Can a business model made famous by McDonalds revolutionize Indian education?
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 24, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — In a typical Delhi slum, sewage overflows from the drain alongside the street and scraps of colored paper and empty bottles tumble in the foul wind. Here and there, a spindly boy in threadbare briefs fetches water from the hand-pump and a baby, her eyes blacked with kohl, plays happily in the grime.
It's not an easy place to live. But even here, Ramesh Singh, a bicycle rickshaw driver, opted to send his son, Dhiraj, to a bare-bones private school when a pilot program for school vouchers gave him the chance several years ago.
“You saw when the teacher tested him,” Ramesh said. “He finished class three in government school, and he can't read anything!”
Rich or poor, Indians are abandoning the country's disastrously managed government-run schools in droves. Only about two-thirds of India's school-age children attend classes at all, and the fierce competition for places at private institutes means that waiting lists are enormous and it's difficult to win admission to any without pulling strings.
More discouraging still, because of its demographics India will need to build another 250,000 schools to meet its goal of universal enrollment by 2015. But that means there's a big opportunity, as well, some investors believe: India could well be the first country in the modern world where the business of educating kids from kindergarten through high school is, well, a business. Meet the would-be chain store of education: the Indus World School (IWS).
The school that Ramesh chose for Dhiraj, called R.S. Public School in homage to the legacy of Eton and Harrow, was not part of IWS or any other big corporation. When I visited the place, the paint was crumbling off the concrete walls. Its barred windows give it an aspect more penal than pedantic, and the children in the courtyard were forced to squint and shield their eyes against a fine grit whipped across the compound by the wind.
Still, at $6 a month, it cost less than the voucher that Ramesh received as part of a pilot program run by the Center for Civil Society, and the teachers actually showed up for work. Corporation-run chain schools would institute higher standards — perhaps even pioneering the franchise model in education.
"India needs entrepreneurs and organizations who are willing to build a scalable execution model of schools," said Satya Narayanan, chairman of Career Launcher. "In terms of numbers, these could translate into a chain of hundreds of schools over a five to seven year period."
With 14 schools in operation, mostly in second-tier cities but also including five rural schools, Indus World School has made a good start.
Earlier this year, the company secured second round financing from Gaja Capital Partners and sold an additional, undisclosed stake to Housing Development Finance Corp. for around $10 million — suggesting that the snowball is beginning to roll downhill. According to Narayanan, IWS hopes to operate 75 schools with over 40,000 students in five years time, which could pave the way for a wave of followers.
According to the entrepreneur, at least a dozen of India's large corporations are discussing similar ventures or investments. But the blue ocean market — 250,000 schools! — means he won't need to worry much about competition for bodies.
Nevertheless, Narayanan aims to make sure innovation isn't limited to the business model.
The company is steadily developing its own intellectual property for the curriculum, with a focus on age-appropriate linkages to career aspirations and higher education goals — music to the ears of middle-class Indian parents.
And the connection with Career Launcher — a test prep and college admissions advisory company that serves 100,000 from 225 outlets — ensures that IWS understands its target customers and their goals.
Can for-profit chain schools really step in where the state has failed — especially for students like Dhiraj Singh, whose parents can't afford to pay more than a pittance?
Studies of tiny, grassroots private schools and school vouchers suggest that the answer may be yes. So far IWS, like most elite Indian schools, offers scholarships for only a few hundred students. But the gathering momentum of the country's recently passed Right to Education law (RTE) could free up funds for private players.
"The RTE needs to be given an operating framework from the current 'intent' state," said Narayanan. "We can contribute immensely to [uplifting the poor] in just a generation if we can implement RTE smartly!"
Monday, October 24, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
In India, customers want the luxe life
Gandhi's homespun cloth or haute-couture? India goes up-market
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 12, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — When one of India's largest real-estate developers opened DLF Emporio — an exclusive shopping mall devoted to fashion designers and international luxury brands — the mall charged would-be patrons a stiff fee just to get through the doors.
The charge was about the equivalent of a week's salary for many Indians. The customers poured in anyway.
These days, the mall doesn't charge admission. But from the looks of things, it could still get away with it.
Even as the government debates whether 32 rupees a day (or about $0.65) is enough to survive on, the sellers of the world's most expensive and ostentatious brands are doing a booming business in India — a land whose most cherished idol once dressed in a loincloth stitched out of cotton thread he spun himself.
“The traffic in the mall has increased incredibly, because it's one of its kind in India,” said a salesman at Louis Vuitton's Emporio outlet. “We have all the luxury brands in a single location. That's a big advantage.”
Louis Vuitton, Ermenegildo Zegna and company aren't just for socialites and Bollywood stars anymore. Luxury retailers in New Delhi say that in India's major metropolitan cities, the market has expanded to include people from all professional backgrounds, and India's growing, and aspiring, middle class.
“We have a number of customers who come in to experience the store, even buying a belt or a shirt,” said a saleswoman at Ermenegildo Zegna. “We have a mix of customers. Yes, we do have lawyers who are looking for a business suit, but there are also people who need formal wear for social occasions.”
Clearly, the days when Mohandas Gandhi urged Indians to spin their own yarn and sew their own clothes are long gone.
Despite the economic downturn of the past year, India's market for luxury goods grew 20 percent last year to reach around $5.8 billion as top brands penetrated second-tier cities like Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad, according to a new study conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the global consultancy AT Kearney.
As the Hindu festival of Diwali approaches, and India enters the busiest shopping season of the year, CII and AT Kearney forecast that the country's luxury market will grow to $14.7 billion by 2015, despite continuing problems with infrastructure and curbs on foreign investment, the report said.
That's because even though the economy has slowed somewhat as the central bank works to rein in inflation, consumer confidence in India remains at an all-time high. In a recent survey conducted by Mastercard, for instance, more consumers in India were planning to buy luxury goods over the next year than in any other country in the Asia Pacific region, apart from Singapore — where the per-capita income is more than ten times higher.
“The kind of spending power people have is expanding, so Armani and Gucci is no longer a dream,” said Bhauya Nagpal, a salesman for Jimmy Choo.
According to CII and AT Kearney, jewellery, electronics, cars and fine-dining grew faster than expected, while apparel, accessories, wines and spirits have continued their strong growth. The market for jewelry, for example, grew 30 percent, compared with an expected 20 percent jump, while the fine-dining segment grew 40 percent versus expectations of a modest 10 percent blip.
That makes India the surprising darling of retailers combatting flagging sales in their traditional cash-cow markets in Europe and the U.S. Already, nearly all of the world's luxury brands are competing for a slice of India's new wealth, though currently the law limits foreign investment in single-brand retail businesses to 51 percent. Retailing experts say global brands will launch some 200 stores devoted to luxury brands by 2020.
Rolls-Royce sold 80 cars here last year, while Ferrari entered the market in May.
Zegna has tapped the haute Indian wedding market with a special “guru collection” of Nehru suits — named after Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the architect of its socialist economic policies — that run around $3,500. French apparel-maker Hermes unveiled a new range of limited-edition saris starting at $6,000 a pop over the weekend.
And even Paris Hilton recently visited the country to launch a luxury boutique that will sell her personal line of fragrances, handbags and apparel in Mumbai.
So what would Nehru think of the country's enthusiastic embrace of ostentation? Not so much, one expects. With more than 3 million wealthy households, India now has more affluent families than any European country, but the annual average income remains around $3,500. That's just enough for Zegna's take on Nehru's signature suit.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 12, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — When one of India's largest real-estate developers opened DLF Emporio — an exclusive shopping mall devoted to fashion designers and international luxury brands — the mall charged would-be patrons a stiff fee just to get through the doors.
The charge was about the equivalent of a week's salary for many Indians. The customers poured in anyway.
These days, the mall doesn't charge admission. But from the looks of things, it could still get away with it.
Even as the government debates whether 32 rupees a day (or about $0.65) is enough to survive on, the sellers of the world's most expensive and ostentatious brands are doing a booming business in India — a land whose most cherished idol once dressed in a loincloth stitched out of cotton thread he spun himself.
“The traffic in the mall has increased incredibly, because it's one of its kind in India,” said a salesman at Louis Vuitton's Emporio outlet. “We have all the luxury brands in a single location. That's a big advantage.”
Louis Vuitton, Ermenegildo Zegna and company aren't just for socialites and Bollywood stars anymore. Luxury retailers in New Delhi say that in India's major metropolitan cities, the market has expanded to include people from all professional backgrounds, and India's growing, and aspiring, middle class.
“We have a number of customers who come in to experience the store, even buying a belt or a shirt,” said a saleswoman at Ermenegildo Zegna. “We have a mix of customers. Yes, we do have lawyers who are looking for a business suit, but there are also people who need formal wear for social occasions.”
Clearly, the days when Mohandas Gandhi urged Indians to spin their own yarn and sew their own clothes are long gone.
Despite the economic downturn of the past year, India's market for luxury goods grew 20 percent last year to reach around $5.8 billion as top brands penetrated second-tier cities like Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad, according to a new study conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the global consultancy AT Kearney.
As the Hindu festival of Diwali approaches, and India enters the busiest shopping season of the year, CII and AT Kearney forecast that the country's luxury market will grow to $14.7 billion by 2015, despite continuing problems with infrastructure and curbs on foreign investment, the report said.
That's because even though the economy has slowed somewhat as the central bank works to rein in inflation, consumer confidence in India remains at an all-time high. In a recent survey conducted by Mastercard, for instance, more consumers in India were planning to buy luxury goods over the next year than in any other country in the Asia Pacific region, apart from Singapore — where the per-capita income is more than ten times higher.
“The kind of spending power people have is expanding, so Armani and Gucci is no longer a dream,” said Bhauya Nagpal, a salesman for Jimmy Choo.
According to CII and AT Kearney, jewellery, electronics, cars and fine-dining grew faster than expected, while apparel, accessories, wines and spirits have continued their strong growth. The market for jewelry, for example, grew 30 percent, compared with an expected 20 percent jump, while the fine-dining segment grew 40 percent versus expectations of a modest 10 percent blip.
That makes India the surprising darling of retailers combatting flagging sales in their traditional cash-cow markets in Europe and the U.S. Already, nearly all of the world's luxury brands are competing for a slice of India's new wealth, though currently the law limits foreign investment in single-brand retail businesses to 51 percent. Retailing experts say global brands will launch some 200 stores devoted to luxury brands by 2020.
Rolls-Royce sold 80 cars here last year, while Ferrari entered the market in May.
Zegna has tapped the haute Indian wedding market with a special “guru collection” of Nehru suits — named after Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the architect of its socialist economic policies — that run around $3,500. French apparel-maker Hermes unveiled a new range of limited-edition saris starting at $6,000 a pop over the weekend.
And even Paris Hilton recently visited the country to launch a luxury boutique that will sell her personal line of fragrances, handbags and apparel in Mumbai.
So what would Nehru think of the country's enthusiastic embrace of ostentation? Not so much, one expects. With more than 3 million wealthy households, India now has more affluent families than any European country, but the annual average income remains around $3,500. That's just enough for Zegna's take on Nehru's signature suit.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Blood diamonds: India plays the middleman
Conflict diamonds threaten Surat's booming polishing business.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 6, 2011
SURAT, India — This summer, the authorities in Surat, the commercial capital of the state of Gujarat, arrested two smugglers attempting to sell nearly a million dollars in so-called blood diamonds.
Close on the heels of similar busts, the arrest again raised fears that the chaotic conditions making this small city on India's Arabian coast the world's new diamond-polishing hub may also make it one of the weakest links in the fight to stop overlords from financing armies with the precious stones.
“Every month, diamonds are coming from Zimbabwe without a Kimberley Process Certificate (KPC),” said Kirti Shah, an elected official of the Surat municipal corporation who is also a diamond trader.
“But I'm the only person in the diamond market who will talk about it openly.”
Once known for processing small, cheap stones, Surat has gradually replaced Antwerp as the center for cutting and polishing nearly all of the world's rough diamonds — as local traders have invested heavily in technology and infrastructure to compete for large, flawless stones. (Antwerp remains a go-to for shoppers.)
Yet even as local factories have installed cutting-edge, laser-guided planning and marking software and the latest grinding and polishing machines, Surat's main advantage over polishers in Belgium and Israel remains its cheap labor force and a centuries-old, trust-based system of trading that keeps transaction costs low.
Every day, trading houses small and large rely on couriers to hand-carry millions of dollars worth of diamonds to Surat from Mumbai on local trains — with no protection but anonymity.
In Surat's markets, diamonds change hands on the street and zip back and forth across the city by motorcycle as traders haggle over prices. When a sale is finally made, nine times out of 10 the deal is done in cash, with nothing but a hand-written chit to record the transaction.
Last year, $30 billion worth of stones passed through this city, according to the Gem & Jewelry Export Promotion Council. That's 11 out of 12 of the world's diamonds.
And while there are no reliable estimates, it stands to reason that if nearly all of the world's legal diamonds make their way here, a good portion of the conflict diamonds do, too.
“It's a very big market,” said a senior investigator in the local branch of the directorate of revenue intelligence — the outfit responsible for combating smuggling, counterfeiting and other economic crimes. “So many brokers are trading on the pavement itself. It's very difficult to monitor.”
Diamond traders say that local press reports claiming that conflict diamonds comprise 15 to 30 percent of the market (citing unnamed sources) have exaggerated the problem. But with some 5,000 polishing units — around 1,500 of them tiny cottage industries scattered throughout the state — it's patently impossible to track each and every stone.
“This not a problem only for Surat, or only for India. It's a problem around the world,” said Damji Mavani, secretary of the Surat Diamond Association, which conducts seminars and other programs to raise awareness about conflict diamonds.
According to the revenue intelligence officer, who is not authorized to be quoted by name in the media, Indian revenue officials have only been monitoring the diamond trade since 2008, because diamond imports are not taxed.
Since the authorities began tracking the business, however, they have already busted traders with three consignments of blood diamonds, each valued around $1 million or more. In September 2008, revenue intelligence officials arrested two Lebanese men — Robai Hussain and Yusuf Ossely — with 3,600 carats in rough diamonds worth around $875,000 at the time.
This April, they caught two Indians — Jora and Prema Desai — allegedly attempting to sell 48,000 carats of conflict diamonds from Zimbabwe worth more than $2 million. And in August, Indian authorities arrested an Indian trader named Pravin Ajudiya and a Congolese national named Jean Tshinaga with some 10,000 carats in alleged blood diamonds valued around $950,000.
Writing in India Today magazine, journalist Shantanu Guha Ray recently cited local traders as saying that such conflict diamonds routinely come to Surat on dhows sailing from Dubai. But in each of the three cases broken by Indian officials, the alleged smugglers hand-carried the rough stones on international flights and were caught because of tips from local informants, the senior revenue official said.
“There may be many such carriers,” the revenue intelligence officer said. “But unless and until we get information, we cannot catch them.”
For opponents of the trade in conflict diamonds, India's frontier-style market presents a serious problem, mainly because the entire interdiction system hinges on documentation.
Since 2003, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has made it mandatory for diamond exporters to document every shipment of rough stones to certify that they do not come from conflict zones. According to the Diamond Trading Corporation — a subsidiary of De Beers, the world's largest diamond company — the scheme has ensured that blood diamonds account for less than 1 percent of the global trade, compared with 15 percent before there was any monitoring system.
But others are less sanguine about the certification scheme's success. Once a diamond is cut and polished, there's virtually no way to trace its origin, though a handful of retailers have tried to set up a method that would allow buyers to do so.
Meanwhile, the main market for cut diamonds is increasingly moving to countries like India and China, where the idea of “ethical consumerism” is even less common than it is in richer nations.
Last year, as the U.S. economy languished, around 70 percent of India's gem and jewelry exports went to diamond traders Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.
“Essentially, illicit diamonds that bypass the early stages of the Kimberley Process (such as those from Gabon and Cameroon, or those smuggled from Cote d'Ivoire, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe) can be laundered through willing companies in the cutting and polishing industry,” Ian Smillie, chairman of the Diamond Development Initiative, wrote in a recent report.
“Arrests and the seizure of uncertified rough diamonds in the United States, the European Union, India and elsewhere demonstrate what may be the tip on an iceberg, one that the [Kimberly Process] has been unwilling to acknowledge or deal with.”
Non-governmental organizations like Diamond Development Initiative, Amnesty International and Global Witness have repeatedly criticized the Kimberley Process for failing to plug loopholes in the system, and, worse, for failing to crack down on offenders like Venezuela, Guinea, Lebanon and Zimbabwe.
But faith in the Kimberely Process has recently fallen to a new low. Activists walked out of a key meeting in June in what Global Witness termed a “vote of no confidence” triggered by a deal to allow Zimbabwe to sell diamonds from its violence-plagued Marange fields that “does not contain sufficient checks and balances to prevent substantial volumes of illicit diamonds from entering the global diamond supply chain.”
According to India Today, the deal allowed the Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Limited, a consortium of 1,500 diamond traders, to directly source rough diamonds from miners in Zimbabwe, making it more difficult for the Kimberley Process to track the stones.
Last year, Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Limited and the Zimbabwe government signed an agreement for the regular supply of diamonds worth $1.2 billion a year in exchange for training Zimbabweans in Surat's diamond-processing units, the magazine reported in May.
Many of those stones will doubtless wind up in Surat's “Mini Bazaar” — a small outpost compared to the main market in Mahidharpura, where there are some 50,000 traders, according to a local broker.
On a typical weekday afternoon here, hundreds of diamond brokers line the street. Clad in the standard cheap polyblend slacks, button-down shirt and rubber sandals, they sit on the back of motorcycles and on stoops, lean against shopfronts or squat on their heels, farmer-style, on the curb.
Behind them, in open-air shops, dozens of traders sit cross-legged behind rows of tiny desks, examining sachets of glittering stones with tiny jeweler's loupes.
If the roughs they came from once had blood on them, nobody would be the wiser, judging from the way polished stones change hands.
“Hello, hello, gentleman,” a local trader calls out from behind a tiny desk. Keen to make a sale, he spills a sparkling pile of half-carat diamonds onto the table from a paper sachet.
“All the documents are in Mumbai only, so there is no need to look at them,” he says when asked whether they are legal. “We buy the diamonds on trust.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 6, 2011
SURAT, India — This summer, the authorities in Surat, the commercial capital of the state of Gujarat, arrested two smugglers attempting to sell nearly a million dollars in so-called blood diamonds.
Close on the heels of similar busts, the arrest again raised fears that the chaotic conditions making this small city on India's Arabian coast the world's new diamond-polishing hub may also make it one of the weakest links in the fight to stop overlords from financing armies with the precious stones.
“Every month, diamonds are coming from Zimbabwe without a Kimberley Process Certificate (KPC),” said Kirti Shah, an elected official of the Surat municipal corporation who is also a diamond trader.
“But I'm the only person in the diamond market who will talk about it openly.”
Once known for processing small, cheap stones, Surat has gradually replaced Antwerp as the center for cutting and polishing nearly all of the world's rough diamonds — as local traders have invested heavily in technology and infrastructure to compete for large, flawless stones. (Antwerp remains a go-to for shoppers.)
Yet even as local factories have installed cutting-edge, laser-guided planning and marking software and the latest grinding and polishing machines, Surat's main advantage over polishers in Belgium and Israel remains its cheap labor force and a centuries-old, trust-based system of trading that keeps transaction costs low.
Every day, trading houses small and large rely on couriers to hand-carry millions of dollars worth of diamonds to Surat from Mumbai on local trains — with no protection but anonymity.
In Surat's markets, diamonds change hands on the street and zip back and forth across the city by motorcycle as traders haggle over prices. When a sale is finally made, nine times out of 10 the deal is done in cash, with nothing but a hand-written chit to record the transaction.
Last year, $30 billion worth of stones passed through this city, according to the Gem & Jewelry Export Promotion Council. That's 11 out of 12 of the world's diamonds.
And while there are no reliable estimates, it stands to reason that if nearly all of the world's legal diamonds make their way here, a good portion of the conflict diamonds do, too.
“It's a very big market,” said a senior investigator in the local branch of the directorate of revenue intelligence — the outfit responsible for combating smuggling, counterfeiting and other economic crimes. “So many brokers are trading on the pavement itself. It's very difficult to monitor.”
Diamond traders say that local press reports claiming that conflict diamonds comprise 15 to 30 percent of the market (citing unnamed sources) have exaggerated the problem. But with some 5,000 polishing units — around 1,500 of them tiny cottage industries scattered throughout the state — it's patently impossible to track each and every stone.
“This not a problem only for Surat, or only for India. It's a problem around the world,” said Damji Mavani, secretary of the Surat Diamond Association, which conducts seminars and other programs to raise awareness about conflict diamonds.
According to the revenue intelligence officer, who is not authorized to be quoted by name in the media, Indian revenue officials have only been monitoring the diamond trade since 2008, because diamond imports are not taxed.
Since the authorities began tracking the business, however, they have already busted traders with three consignments of blood diamonds, each valued around $1 million or more. In September 2008, revenue intelligence officials arrested two Lebanese men — Robai Hussain and Yusuf Ossely — with 3,600 carats in rough diamonds worth around $875,000 at the time.
This April, they caught two Indians — Jora and Prema Desai — allegedly attempting to sell 48,000 carats of conflict diamonds from Zimbabwe worth more than $2 million. And in August, Indian authorities arrested an Indian trader named Pravin Ajudiya and a Congolese national named Jean Tshinaga with some 10,000 carats in alleged blood diamonds valued around $950,000.
Writing in India Today magazine, journalist Shantanu Guha Ray recently cited local traders as saying that such conflict diamonds routinely come to Surat on dhows sailing from Dubai. But in each of the three cases broken by Indian officials, the alleged smugglers hand-carried the rough stones on international flights and were caught because of tips from local informants, the senior revenue official said.
“There may be many such carriers,” the revenue intelligence officer said. “But unless and until we get information, we cannot catch them.”
For opponents of the trade in conflict diamonds, India's frontier-style market presents a serious problem, mainly because the entire interdiction system hinges on documentation.
Since 2003, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme has made it mandatory for diamond exporters to document every shipment of rough stones to certify that they do not come from conflict zones. According to the Diamond Trading Corporation — a subsidiary of De Beers, the world's largest diamond company — the scheme has ensured that blood diamonds account for less than 1 percent of the global trade, compared with 15 percent before there was any monitoring system.
But others are less sanguine about the certification scheme's success. Once a diamond is cut and polished, there's virtually no way to trace its origin, though a handful of retailers have tried to set up a method that would allow buyers to do so.
Meanwhile, the main market for cut diamonds is increasingly moving to countries like India and China, where the idea of “ethical consumerism” is even less common than it is in richer nations.
Last year, as the U.S. economy languished, around 70 percent of India's gem and jewelry exports went to diamond traders Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.
“Essentially, illicit diamonds that bypass the early stages of the Kimberley Process (such as those from Gabon and Cameroon, or those smuggled from Cote d'Ivoire, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe) can be laundered through willing companies in the cutting and polishing industry,” Ian Smillie, chairman of the Diamond Development Initiative, wrote in a recent report.
“Arrests and the seizure of uncertified rough diamonds in the United States, the European Union, India and elsewhere demonstrate what may be the tip on an iceberg, one that the [Kimberly Process] has been unwilling to acknowledge or deal with.”
Non-governmental organizations like Diamond Development Initiative, Amnesty International and Global Witness have repeatedly criticized the Kimberley Process for failing to plug loopholes in the system, and, worse, for failing to crack down on offenders like Venezuela, Guinea, Lebanon and Zimbabwe.
But faith in the Kimberely Process has recently fallen to a new low. Activists walked out of a key meeting in June in what Global Witness termed a “vote of no confidence” triggered by a deal to allow Zimbabwe to sell diamonds from its violence-plagued Marange fields that “does not contain sufficient checks and balances to prevent substantial volumes of illicit diamonds from entering the global diamond supply chain.”
According to India Today, the deal allowed the Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Limited, a consortium of 1,500 diamond traders, to directly source rough diamonds from miners in Zimbabwe, making it more difficult for the Kimberley Process to track the stones.
Last year, Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Limited and the Zimbabwe government signed an agreement for the regular supply of diamonds worth $1.2 billion a year in exchange for training Zimbabweans in Surat's diamond-processing units, the magazine reported in May.
Many of those stones will doubtless wind up in Surat's “Mini Bazaar” — a small outpost compared to the main market in Mahidharpura, where there are some 50,000 traders, according to a local broker.
On a typical weekday afternoon here, hundreds of diamond brokers line the street. Clad in the standard cheap polyblend slacks, button-down shirt and rubber sandals, they sit on the back of motorcycles and on stoops, lean against shopfronts or squat on their heels, farmer-style, on the curb.
Behind them, in open-air shops, dozens of traders sit cross-legged behind rows of tiny desks, examining sachets of glittering stones with tiny jeweler's loupes.
If the roughs they came from once had blood on them, nobody would be the wiser, judging from the way polished stones change hands.
“Hello, hello, gentleman,” a local trader calls out from behind a tiny desk. Keen to make a sale, he spills a sparkling pile of half-carat diamonds onto the table from a paper sachet.
“All the documents are in Mumbai only, so there is no need to look at them,” he says when asked whether they are legal. “We buy the diamonds on trust.”
Monday, October 03, 2011
Analysis: India needs US-Pakistan friendship
Why India can't leverage the US-Pakistan spat, and what it means for regional stability.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 3, 2011
Editor's note: The idea for this article was suggested by a GlobalPost member. What do you think we should cover? Become a member today to suggest and vote on story ideas.
NEW DELHI, India — Indian diplomats and military strategists no doubt felt a twinge of satisfaction last month, when the just-retired chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staffs finally came out and accused Pakistan's spy agency of employing terrorist groups.
New Delhi had long hoped for a breakdown of ties between Washington and Islamabad that would put an end to billions of dollars in U.S. aid that it says Pakistan uses primarliy to amass weapons against India.
But as much as New Delhi may have hoped and prayed for such a rift, when the United States succeeded in patching things up following Adm. Mike Mullen's accusation that Pakistani intelligence was using the Afghanistan-based Haqqani terrorist network to wage a “proxy war” against U.S. forces, the sigh of relief was almost audible.
What India wants above all, is for Pakistan to stay in check. And the fact of the matter, experts say, is that the United States makes that possible.
“The unraveling of U.S.-Pakistani ties in recent days posed huge dilemmas for India,” said Harsh Pant, an academic with the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London.
It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that whatever satisfaction India may have derived from hearing its own frequently repeated refrain from the mouth of America's highest-ranking military officer, it is more concerned about Pakistan being suddenly unleashed than it is about Islamabad's influence in Afghan peace talks or its diplomatic role in post-war Kabul.
That's because even though New Delhi has for years complained that the United States has overlooked Pakistan's alleged use of terrorist groups to wage a so-called proxy war against India, beginning with the Kargil conflict in 1999 and increasingly since Sept. 11, 2001 the United States has offered India its only leverage, however limited, over an increasingly reckless enemy.
“While there might be a sense of schadenfreude in certain circles in India, over the longterm [a rift between the United States and Pakistan] complicates the strategic realities for India,” Pant said.
Though “proxy war” has been its pet term for the Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence's activities for decades, New Delhi did not seize the moment following Mullen's statement to urge Washington to sever its military alliance with Islamabad. Rather, it issued a call for an extension of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, which makes breaking that alliance impossible.
"For peace, stability and security in Afghanistan, it is imperative that the ongoing transition must be linked to the ground realities rather than rigid timetables,” India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Hardeep Singh Puri told fellow delegates in the aftermath of Mullen's statement.
“This, the international community in its hurry to withdraw from a combat role in Afghanistan, will ignore at its own peril.”
Enemies since the bloody Partition that carved two independent states from the erstwhile British India, India and Pakistan have fought four wars since their creation in 1947 — three times over territory in Kashmir and once as part of modern Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan.
But even though India has never lost, Pakistan has never given up. The region remains one of the world's hot spots, with many other conflicts threatening to boil over.
More recently, all eyes have been trained on the subcontinent since a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament and a subsequent nose-to-nose confrontation between Indian and Pakistani forces on the border raised fears of the world's first nuclear war in 2002.
But New Delhi's retreat from the brink then and its refusal to mobilize troops again after the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai suggest that another full-scale war between India and Pakistan is far less likely than once believed.
The reasons are simple. India's growing military superiority virtually rules out an invasion by Pakistan, particularly since Beijing has more or less made clear that its support begins and ends with looking the other way with regard to Islamabad's employment of terrorist groups to nip at India's flanks.
And Pakistan's substantial nuclear arsenal, superior missiles and well-equipped air force act as a more than sufficient deterrent to any military action by India — whatever the provocation.
“India has not shown interest in fighting, Pakistan or anybody. It has reacted to provocations rather than seeking to resolve its 'Pakistan problem,'” said Sunil Dasgupta, co-author of "Arming Without Aiming: India's Military Modernization."
By almost any measure, today Pakistan's military prowess simply does not compare with India's, according to figures tabulated by Global Firepower.
At $36 billion, India's defense budget is nearly six times Pakistan's expenditure of $6.41 billion, and if it came to financing a shooting war, New Delhi has $284 billion in foreign reserves to Islamabad's paltry $16 billion.
In terms of boots on the ground, India has a standing army of 1.33 million soldiers, versus Pakistan's 617,000. Its tanks and other land-based weapons outnumber Pakistan's by 75,000 to 16,000. Its navy is nearly 10 times larger, and its 2,462 military aircraft are almost double Pakistan's 1,414 — though some say Pakistan's pilots are both superior and better equipped, thanks to decades of American military aid.
There's only one problem, says G. Parthasarathy, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan. And that's what America is only just beginning to confront.
“I'm glad that reality has dawned, rather late in the day,” said Parthasarathy, in response to Mullen's statement. “But [the Pakistanis] are not going to give up their jihadi assets. If you choose to keep your head in the sand, there's nothing we can do about it.”
Pakistan's singular focus on India — some might call it an obsession — and its willingness to employ any means necessary to frustrate its nemesis mean that it remains a serious threat for India.
Moreover, India's increasing regional role, and China's saber-rattling response, makes it impossible for New Delhi to match Islamabad's singleminded approach.
“India needs to deploy a substantial number of its forces along the Sino-Indian border, thereby attenuating its capabilities,” said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University.
“Separately, Pakistan has long adopted an asymmetric war strategy against India [by providing covert aid to terrorist groups] and conventional capabilities are not especially helpful in dealing with such a strategy. Also, because of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, India cannot respond using conventional forces.”
Things could well get worse before they get better. According to Pakistan's Ahmed Rashid, author of "Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia," Pakistan now faces economic strife, deadly ethnic tensions and an internal problem with the Islamic extremists it once fostered.
Meanwhile, civilian control over the military is at a low ebb. “Pakistan is on the edge of a precipice and one faulty step — either by the Americans or the Pakistan army — could plunge an already beleaguered state into meltdown,” Rashid wrote in a recent column for the BBC.
That leaves an ever-reluctant India — still punching below its weight, even as it seeks a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council — on the edge of a precipice, too.
“In the longterm, obviously, India and the U.S. are headed for strategic, economic, and social convergence,” said Dasgupta, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The policy challenge for the U.S. and India for some time now has been to figure out how to get from the short-term divergence over Pakistan to the long-term state of natural alliance.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - October 3, 2011
Editor's note: The idea for this article was suggested by a GlobalPost member. What do you think we should cover? Become a member today to suggest and vote on story ideas.
NEW DELHI, India — Indian diplomats and military strategists no doubt felt a twinge of satisfaction last month, when the just-retired chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staffs finally came out and accused Pakistan's spy agency of employing terrorist groups.
New Delhi had long hoped for a breakdown of ties between Washington and Islamabad that would put an end to billions of dollars in U.S. aid that it says Pakistan uses primarliy to amass weapons against India.
But as much as New Delhi may have hoped and prayed for such a rift, when the United States succeeded in patching things up following Adm. Mike Mullen's accusation that Pakistani intelligence was using the Afghanistan-based Haqqani terrorist network to wage a “proxy war” against U.S. forces, the sigh of relief was almost audible.
What India wants above all, is for Pakistan to stay in check. And the fact of the matter, experts say, is that the United States makes that possible.
“The unraveling of U.S.-Pakistani ties in recent days posed huge dilemmas for India,” said Harsh Pant, an academic with the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London.
It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that whatever satisfaction India may have derived from hearing its own frequently repeated refrain from the mouth of America's highest-ranking military officer, it is more concerned about Pakistan being suddenly unleashed than it is about Islamabad's influence in Afghan peace talks or its diplomatic role in post-war Kabul.
That's because even though New Delhi has for years complained that the United States has overlooked Pakistan's alleged use of terrorist groups to wage a so-called proxy war against India, beginning with the Kargil conflict in 1999 and increasingly since Sept. 11, 2001 the United States has offered India its only leverage, however limited, over an increasingly reckless enemy.
“While there might be a sense of schadenfreude in certain circles in India, over the longterm [a rift between the United States and Pakistan] complicates the strategic realities for India,” Pant said.
Though “proxy war” has been its pet term for the Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence's activities for decades, New Delhi did not seize the moment following Mullen's statement to urge Washington to sever its military alliance with Islamabad. Rather, it issued a call for an extension of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, which makes breaking that alliance impossible.
"For peace, stability and security in Afghanistan, it is imperative that the ongoing transition must be linked to the ground realities rather than rigid timetables,” India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Hardeep Singh Puri told fellow delegates in the aftermath of Mullen's statement.
“This, the international community in its hurry to withdraw from a combat role in Afghanistan, will ignore at its own peril.”
Enemies since the bloody Partition that carved two independent states from the erstwhile British India, India and Pakistan have fought four wars since their creation in 1947 — three times over territory in Kashmir and once as part of modern Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan.
But even though India has never lost, Pakistan has never given up. The region remains one of the world's hot spots, with many other conflicts threatening to boil over.
More recently, all eyes have been trained on the subcontinent since a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament and a subsequent nose-to-nose confrontation between Indian and Pakistani forces on the border raised fears of the world's first nuclear war in 2002.
But New Delhi's retreat from the brink then and its refusal to mobilize troops again after the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai suggest that another full-scale war between India and Pakistan is far less likely than once believed.
The reasons are simple. India's growing military superiority virtually rules out an invasion by Pakistan, particularly since Beijing has more or less made clear that its support begins and ends with looking the other way with regard to Islamabad's employment of terrorist groups to nip at India's flanks.
And Pakistan's substantial nuclear arsenal, superior missiles and well-equipped air force act as a more than sufficient deterrent to any military action by India — whatever the provocation.
“India has not shown interest in fighting, Pakistan or anybody. It has reacted to provocations rather than seeking to resolve its 'Pakistan problem,'” said Sunil Dasgupta, co-author of "Arming Without Aiming: India's Military Modernization."
By almost any measure, today Pakistan's military prowess simply does not compare with India's, according to figures tabulated by Global Firepower.
At $36 billion, India's defense budget is nearly six times Pakistan's expenditure of $6.41 billion, and if it came to financing a shooting war, New Delhi has $284 billion in foreign reserves to Islamabad's paltry $16 billion.
In terms of boots on the ground, India has a standing army of 1.33 million soldiers, versus Pakistan's 617,000. Its tanks and other land-based weapons outnumber Pakistan's by 75,000 to 16,000. Its navy is nearly 10 times larger, and its 2,462 military aircraft are almost double Pakistan's 1,414 — though some say Pakistan's pilots are both superior and better equipped, thanks to decades of American military aid.
There's only one problem, says G. Parthasarathy, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan. And that's what America is only just beginning to confront.
“I'm glad that reality has dawned, rather late in the day,” said Parthasarathy, in response to Mullen's statement. “But [the Pakistanis] are not going to give up their jihadi assets. If you choose to keep your head in the sand, there's nothing we can do about it.”
Pakistan's singular focus on India — some might call it an obsession — and its willingness to employ any means necessary to frustrate its nemesis mean that it remains a serious threat for India.
Moreover, India's increasing regional role, and China's saber-rattling response, makes it impossible for New Delhi to match Islamabad's singleminded approach.
“India needs to deploy a substantial number of its forces along the Sino-Indian border, thereby attenuating its capabilities,” said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University.
“Separately, Pakistan has long adopted an asymmetric war strategy against India [by providing covert aid to terrorist groups] and conventional capabilities are not especially helpful in dealing with such a strategy. Also, because of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, India cannot respond using conventional forces.”
Things could well get worse before they get better. According to Pakistan's Ahmed Rashid, author of "Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia," Pakistan now faces economic strife, deadly ethnic tensions and an internal problem with the Islamic extremists it once fostered.
Meanwhile, civilian control over the military is at a low ebb. “Pakistan is on the edge of a precipice and one faulty step — either by the Americans or the Pakistan army — could plunge an already beleaguered state into meltdown,” Rashid wrote in a recent column for the BBC.
That leaves an ever-reluctant India — still punching below its weight, even as it seeks a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council — on the edge of a precipice, too.
“In the longterm, obviously, India and the U.S. are headed for strategic, economic, and social convergence,” said Dasgupta, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The policy challenge for the U.S. and India for some time now has been to figure out how to get from the short-term divergence over Pakistan to the long-term state of natural alliance.”
Thursday, September 29, 2011
India: bouncing back from the plague
After the plague hit Surat in 1994, an amazing thing happened: this Gujarat city cleaned up its act.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 29, 2011
SURAT, Gujarat — When an outbreak of the pneumonic plague struck Surat in 1994, the so-called “diamond city” took an unprecedented step, as far as India goes: It cleaned up its act.
Best known for its booming textile and diamond-polishing industries, Surat fell victim to the plague because it was among India's dirtiest cities — though its lackadaisical attitude toward garbage and sewage was by no means unusual in a country one might call hygiene-challenged.
But thanks to a coming together of public will and a host of reforms, Surat successfully went from one of the country's dirtiest cities to one of its cleanest in 18 short months.
Perhaps more remarkable, despite the exodus of S.R. Rao, the municipal commissioner who made it happen, Surat has more or less maintained its high standards, despite the city's rapid expansion over the past decade.
Is there a lesson here for the rest of India? Definitely. But it will take more than plagiarizing Rao's urban planning documents to get it done elsewhere — at least without a rash of epidemics.
“It's not a question only of the model, it's a question of the local people's behavior,” said K.D. Yadav, a professor of civil engineering at Surat's S.V. National Institute of Technology.
There's nothing like a dose of the plague to get a city thinking about hygiene, it turns out — especially a strain that's more virulent than the infamous Black Death.
Thus, in 1994, after 54 residents died and some 300,000 fled to escape a possible quarantine, the people who stuck around were willing to get with the program — working to eliminate the tons of garbage and overflowing sewers that had inundated the city with disease-carrying rats.
But the design of the system is instructive, too.
In an effort to make city officials more accountable, Rao divided the municipality into six zones, appointing a commissioner for each, so that it was crystal clear who was to blame for problem areas.
Rao ordered officials responsible for solid waste management to make personal field visits every day, rather than relying on dubious reports, and he instituted a grievance-redressal system for complaints and fines for violaters.
It sounds like basic stuff, and it is. The trick is that Surat made it work. And there the devil is in the details.
“At that time, the [Bharatiya Janata Party] BJP had won 98 out of 99 seats [in the municipal government], so there was no opposition,” said Hemant Desai, deputy commisioner of health and hygiene. “People believed it was for their benefit, so they cooperated.”
Thanks to that rare spirit of consensus, Surat was able to make a raft of changes to the system, almost overnight.
The city decentralized responsibility for garbage collection so thoroughly that each individual street sweeper answers for a specific stretch of road. Modern garbage trucks with closed beds conduct door-to-door collection of household trash every day — instead of the open bicycle-carts used in most Indian cities — and the garbage is taken directly to a local transfer center instead of being sorted on the roadside by collectors that moonlight in the recycling trade.
At the transfer stations for each zone, the city's 240 trucks unload 800-1200 kilograms of garbage to be sorted and collected into loads of 10 metric tons which go to the disposal site. And because the business is contracted out, and the contractors are paid by the ton, the garbage actually makes it to the weighing station.
Similarly, in wealthier sections of the city, there's a grant-in-aid scheme that allows 600 residential societies, who have the biggest stake in the cleanliness of their area, to take over their own sanitation system.
The entire system is computerized, so that residents' complaints come to the attention of city officials immediately, and the same sanitary workers that are virtually invisible in Mumbai and New Delhi are in Surat empowered to collect fines on the spot from people and businesses that dump trash on the roadside.
Instructively, it took a wee tweak of the system to make that happen — the sanitation department calls the fines “administrative charges” because it's not legally empowered to issue tickets — but its workers collect around $400,000 a year keeping residents on their toes.
In 2010, Surat dropped a notch to third in the rankings of India's cleanest cities, and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board has pointed out that the city's textile industry has not been nearly as successful in curbing industrial pollution as the garbage collectors have been in cleaning up the streets.
But even if it's less than perfect — it takes an eye well-schooled in Indian cities to see it as “clean” — Surat's transformation has already attracted would-be imitators from cities like Lucknow and Pune to study its garbage collection system, according to Desai.
And as the city population has doubled over the past 10 years, new residents have gotten at least one timely reminder that cleanliness has its benefits.
When a disastrous flood hit the city in 2006, Surat's showpiece sanitation system paid off, allowing workers to clear more than 300,000 metric tons of garbage and debris in less than a month, and Rao's successor in the city commissioner's office, S. Aparna, took advantage of the tragic destruction of the makeshift shanties of thousands of slum dwellers to relocate them into properly constructed, low-income housing she financed with money from the centrally funded Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM).
“We have been fortunate in getting officers who are really enthusiastic about development,” said S.V. National Institute of Technology's Yadav.
And that right there may be the lesson for India — even if it is bittersweet. Government works. But only if people make it work.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 29, 2011
SURAT, Gujarat — When an outbreak of the pneumonic plague struck Surat in 1994, the so-called “diamond city” took an unprecedented step, as far as India goes: It cleaned up its act.
Best known for its booming textile and diamond-polishing industries, Surat fell victim to the plague because it was among India's dirtiest cities — though its lackadaisical attitude toward garbage and sewage was by no means unusual in a country one might call hygiene-challenged.
But thanks to a coming together of public will and a host of reforms, Surat successfully went from one of the country's dirtiest cities to one of its cleanest in 18 short months.
Perhaps more remarkable, despite the exodus of S.R. Rao, the municipal commissioner who made it happen, Surat has more or less maintained its high standards, despite the city's rapid expansion over the past decade.
Is there a lesson here for the rest of India? Definitely. But it will take more than plagiarizing Rao's urban planning documents to get it done elsewhere — at least without a rash of epidemics.
“It's not a question only of the model, it's a question of the local people's behavior,” said K.D. Yadav, a professor of civil engineering at Surat's S.V. National Institute of Technology.
There's nothing like a dose of the plague to get a city thinking about hygiene, it turns out — especially a strain that's more virulent than the infamous Black Death.
Thus, in 1994, after 54 residents died and some 300,000 fled to escape a possible quarantine, the people who stuck around were willing to get with the program — working to eliminate the tons of garbage and overflowing sewers that had inundated the city with disease-carrying rats.
But the design of the system is instructive, too.
In an effort to make city officials more accountable, Rao divided the municipality into six zones, appointing a commissioner for each, so that it was crystal clear who was to blame for problem areas.
Rao ordered officials responsible for solid waste management to make personal field visits every day, rather than relying on dubious reports, and he instituted a grievance-redressal system for complaints and fines for violaters.
It sounds like basic stuff, and it is. The trick is that Surat made it work. And there the devil is in the details.
“At that time, the [Bharatiya Janata Party] BJP had won 98 out of 99 seats [in the municipal government], so there was no opposition,” said Hemant Desai, deputy commisioner of health and hygiene. “People believed it was for their benefit, so they cooperated.”
Thanks to that rare spirit of consensus, Surat was able to make a raft of changes to the system, almost overnight.
The city decentralized responsibility for garbage collection so thoroughly that each individual street sweeper answers for a specific stretch of road. Modern garbage trucks with closed beds conduct door-to-door collection of household trash every day — instead of the open bicycle-carts used in most Indian cities — and the garbage is taken directly to a local transfer center instead of being sorted on the roadside by collectors that moonlight in the recycling trade.
At the transfer stations for each zone, the city's 240 trucks unload 800-1200 kilograms of garbage to be sorted and collected into loads of 10 metric tons which go to the disposal site. And because the business is contracted out, and the contractors are paid by the ton, the garbage actually makes it to the weighing station.
Similarly, in wealthier sections of the city, there's a grant-in-aid scheme that allows 600 residential societies, who have the biggest stake in the cleanliness of their area, to take over their own sanitation system.
The entire system is computerized, so that residents' complaints come to the attention of city officials immediately, and the same sanitary workers that are virtually invisible in Mumbai and New Delhi are in Surat empowered to collect fines on the spot from people and businesses that dump trash on the roadside.
Instructively, it took a wee tweak of the system to make that happen — the sanitation department calls the fines “administrative charges” because it's not legally empowered to issue tickets — but its workers collect around $400,000 a year keeping residents on their toes.
In 2010, Surat dropped a notch to third in the rankings of India's cleanest cities, and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board has pointed out that the city's textile industry has not been nearly as successful in curbing industrial pollution as the garbage collectors have been in cleaning up the streets.
But even if it's less than perfect — it takes an eye well-schooled in Indian cities to see it as “clean” — Surat's transformation has already attracted would-be imitators from cities like Lucknow and Pune to study its garbage collection system, according to Desai.
And as the city population has doubled over the past 10 years, new residents have gotten at least one timely reminder that cleanliness has its benefits.
When a disastrous flood hit the city in 2006, Surat's showpiece sanitation system paid off, allowing workers to clear more than 300,000 metric tons of garbage and debris in less than a month, and Rao's successor in the city commissioner's office, S. Aparna, took advantage of the tragic destruction of the makeshift shanties of thousands of slum dwellers to relocate them into properly constructed, low-income housing she financed with money from the centrally funded Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JnNURM).
“We have been fortunate in getting officers who are really enthusiastic about development,” said S.V. National Institute of Technology's Yadav.
And that right there may be the lesson for India — even if it is bittersweet. Government works. But only if people make it work.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
India: fight to preserve dying languages
A new survey of India's hundreds of languages could have far-reaching political implications.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 18, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — This fall, a plucky Indian professor of English will fire the first shot in a battle to revolutionize how this large, diverse country perceives itself.
The key to his project: an army of some 2,000 volunteer linguists, translators and typists.
For the first time since the British Raj, Ganesh Devy's People's Linguistic Survey of India will catalog the nation's myriad tongues. The enormous exercise will call into question colonial definitions of civilization and ethnicity that have persisted through the 60-year history of independent India.
“This is one of our heritage treasures that we have not been overtly aware of,” said Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. “It's very important to conduct these surveys and catalog [these languages], because it will help us formulate the appropriate language policy. We do not have an appropriate language policy [in India] because we don't have an idea of the breadth and length of lingusitic diversity.”
Reminiscent of Sir James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary project — which drew on the knowledge of hundreds of volunteers, including a prolific murderer, for information about the origins of English words — the People's Linguistic Survey promises to be a remarkable resource for academic researchers and a vital aid in the struggle to preserve dying tongues.
But the growing stack of tomes may have broader implications, too, for India's education system, and even the political organization of its 28 states and seven union territories.
“This will provide good material for fresh thinking about cognitive categories in every walk of life,” said Devy, who is a professor at the the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gujarat.
“If I may say so, in all modesty, perhaps this will come to be seen as one of the more important linguistic projects during the last 100 years in India,” he said.It is indeed a huge endeavor.
The original British language survey took some 30 years to complete. More recently, India's registrar general, which conducts the census, has taken 15 years to survey just four states.
But Devy's army of volunteers have already finished work in nine states. Progress is underway in seven more. The first results are slated, from Jharkhand, to be published in November — with Gujarat and Maharashtra ready for the World Languages Meeting in Gujarat in January.
Devy expects the entire project — including a series of books in English — to be finished by the end of 2014.
“I have been working with the languages of the tribal communities of India for the last 20 years, working with the tribal communities, so I have been able to set up quite a large network of individuals interested in looking at language identity, language loss, language empowerment, and issues like that,” said Devy.
It was through that network that the professor recruited an army of volunteers whose efforts have already put the government to shame.
“These volunteers include professional linguists, teachers, cultural activists, farmers and villagers. It is a cross-section of Indian society,” Devy said. “Of course, my list is deficient: I don't have any criminals or black marketeers.”
To aid researchers, each language will be detailed with a 1,000-word history, a brief glossary and some examples of poems and stories. And based on preliminary findings, the official number of Indian languages will likely rise from the Raj-era figure of 179 — of which a paltry 22 are officially recognized by the constitution — to nearly 900.
However, it's the main reason for the expected increase that makes the project revolutionary.
When British linguist George Abraham Grierson conducted his Linguistic Survey of India in 1894, he ignored the languages of many nomadic tribes. He classified as dialects many other tongues that local people used to define their ethnicities. And he neglected a large part of South India because the Nizam of Hyderabad in what is today the state of Andhra Pradesh refused to cooperate.
At least partly as a result, when first the British and then Indian authorities divided the country into language-based states, many sizable groups found themselves split by separate administrations and robbed of political influence in keeping with their numbers. For instance, planners deemed the Gond tribe insignificant because the Gond language had no written literature or written script (until 1928) — so the group was scattered across five different states.
“These states were formed irrespective of the number of speakers of languages,” said Devy. “To give you an example, the Munda group, the Santhal group, the Bhil group – they did not get their states.”
These linguistic boundaries have already proven controversial. Since 1960, when language-based agitations forced the Bombay State into today's Gujarat and Maharashtra states, nearly a dozen new states have been carved out on linguistic or ethnic grounds, and the troubles aren't over.
Ethnic rebellions still simmer across the country, demanding separate states, or even nationhood, for the speakers of Nepali, Bodo and other languages that borders — and, too often, government budgets — have ignored.
At the same time, Grierson's language survey, and independent India's subsequent propagation of its inherent prejudices, has had a disastrous impact on India's many indigenous tribes.
“The marginalized people are speaking marginalized languages,” said the University of London's Abbi.
In the most dramatic instances, languages — and sometimes the people who speak them — have simply ceased to exist. Last year, for example, when an 85-year-old Andaman islander named Boa Sr gasped her final breath, the Bo tribe and the Bo language were irrevocably lost.
“With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory,” Survival International's Stephen Corry remarked at the time. “Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”
But even where tribal communities remain robust in numbers, the low status afforded to their languages has helped to keep them isolated and excluded from India's snowballing economic development.
"Only around 15,000 people in India speak Sanskrit, while some 80 million speak various tribal languages in central India alone,” said Shubhranshu Choudhary, founder of CG Net Swara, a mobile-phone based news platform for Indian tribal peoples. “Yet All India Radio, the only source of news for many rural Indians, broadcasts frequent bulletins in Sanskrit and none in these tribal languages."
Though various studies have shown that children learn better when taught basic concepts in their mother tongue before attempting to master a second language, India prioritizes just 22 out of the 900-odd languages that Devy seeks to catalog, and the state's promised free and compulsory education is most often available in fewer still.
“In the Constitution of India, there is a special schedule of languages, which alone receive official support,” said Devy. “When the schedule was created after independence, it had 14 languages. Now it has 22. All the funds for primary, secondary and higher education can go only to these languages.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, tribal literacy rates lag behind those of the general population, and only about one-fifth of the so-called “Scheduled Tribes” noted by the Indian constitution as historically underprivileged are attending school, according to the latest census.
“If we don't include these langauges in our education policy, obviously we are discriminating against them,” said Abbi. “We have a reservation policy [that mandates quotas in jobs and higher education] for the [historically underprivileged] Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. But the reservations are for the tribe, not the language. This is the reason why tribals want to forget their languages.”
Meanwhile, the proportion of tribal peoples living below the poverty line, at nearly 50 percent, is also “substantially higher than the national average,” according to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes.
“My aim is not to find which is the language that is spoken by fewer than 5 percent, and how will I revive that language,” said Devy, who founded a university for tribal peoples known as the Adivasi Academy in 1999.
“My aim is to see where a sizeable number of people exist, have a speech tradition, a language of their own, but because of the denial of the language in legitimate educational spaces this community is suffering on the developmental scale.”
Making sure the world knows that these languages exist is the first step.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 18, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — This fall, a plucky Indian professor of English will fire the first shot in a battle to revolutionize how this large, diverse country perceives itself.
The key to his project: an army of some 2,000 volunteer linguists, translators and typists.
For the first time since the British Raj, Ganesh Devy's People's Linguistic Survey of India will catalog the nation's myriad tongues. The enormous exercise will call into question colonial definitions of civilization and ethnicity that have persisted through the 60-year history of independent India.
“This is one of our heritage treasures that we have not been overtly aware of,” said Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. “It's very important to conduct these surveys and catalog [these languages], because it will help us formulate the appropriate language policy. We do not have an appropriate language policy [in India] because we don't have an idea of the breadth and length of lingusitic diversity.”
Reminiscent of Sir James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary project — which drew on the knowledge of hundreds of volunteers, including a prolific murderer, for information about the origins of English words — the People's Linguistic Survey promises to be a remarkable resource for academic researchers and a vital aid in the struggle to preserve dying tongues.
But the growing stack of tomes may have broader implications, too, for India's education system, and even the political organization of its 28 states and seven union territories.
“This will provide good material for fresh thinking about cognitive categories in every walk of life,” said Devy, who is a professor at the the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gujarat.
“If I may say so, in all modesty, perhaps this will come to be seen as one of the more important linguistic projects during the last 100 years in India,” he said.It is indeed a huge endeavor.
The original British language survey took some 30 years to complete. More recently, India's registrar general, which conducts the census, has taken 15 years to survey just four states.
But Devy's army of volunteers have already finished work in nine states. Progress is underway in seven more. The first results are slated, from Jharkhand, to be published in November — with Gujarat and Maharashtra ready for the World Languages Meeting in Gujarat in January.
Devy expects the entire project — including a series of books in English — to be finished by the end of 2014.
“I have been working with the languages of the tribal communities of India for the last 20 years, working with the tribal communities, so I have been able to set up quite a large network of individuals interested in looking at language identity, language loss, language empowerment, and issues like that,” said Devy.
It was through that network that the professor recruited an army of volunteers whose efforts have already put the government to shame.
“These volunteers include professional linguists, teachers, cultural activists, farmers and villagers. It is a cross-section of Indian society,” Devy said. “Of course, my list is deficient: I don't have any criminals or black marketeers.”
To aid researchers, each language will be detailed with a 1,000-word history, a brief glossary and some examples of poems and stories. And based on preliminary findings, the official number of Indian languages will likely rise from the Raj-era figure of 179 — of which a paltry 22 are officially recognized by the constitution — to nearly 900.
However, it's the main reason for the expected increase that makes the project revolutionary.
When British linguist George Abraham Grierson conducted his Linguistic Survey of India in 1894, he ignored the languages of many nomadic tribes. He classified as dialects many other tongues that local people used to define their ethnicities. And he neglected a large part of South India because the Nizam of Hyderabad in what is today the state of Andhra Pradesh refused to cooperate.
At least partly as a result, when first the British and then Indian authorities divided the country into language-based states, many sizable groups found themselves split by separate administrations and robbed of political influence in keeping with their numbers. For instance, planners deemed the Gond tribe insignificant because the Gond language had no written literature or written script (until 1928) — so the group was scattered across five different states.
“These states were formed irrespective of the number of speakers of languages,” said Devy. “To give you an example, the Munda group, the Santhal group, the Bhil group – they did not get their states.”
These linguistic boundaries have already proven controversial. Since 1960, when language-based agitations forced the Bombay State into today's Gujarat and Maharashtra states, nearly a dozen new states have been carved out on linguistic or ethnic grounds, and the troubles aren't over.
Ethnic rebellions still simmer across the country, demanding separate states, or even nationhood, for the speakers of Nepali, Bodo and other languages that borders — and, too often, government budgets — have ignored.
At the same time, Grierson's language survey, and independent India's subsequent propagation of its inherent prejudices, has had a disastrous impact on India's many indigenous tribes.
“The marginalized people are speaking marginalized languages,” said the University of London's Abbi.
In the most dramatic instances, languages — and sometimes the people who speak them — have simply ceased to exist. Last year, for example, when an 85-year-old Andaman islander named Boa Sr gasped her final breath, the Bo tribe and the Bo language were irrevocably lost.
“With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory,” Survival International's Stephen Corry remarked at the time. “Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”
But even where tribal communities remain robust in numbers, the low status afforded to their languages has helped to keep them isolated and excluded from India's snowballing economic development.
"Only around 15,000 people in India speak Sanskrit, while some 80 million speak various tribal languages in central India alone,” said Shubhranshu Choudhary, founder of CG Net Swara, a mobile-phone based news platform for Indian tribal peoples. “Yet All India Radio, the only source of news for many rural Indians, broadcasts frequent bulletins in Sanskrit and none in these tribal languages."
Though various studies have shown that children learn better when taught basic concepts in their mother tongue before attempting to master a second language, India prioritizes just 22 out of the 900-odd languages that Devy seeks to catalog, and the state's promised free and compulsory education is most often available in fewer still.
“In the Constitution of India, there is a special schedule of languages, which alone receive official support,” said Devy. “When the schedule was created after independence, it had 14 languages. Now it has 22. All the funds for primary, secondary and higher education can go only to these languages.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, tribal literacy rates lag behind those of the general population, and only about one-fifth of the so-called “Scheduled Tribes” noted by the Indian constitution as historically underprivileged are attending school, according to the latest census.
“If we don't include these langauges in our education policy, obviously we are discriminating against them,” said Abbi. “We have a reservation policy [that mandates quotas in jobs and higher education] for the [historically underprivileged] Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. But the reservations are for the tribe, not the language. This is the reason why tribals want to forget their languages.”
Meanwhile, the proportion of tribal peoples living below the poverty line, at nearly 50 percent, is also “substantially higher than the national average,” according to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes.
“My aim is not to find which is the language that is spoken by fewer than 5 percent, and how will I revive that language,” said Devy, who founded a university for tribal peoples known as the Adivasi Academy in 1999.
“My aim is to see where a sizeable number of people exist, have a speech tradition, a language of their own, but because of the denial of the language in legitimate educational spaces this community is suffering on the developmental scale.”
Making sure the world knows that these languages exist is the first step.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
India: soft-core porn makes a comeback
Before the internet, Indian porn stars were big — literally — but the films showcased more sexuality than skin.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 7, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — On a hand-painted poster for a 1990s' grade-B Indian film "Qatil Jawani" ("Murderous Nymphette"), a plump and naked actress sits astride a shirtless man, her head thrown back in apparent ecstasy as the man's hands paw at her chest.
Once ubiquitous in so-called “morning shows” at theaters across the country, soft-core films like "Biwi Anadi Sali Khiladi" ("Innocent Wife, Cheating Sister-in-Law") and "Kaam Tantra" ("Principles of Sex") have slowly disappeared from the big screen in India with the increasing availability of hardcore pornography on the internet.
But now, as mainstream cinema sheds its former reticence about sex and female sexuality, Indians are beginning to take a second look at soft-core porn, this time for what it says about Indian culture.
This December, television soap magnate Ekta Kapoor will release “The Dirty Picture,” a mainstream Bollywood biopic about Silk Smitha — a skin-show specialist from the '80s who crossed over to perform sensuous so-called “cabaret” numbers in mainstream films.
More subtly, in this year's "Tees Maar Khan," a Hindi action comedy film, imported British-Indian bombshell Katrina Kaif made waves with the song, “Sheila Ki Jawani," or "Young Sheila." The song was an homage to the Hindi title of one of Silk Smitha's softcore flicks, “Reshma Ki Jawani," or "Nubile Reshma."
And in New Delhi this week, Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K) ad agency is presenting an exhibition of soft-core porn posters as, well, art.
“School kids, college students and even grown up men used to go to these movie halls just to see a glimpse of a woman bathing or a random love-making scene,” said W+K executive creative director V. Sunil, whose personal poster collection is on display in the exhibition called "Morning Show."
Before the globalization of sexuality that came with the internet, India's porn stars were big — literally.
Silk Smitha herself was no waif. Looking especially buxom packed into skimpy clothes, she knocked down evil thugs like bowling pins – highlighting a peculiar facet of India's soft-core porn.
The Indian films that were once labeled pornography were less about nudity and graphic sex than they were about female sexuality, according to Meena T. Pillai, a cultural critic at the University of Kerala — the state where the softcore porn industry was centered, due to its relatively liberal censor.
Apart from voluptuous stars and voluminous cleavage shots, the only real distinguishing factor of pornographic films was that they centered on a sexually aggressive woman, in contrast to the demure domestic ideal.
“You'd be shocked if you actually saw a Malayalam [language] softcore porn movie. [The camera] basically stops at the thigh. It doesn't ride further up than that,” said Pillai. “But the moment you show women's desire, that movie would automatically be labeled porn.”
I.V. Sasi's 1978 “Avalude Ravukal” ("Her Nights"), for example, was labeled soft-core porn simply because it dramatized the story of a prostitute and depicted the heroine — played by Sasi's wife, Seema — exercising her power over men by offering and denying them sexual favors.
Similarly, the titillating 1989 film “Layanam” — starring Silk Smitha — depicted three adult women seducing a young man.
Other soft-core hits, like “Air Hostess Girls,” apparently stuck to more tried-and-true scenarios.
To make up for any lack of skin, theater owners and distributors illegally spliced in random sequences from foreign films — splashes of nudity or even hardcore porn.
The practice was so common that in Kerala it earned its own classification as “bit cinema,” and occasionally found its way onto theater promos like the one for a film called “Honey, I Love You,” where a white woman in a bikini is embossed with the tag line: “THE GOOD PARTS. THE SEXY PARTS. THE BODY PARTS.”
Following Silk Smitha, the hottest heroine in the Malayalam porn business was a buxom young actress named Shakeela who just kept getting bigger as she got bigger — appearing in more than 50 movies.
“In Kerala, in the south, we like slightly bulky women,” explains Sunil. “Anyone with big boobs is a big thing.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 7, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — On a hand-painted poster for a 1990s' grade-B Indian film "Qatil Jawani" ("Murderous Nymphette"), a plump and naked actress sits astride a shirtless man, her head thrown back in apparent ecstasy as the man's hands paw at her chest.
Once ubiquitous in so-called “morning shows” at theaters across the country, soft-core films like "Biwi Anadi Sali Khiladi" ("Innocent Wife, Cheating Sister-in-Law") and "Kaam Tantra" ("Principles of Sex") have slowly disappeared from the big screen in India with the increasing availability of hardcore pornography on the internet.
But now, as mainstream cinema sheds its former reticence about sex and female sexuality, Indians are beginning to take a second look at soft-core porn, this time for what it says about Indian culture.
This December, television soap magnate Ekta Kapoor will release “The Dirty Picture,” a mainstream Bollywood biopic about Silk Smitha — a skin-show specialist from the '80s who crossed over to perform sensuous so-called “cabaret” numbers in mainstream films.
More subtly, in this year's "Tees Maar Khan," a Hindi action comedy film, imported British-Indian bombshell Katrina Kaif made waves with the song, “Sheila Ki Jawani," or "Young Sheila." The song was an homage to the Hindi title of one of Silk Smitha's softcore flicks, “Reshma Ki Jawani," or "Nubile Reshma."
And in New Delhi this week, Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K) ad agency is presenting an exhibition of soft-core porn posters as, well, art.
“School kids, college students and even grown up men used to go to these movie halls just to see a glimpse of a woman bathing or a random love-making scene,” said W+K executive creative director V. Sunil, whose personal poster collection is on display in the exhibition called "Morning Show."
Before the globalization of sexuality that came with the internet, India's porn stars were big — literally.
Silk Smitha herself was no waif. Looking especially buxom packed into skimpy clothes, she knocked down evil thugs like bowling pins – highlighting a peculiar facet of India's soft-core porn.
The Indian films that were once labeled pornography were less about nudity and graphic sex than they were about female sexuality, according to Meena T. Pillai, a cultural critic at the University of Kerala — the state where the softcore porn industry was centered, due to its relatively liberal censor.
Apart from voluptuous stars and voluminous cleavage shots, the only real distinguishing factor of pornographic films was that they centered on a sexually aggressive woman, in contrast to the demure domestic ideal.
“You'd be shocked if you actually saw a Malayalam [language] softcore porn movie. [The camera] basically stops at the thigh. It doesn't ride further up than that,” said Pillai. “But the moment you show women's desire, that movie would automatically be labeled porn.”
I.V. Sasi's 1978 “Avalude Ravukal” ("Her Nights"), for example, was labeled soft-core porn simply because it dramatized the story of a prostitute and depicted the heroine — played by Sasi's wife, Seema — exercising her power over men by offering and denying them sexual favors.
Similarly, the titillating 1989 film “Layanam” — starring Silk Smitha — depicted three adult women seducing a young man.
Other soft-core hits, like “Air Hostess Girls,” apparently stuck to more tried-and-true scenarios.
To make up for any lack of skin, theater owners and distributors illegally spliced in random sequences from foreign films — splashes of nudity or even hardcore porn.
The practice was so common that in Kerala it earned its own classification as “bit cinema,” and occasionally found its way onto theater promos like the one for a film called “Honey, I Love You,” where a white woman in a bikini is embossed with the tag line: “THE GOOD PARTS. THE SEXY PARTS. THE BODY PARTS.”
Following Silk Smitha, the hottest heroine in the Malayalam porn business was a buxom young actress named Shakeela who just kept getting bigger as she got bigger — appearing in more than 50 movies.
“In Kerala, in the south, we like slightly bulky women,” explains Sunil. “Anyone with big boobs is a big thing.”
Delhi bomb: Experts see failure to adapt in terrorist strike
With an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, India has ignored old-fashioned policing.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 7, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Hours after a powerful explosion rocked central New Delhi, killing 11 people and leaving dozens more seriously injured, the city is still reeling.
But the spontaneous outrage directed toward Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi when he attempted to visit some of the blast victims at a local hospital this afternoon offers a strong hint of where public opinion is headed.
The bottom line: Today's blast marked the 19th terrorist strike in the Indian capital in 15 years, and despite nearly as many revamps and restructures, neither today's Congress-led government nor its predecessors from the Bharatiya Janata Party, have taken effective measures to improve internal security.
Instead, “there has been a lot of utterly wasteful symbolism in the creation of a number of meta institutions that have no utility whatsoever,” said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
“Despite all our internal security problems for the past 60 years, we still don't have a counterinsurgency policy,” said Kishalay Bhattacharjee, internal security chair at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses.
“We do not have an anti-terrorism policy. So anything that is decided is very ad hoc. It's very knee-jerk and it's decided on the spur of the moment to allay the public fear or calm down the anger, and then it lapses back into non-implementation mode.”
At 10:17 a.m. Wednesday, an improvised explosive device reportedly made with ammonium nitrate was detonated among a crowd of people gathered outside the Delhi High Court.
Apparently hidden in a briefcase, the bomb generated a powerful explosion that killed several people on the spot and lacerated many others with shrapnel. By evening local time, 11 people had died from wounds sustained in the blast, and the tally of the injured had climbed to more than 70.
Every Indian politician of note and more than a few foreign luminaries expressed their horror and disgust. And opposition politicians declared their solidarity with the government in the midst of the crisis.
But when the usually nimble-footed Gandhi arrived on the scene at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, where victims were being treated, angry bystanders shouted slogans demanding that he “go home or back to where he came from,” according to India's Economic Times newspaper.
Though Gandhi was just a stand-in for the government, or politicians, or the powers that be, the angry reaction was real and justified. From the 2001 attack on parliament to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India's security establishment has had the same, tired response to terrorism, according to experts. They talk. They draw up some papers. Maybe they even create a new intelligence agency. But on the streets, where the actual work of policing happens, nothing changes.
“Forget about intelligence,” said Bhattacharjee. “We do not have the basic security and surveillance infrastructure working in this county. If you go to the mall or cinema hall, the metal detector is there, but half the time it doesn't work.”
In this instance, India's intelligence agencies reportedly had passed information about a possible terrorist attack on to the Delhi police. However, it was apparently not specific enough to generate an action plan. And that's precisely where the problem lies.
“The police is the weakest link in our addressing of internal security challenges,” said Bhattacharjee. “[For the system to work], the police has to be the strongest nodal agency. There is no army out here, or paramilitary forces working out here.”
Nevertheless, India has repeatedly ignored reform at the grassroots level in favor of snazzy acronyms and big-fix fantasies. The National Investigation Agency, for instance, was designed to eliminate information getting lost in the shuffle by providing a single node for intelligence about terrorism.
The National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) was constituted to do essentially the same thing for operations. And the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) — inaugurated Sept. 1 — is intended to put all that lovely intel together in a central database.
The only trouble is that India's problem isn't that it has too much information, or that it's too disorganized, says Sahni.
“The reality is we have very small flows of information from the ground,” he said.
The best case in point? The most effective measure to combat terrorism that India has proposed in recent years is a database known as the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS). But the way that it is being introduced virtually guarantees its failure, Sahni believes.
“It's no use creating these big computer centers in Delhi if there isn't one computer and one man to operate it in every police station,” he said. “We are trying to do these things top-down, when we ought to improve the system from bottom-up.”
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 7, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Hours after a powerful explosion rocked central New Delhi, killing 11 people and leaving dozens more seriously injured, the city is still reeling.
But the spontaneous outrage directed toward Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi when he attempted to visit some of the blast victims at a local hospital this afternoon offers a strong hint of where public opinion is headed.
The bottom line: Today's blast marked the 19th terrorist strike in the Indian capital in 15 years, and despite nearly as many revamps and restructures, neither today's Congress-led government nor its predecessors from the Bharatiya Janata Party, have taken effective measures to improve internal security.
Instead, “there has been a lot of utterly wasteful symbolism in the creation of a number of meta institutions that have no utility whatsoever,” said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.
“Despite all our internal security problems for the past 60 years, we still don't have a counterinsurgency policy,” said Kishalay Bhattacharjee, internal security chair at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses.
“We do not have an anti-terrorism policy. So anything that is decided is very ad hoc. It's very knee-jerk and it's decided on the spur of the moment to allay the public fear or calm down the anger, and then it lapses back into non-implementation mode.”
At 10:17 a.m. Wednesday, an improvised explosive device reportedly made with ammonium nitrate was detonated among a crowd of people gathered outside the Delhi High Court.
Apparently hidden in a briefcase, the bomb generated a powerful explosion that killed several people on the spot and lacerated many others with shrapnel. By evening local time, 11 people had died from wounds sustained in the blast, and the tally of the injured had climbed to more than 70.
Every Indian politician of note and more than a few foreign luminaries expressed their horror and disgust. And opposition politicians declared their solidarity with the government in the midst of the crisis.
But when the usually nimble-footed Gandhi arrived on the scene at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, where victims were being treated, angry bystanders shouted slogans demanding that he “go home or back to where he came from,” according to India's Economic Times newspaper.
Though Gandhi was just a stand-in for the government, or politicians, or the powers that be, the angry reaction was real and justified. From the 2001 attack on parliament to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India's security establishment has had the same, tired response to terrorism, according to experts. They talk. They draw up some papers. Maybe they even create a new intelligence agency. But on the streets, where the actual work of policing happens, nothing changes.
“Forget about intelligence,” said Bhattacharjee. “We do not have the basic security and surveillance infrastructure working in this county. If you go to the mall or cinema hall, the metal detector is there, but half the time it doesn't work.”
In this instance, India's intelligence agencies reportedly had passed information about a possible terrorist attack on to the Delhi police. However, it was apparently not specific enough to generate an action plan. And that's precisely where the problem lies.
“The police is the weakest link in our addressing of internal security challenges,” said Bhattacharjee. “[For the system to work], the police has to be the strongest nodal agency. There is no army out here, or paramilitary forces working out here.”
Nevertheless, India has repeatedly ignored reform at the grassroots level in favor of snazzy acronyms and big-fix fantasies. The National Investigation Agency, for instance, was designed to eliminate information getting lost in the shuffle by providing a single node for intelligence about terrorism.
The National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) was constituted to do essentially the same thing for operations. And the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) — inaugurated Sept. 1 — is intended to put all that lovely intel together in a central database.
The only trouble is that India's problem isn't that it has too much information, or that it's too disorganized, says Sahni.
“The reality is we have very small flows of information from the ground,” he said.
The best case in point? The most effective measure to combat terrorism that India has proposed in recent years is a database known as the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS). But the way that it is being introduced virtually guarantees its failure, Sahni believes.
“It's no use creating these big computer centers in Delhi if there isn't one computer and one man to operate it in every police station,” he said. “We are trying to do these things top-down, when we ought to improve the system from bottom-up.”
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Has Indian e-commerce really arrived?
Homegrown Flipkart aims to give Amazon a run for its money.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — When rumors of Amazon.com's pending entrance into the Indian market began circulating earlier this summer, insiders from India's e-commerce industry weren't surprised.
Since the disastrous dot-com bust of 2000 shuttered as many as 1,000 Indian e-commerce sites, the business has quietly clawed its way back to prominence, with Indians expected to spend as much as $10 billion online this year, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
And even though the bulk of that money goes to travel sites like MakeMyTrip.com and the Indian railways' booking portal, venture capitalists have already pegged the value of the country's most successful e-retailer, Flipkart.com, at a whopping $1 billion, according to reports.
So has Indian e-commerce really arrived? Is Flipkart an Amazon slayer? Or does the investor feeding frenzy signal nothing more than the beginning of yet another Indian internet bubble?
“E-commerce in India is in a very nascent stage, so while there is a big chunk of demand, it hasn't been fulfilled in the manner it should have been by now,” said Ravi Vohra, Flipkart's vice president of marketing.
“We think Amazon's entry will give further boost to the momentum. We see the pie expanding with the entry of more players.”
The e-commerce business is indeed growing rapidly — with the size of the market increasing nearly 50 percent this year, from around $7 billion in 2010 to an estimated $10 billion by the end of 2011.
But the retailing of manufactured goods from books to cosmetics, which so far only accounts for around $450 million, according to Vohra, may well be poised for an even steeper growth curve.
The reasons are simple. Plane and train tickets have already assuaged customer anxiety about buying online. Flipkart and its leading competitors have licked the problems with delivery that plagued the first wave of Indian e-retailers. And even as shopping malls mushroom across the country, India's small-town consumers are gaining in wealth and sophistication at a much faster rate than physical stores can expand to reach them.
The book business is already feeling the heat. According to an executive who has worked with publishers and distributors, e-retailers like Flipkart can offer deeper discounts on books than the stores located in high-rent areas like malls and airports — though low-margin Mom-and-Pop retailers can still compete. Already, the executive says, many customers are just browsing in the mall or airport, and then going home to buy the title online.
“I prefer buying from Flipkart because their library is extensive, website efficient and delivery process prompt and painless,” said Tushar Burman, a Mumbai resident. “I do not buy books offline anymore, unless I happen upon an interesting one, on one of the rare visits to the bookstore.”
Founded in 2007 by Sachin and Binny Bansal, two Indians formerly employed at Amazon, Flipkart has succeeded by adjusting the e-commerce model to fit local conditions.
With credit-card penetration low, and the postal service and couriers notorious for lost and delayed shipments, the company pioneered a cash-on-delivery payment system and an in-house courier system that covers almost one-fourth of the country. Now selling music, movies, games and software, mobile phones and electronics, as well as books, the company reportedly does $6 million in sales per month.
Flipkart's market cap is only about a hundredth of Amazon's. But with the upstart's growing sales, the Bansals' former employer will need more than a slick web interface to knock them off the mountain. But is Flipkart worth $1 billion?
According to a July report by VCCircle.com, that's the value set by a pending $150 million stake sale to private equity firm General Atlantic Partners.
Vohra refused to confirm or deny that valuation. But according to data collected by Venture Intelligence, rising prices have not deterred investors from placing ever larger bets on India's e-commerce companies — even though none of them has yet turned a profit.
Investment firms have pumped $140 million into e-commerce startups over the past six months, compared with just $48 million in 2010 — while the valuations of some startups soared four to six times, according to a recent article in Forbes India.
“The valuations … do look a bit stretched to me, even though there is strong consumer growth and adoption,” said Alok Mittal, managing director of venture capital firm Canaan Partners.
Currently, equity stakes in many startups are going for prices that value them at more than 10 times their gross sales. And even if those sales take off, the business model that Flipkart and others have pioneered to cope with India's supply chain challenges and wary consumers — free shipping, cash-on-delivery and deep discounts — suggests that at least some players may be boosting their losses with every new sale. Factoring in the whack for shipping, discounts, COD and returns, for instance, Forbes India estimated that a typical book might sell for almost 15 percent less than it costs the e-retailer to deliver it.
Of course, that's exactly the sort of thing people said about Amazon — which is set to begin operations in India by the beginning of next year. And some local booksellers say that Flipkart's numbers do add up.
“Discounts in the book business are very complicated to understand from outside. But there is a logic to it which Flipkart does understand,” said a Mumbai-based executive in the book-distribution business, who explained that most retailers only offer deep discounts on certain titles, where the price cut can be passed on to the publisher. “At worst, they are only as vulnerable as large-format retailers.”
Praveen Kurup in Mumbai contributed to this report from Mumbai.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - September 1, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — When rumors of Amazon.com's pending entrance into the Indian market began circulating earlier this summer, insiders from India's e-commerce industry weren't surprised.
Since the disastrous dot-com bust of 2000 shuttered as many as 1,000 Indian e-commerce sites, the business has quietly clawed its way back to prominence, with Indians expected to spend as much as $10 billion online this year, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
And even though the bulk of that money goes to travel sites like MakeMyTrip.com and the Indian railways' booking portal, venture capitalists have already pegged the value of the country's most successful e-retailer, Flipkart.com, at a whopping $1 billion, according to reports.
So has Indian e-commerce really arrived? Is Flipkart an Amazon slayer? Or does the investor feeding frenzy signal nothing more than the beginning of yet another Indian internet bubble?
“E-commerce in India is in a very nascent stage, so while there is a big chunk of demand, it hasn't been fulfilled in the manner it should have been by now,” said Ravi Vohra, Flipkart's vice president of marketing.
“We think Amazon's entry will give further boost to the momentum. We see the pie expanding with the entry of more players.”
The e-commerce business is indeed growing rapidly — with the size of the market increasing nearly 50 percent this year, from around $7 billion in 2010 to an estimated $10 billion by the end of 2011.
But the retailing of manufactured goods from books to cosmetics, which so far only accounts for around $450 million, according to Vohra, may well be poised for an even steeper growth curve.
The reasons are simple. Plane and train tickets have already assuaged customer anxiety about buying online. Flipkart and its leading competitors have licked the problems with delivery that plagued the first wave of Indian e-retailers. And even as shopping malls mushroom across the country, India's small-town consumers are gaining in wealth and sophistication at a much faster rate than physical stores can expand to reach them.
The book business is already feeling the heat. According to an executive who has worked with publishers and distributors, e-retailers like Flipkart can offer deeper discounts on books than the stores located in high-rent areas like malls and airports — though low-margin Mom-and-Pop retailers can still compete. Already, the executive says, many customers are just browsing in the mall or airport, and then going home to buy the title online.
“I prefer buying from Flipkart because their library is extensive, website efficient and delivery process prompt and painless,” said Tushar Burman, a Mumbai resident. “I do not buy books offline anymore, unless I happen upon an interesting one, on one of the rare visits to the bookstore.”
Founded in 2007 by Sachin and Binny Bansal, two Indians formerly employed at Amazon, Flipkart has succeeded by adjusting the e-commerce model to fit local conditions.
With credit-card penetration low, and the postal service and couriers notorious for lost and delayed shipments, the company pioneered a cash-on-delivery payment system and an in-house courier system that covers almost one-fourth of the country. Now selling music, movies, games and software, mobile phones and electronics, as well as books, the company reportedly does $6 million in sales per month.
Flipkart's market cap is only about a hundredth of Amazon's. But with the upstart's growing sales, the Bansals' former employer will need more than a slick web interface to knock them off the mountain. But is Flipkart worth $1 billion?
According to a July report by VCCircle.com, that's the value set by a pending $150 million stake sale to private equity firm General Atlantic Partners.
Vohra refused to confirm or deny that valuation. But according to data collected by Venture Intelligence, rising prices have not deterred investors from placing ever larger bets on India's e-commerce companies — even though none of them has yet turned a profit.
Investment firms have pumped $140 million into e-commerce startups over the past six months, compared with just $48 million in 2010 — while the valuations of some startups soared four to six times, according to a recent article in Forbes India.
“The valuations … do look a bit stretched to me, even though there is strong consumer growth and adoption,” said Alok Mittal, managing director of venture capital firm Canaan Partners.
Currently, equity stakes in many startups are going for prices that value them at more than 10 times their gross sales. And even if those sales take off, the business model that Flipkart and others have pioneered to cope with India's supply chain challenges and wary consumers — free shipping, cash-on-delivery and deep discounts — suggests that at least some players may be boosting their losses with every new sale. Factoring in the whack for shipping, discounts, COD and returns, for instance, Forbes India estimated that a typical book might sell for almost 15 percent less than it costs the e-retailer to deliver it.
Of course, that's exactly the sort of thing people said about Amazon — which is set to begin operations in India by the beginning of next year. And some local booksellers say that Flipkart's numbers do add up.
“Discounts in the book business are very complicated to understand from outside. But there is a logic to it which Flipkart does understand,” said a Mumbai-based executive in the book-distribution business, who explained that most retailers only offer deep discounts on certain titles, where the price cut can be passed on to the publisher. “At worst, they are only as vulnerable as large-format retailers.”
Praveen Kurup in Mumbai contributed to this report from Mumbai.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
India: Corruption chaos
Opinion: In wrangling over a new anti-corruption law, India is missing the forest for the trees.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 23, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Tens of thousands of protesters rallied across India on Monday, as social activist Anna Hazare's indefinite fast against corruption entered its seventh day and the government scrambled for forge a compromise.
But by focusing so narrowly on the nuts and bolts of the bill, the protest leaders, and the politicians they oppose, appear to be missing the forest for the trees.
No law will ever be enough to root out corruption from Indian society. But the mass movement itself — whether it is democratic or anti-democratic — may offer the germ of the broad cultural change needed to accomplish what no supercop could do. That is: Make corruption, which has always been illegal, also socially unacceptable.
The government has already capitulated to Hazare's demand for an anti-corruption law and his insistence that members of his coterie be included in the drafting process — though some objected that this granted undue influence to “representatives” who had never stood for an election. But now that members of parliament have developed a draft bill to create the anti-corruption office, Hazare is again fasting in protest because the government's draft does not grant the ombudsman power over the prime minister or the judiciary.
No doubt there are merits in the arguments of both sides, however wrapped up in the abstractions of “democracy,” and “the constitution,” they may be. But the nuts and bolts of the ombudsman law are immaterial when it comes to its actual purpose. India's weakness has always been in enforcement, not in legislation.
Corruption is so pervasive that the ombudsman's staff would have to be as large as the bureaucracy it is intended to police in order to sort through the reams of complaints it would have to process. And there is precious little to suggest that the regulatory superstructure would be any more inclined to honesty than the bureaucrats it's charged with monitoring — other than the fantasy of officers whose reputations are “above suspicion.”
Yet there is still promise in the Annapalooza under way at New Delhi's Ramlila Ground — which is usually reserved for annual dramatizations of the Hindu epic Ramayana. With the atmosphere of a rock concert crossed with a religious revival, Hazare's movement has encouraged India's much-maligned middle class to engage with the political system — though the crowd thinned with the end of a three-day holiday weekend on Tuesday. And, however naïve their us-versus-them formulation — which holds “the politicians” alone responsible for the corruption that plagues the country from top to bottom — Hazare's people have established a beachhead for morality where there was none.
And that could be where the beginning of a solution is to be found.
The “corruption” evoked at Annapalooza is nebulous and generic — drawing no distinction between the bribe accepted by a policeman to overlook a traffic violation, the side payment that an official at the passport office demands before he will process your documents, and the kickback paid by a company in exchange for a government contract (or telecom license). The common citizen is held to be a helpless victim of a grinding system where everybody is on the take, and the reviled politicians are held to be responsible for every link in the chain, as though every bribe ended up in some member of parliament's pocket.
But there is a vast difference between the bribe extorted from a citizen who is only asking for something he is due, like the grain allotted to below poverty line families by the public distribution system, and the bribe paid to jump to the head of the line or to get away with disobeying the law. If you get stopped for a traffic violation, the cop will take less than half the amount you'd have to pay for the official fine. If the building inspector finds a violation, his bribe will miraculously work out to 10 percent of the cost you'd have to pay to get up to code. And if you're compelled to bribe the telecom minister to get a license, well, you can bet the bribe amounts to a lot less than the money it saves you.
Through blurring these distinctions, Hazare has brought India's normally apathetic middle class onto the streets. But he will have to make clear what's really at stake if his mass movement is to have any impact. Passing another law or creating another regulator will be useless unless Hazare — who has made Gandhi his model — can convince his followers to emulate his idol, too. Because the first step in ending corruption will mean waiting in line, following the rules, and paying the fine.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 23, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — Tens of thousands of protesters rallied across India on Monday, as social activist Anna Hazare's indefinite fast against corruption entered its seventh day and the government scrambled for forge a compromise.
But by focusing so narrowly on the nuts and bolts of the bill, the protest leaders, and the politicians they oppose, appear to be missing the forest for the trees.
No law will ever be enough to root out corruption from Indian society. But the mass movement itself — whether it is democratic or anti-democratic — may offer the germ of the broad cultural change needed to accomplish what no supercop could do. That is: Make corruption, which has always been illegal, also socially unacceptable.
The government has already capitulated to Hazare's demand for an anti-corruption law and his insistence that members of his coterie be included in the drafting process — though some objected that this granted undue influence to “representatives” who had never stood for an election. But now that members of parliament have developed a draft bill to create the anti-corruption office, Hazare is again fasting in protest because the government's draft does not grant the ombudsman power over the prime minister or the judiciary.
No doubt there are merits in the arguments of both sides, however wrapped up in the abstractions of “democracy,” and “the constitution,” they may be. But the nuts and bolts of the ombudsman law are immaterial when it comes to its actual purpose. India's weakness has always been in enforcement, not in legislation.
Corruption is so pervasive that the ombudsman's staff would have to be as large as the bureaucracy it is intended to police in order to sort through the reams of complaints it would have to process. And there is precious little to suggest that the regulatory superstructure would be any more inclined to honesty than the bureaucrats it's charged with monitoring — other than the fantasy of officers whose reputations are “above suspicion.”
Yet there is still promise in the Annapalooza under way at New Delhi's Ramlila Ground — which is usually reserved for annual dramatizations of the Hindu epic Ramayana. With the atmosphere of a rock concert crossed with a religious revival, Hazare's movement has encouraged India's much-maligned middle class to engage with the political system — though the crowd thinned with the end of a three-day holiday weekend on Tuesday. And, however naïve their us-versus-them formulation — which holds “the politicians” alone responsible for the corruption that plagues the country from top to bottom — Hazare's people have established a beachhead for morality where there was none.
And that could be where the beginning of a solution is to be found.
The “corruption” evoked at Annapalooza is nebulous and generic — drawing no distinction between the bribe accepted by a policeman to overlook a traffic violation, the side payment that an official at the passport office demands before he will process your documents, and the kickback paid by a company in exchange for a government contract (or telecom license). The common citizen is held to be a helpless victim of a grinding system where everybody is on the take, and the reviled politicians are held to be responsible for every link in the chain, as though every bribe ended up in some member of parliament's pocket.
But there is a vast difference between the bribe extorted from a citizen who is only asking for something he is due, like the grain allotted to below poverty line families by the public distribution system, and the bribe paid to jump to the head of the line or to get away with disobeying the law. If you get stopped for a traffic violation, the cop will take less than half the amount you'd have to pay for the official fine. If the building inspector finds a violation, his bribe will miraculously work out to 10 percent of the cost you'd have to pay to get up to code. And if you're compelled to bribe the telecom minister to get a license, well, you can bet the bribe amounts to a lot less than the money it saves you.
Through blurring these distinctions, Hazare has brought India's normally apathetic middle class onto the streets. But he will have to make clear what's really at stake if his mass movement is to have any impact. Passing another law or creating another regulator will be useless unless Hazare — who has made Gandhi his model — can convince his followers to emulate his idol, too. Because the first step in ending corruption will mean waiting in line, following the rules, and paying the fine.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Hollyworld: India in 3D
One savvy Indian entrepreneur bets against MGM, Sony, Disney, Warner Bros ... and, well, just about everybody.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 11, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — A few months ago, bargain-basement Bollywood filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt released India's first 3D film, a schlocky teen horror flick called "Haunted."
Against the odds, it was a sleeper hit — but not because of stellar performances or even slick marketing. Its success was due, largely, to one Indian entrepreneur's decision to take on the biggest Hollywood studios in the business.
The Indian film industry — until recently a "single genre" business of epic song-and-dance family tearjerkers — has never been much for costly special effects. But as Hollywood's biggest guns put their muscle behind 3D and Indian producers began pushing the envelope with films like Bollywood's "Krrish" and Tamil cinema's "Robot," Sanjay Gaikwad saw the glimmer of an opportunity for a cheap, Indian-made rival to Hollywood's 3D technology..
"In Hollywood, when they create the movies their main revenue comes from North America and they look at territories like India as incidental business, so the critical mass [for 3D] was coming from somewhere else," Gaikwad said.
"But in India, the kind of response that 3D content got was phenomenal, so obviously there was a lot of interest generated among Indian movie producers."
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the number of 3D releases in India has increased steadily over the past two years. Globally, eight of the top 20 grossing films in the first eight months of 2010 were 3D, compared with only three in 2009 and one in 2008, and the consultancy believes that the trend is set to continue despite risk of weak films diluting audience interest.
Meanwhile, 3D has already emerged as the biggest driver for Gaikwad's other business — the digitalizing of cinema screens.
As CEO of Mumbai-based UFO Moviez, Gaikwad had already revolutionized India's film distribution business by convincing thousands of single-screen theater owners in the hinterland to convert to digital — creating his own, cheaper alternative to the technology being promoted by Hollywood's Digital Cinema Initiatives, a virtual cartel comprising Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros.
So, when he saw James Cameron's "Avatar" fill multiplexes with audiences ready to pay a 25 percent premium for 3D, it was like deja vu.
"When we started our digital cinema business in 2005, we knew that when everything got digitized moving to 3D would be much easier than during the analog days," said Gaikwad.
"Eventually, it was proven when Hollywood studios started releasing a large number of 3D movies over the last two, two-and-a-half years. That is the time we realized 3D is here to say."
Ten years ago, Gaikwad convinced theater owners to convert to digital so they could download new releases instantaneously — filling seats by beating local pirates to the punch. But with 3D, it was a tougher sell.
Apart from a handful of multiplexes in metropolitan cities, Indian movie theaters earn 90 percent or more of their revenue from Indian films — not Hollywood blockbusters like "Avatar." After a decade of effort by DCI, the Hollywood cartel had only managed to sign up 76 theaters.
Meanwhile, until this year, no Indian had ever made a 3D film, and as long as only a handful of big city screens had the technology to show them, they weren't about to start, either.
"Unless you have that critical mass, you can't spend that additional budget for 3D content, and if you don't have any 3D content then people are not interested in investing in 3D infrastructure, so it was becoming like a chicken and egg story," said Gaikwad. "That is the time we decided to do something different."
To bridge the gap, Gaikwad's UFO Moviez spent a year-and-a-half creating its own 3D technology, which doesn't require a silver screen and costs about a third of what Hollywood's DCI 3D technology costs to install. Then, because the DCI agreement meant that he wouldn't be able to show films produced by the big seven Hollywood studios, he approached Indian cinema owners and offered to give them his 3D projectors for free, in exchange for a modest cut of the proceeds for upcoming movies — at 10-15 rupees per ticket.
"The capital cost is borne by UFO, whether it is changing the screen from the white screen to silver screen or by putting this 3D box and the additional projector," Gaikwad said. "Only when 3D movies are played do we recover our costs. That is how we started aggressively going into the market."
The bet is already paying off — at least in terms of expansion.
Currently, UFO Moviez has inked deals to install its 3D projectors in 200 Indian cinema halls, and Gaikwad says they will be up and running in 500 theaters by March 2012. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. UFO Moviez has tapped around $60 million in financing from Providence Private Equity. And with a planned investment of around $20 million, UFO is targeting 1,500 screens by the end of next year, ready to cash in on a wave of new Indian 3D content.
Ten made-in-India 3D films are reportedly slated for release this year, and according to the Bollywood rumor mill — "Haunted" made a big enough splash that the upcoming 3D films may well include the third installment of the blockbuster "Dhoom" franchise ("Dhoom 3 in 3D") and superstar Shah Rukh Khan's much anticipated superhero film "Ra.One."
The company will recoup its costs after just 10-12 Indian 3D releases. But can UFO Moviez go head to head against the DCI cartel and make money? Yes and no, says Gaikwad.
"The Hollywood Content has a [different] audience profile, whereas we still see 90 percent [revenue] from Bollywood movies and there's a large number of single screen theaters," Gaikwad said.
"Obviously, the single-screen theaters cannot afford the technology which is recommended by Hollywood studios so they are looking at the most cost effective without any compromise on quality. That is the solution which we have provided."
At the same time, though, UFO Moviez has cracked the window for Hollywood filmmakers who haven't pledged their souls to DCI to get their 3D films into more theaters across India, and the makers of movies like "Drive Angry," "Sanctum," and the "Nutcracker" have already leapt at the opportunity.
"Barring those seven studios, the other independent movies which come out of Hollywood are getting released on the UFO platform whether in 2D or 3D," Gaikwad said.
Of course, with only one film in the can, it's hard to say for sure if Gaikwad's 3D bet will pay off. He could sink or swim on the basis of a few terrible 3D movies, and Indian producers are notorious for their hit-or-flop, scattershot approach to the business. But the results from "Haunted" suggest that 3D could give an added boost to future genre-breakers in the vein of "Krrish" and "Robot."
An otherwise unimpressive film with C-list stars, "Haunted" had the biggest box office opening of any horror film to date in India, grossing around $3 million and nearly doubling its producers' investment. Meanwhile, theater owners reaped the benefits not only through packed houses but also through charging a 25-30 percent premium for tickets. Overall, 3D screen revenue was five times that of 2D screen theaters.
"Three to five years down the line, when we reach a critical mass of 1,500 to 2,000 theaters equipped with 3D, at least 5 percent of the content, or 100 films in Hindi and regional languages, will be released in 3D. At least 10 to 15 will do really serious business."
By that time, Hollywood may well have changed its tune.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 11, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — A few months ago, bargain-basement Bollywood filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt released India's first 3D film, a schlocky teen horror flick called "Haunted."
Against the odds, it was a sleeper hit — but not because of stellar performances or even slick marketing. Its success was due, largely, to one Indian entrepreneur's decision to take on the biggest Hollywood studios in the business.
The Indian film industry — until recently a "single genre" business of epic song-and-dance family tearjerkers — has never been much for costly special effects. But as Hollywood's biggest guns put their muscle behind 3D and Indian producers began pushing the envelope with films like Bollywood's "Krrish" and Tamil cinema's "Robot," Sanjay Gaikwad saw the glimmer of an opportunity for a cheap, Indian-made rival to Hollywood's 3D technology..
"In Hollywood, when they create the movies their main revenue comes from North America and they look at territories like India as incidental business, so the critical mass [for 3D] was coming from somewhere else," Gaikwad said.
"But in India, the kind of response that 3D content got was phenomenal, so obviously there was a lot of interest generated among Indian movie producers."
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the number of 3D releases in India has increased steadily over the past two years. Globally, eight of the top 20 grossing films in the first eight months of 2010 were 3D, compared with only three in 2009 and one in 2008, and the consultancy believes that the trend is set to continue despite risk of weak films diluting audience interest.
Meanwhile, 3D has already emerged as the biggest driver for Gaikwad's other business — the digitalizing of cinema screens.
As CEO of Mumbai-based UFO Moviez, Gaikwad had already revolutionized India's film distribution business by convincing thousands of single-screen theater owners in the hinterland to convert to digital — creating his own, cheaper alternative to the technology being promoted by Hollywood's Digital Cinema Initiatives, a virtual cartel comprising Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros.
So, when he saw James Cameron's "Avatar" fill multiplexes with audiences ready to pay a 25 percent premium for 3D, it was like deja vu.
"When we started our digital cinema business in 2005, we knew that when everything got digitized moving to 3D would be much easier than during the analog days," said Gaikwad.
"Eventually, it was proven when Hollywood studios started releasing a large number of 3D movies over the last two, two-and-a-half years. That is the time we realized 3D is here to say."
Ten years ago, Gaikwad convinced theater owners to convert to digital so they could download new releases instantaneously — filling seats by beating local pirates to the punch. But with 3D, it was a tougher sell.
Apart from a handful of multiplexes in metropolitan cities, Indian movie theaters earn 90 percent or more of their revenue from Indian films — not Hollywood blockbusters like "Avatar." After a decade of effort by DCI, the Hollywood cartel had only managed to sign up 76 theaters.
Meanwhile, until this year, no Indian had ever made a 3D film, and as long as only a handful of big city screens had the technology to show them, they weren't about to start, either.
"Unless you have that critical mass, you can't spend that additional budget for 3D content, and if you don't have any 3D content then people are not interested in investing in 3D infrastructure, so it was becoming like a chicken and egg story," said Gaikwad. "That is the time we decided to do something different."
To bridge the gap, Gaikwad's UFO Moviez spent a year-and-a-half creating its own 3D technology, which doesn't require a silver screen and costs about a third of what Hollywood's DCI 3D technology costs to install. Then, because the DCI agreement meant that he wouldn't be able to show films produced by the big seven Hollywood studios, he approached Indian cinema owners and offered to give them his 3D projectors for free, in exchange for a modest cut of the proceeds for upcoming movies — at 10-15 rupees per ticket.
"The capital cost is borne by UFO, whether it is changing the screen from the white screen to silver screen or by putting this 3D box and the additional projector," Gaikwad said. "Only when 3D movies are played do we recover our costs. That is how we started aggressively going into the market."
The bet is already paying off — at least in terms of expansion.
Currently, UFO Moviez has inked deals to install its 3D projectors in 200 Indian cinema halls, and Gaikwad says they will be up and running in 500 theaters by March 2012. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. UFO Moviez has tapped around $60 million in financing from Providence Private Equity. And with a planned investment of around $20 million, UFO is targeting 1,500 screens by the end of next year, ready to cash in on a wave of new Indian 3D content.
Ten made-in-India 3D films are reportedly slated for release this year, and according to the Bollywood rumor mill — "Haunted" made a big enough splash that the upcoming 3D films may well include the third installment of the blockbuster "Dhoom" franchise ("Dhoom 3 in 3D") and superstar Shah Rukh Khan's much anticipated superhero film "Ra.One."
The company will recoup its costs after just 10-12 Indian 3D releases. But can UFO Moviez go head to head against the DCI cartel and make money? Yes and no, says Gaikwad.
"The Hollywood Content has a [different] audience profile, whereas we still see 90 percent [revenue] from Bollywood movies and there's a large number of single screen theaters," Gaikwad said.
"Obviously, the single-screen theaters cannot afford the technology which is recommended by Hollywood studios so they are looking at the most cost effective without any compromise on quality. That is the solution which we have provided."
At the same time, though, UFO Moviez has cracked the window for Hollywood filmmakers who haven't pledged their souls to DCI to get their 3D films into more theaters across India, and the makers of movies like "Drive Angry," "Sanctum," and the "Nutcracker" have already leapt at the opportunity.
"Barring those seven studios, the other independent movies which come out of Hollywood are getting released on the UFO platform whether in 2D or 3D," Gaikwad said.
Of course, with only one film in the can, it's hard to say for sure if Gaikwad's 3D bet will pay off. He could sink or swim on the basis of a few terrible 3D movies, and Indian producers are notorious for their hit-or-flop, scattershot approach to the business. But the results from "Haunted" suggest that 3D could give an added boost to future genre-breakers in the vein of "Krrish" and "Robot."
An otherwise unimpressive film with C-list stars, "Haunted" had the biggest box office opening of any horror film to date in India, grossing around $3 million and nearly doubling its producers' investment. Meanwhile, theater owners reaped the benefits not only through packed houses but also through charging a 25-30 percent premium for tickets. Overall, 3D screen revenue was five times that of 2D screen theaters.
"Three to five years down the line, when we reach a critical mass of 1,500 to 2,000 theaters equipped with 3D, at least 5 percent of the content, or 100 films in Hindi and regional languages, will be released in 3D. At least 10 to 15 will do really serious business."
By that time, Hollywood may well have changed its tune.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Will the US lose Pakistan to China?
Analysis: Why India's biggest fear could offer salvation.
Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 8, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — With a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on the horizon, India has been caught between cheering Washington's moves to rein in Pakistan's military and bewailing the possible fallout if America "loses" Pakistan to China.
Unlike the United States, which can take its guns and go home, India will have to deal with the fallout of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistani radicalism for the next decade.
A resurgent Taliban and the return of a radical Islamic regime in Kabul could create a new safe haven for anti-Indian terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba — the Pakistan-based terrorist organization responsible for the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Some analysts fear that even as Islamabad works to bring the Taliban on board for a peace deal in Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership may help broker a settlement between Pakistan and various domestic terrorist groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban, uniting the various jihadi organizations to focus on India, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly.
Realistically, the United States won't cut and run in 2014, but it will reduce its presence and convert its counterinsurgency operations into "counterterrorism plus," says Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies.
The recent move to freeze $800 billion in military aid to Pakistan is probably as much a signal to Congress that the State Department knows what it's doing than an indicator of any real plans to change horses midstream.
But let's play what if.
Despite concerns about China's rising influence in the region, losing Pakistan — an unlikely, if not impossibly bold maneuver — could be the most profitable move Washington has made in the War on Terror since Sept. 11. And India could benefit even more than the United States.
The conventional wisdom in New Delhi is that China uses Pakistan as a tool to thwart India's rise as a regional power, while Beijing sees the growing strategic partnership between India and the United States as part of a broader effort to prevent China from developing interests any further afield.
But even though there is more than a little truth in those perceptions, the United States may have an opportunity to create a paradigm shift in the politics of the region with a change in the way it views Pakistan — paradoxically gaining influence by ceding power.
For 50 years, America has endeavored to create a strong, democratic ally in Pakistan by doling out billions of dollars in economic and military aid, only to watch with horror as it emerged as one of the most virulently anti-American countries in the world and a covert sponsor of terror, Lawrence Wright argued convincingly in a recent issue of the New Yorker.
Because aid flows through the military establishment and the Inter-services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), it seems, American cash has empowered a shadowy regime of spooks and soldiers at the expense of the legitimate civilian government. But that's not the only compelling case for turning off the tap now, as Islamabad attempts to extort a dominant role for Pakistan in post-war Afghanistan.
Washington could save billions of dollars a year and stick Beijing with the bill at a single stroke, even as it alleviates Chinese fears of containment or encirclement by granting it equal responsibility for guaranteeing security in its own backyard.
More importantly, granting China that responsibility would likely compel Beijing to take a leadership role in managing and reforming Pakistan, rather than stirring up trouble with the confidence that the U.S. is riding herd. It would also address a simple reality: China already exerts more influence over Pakistan than the United States.
"I don't think the Americans have done enough to reach out to China," said Fair. "I don't think they've done enough to reach out to Saudi Arabia. They have a lot more influence than we do."
Moreover, paranoid fears aside, Beijing has repeatedly shown it has no interest in pushing Pakistan over the brink. In 1999, the Chinese thwarted Gen. Pervez Musharraf by refusing to support him in the Kargil War against India, for instance. Likewise, it was Beijing (not Washington) that induced the Pakistani government to send troops in to root out Islamic militants barricaded in the Lal Masjid in 2007.
And, most recently, when Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani sought a Chinese pledge of support following Washington's decision to freeze $800 billion in military aid, Beijing maintained a studied silence.
"It is Pakistan that wants China more than China wants Pakistan," said Suba Chandran, director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.
Neither the United States nor India can match China when it comes to playing hardball with Pakistan's military establishment. But both strategic partners could do a great deal more to promote Pakistan's civilian institutions if they focused on trade, according to Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council.
For instance, by expanding so-called "reconstruction opportunity zones" — where manufacturers enjoy preferential tariffs for exports to the United States — America could reduce the need for humanitarian aid at the same time it strengthens its economic ties with civilian Pakistanis. Similarly, removing various roadblocks could boost trade between India and Pakistan from today's $2 billion to $42 billion a year — creating a strong, new economic impetus for peace that might well spill over into Afghanistan.
"The pressure will grow on the military establishments to tone down their rhetoric and stop talking to each other as adversaries as the two countries economies are increasingly going to be linked," Nawaz said.
Meanwhile, said Chandran, a comparable increase in Sino-Indian trade promises to make China and India economic partners in the upcoming "Asian Century."
If, that is, China and India can resolve a niggling border dispute and Washington can convince Beijing that the Indo-U.S. strategic partnership is not part of a secret plan to keep China down.
Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - August 8, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — With a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on the horizon, India has been caught between cheering Washington's moves to rein in Pakistan's military and bewailing the possible fallout if America "loses" Pakistan to China.
Unlike the United States, which can take its guns and go home, India will have to deal with the fallout of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistani radicalism for the next decade.
A resurgent Taliban and the return of a radical Islamic regime in Kabul could create a new safe haven for anti-Indian terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba — the Pakistan-based terrorist organization responsible for the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Some analysts fear that even as Islamabad works to bring the Taliban on board for a peace deal in Afghanistan, the Taliban leadership may help broker a settlement between Pakistan and various domestic terrorist groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban, uniting the various jihadi organizations to focus on India, according to Indiana University professor Sumit Ganguly.
Realistically, the United States won't cut and run in 2014, but it will reduce its presence and convert its counterinsurgency operations into "counterterrorism plus," says Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies.
The recent move to freeze $800 billion in military aid to Pakistan is probably as much a signal to Congress that the State Department knows what it's doing than an indicator of any real plans to change horses midstream.
But let's play what if.
Despite concerns about China's rising influence in the region, losing Pakistan — an unlikely, if not impossibly bold maneuver — could be the most profitable move Washington has made in the War on Terror since Sept. 11. And India could benefit even more than the United States.
The conventional wisdom in New Delhi is that China uses Pakistan as a tool to thwart India's rise as a regional power, while Beijing sees the growing strategic partnership between India and the United States as part of a broader effort to prevent China from developing interests any further afield.
But even though there is more than a little truth in those perceptions, the United States may have an opportunity to create a paradigm shift in the politics of the region with a change in the way it views Pakistan — paradoxically gaining influence by ceding power.
For 50 years, America has endeavored to create a strong, democratic ally in Pakistan by doling out billions of dollars in economic and military aid, only to watch with horror as it emerged as one of the most virulently anti-American countries in the world and a covert sponsor of terror, Lawrence Wright argued convincingly in a recent issue of the New Yorker.
Because aid flows through the military establishment and the Inter-services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), it seems, American cash has empowered a shadowy regime of spooks and soldiers at the expense of the legitimate civilian government. But that's not the only compelling case for turning off the tap now, as Islamabad attempts to extort a dominant role for Pakistan in post-war Afghanistan.
Washington could save billions of dollars a year and stick Beijing with the bill at a single stroke, even as it alleviates Chinese fears of containment or encirclement by granting it equal responsibility for guaranteeing security in its own backyard.
More importantly, granting China that responsibility would likely compel Beijing to take a leadership role in managing and reforming Pakistan, rather than stirring up trouble with the confidence that the U.S. is riding herd. It would also address a simple reality: China already exerts more influence over Pakistan than the United States.
"I don't think the Americans have done enough to reach out to China," said Fair. "I don't think they've done enough to reach out to Saudi Arabia. They have a lot more influence than we do."
Moreover, paranoid fears aside, Beijing has repeatedly shown it has no interest in pushing Pakistan over the brink. In 1999, the Chinese thwarted Gen. Pervez Musharraf by refusing to support him in the Kargil War against India, for instance. Likewise, it was Beijing (not Washington) that induced the Pakistani government to send troops in to root out Islamic militants barricaded in the Lal Masjid in 2007.
And, most recently, when Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani sought a Chinese pledge of support following Washington's decision to freeze $800 billion in military aid, Beijing maintained a studied silence.
"It is Pakistan that wants China more than China wants Pakistan," said Suba Chandran, director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.
Neither the United States nor India can match China when it comes to playing hardball with Pakistan's military establishment. But both strategic partners could do a great deal more to promote Pakistan's civilian institutions if they focused on trade, according to Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council.
For instance, by expanding so-called "reconstruction opportunity zones" — where manufacturers enjoy preferential tariffs for exports to the United States — America could reduce the need for humanitarian aid at the same time it strengthens its economic ties with civilian Pakistanis. Similarly, removing various roadblocks could boost trade between India and Pakistan from today's $2 billion to $42 billion a year — creating a strong, new economic impetus for peace that might well spill over into Afghanistan.
"The pressure will grow on the military establishments to tone down their rhetoric and stop talking to each other as adversaries as the two countries economies are increasingly going to be linked," Nawaz said.
Meanwhile, said Chandran, a comparable increase in Sino-Indian trade promises to make China and India economic partners in the upcoming "Asian Century."
If, that is, China and India can resolve a niggling border dispute and Washington can convince Beijing that the Indo-U.S. strategic partnership is not part of a secret plan to keep China down.
Monday, August 01, 2011
Cold Comfort
Soft adventure in Ladakh may be harder than it sounds
JASON OVERDORF
Outlook Traveler - Aug. 1, 2011
From the high ridge overlooking Khaltse, a tiny village some 100 kilometres from Leh along the road to Kargil, I stopped in the shadow of a towering boulder to gaze down on the peaceful Lamayuru monastery, set amid the sweeping, khaki-coloured rocks known as ‘the moonland’. Panting in the thin air, with sweat dripping down my back despite Ladakh’s dry climate, I let all thoughts of Delhi and deadlines drift away, listening to nothing but the sound of the wind. This is what I’m here for, I thought. Solitude. Silence. Peace. All of which are growing ever harder to find, even in the remote fastness of Ladakh.
On a last-minute, five-day blitztour, this day hike from Khaltse to Wanla was the closest I’d come to the big empty desert, and I felt my chest swell with desire for more. I’d hoped to tap the new market for so-called ‘soft adventure’ to knock the carbon monoxide out of my lungs and wipe the monsoon grease off my skin. But I’d had to scale back my plans when I landed in Leh, and the thin air reminded me that those lungs I was so keen to overhaul had aged ten years since my first visit. It would take at least two days for my body to adjust to the height, warned Milind Bhide, the 45-year-old owner of Countryside Adventure Holidays, who’d come from Mumbai to shepherd me through the trip. No matter how fit you think you are, 3,500 metres in altitude will kick your ass—even on a supposed ‘comfort trek’.
“Altitude-wise, all the treks in Ladakh are moderate to tough,” Milind told me on my first day in Leh. You don’t need to be an elite marathoner to survive a walk in the mountains, of course. But working out in the gym for 45 minutes three or four times a week was no preparation at all for four hours of hiking to 4,000 metres or more—the minimum standard set for most comfort treks. Without time to acclimatise, it would be better for me to travel by jeep. However, Milind assured me that we could still map out an itinerary that would get us off the well-worn path and incorporate a little adventure.
That was welcome news.
Since I first came here in 2002, the number of travellers visiting Ladakh has grown dramatically—from around 10,000 to some 80,000 tourists a year—and I noted the signs of the boom everywhere. Leh’s bustling market, once the sole purview of Israeli hippies and gap-year backpackers, now teemed with Indian travellers on package tours. Checklist sites like the Shey Palace and Thiksey monastery, which I first visited virtually alone ten years ago, were now surrounded by Sumos and Safaris and crawling with camera-toting tourists. Don’t get me wrong. Ladakh is still amazing. But the message is clear. Go now, before the Leh Bazaar gets any closer to the Shimla mall, and be prepared for long drives and a little sweat if you want to find your own piece of emptiness.
On our first ‘real’ day of travelling, for instance—not counting a day spent acclimatising in Leh—photographer Parth Sanyal and I woke at 5am to make the long drive up to the region’s second highest pass, on the road to Manali, before the light became too harsh for the camera. And by the time we returned—visiting the monasteries at Hemis, Stukla and Thiksey on the way back to the small village of Sabu, a few kilometres from Leh—it was nearly eight o’clock. The next day we were up at six for a day hike from Sabu to Leh and then a six-hour road journey over the world’s highest motorable pass at Khardung La and down into the Nubra Valley to see the sweeping sand dunes and two-humped Bactrian camels before sunset. And again the next morning we were up at dawn for the drive back to Khardung La, cycling down the winding road to Leh, and another five hours by jeep to the trekking hub of Temisgam.
To make sure we avoided the tourist conveyor belt, Milind had thoughtfully arranged for us to stay in quaint, tranquil surroundings each night. In Sabu, for instance, we stayed in the same cosy tents enjoyed by Aamir Khan and the prime minister’s daughter (on separate occasions!) at the lovely Ladakh Sarai. Similarly, in Nubra, we slept between a bubbling brook and a vegetable garden at the Organic Retreat, while in Temisgam we enjoyed some of the best vegetarian food I have ever eaten, at the Namra Hotel—a little Tibetan-style gem built to match the monastery on the hill above.
Meanwhile, the long journeys were as exhilarating as they were exhausting. Ladakh’s forbidding landscape is not for everyone—after four or five beers, a Slovenian friend cursed it as nothing but brown, brown, brown—but for me this is only the difference between what eighteenth-century climbers like John Dennis and Joseph Addison described as the beautiful and the sublime. The stark contrast of khaki and copper rocks jutting into the brilliant, cloudless sky sings like the call to adventure. Anything but monotonous, in a certain slant of light the rocks take on infinite patterns: the branches of a tree seeming to grow up the side of the mountain, the stretched faces of the moai statues of Easter Island, the spires of a thousand cathedrals. And there is a primal, muscular majesty—something more than the inviting beauty of a pretty meadow—in the narrow palette of slate, khaki, copper, black and gold.
Amid this bleak landscape, the tiny villages, each with its own monastery, are teardrops of green nestled in the stone. On our first long drive, we stopped at a solitary farmhouse beside the Manali-Leh highway, where mustard was flowering yellow in the fields, and watched a young Ladakhi woman working in the field with a baby strapped to her back. I am not a religious person. But with the silver-leaved poplar trees swinging in the wind, and a mountain stream tumbling down the rocks, it was easy to fantasise a life for myself here of tranquil self-reflection (however out of character).
I ordinarily have no time for cathedrals, temples and mosques. But in Ladakh I had no complaints about visiting two or three monasteries a day—from the bustling throng of Hemis, where a special prayer ceremony had drawn hundreds of locals in yak-wool robes and turquoise jewellery, to the white wedding cake of Thiksey, reminiscent of Lhasa’s Potala Palace in design. Perhaps it’s the contrast between these silent, idyllic refuges and the bleak proof of the earth’s tremendous power that surrounds them; nowhere is the upheaval from the crash of continents more plainly seen.
At no time was the evidence of this power more dramatic than on my first brief day hike from Sabu to Leh. From the small stupa overlooking the village, we followed the destructive path of the floodwaters from last year’s cloudburst into the mountains, where the torrent had carved a deep ravine, sending great boulders spinning down into Sabu, washing out a bridge and destroying the homes of several families. The flash flood had left behind a dry riverbed as flat and smooth as a highway, but even here the altitude starved my lungs of air and Parth—a two-pack-a-day smoker who prefers paranthas to press-ups—turned back before we’d even started uphill.
He didn’t know what he’d be missing. Although we were only a short distance from Leh, after a few minutes of huffing and puffing, Milind and I might as well have been hundreds of miles from the nearest plug point. As we walked, my body seemed to adjust to the altitude a little more with each step, so that when we crested the last jagged ridge and looked down on the Leh Palace and the dotted green of guesthouse kitchen gardens, I felt ready for four hours and 4,000 metres.
Sadly, that was not to be. A five-day trip to Ladakh requires tough choices, and well-rested Parth and I had many hours ahead of us.
Dropping Milind at his office in Leh, we barrelled on for Khardung La, where I put some of my newfound energy to work scrambling up the rocks above the tiny monastery for a better view of the glacier, using the prayer flags as guy-wires. And then we plunged down into the Nubra Valley, where the terrain changed abruptly from jagged, slate-coloured rock to sweeping sand dunes and blue-green seabuckthorn bushes along the Shyok river. A few miles outside Diskit, the tiny village that is the centre of activity in the valley, the river swelled to a wide, shallow lake in a broad alpine meadow. A pony herd was grazing in the wet, marshy grass, and the still, clear water reflected the snowcapped peaks in the distance like a mirror.
With the sun setting, we roared through Diskit to Hunder, where we joined the horde of Indian and foreign tourists queuing up for rides on the region’s famous Bactrian camels (now critically endangered in the wild). Though I would probably give the camel rides a pass next time, after a day in the mountains, alone on the winding road, the commonplace hilarity of tourists being tourists was unexpectedly welcome. A busload of Ladakhi kids—in the valley for a school camping trip—sat patiently on the sand, laughing when a shaggy camel pissed a steaming protest against the working conditions on an American girl’s sandals, and smiling at a Punjabi woman’s startled screams when her camel lurched see-saw fashion to its feet. Finally, when everybody else had sloped off to their guesthouses, the camel pullers announced that it was time for the school kids to ride, and the 150-bucks-for-ten-minutes tourist trap was instantly transformed by their unfiltered enthusiasm.
From that point on, the trip just kept getting better.
The next day, Milind met us at Khardung La with a pickup truckload of mountain bikes, so that we could cycle down the winding road from the pass into Leh, a trip of about forty kilometres. Parth remained steadfast in his no exercise policy, this time on professional grounds (he had to take our snaps). But Milind had been selling the ‘ride up, cycle down’ package for some time without having tried it himself and one of his friends, Kim, was in town from Manali, so he’d decided to give it a whirl.
Unlike trekking, which requires youth or fitness, no matter how easy the route, I soon discovered that the only requirement for downhill cycling is a bit of nerve. The first few kilometres down are rutted with potholes, so you have to keep an eye on your speed to avoid taking a tumble, but the only muscles you need are the ones that squeeze the handbrakes. Really. If I’d wanted to, I could have made it all the way to Leh without cranking the pedals once, but around halfway to the checkpoint at South Pullu, when the road turned to pristine blacktop, I couldn’t resist amping it up a bit. In no time, I was clocking sixty kilometres an hour, my full concentration focused on squeezing those brakes in time to lean into the next hairpin. I don’t think you could find a speed freak anywhere who’d object to this sort of soft adventure.
The highlight of the journey, though, was still to come. After forging on toward Kargil, past where the Indus meets the Zanskar river, we spent the night in the lovely, remote town of Temisgam and set off for Lamayuru at first light. Though we didn’t have to sweat to get there, this area was devoid of tourists, apart from a handful of foreigners making the five-day trek from Khaltse to Chilling, because all the Indian groups follow the Three Idiots route to Pangong lake, in the opposite direction. We wound up the jalebi road to Lamayuru without seeing a soul. In the distance, the monastery looked like a vision set amid a fantasy landscape—waves of white sand that look like cake frosting turned with a knife. No one else was visiting the monastery, either, and only when Milind and I took our first rest break on our short hike from Khaltse to Wanla did we run across any other tourists: a father and son from Britain trekking behind two heavily laden donkeys.
It wasn’t exactly an expedition, I reflected as I looked down on the moonland below. But unlike most adventures—chiefly enjoyed in retrospect, according to the ever so wise Bilbo Baggins—I found myself wishing it could go on just one more day.
JASON OVERDORF
Outlook Traveler - Aug. 1, 2011
From the high ridge overlooking Khaltse, a tiny village some 100 kilometres from Leh along the road to Kargil, I stopped in the shadow of a towering boulder to gaze down on the peaceful Lamayuru monastery, set amid the sweeping, khaki-coloured rocks known as ‘the moonland’. Panting in the thin air, with sweat dripping down my back despite Ladakh’s dry climate, I let all thoughts of Delhi and deadlines drift away, listening to nothing but the sound of the wind. This is what I’m here for, I thought. Solitude. Silence. Peace. All of which are growing ever harder to find, even in the remote fastness of Ladakh.
On a last-minute, five-day blitztour, this day hike from Khaltse to Wanla was the closest I’d come to the big empty desert, and I felt my chest swell with desire for more. I’d hoped to tap the new market for so-called ‘soft adventure’ to knock the carbon monoxide out of my lungs and wipe the monsoon grease off my skin. But I’d had to scale back my plans when I landed in Leh, and the thin air reminded me that those lungs I was so keen to overhaul had aged ten years since my first visit. It would take at least two days for my body to adjust to the height, warned Milind Bhide, the 45-year-old owner of Countryside Adventure Holidays, who’d come from Mumbai to shepherd me through the trip. No matter how fit you think you are, 3,500 metres in altitude will kick your ass—even on a supposed ‘comfort trek’.
“Altitude-wise, all the treks in Ladakh are moderate to tough,” Milind told me on my first day in Leh. You don’t need to be an elite marathoner to survive a walk in the mountains, of course. But working out in the gym for 45 minutes three or four times a week was no preparation at all for four hours of hiking to 4,000 metres or more—the minimum standard set for most comfort treks. Without time to acclimatise, it would be better for me to travel by jeep. However, Milind assured me that we could still map out an itinerary that would get us off the well-worn path and incorporate a little adventure.
That was welcome news.
Since I first came here in 2002, the number of travellers visiting Ladakh has grown dramatically—from around 10,000 to some 80,000 tourists a year—and I noted the signs of the boom everywhere. Leh’s bustling market, once the sole purview of Israeli hippies and gap-year backpackers, now teemed with Indian travellers on package tours. Checklist sites like the Shey Palace and Thiksey monastery, which I first visited virtually alone ten years ago, were now surrounded by Sumos and Safaris and crawling with camera-toting tourists. Don’t get me wrong. Ladakh is still amazing. But the message is clear. Go now, before the Leh Bazaar gets any closer to the Shimla mall, and be prepared for long drives and a little sweat if you want to find your own piece of emptiness.
On our first ‘real’ day of travelling, for instance—not counting a day spent acclimatising in Leh—photographer Parth Sanyal and I woke at 5am to make the long drive up to the region’s second highest pass, on the road to Manali, before the light became too harsh for the camera. And by the time we returned—visiting the monasteries at Hemis, Stukla and Thiksey on the way back to the small village of Sabu, a few kilometres from Leh—it was nearly eight o’clock. The next day we were up at six for a day hike from Sabu to Leh and then a six-hour road journey over the world’s highest motorable pass at Khardung La and down into the Nubra Valley to see the sweeping sand dunes and two-humped Bactrian camels before sunset. And again the next morning we were up at dawn for the drive back to Khardung La, cycling down the winding road to Leh, and another five hours by jeep to the trekking hub of Temisgam.
To make sure we avoided the tourist conveyor belt, Milind had thoughtfully arranged for us to stay in quaint, tranquil surroundings each night. In Sabu, for instance, we stayed in the same cosy tents enjoyed by Aamir Khan and the prime minister’s daughter (on separate occasions!) at the lovely Ladakh Sarai. Similarly, in Nubra, we slept between a bubbling brook and a vegetable garden at the Organic Retreat, while in Temisgam we enjoyed some of the best vegetarian food I have ever eaten, at the Namra Hotel—a little Tibetan-style gem built to match the monastery on the hill above.
Meanwhile, the long journeys were as exhilarating as they were exhausting. Ladakh’s forbidding landscape is not for everyone—after four or five beers, a Slovenian friend cursed it as nothing but brown, brown, brown—but for me this is only the difference between what eighteenth-century climbers like John Dennis and Joseph Addison described as the beautiful and the sublime. The stark contrast of khaki and copper rocks jutting into the brilliant, cloudless sky sings like the call to adventure. Anything but monotonous, in a certain slant of light the rocks take on infinite patterns: the branches of a tree seeming to grow up the side of the mountain, the stretched faces of the moai statues of Easter Island, the spires of a thousand cathedrals. And there is a primal, muscular majesty—something more than the inviting beauty of a pretty meadow—in the narrow palette of slate, khaki, copper, black and gold.
Amid this bleak landscape, the tiny villages, each with its own monastery, are teardrops of green nestled in the stone. On our first long drive, we stopped at a solitary farmhouse beside the Manali-Leh highway, where mustard was flowering yellow in the fields, and watched a young Ladakhi woman working in the field with a baby strapped to her back. I am not a religious person. But with the silver-leaved poplar trees swinging in the wind, and a mountain stream tumbling down the rocks, it was easy to fantasise a life for myself here of tranquil self-reflection (however out of character).
I ordinarily have no time for cathedrals, temples and mosques. But in Ladakh I had no complaints about visiting two or three monasteries a day—from the bustling throng of Hemis, where a special prayer ceremony had drawn hundreds of locals in yak-wool robes and turquoise jewellery, to the white wedding cake of Thiksey, reminiscent of Lhasa’s Potala Palace in design. Perhaps it’s the contrast between these silent, idyllic refuges and the bleak proof of the earth’s tremendous power that surrounds them; nowhere is the upheaval from the crash of continents more plainly seen.
At no time was the evidence of this power more dramatic than on my first brief day hike from Sabu to Leh. From the small stupa overlooking the village, we followed the destructive path of the floodwaters from last year’s cloudburst into the mountains, where the torrent had carved a deep ravine, sending great boulders spinning down into Sabu, washing out a bridge and destroying the homes of several families. The flash flood had left behind a dry riverbed as flat and smooth as a highway, but even here the altitude starved my lungs of air and Parth—a two-pack-a-day smoker who prefers paranthas to press-ups—turned back before we’d even started uphill.
He didn’t know what he’d be missing. Although we were only a short distance from Leh, after a few minutes of huffing and puffing, Milind and I might as well have been hundreds of miles from the nearest plug point. As we walked, my body seemed to adjust to the altitude a little more with each step, so that when we crested the last jagged ridge and looked down on the Leh Palace and the dotted green of guesthouse kitchen gardens, I felt ready for four hours and 4,000 metres.
Sadly, that was not to be. A five-day trip to Ladakh requires tough choices, and well-rested Parth and I had many hours ahead of us.
Dropping Milind at his office in Leh, we barrelled on for Khardung La, where I put some of my newfound energy to work scrambling up the rocks above the tiny monastery for a better view of the glacier, using the prayer flags as guy-wires. And then we plunged down into the Nubra Valley, where the terrain changed abruptly from jagged, slate-coloured rock to sweeping sand dunes and blue-green seabuckthorn bushes along the Shyok river. A few miles outside Diskit, the tiny village that is the centre of activity in the valley, the river swelled to a wide, shallow lake in a broad alpine meadow. A pony herd was grazing in the wet, marshy grass, and the still, clear water reflected the snowcapped peaks in the distance like a mirror.
With the sun setting, we roared through Diskit to Hunder, where we joined the horde of Indian and foreign tourists queuing up for rides on the region’s famous Bactrian camels (now critically endangered in the wild). Though I would probably give the camel rides a pass next time, after a day in the mountains, alone on the winding road, the commonplace hilarity of tourists being tourists was unexpectedly welcome. A busload of Ladakhi kids—in the valley for a school camping trip—sat patiently on the sand, laughing when a shaggy camel pissed a steaming protest against the working conditions on an American girl’s sandals, and smiling at a Punjabi woman’s startled screams when her camel lurched see-saw fashion to its feet. Finally, when everybody else had sloped off to their guesthouses, the camel pullers announced that it was time for the school kids to ride, and the 150-bucks-for-ten-minutes tourist trap was instantly transformed by their unfiltered enthusiasm.
From that point on, the trip just kept getting better.
The next day, Milind met us at Khardung La with a pickup truckload of mountain bikes, so that we could cycle down the winding road from the pass into Leh, a trip of about forty kilometres. Parth remained steadfast in his no exercise policy, this time on professional grounds (he had to take our snaps). But Milind had been selling the ‘ride up, cycle down’ package for some time without having tried it himself and one of his friends, Kim, was in town from Manali, so he’d decided to give it a whirl.
Unlike trekking, which requires youth or fitness, no matter how easy the route, I soon discovered that the only requirement for downhill cycling is a bit of nerve. The first few kilometres down are rutted with potholes, so you have to keep an eye on your speed to avoid taking a tumble, but the only muscles you need are the ones that squeeze the handbrakes. Really. If I’d wanted to, I could have made it all the way to Leh without cranking the pedals once, but around halfway to the checkpoint at South Pullu, when the road turned to pristine blacktop, I couldn’t resist amping it up a bit. In no time, I was clocking sixty kilometres an hour, my full concentration focused on squeezing those brakes in time to lean into the next hairpin. I don’t think you could find a speed freak anywhere who’d object to this sort of soft adventure.
The highlight of the journey, though, was still to come. After forging on toward Kargil, past where the Indus meets the Zanskar river, we spent the night in the lovely, remote town of Temisgam and set off for Lamayuru at first light. Though we didn’t have to sweat to get there, this area was devoid of tourists, apart from a handful of foreigners making the five-day trek from Khaltse to Chilling, because all the Indian groups follow the Three Idiots route to Pangong lake, in the opposite direction. We wound up the jalebi road to Lamayuru without seeing a soul. In the distance, the monastery looked like a vision set amid a fantasy landscape—waves of white sand that look like cake frosting turned with a knife. No one else was visiting the monastery, either, and only when Milind and I took our first rest break on our short hike from Khaltse to Wanla did we run across any other tourists: a father and son from Britain trekking behind two heavily laden donkeys.
It wasn’t exactly an expedition, I reflected as I looked down on the moonland below. But unlike most adventures—chiefly enjoyed in retrospect, according to the ever so wise Bilbo Baggins—I found myself wishing it could go on just one more day.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
India meets the Motor City
Can Royal Enfield, the world's oldest motorcycle maker, finally achieve commercial success?
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - July 19, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — On a sweltering July afternoon, bikers roar around the tight circle drive of the Ashok Country Resort outside New Delhi. The signature thump of India's most beloved motorcycle — the single-cylinder, Royal Enfield Bullet — multiplies, escalating to a roar.
Across the hotel compound, other riders, still mud-spattered from their journey, tinker with bikes that have just returned from the 1,500-mile "Himalayan Odyssey."
The Odyssey, organized by Royal Enfield Motorcycles, goes from Delhi to a high mountain pass called Khardung La in the Ladakh region, and back again. Riders from all over India participate in the legendary ride, which started in 2003.
"It was positively the greatest experience of my life," said 27-year-old Khurum, a business consultant who hails from Pune, Maharashtra, having just completed the ride.
"I had a smaller bike earlier, but I always wanted to pick up an Enfield. ... When you have that kind of power between your legs, it's a different feeling."
Royal Enfield, born in Britain and transplanted to Chennai, is the world's oldest motorcycle company. But even though its Bullet motorcycle is perhaps the most recognized and beloved brand in India, for many years the company seemed doomed to eke out an existence as a kind of curiosity. Commuters swore by the bike, but it never quite achieved mass appeal.
Then came foreign competitors like Harley-Davidson, Triumph and Ducati, revving their engines on Enfield's home turf and threatening to leave the company in the dust.
But just as Enfield's prospects might appear at their darkest, the firm may actually be poised to turn its cult following into something it has always fallen short of: commercial success.
"We're at a very, very interesting inflexion point," said Royal Enfield chief executive Venki Padmanabhan, who was named to the position in February, in an interview with GlobalPost.
"Royal Enfield, if you track it through its 100 years of history, has been like a wannabe brand. It's got appeal, and it's always on the brink of commercial success, but it never gets over the hump. ... But since 2000 Siddartha [Lal], the owner, has really grappled with the demons of the brand."
Not long ago, Royal Enfield — which once made rifle parts for the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, Middlesex — sold only around 25,000 bikes a year, while the 100 cc commuter bikes of competitors like Hero Honda sold in the millions.
But this year, under the guidance of Padmanabhan, schooled in Detroit's automobile industry, Royal Enfield aims to increase output to 70,000 bikes from last year's 52,000. A new factory capable of building 150,000 bikes a year will come online next year, and a second plant capable of building another 350,000 bikes a year is slated for three to five years down the road.
Considering this year customers had to wait a whopping eight months for delivery after placing an order for a new bike, it's about time.
"I'm writing on my blog: I'm making 40 percent more bikes than I did last year," Padmanabhan said. "If the waiting period's not budging, don't mistake us, we're not insensitive to it. But obviously we're not doing enough."
At the same time, the company aims to add three or four dealers a month to its present network of 180 sellers over the next three years, while boosting international sales in countries like the U.K., France, Italy, Spain and the United States. Royal Enfield sold only 2,500 bikes abroad in 2010, but wants to add another 11 markets to the 29 countries where the brand currently has a small presence by next year.
It's a big opportunity. India's market for two-wheelers is already huge — with buyers picking up around 12 million bikes and scooters a year. Experts forecast continued double-digit growth for years to come.
Foreign competitors like Harley and Triumph may pose a serious threat down the road, but for now Padmanabhan sees their entry as spurring demand for bigger, more stylish bikes and driving interest in motorcycling as a hobby and a lifestyle choice, rather than a cheap way to commute.
"The fact that all these big guys are coming in just means that leisure motorcycling will become a significant interest among young men," Padmanabhan said.
But is the Bullet biting off more than it can chew?
Padmanabhan says that the aggressive targets may seem sudden, but Royal Enfield has been putting the pieces in place for the better part of a decade. It started when 37-year-old Siddartha Lal — scion of the family-owned group, Eicher Motors, which owns Enfield — took the helm in 2000. Enfield had been losing money, and Lal's father, Vikram, was keen to shut it down. But Siddartha, a passionate Bullet lover, convinced Vikram to give him two years to turn the firm around — and then embarked on a crusade to reinvent the engine that had made it famous.
For decades, Royal Enfield's 350 cc and 500 cc Bullet was the only "big bike" available. Its classic British design — framed around a four-speed, single-cylinder, iron-barreled engine that harks back to the heyday of BSA, Norton and Triumph — remained essentially unchanged for 50 years. Fans forged a cult-like following that endured even as faster, cheaper and more reliable Japanese designs stormed onto the scene.
But that classic character was at once Enfield's greatest strength and its biggest weakness: It ensured that the Bullet attained an iconic status, like Levi's 501s or Harley-Davidson's Sportster, yet it also guaranteed that it would never sell in big enough volumes for commercial success.
The 50-year-old engine also had technical difficulties, according to Padmanabhan. "The fact was it was not reliable. It seized. It leaked," he said.
In 2007, however, Royal Enfield unveiled a new design with an integrated gearbox and fuel injection. To the dismay of hardcore fans, the company also moved the gears and brake — which had always been "backwards" — so that the gear pedal was now on the conventional left-hand side of the bike.
Designers worked long hours to make sure that the new engine still looked old, so that when the company launched the Bullet Classic 500 in 2009, it would appeal to the faithful as well as new converts. But there was one crucial problem: You can make a modern engine look old, but you can't make it sound old. Aluminum just won't thump like cast-iron.
A quick internet scan suggests that the reviews were mixed. Some called the muffling of the classic thump "blasphemy" and "complete suicide" for the brand. Others said the modern features are a good trade.
And sales numbers for the Classic — a retro-looking Bullet with the new engine and electronic fuel injection — suggest that even if Enfield has lost a few die-hards, it's gaining a foothold among young riders looking for a stylish bike that spends as much time on the road as it does at the mechanic.
Perhaps it's time for Royal Enfield to finally live up to the swagger of its old-school slogan: "Made like a gun ... goes like a Bullet."
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - July 19, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — On a sweltering July afternoon, bikers roar around the tight circle drive of the Ashok Country Resort outside New Delhi. The signature thump of India's most beloved motorcycle — the single-cylinder, Royal Enfield Bullet — multiplies, escalating to a roar.
Across the hotel compound, other riders, still mud-spattered from their journey, tinker with bikes that have just returned from the 1,500-mile "Himalayan Odyssey."
The Odyssey, organized by Royal Enfield Motorcycles, goes from Delhi to a high mountain pass called Khardung La in the Ladakh region, and back again. Riders from all over India participate in the legendary ride, which started in 2003.
"It was positively the greatest experience of my life," said 27-year-old Khurum, a business consultant who hails from Pune, Maharashtra, having just completed the ride.
"I had a smaller bike earlier, but I always wanted to pick up an Enfield. ... When you have that kind of power between your legs, it's a different feeling."
Royal Enfield, born in Britain and transplanted to Chennai, is the world's oldest motorcycle company. But even though its Bullet motorcycle is perhaps the most recognized and beloved brand in India, for many years the company seemed doomed to eke out an existence as a kind of curiosity. Commuters swore by the bike, but it never quite achieved mass appeal.
Then came foreign competitors like Harley-Davidson, Triumph and Ducati, revving their engines on Enfield's home turf and threatening to leave the company in the dust.
But just as Enfield's prospects might appear at their darkest, the firm may actually be poised to turn its cult following into something it has always fallen short of: commercial success.
"We're at a very, very interesting inflexion point," said Royal Enfield chief executive Venki Padmanabhan, who was named to the position in February, in an interview with GlobalPost.
"Royal Enfield, if you track it through its 100 years of history, has been like a wannabe brand. It's got appeal, and it's always on the brink of commercial success, but it never gets over the hump. ... But since 2000 Siddartha [Lal], the owner, has really grappled with the demons of the brand."
Not long ago, Royal Enfield — which once made rifle parts for the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, Middlesex — sold only around 25,000 bikes a year, while the 100 cc commuter bikes of competitors like Hero Honda sold in the millions.
But this year, under the guidance of Padmanabhan, schooled in Detroit's automobile industry, Royal Enfield aims to increase output to 70,000 bikes from last year's 52,000. A new factory capable of building 150,000 bikes a year will come online next year, and a second plant capable of building another 350,000 bikes a year is slated for three to five years down the road.
Considering this year customers had to wait a whopping eight months for delivery after placing an order for a new bike, it's about time.
"I'm writing on my blog: I'm making 40 percent more bikes than I did last year," Padmanabhan said. "If the waiting period's not budging, don't mistake us, we're not insensitive to it. But obviously we're not doing enough."
At the same time, the company aims to add three or four dealers a month to its present network of 180 sellers over the next three years, while boosting international sales in countries like the U.K., France, Italy, Spain and the United States. Royal Enfield sold only 2,500 bikes abroad in 2010, but wants to add another 11 markets to the 29 countries where the brand currently has a small presence by next year.
It's a big opportunity. India's market for two-wheelers is already huge — with buyers picking up around 12 million bikes and scooters a year. Experts forecast continued double-digit growth for years to come.
Foreign competitors like Harley and Triumph may pose a serious threat down the road, but for now Padmanabhan sees their entry as spurring demand for bigger, more stylish bikes and driving interest in motorcycling as a hobby and a lifestyle choice, rather than a cheap way to commute.
"The fact that all these big guys are coming in just means that leisure motorcycling will become a significant interest among young men," Padmanabhan said.
But is the Bullet biting off more than it can chew?
Padmanabhan says that the aggressive targets may seem sudden, but Royal Enfield has been putting the pieces in place for the better part of a decade. It started when 37-year-old Siddartha Lal — scion of the family-owned group, Eicher Motors, which owns Enfield — took the helm in 2000. Enfield had been losing money, and Lal's father, Vikram, was keen to shut it down. But Siddartha, a passionate Bullet lover, convinced Vikram to give him two years to turn the firm around — and then embarked on a crusade to reinvent the engine that had made it famous.
For decades, Royal Enfield's 350 cc and 500 cc Bullet was the only "big bike" available. Its classic British design — framed around a four-speed, single-cylinder, iron-barreled engine that harks back to the heyday of BSA, Norton and Triumph — remained essentially unchanged for 50 years. Fans forged a cult-like following that endured even as faster, cheaper and more reliable Japanese designs stormed onto the scene.
But that classic character was at once Enfield's greatest strength and its biggest weakness: It ensured that the Bullet attained an iconic status, like Levi's 501s or Harley-Davidson's Sportster, yet it also guaranteed that it would never sell in big enough volumes for commercial success.
The 50-year-old engine also had technical difficulties, according to Padmanabhan. "The fact was it was not reliable. It seized. It leaked," he said.
In 2007, however, Royal Enfield unveiled a new design with an integrated gearbox and fuel injection. To the dismay of hardcore fans, the company also moved the gears and brake — which had always been "backwards" — so that the gear pedal was now on the conventional left-hand side of the bike.
Designers worked long hours to make sure that the new engine still looked old, so that when the company launched the Bullet Classic 500 in 2009, it would appeal to the faithful as well as new converts. But there was one crucial problem: You can make a modern engine look old, but you can't make it sound old. Aluminum just won't thump like cast-iron.
A quick internet scan suggests that the reviews were mixed. Some called the muffling of the classic thump "blasphemy" and "complete suicide" for the brand. Others said the modern features are a good trade.
And sales numbers for the Classic — a retro-looking Bullet with the new engine and electronic fuel injection — suggest that even if Enfield has lost a few die-hards, it's gaining a foothold among young riders looking for a stylish bike that spends as much time on the road as it does at the mechanic.
Perhaps it's time for Royal Enfield to finally live up to the swagger of its old-school slogan: "Made like a gun ... goes like a Bullet."
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Mumbai blasts complicate talks between India and US, Pakistan
Analysis: Three consecutive bombings in Mumbai set stage for tough Indian stance before Hillary Clinton's visit.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - July 13, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — India has so far refrained from blaming Pakistan for the three serial blasts that struck Mumbai Wednesday.
But the apparent terrorist attack will harden New Delhi's stance in upcoming peace talks with Islamabad, not to mention the next round of so-called "strategic dialogue" with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday.
Pakistan's newly appointed foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is slated to visit New Delhi to meet with Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna on July 26.
Islamabad responded immediately to Wednesday's blasts by issuing a statement of condolence.
"President Asif Ali Zardari, prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, the government and the people of Pakistan have condemned the blasts in Mumbai and expressed distress on the loss of lives and injuries," the statement read.
But however carefully politicians tread on both sides of the border, the danger these bombings pose to peace in the region — not to mention successful U.S. negotiations of the issues surrounding India's and Pakistan's competing visions of their roles in post-war Afghanistan — can hardly be exaggerated.
On Wednesday, three nearly simultaneous explosions rocked India's financial and film capital, killing 21 people and injuring more than 100. All three bombs were planted in garbage heaps in some of the most congested parts of the city.
Government officials immediately said that the explosions bore the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, and local police named two notorious terrorist groups, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Indian Mujahideen. Officials called the Indian Mujahideen, which has used similar methods in the past, the prime suspect. Most often described as an indigenous Indian terrorist group, the Indian Mujahideen also receives support from Pakistan, according to India-based terrorism experts.
Though nearly three years have passed since the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, and the two nations have made progress in re-establishing so-called confidence-building measures designed to prevent a shooting war, India's anger toward Pakistan remains intense, and Mumbai, a beloved city, is an extremely sensitive flashpoint.
Immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example, the more hawkish media outlets here pumped army officials about India's own ability to conduct a similar commando raid on Pakistani soil. And it has been said countless times through informal channels that India cannot guarantee it will respond with the same stoicism it showed after the November 2008 attacks if confronted with another terrorist attack clearly linked to Pakistan's intelligence agency.
Yet however desirable they might seem, nobody expected much from the most recent round of talks, or any in the near future, between India and Pakistan. It's India's strategic dialogue with the United States where the damage might be done.
The U.S. decision to halt some $800 million in aid slated for Pakistan's military — much of it reimbursement for costs incurred in the fight on that country's border with Afghanistan — has pushed Islamabad into a position where it will be tempted to respond forcefully to further condemnations from New Delhi or Washington.
Presumably, the timing of that slap on the wrist was no accident. And announcing immediately before Clinton's visit to New Delhi that Pakistan's army has to fight for the right side if its generals want to keep cashing American checks was intended to add weight to the message.
To avoid granting terrorists undue sway over the content of the India-U.S. dialogue, Clinton and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cannot blink. The danger of escalation, or of squandering any small progress that may have been made in ironing out a plan for post-war Afghanistan, is strong.
But the risk of missing the moment is even stronger. Washington's recent signals that it is willing to play hardball with Islamabad have the potential to be a game changer in south Asia, but only if the United States holds fast.
By Jason Overdorf
GlobalPost - July 13, 2011
NEW DELHI, India — India has so far refrained from blaming Pakistan for the three serial blasts that struck Mumbai Wednesday.
But the apparent terrorist attack will harden New Delhi's stance in upcoming peace talks with Islamabad, not to mention the next round of so-called "strategic dialogue" with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday.
Pakistan's newly appointed foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is slated to visit New Delhi to meet with Indian foreign minister S.M. Krishna on July 26.
Islamabad responded immediately to Wednesday's blasts by issuing a statement of condolence.
"President Asif Ali Zardari, prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, the government and the people of Pakistan have condemned the blasts in Mumbai and expressed distress on the loss of lives and injuries," the statement read.
But however carefully politicians tread on both sides of the border, the danger these bombings pose to peace in the region — not to mention successful U.S. negotiations of the issues surrounding India's and Pakistan's competing visions of their roles in post-war Afghanistan — can hardly be exaggerated.
On Wednesday, three nearly simultaneous explosions rocked India's financial and film capital, killing 21 people and injuring more than 100. All three bombs were planted in garbage heaps in some of the most congested parts of the city.
Government officials immediately said that the explosions bore the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, and local police named two notorious terrorist groups, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Indian Mujahideen. Officials called the Indian Mujahideen, which has used similar methods in the past, the prime suspect. Most often described as an indigenous Indian terrorist group, the Indian Mujahideen also receives support from Pakistan, according to India-based terrorism experts.
Though nearly three years have passed since the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, and the two nations have made progress in re-establishing so-called confidence-building measures designed to prevent a shooting war, India's anger toward Pakistan remains intense, and Mumbai, a beloved city, is an extremely sensitive flashpoint.
Immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example, the more hawkish media outlets here pumped army officials about India's own ability to conduct a similar commando raid on Pakistani soil. And it has been said countless times through informal channels that India cannot guarantee it will respond with the same stoicism it showed after the November 2008 attacks if confronted with another terrorist attack clearly linked to Pakistan's intelligence agency.
Yet however desirable they might seem, nobody expected much from the most recent round of talks, or any in the near future, between India and Pakistan. It's India's strategic dialogue with the United States where the damage might be done.
The U.S. decision to halt some $800 million in aid slated for Pakistan's military — much of it reimbursement for costs incurred in the fight on that country's border with Afghanistan — has pushed Islamabad into a position where it will be tempted to respond forcefully to further condemnations from New Delhi or Washington.
Presumably, the timing of that slap on the wrist was no accident. And announcing immediately before Clinton's visit to New Delhi that Pakistan's army has to fight for the right side if its generals want to keep cashing American checks was intended to add weight to the message.
To avoid granting terrorists undue sway over the content of the India-U.S. dialogue, Clinton and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cannot blink. The danger of escalation, or of squandering any small progress that may have been made in ironing out a plan for post-war Afghanistan, is strong.
But the risk of missing the moment is even stronger. Washington's recent signals that it is willing to play hardball with Islamabad have the potential to be a game changer in south Asia, but only if the United States holds fast.
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