last year, they were bumping down the highway outside of town when a Toyota minivan swung in behind them. Then it accelerated, roaring past the astrologers' Chevy and forcing it off the road. Three contract killers jumped out and sprayed the Chevy with bullets, killing everyone but the driver.

The victims should have seen it coming—and not because they were astrologers. A few months earlier, Nagaraju and his Gandham clan allegedly arranged the brutal murder of Durga Rao, the charismatic scion of the rival Buthams, and Durga’s relatives vowed revenge, according to a local police report. In separate reports, the police say Butham family members are suspects in the attempt on Nagaraju’s life and the murder of his relatives. Nagaraju has yet to face trial and says his enemies have framed him, according to a local prosecutor.

It’s suddenly dangerous to be a prosperous prognosticator in this country. In recent years, as astrologers and gurus have emerged as fixers and go-betweens for India's often-corrupt politicians, violence has grown increasingly common in that line of work. In 2012, hitmen dressed as police officers gunned down an astrologer who advised powerful politicians in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His murder, police say, was the result of disputes with rival kingmakers over local elections and construction contracts.

In the neighboring state of Haryana, a guru—who critics say operated with impunity for years because politicians relied on him to deliver votes from his devotees—faces charges of rape, murder and fraud, among other things. (He says his enemies fabricated the charges.) And last year, another Haryana guru barricaded himself in a compound with as many as 15,000 followers to avoid being arrested on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder, in connection with a clash between his group and another sect. He, too, is said to have long enjoyed the support of local politicians.

Residents say the Buthams and Gandhams also have enough clout to call in small favors from state-level politicians. And the bloodshed between the two families in the village of Pinakadimi, the police say, seems to be the result of that battle for money and influence. As one local police source, who asked for anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press, put it, “Durga and his rival Nagaraju were vying for control of the local political machine.”

The Untouchable Astrologers

In a sign of the astrologers' new wealth, many villagers have multistory homes rather than the simple huts common in Indian villages. The garish pink houses of the Buthams and the gaudy blue homes of the Gandhams have satellite dishes and are decorated with expensive enamel tiles. Both families have set up lucrative fortune-telling businesses in Mumbai, New Delhi and other major Indian cities, and make frequent trips to meet clients in Australia, Japan and Singapore, among other places. Their customers, according to local journalists, include international businessman Lakshmi Mittal, as well as top local politicians and film stars.At first glance, Pinakadimi looks like a typical South Indian hamlet. Not far from the ditch where assassins threw Durga’s body, a handful of water buffalo amble across the village’s main street, a narrow dirt road. Piles of harvested corn dry in the sun in the adjacent field. But Pinakadimi is not a typical town; it’s known as “the village of the astrologers,” as many of its 500-odd families earn their living through astrology and fortune-telling, catering to clients across the country and even overseas. Not long after I arrive, a slim man with a neat mustache accosts me and offers an impromptu reading. “You will be rich,” he says. “You will have two wives and five children.” (He's zero for three so far, but I'm only 44.)

The rise of the two families represents a remarkable leap across caste barriers, experts say. For centuries, astrology was the domain of high-caste Brahmins. Traced to the ancient Hindu texts known as the Vedas, it was a priestly discipline, used for matchmaking and to identify auspicious days for weddings. So-called “remedial astrology”—which involves the sales of gems, charms and rituals as remedies to counter bad planetary alignments—is a more lucrative offshoot (astrologers sell both trinkets and advice). Such services were not available to the lowest castes, however, because the Brahmin priests considered them untouchable. So the Jangalu caste, which the Buthams and Gandhams belong to, had a vast audience for their predictions, rituals and remedies.

As long as that audience remained poor, the itinerant fortune-tellers couldn’t make much of a living. But since the 1990s, the lower castes have become a potent social and political force. The erstwhile untouchables and menial laboring castes together make up more than half of India’s population and have given rise to regional parties that have displaced both the Indian National Congress Party and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party—the country’s dominant political groups—in half a dozen states. This shift shrugged off centuries of prejudice, but it has created a Boss Tweed-style patronage system, as lower-caste leaders distributed contracts and government jobs to garner support.

Gandham clans is rooted in a fight for the spoils, police say. Already rivals in the astrology business and real estate speculation, the two families had also become embroiled in a long-running dispute, the result of a Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance gone wrong. In defiance of the traditional arranged marriages, Nagaraju’s niece ran away with Durga's nephew in 2006. After heated negotiations, the families reluctantly agreed to let the young couple marry. But there was no happily ever after.

Not long after the wedding, the relationship fell apart, and the marriage’s demise deepened the enmity between the two families and ended any hopes they might share political power. Both families donated heavily to rival campaigns for the local state assembly, and before the killings began last year, they backed competing candidates to head the local village council, a key conduit for government-funded projects. “The Gandhams were jealous of [Durga] because of his popularity,” says his widow, Tirupathamma. “He was always generous to the people of the village, and people of all communities came to him for help and advice.”

The police paint a less flattering portrait. Just before the local polls, Durga apparently ditched the candidate he'd been supporting in the race for village council chief and threw his money and support behind another man, said the local police officer. Police say the maneuver may also have been part of the motive for the attack.

‘He Was Covered in Blood’

Today, Tirupathamma is living under police protection. A solidly built woman with a broad face and long hair, she wears a bright-green sari printed with purple flowers and a dozen red and gold bangles on both wrists when I meet her on the porch of a massive bungalow. Standing between two armed police officers, she produces a smartphone and swipes through a series of professional-looking photos of her husband—a strikingly handsome man with the wavy, swept-back hair of a South Indian film star. Wearing black aviators and a tight-fitting shirt, he strides boldly toward the camera in one of the pics. In another, embossed with the Michael Jackson's name, he poses like the singer.

Tirupathamma's voice cracks and her eyelids flutter as she describes the night her husband was killed. (The police say at least four attackers stabbed him 16 times.) After his usual dinner of an apple and two chapatis, a type of unleavened bread, Durga went for a walk. Tirupathamma was washing the dishes when she heard people shouting outside. She stepped onto her balcony to see what was going on. “Durga has been attacked,” one of the villagers shouted. Durga's brother went out to find him, Tirupathamma says. When he came back, he was covered in blood. “He told me that Durga had been murdered, and he collapsed on the ground.”

Nagaraju’s first hearing is slated for August, at which time he’ll apply for bail. The trial itself may drag on for decades, due to the Indian court system’s glacial pace. For Tirupathamma, the resolution can’t come soon enough. As she speaks, a tear rolls down her cheek. “I vowed that I will not begin mourning until all my husband's killers have been eliminated.”

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/07/10/indias-zodiac-killers-349280.html